Dark days, early mornings and the opportunity to reflect on this season of Advent go together.

We are all being told we need more exercise so every morning – well, strictly speaking, almost every morning – I take a short walk before I go to work. At present, it is still night when I go out and it seems to be getting darker and darker because we are a week off the shortest day of the year.  Today the cloud cover was very thick and without starlight or moonlight I couldn’t see the path at my feet until my eyes adjusted to the different densities of black, grey and silver, where overnight rain had gathered in puddles.  Once in front of the Abbey, however, the sharp profiles of the winter trees stood out against the sky, black upon grey-black.  A bird sloped soundlessly across the path and hid itself from me stealthily.  A plane droned high above and I wondered whether the passengers were enjoying a beautiful sunrise above the clouds or were caught up in the mist.

What is so amazing on these winter walks is not just what you see but what you don’t hear. Everything is silent.  As I already mentioned, one might see a bird: I often do.  But they are silent and hop about close to the ground as if safer there.  Every now and then there may be an owl’s hoot or my feet on the gravel may alarm some ducks or coots, but for the most part I walk through a deep and profound silence.  Mister Eckhart said, “There is nothing so much like God as silence,” and on these morning walks I feel he is absolutely right.  The silence is not empty but denotes presence.  It is full of….?

And the change comes as you walk. On a totally overcast day like today, you realise that as you have been walking, blackness has become different shades of grey.  Looking towards the east, you see bank upon bank, slice upon slice: hoary, ashen, steely, silvery, griseous, slate, pearl greys.  Despite the overcast sky, light comes.  As you look, as you walk, you know that everything you see belongs to you; that no one is seeing what you are seeing from your unique physical position on this day and at this moment.  This is God’s gift to you – and, of course, not just to you but to every person wherever they are who are looking upon this miracle from their unique angle.

And then the birds begin to sing.

It is a profound moment. The day may be overcast.  There may not be any sunshine today, but the light will come and we will walk in the light, even if it is not the full light from a cloudless sky.   And the time of waiting in the night is not wasted.  On the contrary, it is precious, for we find we are not alone in the dark.  There is a presence there with us in the silence, also waiting, biding his time, inviting us and full of grace.

I feel before starting this blog that I must apologise for not having written it for three weeks.  Like other people sometimes the demands on time and energy are more than I can manage: something has to give.

Perhaps this is the way we go into Advent.  Life gets so busy and what gives is the spiritual side.  To begin with we determine that we are going to make this season very special: we are going to concentrate on the themes of Advent.  But then instead of preparing our hearts and souls for the birth of Christ we find ourselves yet again just thinking about Christmas Day and all the things we have to do to prepare practically – so that good wishes have been sent to everyone we should wish them for, presents are bought and wrapt and the turkey is on the table, cooked!

Today in preparing for our Remembrance Day service, I read about the man who wrote that famous First World War poem, “In Flanders Fields.” Named John MaCrea, a doctor, he was battalion surgeon to an artillery unit at Ypres.  For seventeen days he worked on wounded men in dug out holes in the canal banks.  He was in his mid-forties.  He didn’t have to enlist at his age.  Indeed, he had sworn never to go to war again after his experiences as a doctor in the Boer War.  There he had seen more men die of disease and the lack of care they got after being wounded then from the wounds themselves.

But when the call went out in 1914 John McCrea joined up again despite his fear because, he said, he was more afraid of his conscience. Later he describe the seventeen days at Ypres as being like Hades but it was the death of a young friend and former student of his, 22 year old Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, which led him to write the poem that has touched so many hearts.  Because there was no chaplain McCrae had to do the funeral rite. The next day he wrote the poem sitting on the step of the ambulance looking out over a landscape of makeshift crosses towards the one belonging to Helmer.  There were poppies everywhere and an East wind was gently blowing.

What struck me as I read McCrae’s biography was that here was an extraordinarily decent human being who found himself caught up in the most appalling horrors, not once but twice in his life, because he was a doctor. Here was a man who really saw, day by day, the utter cruelty and futility of war; who suffered his own losses and bereavements.  He didn’t die in battle but because he always had severe asthma he came down with pneumonia and meningitis and died before the war ended.  No doubt the time in the trenches did not help his already fragile health.

