Month: March 2024

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Freedom

Christ_on_the_Cross_by_Frantisek_Bilek

Christ_on_the_Cross_by_Frantisek_Bilek wiki commons

Contemplation and meditation are often thought of as activities, which don’t really relate to everyday life or the life of the wider community.  This is a mistake.  The iconic image of contemplation, maybe, is the monk or the nun alone in prayer in their cell.  But such people know the connection that what they are doing has with the rest of the world.  Thomas Merton, himself a monk who wrote extensively about contemplative practice, was also much concerned with the world’s social and moral problems.  In He is Risen, he wrote in 1975 about freedom of action and thought in the context of spending time with God:

“Too may Christians are not free because they submit to the domination of other people’s ideas. They submit passively to the opinion of the crowd. For self- protection they hide in the crowd, and run along with the crowd – even when it turns into a lynch mob. They are afraid of the aloneness, the moral nakedness, which they would feel apart from the crowd.

But the Christian in whom Christ is risen dares to think and act differently from the crowd.

He has ideas of his own, not because he is arrogant, but because he has the humility to stand alone and pay attention to the purpose and grace of God, which are often quite contrary to the purposes and plans of an established human power structure.”

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The Word Within the Words Malcolm Guite

Darton, Longman & Todd 2021 £8.99 ISBN 978 1 913657 38 3

Given that Julian meetings are held in silence, ‘The Word within the Words’ may seem an odd choice for reading. We forget that words are distinguished by the silence, however brief, between them, which gives them space for their meaning to emerge. John’s gospel begins, ‘In the beginning was the Word’; and what follows tells us that this word is a verb, not a noun. It does not describe God; it opens the path for God to act, and interact, with His creation.

And this is the theme which runs through Malcolm Guite’s book. He draws on his experiences as a scholar working on medieval poetry, much of which had a religious context, which led him to discover his faith. He uses poetry, both his own and that of a variety of other sources, to illustrate the power of words, provided they are given the silence they need to grow in our hearts and minds, and to enable God to act in and through us.

This is a short book – less than 90 small pages – and can be read in about an hour and a half. But I should have said, ‘mis-read’; it is not a book to be read and then gather dust on the shelf; you need to allow the spaces between the words to have their effect, too. Think of it as a spiritual fertiliser, to be thinly spread and dug in; its effects will be seen later, in ways we may not have anticipated. Because, for words to grow and bear fruit, silence is essential.

Brian Morris