today, you are my silent music
and yet we make it together.

to be so near to the dead end and still to trust.
I understand the urgency,
although I wouldnt be able to place it exactly.
acting upon it brings me up against a multitude of enemies.

that this relates directly to my 'creative life' is also clear.
thinking today of 1970: my discovery of beethoven.
it wasn't so much the music.
it was a road: a way forward.
his urgency.

music
you
dead end.
stay on course: even into the dead end.

the contradiction:

this looming dead end is my way forward.

Obama's healthcare plan passed . . . . 212 to 219 I believe.

The gospel today is the woman caught in adultery. I never knew before that the Romans had banned stoning but it's obviously crucial to know this to understand what the Jewish leaders were really trying to get Jesus to do. If he advocates the Mosaic Law he can be condemned as anti-Roman, and if he refutes the Law he can be condemned as anti-Jewish.

the worse things seem to get, the more clearly I see you.

my music has always been about colour.
so are the psalms.
so are you.
colourful God.

I suspect that the real battle over my music is probably more about the fear of meaninglessness.
I've sensed this a couple of times in the last few days. 
things it is important that I face.

one enters the kingdom of heaven quite blind.
the music: I need to surrender it.
the 'artist' image tides me over, perhaps for jettisoning later.
the constant temptation: anything available to cling on to,
but really there is no need.
it's a reaction of fear: clutching at 'what is'.

aware again of the way in which you have made the problem of renunciation as easy as possible for someone so weak;
as though you are saying
'I've done all the hard graft for you, now just loosen those fingernails . . . '

just a couple of things,
and I'm not sure that either of them really need to be written down:
but here they are anyway.

the deadly earnestness of you: the cross tells me this.
'don't let anything distract you', you say,'however important it may seem
it really isn't in comparison.'

my isness.
I was thinking today that my 'isness' and your  'I amness' are perhaps where we meet. . . . .
could it be that I cannot be me unless I am in you;
that my being flows directly from yours, and if anything impedes that stream of being, then incompleteness and disintegration follow?
 . . . . like trying to live without air?

wrestling painfully today, yet again, with my music:
so bound up with my life in you in ways that are still beyond my comprehension.
the inadequacy of my music!
a source of constant distress.

the nothingness of you: it's important to acknowledge this and to accept it.
over and over if necessary.
it's almost as if I have to forgive you for it.

the artificiality of identifying God as 'father' and 'son'.
obviously we can only use the words that can be understood by all
but who knows how wide the gulf between crude representation of truth and the very truth itself might be?

More urgently, how many people who yearn for the very truth are distracted by the limitations of language?

Scripture draws from the same intuitive well as art and poetry. For those born in an age of science this creates an added hurdle.

'Christianspeak' was always a barrier to me because it answered questions that I had not asked whilst the questions that I was really asking it couldn't answer.

It was only through the psalms that I could really find you. The psalmist asks the questions I was really asking and we learned together, gently, that there were to be no answers; at least, not the ones I was anticipating or hoping for. Over the years it has dawned on me(slowly) that the psalmist with whom I sang was actually you yourself all along. (Emmanuel)
It was ultimately the questions themselves which shone with the sustaining light.

scapegoat, old testament and time

in your eyes, we share sin.
but the way of man is to scapegoat others rather than to accept this.
(weight too heavy to bear)
when we look at the cross we see the scapegoat;
you yourself, willingly.

which tells us that it must stop here: the scapegoating I mean.
you ask us to bear our share in sin (not alone, because with you)
so that someone else doesnt have to.
when we judge, we condemn ourselves
just as we condemn them.
(he who is without sin, let him cast the first stone)

you ask us to carry our cross.
because if we don't, the cross doesnt go away:
it has to carried by another.

today, other things too:

Allah of the muslims,
Yahweh of the jews,
God of the christians.
the One who shines with countless lights:
and, to you who give everything,
what other response can there be but to give everything back?

any other response is surely just foolishness
because the everything that you give is only a sign.
yes, that everything that you give we take and gather into barns,
collect in museums and bank vaults
delight in, label, and study
(accumulating wonderful stuff: treasure)
but how can any of this make us happy
when what we really want is you yourself?

'made in your own image'
what else can that mean except that you made us to love?
We can never be happy except in love,
and what else is love but giving all?
any love which does not give all is incomplete:
an unhappy love of compromise and dark places.

another thought:
jesus as God:
I have stumbled hopelessly over this.
and yet these past two weeks I have looked and looked at the cross
and seen you there.
not jesus as God in the way that a dog is a boxer . . .
but jesus acting for you;
I look at him and see your light.
(you are the one who acts.
Your Stillness is no stagnant lake.)

(to those with ears to hear, late beethoven speaks your light. (it pours through the cracks) but jesus acts your light.

which takes me back to the old testament:
not just a 'preparation' for revelation
but an essential part of it.

jesus, without the old law,
without all that had come before,
would not be the full revelation.
(is what jesus means in the 'not a single jot'?)

it wasnt that you had several shots at it and only hit some sort of bullseye with jesus,
or even that the old testament is full of misunderstanding
or half-understanding about who you are, [although I think that is true]:
there could be no full understanding of who you are and what you intend
without all of it: from 'in the beginning' right through to revelation
(and beyond?).

which takes me back to the concept of time.
[through today's prayer: a host of memories:
light-filled moments when things made more than sense:
remembered.]

writing is not a way of 'preserving the past',
it's a way of 'enriching the present' -
and the difference is everything because it is where you are to be found.
[the Always Present]
the God of isaac, and abraham, and joseph.
(it's worth pointing out the way in which the words 'past' and 'present' seperate time and simply make it harder to see a continuum.)

in the same way, the kingdom of heaven is not to be found in a 'future',
while we push it into a future how can we make it a part of our present?
only when the future becomes now,
where you are,
can we live in your presence;
[your present.] 

let god be god

yesterday's post illustrates the shortcoming of prose to describe things of the spirit. (well, my prose anyway.) today has shown that something really does seem to have changed in the relationship between me as musician (and very much a lost one) and me as person. [I was going to write the word christian there, but somehow it doesnt seem fundamental enough.

tonight, singing vespers: joy . . .
because I was doing what I need to be doing,
what I want to be doing,
and what I am called to be doing. 
isnt that total freedom?

