Archbishop Desmond Tutu, campaigner and celebrant, vibrant witness to an inclusive Church and polity, once remarked that he was too busy, challenged, and committed not to find two hours a day for silent, personal prayer! This might be a touch demanding for most of us but in a year that has demanded reservoirs of adaptability, flexibility, and resilience from all of us, something proximate might not be a bad place to start!
As I have known from long association with the Prison Phoenix Trust, https://www.theppt.org.uk/ a spiritual practice makes a difference and can be practiced anywhere, even in the most difficult of circumstances. One of the surprising things, I first noticed about a prison is just how noisy they are for starters! Interestingly, at least in the early days of the pandemic with inmates locked down, one of our trustees, governor of a women's prison, noted that several women had mentioned how less stressful life was now, with the contacts with others limited, contained! Every cloud ...
But it has undoubtedly been a cloudy year, which has testified to both the world's interdependence and its fragility. I have been reading the poetry of Denise Levertov, truly one of the last century's finest poets, and was reminded of her poems emergent out of reading Julian of Norwich.
"God's wounded hand
reached out to place in hers
the entire world, 'round as a ball,
small as a hazelnut'. Just so one day
of infant light remembered
her mother might have given
into her two cupped palms
a newlaid egg, warm from the hen;
just so her brother
risked to her solemn joy
his delicate treasure,
a sparrow's egg from the hedgerow.
What can this be? the eye of her understanding marveled.
God for a moment in our history
placed in that five-fingered
human nest
the macrocosmic egg, sublime paradox,
brown hazelnut of All that Is -
made and loved and preserved.
As still, waking each day within
our microcosm, we find it, and ourselves."
From 'The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich, 1342-1416' by Denise Levertov (Section 4).
Julian of Norwich might be thought of as the 'glass half full' kind of saint. Neither receiving her Showings when on the verge of death from an unknown illness in her early thirties nor living through the Black Death and its consequences in her childhood seem to have dented her supreme confidence that the world was rightly made. It was on its gifted trajectory towards redemption when ''All will be well".
Yet, as Levertov's image of an egg makes clear, both the world and we in it are profoundly fragile, and this year, one of the hottest on record and ravaged by a global pandemic makes that only too apparent.
From where did Julian find her resilience? She found it gifted from the same person from two directions.
Outwardly, in Christ, she found a God that had woven the pattern of the world in love, love was its meaning, the very fabric of the cosmos, and in Jesus, she had found a God who had stepped into the very fabric of the world, into its limits and vulnerability in suffering and death and come through into new, resurrected life in which death was not an end but ended.
Inwardly, she had found the very same patterning in herself, that her patterning and God's patterning were ultimately oneing (a word she coined). She holds the hazelnut after the same manner that God holds it. She tends it in the same caring. She wakes each morning with the potential of that relationship renewed in the stillness of her awareness and her gratitude. "As still, waking each day within our microcosm, we find it, and ourselves."
This is the Christmas message in a nutshell (pun intended) that Christ comes so that we might remember ourselves, made in this image and likeness, and this image and likeness is not only 'in me' but is the weft on which the world is woven, crafted after the Logos, the divine patterning. We care for it as we care for ourselves because they are oneing; and, that oneing is expressed in the mercy and compassion we show, exchange with one another. We may keep losing sight of this patterning, going astray, not least because the world offers multiple images that disguise it all too thoroughly, but here He is always reminding us of it - a Jesus is not just for Christmas!
The mirroring of the world this year could be seen as our interconnectedness as shadow - we must keep our distance - but in our shadows (as Julian recognized), in our wounds, are our blessings. We can only flourish in the world where 'all is well' if we learn to find each day the world in our hands, caring for it tenderly in its fragility; and, we only do that if we live into the still attentiveness this requires; however, modestly and gently or robustly according to our circumstances. As St. Theresa of Avila reminds us, God has no other hands than our own.
So I end the year imagining that mysticism has never been more urgent, more necessary; and, everyone is one because we are one-d.
My first (and last) working visit this year was to Kenya and Uganda - indeed I narrowly missed being quarantined and repatriated (and had the opportunity to notice too how better prepared for Covid-19 was Uganda than Europe - when you know your systems are fragile, you take better care) and one of the organizations I met, and that we support, is SINA (The Social Innovation Academy) who this year was subject to a film from the (English language) German Network, DW, that shows two of its graduates and the successful social enterprises they have launched. SINA specializes in working with young people from highly disadvantageous backgrounds and they, together, achieve wonderful results:
I look forward to a return visit, hopefully, in a happier 2021.
A year in which, for me, meetings with 3D people with legs may re-emerge!
On which note Merry Christmas and a Happier New Year!
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