day 9

What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of the heart.

Terry Tempest Williams

I choose joy.  It might get messy.  It might be difficult to imagine, it might be hard to realise, and it might be even harder to hold onto.  But as Henri Nouwen says,

We can choose joy … choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise … or choose despair and be destroyed by it.

(Bread for the Journey, 38)

I choose joy because I know I want to live with an open heart, open towards my God, towards others and towards my self.  I know this choice to journey along the road to Joy will need perseverance. There will be darkness. There will be difficulties.  There will be diversions.  I will need to cling onto hope for all I am worth, if I am to recognise the promises, the opportunities, that can arise out every encounter and every experience.  Alain de Botton and John Armstrong suggest that,

… in many cases the difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convince others of our due.  We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope … we need tools that can preserve our hopeful dispositions.

(Art as Therapy, 13)

During the midst of this year’s global pandemic, colour suddenly burst forth as the sign and emblem of hope, compassion, gratitude and solidarity.  The rainbow’s spectrum appeared everywhere, claimed by religious and non-religious alike.  

lockdown rainbow (Kate Kennington Steer, mixed media collage)

What is it about this array of colour that represents such a well of emotions?  Keren Dibbens-Wyatt offers me this contemplative perspective:

A promise ribbon falling in a cascade of colours through the air as the sky dries its tears and finally lets the sun shine.  A bridge between sadness and joy, arching across the divide between creation and re-creation.  Your partialness just as much an illusion as your sudden appearance, when of course your spectrum is always there and you are just one visible section of God’s wedding band, round and perfect, a sign of covenant grace encircling those he loves, people and animals, to whom he says, “Never again” and “I am with you always.”  Hovering hues, high and holy, a sneak preview of the kingdom to come, like a glimpse of God’s petticoat sweeping through the blue.  A breakthrough of that world to this.  An eternal beau of brightness, almost unbearable in its simple vibrancy, so that it must depart into the invisible soon and fade.  Those who have eyes to see, let them see.

‘Day 37: Rainbow’, Garden of God’s Heart, Keren Dibbens-Wyatt (37)

spectrum’s shimmer. iPhone image.

Sunday 2

you need to be very still
to hear the concert of your body 

to think about what you contain 

salt and water
knows what it’s doing
renewing itself
back to earth
it is a quiet thing
this is where our riches are
we are all red inside
brimming with love
all fluid and quiet and fire. 

‘Core’

Kerrie O’Brien

I am on the journey towards being a JoyPilgrim.  Reflecting on where my ‘riches are’, I remembered Eckhart Tolle writing about ‘isness’, the transformative power of doing absolutely nothing, merely being:

Find the “narrow gate that leads to life” … It is called the Now.  Narrow your life down to this moment … use your senses fully.  Be where you are.  Look around.  Just look, don’t interpret.  See the lights, shapes, colours, textures.  Be aware of the silent presence of each thing.  Be aware of the space that allows everything to be … Allow the ‘isness’ of all things.  Move deeply into the Now.  

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (52)

I spend much of my time in bed, seemingly doing nothing.  Coming to the end of each day and still seemingly having ‘nothing to show for it’ is a habitual mind script that I am trying to change.  Such language of achievement and productivity is deeply unhelpful to a perfectionist like me and over the years it has become a very large stick with which I can beat myself.  Such language takes me further and further away from the Now, distancing me from the revelation of the Holy in that instant.  The more I am isolated from the Holy, the more ill I become.  

So my spiritual journey is characterised by the idea of ‘travelling whilst staying still’.  I long to be constantly open to the transformative potential of each moment, where Sophia waits to guide, teach, reassure, lead, and play.  ‘Travelling whilst staying still’ is a heart journey, not merely a mental idea; it is an intentional, chosen-moment-by-moment, holistic adventure into Joy.

The first king was on horseback.

The second a pillion rider.

The third came by plane.

Where was the god-child?

He was in the manger

with the beasts, all looking

the other way where the fourth

was a slow dawning because

wisdom must come on foot.

