This is the Sixth and Final Part of a Lenten series on the theme of ‘Stillness’ - רָפָה (raphah) in the Hebrew Bible.

רָפָה (raphah): be still, cease, let go, fail, forsake, be feeble, let alone, surrender, be slothful, be slack, fall limp, let

My translation: disrobe, undress

I have published a reflection every Sunday morning through Lent. You’ll find the full series here and a brief summary of the pieces to date here.

Through history Christianity has, for the most part, not followed Christ.1

Who would.

One Sunday He enters Jerusalem hailed by the people as a conquering hero.

Cloaks are proudly laid on the ground.2 Palms joyfully strewn before Him. As a latent, but potent, political imagination of national victory and liberation reaches fever pitch.3 A Messiah type figure ready to cast off the shackles of oppression and release a weary people from the weight of empire.

Yeah...Go Jesus! We’re patriots.

The Triumphal Entry.

Within a week He is dead. Brutally murdered by the very powers that He is meant to overthrow. Deserted by even his closest followers.4 Publicly humiliated and exposed as an apparent fraud. Spat on. Beaten. Mocked. Rejected.

And He just takes it.

Utter desolation.

A total loser.

Not many politicians’ cup of tea.

Facing false accusations from religious leaders in his trial, Jesus does not defend Himself.

He is silent. Still. Limp. Feeble.

When he does speak, he is on a completely different imaginal plain. Conjuring images of the ‘Son of Man’ riding on ‘the clouds of heaven’, rather than saving His reputation. Or His life.5

Confronted by the top political authority, who has the power to save his life and seems to desire to do so, Jesus ‘did not answer him one word’.

I wonder often these days where my path diverged from particular friends of mine.

I still like and respect them. And some of them are part of the charge in the ‘Battle for Britain’. Their brave hearts (I mean that genuinely6) set on defending Britain as a ‘Christian Nation’. Their theology embracing the likes of Tommy Robinson, who feel called to (hatefully) defend ‘Western Civilisation’ from the ‘barbarian hoard’.

They think I am naive. And perhaps they are right.

But their Jesus seems to be entering Jerusalem on a war-horse.

Whereas the Jesus of the gospels enters on a donkey.

In fact it seems He sort of enters with his body awkwardly stretched across both a donkey and its colt.

I’m pretty sure this is me taking it too literally, but in the gospel account it does say that He ‘sat on them’. And the weirdness of that image - a heroic man’s legs stretched uncomfortably across two different sized animals that are freaking out underneath him with the noise of the crowd - goes a long way to expressing Jesus’s radically subversive presentation of ‘kingship’.

It’s a hilarious image. The kind of humour that appeals to us Brits. Slapstick. More ‘Carry On’ than Life of Brian.

A total mockery of our repeated attempts to turn Him in to the kind of hero that we think we need. The Strong Man.

So of course Christianity doesn’t tend to want to follow Christ.

Jesus is ugly.

Mishapen.

Chaotic.

And messed up.

Everywhere He goes, He destroys social harmony. Upturns religious priorities. Undermines economic orders. Both ‘left’ and ‘right’.

He turns away from fame and success.

Provokes his followers to reject Him.

Exposes the hypocrisy of religious and political leaders.

Learns from scary foreigners.

Prioritises time with social outcasts.

Let’s Himself be killed.

To those of us with power, before Jesus is Beautiful, He is very very ugly.

Like the ‘suffering servant’ of Isaiah 53,7from which I have quoted above:

He has no form or comeliness;
And when we see Him,
There is no beauty that we should desire Him.
He is despised and rejected by men,
A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

And we all...at least those of us for whom the status quo is of service...want to hide our faces from Him.

He messes up our worlds.

Here I want to draw from a piece called Shibboleth, from November 2024, where I write about stillness in a way that is both personal and profoundly political - you may remember I was tempted to call this series a ‘political economy of stillness’:

’I sometimes see things. By which I mean I have kind of waking dreams and visions.

I’ll be washing up, or doing something that doesn’t require much brain power, and will realise that I am watching a scene unfold on some imaginal plate in my mind.

A good while back, I had a waking vision of a large crack emerging down the centre of the North American land mass. It was dark, and it was deep, and I saw people, understandably, running away from it as fast at they could, some to the far left of the land, and some to the far right, terrified of the emerging abyss.

There was much to pay attention to in all of the movement, but both my eyes and my ears seemed fixed on the abyss itself, looking deep in to the darkness of the crack, as if something was wanting to be seen, or heard...willing me to stay with the fear and the difficulty, rather than run from it.

And, as I let my attention rest there, I began to hear distant sounds from the deep. But they weren’t the sounds of horror and pain that you might expect to emanate from our understanding of the abyss in Western culture. Rather, I could hear bustling sounds of trade and warm shouts of greeting and laughter. Wheels on cobblestones. Animals. Children. Sounds of a beautiful aliveness.

And as I listened more intently, and the sounds became clearer, I realised I was descending in to the crack, drawn both by the warmth of the sounds and a distant glow of light beneath me.

I was no longer thinking about the dark cliffs to my side, nor my fear of falling. I was weighted by curiosity...and longing...and, for a flash of a moment before the vision ended, I glimpsed a world alive at the base of this abyss that was busy and thriving. Full of chatter and laughter and trust and care. And, importantly, trade. It was a market street. And what I was witnessing was a joyous ‘oikonomia’ - a way of exchanging goods and labour that honoured relationship and brought joy. But, cobbled streets aside, it didn’t feel like a nostalgic return to the past. It felt like a deepening in to the core of the present.

And the whole scene was lit by a curious light that didn’t seem to have a source, which reminded me of the verse in the book of Apocalypse (or Revelation), which speaks of a city which ‘had no need of the sun or of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of G_d illuminated it’.⁷ It was as if the life going on down there emanated its own light.

As I exited the vision, and returned to focussing on my washing up, I remember a sense of grief that, by (understandably) running away from the dark crack both sides of the population of that land (which in the vision was North America, but relates, I think, to rest of the ‘developed’ world too - I don’t mean to be another Brit lecturing America) had no idea of the beauty at its base, and were too far away to hear its song of gladness that might otherwise draw them in.

And it got me wondering how we could become less scared of the dark. Less repelled by the wounds. The cracks. Better able to remain still⁸ long enough to hear the sounds of promise emanating from the Deep.’

Stillness, רָפָה, allows us to hear that glad song, emanating from the Deep.

It enables us to move to an entirely different rhythm to that played like a death-march at the surface.

As beloved Brazilian poet, psychoanalyst and liberation theologian, Rubem Alves, said:

‘Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is to dance to it’

Rubem Alves - The Seed of the Future: The Community of Hope

I have reached the end of my Lenten series.

I am relieved. Committing to write six weekly meaningful pieces, when I have to labour in body and heart and soul just to draw my words in to straight-ish lines, has been quite something, in the midst of every thing else.

I am grateful. It has reminded me how much I love writing and set me up well to continue.

And I am a bit broken open.

I forgot, of course, that choosing to write on such a disrobing subject as stillness would, quite rightly, undress me.

So stillness (רָפָה) is about getting naked.

Jesus was able to move through the world in the way He did, alive to every moment, because He was naked before The Beloved, and therefore in constant communion. This allowed Him to be naked before the world. Undefended. Fully Alive.

He danced to an entirely different rhythm.

And was Himself a Song.

• In the Introduction to the series, Pope Innocent III caught sound of that Song in the eyes of a lover of Life, Francis. It compelled him to disrobe - humiliating himself before his cardinals - and kiss his feet.

• In Cultivating an Astonish-able Soul, the Perfect Day - in this case The Sabbath - can only be entered by disrobing ourselves of allegiances and ideologies and addictions at the threshold. The other side of which is The Song.

• In Landing Butterflies, by falling asleep to the gods of our age, we become still enough for newness to land on us, with the tenderness of butterflies. We sing the Songs we are given. And, like artists, we never allow ideas to become ideologies.

• In Being Held, we become still in the Mother-Arms of God, which are strong enough to soothe a raging world. Calmed and quieted, like a weaned child with their Mother. Able to hear Her Song. Deepest down we are held.

• In Shake if Off, movement brings us to a point of stillness, as we shake off all that doesn’t serve Life. Baptism being an ultimate form of Stillness. A moment of underwater nakedness before The Beloved, after which we should be able to shed our clothes with ease as needed.

• And in The Turning World, we find the Still Point. Dance from it. Cultivate in ourselves, over time, a place that is darkly silent amidst, not aside from, the movement and the noise and the joy and the devastation of life.

I consider this collection of strange pieces to function as a ‘political economy of stillness’. Because I have offered a multi-faceted shape of what stillness, in the Hebrew Bible, might be. And because living from a place of stillness changes everything.

Becoming naked before The Beloved...as individuals and as collectives...means you can no longer invest in systems of death. You can only invest in systems of Life. Which shapes our politics, and therefore our economies, to an entirely different song.

The Song of the Abyss.

The Jewish prophets lived that Song. And probably didn’t have many friends as a result. They were hated by both Left and Right. But they didn’t care.

They knew a summons to ‘wake up the world’.

They weren’t interested in ‘right behaviour’. And they certainly weren’t interested in ‘right politics’. They were interested in freedom. And in Beauty. In its deepest, most ruthless, liberatory sense.

‘Beauty is life’s triumph over death. It is life’s melody as it faces the Abyss’.

Rubem Alves - The Poet, The Warrior, The Prophet

Our little Lenten word, רָפָה (raphah), is like a prophet. Brutal. Beautiful. Undefended. Dancing to a different rhythm. Training us to do the same.

So as we head in to Holy Week, and I bid you a-Dieu, I am left thinking about Jesus. The Song. Who danced to its rhythm even when He couldn’t hear it. Even when it led Him to His death.

And I begin to anticipate The Risen Song the other side of that threshold.

‘Be still (רָפָה - disrobe) and know (יָדַע - know intimately or be made love to) that I am God’.

Psalm 46:10

Thank you so much if you have joined me for this series.

I would be so glad to hear any thoughts or reflections in the comments. And if you know anyone that would enjoy such a series, please do share it with them.

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If you would like to read more on this theme, I’ve remembered how much I love my Shibboleth piece. Framing this same idea of stillness as being washed by glad water.

And I won’t re-post this on Easter morning, but I might re-read it myself: Mary - in defence of feeling.

A particular thank you to those that have become paid subscribers over the last weeks. Everything I do in life is freelance, and I’m a slow writer, so your support really is SO appreciated. If anyone else would like to upgrade to a paid subscription you would be very welcome!

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I have pieces lining up inside of me to be written. Some have been waiting for about six years. So I hope I will, from this point, be publishing something here every 2-3 weeks.

And I will leave you with this little film - a daily glimpse of the Magnolia tree that I have borne witness to, outside my study window, through Lent. Some of you will know that Magnolias delight my soul. They too are like prophets. Untimely. Socially awkward. Eager. Honest. Bursting in to Song before we are ready for them. Exposed. Barefooted. Dancing to a Different Beat.

With love and thanks, x Vanessa.

This is Part Five of a six-part Lenten series on the theme of ‘Stillness’ - רָפָה (raphah) in the Hebrew Bible.

רָפָה (raphah): be still, cease, let go, fail, forsake, be feeble, let alone, surrender, be slothful, be slack, fall limp, let

My translation: disrobe, undress

I am publishing a reflection every Sunday morning through Lent, so please feel free to share this series with anyone that might be interested.

Share

If this is the first time you have encountered my work, you might find it helpful to read my Welcome to the Tuning Fork piece first.

And I have quite a few new readers, so I will start with something of a recap...skip down to the next section if you don’t need that.

So far...

So far in this series we have understood this word רָפָה (raphah), in the Hebrew Bible, as an ‘undressing’ sort of word.

It’s not just an inner quiet, or a physical stillness. It’s a ‘disrobing’ of the layers which numb us to Life. Our defences, our ideologies, our addictions, our pride, our shame.

An apocalyptic little word that would gladly disrobe whole civilisations of their limiting ideologies.

And it’s a disrobing for the sake of something...being held and encountered by the Beloved.

‘Be still (רָפָה - disrobe) and know (יָדַע - know intimately or be made love to) that I am God’.1 (Psalm 46:10)

Introduction: I shared the image of Pope Innocent III disrobing and descending the vast papal staircase, in Zeffirelli’s life of St Francis, to kiss the hand of the young misfit.

His intention was to offer a semblance of approval and then return to his throne. But, as he looks in to the barefoot brother’s eyes, he is struck by horror. His knees begin to soften and he knows he must descend for real and kiss Francis’s filthy earth-loving feet.

In Francis, Pope Innocent encounters the Beloved, and is compelled to genuinely disrobe and become still.

Part One: Cultivating an Astonish-able Soul - we looked at the idea of Sabbath (Shabbat) as a regular practice of undressing ourselves of our personal and political dependencies and allegiances.

I called it a ‘day of naked rest’ that orientates us away from ‘the survival of the ‘principalities and powers’ that we rely on to order and rule and make sense of our world...and forces them, rhythmically, week after week, like those crashing waves, to surrender to the greater power of Love and intimacy’.

So the practice of stillness is both profoundly intimate and politically (and therefore economically) radical and resistant.

Part Two: Landing Butterflies - I honoured the quality of stillness that artist’s must cultivate in themselves in order to be available for ideas to land. Still enough to land butterflies.

Purgation is not a fashionable word, but it’s what artists are practicing all the time. Hovering patiently over a complex writhing multiplicity of all-that-could-be until the Idea begins to emerge. At which point they purge themselves of every other possibility and give their whole being to ‘bodying forth’ that idea.

Art-making, like Lent, ‘is a brutal, death-like process. But it is for the sake of something.

It is a Yes that speaks a hundred no-s’.

Part Three: Being Held - I touched on the kind of stillness that arrives when we know we are held. And safe. Stillness as softening

Becoming still in the Mother-arms of God. Still on the Mother-breast of God. ‘Calmed and quieted like a weaned child with [their] mother’. The Mother’s voice...the Mother’s arms...being strong enough to sooth and soften a war-ravaged world.

The possibility that, however complex and painful and insurmountable things can be in the thick of life, deepest down, we are held.

Part Four: Shake It Off - I wrote about becoming still - as individuals and collectives - by regularly shaking things off of us.

The idea of Baptism as an ultimate kind of stillness. The water undresses you and you are, for one flash of a moment, naked before the Beloved. A baptised life should (in theory) find it easy to keep shaking things off - you’ve already surrendered all. So, in times of wider shaking, you are (in theory) able to offer safety, and sanity...to become islands of sanity... because you are rooted in that which remains.

“Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.”^{[e] 27} The words “once more” indicate the removing of what can be shaken — that is, created things — so that what cannot be shaken may remain”. (Hebrews 12:26-27)

This Sunday I want to write about ‘the still point’ and ‘the dance’.

The Still Point

I spent much of yesterday morning with my hands in the kitchen sink wondering why I would bother to write six reflections on a tiny Biblical Hebrew word, רָפָה, (my friend did say it was a little eccentric...‘I can’t think of anyone else that would want to do such a thing’) when an increasing amount of the world is being increasingly set on fire by idiotic, unreflective actors.

What’s the point?

In fact why bother doing anything at all?

And then the late, and very brilliant, Walter Brueggemann’s words came to my mind.

He told us artist types that we need to:

‘offer symbols that are adequate to contradict the situation of hopelessness in which newness is unthinkable’

and that:

‘speech about hope cannot be explanatory and scientifically argumentative; rather it must be lyrical in the sense that it touches the hopeless person at many different points’.

So a dead Brueggemann convinced me there was value in just keeping on being a lyrical image-breathing human.

And today I am going to offer two images of T.S. Eliot’s symbol of ‘the still point’, without which there is no ‘dance’.

The Dark Lake. And The Turning World.

The Dark Lake

It wasn’t until I was forty that I realised I have a dark lake at the base of my soul. Or perhaps at the base of my spine.

A therapist had asked me a challenging question and, as is often the case when I need to concentrate, I had closed my eyes and gone ‘in’ to see how my inner life wanted to respond.

And I experienced, as I suspected I would, all of the rival interests and emotions and priorities banging and clashing and singing and pushing and pressing against each other so they could get to the front of the queue.

And then for a tiny second, the mesh of chaotic thoughts parted, and I saw, way below them, and far out of my reach, an utterly still, oil-black, oval-ish shaped lake.

I gasped inwardly. It was completely silent. Such a loud silence that it drowned out all of my warring factions. Perhaps they all turned and gasped too.

There was no vegetation. No animal life. Just a vision of dry rolling hills and an oil-black lake.

And I knew...I just knew that I knew that I knew...that this was wisdom. Ancient wisdom right there. Calm and present. Right at the depths of me. A lake that, I knew, could become my still-point. Was my still point. If only I knew how to find it.

The noise returned and I lost sight of it.

But the last eight years have been about becoming someone that is better able, some of the time at least, to find and sit by that lake. The ‘Luminous Dark’ image that has fronted each of these Lenten reflections expresses that place in me.

My Still Point.

Last week I was in Yorkshire and spent a morning with the wonderful being introduced to the place where we will host a Nostos retreat in November.

After a beautiful extended time of talking in the sun with some of the team there, Paris gave us a tour of the main house - a vast stately home (covered from head to toe in paintings), some version of which has been owned and stewarded by the same (Catholic) family since the 11th Century.

It’s quite a place!

And Sharon, who had been there a number of times before, asked if we could visit ‘the well’.

From the glint in her eye I could tell this was going to be something of a treat. But I was unprepared for the impact it would have on me.

Behind a thick wall, at the back of a winding wine cellar, at the end of a series of narrow basement passages, is an oil-black hole in the ground.

A metre and a half wide. The water is perfectly still. Silent. Present. Even now as I write. It’s just...there. Being itself. Dark. Cool. Quiet.

The three of us met it with silence. Only for a moment. But it showed we had all cultivated that place in ourselves. A place that is ready to greet a dark well when it meets one.

It’s the closest I’ve come to encountering the Dark Lake in the flesh, so to speak. And it’s amazing to think of all the life that is happening...happening...happening all over that estate all the time.

And deepest down underneath it all is this Quiet Well.

A Still Point.

The Dance

I love to dance.

I need to dance.

When I was ten we lived in Germany and our house had a huge landing. So that was where I hosted my dance competitions (when I wasn’t teaching myself French or watching my brother try to kill himself racing around an army assault course on his bike).

I was, quite impressively, judge, competitor and compere. Which must have meant I had no friends.

At University, where I did thankfully have good friends, we had awesome club nights and I would keep a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut in my back pocket in case my friends took drugs and I needed something to keep up with them. I repeated this trick at a festival in my early forties and I think I danced for seven solid hours.

At around that time a friend trained in ‘Movement Medicine’ and used to host weekly sort of healing dance sessions in North London. It was a bit like Five Rhythms, with perhaps a little more freedom for the host-dj to respond to whatever was happening in the moment in the room. And for me it was bliss.

You could be quiet and still one moment, perhaps moving your toes alone, wrapped in a blanket on the floor. And then wild and raging the next with some hardcore beats and permission to sort of tear the place down with the energy in your movements.

Some years later, having moved down to the coast, I got severely stuck whilst trying to write my Theology Masters thesis.

Everything was alive and fecund within me. I knew what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. Dead poets and theologians had been in conversation around campfires inside my head and heart for years. Slowly self-organising in to chapters.

And yet, when I sat down to write, nothing happened.

There was no link between my heart and my typing fingers. I was blocked.

‘You’re trying to write the unwritable Vanessa. The ineffable doesn’t want to be written. Try treating it like a work of art. Make it, rather than write it’.

So I decided to take myself to a similar dance group and, one Sunday morning, spent two hours dancing my thesis. The Introduction. Crossing the Abyss. Creating Ex Profundis. Superabundance and the Apophatic Event. Art-making as Erotic Practice. Keeping the Ends Untied.

Chapter by chapter, I stretched it through my arms and curled my fingers and angled my legs and bent my head down and arched my back and stretched my arms out and up again. Head up. Idea by idea. They all got expressed by my gloriously alive body in a space where everyone was being as weird as me so no-one noticed.

At the end we sat around in a circle to do a sort of check out and I said, gleefully, ‘I just danced my Masters thesis’. There was a baffled silence. And then shrieks of delight.

Soon after that I began to write. And my thesis flowed through my eight typing fingers like warm honey.

The Turning of the World

That winter I joined the same group for a Winter Solstice Celebration.

I don’t easily find spaces where I can be present as both my spiritual and my embodied self. Which sounds ridiculous, because wherever I am present, I am of course always both of those things. But spaces that explicitly love and follow Jesus don’t tend to be in to ecstatic kinds of dance. And spaces that love ecstatic kinds of dance don’t tend to explicitly love and follow (or, sometimes, want to be around those that love and follow) Jesus.

So I joined the group feeling a little wary, because I was trusting the (amazing) host to hold a ‘spiritual’ space that I could feel safe in.

But the music soon took over and we spent 1 hour and 27 minutes dancing to the max...moving from quiet and tender to hilarious and raucous to relational and collaborative to internal and reflective to leaping and flinging and delighting and being huge and spacious and unashamed.

As I said, I love to dance.

And as the clock moved towards 9.27 - the exact moment of the earth’s (northern) axis being tilted furthest away from the sun - the host brought us masterfully down to a place of gentle quiet movement and, on the pin of 9.27pm, we were still.

A room of twenty people that had been in full movement together was now held, as if on one pointed toe on one pin, in silence.

And my brain was suddenly behind me, up in the darkness of space. And I could sense the planets turning. Feel a cool breeze over my body.

And I heard a sound.

An ethereal one. A kind of song. A kind of wind. Not quite a lament. But a sound that could hold all, even the most cracked, in its beauty.

My body was perfectly still, but for its blood and aliveness. And I was, for that pointed moment, amidst the planets.

And once the group had held itself in that pointed stillness for long enough, the host brought music back in. And it was a great surprise.

