Christ and the Hurdy-Gurdy Man

I've just finished reading a rather wonderful wintry book: Ian Bostridge's Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession. It's about a musical masterpiece, written by a singer who has made it peculiarly his own - and who knows not only how to sing but how to write.

Schubert's song cycle is a setting of 24 poems by the German romantic poet Wilhelm Müller. They tell of a spurned lover who, leaving his beloved's home town behind, sets off through the snow and ice on a forlorn winter journey. You may know Winterreise - I have it since I was five: my grandmother would pick out some of its songs on the piano and tell me the story. But this blog doesn't depend on your ever having heard it. So read on....

I've always been intrigued by the way the work ends. You would expect the last song to be about either death or springtime. Yet the final poem in the cycle is a strange piece called 'The Hurdy-Gurdy Player', Der Leiermann. It depicts the lonely wanderer's final encounter on his hopeless journey. This is Bostridge's translation.

Over there behind the village / Stands a hurdy-gurdy man,
And with numb fingers / he grinds away, as best he can.
Barefoot on the ice / He sways back and forth,
And his little plate / Remains always empty.

No-one wants to hear him, / No-one looks at him,
And the dogs growl / Around the old man.
And he lets it go on, / Everything, just as it will;
Turns the wheel, and his hurdy-gurdy / Never stays still for one moment.

Strange old man, / Should I go with you?
Will you to my songs / Play your hurdy-gurdy?

After the emotional complexity of the earlier songs, this one is artlessly simple. The stanzas are repetitive, without much variation or adornment, as if the wanderer's warm beating heart is being frozen lifeless by the icy cold and blank despair - the first a recurring metaphor of the second throughout these songs. And there the cycle ends - or maybe, simply stops, for in no sense is this a conclusion of the agonised journey that has led up to it.

What do the hurdy-gurdy man and the wanderer's encounter with him symbolise?

Bostridge explores some of the ways in which Leiermann has been read. He could be an image of death, beckoning to the wanderer to succumb to the inevitable, which has been foreshadowed earlier in the cycle, and which to some extent he has already been longing for. Or he could be a symbol of the musical wanderer himself: no longer the performer at an elegant salon or 'Schubertiad' but a despised street musician dully, mechanically, churning out tunes for whoever cares to stop and listen; like Flaubert's 'cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars'. At this edge of unreason, the songs we have been listening to for over an hour turn out to be parodied as no more than the mindless turning of the hurdy-gurdy handle. In the end, the singer is faced with who he truly is: an unwelcome, unloved, disfigured outcaste.

But is it outlandish to see another more theological trope in this strange, alien figure, an image of the Christ who is every wanderer's journey's end?

It's true that there is nothing explicit in the songs to suggest this. But I'm not so much interested in what the poet or composer 'meant' (how would we ever know?) but how we 'read' the piece today. To me, the symbolism of this ending is powerful. In the previous 23 songs, the traveller has been drawn into many different worlds suggested by his dreams, memories, endless introspection, reveries, and experiences of natural phenomena that in his fevered romantic imagination, come to stand as images of the self. There have been only fleeting encounters with living, breathing creatures, let alone with other human beings. This all underlines his terrible solitariness in a freezing lifeless landscape, the familiar romantic image of having loved and lost.

But in this last song, he meets another man. The Leiermann is a complete wreck of a person, yet his very disfigurement and exclusion from human society recall the degraded victim of Isaiah who was 'despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief'. In the passion narrative of the gospels, this is how the suffering of Jesus is described; he is crucified 'outside a city wall', banished from human society, cast out, accursed.

This kind of language has been used by the theologian Rene Girard in his study of the scapegoat. He suggests that 'mimesis' lies at the heart of the familiar human transactions that isolate individuals who are made to carry on behalf of everyone else the negative projections of people unable to live with their unwanted dysfunction. Victims of oppression or bullying often carry symbolic meaning for those who perpetrate cruelty for reasons that are not always consciously understood. The 'scapegoat' is then banished from society as an accursed figure who will carry those split-off aspects of the self into a far country where they need no longer cause trouble. In classical language, the scapegoat 'bears the sin of many' by removing it to a safe place.

