On Mood

I recall the fashion when I was young for mood rings. The ring changed colour apparently according to your mood: in fact, according to your temperature. What is mood? The word is related to mind or spirit: a spirited mood would be a brave one.

            Moods can be affected by many things: even weather. Somehow I know what sun and moon are doing, even within the house. A full moon means a sleepless night. An overcast sky is lowering; a sunny day encouraging. A walk in light sunshine is calming.

            A listening walk is fine meditation. Realising how noisy our vehicles are: they block out bees, birds, even barking dogs. Chainsaws with their scything grind; shovels scraping, mowers rattling. The dog’s toenails scraping the footpath; wind sounds past my ears; the kids’ ball bouncing.

            A fine day is enlivening. The road mender who came to tell the church the road would be refinished next week (“a road only lasts four or five years, so we have to work at it continually”) gave a recipe for life. Our life roads need refinishing too, maybe just as often. “What a beautiful day,” he said. “Makes you glad to be alive!”

On Communication

When I was a student of Art History, I was sent to the museum to examine prints of Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra. These were kept in map drawers and handled with white gloves. The dramatic images of starvation, torture, murder, defilement and death during Napoleon’s Peninsular War in Spain have influenced artists for two centuries. The disasters of war have not changed.

            In Wellington’s time, communication determined battles. News of ceasefires and peace agreements might take weeks to reach engaged armies. The enemy’s communications could be delayed or halted so orders and dispositions failed to reach them. Much depended on the weather.

            History is vital. We need to remember Napoleon and others seeking world domination. We need also to view our own time and the ways it differs from the past. Chiefly at the present, we should understand communication.

            Reading news of the massive earthquake in Nepal (an act of nature) I learned that all the Sherpas at Mt. Everest are on Facebook. People in Nepal consult technology. Very soon, no corner of the earth will be unconnected, with implications for the whole world.

            How does God communicate with us? Can our orders and dispositions be delayed? Are we fighting battles when peace is already agreed? Should we, like Wellington, hold back when communications are not yet clear? Liturgy, reading, prayer: listen, and attend.

On Praying Some Prayers

The past weeks have been conducive to prayer. Earth trembles, cities crumble, people lie fearful in rain without shelter. Men face firing squads, women slavery; thousands drown fleeing wars and tyrannies. What prayers to pray?

            Do I have the right to pray for my own health and agency? Every day I thank God for treatments and think one little miracle wouldn’t hurt. I lie in comfort in a brilliant hospital, smiling angelic-faced attendants drip-feeding miraculous medicines. While others lie in rain or drown in cold sea. What prayers to pray?

            All over the world, governments get it wrong, and imbuing the hearts of ministers with righteousness is slower than the drip in my hand. Prisoners die by noose, gun and knife, and a variety of inventions devised by inventive souls. The Lady Jane Grey, a fervent Evangelical, asked her executioners: ‘May I say this Psalm?’ and began Miserere Mihi, aged 16.

            You can pray for all prisoners and captives, and sometimes this is heard: nearly 300 women and girls freed from captivity by military action. I can send money to Oxfam, and hope for blankets, water, shelter, to be given. Brushing past my conscience, still praying for myself. What prayers to pray?

            Or you can pray, with the Buddhists, for the welfare of all sentient beings. The West has been taught to say this, thank God, but much enlightenment must come to pass.

            The Lord, says the Psalm, is plenteous in mercy. What prayers to pray?

On Cleaning the House

This week I decided to clean my house thoroughly, helped by bright sunshine. This is actually a privilege, as long as you don’t do it too often.

            Benefits of cleaning house: you’re in your own space, moving things around, placing them just where you want them. You decide what’s clean and what’s dirty. You come across valued objects from happy times, and things that make you wonder where you were when. You take notice of oils, chemicals and possible poisons you’ve overlooked in your environs. If, like me, you’ve been too sick to clean up, there’s the simple pleasure of agency, being able to do it.

            A mental or spiritual cleaning has the same benefits. Moving outworn ideas into back cupboards; accepting events or persons you thought were unwholesome; becoming aware of poisonous emotions like greed, revenge, egotism and hostility. Binning what you can.

