First, create silence – as a precondition to any kind of healing.
Kierkegaard
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Albert Einstein
Red Doors
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention….
And then
once more the quiet mystery
Is present to me….
Denise Levertov
Image: Phil Greenwood, Shadows Way
How do you approach life?
Are you open to possibility?
Have you a teachable, receptive heart?
Are you attentive?
Or do you want to fix, control and always understand?
Are you willing to admit you don’t always know?
Or that you could be wrong?
How do you feel about not knowing everything?
Not being perfect?
Are you able to recognise that change is not only necessary but possible for you?
Jesus said that unless you become like a little child you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. “Every child is an artist” and for Picasso the problem was “how to remain an artist once [you] grow up”. When he was looking at some children’s drawings he said: “When I was [their] age I could draw like Raphael: it took me many years to learn how to draw like these children”.
As I “grow up” I begin to realise just how often “I””” – my ego – gets in the way. I also realise just how at cross-purposes I often am – within myself and with others. Spend some time looking at choices you have made – and are making – and find the courage to look at the consequences of these choices.
Do you let the “world offer itself to your imagination”? Can you envision – and even admit – that there’s probably another, more creative and fruitful way?
John Keats describes the disposition necessary for a poet – as “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable searching after fact or reason”.
Ignatius of Loyola says “There are very few people who realise what God would make of them if they abandoned themselves entirely into his hands, and let themselves be formed by his grace”.
Stay with these words. Savour them. Let them speak to you. Let them invite you into “another way of knowing, another way of being”. The invitation God makes is to learn to live in uncertainty: to live with mystery: and even doubt. The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Remember Pascal’s words: “The heart has its reasons which reason doesn’t know about”
As we begin our final series for the year Fr Philip Carter speaks to us about approaching life. His first words ask us to create silence, so the images for this post bring us into the silent and peaceful world of the artist Phil Greenwood, born in 1943 in Dolgellau, North Wales and now living in Kent.
He works as a printmaker using etching and aquatint. A landscape artist he works mainly on copper plates. His work is extremely economical in that he usually uses only two plates and two or three colours to achieve a great range of tone and colour by the depth of the etch and by overprinting and fusing one colour with another. His images do not always relate to a specific place – he develops and works with an amalgamation of ideas recalled. The atmosphere exemplified by the landscape is the important factor.
Source: Phil Greenwood
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click on the link below.
