Enigma code

All those cryptographers working in secret at Bletchley Park during the war were honoured by the Queen this week. They weren’t the only ones working on an enigma, among them a strange Russian mystic called Gurdjieff. His writings are almost as impenetrable as that Nazi code. A relative sent me a book about him. I have tried reading it but as the sender feared I felt bound to return it with the following comment:

“You were wise to be uncertain about my reception of this book. There are many ways of encoding the truth about Being but Mr. Gurdjieff’s is not one that I can easily access. At my stage of the proceedings known as ‘life’ I have enough cryptographers to help me on what remains of my way.”

We are bound to use code when talking about ‘God’ and the meaning of life. In last Saturday’s Guardian the Archbishop of Canterbury is reported as saying, “We must get to grips with the idea that we don’t contribute anything to God; that God would be the same God if we had never been created. God is simply and eternally happy to be God.” Now that is code I cannot decipher. Could we substitute the word ‘universe’ where the Archbishop uses ‘God’? I don’t know and I cannot ask him (the Archbishop, I mean, not God).

In the same interview the Archbishop says he prefers the word ‘trust’ to ‘faith’. That I do understand. In this morning’s yoga/meditation I find myself distracted by the Archbishop’s words and other thoughts about the meaning of life. I feel pulled away by fears arising from the state of a friend now in hospital with acute depression. Nothing makes any sense. Then I come back to this present moment, just as I am, fears, intellectual doubts and all: simply accepting it all as it is, now. It’s not that I find ‘faith’. It’s just that suddenly I am at peace. It’s a kind of trust: in what? Well, I suppose simply this moment and the next and the next. Sometimes I can find words to talk about it and some cryptographers write about it in ways that make sense to me, but mostly the enigma, the mystery requires a trustful silence. I think it's what Jesus meant by the 'the Kingdom of God', or in the words of a well known hymn: 'the silence of eternity interpreted by love'.