If the hurdy-gurdy man is a symbolic scapegoat, he may turn out to hold redemptive significance for the wanderer as his winter journey comes to a close. Here is one exile confronting another; one kind of despair recognising its mirror image in the other person. On the desperate margins of existence, there is a solidarity in their isolation. At long last, the singer has found a kinsman, 'bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh'. He is not alone in his music-making any longer. So, from speaking about him, the wanderer finally addresses him directly. 'Strange old man, should I go with you? Will you to my songs play your hurdy-gurdy?' A new relationship is formed, a new community.

I know: it's a pretty desperate answer to the wanderer's question. What, if anything, happens next? After these 24 stations of death, will there be a resurrection? Are these two alienated characters, the wanderer and the hurdy-gurdy player, changed by their strange meeting? Is there so much as a hint that spring might come at last?

Bostridge writes about what often happens in the concert hall as the last note dies away at the end of a performance of this work. There is a long silence that indicates how deep the audience's own involvement with it has been, then only tentative applause to begin with, as if, like a religious work, you aren't quite sure if you are supposed to applaud or not. The response of audiences to Bach's Passions is similar, as : maybe the song cycle is Schubert's highly personalised version of the passion story. A mark of great art is that it has a cathartic, redemptive, dimension, not just because of its beauty but because of the depth of insight with which it interprets its subject matter. Somehow, we know that this winter's journey is about each of us: Winterreise is our journey too, in whatever aspect of life we feel it: our disappointment in love, our loss of hope, our bereavement, our identification with the pain and sorrow of a suffering world. This is its capacity to open doors to a genuinely spiritual experience, even for those who don't think of themselves as 'religious' people.

On the surface, the cycle seems unremittingly bleak. But the passion analogy may suggest meanings that are not so hopeless after all. The Good Friday lament, 'Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?' invites us to stop, pay attention and reflect in front of an image of human suffering. To bystanders, the crucifixion must have seemed to be an event without purpose, just another death like all the others. This bafflement is reflected in the way the death of Jesus is recorded in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. The innocent sufferer dies in godforsaken dereliction: 'my God, my God, why have you abandoned me?' This passion is absurd; what possible significance could it have? It is only on profound reflection that the victim's story, like the scapegoat, begins to gather meaning.

So while the companionship between these two lost souls in exile, wanderer and hurdy-gurdy man, looks like a bitter irony on human love and belonging, the final question-mark in the poem puts it in a different light. And the song's concluding chord, unresolved but not hopeless, offers a clue that despair has not had the last word after all.

Je Suis Charlie: thinking and praying in the shadow of a massacre

As I write this, a vast crowd is gathering in Paris in a defiant cry for freedom and unity following last week's terrible massacres. Many world leaders are joining them, among them David Cameron. I wish I could be there too. Yet I am there, wholeheartedly, in spirit, in imagination, in sympathy, in everything except body.

Much has been written about these events and their aftermath. The Twitter hashtag #jesuischarlie has trended beyond all expectation. I have added to the volume of tweets expressing sorrow, prayers, outrage, and condemnation. Above all I have wanted to join the worldwide chorus of Non!, the refusal to cave in before the fear violence is meant to evoke. Bombs and guns will never, ever, intimidate the pen. Not in any society that treasures democracy and is pledged to live by it. 

What have been my thoughts in the past few days? They have swung this way and that, I admit it: when events are so wicked, it can take time for our initial responses to stabilise. At first I entertained the notion that when religion is mocked or insulted, as in the long tradition of satire in which Charlie Hebdo stands, we should not be surprised if its committed practitioners react violently. But that's the first step on the dangerous path where understanding an evil can veer into subtly shifting responsibility for it. We can start to think that when people say certain things or draw certain pictures, they should expect a retaliation. So while we are appalled, we toy with the thought that they partly brought it on themselves: whether through malice, unwisdom or just carelessness, they were responsible. But this is absolutely how not to see it. Responsibility for this atrocity lies with those who pulled the trigger - with them alone. 

