Flesh of our Flesh

this was my prayer, my moment with the Almighty this morning...

Dear God
When were you last slapped,
hard in the face,
out of the blue,
so you were stunned,
had pins and needles,
lost your sense of being for a second
and then watched your skin swell, darken, run
red
...and stretch to its limits?

When did you last last hold a baby up to
your own face, God,
smell the warm body,
touch the innocent skin,
know the life pass between you, with no words?

Do you have feelings too, God?
Do things touch you?
Are you spirit or are you substance,
for real or only ether-real,
or you there or everywhere?
If we reached out and touched you
would our hands pass right through
...your elusive, divine self?

What about any distinguishing characteristics?
What colour are you God?
How's your eyesight,
what's your body like,
would we spot you in a crowd,
would we stare at you for some disability?

How many senses have you got, God,
five, six, eighteen, ninety-four?
And your sense of touch,
is your handshake firm as a vice
or slippery as an eel?
What do you smell of God?
Anything in particular,
the universe, is it,
planets, oceans, space, skies?

If it's true that your Spirit is always willing
...is your flesh ever weak?
And if the Word was made flesh,
are you flesh of our flesh,
bone of our bone?

Is that you there, meek and mild,
meanly wrapped in swaddling clothes?
Is that you, Baby J,
Word of the Father,
now in flesh appearing,
is that you, screaming as you arrive
like the rest of us,
screaming at the shock of the new,
the shock of the cold and old and broken?
Is that you,
slipping clumsily out from between
a Virgin's legs,
covered in blood and gunge and straw,
when moments before,
you had been covered in glory?
Tied to the mother of God by stringy flesh,
sucking for your very own life on a woman's breast
...what a come-down.

And is someone slapping your bum,
a world-first,
God gets a thrashing,
God gets to feel flesh on flesh
and it makes him cry?

Still, at least you had an audience,
cows, was it, or maybe a goat or two?
Did they look at you in awe and wonder,
were the cattle lowing a bit,
or were they a smelly nuisance?
But 'little Lord Jesus no crying he makes'.
Well, that doesn't sound right.
The thing about flesh is that it makes you cry;
for better or worse, you've got to cry.
'Who is he in yonder stall
at whose feet the shepherds fall?'
Did they fall?
Did they recognise you up close,
did they know that it was you, God,
starkers, in the flesh,
or were they just intrigued by
the heavenly host
and that funny star?

And did the flesh inconvenience
and annoy and anger you,
like it does the rest of us,
your fleshy creatures?
Did your nose run green,
your skin flake or bruise red,
Did your breath catch with asthma
in that smelly barn,
your chest tighten in fear?
were you irritated by flies and gnats
(ones you had made earlier),
...or did they show some respect?

And later on, what did you do about
your fleshly lusts?
And, just out of interest, where, on earth,
did you go for your private moments
- are there miraculously fertile plants
there today,
trees with roots for miles
and branches into the heavens
forever bearing fruit
...or are those places
where the divine squatted in squalor with his
lowly creatures,
and wiped his bum with leaves,
just like any other place?

When you were tired,
when it was all going wrong,
when your friends misunderstood,
lost interest,
wandered off,
did you think,
'What did I get into this body-business for?'
swapping spirit for flesh,
swapping omnipresence for being somwhere
...in particular?
Did you feel trapped in that body,
or didn't you know what it had been like
before you became body?
When were you in-carnate
...did you recall what it was like
being out-carnate?
Flesh doesn't fly, usually,
flesh can't be in more than one place at a time,
flesh is limited, awkward.
Did you ever notice it,
did you wonder at the restrictions of
the body corporeal,
or were you just one of us,
God Inc.?

Did the flesh exhilarate you,
excite you,
did you run and laugh and fall,
did you sweat and wrestle and argue
and were you grateful to live
on earth
a human
in flesh
to be one of us?

"He was little, weak and helpless,
tears and smiles like us he knew,
and he feeleth for our sadness,
and he shareth in our gladness."

And how's your body now,
do you wear a halo, or a crown,
is it of gold, or is it of thorns,
are there marks on your palms,
have you got blood on the side of your shirt still?

Jesus of the body, of the flesh,
Jesus of the teeth and hair and toenails,
welcome to the body, God
and thank you for taking it,
for putting flesh on the bones of
our skeletal lives,
thank you, Jesus, for becoming body among us,
that veiled in flesh Godhead we see.

Flesh is all we have
but, as you know now,
flesh is not all we are.

Crafted by this great man, my friend Martin Wroe from his book, 'When You Haven't Got a Prayer: A journalist talks to God' (Lion, 1997)

Happy Place

Watched an episode of 'Friends' the other morning and amidst the genius comic timing (very Laurel & Hardyesque) of Joey and Chandler was a very funny moment from Pheobe where she goes to her happy place. And it got me wondering where mine was, where was the most beautiful place I have been.....

Here it is.....

Question is, where's yours? Answers on a comment please....

ps, this was my pathetic attempt at being Ansel Adams

L 5

GROWTH DOES NOT RESIDE IN A PLACE CALLED COMFORTABLE .....

