Time to think

Because of the heat, we've had two quiet days, with brief excusions into the city centre and local walks, plus a fair amount of eating sleeping and for one in a while in my case, reading. When we met on Tuesday, Julia enthused about a book by Melvyn Matthews, whom I remember as Bristol University Anglican Chaplain at the time I was Team Rector of the St Paul's area of the city. He went on from there to work at Ammerdown ecumenical conference centre near Bath, and eventually to Wells Cathedral, where his gift as a writer and spiritual guide developed to the full. The book in question is called 'Both alike to thee', the title is a quote from Psalm 139 verse 12. (also used in an exquisite Taizé chant 'La tenèbre n'est point tenèbre devant toi: la nuit comme le jour est lumière'). The book's subtitle is: 'The retrieval of the mystical way'.

It's a learned discussion about the taming and domestication of Christian spirituality which has gone on since the Renaissance. It's a process which has detracted from ancient thinking about the divine mysteries of faith, in which the utterly transcendent majesty of the unseen and unknowable God of all stood above and beyond all human notions of incarnation and 'God in the ordinary'. Matthews understands mysticism as a reaction, a protest against the tendency of both church ritual and doctrine to contain rather than point towards the mystery of the Author of Being. While the book is hard work, intellectually speaking, its threads of argument connect with elements in my own experience, and my own frustration with the official church's current problems at retaining both its credibility and cohesion in a spiritually hungry, insecure time.

Matthews points out that we all too readily speak about God as if God were nothing more than another reality in the realm of existence. He claims we have reduced our way of thinking about God, and our God talk reflects it. This says more about us and our self obsession in compliance to the spirit of the age than it does about God. God-talk should be disturbing and uncomfortable, shaking our preconceptions and complacency: awkward, fragmented, unfinished, because nothing we can say however magnificent can contain the divine reality. We should have problems talking about God, we should not find it easy, to even begin to express a fragment of the reality of our Creator. Better to be speechless with awe he thinks. I like this. It resonates well with me after forty one years of striving to be an official spokesman and defender of the church, striving against fundamentalist authoritarianism in all its manifestations.

He speaks about the contemplative person being able to stand and identify with those who are on the margins of society because they have a deeper freedom within themselves and do not find their authenticity or identity given them by the establishment to which they belong. This too rang bells with me. I have been reflecting lately on my reasons for punctual retirement. I've lived an active and exposed life in public ministry, and felt increasingly inadequate discharging that commission, whether the feeling was true and typical for my age, or an illusion bred by un-necessary tiredness. I'd rather feel inadequate than be complacent, but the question that's come to dominate in recent years is how to remain true to God, how to grow in openness to God beyond the role assigned me by the Church or by public perception of its representatives - particularly when much of the Church seems to have become confused in understanding its own value and true purpose?

I don't think I'll ever be a decent contemplative, but that's what I yearn to work at - to keep knocking at the gates of glory, for as long as I have breath in my body. Melvyn Matthew's book makes me feel this may be less bizarre than it sounds.