What they did was an act of hatred of the freedoms our democracy stands for. We need to calibrate those freedoms. In any society, rights are not absolute. They have to be negotiated and consented to. Freedom of speech, precisely because of the power it gives, has to be handled responsibly. Paddy Ashdown tweeted last week: 'Some say that because you can say something, it doesn't mean you should. But free speech means that because you shouldn't say something, it doesn't mean you can't.' To put it that way round is clarifying. There are things I shouldn't say or write; if possible, I shouldn't even entertain the thought behind them. Not because I am not free to, or am afraid to, but because it erodes the value of another human being, damages people, or is exploitative or hurtful or just plain rude. That is a judgment everyone must make. And within the boundaries of what is lawful, we should expect a huge range of opinion as to what is or is not responsible in an environment where so many freedoms are given us. Charlie Hebdo is not everyone's cup of tea. But however people use these freedoms, and even if they abuse them, violence is never the answer. 

Voltaire has predictably been much quoted: 'I disagree with what you say, but shall defend to the death your right to say it'. It's hard to improve on that. I guess that saying that makes me what I have realised in a new way I am: a citizen of modernity, a child of the Enlightenment. The assault on Charlie Hebdo was a clear attack on the values of the Enlightenment at the very heart of its French homeland. Freedom to speak, equality before the law, toleration of dissent, all this was in the sights of the Islamists as they named their victims and gunned them down. They did what they did not out of reverence for truth and justice on behalf of the Prophet. It was an act of naked fear. 

To be a post-Enlightenment society means standing for the belief that the tyranny of ideas, any ideas, even the best, can never belong in a civilised society, let alone the distorted and debased doctrines of radical Islam or other extreme fundamentalisms. The principle of laïcité lies at the heart of the secular French Republic. That clear separation of the state from religious belief and practice is the direct heir of Enlightenment thinking. It's not that religion is to be repressed, but that everyone should be allowed to practise it according to their conviction in an environment of toleration. Or not, as the case may be. It's important for people of faith to understand that liberal secularism, so hated by some strands of Christianity, is not the tyrannous proscription of faith but the guarantor of a space in which it can find its free expression. At its best, it is the ally of good religion, not its enemy.

This much has become clearer to me in the past few days: that we must speak and act not out of fear or hatred but out of the love of truth. Yes, the Enlightenment itself did not always live up to its own best vision of a civilised society: witness the Terror that followed the French Revolution. But just as in Christianity and Islam, we need to rise to the highest aspiration of a noble movement, not the corrupted versions certain periods of history bear witness to. And the Enlightenment has given us gifts we should celebrate and be profoundly thankful for. It's arguable that it could only have happened in a Christian environment with its respect for the individual, for personal freedom and for the pursuit of truth. 

The preacher in the Cathedral today got it right. He said that he certainly did not like it when his Lord was maligned or mocked or his name used as a swear word. It is hurtful and grievous. Yet nothing anyone can say or do to Jesus Christ today can go beyond what he has already suffered in his passion and crucifixion. He stands before us as the Lord of truth and love. And, as the New Testament tells us, he did not resort to retaliation when he was ridiculed and insulted. 'When he was abused, he did not abuse in return.' 

Islam honours the same God of Abraham as Christians and Jews. He is not a coercive tyrant; on the contrary, as the Qur'an insists, he is 'Allah the compassionate and merciful'. We do not confuse those who follow the noble path of Islam with the crazed extremists who have so violently twisted its meaning and practice, and by wreaking havoc on the streets of France brought the name of a great world faith into disrepute. Jesus prayed from the cross for those who did not know what they were doing. These atrocities are beyond comprehension to us, beyond our capacity as mortals to forgive. We burn with anger on behalf of victims who can no longer cry out for themselves. Yet is it not precisely in the heat of our rage that we must pray that hardest of all prayers that Jesus uttered at the darkest moment of his passion: 'Father, forgive'? Or try to?

