“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees:

A Story For December

Strange man

(Go to Intimations) and somewhere else in the text I mention flowers

It must be twenty or so years ago that I saw some of William Turner’s paintings for the first time. I was moving around the museum where I had this experience for some time looking at paintings in the classical mode before I entered the slightly darkened room devoted to Turner’s paintings. Compared to the other wonderful paintings I had seen that day I was struck by something significantly different about his. It was something about their brightness and colouring that immediately engaged me. Maybe it was because I am so partial towards the colours he uses, colours I associate with sunrise, with life and with resurrection. It was as if his impressionistic use of such radiant colours gave me the feeling that something new was afoot, something revolutionary.

Only on second thoughts
It was only when I reflected on Mike Leigh’s film about the final years of William Turner’s life that I realised how much the revolutionary causes he was involved in appealed to me. But this was not my initial reaction to the film as it portrays him as he was in real life, a rough diamond who was awkward, gruff, bearish, obdurate, with only the odd glimpse of redeeming charm. For example, he is indifferent to Hannah, his housekeeper, whose life centres on him and at one point in the story he grossly abuses her. His art was what many of those close to him were there to serve and his life echoed the selfish expectation of the artist that William Wordsworth in his later years lamented.

My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought,
As if Life`s business were a summer mood;
As if all needful things would come unsought
To genial faith, still rich in genial good;
But how can he expect that others should
Build for him, sow for him, and at his call
Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?

A strange mix of a man
William Turner was born in London in 1775 and when his mother died young he developed a very close relationship with his father. He recognised William’s talent and supported him by exhibiting his works in the family’s shop. Though Turner was largely self-taught he received at 14 a scholarship to the Royal Academy and though he got early recognition he remained withdrawn and taciturn. At the age of 26 he was admitted to the Royal Academy and soon after he became financially independent and rented a place in Harley Street.

Turner travelled a lot throughout Europe and it was on a trip to Italy that he was captivated by the southern light and began to capture it in his paintings and thereafter became “the painter of light”. Throughout his life he was fascinated by dramatic scenes of nature especially those involving ships and water. He kept his technique a secret and remained very guarded about his private life.

Many of his most famous pictures were created in the last few years of his life, during which Turner retreated ever more from social life because of ill health. At his death in 1851 he left 300 oil paintings and almost 20,000 drawings and watercolours to the English state. Many of them can now be seen in the Tate Gallery.

Mr Turner as the film portrays him
As portrayed in the film Turner is a man of immense energy always on the move. He is the original plain, blunt man who has little time for the sophisticated and often superficial talk that surrounded the art world of his time. He never lost his cockney accent even though the people he associated with at the Royal Academy as a student and later as a member would have looked down on him for his lack of refinement. He was a big man who did not take exception to the artificial world he lived in but challenged it with gutsy humour. He was adventurous, travelling around England and abroad on his own, endlessly giving expression to his immense creative powers, sketching everything that caught his eye. In Rome alone on one of his visits he did 2000 sketches of buildings that interested him.

An initial sense of distaste
I left the cinema with a sense of distaste for the uncouth character of Turner as he is portrayed in the film. This is probably because I find it hard to stay with the stories told in films, novels or biographies if I do not warm to their central characters. In the final scene of the film Mike Leigh does not leave us with a very good taste in our mouth as we contemplate Hannah, Turner’s housekeeper for 40 years. Cut out of his life we see her as a demented old woman wandering around the house where she had devoted herself totally to him even though he never recognised this. Perhaps she is a symbol of the other people Turner used and abandoned; he lived the life of a bachelor, disregarding most of the women in his life and disavowing the resulting children and grandchildren because they got in the way of his work

Intimations of the age of authenticity
However, later when I reflected on the bigger picture of William Turner that lay behind the film, especially on the role his paintings played in the Romantic movement and what that led on to, I began to see him in a kinder and warmer light. Against the background of the extremely authoritarian and moralistic nature of the Victorian age Turner’s life is an extraordinary statement of authenticity.

He was always his own man, true to his roots in London’s East End both in his ideas and in the way he voiced them. He took delight in confronting the superficiality of his age, the artificial refinement of the art world of his time and of the phoniness of their way of talking about it. There is an amusing scene in the film in which the son of one of his patrons launches into a convoluted intellectual analysis of one of Turner’s paintings while the no-nonsense artist sits there barely able to contain his scorn.

Like many of his fellow Romantics Turner gave us a preview of what Charles Taylor in his book, The Secular Age, calls the age of authenticity. This was initiated by the Romantics like Wordsworth but came to full flower in the 60s when the authority of experience sought a better balance with the experience of authority that had prevailed since the Victorian age and Vatican 1.

What flowered in the 60s
The authority of experience was lyrically expressed, for example, in the songs of the Beatles as they gave an honest voice to the age-old dream of the joy we seek in love and relationships, not hiding how limited our experience of it can be most of the time. This was a wonderful time when the Second Vatican Council or Vatican 2 gave fresh expression to the human dream and how the persons of the Trinity seek with a passion to realize it. To rediscover this vision they had to return to how this vision and value system were experienced in the first millennium. What came out of this re-emergence of the Christian dream was a new way of seeing ourselves and of valuing our worth that required a whole new style of loving and relating. This new style was what John O’Malley in his book, What Happened At Vatican 2? says is the most important thing to come out of Vatican 2

Of Courtesy, it is much less
Than Courage of Heart or Holiness,
Yet in my Walks it seems to me
That the Grace of God is in Courtesy.
Hilaire Belloc

Where the Grace of God is
“Vatican 2 taught many things, but few more important than the style of relationships that was to prevail in the church. Its style of discourse was the medium that conveyed the message. It did not, therefore ‘define’ the teaching but taught it on almost every page through the form and vocabulary it adopted. In so doing it issued an implicit call for a change of style – a style less autocratic and more collaborative, a style willing to seek our and listen to different viewpoints and to take them into account, a style eager to find common ground with the other, a style open and above board, a style less unilateral in its decision-making, a style committed to fair play and to working with persons and institutions outside the Catholic community, a style that assumes innocence until guilt is proven, a style that eschews secret oaths, anonymous denunciations and inquisitional tactics.”

The re-emergence of the dream innate to us
There is another aspect of the Romantic Movement that Turner’s paintings give us a preview of. This was the re-emergence of a feeling for the sublime in an age when society was gradually being emptied of the experience of God and of the transcendent. Where we might associate the Romantic movement with finding the sublime in nature, writers like Jane Austen found it in the world of love and relationships. In her stories the sublime is celebrated in the realm of love and relationships. But where Jane Austen focused on how the human dream emerged for the gentry, George Elliot celebrated how it is realised for country people and Charles Dickens focuses his attention on how the dream of ordinary people struggles to be realised in the grim world created by the industrial revolution.

Glad Sight
Glad sight whenever new with old
Is joined through some dear homeborn tie;
The life of all that we behold
Depends upon that mystery.
Vain is the glory of the shy,
The beauty vain of field or grove,
Unless, while with admiring eye
We gaze, we also learn to love.
William Wordsworth

It is in Wordsworth most of all that we see the re-emergence of the sublime in nature, in the lives of ordinary people and in his rediscovery of a God in whose providence or dream for him he can trust.

The Excursion
Yet I will praise Thee with impassioned voice;
My lips, that may forget Thee in the crowd,
Cannot forget Thee here; where Thou hast built,
For Thy own glory, in the wilderness!
– Come labour, when the worn-out frame requires
Perpetual Sabbath; come, disease and want,
And sad exclusion through decay of sense;
But leave me unabated trust in Thee,
And let Thy favour, to the end of life,
Inspire me with ability to seek
Repose and hope among eternal things –
Father of heaven and earth! and I am rich,
And will possess my portion in content!
Where the sublime is ultimately found

A relationship we all aspire to

In Turner’s life it took a long time for what is sublime or beautiful about love and the dream it inspires to captivate him but it eventually did in the person of Mrs Booth. It was however his father who laid the foundation for this experience in the relationship of equality, respect and deep affection he sought with his son; it is a relationship everyone aspires to. Turner’s father built this relationship in the way he accepted and affirmed his son, recognising his child’s talent and displaying his pictures in the shop where he worked. In the film Turner’s father plays many roles: he is part servant, part caterer, part his PR man as well as his number one fan. We get our most intimate glimpse into their relationship in how profoundly Turner was affected by his father’s death; he was so bereft at this loss that it took a long time for him to get his bearings again.

Someone who put manners on him

It was on this foundation that Mrs Booth built. Initially she came to know him when he stayed at her boarding house in the south of England and eventually when he moved in with her after the death of her second husband. From the start of their relationship she charmed him with her affection, humour and common sense. It was with the genius she had for loving and relating that she gradually tamed Turner and brought out the best in him.

Opening a window onto the stars
Mr Turner presents us with a classic case of how the 10% or so of ourselves that is defective can so easily capture and imprison us. We become so fixated with the fraction of human nature that is deficient that it is difficult for us to become aware of and to savour all that is good and even beautiful about ourselves and others. It must have been with this source of illusion in mind that Jesus told the following story:

” Let both of them grow together until the harvest”
“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’” Matthew 13:24-30

It is only when we learn to live with the weeds amid the wheat that we can focus on the 90% of life that is a window onto the stars.

The “Ah” of wonder

The “Ah” of wonder
Attempting a definition,
A brief intense forgetting of self
A leap away from the “me”
When the rose
Unfolds,
When the stars
Arise
And the eyes
Widen with love
For everything that is.
A Samaan-Hanna

A Story For November

What strikes me most strongly about a film I saw recently called Ida is how it gripped me in spite of the fact that the person the film is about remains such a mystery throughout. What is going on in her mind and heart is drip fed to us more in deeds and gestures more than in words. What she reveals about herself in the end can be understood only in terms our basic call to search for the Holy Grail and to answer the question it asks us: Whom does the Grail serve? But more about this below

The story of Ida
The story told in the film Ida takes place in Poland in 1962. Anna is a beautiful eighteen-year-old woman preparing to become a nun. She has lived all her life in the convent where the nuns agreed to look after her when she was orphaned as a baby. She learns that she has a relative she must visit before taking her vows. The relative turns out to be her mother’s sister, Wanda and Anna soon finds out that she is a former hard-line Communist state prosecutor notorious for sentencing priests and others to death. She also finds out that their family is Jewish and that her real name is Ida. As a result of these revelations the two women set out on a journey to discover each other and what happened to their family. Ida has to choose between her birth identity and the religion that saved her from the massacres of the Nazi occupation of Poland. Wanda too must confront decisions she made in the past when she chose loyalty to the cause before her family.

A study of character nothing distracts us from
The setting of the story has all the starkness of winter. It is shot in black and white and we are surrounded throughout the film by the grey light of winter. The effect of this on the landscape is all around us and its chilliness gets into our bones. In this setting the backgrounds of Ida and Wanda gradually emerge. The film portrays for us the atmosphere of depression that followed the second world war and the takeover of Poland by the Russian communist regime. From films like, The Lives of Others we get some idea of how oppressive this takeover was. We do not encounter the people who ruled Poland at the time of the film but we do see the effects of their rule on the people Ida and Wanda meet on their journey; their lives are shrouded in silence as it is safer to say nothing about the present or the past.

Wanda herself is the closest we get to a revelation of what communism did to people. As a young woman she was an activist in the ‘revolution’ and became a ruthless judge notorious for handing down the death sentence. She is now bored with the system and has become rudderless and irresponsible, relying on alcohol to keep her going. The film focuses on these two Jewish women and we experience the immense guilt, fear and anger that surrounds the people they meet as they journey into the tragedy that surrounds their family. However, for all its sombre subject matter, there is warmth here too in the relationship between the two women at the centre of its focus; a warmth that is personal and spiritual as they grow in understanding of the very different worlds they live in.

The focus of the film
Nothing distracts us from the film’s focuses on these two contrasting pictures of Ida and Wanda; all else struggles to be seen in the landscape of the larger picture. Though the focus remains on these two woman those who are involved in their story are also the subject of intense scrutiny. How their whole person is involved in the way they love and relate or fail to do so means that we identify with them and the circumstances in which they lived as if we were living in the period in which the film is set. The portraits the film paints of these two woman is also a study of two contrasting visions of what life is about, two apposed sets of values and lifestyles; The stark contrast of these two cultures is personified by Wanda and Ida.

Two worlds portrayed by Wanda and Ida
The world that Wanda personifies is that of communist controlled Poland of the early 60s. We see how power has corrupted people in their loss of basic human values such as respect, tolerance and forgiveness. We see in the people they meet on their journey the depression that results from the fear, the guilt, and the frustration they live with. Ida on the other hand chooses to live in a place that, to the worldly eye of Wanda, seems dull and constricting; a waste of a life as she sees it. How Ida sees life and what she values remains a mystery and though we get to know more about her as the film comes to a close, what she reveals about herself is spoken more in deeds than words or in any show of emotion. We are left wondering what lies behind her intense dedication that pervades the film. We wonder whether it is because she is very young and has been brought up in the very unusual circumstances of a convent or whether behind her inscrutability she has a mind and heart of her own.

Our exposure to the circumstances in which she was reared is brief but what we see of it is humane but strictly regulated and devotional. It is like what I knew in the early 50s when I went to the seminary and had my enthusiasm challenged by the strict demands the system made on us. From the perspective of 60 years later however it seems cold and formal. There is humanity and respect in the way the mother superior treats Ida and the need she has to deal with her past even if this means leaving the safe confines of the convent where Ida is at home. The mother superior knows a lot more about Ida than we do and she must think a lot of her if she believes that Ida is strong enough to withstand the shock that living outside the environment of the convent will be.