R.S.Thomas, from Counterpoint.

fluid quiet fire. iPhone image.

day 7

this skin

this Black skin

a constant reminder of centuries of genocides in a world that kept/keeps silent every time it happens

this Black skin

a symbol of glory and triumph, symbolizing that despite all we conquered!

a skin whose essence is made of honey and gold but who’s story has been summed up to that of slavery and oppression

even though the sea holds more history of us than white minds ever will and even though the genocide continues till today. We have rised, we are rising.

because we are not defined by your crooked ignorance of who we are nor by the white supremacist version your history textbooks teach you

my melanin has and never will demand acceptance from you. i am centuries old in this small body, because my ancestors have lived the lesser life so i could have a fuller one

i have lived all these memories a century ago and so my wisdom and light is a reflection of that

i am Black and i carry the burden of the universe on my shoulders because the world’s agenda seems to want to destroy the very being of where they came from

i am Black, and there was way God could have blessed me more, no way he could’ve made me more beautiful

my skin is the color of the earth and my hair defies gravity… i am magical, i am Black!

‘This Black skin — a poem on Blackness’

Elizabeth Queta

(see/hear her read this at an open mic night)

I cannot go any further into this pilgrimage towards Joy by exploring colour, without stating I am profoundly troubled by the historical connections between colour and class, and between colour and race.  In this year where the world’s response to the killing of George Floyd was a wake-up call to many, and such injustice became the rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement, I cannot avoid confronting my own casual assumptions.  It is no longer enough to say ‘we are all people of colour’ when part of the social construction of my understanding of colour is made up of passages such as this, from Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810):

… it is also worthy of remark, that savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colours: that animals are excited to rage by certain colours; that people of refinement avoid vivid colours in their dress and the objects that are about them, and seem inclined to banish them altogether from their presence.

I do not know what to say to my ‘black’ friends other than asking for their forgiveness for my part in perpetuating, however unwittingly, such assumptions.  Even the following fascinating account of the symbiotic nature of light and darkness, cannot help drawing on an inherited metaphor of cultural imperialism:

Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surprisingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture.  Without that darkness, there would only be a blur.  Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen.  If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in the theater gazing together at a deep imaginative night.  It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map.

from Rebecca Solnit A Field Guide to Getting Lost (175)

My grief and silence makes language itself seem a ‘terra incognita’, an unknown land where my vocabulary deserts me when I think of the pain my fellow human beings impose on one another through apartheid, racism and segregation.  Somewhere in this too I have to choose joy, but just at this precise moment, that feels deeply difficult.  I am ‘in the dark’, sitting alongside so many others, holding each other in solidarity as we cry to God and to one another, for justice, for mercy, for freedom.

You have looked at so many doors with longing, wondering if your life lay on the other side.

For today, choose the door that opens to the inside.

Travel the most ancient way of all: the path that leads you to the center of your life.

No map but the one you make yourself.

No provision but what you already carry and the grace that comes to those who walk the pilgrim’s way.

Speak this blessing as you set out and watch how your rhythm slows, the cadence of the road drawing you into the pace that is your own.

Eat when hungry. Rest when tired. Listen to your dreaming. Welcome detours as doors deeper in.

Pray for protection. Ask for the guidance you need. Offer gladness for the gifts that come and then let them go.

Do not expect to return by the same road.

Home is always by another way and you will know it not by the light that waits for you but by the star that blazes inside you telling you where you are is holy

and you are welcome here.

‘The Map You Make Yourself’

Jan L Richardson

terra incognita.  original artwork by Kate Kennington Steer (mixed media)

day 6

I could not predict the fullness
of the day. How it was enough
to stand alone without help
in the green yard at dawn.

How two geese would spin out
of the ochre sun opening my spine,
curling my head up to the sky
in an arc I took for granted.

And the lilac bush by the red
brick wall flooding the air
with its purple weight of beauty?
How it made my body swoon,

brought my arms to reach for it
without even thinking.

*
In class today a Dutch woman split
in two by a stroke – one branch
of her body a petrified silence,
walked leaning on her husband

to the treatment table while we
the unimpaired looked on with envy.
How he dignified her wobble,
beheld her deformation, untied her

shoe, removed the brace that stakes
her weaknesses. How he cradled
her down in his arms to the table
smoothing her hair as if they were

alone in their bed. I tell you –
his smile would have made you weep.

*
At twilight I visit my garden
where the peonies are about to burst.

Some days there will be more
flowers than the vase can hold.