On Good Friday Afternoon

In the Chapel of the Nine Altars in Durham Cathedral, there is a striking sculpture by local sculptor Fenwick Lawson. His Pietà shows Mary at the end of a long and terrible Good Friday. Stretched out at her feet lies the body of her dead Son rigid after his ordeal on the cross. His left arm is slightly raised, stretching out towards his mother whose hands in turn are opened towards him. In his wrist is the mark of the nail of crucifixion. She is depicted as the woman who has undergone sorrow beyond words. Her face is worn with grief and with the scars of ageing that great suffering incises on the human body. I have tweeted some images today: @sadgrovem.

Large numbers of worshippers come here on Good Friday afternoon for a simple service of evening prayer. A few years ago we decided to make the Pietà the focus of our last act of worship on this solemn day. It is the traditional office of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, very simple and spare with no words wasted and plenty of silence for thought and meditation. It needs to be understated like this, almost empty, coming as it does after three hours of profound spirituality and high emotion in the Good Friday liturgy. In liturgical time, Jesus is being laid to rest. His mother, his disciples are exhausted, numbed, and so are we.

How to bring the service to an end? We do it by listening to the Stabat Mater read aloud. This 13^th century Latin hymn enters into Mary’s experience as she watches her Son die.

At the cross
stood the sorrowful mother in her grief
while her son hung there.

The genius of the poem is to recognise that Mary’s grief is the same as any mother would feel. Even if he had not been the Son of God, he would still have been hers, and how could she love him more than in the hours of his suffering and dying?  There’s a moment I find especially poignant:

She watched her own sweet child
dying in desolation
giving up his spirit.

This is ‘the sword that shall pierce your own heart’ that Simeon had warned Mary about when she brought her 40-day old infant into the Temple to present him to the Lord. Death can have the effect of reawakening childhood memories and what mother would not remember her precious son’s infancy at a time like this?

When I wrote my book Lost Sons, I introduced it by meditating on this corner of the Cathedral. I have always been struck by two other presences near the Pietà. One is a painting by Paula Rego that shows Margaret, the 11^th century Queen of Scotland, with her son David sitting at her feet. This time, it’s the mother who is at the point of death, but the mother-son image is a striking if unconscious echo of the sculpture (I put it that way round because the Pietà was here first). The other feature is a simple early 19^th century memorial plaque to two sons who died in early childhood. It was placed there by their ‘afflicted’ parents to commemorate their beloved boys John and Francis. Were they their only children? We don’t know, but underneath the simple words the emptiness of a bereavement two centuries ago still speaks powerfully.

To me, the Pietà helps to make sense of what must be the worst human loss a parent can ever experience, the death of a son or daughter. Christians have always seen in the suffering of Jesus God’s loving identification with all human suffering: the divine Victim knows what every victim is going through. The Pietà says the same. But it does this by focusing specifically on how death severs human intimacy, strikes at the heart of the love and friendship that we need if we are to flourish and be happy. The thought that God understands and cares gives solace in our darkest times.

In his Good Friday sermon, the Bishop spoke about Jesus’ last word from the cross in St John: ‘it is accomplished.’ That sounded like an ending, he said. He went on: ‘how and why it is not an end but a beginning, I cannot know on this day - yet.’  The Stabat Mater is a sombre poem. But at the end of its long and gloomy day, the sun comes out once more. Like today’s sermon, its conclusion hints at Easter in a last line that speaks of glory and paradise. Tomorrow, on Easter Eve, we imagine a Sabbath rest for the Christ who has finished his work. And then, early on the first day of the week, he will stride through the grave and gate of death into the glory of resurrection blazing the trail where in God’s time, we hope to follow.  

