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I HAVE GOT THIS PAIN IN MY HEAD IT’S LIKE FALLING DOWN A HOLE.......
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YOU ARE A STONE You are a stone. You lie on a Cotswold hill under the open sky. The sun rises and warms you, the evening comes, and you are a stone. Night and day follow each other, year succeeds year, and you are a stone. The four seasons send their weather upon you. Rain washes you. Wind dries you. Frost lingers between you and the earth. In the spring a butterfly rests upon you and opens her wings, and you are a stone. Century after century you are a stone. Lichen grows on you, and a little moss. A wisp of dry grass springs from a crevice. Small creatures move beneath you, a Roman snail slides across your face. Sometimes children run and hide nearby. You are one hundred and eighty million years old. All things round you change, but you do not change, for you are a stone. After a hundred thousand years, you knew that you were a stone. When twenty million years had passed you became aware of what is stored up within you. You are granular and rich with variety within. There are caves in you, lined with crystals. There are faults and stresses. And scattered all through you is a profusion of fossilised shells. These are the remains of sea molluscs that lived and died long before you ever were. Some are flat, and plated with pearl. Some are fluted, some are whorled. Many are tiny, and many more were fragmented and made unrecognisable in the movement and pressure that created you. It is because of these that your own characteristic shape has endured. Without them you would have been cracked and flaked by frost or hammer long ago. Without them you could not be. So you are composed of countless unremembered deaths. All those lives were yielded up to make you what you are. You are built on sacrifice. This is the eternal secret at the heart of the universe, and it is there in the heart of you. You are a stone. You will outlast most other things, and then you, too, will pass away. But the eternity that is locked within you, the thought that is in the mind of God, will never pass away.
I HAVE GOT THIS PAIN IN MY HEAD I think my head has been full of pain since the moment I was born. The world’s pain is in my head. Who can take this pain away? I think that after all the only answer is to have it off. I charge you not to laugh lewdly at that expression, I mean, of course, that I must have my head off. Surgery is the only answer to this pain. Will someone perform the service of removing my head? THE SERVICE OF REMOVING MY HEAD: Dearly beloved we are gathered here in the sight of almighty dog and in the face of this conflagration to remove the head of this fool, the burden of which is intolerable. Right, pull it off.......(I charge you not etc.) My head is pulled off, I do not know how because one does not know these things at the time in the nature of the case, the head being the means of knowing. But after it is removed, then I see, and my head is placed in a plastic bag to save it dripping on the cope. Now take it away, away from these pews and streets and traffic lights, away into the woods, and lay it under the oak. My head is laid down at the foot of a fine, broad, spreading oak. A parcel of pain amid the gentle roots. And the pain goes out of it and into the tree, into the branches, into the leaves. The leaves die and fall to the ground, and the pain sinks back into earth from whence it came, and it is gone. A small round white growth pushes up between the dry leaves, like a budding mushroom. A new, fresh, fragile, baby head. Another new born sac of pain to be raised in the world.
CHRISTIAN COMMENT "Human beings are not nice", someone said recently. And when I look at the news, at history, and at what goes on in my own head, I see much truth in it. The danger is, that as our knowledge, and therefore our power, increases, we don’t seem to get much nicer. And this worries us. And it worried Mary Shelley when she wrote "Frankenstein" about 180 years ago - the story of the clever doctor who tried to create a perfect man in his laboratory and produced a monster who went out of control. The question is: can we humans be trusted with the galloping increase in our knowledge and power? The recent report Human Genome Project tells us how much is now known about ourselves and the way we work. This gives us a frightening power over each other and our planet which can be used for good or ill. Can we rely on ourselves to use it for good? We need so much wisdom, so much love. We need the story of Christ who had all the knowledge and power of God and yet emptied it out into the world for the sake of people like us.