A sung version of the prayer of St Francis.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

At the turning of the world, my spiritual-embodied self was held and welcomed.

Psalm 46, from which we have drawn out core verse, ‘be still, and know that I am God’, offers a place of refuge and safety in the midst of devastation and collapse.

And at the heart of the psalm is an image of stillness and dance:

‘There is a river whose streams shall make glad the city of God’

God is in the midst of this city, which is in the midst of, or surrounded by, or perhaps even submerged by, this glad dance of a river. And she is not moved.

Movement and stillness.

Regular practices of stillness - of undressing ourselves, for a moment, of our identities and allegiances and insecurities and boasts and shames and hiding places and standing naked before the Beloved, letting ourselves be seen and loved - cultivates in us, over time, a place that is darkly silent amidst, not aside from, the movement and the noise and the joy and the devastation of life.2

I have learnt that I can walk through the hidden door in the image at the top of this piece at any moment in the day. Or night.

When I do, everything changes. It is empty. I am quiet. And I look out at the world through its radiating light.

I (just like the rest of the church) mostly do not live from that place. Often I forget its even there. And when I remember it takes me a while to find my way in. But when I do it is I that is found.

And from that Still Point everything else becomes Dance.

And then there is only The Dance.3

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I would like to recommend another series - my friend ’s beautiful and brilliantly researched series on the radical Greek of the over-familiar Lord’s Prayer which you’ll find here.

And for anyone that is keen to find a space where they can explore the idea of ‘the divine’, and what it means to live from and within such a ‘place’, without having to cross the threshold into a particular religion, I recommend taking a look at ’s new Nostos Institute.

and I have the privilege of being involved, and we three met online with 150 or so others yesterday to be part of Sharon’s first conversation. It was wonder-full. I host my first spiritual accompaniment session with the group on Thursday. You can join at any time.

This is Part Four of a six-part Lenten series on the theme of ‘Stillness’ - רָפָה (raphah) in the Hebrew Bible.

רָפָה (raphah): be still, cease, let go, fail, forsake, be feeble, let alone, surrender, be slothful, be slack, fall limp, let

My translation: disrobe, undress

I am publishing a reflection every Sunday morning through Lent, so please feel free to share this series with anyone that might be interested.

Share

You’ll find a summary of the series to date here.

If this is the first time you have encountered my work, you might find it helpful to read my Welcome to the Tuning Fork piece first.

When I was 27 I was baptised in the River Thames.

I’d heard lots of stories of people feeling ecstatic as they rose from the water after their full submersion baptism, and I was anticipating the same kind of experience for myself.

But mine was the opposite.

As soon as my friends James and Mike dunked me under, my body lost all strength. When they pulled me up I couldn’t stand. So my first experience of ‘the risen life’ was my having to lean my full weight on my friends’ arms.

I remember hearing shrieks of delight from the river bank. And I know I felt joyful, because I have a photo of that moment beside my bed and my face is radiating Life.

But I was limp. Feeble. Dependent.

רָפָה

And, as I was dragged back to the bank, I heard the words in my head ‘yours is the way of ‘deflation’ Vanessa’.

Hmmm.

Not quite what I was anticipating!

Baptism could be seen as an exemplary form of ‘stillness’. רָפָה.

(Which does not, sadly, mean that baptised people act as baptised people - I’m not writing in defence of the Church, or of myself).

As you go under, you surrender all. Your sense of your own identity. Your allegiances. Your belonging.

You let the water ‘undress’ you.

People often assume this means you are undressed of your worst stuff. The ways you’ve messed up. The lies you’ve believed. The harm you’ve done. The resentments you’ve harboured. Your sense of insignificance. Your addictions, your pride, your control.

But it also means your best stuff.

You surrender all of it.

Your gifts. Your skills. Your successes. Your popularity. Your wealth. Your hopes. Your ambitions. Your significance. Your accolades. Your strength.

It’s clear that we somehow manage to forget that bit.

And it’s not just personal. You surrender your allegiance to anything that isn’t Love, including systems, ideologies, and states. Your national identity. Your political allegiance. Your religious commitment. Your family heritage. Your class. Your relationship to a legal system. Your belief in Marxism. Capitalism. Christianity.

All of it.

For one sharp splash of a moment, you are entirely naked before The Beloved.

Which makes sense of baptism being called a ‘pledge of a clear conscience toward God’ (1 Peter 3:21). It’s not that we are clean before God - we enter that water as glorious and appalling as we really are - but that for that one moment, we are clear. Undefended. Seeable. Seen.

And the idea is that in that moment of vulnerability, where we are as helpless as a newborn, we are seen by Love. Beheld. Received. Recognised. Affirmed.

Jesus heard the word ‘beloved son’ when He rose from the water.

That becomes our new identity.

‘Beloved’.

And a beloved that knows they belong in relationship with The Beloved.

At which point we emerge from the water and re-enter the world and remember our jobs and our friends and our griefs and our responsibilities and our political allegiances and our grudges and the wars our country is fighting and our neighbour’s sick child and the books we want to write and the harms we’ve caused and the legal system that we now need to let hold us to account.1

Just like Pope Innocent III in the introduction to this series who, having died a death to his pride and status by bending down to kiss the filthy feet of brother Francis, turns and has his robes and symbols of office returned, we begin to re-ascend the stairs and put some of our robes back on. Because we can’t function in the world without clothes.

But something has changed.

We never wear those robes in the same way again. We are not invested in them in the same way. We are eager to disrobe whenever given the opportunity. To shake them off.

We know our core identity is one of nakedness.

Wearing nothing, we are beloved.

Buy why, you ask, am I talking about baptism, when most of my readers aren’t ‘christian’, and I’m not suggesting people go and get baptised.

Well...

I spend a remarkable amount of time wanting the whole world to be dunked under water. To have one sharp splash of a moment where the whole world is naked before God.

(I know parts of the world are already literally drowning. That’s not what I mean by under water).

People (including myself) are upset with the God of the Bible when He causes the earth to flood and everything apart from that which is protected in the ark to be destroyed. But the story makes it clear that it is humans that have ruined the world: ‘the earth was filled with violence’ (Genesis 6:11). The God character in that story decides to destroy the destruction.

He literally dunks the whole world under water and starts again.

Today that seems like a sensible idea.

Or perhaps we just dunk the Church. For one moment the global Church, of every creed and denomination, is still before God. Silenced. Disrobed of their (our...I am part of the church) political and national and economic allegiances. Concerned, for a moment, with confessing their (our) own sin, rather than calling out that of others.

What would emerge from the water? What would a deflated global church (small ‘c’) be like? Not deflated as in discouraged. We already know what that’s like. Deflated as in still. Still before the God and still before the World. Naked.

Would we at last hear the song of the Angels?

And, for a minute (and not a minute more), we’ll let Tay Tay be one of those angels. Because she helped me, at the start of the year, spend two hours shaking off the clothes I was wearing, and becoming still, for a moment, before God and the world.

I heard those beats, knew it was ‘Shake if Off’, ran to find a girl-dad, and dived in.

I stay out too late
Got nothing in my brain
That’s what people say, mm-mm
That’s what people say, mm-mm

Arms flinging, head flicking, smile grinning, joy bringing, sheer delight.

It was midway through an event that I’ve been co-curating and co-hosting every January for the last number of years. When I’m responsible for curating things I carry something of them in my body whilst the ideas slowly gestate and grow and take on form and become ready to be birthed.

By the Saturday night this event has taken on its own life and my job is done, so I’m able to step back. Or, in this case, I can begin to shake it off.

But I keep cruisin'
Can't stop, won't stop movin'
It's like I got this music in my mind
Sayin', "It's gonna be alright"

So I did. First the weight of it. The responsibility. The amount of my time and care it had required. I delightedly shook that out of my arms and my legs and my beautiful brain. The relationships. The schedule. The meaning. The purpose. All of it got flung across the room as my body gleefully stomped and stretched and shook and grinned its way through the song.

'Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off (whoo-hoo-hoo)2

And then I realised there was a deeper letting go. It was time for me to let go of my curation of the event. It wasn’t mine to carry anymore. Longer term, my job was done. So I let that be released from the deep place in which I held it, and it worked its way down up and round and out. Through my toes. Through my nose. I shook it out and off and away.

Shake it off, I shake it off
I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off
I, I, I shake it off, I shake it off (whoo-hoo-hoo)

By which point Taylor had stopped singing, but my shaking had only just begun. So I took my headphones (it was a silent disco) outside and, under the stars (which were covered by clouds), and witnessed by the woods and the night creatures, I switched to a more hardcore dance channel, and I danced, and I danced, and I danced, and I danced. With others. With myself. With the night creatures. With the Spirit. And all the while I was seeing things in my life and loosening their grip on me. My grip on them. Letting things go. Shaking them off.

And there came a moment when I stopped. Exhilarated. Energised. And still.

And I saw something. It was like the ‘now’ was peeled back for a moment, and I saw fields and fields and fields and fields of people. We were hosting an event for 250 people, and that is a big deal for me. But here were tens of thousands. And they were all there for something. All hungry for something. Like we’d managed to create some monumental feast, and everyone was invited.

I didn’t know what it meant. I still don’t. But I felt I was being invited to let go of my own perspective on what was possible. My own sense of my self, and my limits. My own take on what was going on in the world and what the ‘right’ responses were. My own shyness and failings.

It was a ‘here I am’ kind of moment.

I had shaken enough off to become still before God. And I found myself, from that place of joyful emptiness, saying ‘yes’. Yes to Life. Yes to God. Yes to my vocation. Yes to Yes.

There is a passage in the Book of Hebrews that would smile at Tay Tay’s song. It transforms ‘Shake it Off’ in to an excellent form of practical theology:

“Once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.”^{[e] 27} The words “once more” indicate the removing of what can be shaken — that is, created things — so that what cannot be shaken may remain”. (Hebrews 12:26-27)

The passage is describing a time of apocalypse. A painful tearing away of that which can be shaken, to reveal that which remains.

And it certainly feels like the world as I have known it has entered such a moment.3 It is being shaken. ‘We’ are being shaken. And the foundations of many of the things we have taken for ‘truth’ are failing. And we are floundering around, trying to find co-ordinates that can hold. And many are seeking refuge in Church traditions. But how much of that will remain?

That’s a tempting digression...but I need to draw this to a close, because it’s Mother’s Day here in the UK, and I’m lucky enough to be with my own mother right now and I want drink my morning coffee with her.

So I’ll just say that this passage in Hebrews is really the reason I have wanted to write a Lent series on ‘stillness’. As we still ourselves, we shake off the things that don’t remain. Daily, hourly, weekly, monthly. The weekly practice of Shabbat, which I wrote about in Part One, is just that. A day of rest where we shake off the things that don’t remain.

And for those that have been baptised that should be relatively easy. You have died to it all once already (Romans 6:4), and you are confident that your identity, and your safety, rests in that which remains. So whatever robes you are wearing...whatever your national or political or economic or familial allegiance...you are always ready to sit and eat and live and work and build a more beautiful world with those that are different to you. Your differences are ‘shake-able’. Important, but not something you cling to. Or that clings to you.

So, in times of shaking, you are able to offer safety, and sanity...to become an island of sanity...because you are rooted in that which remains.

In practice that is of course, for the most part, not what we are experiencing. Sadly.

But I would like to be leading a life that is at least gesturing towards it. To becoming an island of sanity.

So Lent is an opportunity to ‘shake off’ some of that which is ‘shake-able’. To dislodge it. Break our allegiance. Recognise it as outer clothing which is removable.

Be Still (Shake it Off) & Know that I am God. (Psalm 46:10)

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And I would like to recommend my friend David Benjamin Blower’s beautiful and brilliantly researched series on the Greek of the Lord’s Prayer which has just started and you’ll find here.

Before I write anything about ‘stillness’, I want to let you know about a wonderful thing that writer-psychologist-mythologist launched yesterday - her Nostos Institute.

I have the joy of being part of Sharon’s start-up team, together with my friend , and will be hosting and developing the spiritual accompaniment side of the programme.

I say more at the end of this piece.

And thank you...

I’d also like to say a deep thank you to those of you that keep deciding, for no reason other than generosity and kindness (all my writing is currently freely available), to support my writing financially.

Everything I do in life is freelance, and I am a slow writer, so, whether you support me monthly or annually, it really does make a big difference in my life. THANK YOU!

This is Part Three of a six-part Lenten series on the theme of ‘Stillness’ - רָפָה (raphah) in the Hebrew Bible.

רָפָה (raphah): be still, cease, let go, fail, forsake, be feeble, let alone, surrender, be slothful, be slack, fall limp, let
(my translation: disrobe, undress)

I am publishing a reflection every Sunday morning through Lent, so please feel free to share this series with anyone that might be interested.

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If this is the first time you have encountered my work, you might find it helpful to read my Welcome to the Tuning Fork piece first.

And I have quite a few new readers, so I will start with something of a recap...

So far...

So far in this series we have understood this word רָפָה (raphah), in the Hebrew Bible, as an ‘undressing’ sort of word.

It’s not just an inner quiet, or a physical stillness. It’s a ‘disrobing’ of the layers which numb us to Life. Our defences, our ideologies, our addictions, our pride, our shame.

And it’s a disrobing for the sake of something...being held and encountered by the Beloved.

‘Be still (רָפָה - disrobe) and know (יָדַע - know intimately or have intimate sex) that I am God’.1 (Psalm 46:10)

Introduction: I shared the image of Pope Innocent III disrobing and descending the vast papal staircase, in Zeffirelli’s life of St Francis, to kiss the hand of the young misfit.

His intention was to offer a semblance of approval and then return to his throne. But, as he looks in to the barefoot brother’s eyes, he is struck by horror. His knees begin to soften and he knows he must descend for real and kiss Francis’s filthy earth-loving feet.

In Francis, Pope Innocent encounters the Beloved, and is compelled to become still.

Part One: We looked at the idea of Sabbath (Shabbat) as a regular practice of undressing ourselves of our personal and political dependencies and allegiances.

I called it a ‘day of naked rest’ that orientates us away from ‘the survival of the ‘principalities and powers’ that we rely on to order and rule and make sense of our world...and forces them, rhythmically, week after week, like those crashing waves, to surrender to the greater power of Love and intimacy’.

So the practice of stillness is both profoundly intimate and politically (and therefore economically) radical and resistant.

Part Two: I honoured the quality of stillness that artist’s must cultivate in themselves in order to be available for ideas to land. Still enough to land butterflies.

Purgation is not a fashionable word, but it’s what artists are practicing all the time. Hovering patiently over a complex writhing multiplicity of all-that-could-be until the Idea begins to emerge. At which point they purge themselves of every other possibility and give their whole being to ‘bodying forth’ that idea.

Art-making, like Lent, ‘is a brutal, death-like process. But it is for the sake of something.

It is a Yes that speaks a hundred no-s’.

Stillness as softening.

This Sunday I want to think about stillness as softening.

A softening that happens when we feel safe. And held.

So I want to focus on the Mother-arms of God. The Mother-voice of God. the Mother-breast of God. And the power this has to still us.

There is a tiny little flick of a psalm in the Hebrew Bible that sings of the need to ‘calm and quieten’ our souls, so they become ‘like a weaned child with [their] mother’. (Psalm 131:2)

A child so held in love that the sound of their Mother’s voice alone is enough for them to feel warmth, even though no longer fed in her arms.

A child so secure in their connection that they feel intimate, even though no longer attached to their Mother’s breast.

They feel safe.

And held.

And are now free to enjoy the taste and variety of solid food and be satisfied.2

The verse that we have been repeatedly drawing on in this series, ‘be still and know that I am God’, is not spoken to a community that is spending a leisurely day in the park.

It is spoken in to a context of regional chaos, warfare, confusion, environmental upheaval, and devastation.

The nations are raging, the kingdoms are moving, the waters are troubled. It seems as if the mountains are being ‘carried in to the midst of the sea’. (Psalm 46:6)

And throughout the noise and turbulence in the psalm, we are repeatedly assured that God offers refuge and safety and strength.

A great relief.

But I realised last week that I had always read this as a sort of ‘World’s Strongest Man’ competition. The situation is scary. God is scarier. The situation is fierce. God is fiercer. The situation is loud. God is louder.

God is, essentially, Geoff Capes.

Especially the part where ‘He uttered His voice’ and ‘the earth melted’.

I mean how awesome and fierce and loud and HOT must that voice be in order for everything, even the earth itself, to immediately refrain from its activity and begin to melt away.

This is such a complex psalm, and I am not attempting to do it justice here.3 But I want to look for a moment at this word ‘melts’, which could also be translated ‘softens’.

Softening has a quite different feel to melting.

We can melt from fear. From shame. From scorching heat.

None of those things make us soften.

We soften when we feel safe. And held.

So what is it that makes me assume God’s utterance is loud and fierce?

The first part of that verse is definitely noisy. The nations are in uproar. Kingdoms are falling apart. But what makes me assume God’s response is even noisier?

Well...the translator(s).

Every work of translation is also, at the same time, a work of interpretation. There are always choices to be made. And the choices that are made are dependent on the priorities of those making them.

The translators of the New King James Version chose, for lots of good reasons, to write: ‘He uttered His voice, the earth melted’.

But ‘uttered’ here, נָתַ֥ן, more often just means ‘gave’. They have made a choice that, in this context of raging war, the more magnificent word ‘utter’ is appropriate. I can understand that.

But magnificent voices don’t make us soften. Gentle ones do.

So what if the voice God ‘gives’ to address the uproar here is gentle.

Authoritative.

But gentle.

What if it’s the voice of the Mother, which, as in the flick of the psalm mentioned above, we experience like warm arms embracing us. Reminding us that we are safe. Held. Loved. And able to cease our grasping and raging and operating out of lack.

To become ‘calmed and quieted like a weaned child with [their] mother’.

It probably wouldn’t take long for someone to convince me that ‘melt’ is the more appropriate word. In which case go for it with all the magnificent language. But I can’t help thinking that, had there been women around that table, ‘soft’ might have at least stood a chance.

The Mother’s voice...the Mother’s arms...being strong enough to sooth and soften a war-ravaged world.

I read that funny flick of a ‘weaned’ psalm every weekday morning. Wrapped in my super-soft blanket on my giant cord beanbag with a cup of tea up in my Chapel-in-the-Sky.4

The psalmist starts by declaring how good it is that their heart is not proud, that their eyes are not haughty, and that they do not concern themselves with things beyond their understanding or capacity.

Yeah right.

I start by declaring how unsurprising it is that my heart is so terribly proud, that my eyes are so often haughty and superior, and that I am endlessly concerning myself with, and trying to have some kind of control over, things I can’t handle, can’t afford, don’t have the time for, and have not even been asked to consider.

Some might not like the sound of that practice, but I find it a great relief to get that off my chest at the start of each day.

I’m a big fan of the Twelve Steps, and love that their meetings tend to begin with a confession of the ways those present are likely to screw up, even in that very meeting. It is honest. Releasing. Sobering. Kind. And invites everyone present to become more self aware than they would be otherwise.

In my morning ritual, rather than feeling bad about myself, I feel I am being kind. I’m saying ‘hey...there’s a lot of lack in your life V, and if you’re not aware of that, you’ll act from that place and be all of these things, which is ok, but there’s another way’.

So I admit how messed up I am. How in need of connection and comfort. Then I read something that reminds me I am loved. That God enjoys witnessing and spending time with me. Before turning my attention to outer things and beginning to pray.

But sometimes I pause before moving on. And I imagine myself being held. Curled up on the Mother-chest of God. Wrapped in their safe, devoted, arms.

I don’t think I quite imagine myself nourished at their breast, but perhaps I should. One of the names for God in the Hebrew Bible is El Shaddai (אֵל שַׁדַּי), which can be translated ‘the God that nourishes me’, or ‘the God on whose breast I am nourished’ (‘Shad’ means breast).

There are good reasons why the name mostly gets translated ‘God Almighty’...a far cry from ‘the God on whose breast I am nourished’, or ‘the breasted One’. ‘Shad’ could mean breast, but it could also be rooted in an ancient Akkadian word which meant ‘mountain’, which would lean the name towards almighty-ness, rather than intimacy.

But, as with ‘softness’, had there been women in the room, ‘breast’ would at least have stood a chance.

Soft. Breast.
Soothed, nourished, secure, nutrient-rich, world.

So I lie on the Mother breast of God for a moment and allow myself to feel held.

Being Held

A few weeks ago I had a dream about being held.

It was the night of the day that I had published the introduction to this On Stillness series. The day before Lent.

And I’d had a feeling, immediately after publishing the piece, that there were things I myself had to let go of...cease striving for...disrobe myself of...before I could start writing with any authority about ‘stillness’.

One of those things was my hope of being reconciled to a close friend.

I have a lot of people in my life, but I don’t find it easy to let myself be known. Which means the few close friends I have are vital to me. They are like co-ordinates. Life is hard to navigate without them.

And this friendship had, for over a decade, been one such coordinate. Someone I didn’t need to explain myself to. A quietly glorious being next to whom I felt at home.

Known.

But the last few years of our friendship have been difficult. Spiky. Painful. Repeatedly ill-fitting.

My instinct was to keep fighting to save our connection - there is so much that’s awful in the world, why let go of something so precious. But that only made things worse. So last autumn we cut all contact and gave up trying to relate.

And there at my desk, having published the introduction to ‘On Stillness’, I felt I had to surrender my expectation that we would ever be friends again. ‘Disrobe’ myself of my sense of entitlement that we would continue to relate. Cease from striving for the situation to be ok.

I had to accept and let go.

So I did.

And I felt like broken bread.

A warm loaf fresh from the oven, torn roughly down the middle - each part handed out in opposite directions to be shared.

I wailed. Waited. And then got on with my day.

That night I dreamt.

I saw this friend. Calmly walked up to them. And asked if they would hold me.

Without hesitation they put their arm around me and held me tight. No words.

I woke in the morning and said to God ‘it’s ok if we are not in each other’s lives, but I know that I will always love them’.