“There is no path to peace. Peace is the path,” said Mahatma Ghandi.  Every day ordinary human beings get caught up in war.  Every day they find themselves involved in something over which they have no control: another man’s quarrel, another man’s sin – but they are in the midst of it.  All anyone can do is try to keep their own sense of integrity, their own sense of what is a right way to behave.  They make peace in their own tents, among their own.  It is not much but to those round them, it makes a deal of difference.

Love is one of those words that has become devalued over time. Today we tend to use it mainly to describe the feelings between a man and a woman.  We are almost embarrassed to talk about love between friends, especially when they are of the same gender.  Yet some of the most powerful love I have ever come across has been between those on the front line in war; soldier, for example and colleague soldier, who would literally give up their life for their friend; who when they are fighting are doing so more for the person to the right and left of them then for any family member back at home.  Shared experience brings people together and the more powerful the experience the more strongly the ties are often felt.

Long before I was ever old enough to be attracted to a boy, I knew what it was to experience love. I was loved by my parents and siblings and I loved them back.  I didn’t think about it.  It was just there.  I knew I cared about my friends in a way that I didn’t care about the other children.  I loved the community I lived in, thinking it was special because it was special to me.  I loved people and places because they gave me a sense of belonging.

Love is about belonging. When two people fall in love they experience a sense of belonging to each other, of being at home with each other, in, what I describe, as their “right” skin.  They also belong to themselves, are at home with themselves in a way that they may not have experienced before.  If their love leads to a permanent relationship they set up a home together where they can root and grow their sense of belonging.  But this belonging is not simply about two people falling in love.  It is the family; growing up I belonged to my family and they belonged to me.  My family gave me a sense of trust and security but also I realised as I grew older an obligation to care to them.  It was at this point that I realised that love is as much about will if you are a Christian, as it is about feeling.  This is why Jesus could commanded us to love one another.

Belonging means attachment to the wider community, my friends, my workplace and those I work with, my home town, my culture, my football team. But seen like this it can lead the wrong way, into exclusivity.  You don’t belong to me if you don’t support my football team or if you weren’t born in this country.  This exclusive belonging is not love.

We know love to be most truly love when it is inclusive, not exclusive. When I think that love is about what I receive, what belongs to me as of right, I am in danger of becoming exclusive.  When I feel that belonging to this group is what sets me apart from others; when I know myself as over and against others because I belong to a certain crowd, this is not love.  There is so much of this wrong-headed sort of belonging amongst us – even in basically decent people, and it is the opposite of love.

When I realise that I belong to the other, just as much as they belong to me, and when I begin to consider the wider and wider circles to which I belong I find that there is no end to them. All of nature belongs to me.  Every time I take a walk and enjoy the autumn trees, birdsong, the breeze in my face and the sheer enjoyment of walking, all I see belongs to me.  At the same time it belongs wonderfully to everyone else.  But I also belong to nature in my responsibility to it and in my love of it.

Right at the centre of all this belonging is that I belong to God and he belongs to me. I can say, “My God,” and not feel embarrassed about it because I am not claiming exclusive rights to his love and attention.  Rather, I am taking up the place in his worldwide family he has given me and realising that I belong to him and to others.  He has made a place for me to abide in and he invites me to dwell there with him and all that he has made and loves.  It is where I most truly belong.

The gospel reading this morning was the story of Blind Bartimaeus (Mark 10: 46 – 52) and one word jumped out at me that I hadn’t really ever taken in before, although I must have read the story many, many times over the years. The little word was, “again”; Bartimaeus says, “My teacher, let me see again.”  What this means literally, of course, is that there must have been a time when Bartimaeus could see.  Unlike the man born blind in John 9, Bartimaeus must have lost his sight due to disease.  He knew what it was to see and what he had lost.  His longing enabled him to cry out to Jesus and he would not be silenced.

Reading this gospel made me wonder what I once ‘saw’ but ‘see’ no longer. What have I lost that once meant so much to me.  I was not thinking specifically of people who have died, broken love affairs or disappointed hopes.  Rather I was thinking of Revelation 2: 4 where the message to the church in Ephesus reads,

But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.

