Last night at the 8pm service, Fr David preached a wonderful sermon about Lent, about Ash Wednesday, about being vulnerable.

The image that has stayed with me is the one of the dog on its back inviting you to rub its belly. How, as the dog trusts and presents himself/herself as an easy target for pain or pampering, as it is loyal to the goodness in us, that we must be more like that too. And that it can be hard, but a life without vulnerability isn’t a life at all.

Silence and Honey Cakes was the one out of three books I read recently that I had read before. And the margins are covered with my pencil notes, as it’s one of my favourite books! Fr David’s sermon reminded me of a note I’d put in of a blog piece from Fr Simon who was also there last night…

Life and love are indeed about risking openness, in God’s case to us, in our case to God – to Life itself – and to one another.

- from Vulnerability post April 2011

We need to be open, we need to be vulnerable. Jesus didn’t get an army together and keep himself protected. He drank water with a Samaritan woman who was outcast by so many others, he spent time with tax-collectors, he wandered into the wilderness on his own for 40 days ready for solitude and silence’s good and often difficult lessons, he didn’t run for the hills when they got ready to crucify him. He remained open, loving, vulnerable.

To be a disciple of Jesus, to learn from him, we need to take up our metaphorical crosses, get ready to carry some pain, and not throw it off the side of the hill and barricade ourselves into a safe-house. We need to be vulnerable. We need to be open. We need to trust in God’s strength and love as we love openly, knowing that whilst that can bring us a huge amount of pain sometimes, it will present the greatest joy, the greatest gift, and will change our lives and the lives of all whom we meet.

Follow God. Be vulnerable, be open, be Love…

Luke 9:23 Then he said to them all, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.

In the past during Lent I’ve taken it to be a period to show myself and God that I wasn’t attached to material objects.

But with Lent 2012 arriving I wondered, what now? I’d grown to hope that there was more to this Lent business than calories (I’m thin so it’s not like I need to throw out the salad).

So I looked more at why we have the Lenten period, and at the Biblical passages that describe Jesus’ 40 day journey into wilderness. I thought about the recorded words of Jesus, and the traditional purpose of Lent as “the penitential preparation of the believer through prayer, penance, repentance, almsgiving, and self-denial.” And from that I came up with something right for me. And something that I’m not going to write about, because as the earlier verses in Matthew’s sixth chapter record, it should be something between the believer and God, rather than the believer and anyone who will listen. I challenge you to try the same! Do something personal for God and/or God’s children, you don’t need to tell other people.

So here we go, day one. Alongside my personal Lenten ‘thing’, I’ll be blogging each day with a favourite Bible verse from the Lectionary.

Matthew 6:21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Eric speaking about the album here

I’ve drawn to the end of the time I allotted myself for my thinking/reading/writing project on silence. And so come my conclusions…

I feel that I’ve learnt a lot. My journey over the last ten days has been more of a personal one than an intellectual one though. What I’ve noticed, is that we are all different. Whilst I feel the need to balance silence and sound, retreating and returning – “fleeing and staying” as Rowan put it in Silence and Honey Cakes - others like Dom Francis the Abbott whom I met in Wales, desire to stay in silence. Others like Alex, a university student of Lampeter, prefer to stay in sound. Both are good and honourable ways of living.

The problem our world faces is thinking that their individual way is right and should be the way for all. Whether we stand to silence, to sound, or choose bits of both and find ways to integrate them, we should respect diversity. Let me rephrase the sentence a bit to reflect to the wider world’s interests. The problem our world faces is thinking that we must be either right-wing, left-wing or middle-line, and that only one of these three positions is right. The problem is the attempt to justify ourselves above others in an aggressive fashion, effectively destroying the lives of those that are different to us.

When Adam and Eve took some of the – in my opinion metaphorical – fruit of knowledge, they decided that they knew better than God. They decided they couldn’t be naked, they couldn’t be vulnerable. They needed to hide themselves and be ashamed, in part, of who they were. So you see, to live in the beautiful world God intended for us, we need to look back to those first days. I’m not saying we need to throw off all our clothes – looking metaphorically again – I’m saying that we need to be ok with being vulnerable and open with one another and with God.

