Advent Women 5

Let me then be destroyed. For that is the only way I may have a chance of surviving. Let those feelings uniquely called forth by sexual love, my life's passion and pain, my learnt desirability figured out of my primeval undesirability, let them prevail. Now I am not dissociated from my ululation. I hear the roaring and the roasting and know that it is I. Resist the telephone! Even though help is only a few digits away. For the first time, I say "No" to any alleviation, to the mean of friendship, to the endlessly inventive love of my sisters. I don't want to be justified. Keep your mind in hell and . . . I want to sob and sob . . . until the prolonged shrieking becomes a shout of joy.

"Loss" means that the original gift and salvation of love have been degraded: love's arrow poisoned and sent swiftly back to the heart. My time-worn remedy has been to pluck the arrow and to prove the wound, testing its resources with protestant concentration. This time I want to do it differently. You may be weaker than the whole world but you are always stronger than yourself. Let me send my power against my power. So what if I die. Let me discover what it is that I want and fear from love. Power and love, might and grace. That I may desire again. I would be the Lover, am barely the Beloved.

Gillian Rose, Love's Work

A couple of weeks ago I took Gillian Rose's The Broken Middle on retreat with me. Fortunately I had other books with me for in the end I only read one and a half chapters because it is such hard going. Every now and again you get some encouragement, but most of the time the strain of reading is immense. I've fought through Hegel, I didn't have the heart for Heidegger, but I feel I should continue with Rose, if only because she has influenced this generation of theologians so much. It's a bloody hard business though. I met up with my old tutor from theological college the other day who wrote her phd on Rose. She claims that Rose is playing with you. I didn't find this particularly encouraging. 

She has written more accessible books though and Love's Work is deceptively accessible for the depth it contains. Similar in tone is her unfinished, posthumous Paradiso, in which she defines the philosopher's task as one of 'eros', 'attention' and 'acceptance'. Eros by which she means intellectual curiosity; attention as in careful concentration; and acceptance as a refusal to make an easy closed-off conclusion - to remain with the problems and conflicts without seeking a way out. The passage above shows how her attitude to love and sex bears the same marks. The eros is pronounced, the passion, the ululation, the shriek and sob; but so is the attention - the rapt concentration of feeling, the honesty of self-assessment, the awareness and analysis; but finally it is the 'acceptance' that is most striking. Refusing to call friends or sisters, staying with the pain, refusing distraction or lies of denial. The refusal of consolation - to 'prove the wound'. The reward is to discover what I want and fear from love, for love not to be diminished and cheapened. 

Many years ago I spent several months with St John of the Cross, endlessly reading the poems and prose. The intention at the time was academic but I gained an interesting spiritual insight. St John teaches a sort of detachment. Not in a not caring way, what might be called indifference, but more like what Rose here calls 'acceptance' (T. S. Eliot takes this up in 'Little Gidding' in the hedgerow and St Julian: All shall be well, and/ All manner of thing shall be well.). The point is that if we can let things go we are freed from the anxiety, the weight of our fragility. Reading him this became I kind of prayer - I looked at what I was most terrified of - for me beginning with things like losing my job, my vocation, mobility, vision, the ability to read, to communicate, enduring unassailable discomfort. It was a sort of process of burning away, meditating upon fear until it dissolved; staying with pain and humiliation rather than running from it. Imaginatively I came to a place of assurance where I truly felt that whatever my conditions I could live in the simplicity of what remained of my mind and its relationship with God.