On Going to See Shakespeare

Last week we went to Sheffield to see The Winter's Tale. The Crucible Theatre has a thrust stage and we had seats close to it. It always takes me a few minutes to get used to Shakespearian language, but in this environment so near to the action we could hear everything clearly. It was a great performance: such a pity that the theatre was half-empty.

Winter's Tale is a favourite play of mine. It's one of the late dramas that are not easy to classify, as if in his maturity Shakespeare is reaching beyond straightforward categories. It starts out as a classical tragedy where, like Othello, the tragic flaw is jealousy. Leontes imagines that his old friend Polixenes is having an affair with his wife Hermione. The drama vividly depicts a man eaten up by self-absorption jealousy, his rapid disintegration bringing about the collapse of a family's whole world with the deaths of his wife and his young son.

But then comedy breaks into the hopelessness. The famous stage direction  'exit, pursued by a bear' seems to introduce a note of parody, hinting that nothing is quite what it seems. There is a clown and lots of flirtatious dancing, and all is set for a happy ending with paradise restored and broken relationships mended. But (spoiler alert) Shakespeare gets there by using a device that has puzzled critics because it seems as if it resorts to trickery. At the climax of the play Paulina brings the statue of lost Hermione back to life. It's a tease, for we don't know whether she was ever really dead or had simply been hidden away and looked after by Paulina. Anyway, in a beautiful recognition scene she and Leontes are reunited and the drama achieves its resolution.

Does the play itself 'lose its mind', disintegrating from the high art of tragedy into what at times feels close to farce? Does the comedy, following hard on the heels of so much grimness, mock what went before as if to say, don't take any of this too seriously: it's just illusion, a ceremony to mark the passage of the seasons? Perhaps it's a parody on both tragedy and comedy: the scarcely believable speed at which things go wrong at the beginning, the sudden lurch into an apparently careless comedy complete with songs, ballet and pick-pocketing slapstick and a miracle (if that's what it is) to end with and undermine belief still further.

Or is Shakespeare, far from being careless, showing his mastery of dramatic form by merging the two genres in one art-work and making what is unbelievable at one level credible at another?

Here's where I find the drama especially telling. As a theologian, I see profound resonances in The Winter's Tale of the central Christian story of the passion and resurrection of Christ.  It's not that any one figure is an image of Jesus (unless it is Paulina whose action in the drama is to bring about both judgment and redemption). It is the drama itself that feels irresistibly Christological, taking us through a passion-like experience of suffering and pain into a realm of laughter, reconciliation and dancing that suggest resurrection and the kingdom of God. So the play is a great transformation scene, leading us out of winter into spring and summer, bringing colour into the sombre monochromes with which it began. This is one way in which the movement from tragedy to comedy is not just credible but ultimately necessary. (See F Buechner,  The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale.)

Paulina says near the end: 'it is required you do awake your faith'. Which is why, when the statue comes to life (and who envies the actor who has to stand there so still for so long?), you can smile at the ludicrousness of what is happening, or else find yourself believing in it and being deeply moved. Theatre is always an act of faith for playwright, actors and above all, audience. In The Winter's Tale, we seem to be summoned into an act of faith that draws us into the life of things, into God. Either parody or gospel - or maybe both, because in an important way the gospel parodies the silliness of self-important human lives and says: look beyond this and see something that is not transient but eternal. Shakespeare is always big enough for there to be endless possibilities in the way we respond. And by keeping us guessing, he always has the last laugh.

Marvellous theatre. Why don't I go to see Shakespeare much more often?

Lost Sons

SPCK have just published my new book, Lost Sons: God’s Long Search for Humanity. I don’t want to indulge in self-promotion (moi?).  But now that it’s out I hope you’ll allow me to say a little about it.