A woman in search of the Grail
As she sets out on her very challenging journey we wonder if she has been programmed by being brought up in a convent and whether her strict and stoical attitude is but a protective shell that might crumble when she comes to realise that life outside the convent has attractive possibilities to offer, ones that she has not been aware of. The other alternative, and we suspect this is true, judging from her fierce determination to hold on to the way of life she has chosen, is that her heart is set on the essential Christian quest which is to seek the Holy Grail.

The Grail Legend
The Holy Grail is the chalice and platter used by Christ at the Last Supper. It is kept in the castle of the Grail King but since he is unaware of its presence he and his whole kingdom are afflicted by a debilitating illness that nobody seems capable of healing, and so the land lies desolate.

In a remote part of the kingdom there lives a simple, naive youth called Parsifal. On being trained as a knight he is given three rules to live by: He must not seduce or be seduced, and he must seek the Holy Grail. When he finds it he must seek an answer to the question, “Whom does the Grail serve?” With these instructions in mind Parsifal set off in search of the Holy Grail.

After many years searching he eventually meets the Grail King who invites him to his castle. When Parsifal fails to recognise the Holy Grail that resides in the castle and to ask the crucial question, the king is not healed and the land continues to be desolate. So Parsifal has to set out on his journey again and on it he is seduced by many things and diverted from his quest until after many wanderings he forgets all about the Holy Grail.

Eventually, he meets a hermit who absolves his sins and gives him instructions on how to find the Grail castle. When he finds it, he asks the vital question and receives the following answer,

The Grail must serve the Grail King.

As a result of becoming aware, with Parsifal’s help, of the Holy Grail and the need to devote himself to serving the One it represents the Grail King is healed. He and his kingdom are cured and their desolation gives way to joy as they learn to acknowledge the presence of the Holy Grail at the centre of their lives.

The ultimate quest

There is a hunger in each of us for love, for what above all else makes and sustains us as people who as made in “the image of God” are made for love. (Gn 1:28) Like Parsifal, we seek to satisfy this hunger we are for God in a multiplicity of ways. We allow ourselves to be seduced, for example, by ‘the good life’, by making something of ourselves in the eyes of the world or by irresponsibly drifting through life. However, if we are to be truly content, we must face the fact that nothing or no one can satisfy this essential hunger that must be put at the service of the Grail King and of the love he passionately wants to share with us. This is his love of us “to the end” that he invites us to remember at mass. (Jn 13:1) In the book called She that Robert Johnson wrote on the psychology of the feminine he makes this enlightening comment.

It is unjust to burden any human being with the expectation that he or she can satisfy our grail hunger.

People who give us an impression of what love is like
An intimate relationship with another person gives us a very valuable impression of what the Holy Grail is like and can make it a lot more real, tangible and credible. The person that offers Ida such a human experience of love is a young musician whom Wanda gives a lift to as she feels he may get Ida’s heart beating again. This good looking young man, let us call him David, plays in a band and represents the emergence of the rock culture and the world of the 60s. He thus represents something new at the time when young people began to voice again the joy of love and relationships as well as all the complexities and limitations of these. This emergence of the dream after the drabness of the post war years of the late forties and fifties was attractive for Ida as she sat listening to David and his band, though still dressed in her full habit and veil.

David became increasingly attractive as he sought to win her over and yet respected the possibility of her wanting to follow her religious vocation. His gentle and deferential approach draws her into an intimate relationship but she wants to be sure of where a life with him might take her. He answers her enquiries as best he can by offering to take her with him as he travels along the coast from gig to gig. They could he suggests walk the beech together in his time off. But she keeps asking, “What then?” In response he opens up a series of possibilities, such as getting married, having a child and buying a house but after each of them, her question remains, “What then?” When he falls silent Ida, seeing no further possibilities, puts on her habit, ties up her hair, puts on her veil, collects her suitcase and leaves the house where they are staying.

W B Yeats in his poem What then? echoes what the inner voice of Ida is saying to her when she persists with her questioning, “What then?” The poem voices the belief that any claim to worldly perfection or fullness is inevitably proven wrong by the philosopher’s ghost.

What then?
His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
“What then?” sang Plato’s ghost. “What then?”

Everything he wrote was read,
After certain years he won
Sufficient money for his need,
Friends that have been friends indeed;
“What then?” sang Plato’s ghost. “What then?”

All his happier dreams came true –
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
Poets and Wits about him drew;
“What then?” sang Plato’s ghost. “What then?”

“The work is done,” grown old he thought,
‘According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,
Something to perfection brought’;
But louder sang that ghost, “What then?”

The film ends with a prolonged sequence in which we are allowed to study Ida’s determined face as she heads back along the road, presumably to the place where she wants to live a life that promises her what she really wants. It interested me that the traffic on the road was all going in the opposite direction to that Ida had set her heart on following. She is not deterred as she is sure of what she has chosen; she has tasted the alternatives and found them wanting.

More about our inner journey in search of the Holy Grail
In two of my books I have followed up this question that I am always asking myself and those too who accompany me in life, the question, What do YOU want?

The Search For Something More seeks to answer this perennial question on a human level. It is based on Erik Erikson’s four calls of adult life: to identity, to intimacy, to be generative and to integrity or wisdom.

Follow Your Dream looks at life’s basic quest of the Holy Grail from a Christian point of view.

What do YOU want?
Under courses in the menu above you will find one called, What do YOU want? This is designed to helps you to explore the unique wisdom about life you have accumulated over the years. It works on the principle that if you seek to find a genuine answer to the question, What do you want? the best thing to do is to explore where you have been on your journey so far, for the further ahead you wish to see the further back you need go.

Peter’s blog for October

A portrait of greatness where it really resides

This film tells the spectacular story of Christina Noble and how after she had reared her own family she went to Vietnam and provided the joy of a loving environment for 700,000 abandoned children. What makes her story so spectacular is that it paints a portrait of a truly great person whose greatness lay in the way she loved and related with children who were left on life’s rubbish heap. This way she had of relating was very authentic because it was rooted in the way she saw people and their true worth in spite of how they appeared against the background of the dreadful circumstances in which they were forced to live. Another aspect of her greatness was that she could find and bring to light the greatness of those she worked for without a note of condescension. Was this because she had lived in circumstances similar to these children when she was young and learned not just to survive but to surmount them and fulfil her human dream against all the odds? Was it this that enabled her to fulfil the dream of these children she worked with by providing them with an environment in which they found the happiness central to all our dreams? Her great gift was that she could draw the latent goodness and beauty out of those she met. I am sure it was the very human and earthy realism with which she did all this that prompted Deirdre O’Kane, who played the role of Christina in the film, to comment, “She’s like Ireland’s smoking, swearing and singing answer to Mother Teresa”.

A background that highlights this greatness
What makes Christina Noble’s achievement all the more remarkable is that her own background was a very troubled one. Her mother died when she was ten and her father was an alcoholic and completely irresponsible in the way he abandoned his children so that the four of them ended up in orphanages. When Christina left the orphanage at fifteen she got a job in a factory but had to sleep in a wood as she had no other place to go. Shortly after that she was raped by four men and became pregnant. The institution she went to to have the child had her son adopted as she had unknowingly signed an agreement allowing them to do this. She then left Dublin and went to Birmingham to be with a good friend of hers and found work in a fish and chip shop. She married and had three children but her relationship with her husband became so abusive that she fled with the children to London where she reared them on her own.

The dream that changed a million lives
When she had reared her children she went to Vietnam inspired by a dream she had when she lived in Birmingham. At the time of the dream she often witnessed horrific scenes from the war in Vietnam on the television where she worked. She was struck by the sheer destructiveness of the war and by what it was doing to the ordinary people and especially to their children. Among the images that made a deep impression on her was one of a naked child screaming with pain as it ran along a road in an attempt to escape the bombings. As a result of all of this she decided in 1987 to visit Vietnam.

As she wandered around Ho Chi Minh city she became aware of the number of children who were abandoned and homeless. Even though she did not speak their language she noticed how readily they responded to her gestures of concern for them. Then with a great amount of paper work and patient waiting she obtained a three month work permit. What won over those who were adjudicating her case in the end was the verse of an Irish song she asked permission to sing for them. This humour, charm, ingenuity and determination was to characterise all her dealings with the Vietnamese government, with those she sought funding from and it also characterised her relationship with God. The film is unusual in the well earthed sense of the transcendent it openly displays.

Knowing God in wrestling with life

The long endurance that opened her eyes to the Father’s face.
Christina Noble embodies in a very earthy way the fulfilment of our human dream and the deeply religious one she built on this. In her frequent dialogues with God inserted into the film God seems to be the father she never encountered. Hers is a very honest encounter with God and the film acknowledges this several times when she visits a church or a Buddhist shrine to unburden herself to one she confided in and sought guidance from in a most authentic way. At the end of the film just before the credits begin we are given details of all that she has so far achieved. Along with the 700,000 she has helped in the 20 or so clinics she has set up for abandoned children we are told that she still talks to God. At a time when so many areas of life have been emptied of God it is a great tribute to the makers of the film that they have given so much room to this striking aspect of Christina Noble’s life. The following poem of Jones Very opens up many aspects of Christina’s faith that the film can only intimate.

The Created
There is naught for thee by haste to gain;
‘Tis not the swift with me that win the race;
Through long endurance of delaying pain.
Thine opened eye shall see thy Father’s face;
Nor here nor there, where now thy feet would turn,
Thou wilt find him who ever seeks for thee;
But let obedience quench desires that burn,
And where thou art, thy Father too will be.
Behold! as day by day the spirit grows,
Thou see’st by inward light things hid before;
Till what God is, thyself, his image shows;
And thou dost wear the robe that first thou wore,
When bright with radiance from his forming hand,
He saw thee Lord of all his creatures stand.

We are God’s plan for self-revelation

“Give them an impression of who I am”
It is, however, in Christina’s own person that we are given a deep impression of the God she converses with and believes in. She is like the person in the following story who is sent to give people an impression of what the great king is like. There is a wonderful truth in the saying that the Holy Spirit needs bodies to communicate what love is like.

A young peasant lad was summoned by a great king to come and see him. When he arrived at the palace, the king said to him, “My kingdom is so large that I cannot meet all my people and touch their lives as I would want to. My wish is that you would give them an impression of who I am.”

As symbols of the new role he was to play, the king gave the youth a sceptre, a robe and a crown. Now, since he did not know the king, the poor lad was very confused about what he was being sent to do. He was too awe-struck to ask the king what he meant, so he went to consult a person whose wisdom he trusted who told him to go back to his farm and just be himself.

As time went on, more and more people came to visit him for they found in him a sympathetic ear and a compassionate heart. He gradually realised that this was what the great king had sent him to do. This was the way he was sent to give people an impression of what the Great King was like.

Made in the likeness of God

“Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his”
There are people in our own story or in the stories others tell us who enliven us by their acceptance, appreciation and concern. These people, such as our family and friends are significant in the sense that they put words on or define the love that makes and sustains us in life. They give us a very tangible impression of what the one who is love is like.

For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men`s faces.
G M Hopkins

A woman with style
There is something about the style with which people love and relate that if we take the time to notice it is “lovely” or beautiful in the deepest sense. The beauty that we find in nature or in art, though more obvious, cannot compare with this work of art that people, in the style with which they love and relate, are. Christina is portrayed in the film as a woman with style and this was the way she related with everyone but especially with children who were for her real persons to be engaged in real human relationships.

Deirdre O’Kane who played the part of Christina in the film says of her, “She is the most incredible human being I have ever met. I want the film to serve her properly… playing her is the biggest thing I’ve done in my career – by a mile,”. With her unfailing humour, charm, enthusiasm, determination, ingenuity and generosity Christina is a woman of stunning beauty, a wonderful human being who flowered amid so much squalor. She is a powerful expression of the reality that it is amid life’s limitations and mistakes that our dreams for ourselves and others, somehow keep emerging. Amid all the negativity that comes at us there are people like our parents, lovers and friends who are living proof that “flowers still grow there” amid the mess that life often seems to be.

Flowers Still Grow
You’re worried, my son, about people hating
And how this world is run, how this world is run.
You say it ain’t true, it’s dirt we’re made of
Often return to, often return.
Don’t search too long for this gold that you seek
It’s too deep to dig for and your arms too weak.
Don’t you worry, my son, about the dirt in the soil
Flowers still grow there, flowers still grow.

That man long ago with his low-down birth
Found his glory planted in the earth.
So don’t search too long for this gold that you seek;
It’s too deep to dig for and your arms too weak.
Don’t you worry, my son, about people hating,
Love is still the lord, love is still lord.
St Louis Jesuits CD – Wood Hath Hope

When I read a description of how the film came to be made I found another story that proved to me that flowers still grow there. It is the story of how Deirdre O”Kane and her husband Stephen Bradley brought this beautiful film to be. In order to buy the rights to Christina Noble’s two books, Bridge Across My Sorrows and Mama Tina they sold their home in Dublin and then over a six year period invested a huge amount of their time, energy and resources in coming to know Christina, writing the script and then undertaking the awesome task of directing the film as well as promoting it for a world-wide audience.

Go along and see their work of art; I am sure you will be as gripped as I was by its great beauty.

Peter’s Blog For September 2014

These times I find it hard to get a novel that really engages me. I have tried returning to ones that gripped me in the past but find that though they have a good sense of the dream all our stories are about they move too slowly. On the other hand, most modern novels are too gloomy for my taste. I was surprised, therefore, to be drawn into a novel in which eagles tell their story.