            Have you outgrown some old prayers that can retire behind new ones? Maybe you now think passing the exam has more to do with your devotion to study, while winning the lottery is in the hands of chance. Is living the Gospel a possible prayer?

            Having the strength to clean house can be pure pleasure. Looking at the clean house, dwelling in it, even though you know you’re going to have to do it all again.

On Burning Churches

The poet W.H. Auden regained his Christian faith after reflecting on the burning of churches during the Spanish Civil War. He’d gone to the war an idealistic Marxist-materialist-atheist, but the burning of churches disturbed him. In trying to discover reasons for his distress, he returned to his Christian belief.

            Atheism presents itself as a wise reasonable alternative to the fires of faith. This is neither new nor reasonable. Revolutionary France turned Notre Dame Cathedral into a Temple of Reason. It doesn’t last. Icons and churches once burned in Orthodox Russia.

            Treasures of art and music may burn with the church. Churches hold the reverence of our ancestors, so burning churches may symbolise obliteration of ancient civilisations.          

            Churches burn for many reasons: if someone lights the hedge on fire and it spreads to the church, is it accidental? Deliberately firing a building is arson, a crime. In 1936, Gaudi’s plans and models for the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona burned when the church was set on fire by revolutionaries: the models are being reconstructed as work on this mighty basilica continues.

            When churches burn, the faith of the congregation continues to flow like fire. A church stands a holy island amid the waves of worldly space. When any church burns, the most important question will be: who has the photographs, drawings, and plans?

On Living in History

I’m a diverse reader, following various interests. This Lent, I’m reading biography, the stories of people living within history. The diaries of German diplomat Count Kessler, a Cassandra post WW I, foresee Hitler’s rise step by step: all meetings, conferences, diplomacy fail.[1]

            Similarly, British Minister Duff Cooper vainly tries to persuade his government of threat, as it fails to arm or mobilise (and Cooper never again speaks to Chamberlain after Munich.) Later, Cooper is anxious about the Levant (region: Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and more) between British and French.[2]

            Then Byron, whose admiration for Napoleon (as Napoleon fights across Europe) embodies the seductiveness of great figures on the Romantic mind. Byron in Ottoman Greece discovers antiquity as prey as Elgin carves away the Parthenon marbles.[3]

            The martyrs of the Venerable English College Rome (many deemed traitors as Roman Catholic priests under Elizabeth I) witness the state’s power to enforce religious compliance, as well as convictions compelling martyrdom. We are heirs of the Reformation, for good and for ill.[4]

            Frailty of civilisations, reach to world conquest, religion as history. History shows what has been, what may be, sometimes what will be. We should read it; we live within it.

---

[1] Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler (1918-1937).

[2] Cooper, Duff. Old Men Forget. (1953).

[3] McCarthy, Fiona. Byron: Life and Legend. (2002).

[4] Saint Michael’s Abbey. The Forty Four: The Martyrs of the Venerable English College Rome. (2000).

On Human Space

Today, due to a competition called Iron Man (the last Iron Man I heard of was Bismarck: times change) I took the old way to the city not the freeway. I hadn’t taken that route in a generation. I’ve reached a place in my life where everything reminds me of something else; my trip was a revival of whole sheets of my former life.

            Witnessing the industrialisation of suburbs I’d known, where I’d stayed, lost events enacted, shops, hospitals, schools, communities overwritten, signage in new languages, blocks of boxlike factory outlets over gardens and homes. At least the sad dusty pony rides by the highway now gone.

            Parts of life have enchantment such that living them blocks out time: passionate love, ambition, joys of parenthood. Time seems not to move while within them: yet finite. The Stabat Mater we sang today tells of a Mother facing such an end: Lenten sorrows.

            It’s of this mutability of human space that Paul writes, saying how we must be changed, the places of our lives like sets to be struck and rolled away, the dramas and traumas like joys and delights concluded, leaving us on the bare structure and stage of God’s Reality.