Earlier this year the title felt as though it had a rueful irony to it.  A book is like a baby: a unique individual whom you have begotten. Its life becomes separate from yours; it has a character, temperament and will of its own. This offspring just didn’t seem to want to be born. It felt like a lost child.  The labour pains were considerable.

I’ve pondered why this might have been.  Maybe the content touched me too personally.  I am after all a (late) father’s son and a son’s father.  So the theme of sons who are lost and found was bound to bring up material from my own past and present.  It would take a psychotherapist (e.g. my wife) years to get to the heart of what all this might mean. 

The book looks at stories in the early part of the Bible that tell of sons who are ‘lost’ in various ways. Abel is murdered, Canaan cursed, Ishmael abandoned, Isaac destined for sacrifice, Esau supplanted, Joseph betrayed, Moses hidden. Adam is the archetype of them all, and us: the child who hides himself from God. In each case I try to show how Jesus in his passion and death is God’s ‘Lost Son’. It is not that these Old Testament stories are all ‘types’ who prefigure Jesus. But the first Jewish readers of the gospels would have known these stories intimately and would, I guess, have brought their own associations to the passion story, seeing ‘pre-echoes’ if you like in these lost sons.

But the wonderful thing about God’s Lost Son is that he is ‘found’ again in the resurrection.  And this turns out to be true of many of the ancient lost sons. Ishmael is rescued from the desert.  Isaac is not killed on the altar because an angel stays his father’s hand.  Esau is reconciled to the brother who supplanted him as Joseph is with the brothers who sold him into slavery.  Moses is discovered in the bulrushes and brought up in the royal palace. So the book is about resurrection as well as death, even if sometimes we have to go looking for it in dark and baffling places.

This may remind you of the parable of the Prodigal Son or, as I think it’s better called, the Lost Son and the Loving Father. It was constantly in my mind as I was writing.  In the introduction, I tell how that marvellous parable seems to have a counterpart in the Hebrew Bible in the moving story of Abraham and Isaac (depicted by Chagall in the painting on the book’s cover – see to the right, and don’t miss the little crucifixion scene in the top right-hand corner). In both stories it isn’t just the son who makes a journey to a ‘far country’ (an idea that appears in both stories) but the father as well: physically for Abraham, imaginatively for the father of the Prodigal. Perhaps the book is an invitation to make that journey as both father and son, ago into a far country and in doing so, enter more deeply into the mystery of the passion.

I dedicated the book to my wonderful not-lost son Aidan.  My three equally wonderful girls are asking when I intend to write a book called Lost Daughters and dedicate it to them.  I am thinking about that.

Four Days by the Sea

I have been away on a kind of retreat.  I spent four days last week in a sunny, airy environment being well looked after by a kind team of staff.  I shared a room with five other men. My bed was by the window from which you could see the sea.  Fledgling pigeons were learning to fly from the ledge outside.  Next door was the church where my wife’s parents had been married 75 years ago, so I felt a family connection to the place.  

These days brought rhythms and routines very different from what I was used to.  Some of them meant uncomfortable physical and spiritual challenges.  But this was true for my companions too.  When we struck up conversation they turned out to represent a rich and colourful kaleidoscope of life in the north-east. I spent much of the time reading: a life of one of my favourite saints, a history of railways, a contemporary novel.  I slept a lot. 

You’ll have guessed that I am talking about a spell in hospital.  I was in the Sunderland City Hospital for surgery.  I’ll spare you the details.  The procedure was routine for everyone except me: I won’t pretend that I didn’t contemplate this ordeal with some anxiety.  It’s behind me now and I’m grateful to be in recovery mode at home. But the quality of care on the NHS is splendid.  Nurses, consultants, orderlies, meal attendants, chaplains were all exemplary.  I want to thank the hospital staff who took such trouble.  It was my first time as an in-patient and it was a good, wholesome experience. 

What are my thoughts about it a week later? 