IT’S LIKE FALLING DOWN A HOLE....... THE KINGDOM Once upon a time the Archbishops asked us what sort of people we needed to be to achieve the society we looked for. It seemed to me, however, that the society the Church is supposed to look for could not be achieved by any sort of people. For the society the Church is supposed to look for is the Kingdom of God. Some Jesus-lovers may be quite successful as social engineers. They may, and sometimes should, join the ranks of those who try to improve, reform, revolutionise, de-porn, conserve the environment of, govern, or abolish society as we know it. But the society which the Church must look for, or at, is not achieved by reformists, revolutionaries, protesters, conservatives, or other moralists; because the Kingdom of God is not achieved. The Kingdom is like being born; or falling in love, or down a hole in the ground; or seeing a joke; or being happy one afternoon. It happens to you. It comes to you. IT COMES TO YOU It comes to you because it is already there. It is not waiting to be built, or spread, or extended, or brought in. It is there, waiting to ambush you. It lurks in colleges and streets, upon coffee cups and machinery, between sheets sweaty with pain or love. Yea, it is there in council chambers and draughty corridors of power, and it groans within the slow grinding movements of political society. (And violent men try to take it by force.) It is there because Jesus is there. I have received no news that the Word has been disincarnated again, nor can I find any way of taking the awkwardness out of the tale that the man was resurrected whole - flesh, bones, hair and all. It should not be surprising therefore (though it usually is) to see him looking at you through the puzzled innocent eyes that drunk, or the humiliated face of that beaten politician. The Kingdom is there, the new world dancing about in the midst of the paralysed, moribund old world: an elusive movement which is our only permanent foundation, an inebriation which is the only true sobriety, a foolishness which is wise, a weakness which is strong. It is there because Jesus is there, the new humanity which is a pregnancy in the old; the heaving, kicking, alive future of the race. MOMENTS OF TRUTH It is there, complete yet incomplete, arrived yet coming, victorious yet unconsidered. It intrudes into our consciousness most typically when we lose our self-possession because of fatigue, joy, or helplessness. These are the moments: when our defences and our valour crumble, and our acts of faith fail and are taken over by faith itself - which is a gift and often the last resort of the faithful. (These are the moments to live for, my love: when the pathetic little action group rejoices over one small concession; when the paralysed man laughs with glee as you fumble with his trousers and try without success to lift him onto the lavatory and the do-gooding solemnity collapses in a heap on the floor; when the tedious meeting is possessed of the famous Moment of Truth and no-one wants to break the spell; when you sit and hold hands with someone who asks for your help and you have nothing to give because you are too tired and too aware of your own unmasked unloveliness, and the Dove flutters down between you and brushes your cheek, and both of you are blessed.) LIVING DANGEROUSLY As I was saying - the Kingdom of God has come and is coming and will come. It is not our task to achieve it, because the builder and maker is God. Our task is to believe it, perceive it, enjoy it, tell it, live in it. So I am not talking about some steady progress to a better world. Nor am I talking (at another extreme) about an otherworldly piety which folds the hands and hopes for heaven. I am talking about faith in the kingdom advertised by Jesus. It is faith in a kingdom which has come as a mysterious other dimension to the world we know. And it is also faith in a kingdom which is coming - painfully distant, yet coming irrespective of what we do because there is a Word which says that it shall. This faith does not leave us inactive, unmoved and unscathed. To believe in the Kingdom is to be committed to it. Once you have perceived it your direction changes. To live by this
faith is to live dangerously. Faith in progress, or faith in a world
beyond is not, I think so costly to keep or so devastating to lose as
faith in the Kingdom. Once committed to the Kingdom you are subjected
to a daily reminder of its absurdity. For what the world sees as improbabilities,
weakness and foolishness are found in the Kingdom to be certainties,
power and wisdom - and vice versa. You will find yourself at cross purposes
with the world in which you have been at home since your birth. On the
other hand, to lose faith in the Kingdom, once you have been enticed
into modelling your life on its funny ways, is to risk the loss of all
meaning in this world or any other world. This loss is a possibility.
