Archive for the ‘Literature’ Category

Fixing my life
November 28, 2010
Come, Holy Spirit
September 9, 2010An Invocation to the Holy Spirit
Come, true light.
Come, life eternal.
Come, hidden mystery.
Come, treasure without name.
Come, reality beyond all words.
Come, person beyond all understanding.
Come, rejoicing without end.
Come, light that knows no evening.
Come, unfailing expectation of the saved.
Come, raising of the fallen.
Come, resurrection of the dead.
Come, all-powerful, for unceasingly you create, refashion and change all things by your will alone.
Come, invisible whom none may touch and handle.
Come, for you continue always unmoved, yet at every instant you are wholly in movement; you draw near to us who lie in hell, yet you remain higher than the heavens.
Come, for your name fills our hearts with longing and is ever on our lips; yet who you are and what your nature is, we cannot say or know.
Come, Alone to the alone.
Come, for you are yourself the desire that is within me.
Come, my breath and my life.
Come, the consolation of my humble soul.
Come, my joy, my glory, my endless delight.
St Symeon the New Theologian
(Quoted in The Orthodox Way, by Bishop Kallistos Ware, Pg.136-7)

A Night Sky Poem
August 23, 2010There Will Be Stars
A poem by Paul Field
Watch the sky tonight
there will be stars
there are always stars
Sometimes hidden
by clouds
illusion
confusion
darkness
but there will always be stars
Sometimes one will fall
shoot across the timeless sky
and in an eternal split second burn brighter and shine
if we glimpse it we are blessed
It will scatter the diamonds of heaven around our feet and guide our
footsteps
for a few precious seconds of our journey
through clouds
illusion
confusion
darkness
The stars that remain can burn on brighter from it’s loss
become more radiant through having shared
it’s power
energy
joy
grace
it’s beautiful, priceless, irreplaceable verse in the eternal song
There will always be stars
when we glimpse one on its fragile, fleeting journey and touch its light
we have been truly blessed
Watch the sky tonight
there will be stars
Words copyright of Paul Field. Taken from the album Rites of Passage by Paul Field and Dan Wheeler, available from www.elevationmusic.com