 Life hurts. We lose people we love.  Perhaps we don’t achieve what we hoped for.  The daily news is depressing and we feel powerless to change things.  Children grow up and leave home.  We age; our bodies ache and don’t do what they used to do.  We become cynical or cease to expect very much.  In fact, we are in danger of drying and shrivelling up if we don’t work quite consciously at remaining open and grateful.  And often our faith feels as though it is drying out, too.  We just go along with it and accept it.  It is this that Revelation challenges – our acceptance of the status quo.  The writer reminds us  that there was a time when everything seemed so vivid, life-giving and life enhancing and we don’t see that anymore.  The world vision has taken over.  It is as if we have lost our sight, our God sight.  The eyes through which we look out at the world have become veiled with disappointment.

I don’t think it has to be this way. One of the things I have experienced on occasions is very deep emotion: joy, love and sadness, in dreams.  It is as if it is all still there but can only be accessed when I let go of this tired, indifferent adult in sleep.  The waking times at which I can also experience life more intensely are when I am able to be awake to the present moment, aware of my senses, glad to appreciate all that is around me.  This can be practiced, and practiced over and over again.  Stop, pause, sense through sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste – stay with it, give thanks.  Jesus made a big thing out of saying thank you – gratitude.  Remember the story of the ten cured of leprosy and only one turns back to Jesus to give thanks?

But perhaps we also need to take a leaf out of Bartimaeus’ book and cry out with all our hearts to Jesus that we might see again because we, like Bartimaeus, cannot do this without Jesus.

“I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can’t really call being alive.”  ― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings

Today (Sunday morning) round about 7am, I received an alarm call and woke up. I was already up and about. The alarm came when I opened the door from Launde Chapel onto our little graveyard. My eye was caught and stayed on the largest stone cross for it was festooned in spiders’ webs. It was a misty morning but the sun was rising and one instinctively knew that there was a beautiful clear sky just beyond the gauzy mist. Caught by the low sun the extraordinary and intricate works of art that are spiders’ webs demanded attention. I had to pause, look and stay.

Moments like this go back into childhood. I remember stopping and looking at orb webs, the classic spider’s web shape, clustered with dew diamonds, on my walk to primary school; being transfixed by sheet webs, the type that lie like blankets on the grass in the very early morning. Today a beautiful orb web hung on one side of the cross and on the opposite was what I think was a cob web. It looked like a string basket but was flat, not a funnel – obviously a different design from a different member of the spider family.

I in my rather lazy way have used words laxly. I have often used the word “cob web” to denote any kind of spider’s web, not consciously taking on board the different types of spider even though the evidence was there before my eyes. Yet again I realise that I have not attended. I, like Mary Oliver, have walked through the world with my mind filled with things of little importance, “in full self-attendance.” I have often had what I know is the common human experience of walking automatically to a destination and realising when I got there that I had no conscious memory of what I walked passed at all. I simply wasn’t present.

But someone inside us does wake up sometimes, and the more we practice trying to wake up the more it happens. Often the moment of waking feels like a response to something other than ourselves, something outside, as in the case of the spiders’ webs and the rising sun this morning. At other times it feels as if we are jarred awake internally, and we are not sure what has woken us.

Rather late in the day I have come to believe that this trying to wake up is one of the most important tasks of being human; one that is very hard for us to do in our western culture with its dependence on constant distraction and speed. But wake up we must, if we do not want to sleepwalk to death.

The words above come from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke called “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” and reading this poem the other day alongside some others reminded me of a part of Richard Attenborough maiden speech in the House of Lords. Not surprisingly he spoke of the Arts.

“The Arts are not a luxury. They are as crucial to our wellbeing as eating and breathing.”

At nineteen I was listening to all things “Pop.” Then my older sister introduced me to the last movement of Beethoven’s “Ninth” and “Nimrod” from Elgar’s “Enigma Variations” – and I was hooked. It was the beginning of a an idiosyncratic journey of discovery that I made and am still making. Friends introduced me to music they enjoyed and if I liked the pieces I would buy my own copy. I discovered the music my mother had always loved and played but which I hadn’t been ready for. It was a delight to come upon compositions that were so familiar and now moved me.