‘I tell You’

Adrienne Rich

If I am to choose joy today I am going to have to make the gargantuan effort to stay present.  As part of my preparations for my journey as a JoyPilgrim, I need to sit much more lightly to my mind’s ruminating thoughts, get curious, and perceive what is really going on around me in this moment.  Where I put my attention will dictate what I am able to see today and what, in turn, I am able to feel.  As Rob Walker says in The Art of Noticing:

To stay eager, to connect, to find interest in the everyday, to notice what everybody else overlooks—these are vital skills and noble goals. They speak to the difference between looking and seeing, between hearing and listening, between accepting what the world presents and noticing what matters to you.

Paying attention to the details, the colours, of my life in this immediate moment, here and now, will bring me directly into contact with the Holy.  Paying attention is the doorway to wonder and the doorway to gratitude.  Most significantly paying attention will bring me into an encounter where I might behold some part of the Immensity who is Joy.

God cannot be thought, but God can be met. Through awe and wonder we experience God and there, as mystics have always stated, we understand more by not understanding than by understanding. In that posture we let God be God. In such a posture, too, we live in contemplation. 

Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God (117).

rise up. iPhone image.

day 5

Once in the Advent season
When I was walking down
A narrow street

I met a flock of children
Who all came running up to me
Saying that they were prophets
And for a penny they
Would prophesy

I gave them each a penny

They started out
By rummaging in trash-cans
Until they found
A ragged piece of silk

It’s blue, they said
Blue is a holy color
Blue is the color that
The mountains are
When they are far away

They laid the rag
On a small fire
Of newspaper and shavings
And burned it in the street

They scraped up all the ashes
And with them decorated
Each other’s faces

Then they ran back to me
And stood
In a circle ‘round me

We stood that way
In a solemn silence
Until
One of the children spoke

It was the prophecy!

He said that long before
The pear tree blossoms
Or sparrows in the hedges
Begin to sing

A Child will be our King.

‘Prophets’
Anne Porter

Is blue a holy colour as Anne Porter suggests?  It certainly figures dominantly in many paintings of the Madonna and Child.  It is after all, one of three primary colours, from which all other hues can be made.  In that sense it might be called an incarnational colour.  But any easy assumption that the sky is blue risks blinkering myself by my own expectations, and expectations are a major handicap on any spiritual pilgrimage.  As I set my heart’s intention of being a ‘joy pilgrim’ for this Advent, I need to be intent on being curious about every facet of every blue that may appear during these days, to see where joy might be revealed.  The English historian A.L.Rowse described such an encounter with blue:

The peculiar purity of the blue sky seen through the white clusters of the apple-blossom in spring.  I remember being moon-struck looking at it early one morning on my way to school.  It meant something to me; what I couldn’t say.  It gave me unease at heart, such reaching out towards perfection such as impels men to religion, some sense of the transcendence of things, of the fragility of our hold upon life.

(found in John Pridmore, Playing with Icons: The Spirituality of Recalled Childhood)

cloudscape (original artwork by Kate Kennington Steer)

Where might joy be found in this ‘unease at heart’?  How does my attraction to blue clothing, for example, sit next to my recognition of Rowse’s description of perfection, transcendence, purity, fragility?

How simple is it to be ‘moon-struck’ by blue?  In Underland the poet Robert Macfarlane explored some of the deepest places below the earth’s crust:  

Crevasses open around us, a few feet deep only at first, soon dropping to twenty, thirty, fifty, countless feet deep.  Colours change.  The surface ice is whiter than at the snout.  The crevasses glow … Here the blue is even more intense, more radiant, older … Ice is blue because when a ray of light passes through it, it hits the crystal structure of ice and is deflected, bounces off another crystal and is deflected again, bounces off into another, and another, and in this manner ricochets its way to the eye.  Light passing through the ice therefore travels much further than the straight-line distance to the eye.  Along the way the red end of the spectrum is absorbed, and only the blue remains. (385)

Be ‘moon-struck’ by blue; be awed, silenced, confronted by depth and immensity.  Yet it might also be easy to be over-awed, overcome perhaps by joy, but perhaps too, by an ‘unease of heart’. In an attitude of wonder Mcfarlane writes: 