It may have some significance that the man who first enchanted me with
this way of thinking, in a night of incommunicable despair, stuffed
newspaper under the door of his bedroom and gassed himself. It is for joy that this risk is taken. You cannot encounter the Kingdom without being charmed away by its seductive suggestions into some form of reckless abandonment. You may, of course, resist joy like the sulky child outside the door who is angry and will not go in and join the party lest he lose his precious grievance or some other form of self-absorption. But if you follow joy you can soon find yourself in deep water. For enjoyment of the Kingdom can lead you into some awesome engagements with the social order, and you may find yourself as a consequence entangled in a thoroughly political situation. Political confrontation may never have been your intention but your celebration of the divine-in-the-human has led you there. If so, do not suppose that your motive will be understood. "You are a king then?" asked puzzled Pilate. And if Jesus could not find words to explain to the governor his strange motivations, then how can you? There is little to be gained by replying to your questioner that it is all down to your peculiar method of being happy and that you are where you are because of the joy that is set before you. Or something. (And you also have to love the governor, chief executive, chairperson or whoever has the power). ...AND WEEP Belief in the Kingdom also leads to anger and grief - a goad to social action which, again, is hard to explain. Living in two worlds at once leads to a disturbing sense of incongruity. (This I believe is the source of much of the comedy and tragedy which we human beings contemplate ourselves. We are forever telling jokes and recounting disasters in order to reconcile what we are in one dimension with what we are in the other.) It is painfully disturbing to experience the dissonance between the splendour that looms in the face of this old lady and the drab indifference of the social order which pays her pension; and between the cherished exemplars of the Kingdom which is what Jesus makes of children, and the starved, bullied, battered, unloved objects that the so-called adult world makes of them every day. So to pray "in earth as in heaven" can cause you to howl in anguish, and rise to act. This motive for action is simpler than "justification by works" (or some smarter psychoanalytical version of the same jibe.) You are simply and impulsively trying to get rid of a pain. It is also disturbing to know that where the land you love diverges from the Kingdom you believe in, there it is building on sand and arranging for its own collapse. It is a pain in the gut. "My bowels! My bowels!" groaned Jeremiah when he saw doom approaching for Judah. And we kick ourselves because (unlike Jeremiah) we did not have the nerve to speak at the critical time. A SMALL HARD STONE Faith in the Kingdom demands a sort of toughness, a hardiness, a willingness to do without familiar supports. It requires the church to be like a small hard stone in the world. Sometimes the prevailing society will trip over it and curse it. Sometimes it will be the one stone which locks the whole arch of society together. Neither is a comfortable role. But a church which has stripped itself of all other commitments save the Kingdom might be that stone, even if it remains incognito as it trips and binds. And such a church might do our society a power of good precisely because the building of a better society is not its primary objective.
NAMING THE NEW New Creation What in the world is God creating now? Is God still creating in this world, or was the evolution of mankind the last gasp, as it were, and thenceforward there is no future but a slow, or sudden, slide down the dipside of the parabola? If creation is still to go on, what form will it take? Will it be in the creation of some more species to top up, or increase, the existing supply? Or the provision of a new environmentally friendly planet to which a sample selection of creatures will be taken in a Noah’s space-ark in the nick of time before disaster overtakes the earth? Or will we all go, in a huge flotilla of space ships or angelic chariots (same thing?) which sweep earthwards in a sort of cosmic Dunkirk rescue? Or will it boil down in the end to the migration of our souls when we die, flitting like bats through the twilight to some supernatural spirit world where we shall hope to meet our relations and possibly the souls of our pets and some of the more loveable animals? I confess to dismissing all these theories of new creation except the last - the survival of the soul and its safe delivery to a supernatural world. And this one makes me uneasy, though I know that I have been consistently associated with it during all my ministry in the Anglican Church. It is not the core of what I have preached but it has generally, I think, been assumed to be. And because it does represent an aspect of what I believe, and because it can be such a kindly reassurance, I have not hastened to disabuse those who have been comforted by what they thought I was on about. What I am on about, what sets my mind reeling, is the biblical apprehension of a new creation which looms in the future but is rooted in the present. It is there in the thrust of the whole Bible story; with its tales of folly and glory; with its savagery and beauty; with its bloodsoaked religion and its powerstruck kings; with its sober wisdom and its spellbinding imagery; with its mysterious power burgeoning in human weakness. It is there in the visions of prophets proclaiming earthbound promises which slip over into a heavenbound earth. It is there in Christ’s portrayal of the kingdom of God. It is there in the gospellers’ unmatching descriptions of the resurrection of Jesus, wounds and all. It is there in Paul’s poetry about the same resurrection for humankind. And it is there in the apocalyptic dreams of a new heaven and a new earth. It is a glory which is coming, yet which is already here, as the harvest is already present in the seed. It is like a pregnancy in this old Sarah of a world: the living, heaving, kicking future of the human race and the world to which we belong. New Birth The new creation,
