Pilgrimage

My scallop shell of quiet…

Mike Farley1 Comment

Give me my scallop shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope’s true gage,
And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage. 

Sir Walter Raleigh

This fragment from a much longer poem is supposed to have been written immediately before Raleigh’s impending execution; in fact he was spared for the time being, and lived another 15 years or so. I found it printed on a small blue card, in All Saints Church at Godshill.

I’ve been vaguely familiar with these lines for many years, but I had forgotten them till I found this small card in a rack with other such things, at the back of the church, and bought it to bring home.

At the entrance to the church, in the porch by the south door, is a modern framed extract (beginning “You are not here to verify…”) from TS Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding‘. I have reproduced the whole section from which it is taken:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

I am not aware that the ancient church in this little village deep inland on the Isle of Wight has ever been a place of pilgrimage as such. If so, the fact is not mentioned in any history of the parish I have seen – though there was a Benedictine priory nearby at Appuldurcombe. But All Saints seems to me like a pilgrim church. Up a steep hill above the village, with its medieval lily cross on the wall above the reserved Blessed Sacrament, it somehow asks to be approached quietly, with reverence – not for the building, but for what it means – as at the end of a long journey.

Pilgrimage is increasingly a pattern that calls to me. As I wrote elsewhere here, “We cannot know the way; but our steps are indeed ordered by the Lord (Proverbs 20.24), if we love him, and will only draw near to him in prayer. He simply says, as he always does, ‘Go’, or even ‘What is that to you? Follow me!’ (John 21.21)” Somehow I find I no longer have the need I once had to be sure of the way.

[Originally published on The Mercy Blog, 26/11/2018]

The Grace of Journey

Mike Farley3 Comments

dav

What we usually call the real world is not Real at all. It is a flaky as they come. Laugh at it; weep over it; pray for it; take every opportunity to expose it; seek to redeem it. But never make the fatal mistake of thinking it is Real.

N. Gordon Cosby, Seized by the Power of a Great Affection (now out of print)

We live in a strange, in-between world, we humans, and mostly it is not at all what it seems. We learn, at school and by contact with most of the adults around us, that what we read of in the newspapers, and are taught in our classrooms, is The Real World, and that we had better pay proper attention to its demands and its particulars. But William Blake saw that

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

The Matrix series of movies touches this concept, in more ways perhaps than one, but for me the crucial expression is in CS Lewis’ luminous fable:

“Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”

Susan looked at him very hard and was quite sure from the expression on his face that he was not making fun of them.

“But how could it be true, Sir?” said Peter.

“Why do you say that?” asked the Professor.

“Well, for one thing,” said Peter, “if it was real why doesn’t everyone find this country every time they go to the wardrobe? I mean, there was nothing there when we looked; even Lucy didn’t pretend there was.”

“What has that to do with it?” said the Professor.

“Well, Sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time.”

“Are they?” said the Professor; and Peter did not know quite what to say.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

All true pilgrimage follows a path that runs along the fault-line between the real and the illusion, between the world of the senses and what underlies it, between space and time, and the eternal. Dee Dyas, director of the Centre for Pilgrimage Studies at the University of York, in examining the nature of  Christian pilgrimage today, and its origins in Scripture and elsewhere, distinguishes three strands that constitute the practical outworking of life’s journey itself as pilgrimage: moral pilgrimage – our journey of obedience to God; physical, or place, pilgrimage – our journey mapped onto the paths of the geographical world and its holy places; interior pilgrimage – our journey towards communion with God through prayer, solitude and contemplation. In a sense, all three of these question reality as social consensus. Our journey to God takes us along the thin places of the mind, as well as of geography, and pilgrimage is really no more than a way of understanding that, of making it tangible, somehow.

Pilgrimage, too, is a way to understand the grace by which God reveals to us the truth by experience and Scripture. Life is gift, and its journey. Pilgrimage is itself all grace: the gift of landscape and distance, the mercy that prayer is even possible. Kathleen Dowling Singh writes:

Grace is the end of illusion, the realisation of a far more expansive and complete sense of being, the peace that quite literally passeth understanding. The word “grace” itself finds its derivation in the Old French for “kindness”… The word… has the connotation of a blessing, a quality of the sacred, and implies beauty, ease, and fluidity. Grace seems endlessly responsive to our longing for it… grace and gratitude have their origin in the same source. That source is Spirit, the Ground of Being. Grace is the experience of finally, gratefully, relaxing the contraction of fearful separation and opening to Spirit as our own radiant splendour: knowing it, feeling it, entering it, as it enters us.