Two hours later I looked at my phone and saw a message. From them.

The first contact we’d had in many months, and the first they’d initiated in more.

The message didn’t fix anything. And it didn’t reassure me that in time we’d be reconciled to one another. But it did tell me that I was loved. And thought of. And missed.

And the sense from my dream returned.

The possibility that, however complex and painful and insurmountable things can be in the thick of life, deepest down, we are held. We can hold each other in love even if we never again relate.

So, returning to that funny flick of a ‘weaned’ psalm, I finish my weekday morning chapel-in-the-sky ritual by reading the second verse:

‘Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul,
Like a weaned child with his mother;
Like a weaned child is my soul within me’.

I take a moment to acknowledge that my adult self is able to exist without being dependent on or grasping for people or things. That my adult self knows she is held, and can therefore be still. That my adult self is able to hear the voice of God the Mother.

I am free.

I put a hand on my chest and breathe in to that experience. And then climb back down through the hole in the floor and go and make coffee.

And this is really the main thing that I try to share and communicate and suggest and propose and argue and shape and feel my way in to in all of my writing.

The idea that, deepest down, we are held.

However complex and chaotic and destructive and exhausting and disappointing and confusing the dynamics of life are in the thick of things. However catastrophic things are in the present, and seem in the future. Deepest down, we are held.

So, returning to Sharon’s Nostos Institute, which I mentioned at the start, I understand this project, drawn from the depths of Sharon’s own insight and experience, to be a dynamic response to the question: ‘how, in these disorientating times, can we know ourselves to be held?’ or ‘what is strong enough to hold us?’

Nostos, I have discovered, is an Ancient Greek word which means ‘homecoming’, or ‘return to a home which was lost’, and is a core theme in Homer’s Odyssey. It is the first part of the word ‘nostalgia’, and I like the idea that we can return and recover things we have lost without the need to become nostalgic or sentimental. It can be clean.

There are four core threads: Philosophical traditions & the soul’s journey; Mythopoetics; Cosmologies and Depth Psychology, around and through which will be woven creative and reflective practices, book groups, philosophy circles and spiritual accompaniment sessions. I will be both a learner and a host. Do check it out if it could be of interest.

I’ll end by sharing a final image of ‘being still’ and ‘knowing God’.

I heard someone teach on Moses being encountered by God in the Burning Bush a few days ago. They reframed the demand that Moses ‘take off his shoes’ because he is on ‘holy ground’.

We tend to interpret holiness, in the Hebrew Bible, as involving unapproachability. There always has to be some kind of separation or veil between us and God.

But the speaker asked ‘when do you take your shoes off?’

The first answer was ‘when you arrive home’.

‘Exactly...what if, rather than God saying ‘this is so holy that you have to take your shoes off’, They are saying:

‘welcome home, come in and take your shoes off’.

A Homecoming. Being Held.

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If you are enjoying this series and would like to support me in my writing practice you are welcome to buy me a coffee, or become a paid subscriber for a while.

Subscribe now

And I would like to recommend another upcoming series - my friend ’s beautiful and brilliantly researched series on the Greek of the Lord’s Prayer which you’ll find here.

I am publishing a reflection every Sunday morning through Lent, so please feel free to share this series with anyone that might be interested.

If this is the first time you have encountered my work, you might find it helpful to read my Welcome to the Tuning Fork piece first.

And my writing sounds all about ‘me’, because I experience the world self-referentially, but my concern is with the ‘us’ of life.

Art-making is a brutal process.

It is about death - many deaths - before it is about life.

And even when it is about life, it is soon about death again.

You always need to be ready to destroy your best idea for the sake of that which is most alive.

Some of you found my talk of ‘disrobing ourselves of ideology’ in my previous piece difficult.

I can understand that. I once had a plan in life to become a ‘peace-maker’, and would listen to practitioners talk about the danger of requiring both sides to ‘leave their politics at the door’. Such a practice always favours the more powerful party. And it’s not quite what I meant.

Perhaps the art-making sentence above expresses it better.

Stillness (רָפָה), in the Hebrew Bible, is about becoming alive to, and therefore available to, the reality of the moment. So it is less concerned with the nature of our ideas, than the ways in which we hold them. Our posture towards them.

If we are unable to surrender our best ideas, if only for a moment, when aliveness presents itself and demands our attention, then our ideas are no longer in service to Life. They are in service to something else.

This is why Jesus, through the Gospels, continually berates religious people and law-makers and -keepers. They have let their ideas become ideologies which are no longer in service to Life. They are in service to something else - normally the maintenance of the status-quo.

Life arrives on the scene and destroys the status quo.
Its Yes is experienced first as a hundred No-s.
No-s which hurt first the beneficiaries of that status quo.

And we walk away sad. Or we walk away glad. It’s our choice.

I am myself an artist. And a blank canvas scares me.

Like the Elohim (אֱלֹהִים) of the Jewish creation story, as interpreted through Christian theology, I must, magnificently, create from nothing - Ex Nihilo.

The blank, white, surface glares directly at me, with no patience for my difficulty in maintaining eye contact.

It stares me down. ‘Who are you really Vanessa? Are you up to this? Do you know how to make a significant mark? Is this going to be worth my time? Do you even know how to show up?’

Probably not.

My studio life is mostly one of avoidance. Procrastination. Failure.

And then one evening, after a cloudy day of not pursuing anything of substance, I make a random, soft, broad, mark, with an old brush, in deep browny-red oil paint that I have just mixed, on a clean piece of water colour paper.

The paper is taped to a board on my easel, and this activity is filling up a half hour window before I need to go and teach. It’s a way to feel a little less bad about my disappointing day.

And, at that moment, I hear the page make a noise.

It is faint, and it is deep. And I think of the word Edom (אֱדוֹם), meaning red, and how it has the same root as the word Adam (אָדָם), meaning human, or, better, ‘earthling’ - one of the earth (adamah -אֲדָמָה) - and how both are related to the word for blood, dam (דָּם).

(Hebrew is a wonderfully visual language. Even without understanding the sounds, it is so easy to see the relationship between these words).

And I find myself wanting to respond to this sound with a line in the brightest green I can find. I don’t have time to mix oils, so I reach for my soft pastels and find the grassiest spring-green that I have and I sing it, firmly but finely, along, and overlapping at points, the dam-earth-red.

And the noise they then make together is loud. It’s clashing and vital and full of an energy that didn’t exist the minute before.

And now something is happening. And I am alert to it. Ears pricked. Nose active. Eyes deepening in to a different kind of seeing.

I feel my way. Letting colours arrive and move and shape just as they see fit. My body stretches to reach for the right materials. My eye stays fixed. My mind acts as memory alone, making available knowledge I’ve gained from every mark made to date, in service of the ‘now’.

Something is demanding to be made through me. And, at this random moment at the end of a failed day, I am soft and defeated enough to be able to surrender to it. To let my ‘whole person’ become a ‘responsive space’, or ‘‘sounding box’’ for the ‘event of beauty’ occurring within me.1

Though my whole body is moving through this making process, I know that somewhere deep in me I have become still.

Still enough for the ‘shy woodland creatures to emerge’.2

Still enough to land butterflies.

My name means ‘butterfly’.

Well actually that’s not true. The name Vanessa was apparently invented by Jonathan Swift, who put the start of his then lover’s surname, ‘Van’, together with a fond-name for Esther, ‘Essa’, and made Vanessa, who became the nymph character in his very long I’ve-still-never-read-it-poem of 1713, Cadenus & Vanessa.

Vanessa was then used as a name for a genus of ‘Nymphalini’ butterflies - all of which are, apparently, ‘brush-footed’. This means they land on four feet, rather than six, and their front feet are shorter and brush like and are used for more creative tasks than standing.

How cool is that. I’m an artist-butterfly.

So the name Vanessa has come to mean ‘free spirit’, which I of course love - though in truth I’m only free enough to know that I am barely free at all.

And it means that whenever I hear mention of butterflies I listen up.

One such mention was at the end of a theology gathering that I was part of in the Spring of 2019. I was about to make some decisions that would significantly change my life and was in need of encouragement.

At the end of the day I walked over to thank a woman who had already shared some insightful things with me. And she said: ‘Vanessa I think I have something else for you. This morning, when I took time to pray, I ‘saw’ lots of butterflies’.

She felt she was going to meet someone at the conference for whom butterflies were important. And that that person was likely to be a writer. She knew she was meant to tell them that God wanted them to become still enough that butterflies could begin to land on them. She thought the butterflies symbolised ideas and then said ‘do butterflies mean anything to you Vanessa? And are you by any chance a writer?’

I smiled.

What an exquisite idea. To become still enough that the tenderness of a butterfly feels safe to land on your soul.

On your mind.

On your heart.

To become tender enough to notice it.

It makes me think of the moment Jesus is walking through a hectic crowd, being bashed and bumped by all those around him.

Yet when the woman who has been bleeding for twelve years touches his garment - light as a butterfly so as not to be noticed - he whips around and asks ‘who touched me?’

His disciples think him ridiculous. How can he ask who touched me. He’s in the thick of a crowd.

But Jesus is an artist. And that tender, desperate touch was Life’s arrival in that moment.

He stilled Himself in the face of it. Forsook His other plans. Fell asleep to the expectations of the crowd. Fell limp before the social and religious etiquette of the day.

Way back in 1996, I visited Kakamega rainforest in western Kenya with my best friend, Lucy, and experienced what is still imprinted on my being as one of the stillest, most exquisite moments of my life.

It involved sleeping and butterflies.

We were teaching in a local High School and had been recommended to stay in the forest guesthouse that weekend. So we jumped in a matatu and somehow found our way to the simple wooden lodge on stilts which became our home for three nights.

I remember blissful hours of candlelit journal writing, cloaked in the night sounds of the forest. Candlelit baths (at the school we had a bucket). Candlelit feasts of killed-before-our-eyes chicken. Candlelit being with a beloved other in silence.

It was when I realised how much I love being quiet.

And the days were dense and lush-green in a way that made everything in me sing with gladness, perhaps for the first time in my life. It seemed we were the only people there, amidst the shrieking and guffawing and leaping and delighting of the monkeys and the birds and the up up up-ness of all the trees.

On our final day we walked to find a clearing that we’d heard about. But it was nearing the heat of the day and we didn’t get far before we found ourselves sitting chatting on the forest floor.

I had a feeling we were pretty close, so I left my friend in order to walk a little further on to check. And, sure enough, I found the clearing. And also found myself, as I strode out in the open sun, twenty yards from a wild cat. Too small for leopard. Too big for a domestic cat. Staring straight at me.

I retreated, quietly, eyes down, walking backwards, heart racing.

As I neared the edge of the clearing I turned and ran back in to the forest, retracing my steps with the intention of grabbing my friend and heading back to the safety of our lodge.

What were we doing? This was dangerous!

But, when I rounded the final corner and scrambled up the little slope to the spot where I had left her, I stopped in amazement.

Lucy was asleep. Lying stretched on her left side in the middle of the path with dappled midday sun draped across her.

And...

...she was COVERED in butterflies.

In my memory there were hundreds of them. All the same kind with simple brown and red wings.

I can’t have been gone more than twenty minutes, but there they were, settled as if this were the safest place in the world for their tender feet to rest for a while.

And she was asleep as if the forest floor were the same.3

In her stillness she became a literal landing place for butterflies.

Jesus fell asleep in a boat. And he stayed asleep in that boat even when ‘a furious storm came up on the lake, so that the waves swept over the boat’.4

When the disciples woke him and asked him to save them from drowning, he rebuked them for having little faith and being afraid.

I’m never to going to fully understand what that scene wants to teach me, but I can understand that, in being asleep to the many dangers of - to the furious storm of - that forest, Lucy became a landing place for butterflies.5

And I’ve mentioned in both previous posts that the Pharaoh character, in the Exodus story, used our רָפָה (raphah) word to accuse the Hebrew Slaves of being lazy; of being asleep to the demands of the gods of the age.

Returning to our initial theme of art-making, I would contend that every work of art that we experience today as ‘alive’, is so because, in the making of it, the artist fell asleep to everything apart from the idea that had landed. And then withheld nothing of themself in the process of bringing that idea into being. To ‘bodying it forth’.6

In the introduction to this series, I gave my own translation of the command in Psalm 46 to ‘be still and know that I am God’:

‘disrobe and let yourself be made love to’.

You can’t make art with clothes on.

And artists are expert at letting an idea make love to them.

That doesn’t necessarily make for great people. Many of our greatest artists were shitty people. But it does make for great art, by which I mean art that we can still stand in the presence of and be in conversation with centuries after it was made. Art that wakes us up.

In truth artists are never really faced with a blank canvas. As with the creation story in Genesis 1, there is already a writhing chaotic mass of potentiality over which their stillness must hover, discerning what is becoming an Idea. Often they just start somewhere. Make a mark. See what happens. But all the time they are watching. Waiting. Sensing.

And when the idea makes itself known, they expertly practice purgation. They purge themselves of every possibility other than the one that is demanding to be made known through them.

Lent invites us to purge ourselves - individually and collectively - of things that are not in service to Life. Invites us to disrupt the status quo. To become still.

It is a brutal, death-like process. But it is for the sake of something.

It is a Yes that speaks a hundred No-s.

‘the lover in all things renounces what is his own and desires to clear all available space in himself for the beloved’.7

Artists are really Lovers.

And if these disorientating times are requiring of us to become more like artists - working with chaos - purging the inessential - unafraid of the dark - then it means we must also become Lovers.

Be still
& know
that I
am God.

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If you are enjoying this series and would like to support me in my writing practice you are welcome to buy me a coffee, or become a paid subscriber for a while.

Subscribe now

And I would like to recommend another upcoming series - my friend ’s beautiful and brilliantly researched series on the Greek of the Lord’s Prayer which you’ll find here.

This is Part One of a six-part Lenten series on the theme of ‘Stillness’ - רָפָה (raphah) in the Hebrew Bible. You can read the introduction to the series here. I will post a reflection every Sunday morning through Lent.

Please feel free to share this series with anyone that might find it helpful.

I once experienced a Perfect Day.

It was only for a moment.

But it was Perfect.

It must have been about a decade ago. It was early summer - probably the first week in June - and I was hosting friends in our family cottage that is perched at the top of a rugged cliff in North Cornwall.

Having crept through the passage so as not to wake anyone (I don’t like talking in the early mornings), I switched the kettle on, unlocked the ‘fire-escape’ door (my brother’s disparaging term for the hole we bashed through the wall to have more direct access to the sea) and stepped out in to the day.

And the day was...still.

The sky was clear - the royal blue of my old school sports kit. The strong arms of land that hold the bay in place were choosing, unusually, to sing the same remarkable note - a brilliant June-green in a major key. The tide was out and the bay vast, arching its back in delight as it dried in the morning sun. On it there were a few dogs and some walkers but it was mostly quiet. And the only sound was the rhythmical rolling crash of waves.

The rhythmical rolling crash of waves.

Rhythmical

Rolling

Crash

That wasn’t normal. So I took a more focussed look. And, sure enough, the lines were long and straight and clear. As if the sea had, for one day only, been allowed to use pencil and ruler. The curves, as they broke, were small but barrelled. The colour between them more green than blue. And their spacing was...Perfect.

Repeatedly perfect.

That sea is normally Beethoven. Moody. Profound. Unpredictable.

But today it was Bach.

And it knew it.

In fact the whole day just...knew it. It knew that it was Perfect. And it knew that I was watching. And it was enjoying being watched.

It was a day that just...was. An I AM kind of day.

And I knew that this Perfect Day required something of me. I just wasn’t sure what.

I wasn’t quite ready to join the surfers, who had sensed the day ahead in their bones and set their alarms for a Perfect before-work surf. I needed food.

So I stood for a moment, felt the Perfection in my heart, breathed the Perfection in to my lungs, stretched the Perfection out to the tips of my outstretched arms and fingers. And then turned to ascend the fire escape and make my cup of tea.

But that was The Day. The Day of Great Price.

The One Day that had treasure in it.

And, a decade later, I at last know the response that it required of me. Perhaps because I have at last become a person crumbled enough to be able to offer such a response.

That day required of me to fall to my knees in astonishment.

That was All.

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God was there made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions — that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.1

This is the way that I now understand The Sabbath, or Shabbat (שַׁבָּת).

The rhythmical, rolling, repeated, enlivening, salt-water crash of walking out, through the fire-escape, every Friday evening, moments before sunset, in to The Sabbath.

The Perfect Day.

I am, to the best of my knowledge, not Jewish. And I do not observe The Sabbath.

But I have, over the last 25 years, intentionally cultivated a quiet attunement to Judaism’s vibrations. Ever since I realised, whilst standing in the garden of a little guest house on the side of a mountain in Northern India, that Jesus was Jewish, not Christian.

That was the beginning of my turning towards God.

The realisation that I could, like the Magi, bow the knee to Jesus without having to ‘become a Christian’.

A few weeks later, when I did at last bow that proud knee, having resisted (to the point of making myself sick) doing so for many weight-laden years, I definitely became, and to this day am still becoming.2 But I didn’t become something.

And that day (in the garden of a little guest house on the side of a mountain in Northern India) was also the day that I was handed a holy-spade and told to begin to dig deep and tunnel under the guarded fences and boundary lines of Western Christianity.3

Jesus was tired of fences.

And, unsurprisingly, I quickly hit Jewish foundations,4 upon which I have slowly, and very falteringly, been building my faith - the truest parts of which remain hidden in dark soil - ever since.

Back to Shabbat. Which, by the way, is a feminine word.

The lover of wild prophets, Abraham Joshua Heschel, tells us that Shabbat is like a ‘Cathedral in Time’ and time, he says, is the dimension of the Divine.5

We don’t create Shabbat. It, like my Perfect Day, just is. We are invited to cross the threshold and step in.

The meaning of the word is similar to our little word ‘raphah’. It means rest or cessation of activity. And it is what Elohim (the God character in the Genesis creation story) does on the Seventh Day. Elohim is the first one to observe Shabbat.

The root of Shabbat is the same as ‘to sit’ (לָשֶׁבֶת - lashevet), so I like to think of Elohim sort of sitting back and watching delightedly as all the squawking, stretching, expanding, multiplying, creeping, leaping, shining, mooning, lapping, touching, relating creatures that have emerged in the previous six ‘days’ begin to be what they are. Become what they are becoming. טוב (tov). Good.

So it’s a day when Elohim doesn’t just cease from work, but sits back and delights. Allows Themself (selves) their own moment of ‘climax’. Which, bearing in mind how much hovering and luring and vibrating (מְרַחֶפֶת - merachephet) Their Spirit has been doing over the depths of potentiality through the process of creation, is, for the reader, a bit of a relief.

I always intentionally draw out the erotic edge in Jewish scripture when I/we find it, not because I find it titillating, but because Biblical Hebrew as a language is drenched in desire. And experiencing this desire in the language is critical to understanding the nature of the God it seeks to reveal.

But this desire invariably gets lost in translation (which is always also a form of interpretation) and then further interpreted out by much Christian theology that hasn’t dared to dwell there.

In my Hebrew Bible class we dwell there. So I can say with confidence that Shabbat is a יָדַע (yada) kind of word. יָדַע meaning ‘know’ in an intimate sexual way, and יָדַע to know God (as in Psalm 46:10 above).

Though Heschel is more discreet than me, his description of Shabbat as the ‘climax of the week’ is beautiful. We don’t rest in order to be able to work more effectively in the week ahead - ‘relaxation for the sake of activity’. Rather work is a means towards an end, and the end is restful delight: ‘a day for the sake of Life’.

‘The Sabbath is the inspirer, the other days the inspired.’

Hence Shabbat is known as דודי (dodi), which means ‘beloved’, and is also feminine.

So why am I writing so much about The Sabbath, when the word I have promised to reflect on is רָפָה (raphah), translated ‘be still’?

Because Shabbat - intimate rest, delight and connection - is the reason we still ourselves. Observing Shabbat in the Jewish tradition requires you to undress before entering in.

You are required to disrobe yourself, through a series of ‘abstentions’ (‘don’t do this...or this...or this’) of the clothes you wear for the six other days of the week. Robes of control and acquisition, domination and labour. You are required to cease striving. To let go of your ego-struggles for power. To let your hatreds and resentments fall limp. To forget your responsibility to keep everything afloat. To become lazy, like the Hebrew Slaves in Egypt, to the gods of the age.

Our word, רָפָה (raphah), is the posture in which we encounter the דודי (dodi), the Beloved.

We are invited, in our naked state, to lean in to the singing arms of the only day in the creation story that is made ‘holy’ - קַדֵּשׁ (kadosh).

‘The seventh day itself is uttering praise.’ (Heshel)

Heschel writes of the contempt that the Jewish communities were held in by the Romans, because of their ‘adherence to the law of abstaining from labour on the Sabbath’: it became a sign of ‘Jewish indolence’ by Seneca and others.

And, from the perspective of ‘the powers’, rightly so. It orientates us (in theory at least) away from the survival of the ‘principalities and powers’ that we rely on to order and rule and make sense of our world - ideologies, institutions, national and political allegiances, flags etc - and forces them, rhythmically, week after week, like those crashing waves, to surrender to the greater power of Love and intimacy.

My friend Bob Ekblad talks about our need to ‘preach good news to the powers’ - by which he means our need to find ways to remind institutions and organisations (including nation states, monarchies, religious denominations, political parties etc) of their true vocation: that they are made to be in service to LIFE. Not Life in service to them.6

So, as we established in the introduction to this series, the practice of stillness is both profoundly intimate and politically (and therefore economically) radical and resistant.

And the Biblical idea of Shabbat-rest extends way beyond the week and the home. It recognises the whole of creation as ‘home’ and requires that the land lie fallow - be allowed to rest - every seven years.

And then every 49 years (7 x 7), there is a Year of Jubilee (יוֹבֵל - yovel), where the WHOLE LAND - people, land, animals, institutions, financial systems, agricultural systems, systems of debt and ownership - are required to undress and rest. To disrobe themselves of their pretence of being in control. Of being ‘right’. Land and property return to their original owners. Hebrew slaves are freed. Debts are cancelled. People, land and animals rest.

