The story of our
most important art form
and yet the most neglected
Life is had in love and relationships Luke 10:25-28
I saw two films in the past month that were both engaging and challenging. They were the French films Clouds of Sils Maria and The New Girlfriend. Both were about our inner world of love and relationships and were, like most French films on this theme, very engaging – I dread to think what Hollywood would make of the latter film. Both films were also challenging in that they confronted us with how we feel about an older woman becoming infatuated with a much younger one and how we react to a man wanting to live out his longing to be a woman. What came through from both films is how central to life our relationships are and how difficult it is to develop them so that they deepen and last. I think that few would deny that this art of being loved and loving as well as how it invites us to relate is by far the most important one but, as Erich Fromm says in in his book, The Art of Loving, it is also the one that is most neglected.
Rather than exploring the complex themes of these two films I would like to reflect on how the Bible deals with the world of love and relationships and how it suggests we navigate our way through these often stormy waters. To begin with I would like to explore this theme in my own experience and then how it is dealt with in the story of the Holy Grail and ultimately in the Bible story.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake waters lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
W B Yeats
Our underground stream of inner wisdom
Many years ago, during a course I attended on journaling, I came across an idea that has remained with me ever since. It is the idea that each of us has an underground stream of inner wisdom which it is important for us to awaken, explore and make our own of. This is no easy task for our wisdom lies deep underground or well below the surface of our consciousness and it is therefore difficult to access. It is a stream in the sense that runs from one end of life to the other and broadens and deepens as we learn what life wants to teach us. It is most importantly a stream of inner wisdom or a body of convictions we each have developed about what is true and worthwhile, a vision and values system that gives meaning and worth to everything in each person’s life. It is to this personal wisdom we each possess that the Bible story must talk to if it is to be meaningful and moving.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
I took the one less travelled by
And that has made all the difference.
Two ways of “Doing the will of God”
If we let the Bible or the Word of God speak to our personal synthesis or wisdom, it can become the main source of what is meaningful and worthwhile for us. The Bible first spoke to me when in 1953 when I did the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. This profound experience led to my being won over by the winning ways of Jesus in the Gospel story and as a result, I wanted to find out all I could.about him and I diligently recorded all my findings in a book I kept for this purpose. Two sayings of Jesus in John’s Gospel guided me into what was to become central to my relationship with him. One of these spoke of his aim in coming among us: “I have come that you may have life and have it in abundance” and the second spoke of the nature of this life: “This is eternal life, to know you the one true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent”. Jn 10:10, 17:3 As a result of being won over by Jesus I wanted to respond in a way that was approved of or even mandatory at that time. This was to let my life be governed by ‘doing the will of God’, and this was seen in the context of obedience to an outer authority. Our worth was defined in terms of how obedient we were to rules that governed every aspect of our lives.
It was in 1964 when studying Theology that I began to read the Old Testament as the best commentary on the Gospels. I delved into this area of the Bible that I had never been exposed to before with the help of a wonderful book called, Theology of the Old Testament by Walther Eichrodt. With this and the enlightening notes of the Jerusalem Bible I discovered that the Word of God is not so much about doing the will of God as about coming to know his love and his plan or dream for us. I realised that it is through knowing and believing in his love that we have life in abundance. I also came to realise that each of the persons of the Trinity have a significant role in revealing this love; that the Father initiates its revelation, sending Jesus to put it in human or tangible terms and both sending the Holy Spirit to lead us into an intimate knowledge of their love and plan for us.
tells the story of how four people
found the Holy Grail in their love for each other
The Holy Grail
It was when I began to teach that I became aware that the Bible is a story best understood in the light of our own story and in that of a story like the following:
The Grail Legend
The Holy Grail is the chalice and platter used by Christ at the Last Supper. It was reputed to be kept in a certain castle where the king resided. As a result of his being unaware of its presence the king and his whole kingdom were afflicted by a debilitating illness that nobody could heal.