The Grace in Dying

Of Hiddenness and Pilgrimage

Mike Farley4 Comments

sdr

I wrote some years ago, “I feel an intense hunger for hiddenness; I long to be like a wren, living out its life deep in an ivied hedgebank, hardly seen among the dense leaves and underscrub. Somehow all this has to do with the heart, too: mine is too full to accomplish anything outwardly, still less to write more for the time being…”

Hiddenness is alien to our culture, and yet I often think that nothing lasting can really be achieved in the spiritual life without its being hidden from the illumination of being public. At times, it needs to be hidden even from ourselves – as Jesus said, “But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” (Matthew 6.3-4 NIV)

This is one of the things that gives me such a longing for the contemplative life itself. To pray, to study, with no possibility of reward, no reputation, no recognition. But I think there may be more to it than that.

I think music subsists as much in its silences as in its sounds: beyond the attack and decay of a note is the time before it was sounded, and the time after. Beyond its pitch is an infinity of vibrations that are not sound: beyond its scale degree are uncountable microtones, many of them well outside the range of human hearing.

We are this kind of thing ourselves – there was a time when each of us was not, and there will be a time after us, and yet our limited lives are shot through with eternity. A bit of the Spirit – who, being spirit, cannot be divided – is in each who lives, human or otherwise (Psalm 104.30), and so the perishable will somehow put on imperishability (1 Corinthians 15.42ff), and we shall “become word in an awareness of hidden things” (John the Solitary) – not in these glimpses, reflections in broken water, but in steady truth and certain rest.

Most of us do not yet know our own essential nature. Maybe we can feel the pain of limitation and the unease of contraction and the longing for liberation beyond self, but we cling to what’s familiar…

It is wise to know our own depths, to plumb and explore them, to allow our hearts to break open, to allow our minds to investigate that which they would rather deny, to allow ourselves to contemplate impermanence, to take death in – our own and the deaths of those we love…

Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging

We cannot find God by thinking about God, for God cannot be thought. Of course, we can, rightly, think about the consequences of God for human beings, and we can even think about what God is for us, but we cannot find our way to God by taking thought. Strictly speaking, we cannot travel to God either, though we can travel to places where we might be more likely to encounter God than some others – this is the point of pilgrimage. The journey itself becomes our way of finding God, rather than our destination.

God is the Ground of Being itself – as Paul said, quoting Epimenides, “For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17.28 NIV). There is, as George Fox famously remarked, “that of God” in each of us. And yet we are so often no more aware of God than of the air that, while sustaining our every breath and heartbeat, presses down on each of us with its tons of unfelt weight. Which is why we need practice, discipline, or even circumstance: contemplation, pilgrimage, or great joy or grief, to get our thinking, discriminating, judging selves out of the way of God.

Perhaps that is where the connection which I feel so deeply, almost instinctively, between pilgrimage and hiddenness comes in: that the thinking self tends to retreat in face of solitude and obscurity. I think this instinct may very well lie behind many of the classical forms of the monastic life – the habit, the taking of a monastic name (so that Darren Smith, for instance, becomes, say, Brother Bartholomew, on profession), even still in some cases the tonsure. The religious gives up their outer, secular identity in order more truly to become their own, inner identity in Christ. But these matters do not trouble – nor do they protect – those of us who are ordinary, secular laity. We have to find other ways – pilgrimage; such contemplative disciplines as the Jesus Prayer, centering prayer, Christian mediation, that can safely and reasonably be practiced among the duties of our everyday lives; or solitude, the simple choice to live alone.

Brother Ramon SSF, the Franciscan hermit and contemplative. wrote, in a small book now sadly out of print, Praying the Jesus Prayer (Marshall Pickering 1988), these words which so well connect today’s and yesterday’s posts on this blog:

It is difficult to speak of the aim or goal of [contemplative] prayer, for there is a sense in which it is a process of union which is as infinite as it is intimate… The meaning and design of the Jesus Prayer is an ever deepening union with God, within the communion of saints. It is personal, corporate and eternal, and the great mystics, in the Biblical tradition, come to an end of words. They say that “eye has not seen nor ear heard”, they speak of “joy unspeakable” and “groanings unutterable” and “peace that passes understanding”.

