letting god be god

he said it in the sermon tonight.

exile 2

I wrote 'me as exile'.
what I feel as though I should have written
'we exiles'

exile

the Jews as exiles.
the Christians as exiles.
me as exile.

my prayer today leads not to clarity
and loose ends must dangle.
but the word exile shines like a beacon;
and your placelessness is my other clue.

the homeless wanderer need wander no more

flummoxed

my prayer grows frothy and wild:
almost painful!
sit on this:
it leads me out and not in,
away, not towards.
pursed lips, a quieter joy please.

so I have been wrong again?
carmel, not citeaux?

my life

my life is a pile of rubble.
no safety here,
no place of security,
only a tent-like temporary shelter
from raging winds,
and dark sunny days.
only placeless, nameless you.
beyond us,
blinding us,
needing us.

the beauty decays even as I watch:
worn away by time and wind.
then nothing is left but you again.
you and you alone.

but no need for flight, or fear!
the beauty we see: hints of you
who, even in your deepest darkness,
as we swim through these murkier waters,
is all we ever seek,
and much much more than all we need.

the chest

part one
A young boy is clattering down a wide, ancient wooden staircase after a latin lesson with his tutor. He reaches a large ornate doorway and looks at the clock. 12.56. He stands beside the door watching the clock, but just seconds later, his eyes widening with astonishment, he spots a tall, very thin, balding man dressed in overalls sidling silently and at some speed under the same staircase towards the back of the house. Edward (the boy) does not recognise the man and, thinking that he might be a burglar (or worse!), resolves to follow - forgetting both lunch and his father.
The stranger heads down the corridor towards the kitchens but turns suddenly through the conservatory doorway into the large high-walled garden beyond. Staying close to the wall, he hurries towards the furthest corner of the garden moving so rapidly that Edward, keeping out of sight as best he can, has trouble keeping up. The man finally disappears behind some rhododendrons and Edward follows tentatively, his heart beating fast. As he reaches the other side of the bushes, he catches sight of the man disappearing through a door in the wall.
'A door in the wall?' thinks Edward. 'That's a door I've never noticed before!' It was a very small door, and clearly very old, though recently painted. Still frowning, Edward reaches the door - now closed - and , with a shaking hand, gently turns the handle. It opens smoothly and, as light enters the dark space beyond, Edward sees that there are narrow steps leading downwards. He listens for a moment and, hearing no sound, creeps slowly down the steps, pausing frequently to listen. The brick steps are narrow and there is a dank, musty smell and an oppressive atmosphere. Painted white long ago, they are faded now, and dirty. The door behind him creaks slowly closed of its own accord and Edward finds himself in almost pitch darkness except for a comforting chink of light under the door behind him. As he nears what he assumes to be the bottom of the staircase it turns a corner to the left and two things happen at once: a rush of damp cold air comes around the corner towards him and the courtyard clock strikes one. With his heart now in his mouth, lunch and father urge him swiftly back up the stairs and out into the warm sunlight. Hurrying back through the conservatory to the corridor and the dining room beyond, he reaches the door. Pausing to catch his breath and pull himself into a calmer frame of mind, and having brushed white dust from the staircase off his clothes, he knocks timidly on the door and his father's voice booms for him to enter.

being nomadic

when I started my prayer today
it struck me that a new day is like a new place:
a new place that I arrive into and must set up tent.
my only guidelines are what happened yesterday,
and possibly the day before.
using those I can steer fairly safely through this new day.

but if I decide to throw away my guidelines,
(when I lose faith in them or try new guidelines of my own;
or, more likely, lie in the grass and watch the sky)
I will probably get lost in the new day
just as I would if it were a new country
and I had thrown away the only map.