Liberty, restitution, forgiveness, relief from poverty, breaking cycles of injustice and exploitation, honouring the land, returning dignity to people and plants and animals.

Ceasing. Undressing. Foresaking. Being Feeble. Letting go.

‘Raphah’ practices baked in to the Biblical vision for life together.7

A rest to walk in to. To lean in to. A taste of the Messianic Age to come.

It’s not clear whether Ancient Israel actually practiced Jubilee, but, as with Isaiah 58, which I mention in the introduction to this series, it tells us a lot about the desires and the priorities of the God of the Bible.

And reminds me why it could serve us well, as people of faith and none, to return and read this book - these books. There is a lot of talk of a ‘return to Biblical values’. But these Biblical values of Shabbat and Jubilee - an undressing of political systems, economic ideologies, unjust systems of debt, practices that treat nature as ‘resource’ etc - don’t tend to be the values being gestured to.8

The reduction of ‘stillness’, in much of the Christian tradition, to an individual, pious practice of ‘quiet times’ and personal reflection is ok, because those are good practices and can be transformative in ones personal life, which can then in turn affect social, political and economic life. But it’s not ‘biblical’, because it has no vision for a collective politics or economics of rest.

And now I’m remembering that I’m not Jewish, and don’t have a weekly practice of Shabbat. And that the title of this piece promised to help us ‘cultivate an astonish-able soul’. But I have so far barely mentioned that word explicitly.

So I am going to end by talking about Jesus. It is Lent after all.

In the Gospel of Mark, the word most often used to describe the response of the crowd to the presence and actions of Jesus is ‘astonished’.

Everywhere he went he astonished people. Which must mean that the way He moved through the world broke open familiar mind-sets and offered something new. Something that caught their attention and expanded their capacity to imagine a more beautiful world.

In many cases, it brought them, instantly, to their knees. People just left their ‘nets’ and followed Him. The air crumbling and breaking on them as generously as bread.

(We read that Jesus loved to hang out with people that had the capacity to be astonished. These people tended to be excluded from both religious communities and society in general - a detail which the writers do not consider incidental).

The Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar speaks of Jesus as the ‘perfect Form’.9 A Form so Beautiful that we are compelled to conform ourselves to it when encountered by it, just like the Sabbath.

And I realise that for me Jesus is The Sabbath.10

I didn’t ‘become a Christian’ on that mountainside in India. I crossed a threshold in to The Sabbath and felt compelled to begin to undress my life accordingly. I’m still undressing. Begrudgingly most days. Gladly on others.

There is a lot in the Church tradition about ‘Christ in us’, and ‘us in Christ’. And approaching Jesus through the Form of Shabbat allows us to understand how stepping in to that Form can be both profoundly personal and radically political at the same time (by which I, of course, do not mean simply ‘left’ or ‘right’ - I mean it shapes every decision that is made as regards life together).

And that Form must be requiring those that claim to follow Jesus, in this age as through all ages, to undress themselves of their political, social, sexual, religious, national and economic ideologies - left and right - enough to enter in and be astonished.11

To practice ‘stillness’.

Like Innocent III in the introduction, we might see no choice but to put the robes back on, but it will be easier for us to remember that such robes are not holy.

Those robes can (at their best) help us navigate the six days of labour.

But only the day of naked rest was made holy.

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If you are enjoying this series and would like to support me in my writing practice (I am a slow writer and all my work is freelance so it can be a little tricky to keep going) you are welcome to buy me an occasional coffee, or become a paid subscriber for a while.

Subscribe now

And I would like to recommend another upcoming series - my friend ’s beautiful and brilliantly researched series on the Greek of the Lord’s Prayer which you’ll find here.

This piece is the introduction to a six-part Lenten series on the theme of ‘Stillness’ - רָפָה (raphah) in the Hebrew Bible - that will begin on Sunday 22nd February. I will post a reflection every Sunday morning through Lent.

Please feel free to share this with anyone that might appreciate such a series.

Today is Pancake Day.

The day when, traditionally, we empty our kitchen cupboards of fatty foods before we begin our Lenten fast.

Today is also the day that I collect my little petrol-guzzling car from the menders. I crashed it on the way to work a few weeks ago and have had to battle to get it fixed rather than ‘written off’, which, I have discovered, is the trend in the UK these days.

So, just as I remove things that aren’t good for me personally from one cupboard, I slip my petrol-guzzling-planet-impacting habit back behind the closed door of another.

And the annoying thing about the Bible, and particularly the Hebrew Bible, is that it doesn’t really allow for this separation of personal and social (or political) ‘piety’. There isn’t really an ‘I’ in the Hebrew Bible.

Speaking on behalf of God, as the Jewish prophets so often dared to do, Isaiah tells us:

“This is the kind of fast day I’m after:
to break the chains of injustice,
get rid of exploitation in the workplace,
free the oppressed, cancel debts...
...do this and the lights will turn on,
and your lives will turn around at once...
...You’ll call out for help and I’ll say, ‘Here I am.’”

Not much navel-gazing here. If you want to be well and know God then live in a way that leans into the flourishing of all things, including (but in no way limited to) your own families.

(In case you are interested, I talk about this passage with my friends and in a piece that we titled ‘Shut up with your Religion!’, which you can find here).

Of course few of us really live like that. And we hear daily of people that have lived generous outward looking lives experiencing terrible suffering. So it’s not easy to believe that doing good automatically leads to a beautiful life.

But it gives us a pretty good idea of what the God of the Bible is interested in. And how disinterested that God is in ‘personal piety’.

And it goes some way to explain why I understand the Bible to be a book - a collection of books really (perhaps more like a library) - that more than meets these disillusioning times.

Whether in oral or written form, the stories and poems and histories and prophecies of the Hebrew Bible have lived through, and wrestled with, more than two millennia of global change and upheaval. And still they sing their song today, as bright and sharp as any new blade of grass.1

And most of those stories and poems and histories and prophecies were written within and about such times of upheaval. The fall of one empire. The birth of another. How to live well in times of desolation. How to live well in times of plenty.

How to live well, irrespective of circumstance.

We just need to learn to undress those stories and poems and histories and prophecies from our own cultural-political-religious strategies to dull and domesticate them to our own narcissistic purposes.2

We need to learn to LET them sing. Their own song. Not ours.

And the brilliant thing is that the Bible gives us the strategies we need in order to do that. It is a self-reflexive book. The prophets (the ‘real’ ones that is, rather than the ‘court’ ones who just say whatever the ‘king’ wants to hear) sing from within a culture the songs that, if heard, have the potential to undo all that is death-like in that very culture.

And this word רָפָה (raphah), which is the word translated as ‘stillness’ in Psalm 46:10 - ‘be still and know that I am God’ - is perhaps the best strategy we have.

It’s easy to assume it is a ‘pious’ word that implores us to build times of quiet in to our lives so that we make time for God. But it is, like pretty much every word in the Hebrew Bible, a profoundly social-political word.

It is the word that Pharaoh uses to describe the Hebrew Slaves who aren’t bowing to his will in the Exodus story. Here the word is translated as ‘lazy’, rather than ‘still’. He is condemning them for not bowing to the gods of the age.

The Kiss

Back in the 2020 lockdown, with spring bursting around me, I got a little hooked on St Francis and his love of simplicity, justice and the natural world, so I watched ‘Brother Son, Sister Moon’ - Franco Zefferilli’s telling of the life of St Francis.

It’s a little saccharine, but I was deeply impacted by Zefferilli’s portrayal of Francis’s visit to the Vatican to implore the Pope to recognise their community (or Order).

Francis doesn’t need to say much. He walks barefoot in a simple brown habit in to Zefferilli’s ridiculously ostentatious Papal chamber, whose walls are lined with glowering cardinals. There is a tense silence, before we see Sir Alec Guinness, or rather Pope Innocent III, slowly remove his resplendent outer wear - his miter and cassock I guess - and begin to descend, step by painful step, down to St Francis’s humble level, wearing only a white dress.

We breathe a sigh of relief as Guinness wisely takes Francis’s hand and kisses it, presumably as a sign of his begrudging approval of this biblically sound but otherwise offensive and aesthetically disastrous way of life. And we think ‘well done Innocent’ and expect him to turn around and be escorted back up to his throne, having held his nose and done what needed to be done if he were to maintain any semblance of moral authority.

But this is not what happens.

We witness instead the inimitable Alec Guinness being struck by a particular kind of horror. His eyes widen (as only his can) as if witnessing his own death, and his knees begin to bend as his body descends, shakily, to the ground. And then that grand old head finds itself confronted by the soiled feet of this relentless irritant-in-the-system - Francis.

And we witness Innocent’s precious lips choose to kiss those filthy feet.

Undressing

This is the meaning of the word רָפָה in the Hebrew Bible.

It is a word that wants to undress every culture - every civilisation - through every era, of is best loved ideologies. To make us lazy to the gods of our age.

It is a word that confronts us, just as Francis did Alec Guinness, with our own deaths.

And it is a word that, in my experience, is often easier for those outside of religion to hear and respond to than those inside (including myself). We religious people are too busy needing to be right and able to explain everything to everyone else. Like Guinness, as Pope Innocent, we humbly descend and kiss the hand, but we rarely stay still long enough to encounter the horror.

Which means that we miss the kiss.

I am told that, in Biblical Hebrew, if there are two imperatives then the second one is primary. So if we are told to ‘be still and know’, it means the knowing is the gold. Being still is merely the means to knowing.

And, as many of you will know, this word for knowing, יָדַע (yada), is the word that is also used throughout the Hebrew Bible for intimate sex.

Pope Innocent doesn’t strip himself of all cultural dignity out of duty. It is not an ethical gesture. He is compelled to kiss Francis’s feet out of love. Erotic love. Not for Francis, but for the Beauty that he encounters through and in him. An apocalyptic Beauty.

If someone asked me to summarise the Bible in one phrase it would be this one - ‘Be still and know that I am God’. But I would do a further translation and say ‘disrobe and let yourself be made love to’ - an idea that, surprisingly, does not make the Hebrew Bible blush.

Having bowed to kiss the Beauty that encountered him in that moment, we witness Alec Guinness rise, turn, be re-dressed by his attendants and slowly retrace his steps up the vast staircase to his magnificent throne.

As he sits, enthroned and surrounded by his cardinals, it looks like nothing has changed. Just like life post-lockdowns in the UK, when we seemed determined to re-trace our steps and return to ‘normal’, even though we’d experienced our known world creak to its knees and kiss the earth.

And yet...

So I am going to write six Lenten reflections on this disrobing word for stillness, רָפָה (raphah), and I would be so glad if you would join me to read them.

It will seem like they are all about ME ME ME, because I learn about the world self-referentially. But my ME is always really about the world’s US. I wanted to call this series a ‘Political Economy of Stillness’, but I didn’t dare. Because I’ve studied ‘political economies’ of all sorts of things, and they never sound like something I would write. But’s that’s what interests me. How such a word...such a practice...wants to shape our social, political-economic realities.

Anyway...whatever it is, I’ve decided to give up, or be disrobed of, self-doubt for Lent. So there’s one more empty cupboard. And let’s just see what results.

If you’d like to become a paid subscriber for a couple of months through the series that would be AMAZING. But all my writing is currently free so you’re very welcome either way.

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And please feel free to share this with others that may be interested.

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Thanks for reading this far. x Vanessa.

(and I would like to recommend another upcoming series - my friend ’s beautiful and brilliantly researched series on the Greek of the Lord’s Prayer which you’ll find here).

And it might be helpful to say that I experience the world self-referentially (I), but my interest is always political (we). So when you read ‘me’ or ‘I’ (frequently in this piece) I invite you to hear it as ‘me and anyone else that can relate to this’.

Stormy Seas

I get hurled about by feelings.

For the last months I have felt like a little boat in huge seas. Seas of my own feelings. Seas of other people’s feelings. And, somedays, seas of what feel like the feelings of the whole world. Including lands and trees and creatures that I will never meet, and memories and histories that are not my own.

I’m sure many of you reading this can relate.

It is hard to regulate.

Sometimes I turn towards my bed thinking ‘well that was a productive day’. But then, scanning back, I realise that yes, I may have moved my body from place to place and performed some tasks, but the only work of substance that I have done is to feel feelings.

Not exactly the essence of ‘productivity’ in most people’s understanding.

I have learnt, for the most part, to surrender to such waves of feeling. Let them crash over me. Pass through me. Leave their trace. Find their own way out.

When I do that, eventually the seas calm and I am left with insights. Understandings. Sometimes even wisdom.

But those seas of feelings are...well...turbulent. For me. And for any that dare to cross my path in those moments!

Last week, to my amusement (I am an artist, not a mathematician), I found myself drawing a graph and plotting on it all the things I had learnt through the internal storm of the last months. My soul quietened within me. My mind bright and alive. Not a wave in sight.1

And at last I am able to write again.

Danger

I grew up in a culture where feelings are considered dangerous. Indulgent. Sentimental. Self involved.

An inheritance from the wars. Boarding schools. Baked in reverence for certain institutions and etiquette.

But I had a problem.

Not feeling or expressing my feelings made me want to die. I was low-level depressed for much of my childhood and more seriously so through my twenties. Books and art taught me how to feel. Taught me it was ok to feel. That it was vital.

When I eventually got my shamed body through a door to speak to a therapist, we quickly began to unravel the chaos of unfelt feelings in my heavy soul. Many of which weren’t even mine.

So feeling and expressing feelings has always been a matter of life and death for me. And, unintentionally, a form of resistance too.

Now I help others to feel and express their feelings, which is a great privilege.

But something profound has changed for me over these last weeks. Possibly thanks to not drinking alcohol through Lent, which heightened my felt experience. But mainly due to the urgency of these times. The need for us to become more whole-hearted in the ways we share and love and engage. Less afraid.

In the spirit of ‘efficiency’, the purpose of feeling, naming and processing feelings is often just to get them out of the way. Like a road blockage. You have to pause and analyse and dismantle so that you can carry on your way. Feelings are a blockage. Feeling them... rationalising them ...clears the way.

But I have realised that feeling IS what I do.

And I’m not meant to clear myself out of the way. Much as I might like to a lot of the time.

If done with my whole heart, my capacity to feel feelings is a blessing. It doesn’t clear the way. It makes a way. Not just for me, but for others too. In the ‘real’, and in the ‘spirit’.

Bright Field

I remember years ago, when my life began to crack for the umpteenth time, having a moving-image come to mind of me getting a puncture in a big road race.

I could see that I would need to pull in to a lay-by for a while to learn to fix my puncture. But then I saw that instead of re-entering the race, I stuck around in the tree-lined puncture lay-by, helping others to learn to fix their bikes in the shade of the trees too.

And, as I watched that image play out in my mind, I noticed that few of the people that entered the lay-by went on to exit and re-enter the race. And I began to suspect there was a secret exit from the lay-by that, in the process of learning to heal, people became more drawn to than re-entering the race.

A small gap in the hedge through which a brighter light shone and which, without cause to pause, they might never have noticed, let alone been able to choose.

Failing. Pausing. Feeling. Healing. Seeing. Choosing. Moving.

A Bright Field.

And this may be why I am so drawn to the Easter morning story, as told by John,2 that some of you will have found yourselves encountering yesterday.

In it I experience both the race and the lay-by.

The Race

Mary Magdalene, beloved friend (some would say lover) and follower of Jesus, having witnessed the brutal death of her beloved, arrives early on the Sunday morning, whilst it is still dark, perhaps so she can be present to, and ready to tend to, his body when the the tomb is opened. Or perhaps just to be near Him.

(She isn’t from Jerusalem, so the re-finding of the route to the tomb, potentially alone (according to this version of the story) and in the dark, is in itself another act of singular devotion. I think Mary is incredible. A true disciple.)

She is shocked and distressed to find that the tomb is already open. Leaps to the conclusion that Jesus’s body has been taken and, rather than pausing to assess the situation herself, immediately runs to get those with (apparently) more authority than her - the male disciples, Peter and (most likely) John (the writer).

I know that experience so well. As a youngest child, and a woman that wrestles with a lot of internalised misogyny, my default is often to assume that someone more important than me should be dealing with things.

Anyway, Mary runs to get the guys, who seemingly do not doubt their aptitude for the task and run to the tomb to assess the situation (warning: I am going to be quite harsh on Peter and John in this piece, but that’s only because I want to let Mary, in contrast, sing for a moment).

And here follows what, for me, is one of the more ridiculous moments in the Bible. And there are many.

In the shadow of the death of Jesus, and the seriousness of the apparent loss of His body, the writer bothers to tell us that these disciples raced each other to the tomb. John outran Peter and got to the tomb first. Bending to look in he sees the linen cloths that Jesus had been wrapped in lying there. Peter then arrives and goes in to the tomb first, noticing not just the linen cloths, but also the handkerchief that ‘had been around His head’.

We are given exacting details of what they find where. Before John (who reminds us again that he was there first), goes in to the apparently empty tomb and, based on their analysis, ‘saw and believed’.

So they race, arrive, enter, observe, assess, measure, see and believe. The Enlightenment project in microcosm. Then they go back home.

Mary, on the other hand, who is seemingly ignored through their important task of analysis, simply ‘stood outside by the tomb weeping’.

The Poet

In her essay ‘Poetry is Not a Luxury’,3 writer Audre Lorde helps us feel our way in to the power of such an experience...the necessity of such an experience...for women.

Lorde is writing primarily for women of colour, and in particular lesbian women of colour, so, when I read her work, I try to remember that much of the consolation isn’t primarily intended for me. Or at least that I need to receive both consolation and critique.

But I have leant heavily on her writing over the last weeks. Reminding myself that feeling can be a hidden source of power ‘from where true knowledge, and, therefore, lasting action comes’. That feeling feelings and working to draw them in to colour (I am an artist) and movement (I dance) and language are neither pointless nor indulgent.

Rather:

‘our feelings and the honest exploration of them [can] become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas’.4

By this I don’t mean the obsessive recycling of old feelings, which I am expert at. Or a languishing in self pity or shame, which I can slip in to like a pair of cosy old pyjamas.

I mean a felt aliveness to whatever the moment genuinely holds, in all its complexity. A developing of a capacity to become expansive enough in body and heart to let a diversity of feeling exist and find its own way in to language and expression.

The poetic. Which Lorde understands to be ‘revelatory distillation of experience’.5

Lorde’s work helps give me a bodily understanding of what theologian Walter Brueggemann must mean when he speaks about a prose vs poetic world. Prose refers to a world ‘that is organised in settled formulae, so that even pastoral prayers and love letters sound like memos’. Whereas poetry ‘breaks open worlds with surprise, abrasion, and pace’.6

Mary here is poet.

Her earlier response, to run and get the guys, took her out of her own experience. But, as the guys go about their prose-like assessing of the situation, she allows herself to feel. And, when they leave, she stays put, weeping.

Self-validation

I remember sitting for a long time in front of a twenty minute black and white on-repeat film of the artist Henri Matisse using a pair of scissors to carefully cut out shapes from coloured card.

This little film was right at the heart of the awesome Cut-Outs exhibition at Tate Modern many years ago. Which is exactly where it belonged. At the heart.

There was nothing...zero, zip, zilch...that gave authority to Matisse’s random and seemingly pointless task of cutting out coloured shapes, other than his choosing to do it. And because he was so earnest in his endeavour...so whole-hearted...the viewer didn’t for one moment doubt the validity of such a task.

It was essential, because the artist determined it was essential.

Art is, at its heart, self-validating.

Returning to our Easter morning story, when Mary stays true to her own experience she begins, like Matisse, to stand in her own authority.

And doing so does indeed break worlds open.

She finds courage to stoop down, still weeping, to look in to the empty tomb. Facing her deepest loss and fear. Not looking away. And there, in the dark, she glimpses the Bright Field. A Field that Peter and John, in their extractive mode of analysis (a bit harsh I know, sorry), had entirely missed.

There are two angels in that tomb.

Peter and John saw linen cloths and handkerchiefs. Signs of absence.

Mary sees presence...angels...‘one at the head and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain’.

Presence that marks Absence that in turn marks a different kind of Presence. The angels ask Mary why she is weeping. Her response is very far from the assessing and theoretical believing of Peter and John. She is distraught. Someone has taken away her Lord and she doesn’t know where they have laid Him.

At that moment she must sense a presence behind her, because she turns and sees someone that she mistakenly takes to be the gardener. Which suggests this person looked like they belonged in a garden. Down to Earth. At ease in that particular garden, even though it was a site of death.

And I can’t help but pause here for a moment.

It turns out that this gardener is the risen Jesus. According to the story (and I am of course not expecting readers to believe this), this is the longed-for-through-generations Jewish Messiah, whose Life has now broken open to the whole world. And the story suggests that the first words this newly risen longed-for-through-generations Messiah says are in the form of a question to a broken-hearted weeping woman. A question that invites her to deepen only further in to her own felt experience, and to own and voice her desire.

‘Woman why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?’

To my mind, and heart, this moment alone stands in judgement of the history of the Church’s posture towards women.

And it poses a deeper, more offensive challenge to the Church than ‘do you see this woman’, which the living Jesus often asked. It asks ‘are you able to hear what I really said? To notice what I really did? Do you even care enough to find out?’

Women

I have the joy and privilege of beginning to be in conversation with writer, psychologist and wise-owl of story and myth, , about stories of women in the Bible, and my own lived experience of faith.

I was left with so many questions for Sharon (which I hope one day to be able to explore) after this conversation-interview, titled Eros, Elohim & other beautiful stories,7 where she asked me about my spiritual path, about my experience of the divine-feminine in the Jewish-Christian tradition, and about why I don’t call myself a Christian.

She modelled a lovely form of hospitality, allowing me space to stretch and roll with my answers, trusting that I would return home to the original point, letting me be ‘an artist’ in the way I communicated.