But there are some things which we can say, which are derivative of that central core of ineffable experience. We can say that such prayer contains within itself a new theology of intercession. It is not that we are continually naming names before God, and repeating stories of pain, suffering and bereavement on an individual and corporate level, but rather that we are able to carry the sorrows and pains of the world with us into such contemplative prayer as opens before us in the use of the Jesus Prayer. God knows, loves and understands more than we do, and he carries us into the dimension of contemplative prayer and love, and effects salvation, reconciliation and healing in his own way, using us as the instruments of his peace, pity and compassion.

Thus we can say that the “prayer of the heart” unites us with the whole order of creation, and imparts to us a cosmic awareness of the glory of God in both the beauty and the sadness of the world. The process of transfiguration for the whole world has begun in the Gospel, but it will not be completed until the coming of Christ in glory. And until that time we are invited, through prayer, to participate in the healing of the world’s ills by the love of God. And if we participate at such a level, then we shall know both pain and glory. The life and ministry of Jesus in the gospels reveal this dimension, for Jesus was at one and the same time the “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief”, and the transfigured healer, manifesting the glory of the Father upon the holy mountain.

The Restless Heart

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Lord, you are great!
And worthy of our praise!
Your strength and your wisdom
Are beyond measure.

We long to praise you,
though we are burdened by our mortality.
We are conscious of sin,
we long to praise you.
For you have so made us that we long for you,
and our heart is restless until it finds rest in you…

Lord, I shall seek you by calling to you,
In calling to you I shall believe, for your Word has come to us.
My faith will call out to you, my Lord.
Faith is your gift to me, through Jesus…

Confessions: St Augustine tr. Benignus O’Rourke OSA

We cannot help it – we are strangers and pilgrims by our very nature (1 Peter 2.11 AV) – a people called out from among those who live only among material longings, to long for God. How this happens is probably a mystery. Certainly it is grace. We are called; and yet that invitation is for all, even for those who do not answer (Revelation 3.20). Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wrote:

What does it mean to be holy? Who is called to be holy? We are often led to think that holiness is a goal reserved for a few elect. St Paul, instead, speaks of God’s great plan and says: “even as he (God) chose us in him [Christ] before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him” (Eph 1:4). And he was speaking about all of us. At the centre of the divine plan is Christ in whom God shows his Face, in accord with the favour of his will. The Mystery hidden in the centuries is revealed in its fullness in the Word made flesh. And Paul then says: “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col 1:19)…

We cannot settle down in a broken world. This is what lies at the heart, I think, of the Bodhisattva Vows of Mahayana Buddhism – a compassion that will not abandon the suffering of created things.

As strangers, we cannot be at home among the pain and injustice that are an inescapable part of this time-bound world into which we were born. As pilgrims, we wander in search of the mercy of God. Like Augustine, we call to God, though our longing itself is through grace. Our weakness, our lack, our longing, is the place where grace finds us: “But [God] said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.” (2 Corinthians 12.9 NIV)

Thus I have found myself called back again and again to the Jesus Prayer. Laurence Freeman once wrote that “sinners make the best contemplatives.” The sense of being separated, marginalised, is in itself a grace, strangely. Jesus himself said that he came (Luke 5.32) not to call the righteous, but sinners. Perhaps it is in accepting this that we open ourselves to the grace and mercy of God in Christ, regardless of our external circumstances. It is no coincidence that the classical form of the Jesus Prayer ends with the words, “a sinner.” To me it seems that knowing oneself as imperfect, fallible, poor in spirit (Matthew 5.3) is essential to living in that mercy.

As I wrote a while ago, our prayer, as contemplatives, is not something that is for ourselves alone, nor even – as if that were not sufficient – simply our response to our perceiving of the immensity of God’s love. I think this cannot be emphasised strongly enough. We need to understand that our life of prayer, especially if we are called to the contemplative life, is not a solipsistic, “self-actualising” activity, or some kind of relaxation technique aimed at producing a pleasant, stress-free state of mind, still less a quest for any kind of psychedelic experience. The contemplative vocation is as much as anything a call to intercession, and to a life lived in the shadow of the Cross.

In the end, our only destination is mercy. Like Ironside’s Door, it may look different from either side: we cry to God for his mercy – but having received it, we realise it was freely given all along.

Thin Places

Mike Farley1 Comment

dav

The term “thin place” has occasionally been overused, but it does seem to me to contain a truth that has everything to do with pilgrimage. Iona, Lindisfarne, the ruined priory of Llanthony in the Black Mountains of Wales: these are places whose transparency to the divine goes back to the earliest days of the faith in these islands – perhaps beyond. Alex Klaushofer calls them sites “where the boundary between heaven and earth [is] permeable”; Mark D Roberts says, “a thin place is defined as a place where God’s presence is known with particular immediacy.”

