Do no harm, leave a lingering trace ...

Bits and pieces of our lives interact in the living room piling system and the fragments of life made up of old newspapers, new books and things waiting hopefully for attention.
One of the reasons I still prefer real newspapers to the online variety is the serendipity of reading while (not) tidying up. So it was yesterday evening in my desultory attempt to look as if I might be cleaning up the sofa I got side tracked into reading Michael Billington's interview with Peter Brook. I found Brook's idea about a pared down Magic Flute which concentrates on the music, on character, story and situation rather wonderful. Even if I never get to see it, just reading about it inspired me to think about opera and also my own "performance art" liturgy in new ways.
However, what moved me and offered me some sense of meaning about my life was Brook saying this at the end of the article when asked about his legacy:

"What does touch me is when people come up to me in the street, as they sometimes do since they mistakenly think I've retired, and talk about some experience that has remained with them. That for me is the only real legacy: the idea that one has left a lingering trace in people's memories. In the end, that's all a director can hope to do."

Brook's humility of ambition - coupled with brilliant artistic vision- impressed me and moved me because it challenged me - I suspect that I would hope to leave rather more than a trace and yet I also know that at the end of my life probably the most I shall be able to say about my achievements is that I will have managed to offer grieving families meaningful funerals and joyful couples happy weddings. Fragmentary traces.
So I began pondering "impact" - our desire, my desire, to "make a difference" to "have a legacy" - and I thought about two women working in development I interviewed earlier this year. They were working according to the "do no harm" development principles - make a positive difference but don't just try to have impact for the sake of being seen to do something. "Do no harm" takes longer but tends to become the work of the people, of whole communities much more, and as a result of that it tends to be much more sustainable. In terms of providing rural communities with water say, that has to be a good thing. I have no idea whether it can be applied say to mission or ecumenism or church life but I like its conscious humility and desire to work with rather than dominate and impose. Yet I know how much, like Psalmist in Psalm 90, I am motivated by wanting my work to have a lasting result (Donne à nos travaux un résultat durable).
Meanwhile a further fragment of a lingering trace is Andrei Makine's latest book, (the entrance to my new place of work is framed by bookshops, this is not good and I succombed when visiting Paris this week) which beautifully evokes how even in a life of suffering brief eternal loves can be transformative.
So rather than having impact I shall hope to linger and to seek to be ambitious with my vision rahter than with my impact. Yet as I reflect on my carbon footprint and on the plastic bottles I will have used in my lifetime I shall also have to face up to the fact that be it impact or lingering, it will sadly not have been as sustainable or without harm as I might aspire to. So I shall focus on the hope of transformative eternal love.

Pondering earthquakes and seismic change with Julian of Norwich ...

I have just finished putting together a liturgy for common prayer tomorrow morning - it is Lent, we will be praying for the people of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, focusing on the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance's Fast for Life campaign. We will of course also be praying for the people of Japan. What to say?
I have framed what I have put together tomorrow with verses from Psalm 46 and Psalm 90

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumults.

I learnt today that the quake has shaken the earth slightly off its axis, moved Japan by a couple of metres. Enormous seismic change. I heard about the psychological support and counselling being prepared and offered to people caught up in this desperate trauma and tragedy. And I watched yet more pictures of the destruction and heard the worrying reports of a second nuclear power plant at risk ...
Psalm 90 says: "For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night."
If there were no earthquakes, no volcanoes our fragile small plant would not have survived even this far - nor would it have been such a green and fruitful planet. What seems merely like brutal meaningless arbitrary tragedy is perhaps rather more part of our beautiful planet's correction mechanisms. A big earthquake now or the whole earth exploding long term? Not much of a choice. Yet this shifting and quaking in the earth's crust is hard for humans to comprehend or accept. How can counselling, psychoanalysis or therapy offer credible frameworks for massive change on this scale? In the end though each of us is just one, limited human life trying to make sense, trying to make our way through, trying to show solidarity, to understand. So hard for us to have the long view, to think of the needs of our planet in 10,000 or a million years ... by then we will be less than dust.
And yet alongside the dust motif of Psalm 90 I want also to hold out the promise of Isaiah 43
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine ...
Because you are precious in my sight, and honoured, and I love you.
We are nothing but dust and faded grass, and yet we a very deeply not nothing, but intimitely loved and named by God.

As I pondered the fragile restless crust of the earth, the terrible tragedy of huge irrevocable change, I thought about Julian of Norwich and her visions and understanding. Tonight, as often, I returned to her vision of God holding "a tiny thing", all that has been created, like a hazlenut in his hand. In the face of trauma and pain, offering love is perhaps the only viable and sustainable option. So somehow I hold on to faith, almost wordlessly.

