“To those who prove victorious I will give some hidden manna and a white stone, with a new name written on it, known only to the person who receives it.” (the book of Revelation ch 2 v17)

Sometimes I’m a bit alarmed by the opening verse of a poem I’m writing ….so I accidentally lose it, only to find it years later and suddenly realise how to finish it.

In this instance, you’ll probably see why I decided’ to lose it! But also, why it took all of those years to understand how to get from the beginning of the poem to the end.

So here she is…

Janice

Janice was jaunty
Relentlessly blythe
As welcome as death
With his grin and his scythe.

She loved with pure gladness to live life and spend
And with grim application to laugh and transcend.

Her heart was unbounded and so was her mind
Her smile ever-ready, she'd never unwind.
As dippy and daring as heroes at sea.
Uncaptained and mastless
She floated quite free.

As bright as the signal flags
Flown in a war
She'd flap in the wind
And be seen from the shore.

‘Which colours are these now?’
They'd ask from the watch
And lean on the Bible and reach for the scotch.

But no one could read them,
Although so intense
Their eyes were too tired
And the mist was too dense.

So Janice though jaunty
And fresh for the fight
Exhausted by waiting
Grew dark with the night.

But alone in the hold
Of the salt sea swell
Was tenderly lifted
As it rose and fell.

Till starlight in greylight and monochrome air
Received all the pain of the colours she'd wear.

Till she was translucent and smooth as a stone
And pale as an opal
With a fire of her own.

Looking back at the poem I can see that it’s her church community, as well as herself, that are not a little dim witted, and cloudy sighted. Having failed to “see” her, they leave her to fall into shadow. Her true self is incomprehensible to them. Instead, the false self flourishes and wanes, exhausted by its own pseudo-vitality.

Activity without repose. Action without Contemplation. Prayer without encounter with God’s inexhaustible mystery.

But in the ‘greylight’, in the apparent failure, loss and solitude, she becomes capable of receiving and of being comforted. In a prayer of repose she is transformed and prepared for authentic action. For God really knows who we are.

“Yaweh, my heart is not haughty,
I do not set my sights too high.
I have taken no part in great affairs, in wonders beyond my scope.
No, I hold myself in quiet and silence,
Like a little child in its mother’s arms,
Like a little child, so I keep myself.
Let Israel hope in Yahweh
Henceforth and for ever.” (Psalm 131)

Under the loving and Creative Gaze of God, we can let go of the layers of the false self.… the needy, anxious, self-pitying, cynical, self-righteous, oblivious, impatient, critical, passive or triumphalist self (add to taste!), but its gradual falling away makes room for God’s presence and Life in us. This is what the Church used to call progress in Holiness, and which the Gospel puts beautifully simply “He must increase and I must decrease!” Such holiness is generally (and specifically by Jesus) deemed to belong to those who know how to be like little children; in the psalm they are very little children indeed, just babies in the arms of their parents.

But this all sounds a bit cosy! What about the world and its problems! What’s all this lazing about being gazed at and loved…doesn’t that sound a bit self-indulgent….all this contemplation is surely for people with nothing better to do, no tax forms to fill in and no toddlers to clean up after.

I remember coming across a shiver-producing quote from Nietzsche, the one who thought that Christianity produced a slave mentality and so urged us to strive to become the Over Man and all that - At any rate he said “If you look into the abyss, the abyss will look into you”. How true. He was in a sense a kind of inverted mystic, with a vocation manqué. His observation, evidently written from personal experience, reminded me how vital it is for us to look steadfastly at the Character of God and His plenitude and not become mesmerised by our own weaknesses, the churchs’ struggles and the world’s demise.

An old hermit once wrote, that contemplation is “a long loving look at the real, filled with personal, passionate, presence”.

We look at God, the most Real of all, and he is already looking at us with love. In prayer, we make the act of Faith that we are beheld.

Then when we give ourselves the chance to become aware of His personal, passionate presence, we grow in a particular kind of confidence that prepares us to respond to our World-healing vocations, but not before we’ve engaged with the healing process ourselves.

The word confidence comes from the latin ‘with’ ‘faith’ (con fidere). So we are called not to be ego-confident but God-within the-true-self confident. When John the Baptist says, He must increase and I must de-crease, this decreasing is not a falsely humble, personality denying, pseudo martyrdom, victim complex thing, an invitation to resignation and supine subservience to oppression of the sort that disgusted Neitzche, no, it’s the gradual uncovering of the true self in which the Trinity is pleased to dwell. And there, in the silent attention of contemplative and sacramental prayer the Trinity converses, becomes the living water springing up to eternal life.

In this context the personality emerges over years of prayer, more balanced, loving, compassionate, receptive and as a consequence, dynamic and outward- facing when it needs to be and dynamically inward-facing when it needs to be.

This is one way we begin to humanise the city, by becoming more human ourselves, which, because of our Vocation to Life in the Spirit both individually and as community means sharing the Life of God within us and amongst us.

This is the victory of the authentic Holy War within. Scary phrase! But we should be afraid of not winning that particular internal war. That is the meaning of daily conversion:..to choose to turn away from the abyss and towards God. That internal struggle is against the tyranny of the self-oppressing ego. It is essential for the good of the community and of society because the unrefined ego outworks itself in oppressing others. The failure to achieve personal holiness manifests itself, in part, in all the unjust structures in society. They are often no more than mirrors of the turmoil in individual souls.

This is the vital connection between personal holiness and social justice. No system, no matter how well devised or de-constructed can make up for the absence of Grace, the absence of mature individuals living a contemplative God- facing life, filled with the character that only His Love and Grace can achieve in us.

“To those who prove victorious I will give some hidden manna and a white stone, with a new name written on it, known only to the person who receives it.” Revelation 2 v17

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