Category: Christmas

In discussion with an Anglican friend earlier in the year, I suggested that the liturgy of the Church of England, even the modern versions, contains very little of the God within. It tends to look to God above, to God looking down, to gratitude, confession and petition. Prayer is surely about nurturing a relationship.  

 
Teresa of Avila, however, has much to say about the God within: “Settle yourself in solitude and you will come upon God in yourself”. And, as a child, I remember being impressed by a saying of Mahatma Gandhi: “I believe God is closer to me than fingernails to the flesh”. Admittedly, being of the Quaker persuasion, I stand towards the edge of the Christian tradition and I look towards waiting in silence, to experiencing moments of transcendence, however simple and fleeting, to assist me in my way through life. 

 
Earlier this year our family spent a week in the hills in mid-Wales. We stayed in an old farmhouse where the view from the yard provided a sublime vision of quiet: meadow, trees, blue mountains, a few silent sheep and, blessedly blue sky. Occasional flights of goldfinches feasting on the purple thistle heads only contributed to the peace. Early each morning I would sit and marvel at the quality of the silence. One morning, indeed, I felt “caught up” in a moment of timelessness. It has come into my mind often since and I have remembered a beginning of a poem by R. S. Thomas which fits completely: 

 
And God said: How do you know? 

And I went out into the fields 

At morning and it was true. 

 
Such intimations are of inestimable value in helping us to navigate a world which contains so much destruction, suffering and inequality. It is all too easy to feel overwhelmed by news, to feel that one’s own puny efforts at supporting others, ‘saving the planet,’ are so miniscule as to be useless. For most of us we might say with T.S.Eliot: 

 
there is only the unattended 

Moment, the moment in and out of time, 

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight 

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning 

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply 

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music 

While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses, 

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest 

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action. 

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation. 

Janet Robinson (JM member) 

[Poem by R.S. Thomas is Amen. Quote from T.S.Eliot from Four Quartets ] 

Photo Tondi Johnston, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pregnancy_Week_22_by_Tondi_Johnston.jpg