ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE |
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Exarchate of Parishes
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| EPISCOPAL VICARIATE OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND | ||
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Wendy Robinson LIVING WITH THE SPIRIT IN A TIME OF CHANGE
Last week I was trying to find the form that this talk could take and deploring that I would not get a text to my friend and our invaluable translator, Nikolai Matveyev, in time. That night I had a dream. In it I was on the way to the conference. It was snowing and you were all out sledging on Reigate Hill. Some of you came down the slope with immense brio and a stylish swirl at the bottom. Others were heading straight for the nearest snow drift! As I got nearer I met, unmistakably, Militza Zernov, my Godmother. I said, ‘O Militza, give me a “Word”for the conference.’ ‘Vendi’, she said in the way she always pronounced my name, ‘Vendi, in those difficult times in Paris the Holy Spirit was our hope, our hope.’ She made a moue of sympathy that I had to give a talk and then immediately went on (how true to Militza as we knew her) to ask if I would please get going on finding an immediate solution to the practical problems of two of her protégés. What she said reminded me of a priest from another church who said to me recently that the only Christian hope left for him in the end was that God raised Jesus from death. Resurrection hope; Pentecostal hope; the Holy Spirit in our midst. The reminder of Militza — and Nicholas too — brought back so many of our early conversations, before and after I became Orthodox in 1980. They were always so firm about the need for lay members of our Church to take seriously the need to become 'lay theologians' exercising freedom of conscience (1Peter 2:16) in the tradition they brought and helped to establish in the West with such indefatigable energy. I remember when I complained about 'the Church' their saying to me, ‘But vot is this “Church”? You are the church!’ They believed so strongly that we should all seek to be committed participants and responsible communicators in the Church — and to seek God deeply enough to have something real and God-given or God-driven to say. Again I happened to notice, the day after this recent dream, a passage in the introduction to Vladimir Lossky's Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church where he says the same kind of thing: ‘A Christian who has received the gift of the holy chrism must have a full awareness of his faith: he is always responsible for the church’. He adds presciently enough – and from his knowledge of Church history too: ‘Hence the restless and somewhat agitated character of the ecclesiastical life of Byzantium, of Russia, and other countries of the Orthodox world.’ I doubt if we would wish to disagree with him! When I first heard the news of our move to the Ecumenical Patriarchate the first response deep inside me was of release and relief – and that has not changed. I am grateful for Bishop Basil's courage and perseverance. Even when something happens that seems a 'leading of the Spirit that will not be denied' it also cannot be denied that the immediate path ahead may prove to be a rocky one; and it has been so. Such a move is a big event –and it immediately stirs up our favourite Orthodox game of ‘Uproar’. We feel anxious and obscurely threatened by change and that becomes marked by angry and accusatory states of arousal. Those states soon lead to a fight with the most primitive of human defences, paranoia. 'We' feel vulnerable, victimised and 'good' and by projection see 'them' as persecutors, in the wrong – and 'bad', or even wicked. These projections are mutual and cumulative. We also still mourn the death of Metropolitan Anthony who, under God, helped to change radically so many lives. He was a complex man living in complex times and he has left us a complex inheritance. Each of us in this room today has a different story of what the past year or so has meant. Some people have suffered a great deal – and I am sure our hearts go out to our priests, deacons, parish councils, choir leaders, trustees and others who have had to carry, and are carrying, the burden and heat of the day: in decisions, many of which have not yet reached closure; in displacements and in dislocations of various kinds. There has been a storm of cyber activity – support, vilification, information and misinformation – much of it wearying, enraging stuff, and 'stuff and nonsense'. The devil is the 'father of lies' and twists the truth into unrecognisable shapes. I hope we can take heart together this weekend, and lean into the life of the Spirit in our midst, so that we can support each other, be alongside each other and share any vision that we have of the way ahead. Let us take every opportunity to do so – in discussions, in workshops, and above all, in conversations with each other. Let us try to be honest with each other about 'how it has been', and by so doing create a 'mulch' for the future seeds that are planted in our midst. Let us see if we can find the depths of the Spirit together. We need some 'team work'. Recently my three year old grandson, Paddy, came rushing up to me from where he had been playing with his slightly older sister, Iona. ‘Grannie, Grannie’, he said, ‘It is very important: we are doing team work.’ He rushed back to his sister and in less than ten seconds he had hit her smartly over the head with a useful little wooden hammer that he just 'happened' to have in his hand. End of 'team work'! I hope we can do better! In the seventeenth century the Quakers were being persecuted and they used to hold Meetings in London to support each other and to try to alleviate suffering where they could. These were known as a 'Meeting for Sufferings'. They had their place. Later, when they continued into quieter times the rebellious young used to call it a 'Seating for Mutterings'. To discern authentic suffering from inauthentic suffering is, of course, a gift of the Spirit which we all have to learn, by hard experience, to practise. Self-inflicted crosses are not the same as the ones that God gives, or allows. I have been immersed, not for the first time, with a sense of companionship in dialogue, in Paul Evdokimov's book, The Ages of the Spirit. In it he is imploring us to find the true freedom of the Spirit where, in the end, our consenting to that which is laid upon us is where we find the most paradoxical and deepest freedom. That was witnessed to by so many in Russia in the last century, from the countless martyrs of the Gulag to the witness of the death of Mother Maria Skobtsova of Ravensbrück and so many others. Evdokimov wants us to find the passionate and living love for God that can help us in the Spirit to find the way, in the One who is the Way. He deplores how we can use our Orthodox customary practices as, what he calls, 'an armour' against the reality of the living Spirit. And we can espouse suffering in a way that is neurotic. He quotes Dostoevsky as showing that suffering in extremis can turn into a curious complacency and that the subtle pleasures of suffering preclude a solution. He adds that God could take our place in order to suffer and die, but He cannot do so for our necessary acts of freedom of choice, of love. So, how this weekend can we both share the weight of what people have suffered and are suffering - (and each of us has a personal life history that will affect how we do that) – and yet seek together the way forward? There is a tendency in Christian circles to over-emphasise a 'repressive inspirational' approach to problems which often proves to be illusory if not delusory. You push down, seek to 'forget', repress what is seen as 'negative' or 'undesirable': and just seek inspiration to live out what is seen as 'good'. The trouble is that it does not go deep enough and sets up a passive resistant undertow on life together, so that folk become resentful, seething, grousing, bellyaching. It is much better to try to share the deeps of things and learn from and with each other what to do and how to move on. So I am trying to say: Let's not pretend that all we need to do is to look to the future – and forget the difficulties. Let's try to look forward and find ways of digesting together what is 'here' in people's experience. It can be slow. The Spirit is often a slow, almost invisible, worker in our depths. Evdokimov thought that all of us have to internalise the history of the way the Spirit has led the church, and practise what he calls 'Interiorised Monasticism', denying nothing of the tradition of the Martyrs, the Desert Fathers, the Saints; but seeking with passion and commitment to live in the world knowing how much transformation in the Spirit is required of us, personally and communally. We believe that the way forward for our Vicariate contains seeds of life and hope for Orthodoxy in this country and within the context of Europe – and, thank God for the welcome we were given by the O.G.A. meeting in Paris at the end of April. Surely we hope to be able to contribute something to the terrible world context of global warming and its predicted consequences on a scale which we hardly dare contemplate in terms of the changes, privations and migration it will bring. We need to immerse ourselves in the transformative ways of the Spirit, for God knows what will shortly be asked of us, our children and our grandchildren. We hardly know how to live now, and the conviction has grown on me that the Holy Spirit is a Spirit of Emergence, giving us some way of living in the 'Now', with all that has been, and in the 'Not Yet' but coming.... The Spirit of EmergenceThe first glimpse we have is of the Spirit, in Genesis, in the form of the dove, hovering over the waters as creation began to emerge. We see the Spirit moving over the waters and showing Noah the rainbow promise of renewed life after a period of 'climate change' indeed. We see the Spirit overshadowing the Virgin at that miraculous time of the Incarnation: Emmanuel, God with us. And now, overshadowing still, and ever, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins says: ‘The Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods, with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.’ May we know that tender, brooding, gestating presence of the Spirit now; calling us into what emergence? As the poet says elsewhere, when he longs for an elusive peace: when will ‘Your round me roaming end?’ For Hopkins knows that the Holy Spirit ‘comes with work to do, he does not come to coo, / He comes to brood and sit.’ The Spirit is brooding, waiting on an emergence that is latent in us, with which we are pregnant. What, in the Spirit, is seeking to emerge this weekend? Indeed He is the Spirit of immersion, emergence and indwelling. He immerses us in life, His gift. He immerses us in Baptism, so that in Him we might emerge into new life in Christ and in the indwelling Trinity; and in Chrismation He seals us. He immerses us in the Liturgy and by the calling down of the Spirit at the epiklesis we are called into being as partakers in the Divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). So, by immersion and emergence from one state of being to another, (‘until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your heart’ (2 Peter 1:19) we learn about the gift of the Spirit's indwelling (John 14:17). It is about the mystery of complex movements of the Spirit between inner and outer worlds; visible and invisible worlds. In another context the modern sculptor, Barbara Hepworth, tried to depict something of that mystery in her sculptural drawings. One small example of that work is in the Tate Gallery in St Ives. When she did it she was hard up and offered it to the Inland Revenue in lieu of taxes she had no way of paying – an offer they accepted! I believe that the Spirit of Emergence is there because He is theGiver of Life, breath, life – and the Giver of New Life in Christ. He longs to foster in us that emergence into new life in Christ. I have come to see that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Emergence, because it is the Spirit who is the greatest agent of change in our lives. It is the Spirit who has to keep moving us and help us to emerge out of the old ways (the old man; the old woman), and into the new life in Christ. In the end it may be, as the saints and mystics witness, change from glory into glory. We glimpse the glory, thank God, particularly in our sacramental life and prayer, and in the wonders and terrors of the created universe and experiences of love. To consent to the daily mix of emerging from our addictions, compulsions, bad moods, prejudices, our passions and sins, is our daily task and needs a daily waiting upon the Spirit to help us to co-operate with Baptismal grace. The word 'emerge' means to rise by virtue of buoyancy out of a liquid, in which the subject has been immersed; to come forth into view from concealment or confinement, and is often an unforeseen occurrence. I like that – the Spirit is what gives us buoyancy to rise from whatever turbulence we are in. It took me back immediately to the way in which we need to keep renewing our Baptismal experience. You remember the great cosmic prayer in the Baptismal sacrament which is part too of the Blessing of the Waters at Theophany; when the sun, the moon, the stars, the light, the deeps, are all called in to glory in the Logos:
We praise God for the illumination of the soul, the renewal of the Spirit, (‘Behold, I make all things new’) the gift of adoption to sonship, the garment of incorruption, the fountain of life. The cosmic waters are always there; full of awesome wonder and awe-inspiring terror too. Yet we have been baptised into Christ; have put on Christ. We are marked with the seal of the Spirit. So let us consent to the waters of life and also renew continually the 'emergent Spirit' who brings us through the waters, however high, however deep, into new life. We dare to claim that if our Baptismal courage is deep, then there will be the times when ‘the desert, the wilderness shall blossom as a rose’. Committing ourselves again and again to the meaning of Baptism and Chrismation is a way to live with the Spirit in a time of change. ‘I stand in awe before Thee, and have cast into the great deep of Thy mercy the despair of my soul’ (second Pentecost Prayer). We meet then the ‘inexhaustible grace of the Spirit’ (first Pentecost Prayer). Then we can know that nothing that happens to us is outside the Baptismal grace of the Spirit. ‘Blessed art Thou, O Christ our God, who has revealed fishers most wise, sending down on them Thy Holy Spirit, and thereby catching the universe as in a net. Glory to Thee who lovest mankind’ (Troparion for Pentecost). We know that all the sacraments interact, as do all the great mysterious truths of the faith in the nexus mysteriorum. I don't know what you find sustains you most ... but I know when times are dark and difficult and all that is possible is to fall and get up again, fall and get up again, I often turn to the great antinomies of the faith (something that Militza undoubtedly taught me). Think of the great reversals of Holy Friday: ‘He who hung the earth upon the waters is hung upon the tree. The King of angels is crowned with a crown of thorns ... He who holds all creation in His hands is held within the tomb ... Life sleeps and hell trembles with awe’ ... and indeed at the Incarnation, as elsewhere, ‘How shall my womb contain Him whom the wide spaces of the heaven cannot contain ... How shall He who dwells in the heights, whom none can comprehend be born of a virgin?’ Always the Spirit of emergence holds us, immersing us in the truths; an indwelling being the only mode. It is the Spirit teaching us not about imitation but about participation in mysteries that lie far beyond our grasp, but not beyond the leap of love that they engender. Think of the same reversal of this-worldly values in the Magnificat, in the Beatitudes. The Spirit in a time of change anchors us in the Jesus Prayer, as we throw ourselves on the mercy of God ... and as we are moved between the way of images and the way, the apophatic way, beyond them, into the abysses of God's mercy. Again, to quote Evdokimov, as he beseeches us to interiorise the faith deeply:
Our life as a vicariate now We have suffered — and let us be brave and say we have inflicted — division and conflict, often of a very dark and bitter kind, in previous communities. Often we try to cope with that by a growing conviction that we are 'right', and they are 'wrong'. It is natural. It is not enough. Perhaps in life and relationships anyway one of the deepest things we have to encounter is to find that we are wrong, or partly so, at least. It is not simple or easy. It involves an apophatic unknowing of the mind and its formulations and prejudices; and, more difficult for those who work from the heart, is that it means an undoing of the heart, of gut-felt convictions. We all do it with difficulty: it is an ascesis, which needs, as Evdokimov says, not a moralism but a solution in the Spirit and from the Spirit:
We all have to begin somewhere and over and over again. My little four year old granddaughter, Iona, who is very interested in words, came to me recently and said: ‘Grannie, I know what agree means, but what does disagree mean?’ Grannie tries to explain. ‘Oh, I see,’ she says, ‘It is when I am right and you are wrong.’... ‘And how does it feel then?’... ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘I am happy because I am right and you are unhappy because you are wrong.’... ‘Would you like Grannie to go on being unhappy?’... ‘No’ she said, and then ran away to play and I thought she had forgotten. However, after a while she returned: ‘Grannie, if you could agree with me that I am right, then you could be happy too.’ Do we ever learn? Perhaps only the emergent Spirit can keep us open to the possibility. The Lord says: ‘Except ye become as little children ye will not enter the Kingdom of God.’ Of course! But sometimes, when we are illuminated or gutted by our children or grandchildren, we can also hear St. Paul about the need to ‘put away childish things’ (1 Cor. 13:11). But it is not so easy. Fall and get up... fall and get up. There are those who seem to believe they know exactly what God, what the Spirit, wants. Recently I heard the story of a priest on a retreat led by his bishop. The priest became bored and decided to take himself off to the shops in the afternoon for a spot of 'retail therapy'. Unfortunately he met the bishop at the gate. In confusion he said that he believed the Spirit had told him to go off and do a bit of shopping. The bishop said, with a smile, ‘That leaves us in the unfortunate theological position of having to say that the Spirit is wrong.’... ‘Why is that?’... ‘It is half day closing!’ What has happened to some of you has involved a possible loss of house, church buildings and their total context – losses of that which you loved and for which you had invested loving work, service, or money. Apart from that sense of homelessness and restlessness, there has been loss or estrangement from friends and associates: the 'parting of friends' over church issues. In that process we become, too, 'strangers to ourselves'. It has meant that things have 'come to grief'. One of the things surely we should have learned in this country, in our generation, through the setting up of hospice care for the dying and the bereaved, is that we must allow grief to find its expression, if we are not to be stuck in depression and an inhibited psychology of losswhich prevents us being able to 'choose life'. We need to be able to listen and be tender to the grief that is being felt, and to know that everyone grieves differently. It is one of the tragic facts that parents who have lost a child often become separated and divorced largely because they grieve differently and cannot bear each other's way of doing it. Some believe one must soldier on and keep 'life' going at all costs; others know that they can only cope if they can weep and mourn the loss; and then eventually find a way through. It is so important that our corporate life goes on and finds what is emerging, and will emerge, we pray, in the Spirit. But that will be rendered more fruitful, I believe, if we can stay with the grieving processes in each other, whatever form they take. Our liturgical life moves constantly between proleptic experiences of praise and celebration, and grief and repentance. The Spirit gives us the buoyancy to live both, including the Spirit's gift of tears. Often we hear (in translation) that the Spirit, the Paraclete, our Advocate against the constant accuser, is called the Comforter. Archbishop Michael Ramsey once said that the Spirit in the Church was to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed (another antinomy). He was using a play on the word comfort. Originally it meant not alleviation of pain and misery but to strengthen and encourage. Someone mentioned to me recently the scene in the Bayeux tapestry where the king is prodding his soldiers to get on with it. The words above read: ‘He was comforting them’! (So when Archbishop Gabriel or Bishop Basil prod us with their staff, we must believe they are comforting us!) So, to comfort each other in grief and the need to share the experience means that we have to find a way in the Spirit to both console each other and encourage each other. But please let us not do this by getting impatient and by 'bracing' those whose experience is different from our own. Because we each carry very different life stories about loss and grief. One aspect of grief is that there are often feelings that because something feels so 'wrong' there must be someone to blame. That can be another person, or it can turn against the self in persecutory feelings of guilt. Either way it can lead to very angry feelings. That can join with the fact that some people are not so much grieved that a move has been made but relieved to be free of a sense of oppression – but anger surfaces about how 'they' are handling the aftermath, whoever the current 'they' are. These divisions do bring out the worst in all of us. Paranoia and paranoid accusations, projection of blame and the way things cannot be sorted quickly leave a state of recurring crises, with