We need to cast aside our certainties, our facts, and accept a diversity in opinion. Respecting one another, loving one another, allowing others to live in different ways, remembering that each life has God in it, and is precious. Valuable. For example, we can’t be pro-life for the unborn and pro-destruction for the self-living. Peace my friends. That’s been the heart of my silence. Peace. Respect of diversity, an openness and willingness to others. Peace.

It is by the living together in the Church of human freedom and the Holy Spirit that we are transfigured, not by the Holy Spirit replacing our activity, not by our activity being inspired, remotely, by the Holy Spirit, but by the presence together of freedom and God’s Holy Spirit weaving in and out of each other, sustained by the patience of the one with the other.

… The anxious struggles of both conservatives and liberals in the Church need to be put into the perspective of what has been done by Christ and the Spirit to create communion, so that at the very least we have to see communion as something other than a hard-won human consensus. First it is a gift; and where we cease to see it like that, we lose the sense of the divine creativity at work in the Church. We may be left with many problems of discipline and order, but we shall have recalled that the ‘consubstantiality’ of life in the Body of Christ is a genuinely new reality, not just an idea or an aspiration.

- Rowan Williams in “A Margin of Silence”

First Reading - 2 Corinthians 4.3-6
And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Gospel Reading - Mark 9:2-8
Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’ Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

Hymns (chosen by me from Complete Anglican Hymns Old & New):
57 Awake fling off the night
105 Christ whose glory
845 Jesus bids us shine
419 Lord the light of your love

Sermon:
Today’s Gospel reading is all about light. Jesus, with three of his friends, treks up the mountain. And Jesus is transfigured before them. To be ‘transfigured’ means to become more beautiful. And the Gospel of Mark tells us that Jesus is dazzling, that Jesus shines.

Put your hands up if you’ve read or seen Harry Potter. (Lots of hands raised) Wonderful isn’t it? In Harry Potter 3, Professor Dumbledore waves his hand over a candle, and it magically lights. As he does so, he says, “happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers, to turn on the light.” To remember Jesus’ love for you and feel supported. Light in the dark gives us hope, that’s what we think about when we light the candles in our prayer corner. And standing on the mountain, shining amongst the cloudy, cold day in the mountains, Jesus’ friends are given strength.

But that’s not all that this passage is telling us. Let’s go back to Harry Potter for a minute. The students at Hogwarts School have all kinds of different lessons to go to. Professor Flitwick teaches Charms, where you can make something do something extra. Make something fly for example. Like party tricks. And so there’s a reason why Professor McGonagall’s lessons are separate from his. Her lessons, are those of “Transfiguration”. Where she can change a rat into a golden goblet, where she completely changes the nature of the thing before her. The Transfiguration of Jesus, then, is no party trick. It is a revealing of the deep, beautiful nature in him. When Professor McGonagall transfigures something, the molecular structure of that thing alters. And while Jesus is transfigured on the mountaintop, he is altering something too. Symbolically, Moses and Elijah, who appear with Jesus in the light, represent the Law and the Prophets. God shouts from the heavens, “Listen to him!” Listen to Jesus. Jesus is altering the way things are. He is telling us to be careful of what we think are cast-iron certainties, and look at things in a new light. From a new viewpoint. To stop rushing to cast judgement, and to love more dearly.

I like reading poetry. And a poet called William Blake wrote a poem called “A Dream”. In this dream, there’s a tiny ant called Emmet. And Emmet is crying, because he’s lost in a big dark forest and can’t find his way home. But thankfully, someone helps him. A glow-worm comes along and finds Emmet, and the glow-worm says, “don’t be afraid. I can light the way for you.” And Emmet journeys with the glow-worm, finds his home, and is happy.

When Jesus is transfigured on the mountaintop, he is revealed as the Son, the Beloved, who we need to listen to. And with Jesus as the Light of the World, we can all be little glow-worms helping others, and we can guide people in his way. Guide them not because they’ll be punished by an angry man in the clouds if they don’t, but because if they aren’t guided, if they’re abandoned and don’t find out what love really is, they end up in the dark, in the forest, alone and waiting for a light to help them find their way home to be happy again.

We are the family of this Church. And together, we can be lights in the world, giving hope to others, loving others, and walking in the way of peace. God is Love. And he wants us to shine for him, as his Beloved Son did on the mountaintop, and can now, does now, in us. We can transform, transfigure, our world into a truly beautiful place. We just need to shine.