Ice has a memory and the colour of this memory is blue… The colour of deep ice is blue, a blue unlike any other in the world – the blue of time.  The blue of time is glimpsed in the depths of crevasses.  The blue of time is glimpsed in the calving faces of glaciers, where bergs of 100,000-year-old ice surge to the surface of fjords from far below the water level.  The blue of time is so beautiful that it pulls body and mind towards it. (338-9)

I am on a journey that follows in the footsteps of wise ancients being pulled toward joy – mind, body and spirit.  I am intent on choosing joy.  Yet I also recognise that in the making of that choice, I need to see the flip side, to hear the pain that the Blues songs express so powerfully.  Similarly, next to Macfarlane’s experiences sits an acknowledgement of the pain the earth itself might feel.  This is clearly seen in the photographer Timo Lieber’s images of the Arctic, where beautiful, but hugely troubling pools of water are forming on the melting ice cap. “There are so many lakes, it’s scary. A landscape you’d expect to be pristine white is just littered with blue”, Lieber says.

Blue might be holy, and perhaps part of its’ intrinsic holiness is a sacred ability to warn us; its’ sacred duty is to draw us in, confounding our expectations and easy assumptions.  If joy is blue to me today, it seems to suggest that deliberately choosing joy must always be a commitment made from the wisdom of compassionately seeing the pain sitting alongside the joy.

Wise women also came.
The fire burned
in their wombs
long before they saw
the flaming star
in the sky.
They walked in shadows,
trusting the path
would open
under the light of the moon.

Wise women also came,
seeking no directions,
no permission
from any king.
They came
by their own authority,
their own desire,
their own longing.
They came in quiet,
spreading no rumors,
sparking no fears
to lead
to innocents’ slaughter,
to their sister Rachel’s
inconsolable lamentations.

Wise women also came,
and they brought
useful gifts:
water for labor’s washing,
fire for warm illumination,
a blanket for swaddling.

Wise women also came,
at least three of them,
holding Mary in the labor,
crying out with her
in the birth pangs,
breathing ancient blessings
into her ear.

Wise women also came,
and they went,
as wise women always do,
home a different way.

Jan L Richardson

singing the blues. iPhone image.

day 4

… judging from the scripture of the season, Christmas is surely meant to be an attitude toward life, not a carnival. It is meant to be arrived at slowly and lived succulently. Christmas is not meant to be simply a day of celebration; it is meant to be a month of contemplation….

Advent is an excursion through scripture meant to give depth and emotional stability to the days for which there are no songs, no tinsel, no flashing lights to distract us from its raw, tart marrow.

Joan Chittister, Thanksgiving 2017

A month of contemplation of life’s ‘raw, tart marrow’, does not sound either joyful or appealing.  Yet if I am to understand anything on this journey into joy, I need to be clear about my intention.  I wish to become a ‘JoyPilgrim’, exploring the nature of the One who is Joy, the One who brings joy to me in all the ups and downs of my everyday here-and-now, the One who longs for my days to be joy-filled in a world saturated with grief and uncertainty.

So I need to get curious about looking for where joy might be revealed, and what the colours of joy might be.  I want to pay attention to what colours block the light of joy in me.  Which might I reflect back to help someone else’s day?  I need to scrutinise my colour blindness.  I need to peer into the shadowed places where I have camouflaged the places of deep shame and loss, even from my own sight.  I need to examine the cultural frameworks which have directed my understanding of colour thus far, and challenge the easy shorthands of symbolic meanings in their differences.

For there are miracles of colour happening in the nature all around me.  They might be a source of joy for me, as yet unseen. Dr Helen Czorski brought to my attention the fireflies in the Smokey Mountains, whose mating displays in May and June are showers of pinprick colours, where the male creates its own personal colour in order to attract a female, making their bodies become physical lanterns of light.  If I have eyes to see, one of the smallest species on earth might show me how life harnesses light.

May my lifelight shine in my colours today.