The Wall

I woke up today and found myself in a different place.
familiar landmarks gone
or changed
or perhaps I just don't recognise them?
my prayer was different:
old meanings swept away,
loved phrases rendered lifeless,
and swathes of darkness.
the thought from yesterday becomes important:
The Wall.
yesterday, it seemed perhaps for the first time,
it dawned on me about The Wall.
The Wall of summer '75.
The Wall of late '86
The Wall of late '98.
perhaps this was no wall at all.
perhaps it never was the barrier I thought it to be.
perhaps it was the very cloud of unknowing I had read about
and never understood.
st john's way of the spirit.
the via negativa.
could it be that here was the truth staring me in the face
and I did not,
would not,
could not see it;
could not walk into it instead of away?

was it my need for control, for knowledge;
my desire to live an independent, individual, vibrant, creative life
that made me turn back - again and again . . . ?
was it perhaps theological problems?
my lopsided patchy intellectualism?
my innate liberalism?
my problem with faith?
or was it sheer stubborn selfishness?

can it be different this time?
if so, how and why?
yes, the circumstance, the trial, and the place are all changed;
but me?

I think about faith quite differently,
I think about myself quite differently too,
I think about life differently,
but whether that will be enough . . . . .?

I am thinking back now to the Seven Keys.
[how crucial it was!]
I need to look again at this story.

today it's so simple

I ignore you:
I am unhappy.
I turn away from you:
I become restless, rootless.
I shun you:
I grieve inwardly
and drown my grief with noise and nonsense.

rebellious blind body of mine:
why do you shun your only source of light!

a new place

I find myself in a strange new place,
darkened windows,
cotton wool on the walls deadens sound.
I recall the snow at worth
silent, and strange.
later I recalled its beauty.

relevant

the catholic church in malaysia is going to court over whether they may call God 'Allah'. local moslems are concerned this might lead to confusion or conversion . . . .
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8065597.stm

hard work

googling 'interfaith forum'
came up with this link
http://www.scripturalreasoning.org/
the video there is an insight into how hard
[and yet no less essential for this]
ecumenical work can be.

I was wondering if they prayed together.
this seemed so important as I watched them talking.

a vision

just as nature diversifies and adapts,
so does man:
not just in the work he does
or the food he eats
or the plants he grows in his garden;
but culturally too:
his music,
his language,
and, above all, his faith.
he adapts not just because the climate is different,
or because the soil is chalky instead of peaty,
or because the rainy season is longer or shorter,
but because he needs to be free.

and so he builds his city walls,
he marks the boundaries on his maps,
he sets up his customs and changes his laws
so that he can be free
free from the babylonians
free from the greeks
free from the romans
free from the turks
free from the british
free from the americans
free from the russians . . . .

our faith is scarred and brutalised by politics
used time and time again
as a way of maintaining power
(marx was right about this)
often in the name of unity
more often in the name of security.

there is only one faith
but many languages,
many roads and many ways.

there's a strange contradiction here:
diversity is good.
the many is good.
but so is the one.

we rejoice in the diversity of nature.
we can even rejoice in the diversity of culture.
so why can't we rejoice in the diversity of faith?

the answer is clear:
a city wall to keep out my warlike neighbour is relatively easy
but when he moves next door
a wall to stop me thinking like him is not.

then there are two alternatives:
block up the ears and shout louder
or open them and talk.

by doing the first we might maintain our ideas for a while
by doing the second, there will be cross-fertilisation of idea.
confusion can (does) follow.
faith is a delicate matter.
(all the parts are especially made.)
if you mix then, the truth might fall apart!

perhaps thats the real issue.
the link between language and truth are bound by a knot:
until they can be teased apart
and the unknowable truth of God allowed to shine
over and above religious doctrine
there will be worldwide strife,
communal deafness,
and much shouting.

the world however is set on its stony path toward smallness
(tiny village)
if the name of God is not to be associated more and more
amongst unbelievers
with the blood and violence that He loathes
there is only one way forward:

education.
but an education of the spirit as well as the mind.
[the one without the other is like a plant without water!]