I was confirmed in December 2010, and the very last words spoken by the Bishop in the service have stuck with me: “Shine as a Light in the world, to the glory of God the Father.” Amen

A friend of mine from London sent me a book in October called Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith by Kathleen Norris. I’ve been dipping in and out of it since, and remembered this afternoon that she had written a few pages on silence. Here’s an extract:

…when I worked as an artist in elementary schools I devised an exercise for the children regarding noise and silence… when I raise my hand, I told them, you make all the noise you can while sitting at your desk, using your mouth, hands, and feet. The kid’s eyes would grow wide – and the teacher’s as well – so I’d add, the important thing is that when I lower my hand, you have to stop.

…making silence liberated the imagination of so many children. Very few wrote with any originality about making noise. Most of their images were clichés such as “we sound like a herd of elephants.” But silence was another matter: here, their images often had a depth and maturity that was unlike anything else they wrote… in a tiny town in North Dakota a little girl offered a gem of spiritual wisdom that I find myself returning to when my life becomes too noisy and distractions overwhelm me: “Silence reminds me to take my soul with me wherever I go.”

And reading that reminded me of a sermon from my own priest Fr Simon, as he told us that most of the children celebrating their first communions last week had told him that their favourite part of the service was the bit where there was a period of silence. Where everyone was quiet and just breathed in the moment.

Rowan Williams’ Silence and Honey Cakes puts it like this:

…there is the silence that is attentive, focused, coming out of peace not anger, coming from fullness not woundedness (well, perhaps from both…). Our freedom to be silent… is the index of our freedom from resentment and from the struggle for power. That’s why authentic silence is difficult; yet it indicates an affirmation, a great Yes to life in freedom.

…Silence somehow reaches to the root of our human problem, it seems.

So for all that we are diverse, silence seems to be really important and necessary in our lives. We need to integrate it into the noise of our world. Be holy, whole and healthy. Not “holy”, tired and stressed.

I wonder what would happen if we placed the meeting-place for General Synod on the top of a mountain. If it took most of a day to hike up, and the result of this was that all members must camp together in the hall before setting the chairs up in the morning, I wonder, how many would turn up? Would we be as committed? Would we embrace the “Communion” of the Anglican Communion, sharing the same floor sleeping in sleeping bags instead of individual-roomed hotels and loaning our extra pillow to the “opposition” that forgot theirs? I wonder what would happen if in the evening before the day of General Synod, all members took to the mountainside and watched the stars, in space of silence, and in space of sound singing camp-song hymns together. I wonder how much we would learn. Putting the effort in for God in getting up the mountain, putting the effort in for one another in the sharing of pillows and such-like, and putting the effort in for ourselves allowing time just to breathe.

Exodus 14:14: The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still.

So we should stop fighting one another, yes?

I’ve come to learn that silence is incredibly valuable. In his earlier years, Adolf Hitler said – as he opposed the honouring of the Treaty of Versailles – that it was not time for silence, it was a time for revolution. And the reality is that too many of us are saying something similar. And for nearly two years I’ve studied Ancient Greece and Rome, and have found that two and a half thousand years ago we were making the same mistakes. It’s time to learn our lesson. It’s not time for one side to seize power. It’s time to be still. Time to listen. Time to love.

There’s one picture in Rowan’s “A Margin of Silence”, at the beginning and the end. It is of a painting, Le Saint Esprit according to Québec painter Benoît Côté…

… whose work you can view (and buy) on his website (click the image). I’m afraid the one above already has an owner: Mia Anderson who wrote the forward for the book. So my photograph isn’t very good, you’ll need to find a copy of the book (or Mia Anderson) to see the colourful copy! “It’s the silent presence of the Holy Spirit alongside this goosely phenomenon of the Pentecostal season that bursts upon” us Mia writes. The art and the book complement one another, even though they had never been planned to.

I’m finding Rowan’s “A Margin of Silence” a bit too academic for me. I have no previous knowledge of Russian Orthodox Theology, so it is interesting, but hard reading. (His “Silence and Honey Cakes” on the other hand is one of my favourite books, and re-reading it has brought me great delight.) Whilst “A Margin” is hard reading, it’s good reading. Handy having a dictionary in Wales to use alongside it!