At the same time, our Lord showed me in a spiritual manner, how intimately he loves us. I saw that he is everything that is good and supports us. He clothes us in his love, envelops us and embraces us. He wraps us round in his tender love and he will never abandon us. As I understand it, he is everything that is good. He also showed me a tiny thing lying in the palm of my hand, the size of a hazelnut. I looked at this with the eye of my soul and thought, "What is this?" And is this is the answer that came to me. "It is all that is made" I was amazed that it managed to survive. It was so small that I thought it might disintegrate. And in my mind I heard this answer, "It lives on and will live on because God loves it." So everything owes its existence to the love of God. The first is God made it; the second is God loves it; and the third is God preserves it.

Proclamation of faith and calligraphy from Wythenshawe

Over on Breadbreaker Kate Gray has posted the text below and titled it "A 21st century proclamation of faith in Jesus?"
Kate and her husband Mike Walsh wrote the text for the service of dedication of their son Zebedee.

Our faith is about our whole life lived in the company of God
Our faith says life is precious, to be nurtured and celebrated
Our faith is about living gently with the earth

Our faith is inspired by Jesus and many other people
Our faith is about love and hope for everyone no matter what’s happened
Our faith calls us to mix and mingle with all sorts

Our faith calls all people to get involved in something bigger than ourselves
Our faith encourages us to be ourselves and make room for others
Our faith energises us to make a positive difference

Our faith values people over profit
Our faith is intuitive, sensuous and honours our bodies
Our faith is dynamic and open to challenge and change

Our faith is about creativity over consumerism
Our faith brings healing where there is suffering
Our faith should be seen and heard and obvious to people around us

Our faith has drawn us to and away from and back to church
Our faith inspires us like fantastic music
Our faith dares us to dream of a future with wild imagination

God’s faith in us never stops.
God wants us to make the most of things.
God never fails to surprise, challenge or love us all.

copyright (c) Kate Gray and Mike Walsh

I also have to thank Kate for linking to Stephen Raw's amazing calligraphic oeuvre I've just spent about an hour looking through his website, an artist fascinated by words and letters and inspired by the religious. His work is wonderful, I may have to treat myself or just get inspired to do some work myself.

Beginning my holiday reading ...

So as we tidy up (well sort of a bit) we come across not only books from recent book buying frenzies in Liverpool, London and elsewhere but also magazines that have been been received but not properly opened. For instance several issues of the New Statesman - which come addressed to me and only rarely gets opened by me and often seems to get "lost" in one of Dr B's bags or under a really not at all interesting computer magazine. (Yes, there are limits to my omnivore approach to reading - puter magazines are no longer it, though I did have a brief monthly fling years ago with PC World.)
In the prehistoric piling we also found September's Reform which I am enjoying reading in the late afternoon sunshine, in particular editor Kay Paris' interview with novelist Mailynne Robinson. I was moved by the penultimate question and response:

Q:There is great sadness in your novels. Religion doesn't bring happiness, but it does bring great dimension to the lives of its religious characters.
A:There is great sadness in life, for example at the inevitable end of great happiness, or in the frustration of profound love. Religion makes experience meaningful and sacred - or it expresses the fact that these things are true of experience properly understood. It does indeed add another dimension to experience.

I've been reading reviews and other interviews with Robinson following her recent Absence of Mind here and here and this quote struck a chord from Tim Teeman's interview:

What is her God, I ask ... Robinson looks briefly stumped. “I can write about it, but that’s a big question. The term ‘God’ has a big reality for me but that’s not to say it has definition.” Is “it” a rock? “Yes, but that doesn’t mean I am not vulnerable to everything in the same way as other people.” She had no image of God when growing up. “That never meant anything to me. I was too Protestant,” she laughs. “There are things that exceed language. God is one of those things, pre-eminently and utterly.”

Over on Faith and Theology Ben Myers does not seem so keen on Robinson's most recent novel Home. I hope to find time to read it myself soon. for now all this internet browsing is just whetting my appetite for the feast of reading and sleeping of the two weeks ahead. Here's a little more from Kay Paris' article, the whole of which should I hope be online in a few weeks time once September turns to October.

Marilynne Robinson was raised as a Presbyterian; she worships now as a Congregationalist and remains a staunch apologist for the ideas of John Calvin – particularly in relation to, on the one hand, his contribution to societal principles and culture, and on the other his understanding of the personal sense one can cultivate of the presence of God. “Perception is at the centre of Calvin’s theology… the great energy that rips galaxies apart also animates our slightest thoughts,” she said during a recent interview for Christianity Today – and it is for us to struggle endlessly between centering on this vision of God in the living of our lives, or giving in to self-centredness.