In a sense this is very close to a negative form of control. When I am on trains and planes I usually spend some time imagining they crash and thinking through my actions. This is of course an idle fantasy and a sort of anxiety displacement exercise. This is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about acceptance - that whatever comes to be the case, it will be ok, or in Rose's celebrated borrowing: 'keep your mind in hell and despair not' (or as Jessie J profoundly reminds us: 'It's ok not to be ok'). This will be tested in greater depth of course. Most of us will endure the slow decline to the body's end, when our assurance is tested. Only time will tell the success of our preparations. Rose was struggling with the cancer that finally killed her as she wrote this work. The great success of it is that she articulates a theology, a spirituality, of suffering, of abiding with conflicts in love and friendship, of staying with the problems of philosophy and politics, and of bearing with the reality of suffering and not turning away:

[New age spiritualities] burden the individual soul with an inner predestination: you have eternal life only if you dissolve the difficulty of living, of love, of self and other, of the other in the self, if you are translucid, without inner or outer boundaries. If you lead a normally unhappy life, you are predestined to eternal damnation, you will not live.

This is the counsel of despair which would keep the mind out of hell. The tradition is far kinder in its understanding that to live, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever. Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.

Advent Women 4

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- 

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not 
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

from 'Daddy' by Sylvia Plath

No one matches Plath for emotional distress. I'm still reading Birthday Letters, one a day. It should probably be classified under 'horror'. It's like a groundhog day of repeated self-violence, a scratched record that jars continually on the note of a scream. Plath's father died just before her 8th birthday following complications after an amputation of his foot, after unrecognised diabetes. Still, as a figure, a figure of death, he looms through Hughes' as well as Plath's work. This last week of mine has been characterized by death and grief for various reasons. It is of course the cold weather but Advent seems to bring the most incongruous combinations of events and emotions together: consuming parties of over-indulgence in a penitential season, the formality of carol services set against the kitsch of decorations and the innocence of nativity plays performed on the barely-cleared floors of funerals and wakes. It makes sense though. Advent ends in birth and it looks towards the end of time. It is the season of life and death.

A Week in the Life of a Curate, Day 5

Friday

I’m not sure whether I managed to sleep through four alarms involving light, radio, annoying tunes and beeping, or if there was a strange technological black-out across W2, or if I am simply incompetent, but I wake up with a lively spirit at not quite nine o’clock. Not a disaster as it’s my day off but much regretted later. Friday is a good newspaper day with Ms Treneman and Caitlin Moran’s Celebrity Watch in The Times, plus a chap who’s marrying a friend of mine this New Year’s Eve with a very good piece. He includes a delightful quote from a Bank of England Governor who was asked by parliament his reasons for a policy and responded: “Reasons Mr Chairman? I don’t have reasons. I have instincts.” I say the morning office from my phone while listening to “U don’t dans 2 Tekno” by the Alabama 3. Both these facts make me feel slightly guilty. Afterwards to make up for missing Wednesday I take a 15k run around the many parks of Westminster. At first I feel good and cruise across Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens into Holland Park. It’s seriously swanky here - enough to make the Hyde Park Estate look positively Council. Cutting through it leads down to Kensington High Street which joins up with the bottom of the gardens. The long stretch in the baking midday sun is torture. Mad dogs and Englishmen. I regret sleeping late. The loop round Green Park is much more pleasant but St James’ is still Olympified and so forces me into a wider arc, which is the last thing I want. Getting past the palace is the usual obstacle course and I finally sweat my way up back through Hyde Park pleasantly overtaking the most absurdly slow cyclists the world has ever seen. It still feels good. Running is probably my most helpful spiritual practice. I find it easy to focus my mind on a single subject so whether it’s working through an idea or meditating on Scripture or whatever it can be very productive. The emotions of long distance running work as a sort of crucible - going through agony and endorphic ecstasy with your mind locked on Romans 7 is an experience - who will save me from this BODY OF DEATH?!