Meanwhile, in a remote part of the kingdom there lived a youth called Parsifal. On being trained as a knight he was given three rules to live by. He must not seduce or be seduced, and he must seek the Holy Grail. When he finds this, the object of life’s journey, he must ask the question, “Whom does the Grail serve?”
After many years journeying he arrived at the king’s castle and was invited to stay. However, he failed to recognise the Holy Grail and to ask the crucial question. Consequently, the king was not healed and the his kingdom continued to be desolate. So Parsifal sets out on his journey again but as a result of being seduced by many things he forgot all about the Holy Grail.
Eventually he met a hermit who absolved him and gave him instructions on how to get to the Grail castle. This time when he found it, he asked the vital question and received 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 king was healed. He and his kingdom were cured and their desolation gave way to joy as they learned to acknowledge the presence of the Holy Grail.
This story is based on the belief that there is a basic desire or dream built into us. It is towards the realisation of this that we journey all our lives even though, like Parsifal, we are often seduced by more superficial dreams. The dream built into us at our making is of a love that will satisfy our fundamental craving but it is one that cannot be fulfilled at a human level. This is because the grail hunger can only be satisfied by the Grail King, who by his death and resurrection has opened up before us a love that knows no bounds. There is a danger that we burden other human beings with satisfying this most basic hunger when in fact they can only give us an impression of the One whose love can satisfy it.
The dream the Grail King has for us
What follows is a very personal account of how I see the Bible and its role in satisfying our basic hunger. As I see it the Bible tells the story of the Trinity’s desire to satisfy our deepest longing or grail hunger by their self-revelation as love. This is their love of us “to the utmost extent” that is symbolised by the cup and platter used by Jesus at the last supper. Jn 13:1 It is in knowing their love and in entering the relationships with them, with ourselves, with others and with all creation that we find the life Jesus so wants to share with each of us.
I have come that you may have life and have it to the full. Jn 10:10
This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. Jn 17:3
Life as all about love and the dream it inspires
The word “know” Jesus uses here means an experience of being loved by the three persons of the Trinity in the exact same way that they love each other. Jn 15:9-10 This desire they have to share “everything”, in sharing the love they essentially are, is what Jesus calls friendship. Jn 15:15 The following views of friendship give us a sense of what it tastes like but also of the inadequacy of human friendship to satisfy our deepest longing.
Sharing our unique dream
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. C S Lewis
Friendship is the nearest thing we know to what religion is. God is love and to make religion akin to friendship is simply to give it the highest expression conceivable to man. John Ruskin
There is in friendship something of all relations, and something above them all. It is the golden thread that ties the heart of all the world. John Evelyn
T
Sweet is the lore that nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things; –
We murder to dissect.
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
W Wordsworth
The Bible tells the story of our journey into friendship as the sum and climax of love
The story of this dream the Trinity have for us began with Abraham who is addressed by God as “Abraham, my friend”. Is 41:8 Moses too is seen as someone with whom God speaks “face to face as with a friend”. Ex 33:11 Initially the Trinity revealed themselves to the leaders of the people but in the new covenant, announced by the prophet Jeremiah, God speaks to each person, or “to the least no less than to the greatest” Jer 31:31-34
The friendship which the Trinity seek to initiate with each of us involves a mutual sharing. They invite us to do this by listening and responding to their self-revelation in the Word. Much of the Bible story is about the difficulty we find listening to the inner voice of this revelation because it has to compete with the insistence of so many external voices. These make it difficult for us to find space to answer the constant call of the Bible story to listen and respond to the Word of God.
“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”
Steve Jobs
When the centre no longer holds
Stephan Covey in his book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People makes the following striking comment about how people so often opt for what is urgent or for meeting external expectations rather than opting for what is important.
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.
In a book called A Severe Mercy Sheldon Vanauken tells us of a much more subtle threat to the way we love and relate that takes the form of what he calls “creeping separateness”.