a new understanding of the strength and weakness of language.
so that, alongside the bible, the koran and the buddhist scriptures,
we also read wittgenstein, and jung, and darwin.
and at the beginning and end of each day we pray.
we pray in the way of our fathers before us.
jew, christian, moslem, hindu, buddhist, taoist.
each following his own special road towards God.
and so we recognise diversity.
we recognise God's love of diversity
we recognise the Many,
and we recognise that we are not the Many
and can only walk one path.
and, through our daily silence,
we can learn that you, Lord God, who walk with us along our chosen path
but that you, in your holiness, are also far, far above all of our paths.

the matter

it isn't a matter of holiness.
it's a matter of life or death.

the urgency surprises me.
it always does.

the blackbird sings outside.
a song I do not understand.

this quiet war

plots

defeat my half-hearted plots against you

the sunshine

the sunshine calls me out.
you call me in.

go out later, you say.
stay here with me first

look

look to the spirit, you say.

tim radcliffe the dominican

"preaching is not just the reporting of facts about God. It gives us God's word which breaks the silence between God and us."

"Prayer can look like the struggle to reach up to a distant God. . . . but we do not break the silence. When we speak we are responding to a word spoken to us. We are taken into a conversation which has already begun without us . . ."

"Meister Eckhart once said,"We do not pray, we are prayed. . . .Our words are God praying, praising, blessing in us."

"Dominic's preaching began in the south of France not far from here, against heretics who despised the body and who thought of all creation as evil. He was confronted with one of those waves of dualistic spirituality which have periodically swept Europe. Augustine, whose rule we have, was caught in another such movement when he was a Manichee as a young man. And even today much of popular thought is profoundly dualistic. Studies have shown that modern scientists usually think of salvation in terms of escape from the body. But the Dominican tradition has always stressed that we are physical, corporeal beings. All that we are comes from God. . . . .We hope for the resurrection of the body. The journey that each of us must travel is, in the first place, this physical, biological one, which takes us from the womb to the tomb. It is in this biological span of life that we will meet God and find salvation."

" Perhaps we are made in the image and likeness of God because we share God's creativity. We are his partners in creating and recreating the world."

"And faced with death, we again long for the words of the angel to announce a new fertility. For all of our lives are open to God's endless newness, his inexhaustible freshness. The angel comes time and time again, with new annunciations of good news."

"But ultimately our lives do not have meaning in themselves, as private and individual stories. Our lives only have meaning because they are caught up in a larger story, which reaches from the very beginning to the unknown end, from Creation to the Kingdom."

"If there is no place for my unrepeatable story, then I will be merely lost in the history of humanity."

"Chesterton wrote, "Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again." And the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead, for grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun; and every evening,'Do it again' to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike, it maybe that God makes each daisy seperately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in nature may not be a mere recurrence, it may be a theatrical encore."

"As Simon Tugwell wrote,'I do not think about my friend when he is there beside me; I am far too busy enjoying his presence. It is when he is absent that I will start to think about him."

a sermon on the rosary, October 1998

my music

my music is stiff and insignificant:
the richness and joy flow instead
through psalm and prayer.

nevertheless, rain falls even in the desert.
just less often

hanging by a thread

I cling to you by my fingernails

from the forum

"to quote a Camaldolese hermit: "You love God, God loves you. That's all"."