First, I reflected a good deal on the nature of a hospital as a ‘place of truth’.  This was something made much of when I went on training courses as a part-time hospital chaplain in the 1980s.  There was nothing life-threatening about my surgery: others were in for more serious reasons than me, and this made me realise I had a lot to be thankful for in a lifetime of good health.  Yet every procedure has its risks, and I was talked through these carefully and honestly.  I always knew what was happening to me and why.  I thought, if only every institution could deal with its ‘clients’ in this way: schools, governments, universities, financial institutions, churches (and yes, cathedrals).  The world would be a better place without smoke and mirrors. A place of truth is also a safe place because truth holds us.

Secondly, I glimpsed in a new way the pressures the NHS is under. One night there was pressure with emergency admissions, a patient who needed constant attention, another patient who fell out of bed. All the staff coped magnificently, yet it seemed that there was no slack in the system to deal with a crisis.  Add to that the systemic challenges of funding cuts and efficiency drives, and all the normal stresses and strains any organisation knows about, and it is amazing to me how good humoured the staff were.  When I was about to go under the knife I quipped with the surgeon and the anaesthetists that it felt rather like an episode of House.  ‘Oh, we really hope not!’ they said.  Their laughter was the last thing I remember. Yet as we all know, our Health Service faces big questions and, despite what politicians say, an uncertain future.  It deserves our complete confidence if we still believe in being a caring, compassionate society – which we do, don’t we?

Thirdly, I learned something about the spirituality of being a patient.  One part of this is the way your world collapses down in a hospital ward.  In this narrow space, you notice everything with heightened intensity: who comes, who goes, the smallest changes in routine, above all what's happening to your own body.  'Out there' with its hum of traffic noise, the line of the sea, the pigeons wheeling in the sky, is a far-off realm, another country where they do things differently.  Even a much-admired orchid sent by friends which took up residence on the window-sill seemed only half to belong to this little world inside.  It's easy to become self absorbed within the confining horizons of the walls of your ward.  Prison literature, the monastic experience both teach the importance of inhabiting a confined space generously, becoming as 'detached' as possible from the things it is so easy to obsess about. Or as Hamlet says, 'I could be encompassed within a walnut shell, yet count myself the king of infinite space'.  An idea rich with possibilities.

Then there is the aspect of being not just a patient, but ‘patient’: allowing the healing processes to take their time, not to be in too much of a hurry for my ordinary life to be given back to me, listening to what my body was telling me. The saint whose life I read was Francois de Sales, the 16^th century Bishop of Geneva.  He said: ‘desire nothing; refuse nothing’. That summed up how I needed to be.  Canon Bill Vanstone wrote an influential book called The Stature of Waiting whose themes kept coming back to me.  The central one is that in his passion, Jesus gave up autonomy and control; instead he was 'handed over' and instead became ‘done to’ by others.  Passion means renouncing the active mode for the passive.  This is where healing and redemption spring from.  That helped me not to worry about all the things I wasn’t able to get on with: unfinished tasks, missed meetings, hundred of unanswered emails, letters not written, work piling up.

‘Desire nothing, refuse nothing’:  there is a lifetime of spiritual wisdom in those four words. Recovery means learning to live thm in a fresh way.  I’d like to think that when the time comes to return to work, it will be the richer for having made this journey.  There has been a lot to think about in my four days by the sea.

Moved and Mystified

I’ve been reading an intriguing book this week: The Antidote: Happiness for People who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman.  I haven’t finished it yet, so I won’t say more about the argument now, though I feel a blog coming on.  (If the title sounds a trifle racy, let me assure you that it’s a serious book.  It looks at the ‘can-do’ success culture that is endemic in the organisational and business world of today, and asks whether it makes sense to live and work this way.  More soon.)

