(This post is going to be a bit spiritual, so skip it if you
don’t like that sort of thing.)
It was the Saturday before Holy Week, and nobody had turned
up for Stations of the Cross at noon. For the last few years we’ve followed the
devotion of the Stations once around the church, and, on the Saturday before
Palm Sunday, once outdoors, tracing a short route about the centre of Swanvale
Halt and causing consternation to the general public. But not this year! Eventually
I went back inside the church and thought I’d better have a bit of a pray as I
was feeling sorry for myself.
Of course, I found myself reflecting, it’s no surprise that
nobody wanted to lose a chunk of a beautifully warm and sunny day contemplating
the violent suffering and death of a man two thousand years ago. It’s quite a
counter-intuitive thing to want to do.
That said, I considered, the Passion of Jesus makes more
sense against a backdrop of sun and heat than England’s usual meteorological mode
of overcast grey. It isn’t just that it feels a bit more like Palestine in the
early first century AD might have felt, but that the harsh indifference of
nature and the jagged contrast of light and shadow calls attention to the
cosmic drama taking place on the streets of Jerusalem and, two millennia later,
in the souls of human beings.
And what drama has taken place in my soul, then, and to what
result? It’s Holy Week again, in my eighth year as Rector of Swanvale Halt, my
thirteenth as an ordained person, my twenty-third as a Christian, my
forty-eighth as a mortal being. I follow the same route of the Passion of
Christ, say the same words, and try to summon up the same feelings. And I see
the same sins besetting me, the same temptations and weaknesses. So much of my
thinking is a disguised way of telling myself how great I am, it’s both
pathetic and disgraceful. Ah, noonday demon, there you are again. Kyrie, kyrie
eleison.
But things do shift, ever so slowly, tectonically like the
earth. It’s true that the slow practice of religion affects the way you think,
the filters which your mind places in front of the world of phenomena. I’m
still ambushed by rage from time to time, but I now have deeper defences
against it and I don’t think I’m
caught out quite so often. And I do feel a greater sense of wellbeing, and even
– whisper it quietly – happiness.
This is not just because I have very little, rationally, to be unhappy about,
because I never did: yet nothing like those old, truly terrifying episodes of
blackness has swept across me for a long while.
It was only partly pure reason that drove me towards
believing in God, trying to work out what I thought about the texts of the New
Testament and where they might have come from: part of the impetus was the
poetry of Christianity, the beauty of it, but that wasn’t the whole story
either. An element in my conversion, I know, was existential dread. Belief
defused the bomb of meaninglessness that sat inexorably ticking beneath the
world, which may seem like a very abstract, philosophical thing to you,
brethren, but it was horribly definite to me. Paradoxically, God has so
smoothed off the lacerating edges of that dread that I can barely remember what
it was like, and I can entertain the idea of not believing any more without feeling too unhappy about it. I can
look on the world with a kind of gentle equanimity. Strange that, isn’t it? –
faith making atheism mentally palatable. That’s a change, too.
Over the last year or so calm, gratitude and affection have
been getting the better of me more often. It could just be age, or it could be
a genuine motion of the spirit and, although I know that the real test of love
is not what you feel but what you do, it is, dare I say it, quite - enjoyable. Where it leads, who can tell?
Away from my narrow small self, at any rate, and how great a thing that is.
So Holy Week proceeds, in sunlight or in grey. Behold the
wood of the Cross, whereon hung the world’s salvation: O sweetest wood, O tree
whose fruit is love.
Just caught up with you again after busyness. This is a deeply rewarding and interesting post, for which I thank you.I'll just add that whatever one believes or doesn't believe, this "bit spiritual" stuff is very helpful.It's fascinating to think that your journey into faith has led you to being able to contemplate not believing, with equanimity. Other traditions would call that equanimity enlightenment. I suspect you wouldn't want to be saddled with sol agre a term!
ReplyDelete0r "large,"as we say in English. Sorry.
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