I’m learning quite a bit from it, and the idea of embracing our creativity has been prominent…

God the Holy Spirit is apprehended when freedom, creativity, inspiration break in… Spirit is what ‘completes’ revelation, what shows us that authority and reason are not the whole story… the Kingdom of God is the level or the realm of human life before God where liberty and creativity come to their fullness in human beings.

Sara Maitland writes briefly on the subject of art in her “Book of Silence”…

… the silence seems to pour out of the work into the space around it. I came to believe that my silence was making my seeing more sensitive…

Art and creativity are important in our silence, in our lives.

Wendy Rudd’s Windsails were hugely important to me in their time in my Home Parish.

Spending time with art gives the spirit space to breathe. Being in the presence of art / creating art, almost seems to hold a mirror up to the soul. It says, are you me and am I you? Are we all that different? Am I your brother or your sister, am I your connecting bridge between Everything and You? Am I a reflection of your needs or/and your desires? Am I God’s? Am I somewhere in between? Am I a moment in unison, both? I am energy…

Hmm. Art and creativity. I wonder what I’ll be thinking about tomorrow…

Glanced to the back cover of “A Margin of Silence” to see a description of the Anglican Communion:

…one of the ‘instruments of communion’ which holds Anglicans in ‘bonds of affection’…

I’m afraid we haven’t seen a lot of that recently now have we? The events of the recent General Synod is one example. Enough nattering already, we need to incorporate stillness into our lives and love one another. We need to stop talking and start acting. Yes we need to communicate, but we’re going round in circles. And we need to be respectful, and we need to listen to one another before we make instant decisions and put up walls against things that don’t seem immediately right to us.

My first full day back in England after my trip. I logged onto Tumblr to look at my updates, and found (from Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, which I love,) this:

The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That’s where you need to go.

This reminded me of Moitessier speaking of the unitive experience of solitude, not as a form of isolation, but of communion with God and with all things around him.

This in turn reminded of Sara Maitland writing about depth:

…there is an interior dimension to silence, a sort of stillness of heart and mind which is not a void but a rich space.

This in turn reminded me of Rowan writing in “Silence and Honey Cakes” of a truly healthy Church:

The church’s aim is to be a community… A healthy church is one in which we seek to stay connected with God by seeking to connect others with God; one in which we ‘win God’ by converting one another, and we convert one another by our truthful awareness of frailty. And a church that is living in such a way is the only church that will have anything different to say to the world; how deeply depressing if all the church offered were new and better ways to succeed at the expense of others, reinstating the scapegoat mechanisms that the cross of Christ should have exploded once and for all.

And this in turn (I told you there were a lot of sparks going on in my head!) reminded me of Sara Maitland informing me that the words ‘healthy’, ‘whole’, and ‘holy’, derive from the same root. The kind of Church with these three qualities is truly healing.

I have a portfolio of Good Newspaper clippings, and THIS IN TURN (hehe) reminded me of one of the articles I stuck into it…

Churches in South Sudan, which becomes independent on 9 July, have committed themselves to “re-engage in mediating” to resolve conflicts in the country, the general secretary of the Sudan Council of Churches, the Revd Ramadan Chan, said this week. Mr Chan said that the council would send delegations of church leaders to conflict zones to initiate dialogue between the government and militia groups.

- CHURCHTIMES 20.05.11

When I read it and stuck it in, I was thrilled. Now of course it’s good news, but also, I thought it said meditation not mediation. Yeah. So I was imaging a load of people sitting in a circle embracing quiet and learning to connect with one another. Hmm. Well, they still are learning to do that, except through mediation! And maybe through mediation – and perhaps some meditation too – the Anglican Communion can become more like a communal body again.

Google defines Communion as the sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings, esp. when the exchange is on a mental or spiritual level. Yes intimate sharing, not shouting matches. Please God can we remember what communion is all about?

Looking recently through some ordinand (wanna-be priest) questions, one was “What do you like most about the Church of England?” And the answer that came to my mind was “The Eucharist. Communion.”