Separation
Don’t You Love Me Anymore
(A song sung by Joe Cocker)
Oh oh I thought I’d see you smile
When I walked in the door
Thought those arms of yours would be open wide
The way they were before
Why do you look at me
Like I’m some stranger now
Why do you pull away
When you used to hold me so tight
Don’t you love me anymore
Have your learned to live your life without me
Don’t you love me, anymore
When did the fire go out
Where did the feeling go
Did it slip away when I wasn’t there.
Creeping separateness
But why does love need to be guarded? Against what enemies? We looked about us and saw the world as having become a hostile and threatening place where standards of decency and courtesy were perishing and war loomed gigantic. A world where love did not endure. … But why? What was the failure behind the failure of love? One day in early Spring we thought we saw the answer. The killer of love is creeping separateness. Involvedness is a gift of the gods, but then it is up to the lovers to cherish or to ruin. Taking love for granted, especially after marriage. Ceasing to do things together. Finding separate interests. We turning into I, what I want to do. This was the way of creeping separateness. And in the modern world, especially in the cities, everything favoured it. …. The failure of love might seem to be caused by hate or boredom or unfaithfulness with a lover; but these were results. First came the creeping separateness; the failure behind the failure.
Coming to know love in all its diversity
Belief in the Trinity’s self-revelation as love is at the heart of our calling as Christians, and something the Trinity constantly “work” towards. Mk 1:14-15 Jn 6:29. The Holy Spirit is seen as the one who leads us into “all the truth” or into the love of the Father that Jesus expresses in human terms.
When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. Jn 16:13-15
How love unfolds
Early in my life I came across a book that invited me to focus my attention on seven very distinct ways Jesus’ love is revealed in the Gospel story. These were aspects of his love that I was familiar with especially when they were portrayed for me in some detail. After reading the Bible for many years I began to notice nine aspects of the Trinity’s love portrayed there. These are faces, portraits or facets of their love and of the dream this inspires that I have written eight books about. They are meant to join it Paul’s prayer for us:
I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Eph 3:18-19
We see how the foundation of this love is laid in the Exodus, in the role that the loves of acceptance, appreciation and concern play there. Ex 3:7-8, 6:6-7, 34:6-7, 34:29-30 In the prophets we see how this love becomes personal and passionate as well as permanent, profound and joyful. Jer 31:31-34, Isa 62:2-5, Hos 2
We share everything
All these loves are a preparation for the love of friendship as Jesus understands it. Thomas Aquinas would go so far as to say that “Love is friendship” since both express the greatest love the world has ever seen. Thus, the whole movement of the Bible story is towards this mutual sharing of “everything” initiated by the Trinity’s passion for self-disclosure. This friendship needs to be cultivated by the conversation the persons of the Trinity initiate and constantly work to maintain no matter how we fail to engage in it. This need of friendship for conversation is based on the principle that to improve our relationships we need to improve the communication going on within them. Our tentativeness about the conversation in which we reveal ourselves to others is well expressed in John Wood’s Poem For Everybody.
Poem for Everybody
I will present you with parts of myself,
slowly, if you are patient and tender,
I will open drawers
that mostly stay closed
and bring out places and things,
sounds and smells, loves and frustrations
hopes and sadnesses
bits and pieces of three decades of life
that have eaten their way into my memory,
carved themselves into my heart
Altogether they are me.
If you regard them lightly
deny that they are important,
or worse, judge them,
I will quietly, slowly
begin to wrap them up
in small pieces of velvet,
like worn silver and gold jewellery,
tuck them away
in a small wooden chest of drawers
and close the lid.
John Wood
The poem highlights how extraordinary is the unfailing passion of the Trinity to converse with each of us.
I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. Jn 10:14-15
I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” Jn 17:26
The life that I have is all that I have,
And the life that I have is yours.
The love that I have of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.
A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have,
Yet death will be but a pause,
For the peace of my years of the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.
Leo Marks