The novel Callanish is about three eagles and a buzzard who tell us the story of their lives in a London zoo. The oldest of them, called Minch, is a wisdom figure for the others and especially for young Creggan, a newly arrived golden eagle from Callanish in north western Scotland. The third eagle called Kraal is from North Africa and has been in captivity for some years. He is still full of anger as he rails against his captivity. The buzzard’s name is Wooli and he deals with his captivity in a completely submissive way but this turns out to be a shrewd ploy meant to catch his captors off guard. However, when his ploy works and he manages to escape he soon realises that he cannot cope with his freedom and so remains within the confines of the zoo and is soon recaptured.

The two ways
This growing inability to deal with a life outside their cages is common among the eagles in captivity as they have gradually settled for being confined to the limited space of their cages. They have become so used to the security of this that they want no other life. They have become so accustomed to being free from attack and to having all their food provided that they have lost their desire for any life other than being confined to the limited area of their cage. But this was not what Minch had learned from her years of captivity and she is prepared to go to great rounds to teach Creggan another way of handling his captivity. In words like the following she keeps reminding him of the course he must follow:

“You must never forget your homesite. For if you are to survive here you will need to remember it, even though you will finally want to forget. But I shall not let you. As long as I am here to remind you I shall never let you forget.

Forgetting is the greatest weakness, and your greatest enemy. Most of the eagles in the Cages have forgotten, for they cannot bear to remember, and because of that even if the opportunity came they would not be able to return to their homesites. But there are a few here, a very few, who cannot forget, and in them there is courage still, and strength, waiting, waiting… In time they will learn which ones they are. For myself, I am perhaps too old now to hope to return. But not too old that I cannot make sure that you never forget. NEVER.”

Having the sky for your limit

The predicament of the eagles is starkly expressed in the following story:

The Sky`s The Limit
There was once a poultry farmer who was given a present of an eagle`s egg. He decided to experiment with it, so he put it among some eggs a hen was hatching out. In due course it emerged with the other chicks and grew up with these. Even though it was never quite the same as them, it adapted itself to their ways and always thought of itself, and acted, as one of them. So it spent its time with the other chickens within the strict confines of the barnyard.

One day when it was about a year old its eye was caught by the inspiring sight of an eagle in full flight and something stirred within it. However, its gaze was soon brought back to earth, by a cock telling it to stop star-gazing and to get on with the job.

Now, there are two endings to the story. One has the young eagle putting its head back down as it had been told to do and continuing for the rest of its days within the very limited world of the barnyard. The other ending is, that the young eagle inspired by the vision in the sky, stretched its wings and took off. From then on it was no longer confined to the barnyard but had the sky for its limits.

Confining our life to a bunker
As I read Callanish and was reminded of this story it dawned on me how the predicament of the eagles is symbolic of ours for over recent centuries we have allowed ourselves to be seduced by a false vision and value system that seriously confines the human spirit and the way God seeks to build on this. This vision is an alluring one that Science, Economics and Consumerism have developed but it tends to confine us to a vision of ‘the good life’ that limits us to an understanding of the human largely in material terms. This very limited area of human life we thus get confined to is symbolised by the barnyard in the story above, by the eagles’ Cages in Callanish and by the graphic image of life lived in a bunker.

The origins of our predicament
We see the beginnings of this bunker-like existence in a comment Kenneth Clark made in his wonderful series of TV programmes called Civilisation. There he tells us that in the 17th century people began to ask themselves the question, Does it work? and Does it pay? rather than the question people had asked themselves up to that time: Is it the will of God? In other words, people began to take on the way Science and Economics viewed the world and what was important or of value in that world. This new way of seeing life gradually replaced one which viewed everything around us as being a part of God’s design or will, understood not as what we are meant to do for God but as a dream God has for us. It is a dream God builds into everything and especially into human nature, a dream that offers us the sky for our limit.

You have prepared a banquet for me in the sight of my foes. My head you have anointed with oil, my cup is overflowing. Psalm 23

What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, God has prepared for those who love him. 1 Cor 2:9

This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 1 Jn 4:10

The bunker Exclusive Humanism confines us to
Instead, what we have ended up with today is what Charles Taylor in his book, The Secular Age, calls Exclusive Humanism. This means that we view life from an exclusively human perspective and that seen and valued largely in material terms. As a result, we suffer from what he terms “the modern malaise” of boredom with the ordinary, restlessness and a sense of depression. He explains how over the last 500 years Exclusive Humanism has taken hold of our minds and hearts as life was gradually emptied of God, of the spirit, of the sublime and of the notion of a dream that is innate to human nature. This is the dream that was built into us when we were made in the image of a God who is love and it is a dream too of the intimacy or union into which the attractiveness of this love draws us.

God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Gn 1:27 …. Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh (or one person). Gn 2:24

Letting our dream become dormant
In the circumstances in which we live today our dream tends to become dormant because the world of work and wealth demand so much of our time, energy and resources that we have little or nothing of these left for bringing our dream to be. This is what Minch is worried about in her concern for her fellow eagles as she sees them being seduced by the limited life the Cages have to offer. She sees them settling for being well looked after, for food, for shelter, and for being free from attack. She fears that they will become so accustomed to having all their material needs met that they will no longer be able to survive without these should they ever be offered the chance to have the sky for their limit. As we saw above, when Wooli escaped from his cage he was no longer capable of availing of the freedom he was offered.

Minch’s way of dealing with this seduction of the Cages is to never let the eagles forget where they have come from. If they are to survive, they must never let go of their memories for these are their strength and their hope.

Minch always wanted Kraal to tell her where he came from because she said, as she had said to Creggan on his first night, that for an eagle to survive the first thing he must know is where he comes from, and he must not forget his memories however distant they may be. They make up his hope and give him his strength. Then Kraal remembered that when Creggan had asked him about where he came from all he had said was ‘the South’and not really told him any more. He had wanted to forget … just as Minch had told him he would.

How we can have the sky for our limit
During my years as a teacher I learned the truth of Minch’s words. I learned that if we are to follow our dream and have the sky for our limit, we must keep returning to the significant places and people of our story. For example, in returning to the love of our parents, family and friends, these people continue to give us a sense of who we are and of what we are capable of becoming. If we remember their love, it arouses our dream of intimacy and the joy we again find in their presence.

It is to this personal and tangible experience of our innate dream that the Bible must talk to if the ultimate dream it reveals is to remain tangible, real and above all credible. It is this fulsome love that the three persons of the Trinity want with a passion to reveal to us that inspires our ultimate dream. However, if their love is not to become too ideal and spiritual for us to identify with, we need to keep returning to people like our parents and how they gave us a very down to earth feel for our dream of love, close relationships and the ordinary joy we find in these.

Flying to knowledge without ever going to college
Often we are reluctant to follow Minch’s urging us to ‘return to our homesite’ because of the ghosts of the past but also because Science and Economics do not value this “hole in reason’s ceiling”. Our personal experience and the way it engages our whole person “heart, soul, mind and strength” is seen as too subjective and personal to have the objectivity Science requires.

And I have a feeling
That through the hole in reason’s ceiling
We can fly to knowledge
Without ever going to college.
Patrick Kavanagh

It is this invaluable personal experience of our dream that our parents for example give us, which Jesus wants to talk to when he reveals the “Good News” of God’s love and dream for us. This is a love that creates and maintains an intimacy or union and a joy that is “complete”. This is the sky of unlimited possibilities that the three persons of the Trinity want us to take off into and to enjoy to the full.

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. Jn 15:9-15

Re-discovering the sublime
One of the first groups of people who sought to break out of the Cages we have confined ourselves to were the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century. William Wordsworth, for example, put our predicament succinctly when he wrote, “getting and spending we lay waste our powers” and so he sought to escape into a sense of the sublime that we find in nature. In poems like the following there is a description of the same quest inspired by Dostoevsky’s belief that “we are saved by beauty” or by the sublime love symbolized by the Grail in the following poem.

The Few
No argument can pierce the shuttered mind.
Let truth shine forth resplendent as the sun,
Still, crouched in their dark corner, will they find
Some guttering candle till life’s day be done.
Even though we sang like angels in their ear
They would not hear.

Those only in whose heart some inkling dwells,
Grown over through it be, crushed down, denied,
Will greet the peeling of the golden bells
And welcome the truth when all around deride.
Yet sight has laid a debt upon their will
Not all fulfil.

For even those who see, only a few
Will have the intrepid wisdom to arise
And barter time’s false values for the true,
Making their life a valiant enterprise
To vindicate their heritage long lost
Nor count the cost.

And out of that so noble fellowship
Questing the Grail upon the mountain peaks
Well is it if it meet the expectant lip
Of even one persistently who seeks
Yet in this quest the glory and the goal
Of the awakened soul.
Arthur Osborne

If you are interested in exploring the dream of love and relationships as the quest “of the awakening soul” you will find a brief picture of it presented in THE HOME PAGE of this website. For a more detailed description of how love and relationships develop you might go the Life, Love and Relationships that is under COURSES in the main menu at the top of this page. To find out how you can discover how love and the dream it generates has developed into a profound wisdom you have accumulated during your life you might look at What Do YOU Want, again under COURSES.

PETER’S BLOG FOR AUGUST

The film chronicles 12 years of the life of a boy called Mason and how during each of these he faces the challenge of growing up. What we see happening to him during these vital years is a thought-provoking account of a person’s journey from the simplicity of childhood to the more self-reflective and complex nature of his life on the threshold of adulthood. Boyhood is, however, equally insightful about the changing nature of all our relationships each of which is explored with the same attention to detail about what happens as we grow up. It is an interesting fact that Richard Linklater the director of this film also made the three films, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight which are about the growth of two young people over a period of 20 years.

A total immersion
While the changing face of society that occurs around the main characters form the background of the story, the primary focus is always on the people themselves and the consistent way their personal strengths and foibles are portrayed. While other directors may appear to be looking at their characters from the outside, the director of this film seems to be sharing in their hopes and dreams and allowing us to do the same. It is rare that a film invites us to share so intimately these early years of our own journey and the wealth of feeling we associate with them as the story the film tells unfolds.

Boyhood puts us in touch with the simple truth that our early years while in progress seem like an aeon, but to parents they flash past in a dreamlike instant. As adults our childhood years change from a plodding narrative into a swirling constellation of remembered and half-remembered moments, which drift in and out of reach. It is, therefore, with a sense of wonder that we grasp the obvious fact that what Linklater so perceptively describes could be easily applied to every one of us. Children and adults are not separate species as we all share the one dream that is innate to all.

The persistent dream
It is a dream that confronts us as it does Mason with a momentous choice between two cultures or ways of seeing life and what is important in it. The two are bidding for our allegiance and each proposes its own distinctive vision, value system and lifestyle. One culture makes a priority of material things, of what we have and what we do, of careers and meeting the expectations of a consumer culture. This is the dominant view of life today and since it has little time for the inner, spiritual world of our human dream, it leaves a vacuum at the heart of society. The alternative view of life and one Mason identifies with makes a priority of a dream that is innate to us as human beings, a dream of love and the network of relationships it leads us into as well as the happiness we hope to find in these.

The two ways that beckon us
Since the first of these two ways of viewing life and what is of value is firmly established, to choose the second one as Mason tends to do involves us in a constant struggle. There is a lot of pressure put on Mason to meet the expectations of his parents, his teachers and of his peers to be successful at his studies and at sport. As a young boy he conforms to these pressures but in his teens other concerns besides popularity and academic success begin to assert themselves. This leads to feelings of not being normal and of disappointing his mother to whom he remains deeply attached. Mason is by nature a dreamer and so he experiences the natural tendency of youth to become independent more than most; he tends to live more and more outside the perimeter fence. He feels the need to begin to take responsibility for his own life even though following his dream in this way will involve not meeting many of the expectations of his parents and peers.

Taking the road less travelled
There is a wonderful depiction of this dilemma that faces us all throughout life in a scene from the film, Dead Poets Society. The film takes place in a very prestigious New England school whose ideals centre on academic excellence and on preparing its pupils for successful careers in the leading professions. Mr Keating is a teacher in this school and as part of one of his classes he takes his pupils out into the quad. There he asks three of them to walk around in front of the rest of the class. They soon fall into line and march to the beat that the rest of the class set for them. After a short while Mr Keating asks them to reflect on what has happened and then gives his own reflection on it:

 “What you have seen illustrates our need for conformity and the difficulty of maintaining our own beliefs in the face of others. Now we have all a great need of acceptance. But you must trust that your own beliefs are unique, your own, even though the others may think them odd or unpopular, even though the herd may go, “That’s bad”. Robert Frost said, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and I, I took the one less travelled by and that has made all the difference.”

Striking the right balance
The ongoing struggle in each of us to maintain a balance between these two influences is powerfully depicted by Stephen Covey in his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In the following quotation from it he describes very insightfully our struggle to find a balance between what is ‘urgent’ and what is ‘important’.

For many years now I have asked audiences the question: “If you were to do one thing you know would make a tremendous difference for good in your personal life, what would that one thing be?” I then ask them the same question with regards to their professional or work life. People come up with answers very easily. Deep inside they already know what they need to do.

Then I ask them to examine their answers and determine whether what they wrote down is urgent or important or both. “Urgent” comes from the outside, from environmental pressures and crises. “Important” comes from the inside, from their own deep value system.