Early on, Burkeman talks about a meeting he had with a self-confessed Stoic (yes, I didn’t know either that people still followed Stoicism as a rigorous philosophical life path inspired by the apostles Seneca and Marcus Aurelius). ‘Keith’ describes how he looks back to a defining incident when he was walking in the park one day.  It was, he says, ‘a shift in perspective – the kind of jolting insight that often gets described as a “spiritual experience”.  “It was quite a short thing…. just a minute or two.  But suddenly I was…directly aware of how everything was connected together in space and time…like travelling out into space, perceiving the universe as a whole, and seeing everything connected together in exactly the way it was meant to be.  As something finished and complete.’  

When I read that I asked myself: what are the unforgettable spiritual high points of my own life?  There are many: being baptised as a teenager, getting married, being ordained, holding my first child as she emerged from the womb, my grandmother’s funeral, and other times. What these have in common is that they are rites of passage.  At liminal times like these, we are in a state of mind that the social anthropologists call communitas.  We feel alive in a different way, even in grief.  Our emotions are heightened, our sensitivities more acute.  We feel closer to other people crossing the same threshold, and we often feel closer to God.

But I had to work harder to recall experiences quite like Keith’s.  I think I have only ever had two.  One was as a schoolboy when I sang the top line of Bach’s St John Passion. I blogged about this a few months ago.  I look back on it as a profoundly religious experience of ‘the Other’ that opened the doors of my perception in a wholly new way. In my evangelical past, I spoke about it as realising, through the music of the passion, that Jesus died ‘for me’.  That is still at the heart of my story and the cross is at the heart of my spirituality.  But I now see how much bigger and wider was the spiritual world into which this heightened awareness was leading me, what the psalms call ‘a large place’.  It was if existence began to be charged with a new and wonderful meaning. 

The other happened about 12 years ago.  I was out walking on my own among the fells of the Dark Peak around Kinder Scout.  In that part of England you are never far from dense population centres: Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds.  Yet the hills are as bleak as any in the Pennines.  It is the nearest England gets to desert.  The wind and rain can howl across the watershed and then you could think yourself at the end of the world.  But on this day it was sunny and warm, calm and peaceful.  Yet for no reason that I could think of, the landscape suddenly began to glow with a hot luminescence that was ominous and threatening.  It was if everything was metamorphosed into a parched, lifeless wilderness.  I felt unutterably alone, forlorn, abandoned.  I must have stood still in this state for a minute or two.  And then I noticed that there was a steady movement in the corner of my eye.  It was traffic on the main road snaking over the fells in the far distance.  Cars and lorries: how reassuring they seemed!  Gradually, my mind cleared and my vision returned to normal. The grass faded to green, the sky to blue.  Grouse were chattering happily.  A curlew swung across the sky.  The warm peat underfoot radiated earthy scents. All was well.

For a few years I tried to ‘make sense’ of this disturbing experience.  I linked it with the Bach moment, and used the time-honoured language of consolation and desolation to try to speak about it.  But the words ran out.  I had to learn Wittgenstein’s dictum that if we can’t speak about something, we should be silent.  And maybe the test of any experience we think of as ‘mystical’ is perhaps that we should struggle to put it into words at all. 

But there is one thing I can confidently say about these two events. In Keith’s language, I became in a new way directly aware of how everything was connected together in space and time.  With Bach that brought the promise of salvation, peace and goodness.  On the Peak I was lonely, afraid, struggling not to be overwhelmed by the presence of the Mysterium tremens et fascinans.  Both times I felt that for a few moments I was at one with this great Presence that infuses and energises the cosmos, one with reality, one with God. It was a profound sense both of connection and of simplicity.

I don’t want to claim too much.  I don't think I am a ‘mystic’.  If these were mystical experiences, two are enough for a life-time.  ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality.’  When Semele pestered her lover Zeus to show himself as he really was, it killed her.  Ordinariness is good, the slow, steady rhythms of prayer, discipleship, relationships, Christian service.  Enough, while we wait for the vision of God, to practise what living faith requires of us: to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with the Lord our God. And know that all of life is gift.