In my thirties my husband introduced me to paintings. I took him to the theatre and he, in turn, introduced me to what he loved. We went to art galleries. At first I felt intimidated. I felt as though there were things I should like and that the fact that some pictures or sculptures left me entirely unmoved was due to my lacking something. Then one day a painting spoke to me so deeply that my whole idea of God was challenged and I received something so precious that it has never left me. A little while later I realised that we had now been to so many exhibitions that I knew something about the subject. I knew, moreover, that I had to wait on a painting, give it time to speak to me. I knew what I liked, was open to learning from artist new to me and didn’t worry when something wasn’t for me.

Like most young people growing up in the fifties and sixties I did poetry at school. I am glad to say I still quote with relish poems I learnt from the age of ten, eleven and twelve. Others are not so easily remembered, and apart from falling for T S Eliot madly in my early twenties (a passion that has never left me) I didn’t really read much poetry until a few years ago. Advent and Lent books with a poem a day to consider alongside some thoughts about the poem have enriched the experience hugely. I have realised what so many have seen before me: there are some things so much too deep for words (as in logical, reasoned, and discursive) that only the words of poetry (paradoxical, imaginative, affective, mysterious and of the heart) can begin to touch them. We find our own complex experiences illuminated, penetrated and examined. Sometimes it makes me sad because in the reading of poetry I realise how much of my life I have not lived, not been engaged with – what I have allowed to pass me by.

The Arts do many things for us but one of the things they do is to “see” us. On occasions they reflect us to ourselves. We see our own limitations. Sometimes they help us make a step that we would never have made otherwise – I can remember plays that have changed my outlook on life. Always, they invite us to live life more fully, to be more deeply engaged with our own life in all its minutiae.

“Who do you say I am?”

Jesus, asking this profound question of his disciples is the gospel reading for today (Mark 8: 27 – end.) It is a tipping point moment in the gospels and was one for me in my very early days as a grown up Christian. I remember the sermon when the preacher put that question to us, asking each of us individually how we would respond if Jesus stood in front of us today and questioned us. It was, I think, the first time anyone had put me on the spot like that and I am really glad they did. That was the moment when I first named Jesus to myself as Lord. In the gospels, it is the first time that any of the disciples calls Jesus, “the Christ.” Peter takes a huge step as he says this, but the next moment we see how limited his understanding is of Jesus’ mission, Jesus’ way of being Messiah, when he tells Jesus off for foretelling his future arrest and death.

I thought I knew this story pretty well until this last week when I was on the local diocesan clergy conference. We had a speaker from South India, a man who had grown up as a Dalit (meaning “oppressed” in Hindi and Marathi, the self-chosen political name of the castes in India who were formerly considered “untouchable” according to the Hindu varna system.) Our speaker came from a village which in the mid nineteenth century had converted as an entire community to Christianity and changed the name of their township to Nazareth.

“Who do you say I am?”

As we were invited to consider this question again we were invited to do so not through the eyes of white, largely middle class respectable and respected people from the Midlands, but through the eyes of the world Church. What had made a whole community of people change their faith allegiance in a country that didn’t know what the word “Christ” meant?

When we have to translate a word for someone we have to go back to its basic meaning. In translating Christ, our speaker told us, the early missionaries did not talked about a culture far away but put the story into their listeners’ experience. Christ was the answer to these peoples’ deepest desire in life and their deepest need for meaning. As Dalits, looked down upon by everyone and virtually enslaved by money lenders, their greatest need was to be respected and to be free. In the gospel of Christ, the Son of God, and in the human person of Jesus they found that God loved them, respected them and gave them freedom: an internal freedom of self-value they had never known before.

Having explored the image of Christ in the eyes of some people from South India, we then looked, through paintings and pictures, at how Christ is seen by all sorts of other cultures throughout our world. Not for them the blue-eyed Hollywood Jesus with the shoulder length oh-so-clean hair, but the Chinese and the West Indian, the Nigerian and South Korean.

We have turned the name ‘Christ’ into Jesus’ surname or we use it academically. But in a world that needs God so much but can’t cope with the God as presented by traditional religion, surely we need to ask what are we actually offering when we talk about Christ? Who do we say Christ is? Who do people need him to be? Surely, he is the answer to ours (and theirs) deepest desire and longing for meaning.

Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength;    he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and makes me tread upon the heights.