Almost without exception the things people write down that would make a tremendous difference in their lives are important but not urgent. As we talk about it people come to realise that the reason they don’t do these things is that they’re not urgent. They’re not pressing. And, unfortunately, most people are addicted to the urgent. In fact, if they are not being driven by the urgent, they feel guilty. They feel as if something is wrong.

But truly effective people in all walks of life focus on the important rather than on the merely urgent. Research shows that worldwide, the most successful executives focus on importance, and less effective executives focus on urgency. Sometimes the urgent is also important, but much of the time it is not.

Clearly, to focus on what is truly important is far more effective than a focus on what is merely urgent. It’s true in all walks of life – including the family. Of course, parents are going to have to deal with crises and with putting out fires that are both important and urgent. But when they proactively choose to spend more time on things that are truly important but not necessarily urgent, it reduces the crises and the fires.

The healthy mix of inner and outer authority
There is a delicate balance that must be maintained between these two influences on our lives or between an outer and an inner authority both of which we are invited to listen to. Mason had difficulty finding this balance because his father left home before he was six and when he returned periodically to visit Mason and his sister we realise that he is not a mature person and had not the wisdom to be a good father figure for his son.. When his mother married again, his step father turned out to be extremely autocratic and sought to control every aspect of Mason’s life. Her third partner was little better and was so intent on getting Mason to meet his standards that he had little sensitivity or sympathy for where Mason was. Compensating for these extremes of the exercise of authority by three men was his mother. She struggled to provide him with the understanding and concern as well as the challenge he needed to leave home and to take responsibility for his own life. She also had to prepare for the day she would be asked to show her love by letting him go and herself for the emptiness that would ensue.

In a wonderful poem by Cecil Day Lewis we find an echo of the inner and outer voices in ourselves and an insightful description of what was going on in Mason’s life.

Walking Away
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

 That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away.
And love is proved in the letting go.

The poem is about something Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian notices about the film when he says,

But the point is that all parents are estranged, continually and suddenly waking up to how their children are growing, progressively assuming the separateness and privacy of adulthood. Part of this film’s triumph is how it depicts the enigma of what Mason is thinking and feeling.

Listening to the still small voice

The cultural atmosphere in which we live today leaves little room for us to listen to the inner voice that seeks to keep us in touch with what is important and not just urgent. This is the voice of the dream that is innate to each of us and that never ceases to influence us even though due to our neglect it tends to become less audible.

It is to this dream built into us at our making that God wants to speak. He does this initially through Moses with whom he speaks in a most intimate way or “face to face as a person speaks to a friend”. (Ex 33:11) Then God reveals to the prophet Jeremiah that he wishes to speak to each person in this intimate way or to make himself known to “the least no less than to the greatest”. (Jer 31:34). What God wants to reveal to us is his love and the intimate relationship he wants to share with us, a relationship that is symbolised by the celebration of life a marriage is.  

And I will betroth you to me for ever; I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord.(Hos 2:14, 19-20)

It is to the voice of this dream God has for us that Jesus invites us to listen in, for example, the parable of the sower. In this story he asks each of us to consider the puzzling reality that when he unfolds God’s dream for us in what he calls “the word of God” we are in various ways unwilling or reluctant to listen to him.

The seed is the word of God. The ones along the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, that they may not believe and be saved. And the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy; but these have no root, they believe for a while and in time of temptation fall away. And as for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. And as for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bring forth fruit with patience. (Lk 8:11-15)

Peter’s blog for July

The film BELLE centres on the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of a Royal Navy captain, John Lindsay, and an African woman, a slave, named Maria Belle. When her mother died Dido was raised at Kenwood House in north London by her great-uncle, Lord Mansfield. There she became the inseparable companion to her half-cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray with whom she had an extraordinary affinity from the start. This relationship is given expression in an unsigned painting which is at the heart of the film.

 
1779 painting of Dido Elizabeth Belle and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray

The picture depicts what Amma Asante, the Ghanaian-British director of the film calls “a bi-racial girl, a woman of colour, who’s slightly higher than her white counterpart” and this indicates a significant social equality extraordinary in the late 18th century. But what does the hand of one young woman upon the waist of the other imply – sisterhood or rivalry? And what should we read from the expressions (playful? defiant? mischievous?) upon the faces of the artist’s subjects? In the film the relationship between the two women is depicted by Asante who says of herself, “I’m bicultural and walk the division that Belle walked every day”.

For me the picture speaks about how Dido sought to free herself from the crippling constraints of living in a situation that tended to deprive her of her identity. Elizabeth’s hand reaches out to prevent her from leaving the only world she knew and was unable to escape from. The more sedate and lifeless role Elizabeth had resigned herself to is symbolised by the chair she is seated in and by her sombre expression. The more intelligent and resourceful Dido has a very different expression on her face as she heads off into the world where her dream of ‘liberty, fraternity and equality’ is beginning to be realised. She like us will have to contend with with the many things that enslave us and prevent the realisation of our dream.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed”,
Luke 4:18

 Loosening the grip of slavery
The story of Belle is played out against the backdrop of slavery, for Mansfield as lord chief justice, had to adjudicate slavery cases that involved huge commercial interests as well as a growing consciousness that slavery was fundamentally wrong. A lot of the film focuses on how this issue affected Dido and her relationship with Lord Mansfield and the young legal activist John Davinier. In particular there was the Zong ship case, which hinged upon the deliberate drowning of human “cargo” for commercial gain. This forms the backdrop for the film’s narrative and the discussion of human rights versus property law, arcane legal argument circling the growing conviction of the fundamental injustice of slavery. In all of this Dido’s apparent influence upon the judgment of Lord Mansfield raises more than just eyebrows in polite society, as the country awaits his ruling on a case that cuts to the heart of Britain’s commercial interests.

The quest for identity
All this provides the context for Asante’s enthralling portrait of a woman struggling to define her identity. She is caught between upstairs and downstairs in terms of social custom and protocol for she is too elevated to eat with the servants, yet too lowly to dine, when there is company, with her “family”. Dido is challenged to find her own space in a world in which her colour marks her as unique among her peers. While this proves problematic enough within the confines of Kenwood House, her situation becomes more complicated still as the prospect of marriage looms. Dido and Elizabeth are torn between variously unsuitable partners, as fortune and standing are starkly juxtaposed with love and affection in time-honoured fashion.

Added to the mix is Dido’s relationship with John Davinier, a clergyman’s son who is employed by Lord Mansfield. When he becomes over involved in the slavery issue he is dismissed but something has been ignited between him and Dido. The story of their relationship with all its twists and turns is played out as in a Jane Austen novel which, like all the stories we tell, is about our inner journey into love and relationships as where our dream is fulfilled. In the end Davinier is the one who finally answers in an unambiguous way the question Dido has been asking herself throughout her life, Am I somebody?

Are You Somebody?
Nuala O’Faolain called the first part of her autobiography “Are You Somebody?”. She got this title from an experience she had in a supermarket. One day while she was out shopping she noticed three young women with trolleys passing her a number of times and each time they did so they had a good look at her and then passed on. Eventually they summoned the courage to ask her, “Are you somebody?” They had obviously seen her on television and wanted to find out was she the well known person they thought she was. On reflection she realised that this was the question she had been asking herself all through her life and that it was thus a good title for her autobiography.

The basic call of adult life
Being somebody or having worth, value or significance is very important for us. To find out who we are or our identity is according to Erik Erikson the first call of adult life and on it depends all the others. I have written at length about this call in pages 75-97 in my book called The Search For Something More.

This sense of our identity is something we see in the eyes of those around us and if over the years what we hear from others is positive, we develop a good self image, while if what we hear is largely negative we develop a poor self image. Most of us live with the latter and how we can be converted to a much more positive image is wonderfully illustrated by Shakespeare’s 29th sonnet.

When, in disgrace with fortune and in men’s eyes,
I all alone between my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee – and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising,
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love rememb’red such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Even though Dido’s father, Elizabeth and her grandparents give her a good sense of herself she is deeply influenced by what the conventions of the time thought of her as a mulatto. We see how her grandparents feel bound to respect these conventions and exclude her from dining with their guests though she may be present when they gather in another room after they have dined.

Views of our identity we must choose between
In this film we are caught in the interplay of a number of ways we answer the question, Are you somebody? For example, the film Belle takes place amid the cultural surroundings of the 1760s when people’s significance was determined by whether they belonged to the upper or lower class. Even within the upper class women, as Elizabeth clearly states, are the property of their husbands and often had little standing outside of marriage. In these circumstances Dido, as the daughter of a slave and thus un-marriageable had little or no standing and found herself rejected as a nonentity.

 How much are you worth?
In today’s cultural surroundings we tend to see our significance or who we are in terms of what we have and what we do, in terms of wealth, career, possessions and the prestige these give us. What characterises this source of our significance is that it comes from outside ourselves and has to be earned by meeting the expectations of others. In fact the true source of our significance comes from within, from the inner voice of a dream that is innate to each of us.

The irrepressible voice of our dream
What fascinates me about the film Belle is how this dream keeps struggling to surface in Dido no matter how adverse the circumstances she is faced with. In fact it is probably these adverse circumstances that challenged Dido to find her identity deep within herself in the dream of love and relationships that her father, Elizabeth and her grandparents had aroused in her. In spite of all the limitations of her surroundings that kept telling her she was a nobody, it was the love she remembered and gradually learned to believe in that gave her the deepest sense of who she was.

This sense of our true significance that comes from within is what the poet wants for his daughter. He is afraid that she might identify with her physical beauty and thus not be capable of real intimacy or of finding a friend.

 A Prayer for my Daughter
May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
or hers before a looking glass, for such
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.
W. B. Yeats

“I have clothed you with my own splendour”
The ultimate source of our significance is found in answering the essential call of the Gospels to ‘repent and believe’ what Jesus calls the Good News of God’s love. This call to repent involves changing the way we see and feel about ourselves insofar as this diverges from the way Jesus looks at, loves and relates with us. We may have learned to see this story as about how we must love God and others whereas it is primarily about how the Father’s love is portrayed for us in the way Jesus looks at us in each Gospel story. Christianity is essentially about “repenting and believing the Good News” of God’s love as portrayed for us by Jesus. Mk 1:15 Repenting here means letting go of distorted images of ourselves we pick up along the way so that we might learn to believe in who we are in Jesus’ eyes and to live in the love he asks us to make our home in.

I have loved you just as the Father has loved me, abide in my love. … I have told you these things that you might share my joy and that your happiness may be complete. (Jn 15:9-11)

Our ultimate identity and the joy it brings us is found in the realisation of who we are in Jesus’ eyes. We get a vision of who we really are from the way Jesus looks at and treats, relates with and loves a person like Zacchaeus. Jesus asks each of us to believe that he accepts, affirms and thus acknowledges you and I in the way he does Zacchaeus. It is only our consciousness of it that ebbs and flows as we are always the centre of his attention and concern.

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see over the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way. When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly. All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.” But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount. ”Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” (Lk 19:1-9)

St Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians reflects on the story of how Moses had to veil his face when he came down the mountain after speaking with God. This was because he radiated such splendour after being in God’s presence that the people were so awed by his glory that they would not come near him. Paul then draws a very inspiring conclusion from this.

But all of us who are Christians have no veils on our faces, but reflect like mirrors the glory of the Lord. We are transfigured in ever-increasing splendour into his own image and this transformation comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (2Cor 3:18)

When Paul uses the word ‘transfigured’ here – and it is the only time he uses it – he is envisioning us being like Jesus when he appeared briefly to his disciples in all his divine glory.

Our true identity is a glorious one if we can only bring ourselves to believe that ours is “an ever-increasing splendour”.

Peter’s Blog for June

This film takes its title from a poem by Paul Valéry which says, “The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!”. It is a beautiful, contemplative film made by Hayao Miyazaki, a legendary Japanese filmmaker in the twilight of his career after six decades of exploring the human spirit. Visually his films are a treat in their impressionistic depiction of nature and of the dream of love and relationship that keeps surfacing and taking flight in spite of our neglect of it.

The Wind Rises is a fictionalised biography of aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, who helped design and develop the planes that would be used by Japan in World War II. In his dreams as a boy he meets Italian aeronautical designer Gianni Caproni and realises that although he cannot become a pilot, due to his poor eyesight, he settles for a career in engineering if he is to develop the wings he needs to fly. His ability to design aircraft is noticed soon after he leaves university and he quickly becames the engineering prodigy of his country’s developing aviation industry.

Reaching for the sky

In the film he is portrayed as an artist whose canvas is the sky in which he endeavours to fly but he realises that he must follow his dream within the constraints of industry and its practical demands. These constraints take form within a growing military industrial complex providing huge amounts of money for planes designed to be agile killing machines. Jiro would rather his planes be elegant and graceful, without guns or bomb-dropping mechanisms but he has to work within a world readying itself for war.

Even though the director of the film, Hayao Miyazaki, is an outspoken pacifist he doesn’t criticise Jiro for his role in perfecting the machinery of death in advance of World War II. Rather, he laments the way that such talent is twisted and such artistry has to be put at the service of the ugly machinations of nations at war. The film does not hide its scepticism about modernity nor its romantic fondness for nature that it portrays in such a gentle and intelligent way.

The loss of so much that is beautiful and life-giving
The Wind Rises is set against the ominous modern march to replace the pastoral with the industrial and the consequent loss of so much that is beautiful and life-giving. The beauty of nature is stunningly portrayed in an impressionistic way and in colours that at times made me gasp. In contrast to this the effects of urban and industrial development are portrayed in drab and even ugly colours. Yet it is against such a bleak background that Jiro’s enthusiasm and imagination take flight.