something I wrote on a forum

I am putting it here because it relates a little to jung and what I was thinking about the vatican 2 document.
"I always think that, in a way, a mature Christian (or a Moslem or a Jew too, for that matter) is an atheist in the sense that he gradually has to dispel any notion of 'understanding' who, how and why God is. Only when we have abandoned all hope of 'understanding' God (which is usually another word for 'controlling' - which, Lord knows, we try to do all the time) is any real meeting possible.
The great problem is Language. It is our only means of communication and perhaps because of this, and because of the million assumptions we have to make for it to make any sense at all, we forget so easily just what a limited palette it actually is.Take, for example, the word ZERO. The word zero has four letters. I can say it out loud and you can hear me say it. But what does the word actually mean? Nothing? An empty space? An Absence of Oranges? No fish? If it means an empty space, it certainly isn't like the space between me and my computer screen. It's something quite different and, when you start to delve more deeply into it, something almost unimaginable. And yet Zero is a word we use all the time. It's a tool. Complete understanding lies beyond us but because it points roughly in the right direction of its meaning, we can make do.
Let's take another word: AFRICA. When I use that word what do you think of? All the things that you think of will be quite different to the things that I think of because it depends so much upon our respective remembered experiences of that place, its people and its events etc. Africa the word becomes a tool which simply points, in our mind's eye, to an area of the brain where we have our own stored memories of that particular word. When we use language, it seems to me important to remember that we are not pointing so much at the Reality itself but at our own experience of that reality.
One more example: LOVE. To a young teenager who has been brought up in a gentle, happy, secure family with two parents and some joyful siblings, that word will mean something so completely different to someone (a boy I knew) who's drunken parents burnt to death in a housefire when he was 7 and who was sent to unwilling grandparents in a faraway place who ignored him and found him a nuisance and an intrusion.We are fooling ourselves if we believe that we understand someone else's words when all that we can possibly understand is our own perception of the words and our own relationship with it.
Coming to the word GOD. . . . . . Actually I don't think I need to write any more. If you got this far you will perhaps see why I find arguments between those who believe in God and those who do not about as meaningful as a conversation between an African tribesman and an eskimo. A smile,a handshake and a little topical present would probably be much more effective."

the choice

I sit down to play the piano
but it seems that you call me to leave off
and stay silent.
not music but silence
not sound but word.

jung

"At the same time, from the point of view of psychological experience or subjectivity, jung felt there was no way to distinguish between the experience of God and the experience of the unconscious. From the perspective of the subjective experience itself, the use of the term God becomes synonymous with the use of the term unconscious." . . . . . .

Theology in his mind understood neither epistemology nor experience. He had listened to the theological discussions of his uncles and experienced the problems of his father, and felt that their belief was as blind as that of the materialists: "I felt more certain than ever that both lacked epistemological criticism as well as experience... The arch sin of faith, it seemed to me, was that it forestalled experience." . . . . .

"Analytical psychology lays itself open to the charge of creating a religion to the degree it finds insuperable, universal, epistemological barriers which deprive religion of any distinctive and genuine kind of knowing; if the possibility of knowing the religious object is denied, then what is left to religion is the religious function, and therefore Jung's psychology can function as a religion just as well as anything else.
Christian theology cannot admit the validity of this approach without suffering the loss of its own distinctive nature and method."

I just want to remind myself of my golden (but unwritten) rule:
knowledge, not for knowledge's sake, but as a means to an end,
or rather, as a means of escape from entrapment. . .
so that I am free to continue my journey . . . .
(?)

the article goes on to discuss jung's relationship with fr victor white. . . .

"Jung is afraid that if evil is looked upon as non-being, "nobody will take his own shadow seriously... The future of mankind very much depends upon the recognition of the shadow. Evil is - psychologically speaking - terribly real. It is a fatal mistake to diminish its power and reality even merely metaphysically. I am sorry, this goes to the very roots of Christianity." . . . .

doesnt he mean the very roots of humanity rather?

"The theologians, in Jung's mind, mistake their concepts for real things, while Jung feels he rightly limits himself to the Imago Dei: "My thinking is substantive, but theological-metaphysical thinking is in constant danger ... of operating with substanceless words and imagining that the reality corresponding to them is then seated in Heaven."

I am thinking suddenly here of the start of the document written by the second vatican council in the 60's which comes so close to recognising this.
doctrine as models of a reality: approximations rather than limpid truth.
not the truth but signposts leading towards rather than away . . . .