But the highlight for me was being asked why I want to encourage more women to be reading stories about other women in the Bible, whether they have faith or not. Whether those stories can have value outside of any theological framework.

I found myself talking about the Song of Songs. An erotic love poem that is found right at the heart of the Hebrew Bible.

Through this dripping-with-oil poem, the woman is continually wooed and delighted in...called forth with words of desire and affirmation...by her Beloved.

At one point the Beloved cries:

‘O my dove, in the clefts of the rock,
In the secret places of the cliff,
Let me see your face,
Let me hear your voice;
For your voice is sweet,
And your face is lovely’.8

And it was this moment that I found myself drawing on in my response to Sharon’s question.

What if the ‘Beloved’ is, in this moment, particularly calling forth women’s voices from the clefts and cracks in which they’ve been hidden, or silenced. What if we are being told that our voices are sweet (because they are true, not because they are docile) and our faces are lovely (the faces of our souls (I can dream)...and the many faces of the Deep).

And what if a good way for us to emerge from the cracks, is to engage from the inside with the stories that are themselves hidden in the ‘clefts of the rock’. In the many cracks in the Bible.

The Bible was written by men,9 for men, and, for the most part, about men. Until recent decades...it was translated by men, interpreted by men and preached by men...methods of both biblical exegesis (understanding the meaning of particular passages) and hermeneutics (approaches to interpretation) were developed by men...and the theological frameworks that were drawn from Bible, and that still get imposed back on it, were constructed by men.

In many strands of the church, including some that have become popular in recent years, there is still an ancient underlying assumption... and a contemporary acceptance ...that women have less authority than men when it comes to handling and understanding this strange book... and... well... to being alive. Hence no women priests and, in many cases, no women preachers or teachers.

So why, on this aching-earth, would I be encouraging women, particularly women that are otherwise free of such religiously sanctioned misogyny, to encounter the stories within such a book?

That will take me a life-time to write about. And I intend to do it.

But, for now, my answer is simple... Jesus.

Making a Way

Jesus lived in the cracks and highlighted, affirmed and empowered the people that He found there. Particularly the women. Called forth their voices. Welcomed their desires. Healed and released them from their physical, mental, emotional, political, social and spiritual oppressions and infirmities.

When it came to those women, He provoked them to action. Compelled them to initiate and lead. And, quite simply, enjoyed being in their presence.

The resurrected Jesus trusted Himself first to a woman. To women. They were the first apostles of the risen life. They were His truest friends at His death. And His chosen collaborators and confidants at His rising. The ones He wanted to see first.10

The fact that history has, for the most part, buried that truth, and built civilisations on its remains, does not make it any less true. Or, thankfully, alive.

In my experience, there are ways in which stories from the Bible, even the horrific ones, quietly resonate at the frequency of those buried truths. It is time for more of them to be unearthed. And for those frequencies to be amplified.

And, much as I am appreciating the voices of many beautiful men talking and writing about their experiences of faith, and of the Bible (and I really am) the work of excavating those particular truths, and of the others that will follow in their wake, is being done by women. Is being sung by women.

Women can become tuning forks, resonating with, and then amplifying, some of the muted (not entirely silenced) frequencies of the Bible.11 Letting their bodies and souls vibrate and their words slowly take shape. Letting poetry become the ‘architecture of [their] lives’.12

I am listening for the voices that don’t feel entitled to speak or take up space, but feel compelled to nonetheless. Bodies that have lived in the cracks are the ones best positioned to share the treasures that can only be found there (and that of course is not limited to women...and is mostly heard on shores that are not European or North American).

We desperately need those treasures.

This is why I want to encourage more women to read the Bible and particularly the stories about women in the Bible.

We are in need of resurrection life through every element of our social, political, economic and spiritual lives together. And it may be that the messengers of such life... the angels (however they present in the day to day)... are waiting in the dark to be noticed by... well... women.

‘Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’’

Waiting to invite us to turn and hear our name said in a way that releases the oil of gladness back through the generations in our families... on our lands... in our hearts. That brings healing. Recognition. Embrace. Power. Delight. Connection. Agency. And that then courses through the lives of the generations to come.

Returning to my own recent insight that I feel feelings not for the sake of clearing them out of the way, but, rather, for the sake of making a way, I experience the Easter morning story as a true friend.

By standing in the inherent authority of her own felt experience, Mary makes a way.

She weeps.

Dares to look in to the dark.

Notices the Bright Field.

Turns and encounters Resurrection Life.

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It is a passage that condemns religiosity, and affirms the actions of many that wouldn’t call themselves religious - including some of you perhaps. So there’s a chance (we hope) that this conversation might be of interest for readers whether they consider themselves religious or not.

Religion, in the Bible, is often a bad thing.

Jesus frequently railed against it, and those that policed it.

The writer, James, in the Second Testament,2 tells us that true religion is this: ‘to visit orphans and widows in their affliction [i.e. the ones that society forgets], and to keep oneself unstained from the world’.3

And the prophet Micah, in the First Testament, when asking himself ‘what does the Lord require of [us]?’ says this: ‘to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [our] G_d’.4 He then says that prostrations and costly sacrifices - religious practices and rituals - mean nothing if we are not doing that.

Basically, if it’s not ‘good news [for] the poor’, then it’s not Good News.

After the US presidential inauguration those weeks back, I found I had to take a shower to wash off the religious language and imagery (I feel like this after every kind of state appropriation of religious imagery, but the need was particularly strong after this one).5 So I sought out the power-hose that is Isaiah 58 - one of the most brutal, expunging passages in the Bible. G_d telling ancient Israel, through the prophet, to ‘shut up with your religion’ and return to true fasting...

It doesn’t matter if we are to the left, politically, or to the right...progressive, traditional, ‘woke’, ‘anti-woke’ or, like me, ‘a bit all over the place’. This is the kind of religion that the G_d6 of the Bible apparently wants. So this passage stands in judgement of all of us that call ourselves ‘religious’, in the biblical tradition at least. And I, for one, fall far short.

My friend and I have, for the last three years, hosted fortnightly bible studies for friends that wouldn’t normally read the Bible, or that left it behind in a previous life and wanted to re-encounter it...or be re-encountered by it.

We were being approached by friends that sensed we needed to find ways to draw again, as a culture, from our more ancient wisdom traditions, including the Bible. So they asked us to help them become more biblically literate.

I had, in the years running up to that, been a little haunted by the idea of the Bible being like a trapped wolf, or tiger, that was prowling around in a cage, longing to be set free to roam wherever it wanted. It made me think of RS Thomas’s White Tiger,

‘...breathing
as you can imagine that
God breaths within the confines
of our definition of him’

David had similar pre-occupations.7 So we decided to gather around biblical poems and stories in a way that allowed them to break loose from our expectations. Become a bit feral. Slip through the bars of our prejudices and doctrines and roam a little freer.

I imagine we’ll write about that practice another time. I mention it now to give some context for the conversation that follows, between Liz, Dougald and myself, around why our reading of Isaiah 58, in our 8am bible study on Friday 24th January, felt so profound.

Liz has been Chief Officer of the Unitarians since 2019. And, for as long as I have known her (since 2016/17 I think, around the time when she wrote a lovely piece on ‘The God-Shaped Hole’) has been concerned with creating spiritually healthy communities that can effectively serve the complex times we are living in. She is part of Hard Art collective and has, for many years now, been quietly weaving relational networks of creative practitioners, dreamers and activists around the UK. She is wise and honest and I love reading the Bible with her.

Dougald is known to many as co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, but when I met him (introduced by Liz at our friend Andy’s wedding, where we three sat on the ‘soul’ table) he was just starting A School Called Home, with his wife Anna. I was part of their first gathering, on the side of a hill in Sweden, and we’ve deepened in friendship since then. I recommend reading his recent book, At Work in the Ruins, if you haven’t already done so. It sang to me of the kind of brave, tender, humble work that we need those wisdom traditions to help us to do.

Interestingly, when I fell through the bottom of my church-self in 2018, in the midst of the bleakness, Liz and Dougald were two of the only people I felt free to say yes to. As if somehow they represented what was ahead for me, rather than behind. I called them my ‘friends in the wilderness’. So it is lovely to share with them here.

And here’s an alternative intro from Dougald:

‘it seems worth acknowledging (and laughing at ourselves over) the strangeness of our little conclave – a theologian who follows Jesus and leads Bible studies but would rather not be called a Christian, a church-leader who is clear that she’s not a Christian and doesn’t know the Bible that well, and a writer who grew up around churches and goes to one most Sundays, but hesitates to identify as a Christian. It’s like the opening of a rather convoluted joke! ;-)’

24.01.25

Vanessa: I was conscious this morning of feeling held in a spacious place by our shared encounter with our passage, Isaiah 58, in a way that felt quite distinct. Often we greet each other at 8am on a Friday morning and the text feels like a lump of cold clay that we will ourselves to stay in contact with. Only towards the end of the 75 minutes do we realise it has softened in our hands and become malleable and a pleasure to work with. But this morning felt different. Like somehow the text welcomed us and we found it easier to cross the threshold and enter. What was different? It's such a fierce passage, it can't be that it felt friendlier. What do you think was going on?

*

Liz: This time, arriving with the 8 o’clock groggy fresh morning brain probably helped, as did the storm in the night that had kept me awake - I didn’t have too many thoughts yet to get in the way. And I think we all arrived with a certain tenderness because of it being the week of Trump’s inauguration - it felt immediately that the power of Isaiah’s trumpeting voice met the grim forces of global politics we’ve been witnessing this week. There was a commonality of our experience - our group dotted about with very different lives - because of that shared context of feeling that the tectonic plates are shifting. It also helped that I’d been in person with you and others from the group at the weekend - relationships refreshed and deepened by real life connection and hugs and whisky.

All of that context perhaps left me vulnerable to the power of the words, and that first third immediately cut through my normal comfortable worldviews - in the same way that the shifting political landscape has since the US election. It felt so clear that the words could point to the cosiness of being a lefty western do-gooder - I felt deeply how the Trump supporters’ disdain for ‘wokeness’ might actually be responding to a certain hypocrisy. I know I can be guilty of hand-wringing about first world problems when I am also complicit in systems that cause hunger and homelessness. The discomfort of putting myself in the shoes of the Trump supporters and seeing things anew opened something up in me.

I think it also helped that the text is so clear and declarative. It wasn’t one of those passages that needs a lot of head-scratching to know what it actually means. And the poetry of the passage gives it energy that matches its meaning - so I think that morning we received a direct, full-power message that met us all wherever we were.

*

Vanessa: Beautiful. I hear you saying so many helpful things there. One being that this passage, in that moment, had a power that was dynamic enough both to resist grim global forces and to resist certain grim forces and areas of blindness in yourself, is that right? So pretty exposing all round?

I wonder if you could say a little more about your experience of the prophet Isaiah’s ‘trumpeting voice’. From our years of reading the Bible together I’m aware that your instinct isn’t always to trust these ‘trumpeting’ male voices. I love what you’ve shared about your own more tenderised receptivity that morning, but I wonder if there is anything else you might like to share about the particular quality of his voice that made it easier to trust him than other ‘trumpeting’ male voices?

*

Liz: Yes, it was exposing and I suppose the work of the group helps those exposing things to be felt and then spoken. The safety that comes from threads of trust built up over repeated gatherings over several years - the trust that it’s a space that can hold difficult or uncertain things being spoken into it.

And yes, I was surprised that I accepted the ‘trumpeting voice’ so readily. Often in these sessions I start off feeling angry and affronted at the voice of the book, feeling both the centuries of oppression that have been acted in its name, and my own childhood experience of Christianity being something that wants to tell me what to do, to follow the rules, to conform.

I know next to nothing about the context of Isaiah, who he was historically, theologically, or mythologically, or what the context of this chapter is. And so I really was meeting it fresh, as story. All I can say about why I accepted this voice today was that when I read it I heard truth. It didn’t sound like a false or harmful voice of ‘power over’. It sounded like the true voice of the natural loving pattern of the universe - which I suppose is what some people call God?!

And I was moved to learn that this has been such a foundational text for you - I wonder whether the truth that spoke to me is the same truth that spoke to you. Or whether it’s a consequence of you being such an influence - directly and by osmosis - of my own adult relationship with the Christian faith. Maybe paying attention to your relationship with God and the Bible primed me to hear truth in these particular words.

The other thing that felt powerful was verse 11’s words of peace and nourishment:

‘The Lord will guide you continually,
And satisfy your soul in drought,
And strengthen your bones;
You shall be like a watered garden,
And like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.’

Those words met me that day when I was feeling like I had strength in my bones for the first time in many months, and that a spring of water was returning - so I had faith in the feeling of that ready aliveness.

*

Vanessa: Thank you Liz. This is all so good to read. Particularly that the passage could mirror back to you that sense of relief at a spring of water returning. And our capacity to be like a ‘well-watered garden’ even in a context of drought. That promise, which is richly laced throughout the Bible, is perhaps reason enough for me to want to encourage people to read it in these particular days.

That’s interesting about my relationship with the passage. I like what Jacques Derrida says about translation - that the best translations always involve some kind of genuine friendship with the text. And this passage really is an old friend. Which is strange to say because it is possibly one of the more brutal passages in the Bible. Basically G_d saying to religious people like me ‘will you just shut the f**k up for once’...! Enough of your facades of holiness and self-righteous religious language. If you want to truly pursue holiness, then serve the least and practice justice. Stop judging others and feeling superior. Open your homes to those seeking refuge of any kind. Share your food. Eat with strangers. Stop exploiting labourers. Undo your systems that oppress. Spend time with the victims.

I remember a friend making me watch a George Carlin comedy sketch many years ago. He thought I’d be horrified, because Carlin swore a lot and laid into religion, exposing its hypocrisy. But at the end of it I said ‘I think that was amazing. He sounds like Isaiah in chapter 58. It’s just a shame he hasn’t bothered to read the Bible before mocking it’. At which point we read the passage together and he changed his tone…!

Dwelling in the passage on Friday morning made me realise how lucky I was to have this as a foundational text in my journey of faith. After being encountered by Jesus at the age of 24, I quickly found my way to a community that was trying to practice His priority towards the poor and marginalised in any society. I’d always known that to be the case since I was a kid. So it was beautiful to be able to explore that core mystery of faith, that G_d is particularly present to those that society rejects, at that point in my life. That G_d is with the victims of any social or political order.

Maybe that’s why I’m so mystified that some of the louder parts of the church today seem to so easily dismiss core parts of that biblical teaching - the priority of G_d’s heart as portrayed in the Bible. It’s too ‘woke’...the ‘social justice gospel’. But it can’t be dismissed that easily. That’s biblically illiterate. Like George Carlin, but he didn’t claim to profess faith (and I’m aware that the same accusation...’biblically illiterate’...could be directed at me by people with different priorities).

Anyway...

Dougald, over to you. I wonder what, if anything, from our time of gathering around this passage, remains warm in your body? Would you like to respond to anything we’ve shared already?

*

Dougald: Thanks, both of you, for inviting me to continue our conversation like this, and for all we’ve shared in this Feral Bible Study group. In the past few weeks, I’ve started practicing the piano regularly for the first time in what’s probably thirty years, and it reminds me of a strange sensation I had when I began getting together regularly with this small group of you to read the Bible regularly, because the best explanation I can give – and I’m not sure how this will land with either my Christian or non-Christian friends – is that it was like picking up an instrument which used to be an important part of my life, feeling the lingering memory of its music in my hands, and with it a certain sense of homecoming.

Often it’s in the way that the text is passed around between us that it starts to quicken for me – and when you spoke, Liz, about feeling those opening verses directed at you, illuminating how you might look from elsewhere as a “lefty western do-gooder”, I felt the focus sharpen. This bit, especially, from verses 3-4:

‘Look, you seek your own pleasure on your fastdays
and you exploit all your workmen;
look, the only purpose of your fasting is to quarrel and squabble...’

I mean, when I read that, I can’t help thinking of my years on Twitter: how easily the performance of doing-the-right-thing, being-one-of-the-good people can serve as a way to get the hormone kick of conflict and feel virtuous into the bargain. And all while knowing that the tools you’re using (and the tools which I’m using to type this now) are the product of the exploitation of workers in mines and factories which I’ll almost certainly never visit.

The second thing I felt, sitting with this text last week, is that it’s modelling what it looks like for a tradition to call itself into question, to face up to the possibility that what it thought was doing the right thing might not have been good enough, that it’s called to a more excruciating self-honesty. And again, while that’s part of the story of the historical events in which this book was formed, it feels pretty relevant today to anyone who isn’t jubilant over how politics in America or lots of other places has gone over the past decade. It’s not enough to be indignant and ask “Why hasn’t it worked, when we did everything right?”

That’s the third bit that landed for me, looking at the answer that’s given in the text. Because I agree with you, Vanessa, that it’s very hard to square this account of what G-d wants with the kind of “civilisational Christianity”, Christian nationalism or prosperity gospel stuff that you’re calling out – but I don’t find anything here that works as a comfortable endorsement for progressive politics as we’ve known it, either. Maybe because of the way that Ivan Illich shaped my sense of these things, I read the description of “the sort of fast that pleases me”, and I’m thinking about how much of the history of the left has been about building and defending systems which allow us to outsource the call that comes in these verses: to secure these outcomes through impersonal systems which remove the need for me to do anything so inconvenient as sharing my food or sheltering the homeless poor.

This isn’t to say that, starting from where we find ourselves, the call should be to abolish those systems and the provision that they still offer, where they do. It’s more to do with not mistaking such systems for the way of being in the world, the way of showing up for others, which I’m hearing in these verses: the way of being which unlocks that mysterious abundance, where you become a flowing spring “whose waters never run dry”. And maybe because I’m reading the manuscript of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s follow-up to Hospicing Modernity, so the impossibility of sustaining the systems and securities of how things were in the rich world for a few generations is on my mind, I find something powerful in that distinction – in the sense that something else might be called for, beyond those systems and their achievements.

Does that make any sense?

*

Vanessa: It absolutely does. Particularly that idea that we are being called at this time ‘to a more excruciating self-honesty’. Thank you Dougald. I struggle to read Illich, but I imagine his imagination was drenched in imagery from these kinds of prophetic passages?

And I love that we’ve picked up on the flowing spring again...that there is a way of being that unlocks ‘mysterious abundance’, irrespective of our circumstance.

It makes me wish people would talk less about ‘Christianity’ and return to talk of some kind of ‘way’. That’s what the original Jesus people were identified as...’followers of the way’. A lot of the time, Christianity isn’t following Jesus.

You second point is begging to be unpacked, but I want to dwell on your third for a moment.

I remember sitting in a tutorial back in 2008 and hearing someone talk about the rise in power of the ‘religious right’ in the US. I was stunned by the rage I felt. Not particularly at the ‘right’. But at the idea any religious movement, whether left-leaning or right, can claim a monopoly on ‘biblical values’. That any part of the church can claim the Bible as ‘theirs’. Since then I have tried to understand the Bible as a kind of ‘third space’ that resists appropriation. Like Plato’s Khora, or the Nihil...a space of super-abundance, perhaps, rather than emptiness, but one that is too cavernous and contradictory for any one to ever get any real kind of grasp on. One minute it seems to be with us. The next it is against.

I think that’s why I consider it a particular treasure for this age, if we can find ways to read it as such. It has the capacity to unsettle all of us. To undress all of us. It doesn’t allow any of us to assume we are ‘right’. Compels us to humble ourselves and become teachable. To learn from others... particularly our ideological enemies. The only people it immediately comforts are those that, in this life, are always already unsettled. When I read the Bible, I experience it as being both ‘for’ me and ‘against’ me at the same time. And the ‘against-ness’ is really important.

So yes...I love hearing your experience of Isaiah 58 being against everything that isn’t life-giving...whether that be the practice of self-serving nationalism, or our reliance on bureaucratic systems in place of relationships. I still hold out hope that we humans are capable of becoming people that can resist the ‘tyranny’ of the left and of the right at the same time. And perhaps the Bible can help cultivate our capacity for that?

From our years of reading together, would you agree? Is it a book that it’s worth people weaving into their life even if they profess no kind of faith? Who do you think it wants to be friends with right now?

And, returning to our passage, if it can be read as an exposé of the different ways that we tend to pretend, and perform, what is its invitation to us, personally, today? I need to read it again and think about this one!

*

Liz: Thinking back to the feeling that was in the group when we read this passage, it was striking how quite quickly it felt like there was nothing more to say. Once we had found ourselves struck open with the text, just being in it felt enough. It was a more bodily response than the intellectual stimulation of chewing around ideas - and that’s what’s been most powerful for me with the way we have been reading the Bible together over these years.

When I try to read it alone, it tends not to work - the language can seem opaque, and I get frustrated that I don’t know the entire context for the whole book. Reading it together, I also often feel frustrated! But inevitably that’s just a period at the start of our gathering when I feel confronted, bewildered, angry at the centuries of ‘Christianity’ as opposed to ‘Jesus following’ as you put it, Vanessa.

At the end of each session I invariably feel ‘well, that was the most relevant, powerful and useful thing I’ve read this week’. And I feel that without calling myself a Christian or even particularly a follower of Jesus (the more I know him, the more I like him, but following Buddha brings riches too, as does remembering my place as a creature in the natural ecosystem - I don’t think what Jesus points at is in conflict with either of those perspectives, but I can’t see myself picking one over the others).

So yes, I am finding this practice of reading the Bible together - in the way we do, insisting on emotional and bodily response, and just about banning any cleverness - one of the most enriching things I do. And my hunch is that it’s open to anyone, whatever their relationship to faith. I suppose my sense is that this book isn’t about ‘faith’ - but is describing the reality of human life. And that it doesn’t have a monopoly on that - but wow, it’s got a lot that really helps.