Michelle Van Loon writes of getting lost with her husband in Jerusalem, and ending up at the Western Wall, the last intact remnant of the Temple that was destroyed in AD 70, during the First Jewish-Roman War:

We were standing in a thin place.

Many of us have had these experiences even when we haven’t travelled a step. These moments during a time of worship or prayer, during a period of great sorrow or trial can undo us with an overwhelming awareness of God’s nearness, holiness, and love. Eternity invades time, and the membrane between heaven and earth seems thin as silk. It takes a pilgrim to breathe the atmosphere there.

To me, this is the very essence of pilgrimage. Perhaps such places are not reachable without an inward journey; which can, it seems, be brought about as much by stillness and prayer as by an outward, physical journey.

I have found the thinnest of places along the shore of Lake Galilee, on the beach where Jesus is said to have cooked breakfast for the disciples (John 21.12), on the morning when he restored Peter. I have found the membrane drawn thin as the green light under the trees in the grounds of Walsingham Priory. And I have found the silent air in my own room barely concealing the nearness of God. Pilgrimage contains its own homecoming, even in the journey itself.

CS Lewis suggests that our own soul may be shaped, like a key, to unlock a particular door in the house with many rooms (John 14.2). Each of us is utterly unique, and the route of our pilgrimage, whether it is as apparently well-trodden as the Camino de Santiago, or as well-hidden as our own room (Matthew 6.6), is our own thread in God’s nearness, kept somehow for each of us alone. I think sometimes that these places carry such a charge of numinosity for each of us because they are, like God, outside time as we understand it – without duration, still, inaccessible to understanding or to thought.

A Long Pilgrimage

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This is one of the last posts I made on both my earlier blogs (see this blog’s About page) and since it led directly to my establishing A Long Restlessness, I thought it would be right to begin with it here:

Over the years I have had more than thirty homes. Eight of the moves, starting before I was able to walk, were fitted in before I was 20, thanks to my peripatetic mother. I must have caught the bug, for I simply carried on, as jobs and personal circumstances moved me around the country; my church affiliations have changed too – not quite so often! – sometimes along with my address. And yet I have longed for contentment, envied those whose settled lives enabled them simply to stay put and watch the seasons change, and the years bring the patterns of history across a settled landscape.

Michelle Van Loon, in her moving book Born to Wander: Recovering the Value of our Pilgrim Identity, quotes Søren Kierkegaard:

Faith expressly signifies the deep, strong, blessed restlessness that drives the believer so that he cannot settle down at rest in this world, and therefore the person who has settled down completely at rest has also ceased to be a believer, because a believer cannot sit still as one sits with a pilgrim’s staff in one’s hand – a believer travels forward.

Pilgrimage, though, is more than moving on. Van Loon (ibid.) distinguishes three “parallel, sometimes overlapping streams” of pilgrimage in Scripture:

  • Moral pilgrimage focuses on everyday obedience to God.
  • Physical pilgrimage emphasises a bodily journey to a holy site in order to seek God.
  • Interior pilgrimage describes the pursuit of communion with God through prayer, solitude and contemplation.

Restlessness, as Michelle Van Loon points out, is potentially a powerful compass. As she reminds us, St Augustine of Hippo wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” My own restlessness has been an odd alternation between my own self-will, and (often misplaced) longings, and God’s calling me back on to the path to “communion with [him] through prayer…” Again and again I am reminded of Proverbs 20.24: “All our steps are ordered by the Lord; how then can we understand our own ways?”

But how can we know that we are on the right path? Gradually, I am coming to the conclusion that we cannot. When God called Abram, he merely said, we are told, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you” (Gen 12.1) “The land I will show you…” Not the land I have shown you, the land to which I have given you directions and a grid reference. “So Abram went, as the Lord had told him…” (v. 4) And Abram wandered around all over the place, from adventure to misadventure, not knowing the way; but in the end he came to the place where God could say to him, “Raise your eyes now, and look from the place where you are, northwards and southwards and eastwards and westwards…” (Gen 13.14) and Abram saw the land to which he had been called.

We cannot know the way; but our steps are indeed ordered by the Lord, if we love him, and will only draw near to him in prayer. He simply says, as he always does, “Go”, or even “What is that to you? Follow me!” (John 21.21)