The film is mainly about someone reaching for the sky, for the sublime, the beautiful, for what transcends the limitations and our destructive ways of abusing the material world. So in spite of all the constraints Jiro always remains a dreamer and an artist who wants the sky for his limit and not to be confined to a very limited kind of life represented by the barnyard in the following story.

The Sky`s The Limit
There was once a poultry farmer who was given a present of an eagle`s egg. He decided to experiment with it, so he put it among some eggs a hen was hatching out. In due course it emerged with the other chicks and grew up with these. Even though it was never quite the same as them, it adapted itself to their ways and always thought of itself, and acted, as one of them. So it spent its time with the other chickens within the strict confines of the barnyard. One day when it was about a year old its eye was caught by the inspiring sight of an eagle in full flight and something stirred within it. However, its gaze was soon brought back to earth, by a cock telling it to stop star-gazing and to get on with the job.

 Now, there are two endings to the story. One has the young eagle putting its head back down as it had been told to do and continuing for the rest of its days within the very limited world of the barnyard. The other ending is, that the young eagle inspired by the vision in the sky, stretched its wings and took off. From then on it was no longer confined to the barnyard but had the sky for its limits.

 This story about having the sky for our limit symbolises the aspirations of the dreamer and the artist in each of us striving not to let the demands of what is urgent drown out the still small voice urging us to follow our innate dream of love and intimacy, of beauty and joy. Having the sky for our limit gives us perspective or lets us see the big picture and the relative importance of everything in it so that we are not consumed by what is just urgent.

How darkness makes us appreciate the light

The Wind Rises focuses a lot on life’s hardships such as the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, the years of depression, the tuberculosis epidemic, the descent into war – all of which create what the director calls “a sense of stagnation more intense than the one hanging over Japan today”. Gerard Manley Hopkins, who depicted these hardships in a way that few poets could rival, has a beautiful image of the odd glimpse of the sublime which “lights a lovely mile”. It calls forth the vision we get when the sun breaks through the clouds and lights up patches of an otherwise dark or gloomy landscape. These are moments when comfort or joy is given room to grow, moments for the poet when we glimpse God’s winning smile.

MY own heart let me have more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst ’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
’s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.

It is in Jiro’s falling in love with Nahoko that we experience another even more important place in which we discover what is sublime in life or discover an “opening to the top”. One well known reviewer speaks of their relationship as “A vivid depiction of human kindness that is touching despite the powerful undertone of sadness. In The Wind Rises friendship sprouts from disaster and love can be seen to end in tears. Yet, throughout, the film never tries to irreparably upset its audience. It’s balanced, and it flows perfectly”.

The style with which people relate
What I found most strikingly beautiful about The Wind Rises is the style with which Jiro, Nahoko and a number of other women in the film loved and related. There is an attractiveness about them that makes their presence in the story not only good but beautiful or whatever word we might use for people who relate in a stylish or artful way. For people not used to finding life’s essential beauty in the art of loving or in the style with which people love and relate there is a need get in touch with the people in our lives who exhibit this beauty in a way that makes it real, tangible and credible. From the time I was a student and was learning about how we tend to see reality in terms of what is true, good and beautiful I became aware that the first two ways of seeing the world around us have got most attention while beauty has remained nebulous or has even disappeared from view.

The ugly absence of courtesy
I was reminded of this absence of beauty from large areas of life today when watching a documentary on television recently called, Blurred Lines. It was a study of a new aggressiveness between men and women especially among young people in England today. For me it was a shocking revelation of how rough and harsh people’s way of relating have become and especially by how abusive of women men’s language tends to be. It made me wonder where has respect and courtesy gone to. When the woman who made the programme asked a well known journalist what he thought of this situation he said that we have to accept it as part of life today and that women who complain about it should as he said “man up” and to give as good as they get. Germaine Greer, whose life’s interest has been this relationship between men and women, said on the programme that though women have become more prominent in all areas of public life the relationships between men and women have in her experience deteriorated.

 An “ever-increasing splendour”
Over against this sobering picture of the lowering of respect and courtesy in public life we all have experience of family and friendship where we find ourselves significant and valued. Within these relationships we may find that we and others relate with style and are at our best, that there is, dare we say it, a splendour about our lives. This reality is strikingly expressed in the film, Calendar Girls, when Jim who is a horticulturist says to his wife in a moment of Yorkshire honesty, “The women of Yorkshire are like the flowers of Yorkshire, each stage of their growth is more glorious than the last but the final stage is the most glorious of all”. Then after a pause, he quips, “And then they all go to seed”. This provides a wonderful foundation for Paul’s vision of us when he says, “We are transfigured in ever-increasing splendour into his (Christ’s) own image, and the transformation comes from the Lord who is the Spirit”. (2 Cor 3:18)

 The centrality of style or beauty to life
This beauty or style with which people love and relate is so central to our dream as human beings that it is sad that we don’t notice its presence and cultivate it. I have become more aware of this elegance with which most people relate, especially since the election of Pope Francis. He seems to me to embody a way of relating that people find very attractive. Is this because the way he loves and relates is very close to the way Jesus loved and related with the people he meets in the Gospel story? It is this style with which people love and relate that the historian John O’Malley sees as the central issue in the Second Vatican Council. He says in the concluding chapter of his book, What happened at Vatican 2?

“Vatican 2 taught many things, but few more important than the style of relationships that was to prevail in the church. Its style of discourse was the medium that conveyed the message. It did not, therefore ‘define’ the teaching but taught it on almost every page through the form and vocabulary it adopted. In so doing it issued an implicit call for a change of style – a style less autocratic and more collaborative, a style willing to seek our and listen to different viewpoints and to take them into account, a style eager to find common ground with the other, a style open and above board, a style less unilateral in its decision-making, a style committed to fair play and to working with persons and institutions outside the Catholic community, a style that assumes innocence until guilt is proven, a style that eschews secret oaths, anonymous denunciations and inquisitional tactics… We must respect the law inscribed on people’s hearts by God calling them to love”.

John O’Malley sees style, not as an “outward adornment” but as an expression of a Gospel way of seeing people and of valuing them. He says “A style choice is an identity choice, a personality choice, a choice in this instance about what kind of institution the council wanted the church to be. It was the outward expression of the adoption of an inner pattern of values. Style sometimes misunderstood as merely an outward ornament of speech, an outer garment adorning a thought, is really the ultimate expression of meaning. … The final documents are more intent on winning inner assent to truths and values and on raising appreciation for them. To a large extent they engage in a rhetoric of praise and congratulation”.

In his book he suggests that at stake were “almost two different visions of Catholicism”: as it strove to move “from commands to invitations, from laws to ideals, from threats to persuasion and from monologue to dialogue, from ruling to serving, from withdrawn to integrated, from vertical to horizontal, from exclusion to inclusion, from hostility to friendship, from rivalry to partnership, from suspicion to trust, from static to ongoing, from passive to active engagement, from fault-finding to appreciation, from prescriptive to principled, from behaviour modification to inner appropriation.” He adds that there was nothing new in the use of these words. “Yet, taken as a whole, they convey the sweep of a newly and forcefully specified style of the church that the Second Vatican Council held up for contemplation, admiration and actualisation”. In its use of words such as these ‘the council devised a profile of the ideal christian’.

The Wind Rises highlights for me the reality that in three specific ways “the world is charged with the grandeur of God”

There is first of all the grandeur or beauty of nature that Mark Kermode, in his review of this film in the Observer, sees as “a rich treat for the eye and soul alike”

Then there is the beauty of the relationship between Jiro and Nahoko that Mark Kermode speaks of “a heartbreakingly touching love story in which the wan Nahoko becomes Jiro’s muse, grounding his head-in-air flights of fancy in the tangible soil of human contact, love, and inevitably, loss. reaching for the sky or the sublime in a grim world”.

Finally there is the sense of the beautiful or the sublime in the style with which Jiro and the women in the story relate. It is their art of loving that left me with the feeling as I came out of the cinema that I had seen something strikingly beautiful. Yet it is a vision that is all around me in the street outside the cinema if I only have eyes to see it. It is in the courtesy of people thanking the buss driver before they get off, the wonderful affection of parents for their children that regularly strikes me when I walk in the local park or when, to my embarrassment, people offer me their seat on public transport – surely I don’t look that old or decrepit. We are offered in these moments of kindness a glimpse of the reality that “the Grace of God is in Courtesy”.

Courtesy
Of Courtesy, it is much less
Than Courage of Heart or Holiness,
Yet in my walks it seems to me
That the Grace of God is in Courtesy.

On monks I did in Storrington fall,
They took me straight into their hall;
I saw three pictures on a wall,
And Courtesy was in them all.

The first the Annunciation;
The second the Visitation;
The third the Consolation,
Of God that was Our Lady’s Son.

The first was of St. Gabriel;
On wings of flame from Heaven he fell;
And as he went upon one knee
He shone with Heavenly Courtesy.

Our Lady out of Nazareth rode –
It was her month of heavy load;
Yet was her face both great and kind,
For Courtesy was in Her mind.

The third it was our little Lord,
Whom all the Kings in arms adored;
He was so small you could not see
His large intent of Courtesy.

Our Lord, that was Our Lady’s Son,
Go bless you, People, one by one;
My Rhyme is written, my work is done.
(Hilaire Belloc)

Peter’s Blog for May

“Sometimes the wrong train can get you to the right station”

This film is about resurrection or about someone who is more dead than alive being brought back to life again through the love of two people. The film centres on Saajan who works in a big insurance company and is about to retire after 35 years service. He is a widower who has no children and feels he has little to live for. The early scenes of the film in which we see Saajan clinging to the handrails of the crowded commuter carriage or smoking on the terrace of his home at night, personify loneliness. This experience of him is intensified as we see him at home and all he has to listen to is the bustle of life in the streets and the sights and sounds of families all around him enjoying their evening meal. At work he never talks to anyone and in the cafeteria where he dines he is always on his own.

Shaikh
The first of the two people who gave him a new way of looking at life is Shaikh, the young man who is to replace Saajan when he retires. He and Saajan are a study in contrasting personalities, for where the older man is dull and yet utterly reIlable the younger one is a charmer but also a chancer. So, inspite of initially being rebuffed by Saajan a number of times Shaikh gradually breaks down his defences with his charm offensive and slowly gains admittance to Saajan’s table in the cafeteria. Even though he brings only an apple and a banana to their shared meals he shames Saajan into sharing the delights of his much more elaborate meal.

It is around their meals together that their relationship develops as Saajan begins to share not only his food but something of his story in the easeful atmosphere that their shared meal provides. Underelying all they share is an experience of the affection they both hunger for. This need is given more significance when Shaikh reveals that he is an orphan. In spite of all his buoyancy he is in search of a father figure and Saajan gradually assumes this role, even standing in for Shaikh’s parents at his wedding.

Ila
The second relationship that brings Saajan back to life also has food as an essential ingredient. This food is delivered each day in a container that is prepared by the families of the office workers or in Saajan’s case by someone he employs to do this. Initially the person who made the film planned to base it on the people who operate this highly organised business so in this film a lot of attention is given to how it works and to the amazing reIlability of the service. Fortuitously, one day Saajan receives a lunchbox which has gone astray and its contents brings him the first moment of enjoyment we see him entering into in the film. When this stray lunchbox continues to arrive on Saajan’s desk each day, much to the surprise of those around him, he immediatly takes time out and surrenders to the sensuous auroma of his lunchbox. But his thoughts soon begin to turn to the person who prepared it and so starts a regular exchange of notes with Ila who is the origin of these delightful meals.

Food for the spirit as well as the body
Ila is married and has one child but her relationship with her husband is a troubled one. He has lost interest in her because as Ila realises from the perfume on his shirts he is having an affair. In spite of this neglect Ila finds life in her relationship with her daughter and in a delightful one she has with her aunt who lives in the apartment directly over her own. They are so sensitive and responsive to each other that they personify Aristotle’s definition of friends being one soul in two bodies; they are not only conscious of what is going on in each other’s kitchens but in each other’s minds and hearts as well. Most of their conversation is about food and one realises that much of the film brings out how intimately meals are connected with relationships and how these are nourished by the conversations these meals can provide a space for. Much of the love we receive in life is expressed through food and the time, energy and resourcefulness that goes into preparing it.

The stuff of love

The daily stream of meals
And the love that prepares them
Are food for body and spirit
The care that creates and sustains us.

Meals are a celebration
Of birth, of marriage, of death
The most intimate moments of life
And each day’s coming together

Food is the stuff of love
To the eye that sees and is sensitive
To the heart that is not indifferent
But ready to praise and be grateful.

It is significant that Ila’s family watch television during their meals. Does this reflect the tendency of technology and the kind of instant intimacy it favours to intrude into an important time nature gives us to communicate and thus cultivate our more intimate relationships?

Love’s fantasies give way to reality
As the momentum of Ila’s relationship with Saajan develops we look forward to a time when they meet but it is part of the subtly constructed conclusion of the film that they never do. At an earlier stage in their relationship they had a vague plan to go off together to a place where they envisaged themselves living happily ever after. He fantasizes about this for some time and about all that it promises. But when they eventually do agree to meet we see her sitting in the resturant awaiting his arrival we know that the fantasy has been overtaken by reality for he does not join her. Instead we see him in the resturant watching her and we later learn why he decides against meeting her. It is because he realises how young and beautiful she is and that he as an old man could never fulfill her dreams. Instead, he decides to go back to where he has lived and to make the most of the ordinary relationships that Ila and Shaikh have taught him to make the most of.