It would be easy to feel annoyed - ‘why didn’t anyone SAY this book was so valuable?!’. Because despite (because of?) growing up in a Christian family and a society shaped by Christianity, I got the impression that the Bible was pompous, pious, irrelevant, judgmental, oppressive, and a tool to beat people into conformity. This group has shown me that it is the opposite of those things - with Isaiah 58 naming that so clearly, the gap between shielding oneself with the performance of ‘goodness’ while being full of hypocrisy, and actually being with that ‘spring whose waters never run dry’.

In my work leading an organisation, I see how easily the practicalities of bureaucracy, however well-meaning, seem to take us away from that spring - at least when the cultural habits of modernity shape our practices of stewardship.

And as you’ve both said, this is present in our wider society. Re-reading the passage after Dougald’s comments made me think of the moral injury doctors and nurses experienced during covid - the people directly doing the hands-on care being hampered by the impossibility of the systems they were working in. And that example can be extrapolated to so much of how we live.

Bringing us back to the context of the US inauguration we read Isaiah in, I think the life that supporters hope for in the Trump regime is related to that disconnect between the aloof structures recent generations have made for efficient care of large populations, and the felt reality of care in their lives.

*

Dougald: I’m struck that, after three years of these strange little Bible study sessions, this was the first time you’ve felt the pull to invite us to continue the reflection and take it out in public, Vanessa – and that, as you’ve reminded us, Liz, what happened this time around was that we arrived at a place where there was “nothing more to say”, a kind of broken-open stillness. I wonder if there’s a connection between those things?

There’s something very personal for me about the journey we’ve been on together, which makes me cautious about saying anything too emphatic about the part the Bible might have to play for others in these times. There’s something here that is a part of my inheritance, a large part of what formed me, and whether I like it or not, it has called me back at this stage in my life. I’ve been a guest around a lot of other tables and learned from them, but there’s something here that is home for me. And, in the next breath, I know how alienating that may sound to many people for whom my work has mattered, almost a betrayal. Because plenty of people have found anything but hospitality in their experiences of churches and Christianity, and there are plenty of bits of the Bible that can be waved around in ways that absolutely fit the impression you grew up with, Liz.

But the practice of coming together and sitting with parts of this book, noticing what it does to us, noticing how often what’s happening in what we read is people being called into question, broken open, taken deeper – or people misunderstanding each other, or making heartfelt promises only to break them five minutes later, or taking the secular language of power or the earlier understandings of sacred language and turning these wildly inside-out... Maybe a practice like this is a more helpful starting point than “belief”, for some of us, given the way that belief has come to mean possession of a set of cosmic certainties. For me, this is a way of staying with the trouble of my own tradition, rather than ceding it to the loudest and most obnoxiously confident voices that claim to speak for it, however powerful they might be.

So I guess my answer to your question about whether it’s worth people weaving this book into their lives is, “Your Mileage May Vary”! But if I come back, again, to the experience of our gatherings, it often feels as though there’s a moment when the text breaks open and becomes a vessel, a space inside which it’s possible to sit for a while, maybe even to dwell. And the Bible is certainly not the only book in which I find such a space – there are certain essays of John Berger, for example, that offered me this kind of space as a young man in ways that were not far from life-saving. But that so many have been able to climb inside this book, often in the worst of times, maybe contributes to a sense that that space is waiting for us, if we approach it from a certain angle.

Only it doesn’t ever seem to be a cosy space, even when it offers refuge and relief. There’s almost always something costly, a challenge, a letting-go that’s called for, that sense of ‘Oh dear...’. So when I come back to the passage we read, that’s how I’m meeting it now. The question becomes: is the work that I’m doing a part of this yoke-breaking, this way of showing up that unlocks a hidden abundance? And how much further might I have to lean in, how much more daring and vulnerable might I have to become, what else would I need to let go of, for that to be true?

*

Vanessa: I think we may have found that place of ‘broken-open stillness’ again, so I won’t say any more. Thank you both so much.

Please do share this conversation with anyone that might find it interesting.

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If this is the first time you have come across my writing, you might like to read this Welcome piece, which will give you an idea of where I am coming from.

Thanks for reading this far!

‘New creation begins here. In a crack in the text. A mere comma of a moment amidst the action. Improbability. Impossibility. Women’s bodies.’

‘...and by Shaddai (שַׁדַּי) who will bless you with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep (תְּהוֹם) that lies beneath, blessings of the breasts (שָׁדַיִם) and of the womb (וָרָחַם)’

וְאֵת שַׁדַּי וִיבָרְכֶךָּ, בִּרְכֹת שָׁמַיִם מֵעָל, בִּרְכֹת תְּהוֹם רֹבֶצֶת תָּחַת; בִּרְכֹת שָׁדַיִם, וָרָחַם.

Jacob’s blessing for Joseph, Genesis 49:25

I’m writing this piece on Imbolc, the Celtic festival that marks the first hint of Spring in the northern hemisphere. Imbolc (i-mbolg) means ‘in the womb’, or ‘in the mother’s belly’, which is lovely, because we’ll be encountering two mothers’ bellies - those of Mary and Elizabeth - in a moment.

And in honour of them, and this day, I am starting this post with one of my more womb-like journal images. One that feels both powerful and vulnerable. Powerful perhaps because it is vulnerable.

Like a womb.

John of the Cross starts his famous little mystery of a book, The Dark Night of the Soul, with a poem, which he then spends the rest of the book unfolding.

O night, that led me, guiding night,
O night far sweeter than the dawn;
O night, that did so then unite
The lover with his Beloved,
Transforming lover in Beloved.

Song of the Soul, verse 4

When I first read this poem in 2019, it made me feel angry. I had entered my own dark night kind of time and everything in and around me felt cracked. Like my life had been dropped on a stone floor.

This book had been waiting on my shelf for a long time. And, when I at last opened it, I expected to find, here at least - in the mouth of the saint of darkness himself - solace.

Instead I found a kind of horror.

‘This? This is meant to be ‘sweeter than the dawn’????! F**k you St John of the Cross'.

That’s what I felt.

It was only years later, once I’d let my insides be scraped by a ruthlessly loving knife...like scraping butter off a piece of toast rather than spreading it on1...that I began to experience the truth of this.

This image marked that moment of change.2

All my journal images from those years painted themselves. When I needed insight I would find my watercolours and start making marks. Something would always emerge, and that image would somehow explain to me what was really going on.

And with this ‘flowering’ image, I learnt that, though the darkness that I experienced around me hadn’t changed, my deepest inner-life had. Womb-like, I had been gestating in the starkness of the dark, a warm wealth and depth and vitality of colour and presence that now sang of the truth of who I really was.

There were ways in which the darkness had indeed become ‘sweet’ to me.

I am now more able to live from a womb-ish authority that somewhat eluded me before. And I find ways to help others, men and women, to cultivate that same dark space of aliveness and beauty in their own lives and bodies. A deep source of strength that we will need to be drawing from in the years ahead. Hidden, internal, replenishing, generative, womb-like sources of energy and wisdom, conviction, courage and care.3

Which is why it is important for women’s voices to be heard. Especially when it comes to cultivating dark inner strength. And I feel the need, in particular, to be hearing women’s voices that have risen, or are struggling to rise, through the clefts in the rock of our historically patriarchal Jesus traditions.

Womb-ish-ness

The word for womb in the Hebrew Bible is ‘rechem’ (רֶחֶם), though various (womb-less) writers also use ‘beten’ (בֶּטֶן), belly, which always makes me smile. It certainly does look like that’s where the baby comes from.

Something that doesn’t get picked up in translation (perhaps because there weren’t many (any) wombs around those tables), is that ‘rechem’ has the same three-letter root, and is very close in sound, to the word ‘racham’ (רָחַם - you can see the vowel-indicators under the letters are a bit different), which means to have compassion, or mercy. You could say they are in the same family of words which, in Hebrew, means you are meant to appreciate the resonance.

Many of us will have heard at least part of Rev Mariann Budde’s sermon in Washington DC cathedral on the morning after Trump’s inauguration ceremony. The part that caught the media’s attention - the last five minutes when she directly addressed ‘Mr President’ - was a plea for such womb-ish mercy towards those in the US that are scared at the moment.

Throughout the Bible, we are repeatedly told to be merciful, or womb-ish. Particularly to those we feel are indebted to us in some way, or that we have little incentive to treat well:

And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full.

But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because He is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.

Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

Jesus, Luke 6: 34-36

The kind of mercy that Jesus tells His followers to practice is outrageous. It goes against the logic of any ‘good society’.4 It devastates our sensible practices of ‘law and order’. And womb-like mercy offers not just compassion, but also a sense of shelter and safety and held care.

Jesus’s words above are translated from the Greek, but if we can allow his concept of mercy to have a Hebraic root, He could be kind of saying ‘be Motherly, just like your Father is Motherly’.5

And, sure enough, one of the main words that Father uses to describe Himself through the Hebrew Bible is this disorientatingly womb-ish word ‘merciful’, or ‘compassionate’.

When They6 reveal Themself to Moses on Mount Sinai, after Moses, the stuttering one, has pleaded to see their ‘glory’, the first characteristic They claim for Themself is ‘merciful’. So they do basically say ‘I am motherly...this is one of my primary characteristics’.7

I love that in preparation for this glorious moment of revelation, G_d tells Moses that They will ‘put you in the cleft of the rock, and will cover you with My hand while I pass by’ because no-one can apparently see G_d’s face and live.

Cleft-ness...watching from the cracks...speaking from the gaps...from the hidden places...is often blessed in the Bible. Jesus is always excavating the clefts. Seeking out the hidden people. Welcoming their voices. Making space for their bodies. ‘Do you see this woman?’. Provoking them, particularly those women, to stand in their own authority.

I find the way Jesus encounters women profoundly moving. He draws out their strength. Their voice. Their confidence. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be kind of laughable that, within a century or so of his death, that subversive practice in his ministry - the restoring of women’s voices and agency...something that He seemed to really delight in - was being reversed by His church. And remains so in many parts of the Church today.

So, when it comes to the Bible, in the clefts we must search. And I’ll turn now towards some of the womb-ish treasure that we found a few years ago in one of those clefts - the three months that Mary, mother of Jesus, and Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, spent together in their pregnancies.

Women Talking

My friend wrote a lovely piece last year about the need for men to seek out opportunities to bear witness to women in conversation with other women. I think he meant in public, but I suspect that, having an incredible wife and so many fascinating women friends (😉), he will have been seeking that out in private too.

And...in my experience (and Jonathan’s too), men really, really, really, really, really enjoy hearing other men speak. Men want to be exploring ideas with other men.

And I don’t blame them. Not only are there a lot of very interesting, insightful, humble, wise, beautiful men in the world. But we are also, in the part of the world that has nurtured my social imagination at least, wired to pay them attention. To expect them to say something of value.

I don’t think we are wired in the same way to expect that value from women. Which means that often we miss what they are saying. Don’t pay it the same quality of attention. Are more skeptical. Distracted by their apparent faults. Their appearance. The tone of their voice.

(Though often that’s ok, because a man may say the same thing in a more polished way a few minutes later...so at least it is heard...!)

Anyway.

I love thoughtful men. And I love listening to thoughtful men. And spend a lot of time doing so.

But there is something that happens when thoughtful embodied women are in conversation with each other that, as Jonathan has (at last!) noticed, allows for something quite different to emerge in their midst.

And, though there is now a lot of backlash, it still seems an important moment for men...for all of us...to prioritise making space for that. Not just for women’s bodies. A woman’s body being included for the sake of it on a panel of men is not just not honouring. From my own experience, the odds are stacked against it even being of much value (my friend writes candidly about this here).

How women host each other. How women host themselves when they are hosting each other. How they listen to each other. Disagree with each other. Learn from each other. Embolden each other. Take care of each other. Notice what’s emerging in their midst. In conversation with one another.

I agree with Jonathan. This is worth making space for. Moving aside for. Choosing silence for. Bearing witness to. Being changed by.

Not out of duty. I can appreciate something in the rise in resistance to that. But out of desire. Curiosity. Humility. Out of longing for more.

Mary & Elizabeth

Jesus’s life was full of cracks...or clefts. And, through one of those cracks, whilst He was probably still in embryonic form, if that, His mother Mary sang one of the most beautiful, womb-ish, politically devastating songs of all time.

That song is well known.

In various traditions it’s known as ‘The Magnificat’. Bringing down ‘rulers from their thrones’. Lifting ‘up the humble’. Filling ‘the hungry with good things’ but sending ‘the rich away empty’. This is Mary’s radical vision of what the mercy of G_d looks like in action.

Perhaps this song alone makes sense of why religious, theological and political authorities soon determined, and in many places still do determine, to keep women quiet.

But we don’t tend to give much attention to the context from which this shattering-of-worlds song emerged. And, as I read around it, I wanted to make space to witness the conversation between two women (and a silent man) that provokes it.

Now Mary arose in those days and went into the hill country with haste, to a city of Judah, and entered the house of Zacharias and greeted Elizabeth. And it happened, when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, that the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. Then she spoke out with a loud voice and said, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! But why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For indeed, as soon as the voice of your greeting sounded in my ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy. Blessed is she who believed, for there will be a fulfilment of those things which were told her from the Lord.”

And Mary sang...

In Luke 1, we read that a young Jewish woman, Mary, possibly in her early or mid-teens, having just received some significant news, decides to leave her home town of Nazareth and visit her elderly cousin, Elizabeth, in the hill country of Judea.

Assuming she walked there, the journey would probably take between 3-5 days. Not your average jaunt. And we are not told whether she went alone or was accompanied.

All we know from Luke’s story is that Mary, who was betrothed to a local man called Joseph and was, in all likelihood, a virgin, had just been encountered by an angel, Gabriel. We are told that said angel had been sent by G_d to greet Mary, tell her she had found favour with G_d, and ask if she would be willing to carry a great redemptive secret in her heart, and in her womb. If she was willing, she would be ‘overshadowed’ by the Highest and would conceive a son, to be called Jesus, who would be the Son of God whose kingdom would have no end.

Quite some announcement.

Before waiting for the young woman’s response, the angel informs her that her cousin Elizabeth has, quite improbably, for she was considered barren, conceived a son and is in her sixth month of pregnancy. Such news seems designed to communicate both a sense of companionship, and the idea that ‘with G_d nothing will be impossible’.

As we know from many a Christmas re-telling, this extraordinary, considerate, adventurous young woman said ‘yes’ to this ghastly-glorious gift of a burden.

But the thing I want to focus on here is the haste with which she apparently ‘arose’ and left her home town in search of such womb-ish company. Did she tell anyone she was leaving? Did Joseph hear about the angel? Did her parents notice anything? What was her excuse for such a trip? Did she know how long she’d be gone for? Was it a way to hide the news of her pregnancy for a while? Did she pass a message to Elizabeth that she was on her way?

I tend to dwell on decisions for a long time. Feeling all the feelings. But Mary says ‘yes’ to the angel, then gets up and leaves. Which makes me smile, because one thing Jesus repeatedly does as an adult, when something significant happens in one town, is to get up and leave for another.

When she arrives at the house of her elderly cousin and her priest husband Zacharias, presumably exhausted and a bit stinky if she has rushed there, she greets a possibly startled Elizabeth. And we learn that as soon as Elizabeth hears that greeting, ‘the babe leaped in her womb’.

That ‘babe’ is John the Baptist, whose wilderness-vocation will be to go before his cousin, Jesus, and make people ready to receive his message of salvation, guiding their ‘feet into the way of peace’. He is a fore-runner, who, we are told, is already filled with the Spirit in his mother’s womb. And his leaping recognition at the voice of Jesus’s mother, Mary, opens his own mother, Elizabeth, to being filled with that same Spirit.

This, in turn, provokes Elizabeth to speak out, ‘with a loud voice’ and proclaim how blessed Mary and the fruit of her womb are. She somehow instinctively knows that Mary is carrying her ‘Lord’, wonders why she should be honoured with such a visit, and blesses her brave young cousin, declaring that there will be ‘a fulfilment for those things which were told her from the Lord’.

A woman affirming - confirming - another woman.

I remember being pretty stunned, with the arrival of Covid and our sense of normality being torn apart, at the speed, and the confidence, with which many male writers began to explain to us the time we had entered. Some, who hadn’t previously taken much interest in theology, quickly began to draw on a Biblical imagination to help us make sense of what was going on... eschatology... apocalypse... the Book of Revelation.

There were ways in which it was helpful. We needed some orientation and there was much wisdom and insight. But I also found it a little disturbing. The speed and the confidence, yes, but more the lack of women’s voices. Including mine.

In wrestling that out with a wiser woman friend some months later, she drew me to Simone de Beauvoir’s insight, that, whilst men tend to inherit a cultural expectation to name reality, women do not. They have to learn it - if they even believe they have a right to do it, which the much of the Church, through history, has told them they do not.

So the relief of hearing a woman here, in a book which is assumed to be oppressively patriarchal, naming reality, and ‘with a loud voice’, is a great gift. Like taking gasps of clean sea air when you get out of the car after a long and confined trip.

And this woman, who has felt the reproach of society for most of her adult life because of her apparent barrenness, doesn’t wait for permission from that society to speak. No. She is filled with the Spirit and speaks out, WITH A LOUD VOICE.

And, in response to such a bold, declarative, Spirit-inspired, womb-ish naming of reality, Mary SINGS.

New creation

We are told that Mary stayed with Elizabeth and Zacharias for three months. Presumably, if she arrived in Elizabeth’s sixth month, up until the time their baby was due.

Can you imagine the conversations they had? One improbable pregnancy, due to age and apparent barrenness. One impossible pregnancy, because she has never ‘known a man’. And yet they bear witness to each other’s bodies expanding.

Three months.

Where did they go? What did they share? What wisdom was imparted from older to younger. Younger to older. What kind of comfort and courage did they find in each other’s company? Two miraculous beings. How much did they talk about G_d? How much did they talk about society? Justice? If Mary was provoked to sing of the fall of the ‘mighty from their thrones’ then presumably a lot? What sense did they have of the beings in their wombs? Were they in on the conversations too? This could be understood as their formative experience of the world. Cradled in the sounds of loving, convivial, courageous women’s voices.

And why had I never before been invited, or invited others, to dwell in these questions? An oh so rare moment in the Bible - not quite as rare as in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings but rare none the less - of two women talking to each other. Being in each other’s company. And I’d barely even considered that it might be important.

A theologian whose work I’m growing to love, Willie Jennings, speaks of this moment being THE beginning. When attempting to offer a ‘doctrine of creation’,8 he starts here - somewhere between the ‘improbable’ (Elizabeth’s apparent barrenness) and the impossible (Mary’s virginity) - somewhere between John and Jesus - this is where he locates a new beginning... a new creation.

How hopeful that is for these days. Improbability. Impossibility. Women’s bodies. Three core elements of new creation.

And this...’THIS’...cried my friend Liz, as she encountered the story as if for the first time in one of our fortnightly online bible studies...’what if it all turned on THIS...on these women being together...carrying Jesus and John inside of them...and if it turns on this’ - this experience of a kind of conviviality, care, intimacy, warmth, hospitality, adventure, domesticity...this oikonomia of mutuality and deep sharing that essentially births the ‘new’ and cultivates a radical social and political imagination - ‘why were we not told of it?’

New creation begins here. In a crack in the text. A mere comma of a moment amidst the action. Improbability. Impossibility. Women’s bodies.

Witness to a womb-ish authority

I want to begin to draw this to a close, even as I feel it’s only just opening. But before I do, I want to pay attention to a silent witness.

Through those three months of conviviality and conversation, there was a third person present. A silent presence.

Elizabeth’s husband, Zacharias, was, like Mary, visited by the angel Gabriel. Whilst he was going about his priestly duty, lighting incense in the Temple, an angel appeared beside the altar and told him that his barren wife would conceive and bear a son, who should be called John. The angel tells him about the role his son will play, then strikes poor Zacharias mute until the arrival of John, because he dares to question the angel’s words.

So, in the background, perhaps even foreground, of those womb-ish three months, is a silent man, bearing witness, just as Jonathan recommends, to women in conversation with women.

When the group of us that meet fortnightly were encountered by this story something very beautiful happened. We were three women and three men. Half the group didn’t really know this bit of the story. The other half had never dwelt with any intention in it. So, as ever, we didn’t know what to expect.

And it quickly became evident that the women in the group were themselves arising, with Mary, to walk to greet Elizabeth in the hills of Judea. We were stunned. This window of womanliness and conviviality. On which the rest of the story suddenly seemed to turn. It was so...central.

And, as we began to unpack that and share our experiences, letting our relief and grief and amazement at the authority of these women expand, our male friends, instinctively, began to lean back, out of the space, bearing beautiful witness, in silence.

It was respectful. Delightful. Unusual. Honouring.

Men really taking time to listen to women’s collective experience.

To learn. To care.

It was magical.

For all of us I think. I hope.

At the end of it, Lydia suggested we share this little hint of a passage at an event we would part of a few months later...’put them through it too’. So we did. With friends from the smaller group putting their bodies in to the roles of Mary, Elizabeth and Zacharias, in the middle of a room of 120 people.

Together we paid attention, for a 90 whole minutes, to this tiny whisp of a passage, witnessing two women in conversation, in the presence of a silent man. Interrogating the characters. Sharing what we noticed. What questions were arising. What feelings were provoked.

I remember a friend saying to me afterwards that, when he saw the passage I was planning to draw people’s attention to, he feared I had gone mad. There was nothing there. Just a woman walking to another woman’s house and greeting her. He felt terrible for me. It was going to be a disaster!

But it was the opposite. In feedback from the weekend, most people mentioned that session as a highlight, stating how rare it was to have a chance to collectively witness the power of a woman in conversation with another woman in such a way. Particularly when it comes to the Bible. And how struck they were by the silence of the man.

As I drew that session to a close, I remember asking the group to pause and sense in their bodies what was going on and whether there was anything they needed to share.

Two beautiful women, who hadn’t yet shared anything, put their hands up. And here was the real treasure. Two womb-ish women sharing their experience of witnessing a room full of people pay full attention to two other women practicing their own womb-ish authority, witnessed by a silent man. And they both voiced similar things.