gestating in the world we know, will, at its birth, be both continuous
with this world but also transcend it. For both reasons those who hope
for heaven will not devalue this earth and its earthiness, but rather
reverence it as the provider and bearer of a greater glory. "Blessed
is the womb that bare thee". And the very fact that this earth
is so fragile and transitory can make it more precious and delightful
than it would be if we knew it would last for ever - just as artificial
flowers do not gladden us as real ones do, precisely because they do
not die. The hope the Bible puts before us is that this story of travail and new birth is being re-enacted in the history of the church and world until the drama is worked out on a cosmic scale with birth pangs which shake the whole earth and which are resolved in the birth of a new heaven and a new earth. However we interpret all this apocalyptic language, we may find it speaks to these times more meaningfully than it has for many ages past. The accelerating pace of change over a generation or two raises the question: how will it end? The escalation in the consumption of resources; our ever-increasing killing power, communication power, inventive power; the explosion of knowledge, of speed, of scope; and the unprecedented convulsions which have gripped the world this century: these things bring an apprehension that the world is fragile, small and finite, and that we cannot go on as we are indefinitely. There must be a term, an end, a show down, an outcome, a qualitative change. Small wonder, then, that there are those who believe that the qualitative change, the New Age, is already upon us. New Names We cannot say precisely what this new creation is like any more than the child in the womb can describe life after birth. It is new, and so by definition cannot be grasped fully by our thoughts and language. We make guesses knowing they may be wrong. New creation may be more earthy than religious people suppose, more spiritual than non-religious people suppose. We do not know for sure how, or if, we share it if we die tomorrow (though I believe I am always in the hands of God); but we can recognise it sometimes in the world we know. We can recognise it in the birth of a baby; in the work of the artist, whose painful labours add a dimension to the medium used and bring a new experience to the beholder; and in the impenetrable mystery which sometimes confronts us in ordinary things and "ordinary" people. It is to be seen most readily in love, that most accessible of divine gifts, and in its creative power, as in forgiveness, to bring new beginnings out of the wreckage of the past. These are not mere illustrations of what is to come, they are samples of it, crumbs that drop to us as we crouch beneath the table, sacraments of the future age. It is like being a dog living in a human household. He lives in his own doggy world interpreting human affairs with his limited doggy mind. Yet there are some words spoken to him by humans (such as "dinner" or "walk") which resonate with recognition within him and which link him with their strange and "other" life. Most significant is the name they have given him. By this he is linked to them in a personal way and becomes, as it were, one of the family. It represents his relationship with humans as baptismal names represent to Christians their relationship with God. Now in Isaiah 62 God tells his people that they and their land will be called by new names (Hephzibah and Beulah, "My Delight" and "Wedded") - new names which will represent their new birth out of the disaster of their exile and forsakeness. I was so entranced by this idea that I wrote this rambling article. Is there a new name for me which represents my part in the newly born creation to come? Is there a voice calling to me from that unimaginable future, speaking a name my brain cannot identify in a language I cannot understand? And is there not a resonance of recognition somewhere within me? Is there not already within me a new self which does not identify, understand, recognise and answer to my new name? I rather think there is. And I rather think that I shall one day begin to know the new name for me and the new name for you, the new name for the church and the new name for the world. And the million new names for God.
WHEN I COME TO DIE I remember walking with my family along the road to the village where I was born. The road was sunlit and bright with yellow dust. This was the village we were forced to leave a few years before, our belongings piled on a cart. I do not remember that; but I have clear memories of the village to which we moved, a couple of miles further on, though I must have been less than two years old when we lived there. I remember someone pushing me in a pram and leaning over the handle talking to me. A year or two ago I met an old woman named Monica who told me shyly: "I looked after you" and I knew straight away who she was. I remember a sheep dog about the same height as I was who came and licked my nose and, because someone said the word "sheep", I imagined for some time that that was what it was. I remember our dog Rob who sat in the road, and the girl who pushed the pram telling me that his tail had been run over. How did I understand what she was saying? I remember my brother and I going out in the rain and standing at the door of the green corrugated iron shed my father built. There we put out buckets to see if the rain would fill them. I remember my mother standing in the doorway of the house calling us back in. I remember the dress she wore, its colour and its pattern. I remember waiting for the ice cream cart. A group of people standing in the middle of a junction of flinty roads, talking and watching for this wonderful thing which came from the town. Then there was the horse-drawn cart high above me and the first thing the ice cream lady did was to drop a half penny cornet to Rob who ate it in one gulp. When I come to die I think I shall find myself walking along the sunlit road to the village where I was born. Then I shall move on to the next village. And there I shall wait and watch with Monica and some others. And then, after a long time, the ice cream cart will come. |