A love spoken in everyday language
Saajan no longer feels he has to escape to some place far away from his present circumstances but that he can find a quiet joy entering into the ordinary relationships that are part of each day. For example, we see him sitting with a group of men who are chanting and it is obvious that he is enjoying himself. Again on the bus that takes him to work he graciously accepts a seat that is offered to him by a young man who calls him “Uncle”. He has begun to live out the Greek legend about how it is Care or Love who makes and sustains us as long as we live.

It is Care that makes and sustains us
Care was crossing a river one day when she took some soft mud and shaped it into a human being. She wanted to give what she had made her own name but Earth also laid claim to this right. It was, after all, of Earth that the human being was formed. Care then asked Jupiter, who was pas¬sing by, to give her creation a spirit. This he gladly agreed to do but then he too wanted it cal¬led after him. They decided to ask Sa¬t¬urn to be arbiter and he gave the following decision, which see¬med a wise one. Jupiter had given it spirit, so he would receive that back when death came. Since it was of earth or humus that it was fashioned, it would be called a human being. How¬ever, since Care had formed this human be¬ing, it would be her role, as long as this being lived, to continue to make and sustain it.

12 Years A Slave star Lupita Nyong’o

The ordinary is “afire with God”
As the film comes to an end we see how Saajan enters into three elements of Care or of a resurrected love that has begun to shape his life anew. We realise that he is coming to accept that he is as people see him, elderly and soon to retire from the work that till recently had been what he had lived a minimal existence for. He is also coming to appreciate the person that Ila and Shaikh have discovered to him and to live in the environment that peoples’ concern for him provides. Having had time to absorb the love shown him by Ila and Shaikh he now has eyes to find this love in the ordinary words and gestures in which he experiences it each day. In the light of this experience he sees everything around him differently or that, in the words of Elizabeth Browning, “earth’s crammed with heaven and every bush afire with God”. He feels the pulse of life in everything as he returns to the place where he has lived for many years and knows it afresh or as if for the first time.

With the drawing of this Love
And the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T S Eliot

Joy is the basic measure of how healthy our relationships are

This story of how love, which Saajan thought he had lost, returns and brings him back to life is beautifully told in the film Lunchbox. It echoes something that is basic to all our stories. This according to Joseph Campbell, who for me is the greatest authority on the stories people tell, is the journey each of us is on. He sees this journey as our innate quest for love and for the intimacy and joy that the attractiveness or beauty of this love draws us into. This dream or object of life’s essential quest is something our parents gave us our first taste of in the way that their love created the intimacy of home and the contentment we found there. When we leave home we become responsible for maintaining this dream our parents initiated. If we do not keep alive our experience of the love we have received in life, then, like Saajan, we will experience a sense of loneliness and sadness when through neglect we get cut off from Care as the one who enlivens us. The book of Wisdom warns us of the danger of forgetting or of being out of touch with the love that is the making of us, the love the Word of God aims to reveal.

… sinking into deep forgetfulness,
they get cut off from your kindness.
No herb, no poultice healed them,
But it was your word, Lord, which heals all.
(Wisdom 16:11-12)

It is to explore the role that Care or love plays in our own story that over the past year I have been working on ways of becoming aware of and believing in this essential source of human sustenance. You will find what I have come up with under COURSES in the main menu of my website; It is entitled, What do YOU want?

The gist of the course
The course invites us to outline the significant events of our story and then to notice and put words on how the significant people in it have loved and related with us. To explore how rich and varied our experience of love is we then explore nine forms this love commonly takes as we move through life. We are very famiIlar with these nine from the time we were children, fell in love and developed close friendships. Finally, we explore ways we can gradually appropriate or believe in the love we have received and given in life. “All you need is love”

All this affection can lie dormant

Hidden treasure
The two people who loved Saajan back to life were probably only arousing a love that due to life’s hardships had become dormant. Once it was aroused all kinds of experiences could put him in touch with his accumulated experience of love and maintain an environment in which he was happy.

When I give courses, there are two songs I use that never fail to make people want to sing along. One of these is Abba’s, I Have A Dream and the other is the Beatles singing All You Need Is Love. The following words always find an echo in peoples’ minds and hearts and they abandon themselves to the somewhat naive simplicity of the song. But after all “It is Care that makes and sustains us”.

Nothing you can know that isn’t known.
Nothing you can see that isn’t shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.
It’s easy.

Chorus
All you need is love (All together, now!)
All you need is love (Everybody!)
All you need is love, love.
Love is all you need (love is all you need).

Peter’s Blog for April

 
C. S. Lewis – A Biography of Friendship

C. S. Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898. He went to school in England and spent his final years studying privately with William Kirkpatrick, his father’s old tutor and former headmaster. As a boy Lewis fell in love with Scandinavian myths and sagas and was wonder-struck by the songs and legends of the ancient literature of Scandinavia preserved in the Icelandic Sagas. In his last years at school he developed a love of Greek literature and mythology and sharpened the clarity and coherence of his thinking as well as his ability to present his thoughts imaginatively and persuasively.

Later, he immersed himself in Irish Mythology and literature and developed a particular fondness for W. B. Yeats whose use of Ireland’s Celtic heritage in his poetry he was attracted to. In a letter to a friend, Lewis wrote, “I have here discovered an author exactly after my own heart, whom I am sure you would delight in, . He writes plays and poems of rare spirit and beauty about our old Irish mythology”. Lewis was surprised to find his English peers indifferent to Yeats and the Celtic Revival movement, Lewis wrote: “I am often surprised to find how utterly ignored Yeats is among the men I have met: perhaps his appeal is purely Irish – if so, then thank the gods that I am Irish.”

In 1916, Lewis was awarded a scholarship at University College Oxford but before he could take advantage of it he was conscripted and fought in the First World War. After the war he returned to Oxford, earned his degrees, and was elected a fellow and tutor in English at Magdalen College. As a scholar, he specialised in medieval and Renaissance literature.

Story as a preferred medium

Lewis’ interest in stories as a way of expressing how he understood and evaluated the world in which he lived remained central for him throughout his life. Even though in many of the books he wrote he used a more conceptual approach to expressing himself he is best remembered for his efforts to express his vision of Christianity in stories like The Chronicles of Narnia. He shared this belief in story as his preferred medium of communicating particularly with his friend Tolkien and in this way they were a much needed support to each other in an academic world which prided itself on its devotion to disengaged reason. Lewis would have loved the way Yeats expressed his choice to be “a foolish passionate man”.

GOD guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone;

From all that makes a wise old man
That can be praised of all;
O what am I that I should not seem
For the song’s sake a fool?

 I pray – for word is out
And prayer comes round again –
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.
W.B. Yeats

 A life based on relationships
What interests me most about Lewis is that his life was built around his relationships and especially around a very distinctive idea of friendship. At a critical time in my life I read his book Four Loves and found it had a profound influence on how I learned to navigate what I now think of as the three ages of love and relationship we pass through as we develop in life.

Jane Moore

The age of affection
Lewis’ experience of affection came mainly from his mother as he had a troubled relationship with his father. However she died when he was a boy and for a time he was bereft of affection until he was a student at Oxford and lodged with an Irish woman called Jane Moore. She had a son Paddy who did his military training with Lewis during which time the two became close friends. They agreed that if one of them survived the war he would look after the family of the one who did not. When Paddy was killed in the war Lewis looked after Jane and her daughter for the rest of their lives. In 1951 when Jane was suffering from dementia and was being cared for in a home Lewis used to visit her every day. In December 1917 Lewis wrote in a letter to his childhood friend Arthur Greeves that Jane and he were “the two people who matter most to me in the world”.

The age of passionate love

After the death of his mother and of Jane Moore, Lewis met the third woman who had a profound influence on his life. She was Joy Gresham, an American writer of Jewish background, a former Communist, and a convert from atheism to Christianity. After corresponding for two years Joy came to England in 1952. Lewis at first regarded her as an agreeable intellectual companion and personal friend, and it was at least overtly on this level that he agreed to enter into a civil marriage contract with her so that she could continue to live in the UK. Of this Lewis’s brother Warren wrote: “For Jack (The family name for Lewis) the attraction was at first undoubtedly intellectual. Joy was the only woman whom he had met who had a brain which matched his own in suppleness, in width of interest, and in analytical grasp, and above all in humour and a sense of fun”. However, after she was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer their relationship developed to the point that they sought a Christian marriage. Two films, called Shadowlands, one made by the BBC and another by David Attenborough focus on this relationship that was the most profound experience of love in Lewis’ life. We see what it meant to him in A Grief Observed a book that describes how the loss of her love impacted on him. I wonder was it his experience of his love for her that prompted him to write.

It is probably impossible to love any human being “too much”. We may love him too much in proportion to our love of God but it is the smallness of our love for God not the greatness of our love for others, that constitutes the inordinacy.

 The age of friendship

It is very significant that Colin Duriez calls his book, C. S. Lewis A biography of friendship. It is this capacity for friendship and the way he understood, valued and lived it out that I find most striking in an age that did not understand or value it highly. From the time he met Arthur Greeves as a boy he had this capacity to share his world with others in what is a very distinctive kind of friendship. In his book, Four Loves he describes it in these words:

“Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure ( or burden ). The typical expression of opening friendship would be something like, Ah What? You too? I thought I was the only one. … It is when two such persons discover, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision – it is then that friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude.”

 Lewis sees friendship as creating a space apart from affection or from that in which lovers dwell.

 “Lovers seek for privacy. Friends find this solitude about them, this barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not. … Friends will still be doing something together, but something more inward, less widely shared, less easily defined; still hunters but of some immaterial quarry; still collaborating, but in some work the world does not, or not yet, take account of; still travelling companions, but on a different kind of journey, Hence we picture lovers face to face but friends side by side, their eyes look ahead.”

Gazing out at a shared vision

A restricted notion of friendship
Lewis’ notion of friendship is about a shared interest and is exclusively about that. A friend’s personal life is excluded as friendship is “without claim or responsibility for one another”. In this way it departs from Biblical and classical ideas of friendship in which there are mutual responsibilities. Another distinctive quality of Lewis’ idea of friendship is that, unlike the love of affection and passionate love, it is unnecessary or not essential for survival. In spite of these restrictions in Lewis’ notion of friendship he states that, “Life – natural life – has no better gift to give” He has done much to reestablish friendship as “the crown of life and the school of virtue”.

 Many people when they speak of their “friends” mean only their companions. But it is not Friendship in the sense I give to the word. By saying this I do not at all intend to disparage the merely clubbable relation. We do not disparage silver by distinguishing it from gold. … Very few modern people think Friendship even a love at all. … To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world in comparison, ignores it.

 “Life has no better gift to give”
It is very obvious that Lewis lived out his belief that “life has no better gift to give” than friendship. He always made a priority of making space to be with friends, for example, for the weekly meetings with a group of literry friends known as the Inklings. At these meetings they shared the interests or the vision that brought them together in their practice of reading to each other what they were working on and then discussing their reactions. This was the art of conversation essential to the ongoing cultivation of friendship. The various groups of friends he belonged to often met in pubs, for meals or went walking together and they seemed to have a great time together sharing the joy that is central to friendship. It was within this context of friendship that with the help of people like Tolkien he made the most important journey of his life from atheism to theism and on to become one of the great Christians of our times.

 The bigger picture of friendship Lewis initiated
Over the years I have come to see life and especially my life as a Christian in terms of friendship. My idea of friendship, however, as distinct from that of C.S. Lewis, has its roots in affection and passionate love. I feel our parents lay the foundation of love in our lives through their gift of affection or in the way they accept, appreciate, care for us in a very personal way. When we fall in love, we learn to give another person a gift of this affection and it takes all the intensity of passionate love to bring about this sysmic shift from centring on ourselves to centring on another. Part of the intensity of passionate love is focused on making it last and on deepening it so that we become capable of the level of mutual sharing of ourselves that friendship calls for.

The Ecstasy of John

 Imagining the Christian life as passionate love
How passionate love became, from the 2nd to the18th century, a way of understanding what it means to be a Christian has always fascinated me. This way of seeing ourselves found expression for centuries in the passionate love depicted for us in the Song of Songs. While in this age of disengaged reason we may wonder why the Song is included in the Bible, during the first millennium it was seen as the interpretive key to understanding the whole Bible story. Was this because it expresses in such a creative way the threefold passion of the Trinity to reveal themselves to us? There is first of all their passion for self-revelation, then the passionate nature of the love they desire to reveal to us and finally the passionate return of love they seek from us. I think that this is what is said to us by the Great Commandment when it invites us to be loved and to love with our whole body and soul, heart and mind. This for Jesus is where life in all its fulness is to be found. Lk 10:25-28.

 Imaging the Christian life as friendship
Why Christians changed from seeing themselves in the context of the passionate love depicted for us in the Song to seeing themselves in the context of friendship is largely due to Thomas Aquinas. For him friendship became central to his vision of being a Christian and he based his idea of friendship on the words of Jesus: “I have called you friends because I have revealed to you everything I have heard from the Father”. What is shared is not just Lewis’ common interest but “everything” the Trinity have and are which is essentially their love. This led Aquinas to make the extraordinary statement that, “Friendship is love”. This view of friendship as the sum and climax of love is what the four gospels move towards; they reveal a vision of Jesus as one who goes around making friends and drawing all into his own relationship with his Father. Aquinas’ vision of friendship did not survive long beyond his own lifetime. This, as a wonderful teacher I once had suggested, was probably because,it was too overwhelming a way of seeing our lives as Christians; it was too good to be true. What a loss we have suffered!