"Analytical psychology unfortunately just touches the vulnerable spot of the church, viz. the untenable concretism of its beliefs, and the syllogistic character of Thomistic philosophy. This is of course a terrific snag, but - one could almost say - fortunately people are unaware of the clashing contrasts. Father White, however, is by no means unconscious of those clashes; it is a very serious personal problem to him."

christianity and jung

it is possible that jung has had more influence upon me than I realised.
http://www.innerexplorations.com/catjc/st1.htm

interesting quote from this article:
"As Jung grew older, his number one personality was attracted to science, while number two was inclined to comparative religion and archeology."

number one
number two

the next sentence is: "But neither was satisfactory by itself."
[hence: psychiatry of course]

it seemed relevant

my music

after many months of despair over my music,
I have set up a little website of older recordings
as a small incentive to writing again.
it may or may not work.
it may or may not have an effect on this blog.
I certainly know that the blog was acting as a needed substitute.
http://www.sjymusic.x10hosting.com/index.htm

word
sound

go-between

perhaps music acts as go-between . . .
'twixt outer and inner I mean.

being me

I shouldn't underestimate the amount of effort involved
in being me

the word

clear as crystal:
iridescent with a hidden beauty like no other

the pope in the middle east

such a shame he didn't get to gaza.
the catholic lady in this clip speaks particularly well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLdeCCF-2CU

facing it

on a forum a couple of days back I wrote:
'stifling social norms'.

perhaps this relates to my music as well.
people don't 'compose'.
composers compose.
they compose and get paid for it
because they are up-to-date artists with things to say.

everything has said to me over the past two years:
you are not a composer.
stop bothering.
concentrate on reality:
prayer is your way forward in the 'inner life'
(there it is again).

only, I listened to an old piece today,
and then I improvised a little at the piano
and then I played through the last stuff that I 'wrote' ('composed').
and so I wonder:
perhaps I have got stuck on the stifling social norms (again).
could it be? could it be?
could it possibly be the music that can make me well?
could it be the lack of it that has contributed to my illness?

music as a means of travel.
that was always how it seemed.
until when? can I pin down the date?

caldey?
looking back (musically)?
turning me to stone?

answers to this cannot come with words.
they can only come with the music.
let the music be what it must be,
if it must be. . . .

dualism

inner life; outer life:
these words occur again and again this morning
[in the smiling sunshine as I go about my chores].

typing them here makes me aware of the problem;
[perhaps what the philosophers mean by ying yang (?)]
apparent opposites that aren't really:
sunlight creates shadow.

my own strange story is my way into yours.
not so much the way then,
although it becomes the way for me.

this is what the psalms help me to do:
weave my own life into the fabric
stitch by stitch

different

today everything seems different:
me certainly but more especially you.
the psalms sound different
and also the gaps in between;
singing them means something different
and my life means something different too.

the tiniest tweak of your little finger
and the world is transformed.

judgement

whereas the judgement of men destroys
the judgement of God gives life.
[red hot coals become a refreshing rain]

couple of things

I think about prayer all wrong.
not asking, or making
just being?

today, serious confusion.
that ugly 'not understanding' place.
but it's only ugly because I long so for control.
this is the point then:
until I can live carelessly
I cannot live with you.

we were in a different place today though
weren't we?
(pause)
so what's it all about then?

fool, haven't you even learnt lesson number one yet!

cornered

when I woke up this morning I said
'how badly it all went yesterday'.
you said, 'no it didn't.
you were cornered you see'

unlearning

I walked down along the river gwynfi
flowing towards cymer.
I saw delicate white wild flowers growing along a stream
I heard flowing water
I watched a butterfly with wings the colours of a rail ticket
dodging amongst the dandelions
I sat by the water and imagined how it was wearing away the rocks
I touched a tree
and spotted one tiny blue flower
like a minute lily.
you showed me these things
'our secret' I think you said.
whoops

the noplace

where you live

silence

you will not hear
you will not see
you will not know
you will not understand

but there -
despite all of this -
unheard,
unseen,
unknown
and misunderstood;
there -
in the silent dark noplace -
am I