After a shower my beginning of term haircut is a success though it means washing my hair three times in one hour which seems ridiculous. I HAVE to fully shower after a haircut, the itching, the itching… Popping into town I pick up Roaring’s ordination present on bike, then head back for juice and coffee. When Roaring was first ordained I sent her my thoughts on getting ‘made’ deacon. Having failed to remember to send her a card to her retreat, I promised to put down how I feel about ordination. I think about this as I get the tube to London Bridge reading ‘Little Gidding’. I meet a friend for a glass of wine and a cigarette by the river and then head to a lecture by Sarah Coakley at Southwark Cathedral. It’s on the sex crisis in the Church and is interesting but much the same as what she has written in the past. I’m wary of seeing sex and love of the poor as a mediating form for the real object of God and my sympathy is more with Romantics like Buber and Schleiermacher, finding God within the concrete expressions of human desire and experience. Her ascetic view of marriage as martyrdom and the emphasis on marriage and celibacy don’t ring very true to me; but then I am very modern. We have dinner with another couple of friends afterwards and it’s all very jolly.

When I get home I scramble my thoughts together on priesthood.

First of all, there is only one priesthood, on this everyone agrees: the priesthood of Christ. Everyone also agrees that all Christians share in this priesthood, the priesthood of all believers as we are all part of the body of Christ. There is also a specific vocation to the priesthood; a calling. I am not interested in magic though, in some hocus-pocus metaphysical alchemy of the soul. Symbolically it would make more sense for the congregation with the bishop to lay their hands on the priest of their election, rather than a clerical web of power-infusion. The so-called ontology of priesthood is, I believe, a mythology, obfuscating the significant act of a developing relationship between God, priest and church that has been lived out by the deacon in her first year. It is easier, more clearly bounded, to define a moment of power and change - those magic hands, just as it is fetishized in the eucharist as a decisive moment with the words of power (institution). It is more true, though, to understand the entire action as a transforming relationship, a participation of the priest and people in the divine life; A new calling to participate in an old relationship. The retreat provides a sort of liminal phase, the caterpillar in the chrysalis, but for the people as well as the priest. The first mass completes the action. But it is always the priesthood of Christ - if I were Roaring I would kiss my own hands after her first mass for they are Christ’s - he has no hands on earth but yours. A gift and an awesome responsibility. You are a walking sacrament because God has chosen you to this calling and inhabits you as part of the body of Christ through God’s own actions.

Anyway rather than getting caught up in a prosaic list of priestly actions, let’s have some Eliot instead:


What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make and end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from. And every phrase

And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,

Taking its place to support the others,

The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,

An easy commerce of the old and the new,

The common word exact without vulgarity,

The formal word precise but not pedantic,

The complete consort dancing together)

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,

Every poem an epitaph. And any action

Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat

Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration. A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always—

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flames are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.


The unspoken image, borrowed from Donne’s ‘Valediction Forbidding Mourning‘ is a compass. The Quartets are full of circular images, the blood, the stars, the seasons, sex and death, everything created moves in circles. The compass draws a circle that ends at his beginning, for him near the Mississippi or, for his ancestors, East Coker where Eliot is actually buried. But it is not just that death is a sort of beginning for the faithful, but that when we understand our end then we will understand our beginning and the rest of what follows - the shape of the circle gives away its centre. How we understand our end - our death and our point if you like, for every moment is also an end understood in relation to the centre - characterizes our entire existence: ‘Lord let me know mine end’. This is the very root of vocation. Our calling, the drawing of Love comes from our end as we achieve the person God has given us to be. Here this calling is a new beginning as a priest. The calling has ever been with you though.