"In times of change
the learners
will inherit the earth
while the knowers,
will find themselves
beautifully equipped
to deal with a world
that no longer exists."
(Eric Hoffer)

I have been very very poor at responding to people's posts and even questions asked from my own - for that I apologise - the dialogue, the openness of many people who stop by is deep and I should treat it with more tenderness than I have of late. Will aim to remedy that...

One of the questions asked of me by Blue Mountain Mama was what do I mean when I talk of level 5. Well, it's a term concerning communication - different levels have varying consequences for our growth and relationships. Pip is the Godfather of L5 communication, a deep and tender soul whose high in life is loving people (particularly the unloved) and peeling their layers to find their innermost beauty...I once remember him saying that every morning he didn't go to work, he went to love - wow! I nicked this illustration from his blog - me thinks I will be forgiven

tragically this is the only picture I can find of the two us...


Speaking of Level 5, I re-read C.S. Lewis' 'The Great Divorce' yesterday - where Lewis, through fable and allegory, finds himself in a bus which travels between Hell and Heaven - it's the genesis of an extraordinary meditation upon good and evil which takes issue with William Blake's 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'.

A remarkable book which asks big level 5 questions if we embrace them - the first one came in the preface - so much so, I had to stop reading and look deep into my own troubled soul for some time:


"You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you leave behind. We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. it does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good as it ripens becomes more continually more different not only from evil but from other good."

that last line particularly still has me reeling, as I said to a friend last night, carpe diem is an onion....

mercies...

...they say they are new every morning.... i hope so

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. ~Kahlil Gibran

...for those now in some better place and those left in Virginia

Loneliness - the window to belonging?

'Don't lose yourself, don't let yourself be lost'
(Laura Veirs)

What is it about 3am? Sleep will not be mine tonight so I am just going to type and see what happens. Normally i know what I want to write about, but if I'm honest, i have no idea where I going with this post.

I have so much stuff, so many issues raging through my head, all vying for position, I'm not sure this will be the most coherent piece of writing I've ever accomplished.

But maybe that's not such a terrible admission. Maybe we should admit a little more than we do that most of the time our lives are rather confused and a little messy. Lots of events recently remembered have caused me to take a hard look at my life and faith - generally, no, specifically, because they are both a little messy.

Whether it was the birth of my children, or the tragic death I recalled yesterday once more of Brother Roger of Taize, or the crazy homeless guy called Warren I met in London who had stitches all over his face from a knife wound, or whether it's just the simple fact that we haven't got life quite figured out the way we'd hoped by now - all of these things and, more importantly, how we work through them, are, and will be, a little muddled, maybe even chaotic.

And maybe (I'm using that word a lot at the moment) we should start not only admitting our chaos but also embracing it a little. Let me use a couple of the above moments as an example. A while back I was sitting at a wine bar by Liverpool Street Station enjoying a chilled glass or 3 of Sauvignon Blanc enjoying the spring sun, when I noticed an unkempt man heading in my direction. He was trying to talk to the other people enjoying the sunshine and their wine, but no-one even looked his way.

As he approached me, I saw that his face was covered in stitches. I asked him how it happened - he told me he had asked someone for some money for food, that an argument followed and that a man produced a knife and sliced open his face.

I asked him to sit with me.

We talked for a good hour, and there he spilled his story (and it was pretty disordered), but more than anything I realised how lonely Warren was, how he longed more than anything for community and belonging.

Brother Roger founded founded a community of monks in Taize, in eastern France (that became a remarkable ecumenical movement) because of this type of loneliness. In this community, he encouraged people to embrace their loneliness by dovetailing it with solitude because this, he believed, would become the doorway into community and belonging. What do I mean? Well, the writer Alain de Botton in his work often talks about the pleasure of sadness. Now, he is no manic depressive who wants us all to be miserable for the sake of it. Rather he believes that sometimes our transient state of being, our own failings, griefs and disappointments - however bleak they may seem - may acually console us.

Why is it that when we are most sad, sad songs and melancholy works of art are the very things that comfort us? Maybe they invite us to feel empathy with those whose stories are being told in their isolation. For what it's worth, I think that sensitively saturated works of art serve as an omnipresent symbol of an emotional texture of the person we want to be and feel deep down, somewhere, we are. It is a feature of love overcoming loneliness and one with which we should all, in whatever way we can, assist.

I remember many mourning the tragic passing of Brother Roger, primarily because he in some small way allowed them to belong. there are many Warren's who wander the streets of big cities around this world who ae lonely because no-one notices. maybe we need to start noticing a little more than we do or, as Marcel Proust suggests, that our lives shouldn't be about looking for new landscapes, but rather seeing the one we belong to with different eyes.

I have often felt lonely, even when I am not alone. Yet my faith gas always supported me through some pretty obscure, surreal, lonely and difficult times and actually I am no longer afraid to need it. I am ceratinly no Saint, but i do feel his presence in those quiet moments when I am still enough to listen - and it means the world to me.

Perhaps more than ever, no matter where we find ourselves in the wild, crazy, painfully beautiful adventure called life, we should all spend more time, occasionally, searching for His pleasure...........