Blue sky … is a flag that signals … high-intensity light and, therefore, optimal conditions for photosynthesis… Blue means a lot of work.  The trees get full as they convert light, carbon dioxide, and water into supplies of sugar, cellulose, and other carbohydrates … the colour of organisms and objects is dictated by the colour of reflected light.  And in the case of leaves on trees, this colour is green… But why don’t we see leaves as black? Why don’t they absorb all the light?  Chlorophyll helps leaves process light … however, [it] has one disadvantage.  It has a so-called green gap, and because it cannot use this part of the colour spectrum, it has to reflect it back unused … What we are really seeing is waste light … Beautiful for us, useless for the trees …  The colour gap in chlorophyll is also responsible for another phenomenon: green shadows … shadows are not all the same colour.  Although many shades of colour are filtered out in the forest canopy – for example, very little red and blue made their way through – this is not the case of the “trash” colour green.  Because the trees can’t use it, some of it reaches the ground.  Therefore the forest is transfused with a subdued green light that just happens to have a relaxing effect on the human psyche.

Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees (227-230)

reflection. iPhone image.

day 3

… think not so much of something ‘being’ a colour but of it ‘doing’ a colour.  The atoms in a ripe tomato are busy shivering – or dancing or singing; the metaphors can be as joyful as the colours they describe – in such a way that when the white light falls on them they absorb most of the blue and yellow light and they reject the red – meaning paradoxically that the ‘red’ tomato is actually one that contains every wavelength except red.  A week before, those atoms would have been doing a slightly different dance …

from Colour: Travels through the Paintbox, Victoria Finlay (6)

Earlier this year I was brought up short by an advent for Gudrun clothes: 

‘Be the colour in colourful’ 

it urged me.  What colour was I being in that moment?  What colour am I projecting to others as I write this sentence?  To use Victoria Finlay’s metaphor, are my atoms shivering vibrantly?

I hope to explore the visceral connections between joy, light and sight this Advent, and particularly to concentrate on how an internal commitment to being joyful – and thus colourful – might affect my doing colour in the lives of others.  For designer Ingrid Fettell Lee, colour is a happening which directly affects our ability to feel joy:

When I studied color and its effect on joy, I wondered: Why is there such a gap between the colors that enliven us, and the colors that surround us?  “Chromophobia,” was the immediate answer I received … Why are people scared of color? “It’s the fear of making a choice,” said an architect. “Of making a mistake and having to live with it.” … Why are there so many chromophobes out there? I think it’s because there’s a cultural bias against color. We’ve come to dismiss color and joy as childish and frivolous, prizing neutral hues as a mark of coolness and mature taste. That belief has left us in a place where we feel almost ashamed to have color in our lives.  I’ve spent the last decade studying joy. From the beginning, it was clear that the liveliest places and things all had one thing in common: bright, vivid color… The human eye is adept at distinguishing between subtly different colors; scientists estimate we can see as many as seven million distinct shades… While we think of color as an attribute, really it’s a happening: a constantly occurring dance between light and matter… Ultimately, creating colors that enliven us is about increasing the activity of these vibrating little particles in a space. Bright colors animate the light that shines on them, reflecting it around a space and magnifying its effect… Once, when [architects] Stamberg and Aferiat were stuck on choosing a color for a house they were designing, they turned to a good friend, painter David Hockney. He said, “Do what I do whenever I have a color problem. Look at Matisse.”

from Joyful: The Surprising Power of Extraordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness, Ingrid Fetell Lee

I wonder, do I have a colour problem?

Could I be colour, be joy; do colour, do joy?

How might this change my seeing God in my here and now this Advent?

Our feeling of being ill at ease in the world… signals our longing to share in that flow of blessing, to experience God’s spirit in true enthusiasm, to feel that joie de vivre that is not just a passing mood.

Brother David Steindl-Rast, Music of Silence (68)

transitioning colours. iPhone image.

day 2

Wonky colour combinations are everywhere

Fashion is no stranger to unusual palettes, but this season splicing shades together was standard: see yellow dress with pink shawl at JW Anderson, red trousers with green jacket at Pyer Moss. Well, we do need cheering up, says colour theorist Marcie Cooperman: “When bad things are happening, wearing several colours together can make us feel better.” LH

Throughout 2020 I have been on a deliberate exploration of colour, trying to get more of it into my life, trying to feel out where colour might lead me in both my creative life and my spiritual life.  So in the midst of Lockdown 2 in the UK I am wondering whether, when I feel as if I am isolated against joy, insulated from it, that there is a particular barrier which is stopping me experiencing it; and whether colour is the way to connect with the joy I feel is so missing in me today.