Deep grief. And deep relief.

There is an awesome moment at the end of this story, which I’ll write more about another time. Elizabeth, emboldened by her time with Mary, says ‘NO’ to the community, when they try to continue the familiar pattern of naming her son Zacharias.

NO! No to the status quo. No to familial ways. No to civic religion. She has heard from God. ‘He shall be called John.’

She names reality again, but this time in public.

The silence of her husband makes space for her to practice her own authority. And Zacharias only gets his voice back when he affirms, in writing, his wife’s declaration, ‘his name is John’.9

And all of this is written, plain as day, in the Bible.

May we women learn to rise up, learn to speak up, learn to sing out, learn to bless. May we learn to name reality. From the dark of the womb. In the tremulous Spirit. Tender darkness over the face of the Deep.

If you know people that would find this post helpful, please do share it with them.

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An endnote: I know that some readers’ experience of wombs will not be easy. Mine isn’t either. But the complexity held in the darkness of the womb, even in the absence of the womb, becomes part of the strength, and the wisdom. Look at this stunning embroidered Bleeding Vessel, for example, created as a medically exact image of the artist’s womb, with all of its pain and beauty and dis-ease recorded in precise detail. What a powerful work of art and what a stunning, redemptive way to honour ones own strength and wisdom and experience.

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Womb-ish writing: Whilst writing this, I read Em Strang’s beautiful reflection on darkness and nothingness (it may be for her paid subscribers, but in her writing you’ll find much on these womb-ish themes). I fell in to Sharon Blackie’s piece on reclaiming women’s stories (‘so that women from these islands might remember who we are’). And I returned to my beloved, wildly womb-ish friend Julie Dunstan’s reflection on Mary’s Song, and her friendship with her cousin Elizabeth. If you would like to start engaging meditatively with scripture in an accessible, embodied way, I recommend her publication, Streams in the Desert.

And finally, I don’t even know who this rather remarkable man was, but, at the end of ’s 2022 event, where I was invited to share alongside other ‘wise-women’ about what Christmas meant to me, he asked about Mary’s song and then began (with the help of whizz pianist ) to sing it…

There are six books that I carry around with me wherever I go.

They are like fierce old friends, holding me true, making me brave, resisting the part of me that always needs to feel that I am ‘right’.

It would be fair to say that all of them, particularly the first, read me, as much as I read them. I am undressed by them, again and again and again.

And that first is my Bible. A tattered creature that I was given when I left my first intentional Jesus community in 2005.

It has travelled the world with me and been left outside in many a storm. It’s full of yellow highlights and scribbles, and on the back page are the names of 9 young (at the time) South African men that I met in the ‘youth’ wing of Cape Town’s notoriously overcrowded maximum security prison, Pollsmoor, when I visited later that same year.

I told them I would pray for them...for Calvin who liked candy...Frankie who liked cricket...Phulminzi who liked church. I’m not sure how much praying I’ve done, but their names are still there. Not letting me forget G_d’s mysterious tenderness towards the incarcerated. And below their names, written in a different pen, is this quote, which I think must be from Rilke: ‘hold with patience all that is unresolved in your heart’.

The second is my darkly thumbed (by which I mean filthy with love and attention) copy of Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep: a theology of becoming. A book I have spent so much time with that it now inhabits my body. Every time I open it I remember my own voice, and that I am meant to be using it.

The others are all thin, punchy little books, written by beautiful, poetic, justice-loving, fire-stoking men.

The Poet, The Warrior, The Prophet, by Brazilian theo-poet and psychoanalyst Rubem Alves. I & Thou by beloved Jewish theologian-sociologist Martin Buber. The Prophetic Imagination, by lover of artists and all that is lyrical, Hebrew Bible-scholar Walter Brueggemann. And An Ethic for Christians & Other Aliens in a Strange Land by lawyer, activist and theologian William Stringfellow.1

Part I: Jesus & the President

And it is to this latter, truly prophetic (in my opinion) book - the reading of which is equivalent to drinking paint-stripper, removing layers of gloss to reveal what’s really beneath - that I have turned for strange comfort in the aftermath of the absurdly scandalous, blasphemous indulgence that was the inauguration of President Trump on Monday.

An indulgence that may, in many ways, not have been significantly more absurd than any other presidential or prime-ministerial inauguration that uses biblical imagery to justify itself.

I always come back to Wendell Berry’s ‘Bad News of the Gospels’ when I think of the claim of any government or nation state to be ‘Christian’:

‘Much is made in churches of the "good News" of the Gospels. Less is said of the Gospels’ bad news, which is that Jesus would have been horrified by just about every "Christian" government the world has ever seen. He would be horrified by our government and its works, and it would be horrified by him.

Surely no sane and thoughtful person can imagine any government of our time sitting comfortably at the feet of Jesus while he is saying, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you.”

Wendell Berry, Christianity & the Survival of Creation

Which of course applies to Biden and Bush as much as to Trump. And Blair and Starmer and all the rest.

The Bible has its own beating heart. Its own integrity. And its own deep, un-containable song, which stands in judgement of anyone and anything - particularly imaginal structures and the resultant social, religious and political systems - that resist the flourishing of all things.

But, as many are writing about in more detail than me, there was a distinct horror to this particular inauguration.

A significant part of the church, and its seemingly drunk theologians and ‘prophets’, has done an almost water-tight job of convincing many of us that this inauguration was more Messianic than Presidential.

It was impressive.

The young preacher waving his arms about as he blessed the land and called forth prosperity from its farthest reaches. Trump presenting himself as a ‘peace-maker’ in the line of Martin Luther King. This administration’s apparent prophetic resistance to any principalities and powers that block growth, success, joy and the entrepreneurial, pioneering spirit.

I remember reading Baudrillard at Uni, and this, as I understand it, was like the perfect Simulacrum.

The prophets and theologians of the MAGA movement are now managing a self-created ‘biblical reality’ that is so well-versed and self-re-inforcing, with it’s own internal logic of US exceptionalism, that it bears little resemblance to the original. And yet it has the power to seduce half the world, in the name of the tenderhearted Jesus that it at the same time effaces.

‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none.

The simulacrum is true.’

Jean Baudrillard

MAGA, and its theological fore-runners (by which, btw, I certainly don’t mean everyone with conservative or traditional views...my own politics are all over the place) have created their own ‘biblical reality’.

But one read of Isaiah 58 (which I’ll be in conversation with friends about in a later post) is enough to expose how far that reality is from the Bible.

The MAGA movement may be right that we humans long to ‘ride on the high hills of the earth’. That we need to be reminded that our light can ‘break forth like the morning’. That we are wired to have ‘glory’ be ‘our rear guard’.

We need vision and beauty-soaked imaginations and we yearn for real inspiration and hope. I have no doubt that many beautiful people will be breathing a genuine, energised, sigh of relief under Trump’s reign (I hear them do so already). One kind of tyranny being replaced by another, but this one is more amenable to them.

But the route to the kind of ‘glory’ that Isaiah describes is made plain.

We must tend to and raise up those that our societies reject. We must feed the hungry, open our homes to those who are cast out, clothe those who are nakedly suffering, stop exploiting our labourers and expose and unravel our structural wickedness.

That is not ‘woke-ness’ (by which I don’t mean such a ‘thing’ doesn’t exist).

It is Biblical Reality.

And, seduced as even I nearly was2 (because I too want cause for hope, and have many friends supportive of that movement that I choose to learn from), I experienced Monday’s inauguration as a court-prophet sanctioned sound blanket, that, through layer upon layer of distortion and parody, with significant drafts of truth in the mix, has layered itself over the prophetic voice of the Bible in order to silence it.

Like the perfect substitution of the ‘signs of the real’ for the ‘real’,3 in it we witnessed a kind of theology of death draped in the semblance of a cloak of life, using religious cues in a way that made it very easy for many around the world, including many of my friends, to delight in it.

Stringfellow writes beautifully about this distinction - between cultures of ‘life’ and cultures of ‘death’. His brave writing has been a genuine place of refuge for me this last week, and one that I felt to share.

I’ll continue to draw on his work, but I recommend reading ‘An Ethic for Christians & Other Aliens in a Strange Land’, and, if you want to learn more, my friends Bob Ekblad4 and are deeply influenced by his work. Richard has written a fantastic series on his books.

*************************

But now I want to talk about Rafael.

In resistance to Monday’s desecrating whirlwind of power and principality and pride, I want to share that there was a hotter ticket in town. It was hosted by a ten year old, and was more of a whisper than a whirlwind. But I’m pretty sure that Jesus would have preferred to be there.

Part II: Jesus & Rafael

Last weekend I co-curated a gathering (with an amazing team of people) for 200 people of all ages in a cold corner of Sussex.

The theme was the idea of resurrecting friendship as a means of resistance. Resistance to division... scarcity... othering... injustice... xenophobia... tribalism... pride... inhumane bureaucracy... destruction of the earth...

It’s hard to ignore the suffering of a friend, whether human or more than human. You don’t exploit or extract from a friend. You rarely want to hurt a friend. You try to understand the opinions of a friend, even when you disagree. You share your food with a friend. You wouldn’t let them go hungry.

Dostoevsky wrote that ‘Beauty will save the world’. But today I like theologian Jurgen Moltmann’s insistence that it is ‘friendship [that] will save the world’. And for 48 hours I really believed it.

The gathering was curated around whatever participants offered in response to the theme (which in turn was drawn from our beautiful friend ’s phd). So we had workshops around power & hospitality, the nature of soul-friendship, friendship & anarchy, mapping our friendships, practicing deep listening, tools for hosting conversations across difference, a photographic love song to a bruised but resilient piece of land, communing with trees, grief, lament, economies of friendship, song, improv, dance, cold-water swimming, poems, feasting.

It was good.

טוב

On the Sunday morning we hosted a time, using Open Space technology, for people to offer new conversations and workshops in response to what was most alive for them from the weekend so far. What were they chewing on?

In the midst of conversations being offered around friendship & money, the wisdom of women’s bodies, the notion of weak centres, and the Enneagram, my friend Anna stood up and shared that her ten year old son, Rafael, wanted to host a conversation entitled ‘Have you made any new friends?’.

I was tired. I’d been holding much of the weight of the weekend, and was tempted to find a comfortable chair and curl up and snooze whilst people dived in to their various topics. But Rafael’s invitation caught my attention. Made my heart beat a little faster. That’s where I wanted to be. In a space hosted by that small wonder of a boy.

Rafael is the youngest child of friends from my first church.

He is probably just over 4’ (though I actually have no idea). Has sparkly eyes behind thick rimmed glasses. Curly hair. Loves wearing his furry hooded coat. And has a killer smile. Any gremlins lurking in your brain flee when he fires that smile at you. Which he does, often.

Over the weekend I often felt quite awkward. I had to take a lead and host from the front - be a mix of gregarious, vulnerable, available, alert, curious, authoritative and present, all at the same time. When in truth I was feeling pretty tired and shy.

And, somehow, this mystical little creature would quietly sidle up to me at just the moments I needed a friend. I had a moment of overwhelm amidst a big group in the entrance lobby. And there he was by my side. I walked in to the silent disco after a slightly bruising conversation (we were tired) feeling sad and a bit clueless. And there he was. At my side. Pointing to the red light on his headphones so I knew which channel he thought I should dance to.

I don’t know how he manages to move through space in such a way. I’ve seen animals do it before. Dogs lying next to the one in the room that most needs care. But rarely humans. Not in such a dynamic way at least...small enough to slip through space unnoticed and then there they are. My friend Bob used to say ‘Jesus is skinny...he can slip through even the tiniest crack’. Rafael seemed to have that quality to him too.

Anyway. Once I’d helped various people get to wherever it was they were going, I headed to the Fernery to join Rafael’s conversation. And, natural host that he was, he immediately turned his body towards the newcomer, waited for me to take a seat, put his hands politely between his knees, looked directly in to my tired eyes, and began to ask me whether I’d made any new friends over the weekend.

And here was the gift of our time. And why I know Jesus would prefer this invitation to that of the inauguration of a president.

Rafael has a stammer. Sometimes his words flow, and sometimes they don’t. And when they don’t, his body moves in ways that are at first surprising...like a fast flowing river being suddenly blocked by a protruding wall or rock...but in time began to feel like an extension of his voice, coaxing and inviting the words to work their way out in to the waiting sentences.

And, for the first time in the weekend, I realised that I couldn’t rush. My only way to be a friend to Rafael, and to the group, was to feel the ground beneath my feet, rest my body back in to my seat, and wait.

And that was when I properly noticed the others in the room.

I saw his Mum, Anna, sitting calmly with her hands crossed on her lap. And I saw my musician friend Julian, leaning back in to his chair with legs outstretched. And I noticed the ease with which he was present to the group, to himself, and to Rafael’s words.

It struck me that these two were just being themselves. That giving people space - not demanding anyone conform to their expectations - was a practice they already had deep in their bones.

Julian, like me, had struck up a friendship with Rafael over the weekend. And I could see why. Julian, like Rafael, felt safe. Like he had no need to judge. Before him was a space of open, positive regard. And his posture said he had all the time in the world. Take your time. There’s no rush.

I remember watching lovely Michael Sheen being asked a question by a young Welsh man, Leo, that, for different reasons to Rafael, struggled to voice his sentences. Leo’s nervous laughs and shyness were met by deep warmth, care and patience from Michael. I remember him saying ‘that’s alright...we’ve got plenty of time..take all the time you need Leo’. Whilst Leo squirmed and blushed, Michael kept gentle but clear eye contact and smiled warmly. He was utterly unfazed, and eventually a clear, concise question tumbled joyously from Leo’s lips.

I thought of this as I witnessed us listening to each other in the group. I could tell that Rafael was carefully taking in everything that was shared. At one point we were speaking about those times when a friend asks you to do something and you say ‘yes’, but you really want to say ‘no’. Rafael began to share his experience, and told us, in that same flow of words and breaks, with his arm keeping things moving, that in those moments he feels ‘regret’. I asked him where he feels that regret in his body and he instantly pressed his hand on his chest...’here’. I asked him if he knew why he felt regret and he said he wasn’t sure yet.

But five minutes later he had his answer, and our bodies waited, gently but with a sense of anticipation, for his shared wisdom. ‘I always... ... ... ... ... feel regret... ... ... ... ... because... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... I know it will make it harder’.

Which is exactly right, isn’t it. If we lie to our friend and to ourselves, even apparently in service of their needs, eventually it always makes it harder.

Conclusion: the whisper trumps the whirlwind

At the end of Trump’s inauguration I found myself thinking of that time with Rafael. The quality of attention in the room. The way it was deepened by our need for patience. The invitation that Rafael’s stammer offered us to rest for a while. To be present. Not in a rush. Attentive but not demanding. Not grasping. At ease. Still.

Stillness, in the Hebrew Bible, has a sense of letting go to it. A kind of disrobing of our normal identities and ideologies. Ceasing striving. Choosing rest. Being still. And such stillness allows us to hear what’s being said. What’s really being said.

I was reminded of the prophet Elijah who, having been found by G_d hiding in a cave, went to the mouth of that cave to listen for G_d’s voice.

Perhaps G_d’s voice occasionally is in the whirlwind. Perhaps some of the chaos and upheaval of the next months in the US and around the world will open some genuine hope and justice and possibility. But more often I think G_d’s voice is in the quiet. In the whisper. And the ones who can help me hear that whisper are not necessarily the ones that can deliver straight sentences.

We need to rest in to the gaps. Notice the cracks. Let ourselves be disrupted. Pay less attention to the confident voices. Listen for the quiet ones. Seek them out. Raise them up. Receive their gift. Be changed.

The Jesus that I have got to know through the thick and thin of life over the last twenty years would, without a shadow of a doubt, have felt more at home in this quiet, transformative, cracked conversation with Rafael, than in the resplendent God-language of Trump’s inauguration.

And that is all I have really wanted to say in this piece.

If we are genuinely listening for the voice of G_d, we will need to learn to be still - be willing to disrobe ourselves of our noisy ideologies and allegiances, if only for a moment - in order to listen for the gentle whisper.

But it will be worth it.

That whisper always trumps the whirlwind. Even though it seems otherwise.

Perhaps Rafael’s parents might let me pack him in my bag occasionally, as my 7th book...a fierce friend whose presence compels me to rest and learn to listen.5

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This time 5 years ago I was a little obsessed with angels. Particularly these ones, that ‘bend on hovering wing’ to sing peace and goodwill over our weary world.

I spent Christmas in Cornwall that year, with my beloved friends and . In the midst of one our expansive conversations, looking out to sea, I can well remember an insight landing on me, almost like an audible voice:

‘You will all need to learn to listen deeply this year...deep enough that you hear the angels sing’.

I didn’t really understand what it meant at the time. Did it mean literal angels? I knew many people that thought they had been encountered by angels. Some described magnificent creatures with eyes flowing with the vitality of waterfalls. Others were simple presences that could easily be mistaken for humans, but always achieved some impossible task.

What was going to happen in the world that would mean we’d have to search that much deeper for hope? How do we listen deeply? Is it to ourselves? To the earth? To the sky?

Strangely the Queen, in her Christmas Day speech that day, also brought in those particular Midnight Clear angels.

A few months later Covid announced its arrival in the UK and, since then, that kitchen insight has become only more resonant. Slowly unfolding its meaning.

Looking back I realise that I experienced it as directive. A Deep calling to Deep moment.

And today, as this strange, battering year draws towards to its close, and the sad plains of our weary world groan, I, like many of you perhaps, desperately need to hear that song anew.

I am depleted.

I know I’m not alone in this. I know it’s common for this time of year. And that it’s nothing compared to the state many around the world...many on my doorstep...find themselves in this Christmas.

But I’ve been scraping my way through the last months. Forcing myself to complete commissions before Christmas. Making deadlines by a whisker. Failing to get excited about events that I have been part of dreaming up. Letting people down. Excusing myself from social events. Not finding head or heart space to share anything here at The Tuning Fork. Lacking the inspiration to counter the despair I feel at much of what is going on in the world.

Mustering enough enthusiasm to enthuse others has felt like pulling my own nails off.

Self esteem has been low. Self condemnation high.

Selah.

And when I stop to ponder (as I did yesterday morning, looking out to a returning sun over a freshly washed beach) why I feel so depleted, my body tells me one thing plainly.

I have, for this last year, practiced such an intentional ‘no’ that I’ve forgotten my own ‘yes’.

I determined at the start of the year that I would try hard not to hate anyone. That I would not default to scapegoating. That I would resist polarisation. That I would choose to lament all suffering, not just that of the people I love, or the ‘side’ I can most easily support. That I would develop my capacity to see from myriad viewpoints. Let things remain complicated. Listen for truth in multiple narratives and encourage others to do the same.

These have been my values for a long time. But this year these practices have required particular intention, as the pull towards over simplistic thinking and rhetoric has been strong (and loud) from every direction.

I haven’t have done a great job of it. I’ve wondered often if I’m just losing my moral rooting and have become a chameleon. But I have kept trying to resist the temptation to fall in to ‘us’ and ‘them’ and, as a result, have been part of an unusual mix of communities through the year. In conversation with many people who would not want to be in the same room as each other.

But, as I have experienced opposing narratives becoming only more self-assured of their rightness, I have felt my body, in its attempt to stay connected, stretch and contort in ways that have made it hard to breathe. Such a posture has begun to stretch the air out of my lungs. The strength out of my arms. And the hope out of my heart.

I agree with philosopher-theologian René Girard that the default practice of humanity is to scapegoat.

And I come to the end of a year of trying to resist such a practice disillusioned, hopeless, angry, lacking in vision and pretty despairing as to the capacity of humans (including myself) to host complexity.

I am tired.

I don’t want to continue like this.

But I also don’t want to succumb to thinking that I am ‘right’. To become an ‘us’ against a ‘them’. And if I’m not in relationship and conversation with people different to me, how will I maintain a deeper perspective?

I have been practicing curiosity. And I have been practicing lament. But something has been missing.

I am in need of angels - better translated ‘messengers’ when they appear in the Hebrew Bible. Such messengers can be natural or supernatural.

And I was encountered by one last week.

My friend Laura took me to watch this exquisite film, Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne.

It guides you through the current exhibition of Van Gogh’s work at the National Gallery in London, all of which is from a particular period of intense creativity in the South of France in the late 1880s - the years running up to his death.

At the end of the film, having spent 90 minutes absorbed in tracing brushstrokes, feeling the vibration of colours, encountering his hunger for truth, his deep conviction of his vocation, his costly belief that only beauty can save the world, and in the company of an audience that barely made a sound, my friend and I couldn’t move. As people left the cinema, we stayed put, and for a moment I let the previously unnoticed royal blue of the art-cinema walls sing to me.

I reached for my friend’s hand as we both quietly wept.

Everything in Van Gogh’s work is alive. And the cost of that aliveness was too great for him. In 1890 he took his own life.1

A number of precious people in my life have killed themselves. Each of them deep and wild and hungry for truth and beauty. My friend is a therapist and supervises a large team of precious whole-hearted people. That week she had been on suicide watch.

When we eventually spoke, we found ourselves honouring both the devastation and the dignity of one so intoxicated with beauty choosing to end their life. The cost paid by those living with thin skins. Feeling the world. Its glory and its horror. Not letting themselves hide. Not being able to perhaps. Singing with every morsel of their being, especially in moments of deepest despair and distress. Some of Van Gogh’s most exquisite (and prolific) work was created in the weeks before his death, whilst living in a mental asylum.

On Thursday evening I had the privilege of experiencing those works in the flesh. And I could have stood in front of this painting of the ‘Poet’ until the gallery closed. It’s one of the first paintings you see, and I kept coming back to it.

Van Gogh wrote that he wanted his paintings to offer consolation, like music.

This painting consoled me.

Looking in to his eyes, you don’t just see the pain of the world. You see a man resigned to the fact that this is his vocation. To be alive to the world in a particular way, and to share his experience of it with such honesty...such innate dignity...that it draws others in to that aliveness.

