Promises, promises

Like the debris which now floats in space the internet is littered with abandoned blogs. I am aware of not posting anything for weeks now. If anyone out there actually likes to read what I write, I apologise for disappointing you. But what to do? My wife, Yvonne, suggests promising just one posting a week. I’ll try it!

We’ve just returned from two weeks on the Greek island of Symi. Above the magnificent harbour is the church of Evangelismos with its tessellated pavement and tall cypress trees, each surrounded by a little wall exactly the right height to sit on. There, in the shade, with a gentle breeze to cool me, and a view across the water to the tumbled mountains of Turkey, as the yachts of the rich came and went below, I took to settling down for a daily meditation. I use a prayer word (or mantra) to help me focus: ‘Be still’, with ‘be’ on the in-breath and ‘still’ on the out-breath. It’s a phrase which has echoes of Psalm 46: ‘Be still and know that I am God’, and of Jesus’ words in calming the fears of the disciples when caught in a storm on lake Galilee. After a while I noticed that the pigeons on Symi have a simpler coo to those in London. It’s a three note call: a short beginning, a longer middle, and a much shorter third note – coo-cooooo-co. I heard, ‘be s-t-i-l-l now’. There was no need for me to repeat my prayer word. The pigeons were doing it for me!

The word ‘holiday’ comes from ‘holy day’ in the days when Christian festivals provided the only available break from work. Holidays on Symi are a bit like that. Life is simplified; no newspapers or television; and not much in the way of ‘entertainment’. I had taken with me, Martin Laird’s book ‘Into The Silent Land’. I know it well; in fact I had become over-familiar with it. This time, I read it slowly and mindfully, re-discovering its hidden treasures, and understanding, for the first time really, what he means by ‘the liturgy of our wounds’.

Stuff is stored away in our brains from earliest times and it’s the painful bits which seem to float up (or sometimes erupt) into consciousness; it’s the persistent annoying mental tics which never seem to give up, especially when one is trying to ‘be still’. I learnt this time to be compassionate with all that; to let it be, to forgive myself; to understand that this human body with its marvellous mental apparatus, its persistent weakness and failure and, ultimately, its death, is also the vehicle of – what? Some call it God but that word presents so many difficulties. Martin Laird is fond of paradoxical statements like ‘depthless depth’ and ‘the groundless ground that is the core of all being’. He writes,

“The very attention that gazes into this vastness is itself this vastness, luminous depth gazing into luminous depth. You are the vastness into which you gaze.”

Buddhists can describe this sort of thing somewhat less paradoxically but then they don’t have to cope with a tradition of God as an object out there. Still you cannot be much more direct and simple than Martin Laird’s, “God does not know how to be absent”.
See you next week, I hope (promises, promises).