Tread Softly…
July 14, 2010He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven
by William Butler Yeats
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
- First of all, there has been the momentous transition to living in a totally new and different part of the country. It is a move that I am very happy with and generally have really enjoyed, yet it is also destabilising and disorienting as the conditions and people of a new environment swirl around you. Even positive and enjoyable experiences can become intoxicating if gulped down all at once.
- Secondly, there has been the breaking of my spectacles – an achiles heal like weakness that can bring down even the most sturdy of giants. I am reminded so powerfully as I try to live with slightly out of focus vision, how frail human life really is. Our health can be taken away from us in a moment – mind or body. Good health is certainly an unearned gift, rarely appreciated until it is taken away in some form, no matter how slight it might be, like a couple of days without glasses.
- Thirdly, the breaking of my glasses provided the ‘sharp shard of broken glass’ in my mind to awaken me to the danger of using people as instruments for one’s own pleasure or plans and how subtle, but powerful a temptation this can be when you are a single person living alone. Perhaps, to protect the soul from experiencing the full weight of existential angst the mind plays little tricks with us, small, seemingly innocuous self-agrandising delusions that cushion us from feeling our true isolated state. Yesterday, I became freshly aware of my need for companionship – a loving and faithful spouse with whom we might shelter each other from the full brunt of the cold bitter winds while sailing single-handed the turbulent ocean of existence on this planet. For a Christian, indeed many religious believers would say that God himself/herself is with the individual soul on their travels across the sea of life, and I would certainly agree. Yet, even God must allow us to brave the existential winds alone sometimes, lest we become convinced that the securities of civilisation, money, pleasure, food and drink are more solidly eternal than fleetingly ephemeral. I remembered yesterday of how blessed I am and how God’s good gifts are not to be taken for granted as part of a self-centred hedonism (even if it be a spiritual or religious hedonism), but rather are kind mercies to help us remember that life could be much harder and indeed for many on this planet it IS much harder. Therefore, we should live soberly, thankfully and reverently. Yes, each day, even each breath is a gift. Thank you God for your kindness to us. Help me to live kindly to others too.
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Wrestling failure – slowly coming to understand its treasures
May 16, 2010‘Suffering makes us deeply aware of our own inability. It takes away our power; we lose control. The light of our eyes can see nothing. Now it is only the inner light in the eye of the soul that can help you to travel this sudden, foreign landscape. Here we slowly come to a new understanding of failure. We do not like to fail. We are uncomfortable in looking back on our old failures. Yet failure is often the place where suffering has left the most precious gifts.’
Eternal Echoes, John O’Donohue
Having dusted off, John O’Donohue’s book Eternal Echoes and written some about it a couple of days ago, I was leafing through it again today. There is such a wealth of wisdom in this book some thoughts are sad, others joyful, most are a result of deep reflection and compassionate, sensitive articulation. The above quotation caught my eye, among others, and I thought I’d cite it for little more reason than I think it’s beautiful and maybe someone who is questioning the value of their life will read it and feel encouraged. A kind of internet message in a bottle.
I like the first words of the citation especially:
‘Suffering makes us deeply aware of our own inability.’
This is such a hard lesson to come to terms with never mind embrace, but it is an absolutely necessary one and precious gift if we can accept it and receive it in the spirit it has been offered to us by ultimate reality. Suffering is that valuable reminder that we are not eternal, at least not in the sense that the Divine is. God may have ‘placed eternity in our hearts’ and there may be an eternal element of our souls, even our redeemed and future resurrected bodies…but, unlike God eternity is not for us the natural state of our existence.
Rather, we are finite.
We are mortal.
We will come to an end.
Grappling with this element of our vocation, an aspect that is common to all human life, indeed all physical life, has been one of the great battles of human history, of political, artistic and religious life. Yet, if we can not just grapple with this spiritual messenger, like Jacob and the angel at Peniel, in the book of Genesis in the Bible (Genesis 32: 22-32), but actually receive it into our lives, then its painful lesson can sweeten our existence. The wounding, yet paradoxically healing message the struggle brings will help our lives to be transformed. We will receive a new start, a new identity. In the terminology of ancient cultures we will be given a new name. Not merely any name, but rather a better name – a name that reflects and sparkles with our true nature and inspires our highest achievement.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Lutte_de_Jacob_avec_l%27Ange.jpg
The ancient texts of the Bible discuss this paradoxical relationship with suffering in many places and yet, perhaps non is so vivid in its physical and poetic imagery than the story of Jacob. In the Biblical story, Jacob whose name means ‘deceiver’ (literally ‘he who grasps the heal’) had earlier in his youth stolen his brother’s birthright, when he tricked his father into blessing him (Jacob) rather than the rightful heir in tribal law the eldest son, Esau. Later in the narrative, Jacob is an older, more mature man, one who has personally experienced suffering, deceit and trickery himself at the hands of others, mostly in the employment of his cunning uncle Laban. In chapter 32 of the story, Jacob is now wealthy with two wives children, servants and cattle. It is at this point that he has to come terms with the real consequences of his youthful betrayal of his brother, as Esau and his band of warriors ride towards Jacob and his family’s caravan.
Aware of the wrong he committed as a young man, Jacob internally faces death as he contemplates what will happen when he meets his long-lost brother. It is in these circumstances: of contemplating his guilt and shameful failure of character with the prospect of ultimate punishment looming ever closer, as well as considering the harm that might be done to his family too, the innocent ones whom he loves, that Jacob comes face to face with God in a most intimate encounter. They literally wrestle each other.
The Bible tells the story this way:
Genesis 32:22-32 (NIV): Jacob Wrestles With God
That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maidservants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”
But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
The man asked him, “What is your name?”
“Jacob,” he answered.
Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.”
Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”
But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.
So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”
The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon.
Jacob – the deceiver – like many of us fights God’s presence in his life, difficult, uncomfortable and afflicting, like physical combat with a wrestler, until he is wounded at the hip and faces his ultimate inability to overcome God. He has been, however, tenacious and utterly determined to win, to literally earn a blessing this time from the Divine messanger…and he does. He becomes Israel, ‘He who wrestles with God’. The stigmatizing label of deceiver(Jacob) is removed and a brand new, sparkling identity of a God Wrestler is stamped into his spirit and soul.
Yet, lest Israel forget the difficult process that led to this new name and new level of vocation, he is physically wounded. His hip is dislocated. From now on, he, Jacob, Israel will walk with a limp. It is this limp, I believe, this reminder of hard-won successes and their intertwining with personal failures that characterise the mature disciple of Christ. It is also the sign of the weathered, seasoned, spiritual pilgrim of whatever tradition she or he may be a part of. The great nineteenth century theologian and scholar of religion, Frederich Schleiermacher, (sometimes frowned upon in Evangelical circles), described religion as a sense of ultimate dependency on the Infinite. Perhaps, it is only through suffering and the persistent physical putting into practice of the desire to seek the Divine face and blessing, that we can truly become aware of our own ultimate inability…and thus… our need for… and dependency on God.