Van Gogh’s sitter for this painting was Belgian artist Eugène Boch, whose face reminded Van Gogh of Dante. But I experienced it as a self-portrait of the artist.

And I experienced said artist, this last week, as an angel. Witnessing the pain of the world. Bending down on hovering wing to sing through it. To speak of Beauty and to lure us in to communion with it.

I have spent the last year bearing witness to a lack of Beauty in the ways we are choosing to understand the world and engage with one another.

I have experienced much Truth. And much Goodness. But little Beauty.

And by Beauty I do not mean prettiness, or loveliness. Beauty has justice at its core: ‘the ethical does not then question the legitimacy of beauty, rather does it reveal itself as beauty’s inner coordinate axis’.2

And, as (dead) German Catholic theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar reminds us, when Beauty is separated from these ‘two sisters’, she ends up taking them along with her:

I have learnt this year that if I am going to continue to try to posture myself in some non-space outside of ‘us’ and ‘them’, I need to drench myself in Beauty. Eros. Desire.

To have a hope of resisting the practice of scapegoating the ‘other’ you do indeed need to make a commitment to be curious, and to lament.

But there is a third requirement. And that is Desire. You need to know what you are saying ‘YES’ to...what it is that you desire...if you are to have a hope of practicing a sustainable ‘NO’.

Van Gogh’s work is dripping with ‘YES’. Is rich in Desire.

And for a moment I forgot my own ‘YES’. Even though it lights my sitting room most evenings.

I need to spend more time with those brave enough to encounter the world naked. Who long to know, in the intimate, biblical sense of the word (yada (ידע), which also means to make love).

The prophets, the artists, the poets, the seers, the mystics.

Rather than being tired, I think I am thirsty.

In my Welcome to the Tuning Fork piece I speak of wanting my writing to be a receptacle that people can use to draw from the deep well of the Jesus traditions.

Well...and well indeed...if that is the case then I realise that I will be drawing with them. I have changed the capital letters of THE TUNING FORK to lower case (to be fair it was only in upper case because the U looks more like a tuning fork). Taken some of the pressure off myself to be sharing Beauty from the tradition and instead, through the year ahead, will be seeking it. Listening for it.

I hope some of you will join me.

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P.S. Shepherd’s encountered by angels:

Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid. Then the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.”

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying:

“Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!”

So it was, when the angels had gone away from them into heaven, that the shepherds said to one another, “Let us now go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has come to pass, which the Lord has made known to us.” And they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the Babe lying in a manger. Now when they had seen Him, they made widely known the saying which was told them concerning this Child. And all those who heard it marveled at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told them.

(Luke 2:8-15)

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A few years ago, my life was ambushed by The Lord of the Rings.

I’d watched the films, but never managed to complete the books. And, having found a solitary spot to listen to the last of Andy Serkis’s 64 hours of masterful reading, sobbing from the core of my being, I realised there was no turning back. My world was now peopled with Elves.

Which seemed a pretty pointless thing to celebrate at a moment of heightened pain around the world.

Russia had just invaded Ukraine and the horrors of war quickly kicked in, closer to home than the others already raging around the world. Devastated people and lands. Mass dislocation. Cultivation of hatred. Violence. Fear. Abductions. Gas-lighting. Confusion, death and deceit.

With friends across the political spectrum, it quickly became apparent how irreconcilable our various world views were becoming.

And my response was to reach for a book about Talking Trees and Elves.

And an extremely violent book at that. One that can be read as both racist and xenophobic. The Orcs (and most of the other ‘darker’ creatures) are of course entirely bad, which allows the reader to celebrate their destruction with no cause for lament (something we humans don’t seemingly need much encouragement to do).

But, in spite of its limits - perhaps even because of them - I found in it what I needed. A story that was stronger than the one I was hearing. That could counter what felt like the slow rise of awfulness in the world around me. A story that had threaded through it a ‘song of glad water’ that was never entirely silenced. That flowed wherever it was needed. That trained me to listen for its sounds, in the knowledge that such a song can break even the toughest ground. The fiercest resolve. Awaken us to beauty.

And that song is found most clearly in the voice of a woman (Lady Goldberry, daughter of the River-Woman...as described in the quote above). One of only about four women in the whole book it has to be said, and left out of the films. But, nonetheless, she is remarkable.

As I listened to TLOTR, that song of gladness became like a tuning fork.

Whenever it sounded, my whole being vibrated. There was resonance with my deepest longings. And, as with all encounters with Beauty, perhaps a subtle re-orientation of my internal life. My spirit was astonished. And revived.

And, you would likely agree, the world feels only more pained today.

Spoken by one who has grown up in a country not ransacked by war, and protected, by privilege, from the ravages of poverty and oppression. So naively still shocked by how awful we can be to each other.

It feels like my journal image at the top of the post. A great complex noisy hoard of severed pain and beauty. Multiple worlds within worlds.

I painted that image in 2019, at a point when I hoped I was coming out of a short dark-night kind of time. My life as I had known it had kind of fallen apart a year earlier and I’d had twelve months of insomnia and being encountered by the unresolved pain I carried around in me.

I had left London, landing in my friend’s gloriously safe little flat overlooking the sea, and had given myself permission to just feel and grieve and learn and witness and heal. To let myself fail.

And here I was at last, emerging from the underworld, towing my hoard of treasure from the deep. Stars. Fruits. Boxes. Limbs. Worlds. Tunes. Energies. A kind of singing chaos.1

And I could see that I was walking towards a stream where I would, presumably, pause a while and wash and tend to all I had found.

I can remember sharing with friends that I had emerged back in to the light at last, and that I would soon begin to write my blog and get on with being more vocal in the world again.

But it turns out that I had underestimated the nature of said stream.

This water, flowing so directly from the mountains and their own bright morning, was a glad stream. It didn’t just wash, it sung. And its song was so pure...its waters so ruthlessly fresh...that allowing it to wash my hoard felt more like death than life.

It’s a bit of a cliché mentioning Tolkien and Lewis in the same breath, but I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s allegory of heaven and hell, The Great Divorce, where characters exit the bus that has taken them to the heavenly realm to find the grass so real that it’s too sharp for some of them to walk on.

Such was the level of unreality in my own life, even after fifteen plus years of church and community and leadership and times of therapy, that being washed in glad water felt like having my insides repeatedly scraped by such a blade. As if needing to free the villi in my gut from layers of gunk.

So, with the wider world as I had known it entering its own dark night, I began to let myself be washed in the gladness of these abysmal waters.2

And, to be honest, The Tuning Fork will sing, when it does, from this understanding that such times of purging can be a strange and terrible gift.

An opportunity for people and communities (perhaps even worlds3) to loose themselves, if they dare, of their inner contradictions and disrupt their damaging behaviour patterns. To dig deep and pull out toxic roots (particularly imaginal and theological ones). To confront addictions and fast from that which causes harm.

The practice of repentance (teshuvah- תְשׁוּבָה), or turning and walking in a different direction, is presented, in the Bible, as a gift. ‘G_d has granted repentance that leads to life’.4 ‘The sacrifices of G_d are a broken spirit, A broken and a contrite heart’.5 ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’.6

It is curious to me that both sides of church - both those whose ‘Biblical values’ tend to lean them left, and those whose ‘Biblical values’ tend to lean them right - often overlook this core Biblical lens of repentance being a gift from G_d that we should eagerly desire for ourselves before expecting it from others.

That having our own (individual, collective and systemic) harmful practices exposed is the first step in a process that ‘leads to life’.

Jesus was, after all, a walking apocalypse.

If the meaning of the word apocalypse is a kind of revealing, or unveiling, then the word presupposes that a destructive tearing, or removing, must happen in order for that which needs to be seen to become exposed.

And wherever Jesus went, he tore through familiar religious, political, social and economic veils. Not because He was an ‘apocalyptic doom-monger’ (a tired trope often used to dismiss the warnings of prophets and truth speakers through the ages), but because, to use the analogy of the tuning fork again, He vibrated at a frequency that resonated with...and therefore awoke and activated...all that was real and true and good around Him.

When a song of Beauty arrives, worlds crack open.

And here we edge closer to the title of this piece, Shibboleth - I needed to swim towards this crack of a word through these abysmally glad waters.

***

I sometimes see things. By which I mean I have kind of waking dreams and visions.

I’ll be washing up, or doing something that doesn’t require much brain power, and will realise that I am watching a scene unfold on some imaginal plate in my mind.

A good while back, I had a waking vision of a large crack emerging down the centre of the North American land mass. It was dark, and it was deep, and I saw people, understandably, running away from it as fast at they could, some to the far left of the land, and some to the far right, terrified of the emerging abyss.

There was much to pay attention to in all of the movement, but both my eyes and my ears seemed fixed on the abyss itself, looking deep in to the darkness of the crack, as if something was wanting to be seen, or heard...willing me to stay with the fear and the difficulty, rather than run from it.

And, as I let my attention rest there, I began to hear distant sounds from the deep. But they weren’t the sounds of horror and pain that you might expect to emanate from our understanding of the abyss in Western culture. Rather, I could hear bustling sounds of trade and warm shouts of greeting and laughter. Wheels on cobblestones. Animals. Children. Sounds of a beautiful aliveness.

And as I listened more intently, and the sounds became clearer, I realised I was descending in to the crack, drawn both by the warmth of the sounds and a distant glow of light beneath me.

I was no longer thinking about the dark cliffs to my side, nor my fear of falling. I was weighted by curiosity...and longing...and, for a flash of a moment before the vision ended, I glimpsed a world alive at the base of this abyss that was busy and thriving. Full of chatter and laughter and trust and care. And, importantly, trade. It was a market street. And what I was witnessing was a joyous ‘oikonomia’ - a way of exchanging goods and labour that honoured relationship and brought joy. But, cobbled streets aside, it didn’t feel like a nostalgic return to the past. It felt like a deepening in to the core of the present.

And the whole scene was lit by a curious light that didn’t seem to have a source, which reminded me of the verse in the book of Apocalypse (or Revelation), which speaks of a city which ‘had no need of the sun or of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of G_d illuminated it’.7 It was as if the life going on down there emanated its own light.

As I exited the vision, and returned to focussing on my washing up, I remember a sense of grief that, by (understandably) running away from the dark crack both sides of the population of that land (which in the vision was North America, but relates, I think, to rest of the ‘developed’ world too - I don’t mean to be another Brit lecturing America) had no idea of the beauty at its base, and were too far away to hear its song of gladness that might otherwise draw them in.

And it got me wondering how we could become less scared of the dark. Less repelled by the wounds. The cracks. Better able to remain still8 long enough to hear the sounds of promise emanating from the Deep.

I considered all of these to be spiritual concerns, yet our modern spiritual practices in the West had not, for the most part, discipled us in the practice of hoping darkly.9 Partly because we weren’t listening (as if we still need all that redundant religious shit, right). But also because, in its historical turn towards the light of knowledge (the cataphatic...that which is knowable) and away from the dark of mystery (the apophatic...that which is unknowable), much religion in the West had forgotten its own negative traditions.

This vision helped prepare me for a time of darkness in my own life. Provoked me to find sources that would train me to move towards, rather than away from, the dark. The wound. But it also sketched the shape within which I have held, and therefore understood, much of what’s gone on in the world since then.

And I began to seek out communities versed in hoping darkly. I knew something of that already in places of poverty and exclusion. But now I found the dark hope of the mystics. And the dark longing of those who love the Earth. The negative wisdom of those who practice looking down.

Which brings us to our landing place. The crack of (very remarkable) Doris Salcedo’s 2007 art work, Shibboleth, at Tate Modern in London.

Columbian artist Salcedo created a fissure in the floor of Tate Modern which ran the length of the vast converted Turbine Hall. It wasn’t wide enough to provoke fear, but it was profoundly disconcerting, seemingly reaching to the foundations of one of Europe’s most respected cultural institutions.

And, unlike the crack in my waking vision, this abyss drew people (including me...I visited multiple times) towards it. Kids would lie on the floor and stretch their arms down. Adults would lean their bodies over and peer deep in to it. Walk the length of it. Puzzle over the meaning. Why such an establishment would allow its floor to be ruined. What to make of it.

In modern usage, a shibboleth is a kind of linguistic password. A (brutal) short cut to determining whether someone is in or out of your group or tribe. Shibboleths are used in times of war to weed out enemies and spies, and in times of ‘peace’ to keep communities ‘pure’. If someone is unable to use a word or phrase in a particular way, that person can be identified as an outsider and kept at a distance or punished accordingly.

(I wonder which shibboleths are live for you right now? Which words or phrases help you figure out who is ‘friend’ or ‘foe’? Who you’ll let ‘in’ and who you’ll keep ‘out’?)

The word shibboleth is taken from a story in the Hebrew Bible where one tribe, the victorious Gileadites, want to prevent another tribe, the defeated Ephraimites, from fleeing back across the Jordan River to their own land. Each person trying to cross had to say the word shibboleth, which was impossible for the Ephraimites, who had no ‘sh’ sound in their dialect so pronounced the word with a ‘s’ and were therefore exposed as the enemy and slaughtered (even though they were essentially all ‘brothers’).

Salcedo’s crack invites us to look down, in to the experience of those we exclude and reject. Her work always focusses on political violence, and here she highlights the dangers of crossing borders, or thresholds. What those of us with power do with those of us that don’t fit. That we don’t want. The inhuman conditions many experience in the apparently ‘developed’ world, and how often those people are immigrants (a live subject, once again).

Salcedo considers Columbia to be in a permanent state of ‘catastrophe’, but in Europe many have had the ‘privilege’ (until now perhaps) of being able to pretend that isn’t happening beneath our feet. Back in the Turbine Hall, if we look down in to the crack we witness ‘catastrophe’. But the spaciousness of the hall, and our familiarity with cultural institutions, trains us to look up. In which case we can carry on regardless, barely noticing the tear in the foundation of the Earth. The Silent Cry.

And my question, to link back to my talk of Elves and gladness and cracks down the length of a continent, is...well...what happens to Western spirituality...or spirituality that is rooted in the Jewish Christian tradition...when it remembers (as many, particularly the poor and marginalised, have never forgotten) that Jesus walks along the base of that crack?

The word ‘shibboleth’ can mean ‘stream’. Hence the resonance of the singing stream of my journal sketch, the glad song of the dark crack in my vision, and this practice of being drawn, at the Tate, to the edge of the abyss. Looking down in to the suffering of the world.

What would happen if we washed further upstream for a while? Closer to the mountains. In water more alive with the gladness of the bright morning.

What if we left the murkiness of our current shibboleths for a moment...those that alert us to ‘-isms‘ and ‘-obias’, ‘-ogynys’, ‘-okeness’ and collectively wash our hoard in faster flowing fresher waters that ruthlessly purge our souls. Which doesn’t meant those judgements aren’t valid. But perhaps we can hold them with a little more humility.

What if we step towards the cracks? They will swallow us up at some point anyway. So rather be intentional? And what if those of us that fear them can learn from those of us that don’t?

What practices can lead us there? Can give us courage to stay long enough to hear gladness through the pain of renunciation. To listen for notes from the resounding Deep.

Jesus tells us quite plainly that it is the meek that will inherit the earth.10 Or the gentle-strong, as my poet friend calls them in this exquisite song. Somewhere along the way that knowledge must have got lost.

What if that word...meek...is the shibboleth for these times? And what if most of us can’t say it?

What if washing in abysmal waters is our only way to retrieve such a word. Waters that wrench from our grasp not just our worst, but our best too. Leaving us, if only for a moment, empty handed. Just like those crossing borders, from whom life itself has often taken everything.

I may lose my world, but perhaps I inherit the Earth.

*****

May we find courage to wash further up stream.
May those abysmally glad waters refresh us. Make us meeker.
May Beauty crack us open. Give us ears to hear gladness at the core of the Earth.
May we look down.
And may we be astonished.

In the name of all that is good and true and beautiful (including the Elves),

Amen.

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A bit more...

You might want to watch this incredible conversation with Doris Salcedo (I will write more about her work in a later post).

And you might want to follow ’s experiments with a ‘joyous oikonomia’.

I am learning so much from ’s hope-full work around practices that help us to look down, and her stunning book Found & Ground: a practical guide to making your own foraged paints.

And, whilst writing this piece, I felt deep resonance with this poem, Past Curfew, that just gifted us.

Finally, if you are looking for others that are fumbling for co-ordinates in the dark...looking for practices that draw us further upstream...you might want to join this five week online-space (pockets, patterns and practices), hosted by Anna and which starts on 6/7 November.

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‘It is not...that Christianity can stand here at its ancient gate, innocent of the aggressions of the West, ready to receive refugees from secular modernity.

It may be the case, however, that we who repent the spectacular failure of Christendom to do justice, practice kindness or walk humbly with our God, are ready for new and stranger coalitions’.

Catherine Keller
Face of the Deep: a theology of becoming

The Tuning Fork will listen for sounds...feel for frequencies... from the resounding Deep (תְּהוֹם - Tehom).

For the ‘Silent Cry’.

A mystical name for G_d, ‘whose divine power is not grounded in domination and commandment’.

The Silent Cry is unearthed by bodies, not brains. It is embodied treasure.

So The Tuning Fork will practice theo-poeisis, more than theo-logos. Drawing from lived experience. Felt knowledge. Embodied practice. Hebraic thought, which happens in the heart (לֵב - Lev).1

My name is Vanessa and I am an artist, spiritual director, and practical theologian.

I create hospitable spaces for people outside (and inside) of religion to be encountered by aliveness in the Jewish-Christian tradition.

I hope The Tuning Fork might become such a space.

Perhaps my essays might become receptacles that people can use to draw from the deeper imaginal waters...the deep wells...of the Jesus traditions in order to return home and water their own lands.

I won’t be trying to convince anyone of anything. I just create spaces for encounter.2

I write from my body. And I write as a woman.

The Christian tradition forgot about women and it forgot about the body. Of the human and of the earth.

It then condemned those that hadn’t.

It forgot its Jewish roots. There is nothing abstract about the Hebrew Bible. It is embodied. Of the earth.

Perhaps re-membering the tradition can bear good fruit for these days.

Emerging at last from an underground-dark-night kind of time, I find, to my amazement, that I am carrying baskets laden with fruit, which I am glad to begin to share.

I hold knowledge in my body.

I have carried in my body, for the last twenty years, anticipation for a time when wider culture in the ‘West’ would encounter more directly (i.e. unmediated by church or academy) the fierce beauty of the Jesus traditions and the radical imagination of the Bible.

(Which doesn’t mean I don’t respect the role of church or academy...it just means something more feral is happening alongside).

From where I stand, it seems such a time is arriving.

I was encountered by Jesus on a silent retreat at the top of a mountain in India in 2001.

On returning home to the UK, words spilled out of my mouth about a Jesus that was free to move in ways that weren’t ‘Christian’, and theologies that would more directly serve life on the ground.

At the time I didn’t really know what I was talking about. But, through years of practice, failure, and deep conversation, I may have a better idea now.

For the last while I (like many others I’m sure) have positioned my body in that seemingly not-yet time-space and behaved as if such a place existed.

When I’ve met people feeling their way in to such a wilderness place, I’ve been able to wave and say ‘it’s here...it exists’.

My friends in that wilderness have been dead poets, mystics and prophets.

Martin Buber. Dorothy Soelle. The Jewish Prophets. Simone Weil. Rubem Alves. Abraham J. Heschel. Rilke. Audre Lorde. Julian of Norwich. J.R.R. Tolkien. Jacques Derrida. William Stringfellow.

And some living ones too.

Catherine Keller. Walter Brueggemann. Bayo Akomolafe. Wilda Gafney. Willie Jennings. Alastair McIntosh and others.

This edge-place with no name is not, and never will be, Christian.

It is a liminal space. A threshold place. Of mutual vulnerability. Of encounter.

A crucible of re-imagining. Re-enchantment.

A place, perhaps, of an-atheism.

Of a culture re-encountering G_d after the death of God. And not knowing what to call them.3

Resisting domestication. Listening for the Silent Cry.

It is a place of ‘religio-secular alliance’4...the ‘new and stranger coalitions’ that Keller mentions above.

Of people drawing from the prophetic edge of the Jewish-Christian tradition as a means to ‘infect’ the atmosphere with a spirit of hope (not optimism), love and ‘responsibility for the world’.5

An edge deep enough to ‘offer symbols that are adequate to the horror and massiveness of experience which [otherwise] evokes numbness and requires denial’.6

A positive kind of climate change.

It does not replace Church. Though church (ekklesia...a ‘summons to assemble’) may often happen along the way.7

There is feasting in that wilderness.

Invitation to deep conversation... dialogue... between a drenched ancient tradition and a parched contemporary culture. Between lovers of the Earth and lovers of the Word.

We take our shoes off (particularly ‘religious’ ones) and become teachable. It is holy ground.

I offer my writing to those ‘tables’...or circles. In service of those conversations.

I will not be defending the Jewish-Christian tradition.8 But I will be sharing from my experience within it.

And I will be writing for people that don’t consider themselves religious, but want to encounter the prophetic imagination of that tradition.

Its fierce beauty.

Its resistance to being co-opted by contemporary ideologies...both left and right.

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You can find out more about me here, can listen to my reflections on Land, Eros & Genesis 1 here, and can read how people experience me as a person here (tho admittedly only the good stuff).

I will post an essay every 2-3 weeks, with not much going on, initially at least, in between.

They will be freely available, but if you would like to support me financially nonetheless that would be VERY helpful. Putting my experience into words takes me a long time, and I am entirely self-employed. So if my writing can find a way to sustain itself, the rest of my life will make a lot more sense.

Painting my own - ‘Into the Deep’
Tuning Fork (lino print) last minute logo thanks to

(Over time it should become clear why I speak of ‘G_d’, rather than God, or G-d, and why I speak of the ‘Jewish-Christian’, rather than ‘Judeo-Christian’, tradition)

And p.s.9

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