outbursts of rancour and bitterness. We must pray for each other and stand firm. There are matters that have to be sorted – if necessary by recourse to law. So there cannot be false, because premature, repentance or reconciliations. We have to bury ourselves in the Spirit – be humble about our sheer bloody-minded humanity – and work as much as we can for justice. After all, we do live in a country which by the skin of its teeth still believes in the rule of law and the possibility of seeking justice. We have to see each other through and offer thanks and prayers and support for those in the front line of negotiations. It is sometimes said that the ability to tolerate and work with conflict is a sign of maturity. The struggle to find solutions is a long process and an arduous one. Perhaps we can be inspired by recent events in Northern Ireland. We have to communicate to get anywhere. Things often turn out differently from the way we think. Do you remember the devil who appears to Ivan Karamazov and tells him a story? It was about the atheist who knew that he was right; but after his death he found that there was a future life. ‘I don't believe this. It is against my convictions. I don't want to go. I refuse on principle.’ Things may turn out differently from the way we think. The Spirit of Truth (John 14:171) can upset all our divisions into who and what is 'right' or 'wrong'. Meantime we have to go on and do what is necessary, and perhaps at least try to practise what I understand to be the lgnatian principle: that all official documents should be read in a positive light, in both senses, positive and light! We do not know where our current living in a state of emergence will lead. One thing the philosopher Bachélard reminds us about emergence: ‘You can imagine an elephant coming out of a shell; you cannot imagine it getting back in’. We will have to live with what emerges. Let us live in the gestating, emergent Spirit now. Evdokimov reminds us that the Gospel never promises anything in history; only a healing. Whatever we have to 'see through' now, the Spirit also reminds us that always other things are happening too; that the Spirit knows, but we do not yet ... will we ever? We need to seek God's deep and mysterious way for us. We are involved in the ascetic struggle to put our fallen lives into the new life in Christ. You will remember what it says in 2 Corinthians 5:
In the end, whatever the temporal process and however long it takes, and the Spirit is patient and persevering; there is an imperative in the Spirit for reconciliation and forgiveness. What God has given must be handed on. In the meantime, let us remember that St Mark says that it was the Spirit who drove Jesus, after baptism, out into the wilderness where he was tempted by the devil. Sometimes the Spirit will lead us, sometimes drive us, into the desert. Certainly the Spirit does not hesitate to place us between a rock and a hard place. We have to do one thing – remain firm, angry enough to work for justice – and at the same time we know that other things beckon too that are of healing. I want to run together two things. One is what Evdokimov says about the Temptations in relation to the life of 'interiorised monasticism' that he pleads for. The other is Charles Williams' work on the forgiveness of sins. (cf.He came down from Heaven, Faber 1940). Both allow for temporal process. Let me put it like this. Williams shows how we can seek too swiftly for forgiveness and reconciliation, before it is timely and hard work has been done; and we are tempted to do that for various reasons. First, we want, as it were, to turn stones into bread, because it is uncomfortable to live in such a stony way with people. But the motive can be comfort rather than deep reconciliation and the devil, who is always waiting for the rebound, can swiftly see to it that bread becomes stone again. In the second place, we may seek to forgive because it is a matter of pride, of superiority. It should be so, and therefore I will do it – first – and subtly put the other at a disadvantage! We will have done the Right Thing; we will have behaved better than the enemy. We feel better but the enemy does not feel inclined to thank us! The third temptation is the false hope of freedom. We can get so sick of the grudges and resentments; the appalling bitterness and strife. So we want to jack it all in. But that is not necessarily the desire for the heavenly kingdom but for the false freedoms of the kingdoms of this world. We have to go on seeking and working at the truth issues involved, so that in the end truth and love can marry and take us with them, as gifts of God, into a more mutual state of forgiveness and reconciliation. In Charles Williams' nice phrase, in the end: ‘Love must carry itself beautifully; it must have style.’ Someone who has been working with me in therapy brought me recently a quotation from another 'Inkling' which she felt expressed the poignancy of a reconciliation she has experienced after much painful struggle with unpalatable truths. It is from the end of The Lord of the Rings. Sam, the hobbit,
In the meantime there is work to be done. The cosmos groans in its eco problems and its climate changes; society groans in its prejudices and indifferences; the Church groans in its ethnic shifts and dogmatisms. We have to live according to Romans 8: 25-27: Each day we say:
Each day the Spirit says to us:
And finally: St Maximus the Confessor's profound ontology, a statement of what is, if we work together with the Spirit in our Vicariate:
MARANA THA |
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