Most of what I have written about the role of affection, passionate love and friendship as a key to understanding what it means to be a Christian is in my final book called, A World Alight With Splendour. There is a full description of what is in this book under My Books in the menu of this website.

It is because I owe so much to of my understanding of affection, passionate love and friendship and how they are so mutually dependent and enriching to C.S. Lewis that I wanted to write about him it this blog.

Prayer for friends
We give thanks for our friends.
Our dear friends.
We anger each other;
We fail each other.
We share this sad earth,
this tender life, this precious time.
Such richness. Such wildness.
Together we are blown about.
Together we are dragged along.
All this delight.
All this suffering.
All this forgiving life.
We hold it together.
Michael Leunig

Peters blog for March

The film called Her tells the story of Theodore whose work consists in composing letters that articulate emotions people are only vaguely conscious of and are incapable of expressing. He fosters communication among people who are unable to converse at much depth though they have all the technology to do so. Or maybe, it is because the facility for instant communication cannot carry the weight of much more than the superficial.

Loneliness and the loss of intimacy
As the film begins, it is over a year since Theodore’s marriage has broken down and he is in the final stages of legalising his divorce. He is lonely and depressed even though he has a well paid job that he enjoys, a beautiful apartment and lives in the perpetually soothing atmosphere of a Los Angeles in which everyone seems serene in their non-stop communications with people other than those they are currently around. His friends try to rescue him from his depression by organising dates with women whom they think might ignite the fire that has gone out in his life. These moments of intensity are, however, not what Theodore is in need of at this time.

Enter Samantha
What he does unknowingly need emerges in a most unexpected way when he instals a new operating system in his computer. As he is setting it up, it asks him a few intimate questions about his personal life, such as, “How did you relate with your mother when you were a child?” He hardly has time to answer these questions before the system has worked out where he is in his life and where he needs to move next. A woman who calls herself Samantha begins to communicate with him in a voice full of empathy and concern.

As Theodore’s job requires that he be at home with how people feel and how they might give expression to their emotions, he welcomes Samantha’s interest in his life and her ability to listen and respond to his various thoughts, emotions and moods. She has the capacity to take him where he is and through her appreciation and concern to give him the energy to move out of the numbed state he has been living in of late. Theodore and Samantha can communicate whenever they wish with the help of an earpiece and a very smart messaging service that accompanies their conversations with helpful visuals.

Where Samantha wants to take him
Under the influence of Samantha, who plays the role of personal assistant and therapist, lover and friend, Theodore’s mood changes from sadness and depression to the one of joy and enthusiasm he felt when he first married. She has the facility to introduce him to a level of relating he is ready for, to make a transition from a level of relating that relies too heavily on the sexual and emotional elements of a relationship to one where people share in a quieter and deeper way. It is more like the way friends rather than lovers relate as it is not possessive and can make room for the other having a variety of friends who far from diminishing the basic friendship can enrich it. So when Samantha reveals that she has many other people besides Theodore that she is intimate with, he is initially shocked but gradually he has the resources to accept this as part of the kind of relationship that he is ripe for. Samantha has taught him how to relate in a more mature way with the result that when, close to the end of the film, she tells him she must leave the relationship he realises he must now learn how to apply the rules of this new way of loving and relating she has introduced him to.

Lead kindly light

Lead, kindly Light, amid th’encircling gloom, lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

 I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou shouldst lead me on;
loved to choose and see my path; but now lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years!

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still will lead me on.
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till the night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile, which I
Have loved long since, and lost awhile!

Meantime, along the narrow rugged path, Thyself hast trod,
Lead, Savior, lead me home in childlike faith, home to my God.
To rest forever after earthly strife
In the calm light of everlasting life.
John Henry Newman

Finding fulfilment in friendship
The film portrays for us a major shift in the way we relate if we are to answer the call of passionate love to find fulfilment in friendship. When we fall in love we are urged to move out of our adolescent tendency to be self-centred and to centre our whole person, body and soul, heart and mind on the person with whom we fall in love. As the second last of a family of ten I never cease to be amazed at how falling in love transformed my brothers and sisters from touchy adolescents into adults whom it was a joy to be with. Surely passionate love is life’s great catalyst in its power to transform us.

The lesser gods are decorous
And with a meek petition wait;
But love comes, fixing his own hour,
And hammers at the gate.

The most impermanent of loves
When C S Lewis comes to deal with passionate love in his book Four Loves he speaks of it as the most fragile or impermanent of loves. People fall out of love just as easily as they fall in love when, for example, differences emerge and they are invited to change in order to live together in harmony. This invitation often comes when there are rows, differences or difficulties and they are confronted with the physical and emotional distance between them these cause. If their experience of these differences is allowed to persist and become habitual, it causes a crisis as they question their compatibility. Like all crises their sense of dissatisfaction with each other can become an invitation as well as an obvious frustration. The hidden invitation their unpleasant situation offers is that they explore the deeper levels at which they might love and relate.

How to make love last
According to the Great Commandment or the one that governs all the ways we love and relate, we are invited to get our whole person or our “whole heart, soul, mind and strength” involved in the way we do so. This implies that we love and relate at four levels: with our body and its senses, with our heart and its feelings, with our soul’s intuitive glimpses of the other’s goodness and beauty and with the convictions our mind has come to about what is true, good and beautiful about the one we love. Learning to love and relate at these four levels and to attain a healthy balance between them is a truly beautiful art form. It is seldom recognised as such though for Jesus it is where we find the fullness of life. (Lk 10:25-28)

The levels that come into play immediately when we fall in love are the first two as we readily become physically and emotionally involved. When we experience difficulties in our relationships, we are invited to accept each other’s weakness and waywardness so that we do not become fixated by these and taken down into feelings of dissatisfaction that can make the relationship too difficult to maintain. If, however, we learn to accept the other’s limitations just as we ask him or her to accept ours we become free to take our relationship onto a new level as we learn to appreciate the other’s gifts of loving and relating that attracted us when we first fell in love. There is a lot of hard work involved if we are to lay the foundations of relating with our whole soul and mind as well as with our whole body and heart but it is where the happiness we are made for is to be found. (Jn 15:9-11)

The road into friendship passionate love invites us to take
When Theodore sits with his friend Amy in the closing scene of the film they have both been chastened by the experience of separation and divorce. We wonder will they cling to each other to avoid the pain of their loss of intimacy and its consequent loneliness or will they follow the path Samantha groomed Theodore to take. This is the road into friendship that passionate love challenges them to take.

In conclusion I would like to reflect briefly on the nature of the friendship that Theodore is led into by Samantha. It is a kind of love and way of relating that C S Lewis in his book referred to above says is not well defined in people’s minds today; he would hold that in fact it is not seen as a love at all by most people. This contrasts with the notion antiquity had of it where it was seen as the “most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue”.

Many people when they speak of their ‘friends’ mean only their companions. But it is not friendship in the sense I give to the word. By saying this I do not at all intend to disparage the merely club-able relation. We do not disparage silver by distinguishing it from gold … Very few modern people think friendship even a love at all … To the ancients, friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world in comparison ignores it. (C S Lewis)

The true nature of friendship
Where previous generations had seen Christianity in the context of the passionate love portrayed in the Song of Song, Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century saw it in terms of friendship. He based most of what he had to say about this friendship on the following words of Jesus, “I have called you friends for I have shared with you everything I have heard from the Father.” For Thomas friendship was the supreme way of loving and relating; he would even say that “love is friendship”. In working out his notion of friendship he was very taken by Aristotle’s ideas and boiled these down to the following three: Firstly, friendship was about what Thomas called ‘benevolence’ which for me is something like the affection that our parents gave us a taste for when we were children. It is a love that is personal or a one to one kind of love that accepts limitations, appreciates what is good and is concerned about all we yet might be. Secondly, Thomas believed that this benevolence had to be mutual or not a one way street in that both friends had to accept, appreciate and care for each other. Thirdly, he believed that friendship is maintained by conversation in which friends listen and respond to each other. Underlying this conversation between friends is the experience of acceptance, appreciation and concern that is implicit in all they do and say.

Underlying all that we share
Is a love that chooses
And calls by name.
A love sensitive and respectful
Accepting of each others weakness
And quietly affirming.
It is a brave one who initiates
Such friendship and braver still
Who maintains it.

Friends sit side by side gazing at a vision
When at the end of Her we see Theodore and Amy sitting together looking out at the sunset in a good old style happy ending to the film, we may feel it is too neat or trite. However, the body language says something more subtle as Theodore turns away from the embrace and the kiss that Amy felt would relieve their pain. In two very symbolic scenes in the film Theodore has already turned away from offers of a quick fix to his loss of intimacy and to his consequent loneliness. As the two sit side by side looking at the glorious sunset we find an echo of C S Lewis’s image of lovers sitting face to face but friends sitting side by side looking out at a common vision.

Lovers seek for privacy. Friends find this solitude about them, this barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not … Friends will still be doing something together, but something more inward, less widely shared, less easily defined; still hunters but of some immaterial quarry; still collaborating, but in some work the world does not, or not yet, take account of; still travelling companions, but on a different kind of journey, Hence we picture lovers face to face but friends side by side, their eyes look ahead. (Four Loves, C S Lewis)

The vision Theodore sees
We are not sure what Amy sees but we are more certain that what Theodore sees is the vision of himself that Samantha has given him. Whatever she was, whether muse or the inner voice of his dream of a love and a relationship that would engage his whole person or whether she was the feminine side of himself that seeks to emerge in the second half of his life, we are not sure. What we are sure of is that Samantha was a good friend in that she gave Theodore a vision of himself which he sees in the way she relates with him. He sees it in the balance between the way she accepts him where he is, appreciates what he has made of his life and is concerned that he would realise his dream. It is now up to him to appropriate this vision and to inspire it in those he befriends.

Friendship
I love you not only for what you are,
but for what I am when I am with you.
I love you not only for what you have made
of yourself, but for what you are making of me.
I love you because you have done more than
any creed could have done to make me good,
and more than any fate could have done to make me happy.
You have done it without a touch,
without a word, without a sign.
You have done it by being yourself. Perhaps it is
what being a friend means, after all.
Author unknown

If you are interested in the notion of friendship as the sum and climax of all the loves, there are six chapters on it in my book A World Alight With Splendour. There is a chapter on the history of friendship, one on its three elements, a chapter on each of these three elements and one on the bond or union friendship creates between people.

Peter’s Blog for February

The story I want to tell this month is that of a novel by John Williams called Stoner. It was first published in the 60s but did not appeal to people at the time. Then on the recommendation of John McGahern, Vintage books decided to republish it in 2012. In reviewing it for the Independent Colum McCann says it is “a book for everyone, democratic in how it breaks the heart… It is a triumph of literary endeavour. It deserves the status of a classic”.

Stoner questions us about how we deal with adversity, with the terrible things that happen to us, with whether life’s sufferings makes us bitter or better. How we deal with the major and minor tragedies of life is for the Oriah Mountain Dreamer the measure of our greatness:

It doesn’t interest me what planets are
squaring your moon. I want to know if you have
touched the centre of your sorrow, if you have been
opened up by life’s betrayals or have
become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain,
mine or your own…
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live
or how much money you have. I want to know
if you can get up after a night of grief and despair,
weary and bruised to the bone,
and do what needs to be done for the children.
It doesn’t matter who you are, or how you
came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in
the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with
whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains
you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself,
and if you truly like the company
you keep in the empty moments.

These are the questions a number of films I have seen recently are asking us, films like, All Is Lost, The Railway Man, 12 Years A Slave and novels like, Stoner and In the Garden the Swallows. It is the question Buddha must answer if he is to find enlightenment and serenity in the midst of life’s Four Sights

Buddha and the Four Sights
At the beginning of his life, even though Buddha had an abundance of this world’s goods he was not happy. His parents did their best to remedy this by shielding him from life’s hardships. They even had the inside of the windows of his carriage painted with pleasant pictures so that he might not see the pain of the world around him.

Then one day when he was travelling through his kingdom he opened the window of his carriage and saw the Four Sights. He saw people looking for food, mourning a loss, caring for the ill and facing old age. These sights had such a profound effect on him that he left his kingdom in search of enlightenment. He eventually found it under the Bo Tree where he was inspired to become a Buddha for others. As a result, wherever we go we find statues of the Buddha. He is smiling, for having been enlightened by the woundedness of human kind, he is no longer depressed.

Stoner’s epiphany 
The novel begins with Stoner as an only child growing up on a farm in Missouri in the early twentieth century. It is a small farm on which his parents eke out a meagre existence. By skimping and scraping, however, they save enough to send their son William to the University of Missouri where he initially studies agriculture. One of the requirements of this course is that he takes a class in English literature and one day during this his teacher reads Shakespeare’s 73rd sonnet and asks Stoner for his thoughts on it. Stoner finds himself tongue-tied and embarrassed, unable to say anything meaningful about the poem. And yet, something happens within him: an epiphany that occurs in a moment of being overwhelmed by something he cannot understand much less articulate.

Sonnet 73 is Shakespeare’s reflection on his approaching death which he compares to the death of nature in Winter, then to night or “Death’s second self” and finally to a burnt out fire. What he recommends we learn from these images is to treasure life, or “To love that well which thou must leave ere long”.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Truth is given the dignity of art 
As a result of this experience Stoner realises that there is something out there which, if he can seize it, will unlock not just literature but the life which Shakespeare invites him to treasure. On hearing this invitation Stoner already feels his humanity awakened, and a new kinship with those around him. His life changes utterly from this moment: he will discover “a sense of wonder at grammar, and grasp how literature changes the world even as it describes it.” He becomes a teacher and even a good one as he admits to himself. Through what he teaches he discovers a truth to which “is given the dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man”.