(Habakkuk 3: 17 – 19)

On Saturday we read these extraordinarily pertinent words as part of our daily morning prayer. Habakkuk is prophesying about a nation and country that will be destroyed by war and by the betrayal of their calling. He foresees the rise of Babylon, its invasion of Judah and the devastation and the subjugation this will bring. All seems hopeless and lost. Reading through the book day by day over the last week has seemed very familiar, like hearing about what is happening in the Middle East now. And alongside the reading, as we have interceded for the world, I have felt that same kind of dismay and powerlessness that I think most of us feel when we listen to what is happening in Iraq and Syria, let alone all the other theatres of war in our world.

But then Habakkuk surprises and jilts us into a different point of view in the very last verses of the last chapter. Suddenly we are looking out from a wider horizon. Almost seemingly as an effort at self-determination, Habakkuk states, that despite the signs he “will rejoice in the Lord; (he) will exult in the God of my salvation.” He reminds himself that God is his strength. With a determination to persevere in faith he states that he will not give up on hope for the future because ultimately God will be there to help him.

Habakkuk might have prophesised around 607 BC but his word is a gift and a challenge in our time. Encountering events as horrific and fearful as we see through our media, feeling the same kind of powerlessness we might feel, perhaps being tempted to give up on God or at least believe that God doesn’t care / isn’t interested, Habakkuk determines otherwise. His action reminds me of a message scrawled by a Jewish author who hid from the Nazis in a dark and damp cellar in Cologne, Germany, which was discovered not long after the end of World War II.

“I believe in the sun even when it’s not shining. I believe in love even when not feeling it.

I believe in God even when He is silent.”

The biggest victory of evil is to destroy hope. The most effective response we can make is to determine to persevere in faith and hope, following Jesus, practicing the things of the kingdom: peace, mercy and justice and knowing that our strength lies ultimately not in ourselves but in God.

Attention is the rarest and purist form of generosity. Simone Weil

Jesus said to Martha, “Marta, Martha, you are anxious about many things. Only one thing is necessary.” Martha, the sister of Mary, had been banging about noisily and huffily, and eventually complained to Jesus that her sister was not helping her. Instead of taking Martha’s side Jesus condoned Mary’s behaviour, saying she had “chosen the better part.” She was attending to one thing and one thing only, Jesus himself.

Many people feel secretly pretty sympathetic to Martha, who was, no doubt, trying to get a meal ready for Jesus and to be a good hostess. But Mary was practicing another kind of hospitality: that of paying their guest full attention. We might secretly think she was still doing the easy thing. Which one of us would not want to sit down and give Jesus our full attention! But that is to assume that Jesus was doing the pastoring. As a dear friend of Jesus, Mary could have been the one looking after him: gently listening to him, his needs; caring for him in his tiredness.

We use the term “paying attention” and rightly, because it costs us something to give attention, whether it is to the person in conversation with us, the road we are walking down, the people sitting alongside us on a train, the News, or our times of prayer. Real attention demands first that we try to wake up to the present moment and secondly that we keep watch over our ego’s desire to jump in, to take over; to make everything about me. Real attention is about creating a sense of space and spaciousness, a hospitable place, in which any transaction between myself and the other can take place – has, if you like, room to breathe.

This is never more so than when we are practicing attentiveness (mindfulness / contemplation etc) in prayer. At times, everything in us is fidgety and impatient. We long to get up and go off and do something “meaningful.” What is the point of sitting here and waiting on God? It seems such a waste of time. But it is at this point of resistance that, if we stick with it, we begin to comprehend Simone Weil statement above. We are doing our best to attend to God without most of the time feeling any response from him. In R S Thomas’ words, we are more likely most of the time, to experience God as a “great absence.” It takes generosity on our side to go on practicing attention when there seem to be no visible results. We think we attend for God’s sake. It is only when we continue in the practice that we realise that there are results and that actually we are receiving much more than we are giving.

Giving attention is pure because it is single minded, rather than pure in a cleanliness way of meaning. It is rare because it demands such an effort and we live in a world that constantly distracts us and pulls us into the “many things.” It is generous because it is about giving all of ourselves to the other without necessarily any reward, “save that of knowing that we do your will.” But as in everything our generous God gives us, whether we are attending to people, a tree in blossom or God himself, in the giving of attention we always receive far more back.