For Eliot this vocation is bound up in language as he is attempting to articulate the relationship of the soul with God. Reality never stops, it constantly changes, and so therefore does our need to rearticulate and rediscover that relationship with God. Every point of the circle, every moment of life, has a tangent that is immediate to the divine, but we cannot bear very much reality and our lives and our words fall short of capturing the divine. Every step then is a movement towards death, Eliot is thinking of Charles I and the civil war as he is in Little Gidding but the illegible stone is the grave of us all who pass away in time. But his point is that the tradition preserves these actions and they continue to live with us - history and canon mean a lot to Eliot. But even more than this because every moment is in touch with God - remember the image is a compass and so every point of the circle is connected to the still point at the centre - every moment touches transcendence, the divine life. Eliot finds God in love and death - the rose and the yew tree, the rose symbolizing love in the garden of Burnt Norton with Emily, and the yew tree of the generations of life and death in East Coker, the village of his ancestors. Each are moments in time, but each take hold of eternity. But this is not dualistic - there is not time and eternity - we cannot get rid of time. Time gives us a pattern of timeless moments, it is every moment. Eternity crouches alongside us waiting to sweep us off our feet. So while light fails on an a winter’s afternoon - three images of the movement of time, light, season, time of day, History is now and England - eternity is there hidden in the midst of time. This then gives us an image for ordination - while light fails on an autumn afternoon in an English church, not much dissimilar to where Eliot is kneeling - in the dance of time, God is present, History is now and England. The calling is in time but also out of time as the compass branches up and back to the centre of the circle, touching every point. God is calling you Now and Here.

Notice then how the line taken from the Cloud of Unknowing, With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling, breaks out of the verse, standing alone, physically representing the in-breaking of transcendence, of the love that moves the sun and other stars, and it is achieved by the voice of this calling, the divine word that speaks into creation in the beginning and calls each of us to our vocation, to our end which is also our beginning.

The calling of priesthood then is a call for exploration, to discover again and again the divine activity in every moment, that gives shape to the whole from the garden of Eden to the New City. And to understand that journey, as the journey of each soul, to be a pattern, a constellation of moments, that touch the divine life as they pass through the gate, (“I am the gate, if anyone enters through me she shall be saved”.) the gate which is the hinge of the compass. This is what Eliade refers to as ille tempore - a sort of return to mythic times of closeness with God - God with us - described by Eliot in Edenic terms but redolent with the love experienced at Burnt Norton with Emily, the innocence of children in love in a garden, refigured as the drop away between waves at the Dry Salvages of Massachusetts; reading between the lines to find the real meaning. And as love and death are by nature simple they cost everything that we have. Such is the case with priesthood. As Paul writes - if there is no resurrection then we of all people are most to be pitied. Ordination seizes our complete commitment, whether we like it or not, otherwise the forces of doubt and resentment will be overwhelming. My Westcott tutor was right to tell me that I was committing myself to a way of life that few would really understand and value. There are of course ways of being a cool, successful, rich priest, but at the heart of priesthood is a renunciation - costing not less than everything, regarding it as garbage compared to the love of God. But this cost is irrelevant in the light of our end, our beginning. As Julian understands, the wealth of Christ’s victory leaps over all sin and fault, all pain and suffering. Eternity which waits always on the edge of reality promises both its final fulfilment and the full restoration of every moment in the plenitude of God - not to diminish the world’s suffering, after all it is a crowned knot of fire; the crucible of Christ’s passion promises a hallowing of suffering not its erasure; but the fire and the rose are one. Suffering meets love and the final image is of the pieta, where the suffering of Christ is met in the love of Mary (the fire and the rose; also the suffering king), transformed under the pentecostal fire of the Spirit which makes all things new.

What does ordination mean? It means kneeling in a church, where prayer has been valid, stepping into the river of a tradition, with every intention of guiding it to its re-incarnate future discovered in the will of God. It means discovering in this time the brush of eternity that graces every moment and hearing the vocation of God and God’s church. It means submitting to the cost of everything in faithfulness to the end that shapes our entire history. It means recognising the constellations of God’s activity in the world and teaching others to pay attention to these heavenly movements. It means following the path drawn by God, and listening to the voice of that calling. It means being brave to the point of death (which is every moment) and faithful to the love of God, discovered in all its many forms in this passing world. Most of all it is the call to take up the historical remembrance of the death and resurrection of Christ, sharing the gift of love under the sign of suffering, and proclaiming the presence of eternity in the midst of us.

ugh. 2.42am. Where does all the time between 12 and 2am disappear?