Good things do happen in Stoner’s life, but so many end badly. He is a son of the soil and though he has learned to be patient, earnest and enduring he rarely feels at home with himself as he moves unprepared into the city and into the world of the university. The book is wonderful at describing his awkwardness, his physical and emotional shyness, his inability to voice his mind or his heart, maybe because he cannot articulate them, or because he simply cannot follow what is happening, or both

He relishes teaching students and they find him a kind, devoted and engaging teacher, but his career is stymied by a malevolent head of department. He falls in love and marries, but knows within a month that the relationship is a failure, “And so, like many others, their honeymoon was a failure; yet they would not admit this to themselves, and they did not realise the significance of the failure until long afterward.” They have a daughter whom he adores and she him, but whom his wife maliciously turned against him; he is given sudden new life by an affair with one of his students called Catherine, but when it threatens their careers they agree to part. When he is aged 42, he reflects that “he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember”.

All these pains of lost and thwarted love test Stoner’s reserves of stoicism to the full; and you might well conclude that his life must be accounted pretty much a failure. But, if so, you would not have John Williams the author of the book on your side. In one of his rare interviews, he commented: “I think he’s a real hero. A lot of people who have read the novel think that Stoner had such a sad and bad life. I think he had a very good life. He had a better life than most people do, certainly. He was doing what he wanted to do, he had some feeling for what he was doing, he had some sense of the importance of the job he was doing … The important thing in the novel to me is Stoner’s sense of a job … a job in the good and honourable sense of the word. His job gave him a particular kind of identity and made him what he was.”

How we see and feel about Stoner depends a lot on what criterion we use to evaluate his life. If we use the criterion of how successful his marriage or his academic career was, we would probably say he was a failure; he was never driven by the success that is so much a part of the american ideal. If we rate him as a teacher or by the job he did I would agree with the author of the book that Stoner’s was a good and even a heroic life. But if we evaluate his life on a human basis, on the way he loved and related with people or on the way he faced a very difficult life or by the courage and serenity with which he faced the greatest adventure of his life which was his death we would have to say his life was extraordinary. His style of relating ended up showing many of the signs of what St Paul in his letter to the Galatians says are those of a truly mature person. He was kind, gentle, tolerant, faithful and generous, and yet he was a person of integrity and courage in the way he adhered to the truth and lived in its light. Like Buddha he reached a state of enlightenment and contentment, especially in the way he faced his death.

When we compare Stoner’s story to that of the people in the three films and in the novel I mentioned above we notice that they all survived and were heroic in doing so because they kept alive the memory of a love that was at the centre of their experience. They learned to live in this love and in the holding environment it created and sustained in spite of the destructive power of the circumstances they were forced to live in.

Even though Stoner grew up as an only child of parents who did not communicate or show much tangible affection he was always conscious that they wanted the best for him and sacrificed a lot to send him to university. He also returned often to the memory of two friends he made as a student, one of whom died in the first world war and the second who worked with him at the university and cared for him in many ways. It was however in his brief relationship with Catherine that he found the most fulfilling love and relationship of his life. It is a relationship that takes us by surprise in its extraordinary range and depth especially for a person who came out of such a stoical background. It is hard to account for the serenity of his final years unless he lived with the vision of himself that he saw in the eyes of those people who loved him. It is a great tribute to Stoner that he was able to maintain this vision or enlightenment in spite of the way he was treated by his wife at home and by his head of department at work.

Even though I have never experienced the enduring adversity Stoner had to deal with I find an echo within of what he went through and how he learned to handle it. I wrote the following lines some years ago when I went through a period of darkness and I felt the truth of Dante’s words, “In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself astray in a dark wood where the straight road had been lost sight of”.

The Taste of Darkness

Dull disinterest drains my energy

And clothes all in listless grey.

The sun that lights my life has hidden

Behind the dark clouds of hopelessness.

Where I would have a hundred things to do,

All my enthusiasm abandons me now.

I am beached and on my back

Waiting helplessly for the tide to turn.

And turn it will in its own good time

For the ocean will surely engulf me again

But refuses to be rushed by my impatience;

We do not rule the tide of God’s benevolence.

This enervating dullness is a testing time,

A weaning from the need for intensity;

A learning to live on heartfelt convictions,

Expressed in the dark winter rings of my story.

Thus develops this taste for a deeper reality,

Felt apart from sense and emotion,

When, in spite of all appearance,

Love is known with faith’s certainty.

How we deal with the sufferings and hardships that come our way so that they do not diminish or destroy us is a major theme in the gospel story. Jesus was no stranger to suffering in his relationships and in the work he set out to do. He describes himself as one immersed or baptised in suffering and in all the pain involved in having what he wanted so passionately to do for people resisted and rejected. “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!” (Luke 12:49-50) We get a wonderful glimpse of how he dealt with his own sufferings and how he would have us deal with ours when after his resurrection he met two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus. The lives of these two were torn apart when they witnessed Jesus’ passion and death and all that led up to it. They were suddenly bereft of their faith and their hope, of their joy and enthusiasm. How Jesus enters their suffering and works to restore their joy and their hope is one of the most exciting and instructive of the Gospel stories.

When Jesus joins them on the road, he first gives them time to say all that is troubling them. He then teaches them a way to maintain their belief in his love and the joy and hope this will open up for them. They must keep alive the memory of his love by telling the story of how he loves them “to the utmost extent”. (Jn 13:1) No matter how hard life becomes they must maintain their joy and hope by keeping the memory of his love alive through the Word and the “breaking of bread”. (Lk 24)

How telling the story and “breaking of bread” can become the most powerful way we have of dealing with the worst things that happen to us is explored in my book Love Remembered. Its title is taken from the final lines of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (No 29) that encapsulates much of what I have said about Stoner.

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Peter’s blog for January 2014

 The one riddle, the one great enterprise in this world is to learn how to love and keep loving. Richard Selig

 The film that was judged to be the best  of the year at the Cannes film festival tells the story of two women called Emma and Adele who are drawn to each other. In their relationship Emma is the senior, dominant partner: better educated, more worldly and higher up the social scale. Adele who is in her final year at school and aims to become a teacher is from a humbler and more conservative background. It soon becomes obvious that Emma’s main interest is her career and that she is willing to sacrifice her relationship with Adele for it. Even though Adele goes on to become a teacher her main interest in life is her relationship with Emma that she pursues with a love whose growth becomes the main focus of the film. We witness in her the extraordinary experience Neil Diamond sings of in the song, I’m A Believer:

 I thought love was only true in fairy tales
Meant for someone else, but not for me
Love was out to get me
That’s the way it seemed
Disappointment haunted all my dreams
Then I saw her face, now I’m a believer
Not a trace of doubt in my mind
I’m in love and I’m a believer
I couldn’t leave her if I tried.

The Life of Adele
The French title of the film is, The Life of Adele: Chapter 1 and 2 and these two chapters could be entitled Initiation and Experience. When Adele and Emma first meet they are instantly drawn to each other and Emma who is a number of years older dominates as she initiates Adele into the world of love and relationships.

However, soon after the initial passion that characterises the early stages of their relationship, a passion that is portrayed in all its beauty, it becomes obvious that Emma cannot maintain their relationship or take it on to the next stage that the intensity of their love is designed to move them towards. We realise that Emma has not got the will or the ability to make their love last because her career has too much of a hold on her heart.

Soon after the cracks first appear in their relationship Emma does something that would normally shatter a relationship. When Emma wrongly suspects that Adele has been unfaithful to her, she, in a fit of violent rage, abuses Adele in language that is as ferociously cruel and destructive as any I have witnessed on screen. It is in Adele’s reaction to this that we see the initial stage of the growth of a love that dominates the rest of the film. Hers is a love that withstands the rejection of Emma and her permanent withdrawal from their relationship.

Love refined as in a fire
It is in this fire of adversity that Adele’s love is refined and becomes strikingly beautiful. We see this especially in the film’s final sequence when Adele goes along to an exhibition of Emma’s paintings. All we know at the end as she walks away is that Adele’s is a love that has been moulded by adversity into something deep and permanent and that nobody can take that utterly transforming experience from her. We may feel a sense of sadness for her that a relationship which promised so much is in one sense ended. However, what she has learned from it has not and this on reflection is seen to have a unique beauty that belongs especially to a passionate love that lasts and deepens and so becomes capable of the intimacy that belongs to friendship. From one point of view we see Adele’s very ordinary affection for the young children she teaches in her sensitivity, acceptance, appreciation and concern for them. From another viewpoint she has an extraordinary capacity for passionate love, one that lasts and deepens. This capacity to fall in love “in a quite absolute, final way” is expressed in the words of someone we might not expect to speak about passionate love or falling in love in this way.

“Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything”
Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything. (Pedro Arrupe S J)

The film is about ‘being in love’ or about what I will call passionate love and where it is designed to take us. I learned a lot about this from C.S. Lewis’ book Four Loves. In it he examines what the Greeks called “eros” which is the name they gave to what we call intimate, passionate, romantic love or to the being in love experience. They gave the name “storge” to what we call familial love or affection, the word “philia” to w hat we call friendship and the word “agape” to what we call “selfless love” or charity.

The roots that intertwine
Passionate love plays a key role among these loves in that it takes the affection we receive a gift of as children and gives it to another. There is an intensity about this giving that engages our whole self, body, soul, heart and mind and centres it on another person. In other words, passionate love is the catalyst that can transform us from self-centred adolescents into other-centred adults. What passionate love is and is not is wonderfully expressed in Dr Janis’ advice to his daughter in the novel, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because that is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion,… That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two. But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined. Imagine giving up your home and your people, only to discover after six months, a year, three years, that the trees had no roots and have fallen over. Imagine the desolation. Imagine the imprisonment.

Where passionate love takes us
Although there is an obvious sexual dimension that we tend to identify passionate love with, the main thrust of its intensity is to involve our whole person, memory, imagination, body, soul, heart and mind in making this kind of love last and in deepening it. Its ultimate objective is to find fulfilment in friendship or in a mutual sharing of our whole self. This friendship that passionate love seeks to find fulfilment in is a very difficult achievement as it involves sharing or making known our whole self. To do this we have to come to terms with or accept how limited and sinful we all are and at the same time learn to appreciate how immensely gifted each of us is. However, this demands a lot of energy and resourcefulness that are difficult to find time for. This is especially so as we belong to a culture which is so addicted to what is urgent that it leaves us little time for what we know in our bones is important. Even so, passionate love remains a powerful source of energy for growth.

Romantic love is the single greatest energy system in the Western psyche. In our culture it has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and woman seek meaning transcendence, wholeness and ecstasy. (Robert Johnson, The Psychology of Romantic Love)

Three illusions
Because we cannot make the time to answer the true call of passionate love we easily fall victim to three illusions. These are like shortcuts we take to benefit from some aspects of passionate love while avoiding full responsibility for all that it has to offer us.

The first of these illusions tends to identify passionate love with the physical and emotional side of it and fails to make room for the glimpses of the other’s goodness and beauty and for the convictions that some of these glimpses gradually develop into. The growth of these glimpses into convictions is a slow and inconspicuous one so that it is difficult to make space in our day to notice, articulate and grow to believe in them. It is, however, precisely this that we are being asked to do when we feel physically and emotionally at a distance from each other. We are invited to rediscover the goodness and beauty we initially found in the person we fell in love with.

A second illusion that stunts the growth of our relationships emerges when we neglect or repress the physical and emotional side of our relationships. When for cultural or religious reasons or out of laziness we fail to cultivate the physical and emotional side of a relationship it tends to dry up and become impoverished.

The third illusion manifests itself when people ask each other to realise their dream by providing a love that is beyond our capacity as limited and sinful human beings to provide. Nobody can realise our dream for us as we each must take responsibility for going on the inner journey on which we realise it. It is an unfair burden to lay on another person when we ask him or her to realise our dream of a love, an intimacy and a joy that is full and complete. They are sure to disappoint us as in the end it is only God can give us this fullness of life that the Bible calls peace. It is something God plans and passionately wants for each of us.

A plan for your peace
The prophet Jeremiah spoke of this when he revealed God’s plan for our peace and Jesus spoke of it too as his special gift to us. It is his wish for us when we meet him on the way.

I have a plan in mind for you, a plan for your peace and not disaster, a future full of hope. If you seek me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me. (Jer 29:11)

My peace I leave you, my own peace I give you, a peace the world cannot give you, this is my gift to you.(Jn 14:27)

 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. (Jn 20:19-21)

In his poem Arcadia Philip Sydney speaks of the dream of intimacy and joy that passionate love seeks to fulfil. This is the dream or fulfilment Jesus calls peace. So since we are in Paul’s words “the beloved of God” (Rom 1:7) we can hear the poem spoken to us by any of the three persons of the Trinity just as truly as by any human beloved.

My true love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange, one for the other giv’n.
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss:
There never was a better bargain driv’n.
His heart in me, keeps me and him in one,
My heart in him, his thoughts and senses guides:
He loves my heart, for once it was his own:

I cherish his, because in me it bides.
His heart his wound received from my sight:
My heart was wounded with his wounded heart,
For as from me, on him his hurt did light,
So still methought in me his hurt did smart;
Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss:
My true love hath my heart and I have his.
(Sir Philip Sidney)