One day I found myself daydreaming about colour in the Bible, and when I was re-reading the Gospel narratives of the Nativity, I was struck by the absence of colour descriptors in the stories.  Are colours not words of spiritual relevance?  A little research delighted my inner photographer, since the Hebrew word 

translated in the KJV as “colors” (or its singular) is ayin (Strong’s Concordance #H5869), means “an eye” either figuratively or literally. According to the 1913 Jewish Encyclopedia and several Bible commentaries, ancient Hebrew had no specific term to describe this property of light… The ancient Israelites certainly knew what colors were as they saw them in Babylonian artwork (see Ezekiel 23:14). They also were aware of the art of their nearby neighbors (Judges 8:26). Scholarship has yet to offer a definitive answer as to the reason why the Hebrew language was deficient in its description of colors… Although the KJV lists bay, black, blue, brown, crimson, green, grey, hoar, purple, red, scarlet, sorrel, vermilion, white, and yellow, a precise translation of the underlying original language word(s) is difficult. 

There is an intimate, sacred correspondence between colour and seeing.  Scientific discoveries only strengthen this connection, since ‘colours’ are the names humanity assigns to different sections of the electromagnetic spectrum that each have a particular wavelength and frequency.  These colours are the ‘visible light’, the light that the average human eye can see (and which can only be measured in nanometers (one billionth of a metre)).  An average human eye might perceive wavelengths from about 390 nanometers long (violet) to about 700 nanometers (red).

Spectrum of visible light: Isaac Newton gave us the now familiar list of seven wavelengths of light that we can see: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo (a wavelength of light roughly 420 to 450 nanometers long), and Violet.

God gave me sight to wonder at these minute fractions of light piercing my eye each second.  To the Great Artist it appears that colour is light is sight.

And what is cause for even greater wonder is all that remains unseen by my frail eyes, as is all that remains untranslatable and unknowable.  The mysterious intricacies of all creation are here to give me joy, not for me to use and abuse, but for me to acknowledge the intimate presence of the Creator as it is being revealed in each and every nanometer.

Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.

Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.

Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.

Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.

Maria Popova

praying for eyes to see. iPhone image.

Sunday 1

[Please note these adventapertures are a slow read.  Poetry and music, science and theology are mixed in with reflections on my personal spiritual journey.  Some days they may not an easy read either, as I try to share as honestly as I can all the bumps in my road to Joy.]

‘when they saw that the star had stopped they were overwhelmed by joy’ 

Matthew 2.10

To learn the scriptures is easy,

to live them, hard.

The search for the Real

is no simple matter.

Deep in my looking,

the last words vanished.

Joyous and silent,

the waking that met me there.

Lal Ded 

I come to writing these #adventapertures on joy with huge hesitancy in my gut.  I know this year has been so hard for so many because of the effects of COVID-19.  So many thousands have died, livelihoods have been shattered, businesses gone bankrupt, families split apart, so many women have been beaten, so many children left uneducated, so many young people left jobless and homeless.

And yet…

It is precisely at this point of being overwhelmed by the bleak negativity and hopelessness of humanity’s plight that I need to remember what joy might be.  Joy is not a fleeting emotion but a bone-deep unshakeable faith that such despair is not all there is to life.

As Eugenia Price says, ‘Joy is God in the marrow of our bones’ and Dom Marmion states, ‘Joy is the echo of God’s life in you.’

Several times this year I have written about how flabby my ‘rejoicing muscles’ are.  In Holy Week I wrote:

This psalmist runs to God for sanctuary:

Let all who seek you

rejoice and be glad in you.

(Psalm 70.4 NRSV)

Suddenly I am pulled up sharp by this reminder to rejoice.  In the midst of all my frantic need for real change of the situations I find myself in, I am asked to rejoice?

I am asked to rejoice in You.  I am asked to rejoice in Your steadfast love, in Your constancy, precisely at the very moment when I feel most in danger.  And in order to rejoice I have to stop my hamster-wheel anxiety and be still; become utterly present to the I AM.

You are my present.  Your presence with me is joy.  

All the faith and trust I ever might need is in that statement.  So I repeat that reconnection with Joy, again and again, growing gladness in me with every repetition.

In the midst of all my sorrows, God keeps calling me out to gladness: there are always, always, things to rejoice over, if I will but look.  