In past times, prayer that got as difficult as it was this morning would send me running for cover but things are different now. Perhaps because I can see how the clouds and the ugliness are not some new manifestation of an aspect of you in yourself but a manifestation only of passing trouble and ugliness in my own being. It seems so obvious, but there was a time when I had no understanding of this at all, or was unable to communicate it to myself - which can perhaps be the same thing?
I overestimated my own ability to 'perceive' you whilst underrating the degree to which my own flimsy and easily turned nature can confuse the mental 'canvas' of prayer and the way in which you do in fact communicate with me (because I know that you do).  
Or perhaps it is just that I know a little more about you and am less easily led astray but darknesses?
To put it bluntly, I know a little better the difference between me and you. It sounds so basic put like this but there was a time when I had no conception of where the boundaries were between us. . . . .(certainly at Worth I think.)
Today has been important (as has the whole week.) The artistic nature of the life of prayer has become a source of inspiration in a way which is difficult to describe: especially in prose. The life of prayer is so essentially a creative one in a transparent almost invisible way. The one who prays seems to me tonight to be an artist who paints without a brush: his painting is a new manifestation of a truth which transcends all comprehensible beauty in a perfectly understandable way. It is because of the transcendent nature of this painting that the artist is neither able to turn it into something visible, nor able to visualise what the painting would be like because the painting lives and the painting is you yourself. . . . .
so hard to put into words and yet I really want to try.

worth was much in my mind this morning, having done some googling about it last night.
was this what made prayer today so difficult?
no I don't mean 'difficult' but 'difficult'.
like it often was at worth.
an indescribable difficult and an impossible-to-grasp difficult.
I'd forgotten how difficult it can get!

urgency

tonight's reading: the prodigal son.

'send loving darts into the darkness'.
I can.

my post yesterday is worrying me a lot.
prayer today: cloudy, ugly and confused.
faith then.
the psalms too: often jangling and incomprehensible.
could it be that yesterday's post was wishful thinking?
or, at the least, a misconception?
that the 'dualism' is not how it is at all?

could it be that there is progress?
I don't mean spiritual progress -
[could any perceived progress of that sort be anything other than unhappy self-deception?]
nor do I mean a burst of temporary inspiration which peters out into the sand . . .
but progress towards a resolution of something fundamental about the way that I live my life?

music and prayer. this problematic dualism.
the key seems to be the way in which I perceive my own place in the overall scheme of things . . . . not as a composer of symphonies then but as a part in yours.
part of me yearned so to be the former
- and it did happen for a little while -
but it could never bring me happiness.
[and I wonder about the reasons for that].

and in this symphony of yours I am not following your score;
nothing as prescriptive as that.
I improvise into your score
and the music is mostly a silent music.
no dead silence this: far from it -
no long pause in a complex orchestration
but a creative interweaving of living silences.
john's silent music. [just like I always dreamt of!]
and the words and the sounds I make are simply crests on waves: 
transparent indications of where silences rise and fall.

could it be that all along the burden of creating was too much for me?
that I could never be happy creating alone -
unsure of every note, wasn't it the uncertainty ultimately that was to defeat me?

the aim was clear enough :
composition was a search into the present, rather than a search into the future. But the nature of composition meant that the present I was searching for could never be found and that when the piece was finally finished I was still forever yearning for that 'present' in the music that I had never even fully discovered during the writing and was certainly lost forever in a tumultuous sea of doubt and apprehension.
and always the terrible question: was this really real?
and how could it be real without the present?

is this what my illness has taught me?
no, you have taught me. . . .
in my illness.
without the illness I could never have reached this point.

just a couple of things about the nature of this score: your score.
it isn't the massive score that one might expect. not at all.
at times it is almost chamber music.
and you are neither the conductor, nor the composer.
instead you sit beside me and we compose together.
I listen to you and you listen to me.
together we make music,
and yet this is no duo.

do I take the musical analogy too far?
it wasnt planned. does it actually work?
is it coherent with the reality of the last few days?
tonight it feels right, and I am glad to have put it into words.

very aware today of the way in which daily problems block prayer; or, rather, make prayer harder.
but also: prayer as work.
making silent music.
nonetheless joyful for that.

living with you

attention to detail:
not for detail's sake,
but because each detail is a step into the present
where you are.

the painter and the musician take care over each stroke, each note:
each one a step toward holiness.

the creative nature of the present where you are:
participation in;
together with;
the doing thereof . . . . .

and still I am squeamish about this:
the holiness of artistic endeavour,
of any endeavour . . . .
it is not the endeavour itself but the way in which it is endeavoured . . .

today you have been good to me in ways I cannot begin to understand.
can I still not see how my illness has been a blessing?

terrible weekend.
separation.
today I struggled back:
relief.
without you: total exile.
with you: everything.
and yet still I might throw it away on a whim!