And as I talked about it in my sermon on the wedding of Cana at Galilee, religion (belief in a God, in Love, in the Source of Life) should be more about relationship and less about archetypal religion. Communion comes not simply in drinking the wine that Jesus gave to us, but the relationship he shows us. God is not a wrathful being who punishes and predestines people to go to Hell. God is not that being. What God is, is love. God draws us into him, to her, through communion wine, through communion conversations, through communion hugs, through the communion of life.

For the Anglican Communion to truly live to its name, we need to accept the diversity within us and stop panicking, stop making everything so complicated, stop shouting, stop speeding. Slow down Anglicans. Slow down world. And listen to the nearly 18 year old even though she isn’t a Bishop, please, because we’re all equal children in God’s eyes, and I don’t want us to fight one another, even if you don’t think I should be a priest because a woman and you want to condemn my Uncle for being gay. I want us to respect one another, and be at peace. Be in communion…

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
Amen.

- Prayer of St Francis

Travelling back wasn’t much fun. I felt down and tired and rather sorry for myself as I headed for the train after my bus. I could describe what I was feeling as being in a state of ‘limbo’. Like being trapped between two worlds – the world of Lampeter retreat and the world of Stockport routine. It was not the feeling of being away from silent countryside, or the feeling of coming back to England that made me sad. It was that in that moment, I was in neither place. I was in between. And that solitude was trapping.

It reminded me then of Sara Maitland’s chapter 3. She wrote of wanderers, travellers, and their good and bad moments in silence and solitude. Extract:

…it was precisely at the point when they felt they could not escape that things started to go wrong for them…

It was only a couple of hours until I had moved away from the in between of the two places and felt normal again. But the trapping solitude was somewhat ominous. Enforced silence isn’t a positive one. After thinking about this feeling whilst in the ‘limbo’ state, I decided to do something about it. I pulled myself up and digged some chocolate out of my suitcase. And then, with my iPod, I decided to choose the sound of my silence, of my solitude…

… and with that the trapping sensation began to subside. I was not leaving friends behind and I was not alone waiting to go Home either. I was in between, but I was connecting more rather than remaining isolated.

I’ve learned on my trip, that we need both silence and sound. Solitude and socialising. Both are important, but having only one of the two is damaging. Silence, solitude, brings inner and outer awareness. Contentment, peacefulness. Whilst sound, socialising, brings communal experience. Family belonging, another kind of connection.

More on “communal” experience tomorrow. As Barbara Brown Taylor had it, “In the imaginative act, two ideas are struck together and sparks leap through the air between them, revealing familiar notions in a new light”. My trip created plenty of sparks, and I’m only about a third of the way through my reading. So more posts to come…

My Lampeter photos on Picasa here

Me, Imran, Rhydian, Alex & Luke, photo/VikkiJackson

Yesterday evening was fantastic. I had thought when I’d got back to my room after Eucharist and lunch that my experience of silence might be drawing to a close. But I was wrong. The taizé service was lovely.

Fr Matthew asked me to read a passage, and it turned out to be one of my favourites. 1 John 4:7-12:

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

The period of silence in between the chants and readings was lovely. Felt very peaceful, and this was a silence that was experienced completely and with others.

After the taizé I headed down to the SU Bar with Vikki and friends: Imran, Luke, Rydian, Alex. We won the quiz! After it we went back to halls and had a really good laugh.

It was turned midnight when I finally began the walk back to the guest house I was staying in (I had a front door key as well as a room key!), and Vikki walked with me. I know we’ll keep in touch.

So what I thought would be a journey into silence, solitude, sheep and sanctuary, turned out to be one of silence, solitude, sheep, sanctuary and socialising. But socialising is nowhere near a good enough word. Stepping into the role of ‘fresher’ for the night and finding people like me, my age, with a passion for study and for life, was wonderful.

Silence has taught me much. But we do certainly need a healthy balance. The kindness and welcome of my new Lampeter friends gave me far more than another evening’s reading would have (I’m not saying reading isn’t important I’m saying we need that balance, and that different things speak to us at different times). It’s been wonderful to discover that whether I end up in Durham or Lampeter, I can be happy in university life. Not just happy, but completely alive, and “free” in a new way.

As I was heading back to the guest house, Vikki said “so out of insanity and back to reality eh?” Yeah. But I’d say that the insanity of Lampeter student life was a beautiful bit of “Real-ness” that reality should have more of.

Me and Vikki, photo/ImranDavid