In July I wrote: 

I know that the counterbalance to this internal self-punishment is to look out – up or down, it doesn’t matter – and flex my rejoicing muscles.  For there is always something to be grateful for in my present, something praiseworthy will always be right in front of me.  God is always in my details.   Presence is always assured, and this moment of connection with thanksgiving is always certain and concrete.

At the Autumn Equinox I wrote:

And the best counter I know to perfectionism is the redemption of gratitude: ‘I will gather you to joy’ says ‘the searcher’ in Rilke’s poem.

Yet in spite of these clear signposts that God is trying to drum something into me, remembering to exercise my rejoicing-muscles has barely scraped a mention on the bottom of my list of priorities.  This journey into joy throughout Advent gives me a new opportunity to correct that and perhaps ingrain a practice in my marrow that will feed me and others through me for the rest of my life. Will you join me?

Two girls discover

the secret of life

in a sudden line of

poetry.

I, who don’t know the

secret, wrote

the line. They

told me

(through a third person)

they had found it

but not what it was

not even

what line it was.  No doubt

by now, more than a week

later, they have forgotten

the secret,

the line, the name of

the poem.  I love them

for finding what

I can’t find,

and for loving me

for the line I wrote,

and for forgetting it

so that

a thousand times, till death

finds them, they may

discover it again, in other

lines

in other

happenings.  And for

wanting to know it,

for

assuming there is

such a secret, yes,

for that

most of all.             

‘The Secret’

Denise Levertov

exercising my rejoicing muscles II (2020). iPhone image.

learning to lean

(all images by Kate Kennington Steer)

As I was journalling this morning about a blog post I recently finished writing and what more planning I needed to do for my own Advent series on imageintoikon, I found myself reflecting on the exact words Christine chose for the Godspace Advent theme this year.  The verb ‘to lean’ caught at my attention.  As a physical movement forward, back or to the side, up or down, it could range from anything from a slight inclination up to a definite bend, and the resulting visible change could be infinitesimal or dramatic.  And I reconnected with a mini-mantra that came to me a couple of years ago after a particularly acute year of physical ill health:

sit in the mess

listen to the pain

lean into the discomfort.

It struck me this morning that leaning towards the light could also cause discomfort.  The comfort that most of us derive from the lift of spirits a sunny day can bring, can cause torture for a migraine sufferer.  As a photographer, I know very well that light can blind as much as it can reveal.

The more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable the nature of light became.

So if one believes, as I do, that all light comes from God, and that one of the names of God is Light, and that this name describes something particular about the character of God, then one is forced to confront the knowledge that the Light who invites us to become whole in her, is not a cosy, reassuring figure.  Light has a power beyond my wildest dreams.  Light is Power.  But the amazing reality of the invitation to lean towards the One who is Light, is that I am invited to become one with this Light.  Indeed, Light longs to share every aspect of what light is with me.

I wonder, what would happen if I were to truly accept this gift and become a light of the Light?

I would have to be prepared for the real nature of Light.  Not just the soft focus, fuzzy haze of bright cloud light, but the sharp brilliance that shows up exactly where all the shadows are.  Accepting the light of Light would mean accepting the dark of Light too.

As a sufferer of depression, I am only too aware that there are plenty of shadows already out there in my life, and they cause plenty of painful stories to rise up in me, most of which I am highly reluctant to let see the light of day.  So, why would I wish to open to the potential of experiencing even more?  And yet, reading Russ Harris’s book The Reality Slap, I was reassured to read this:

This pain tells you something very important : that you’re alive, that you have a heart, that you care, and there’s a gap between what you want and what you’ve got.  And this is what all humans feel under such circumstances … What would you have to not care about, in order to not have this pain? (102, 106)

The shadows tell me that I care about the Light.  They tell me that I really am a “light-baby”, attracted to the mystery of what light conceals as much as it divulges.  They tell me I want to be present to the Light in as many ways as I can, in all areas of my life.  This  is what I care about, and so this is what hurts when, for so many different reasons, I fall short of realising this is my purpose.

Leaning towards the Light then is going to mean leaning into whatever and wherever discomfort comes this Advent, learning to listen to what wisdom the shadowed messes of painful places wish to bring to me.  

I know The Light will speak through my dark. 

This post was originally published on the Godspace blog.