Fr Philip Carter offers a ministry of spirituality, with a series of meditations on some questions that we may ponder as we consider our life in God.
You will find here his reflections and questions for meditation, images, music and poetry to enrich your life’s journey.
“Love’s not love unless it’s vulnerable”
Dennis Potter, in an interview only days before his death from cancer said that “Religion has always been to me the wound, never the bandage”. Being vulnerable is meaning to carry our wound (vulnus). It is not, as popularly thought, overcoming weakness and vulnerability, but accepting that this place of “poverty of spirit” is the right place for me.
“I come to wound you and to heal the wound”
says the Australian poet Kevin Hart.
Jesus was born into a world of power struggle. He knew alienation. And in his woundedness and vulnerability he offers us intimacy – to those of us who can expose our wounds.
St. Paul was clear:
“my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness”
2 Corinthians 12:9
“The meaning is in the waiting”
R. S. Thomas
Image: Riki Yarbrough, Silence
The most poignant of human activities is to wait. Waiting stretches us, pushes us on to our inner resources. Waiting sifts us, asks us to choose. Waiting shows us what matters, and deepens us. Waiting is the practical inner defiance which arises out of the logic of faith. To wait is often the only thing we can do with any kind of assurance. Waiting beyond words. Waiting in the silence. Waiting – alone, but not alone. Hope is not optimism. Hope hangs in there, and finds meaning in however things turn out.
Image: Riki Yarbrough, Joseph
“Safe, when all safety’s lost”
WW1 Poet Rupert Brooke
The images in this post are of paintings by Riki Yarbrough, whose work illustrated the blog post two weeks ago, The poetry of faith: let the desert bloom. This work comes from her Advent series, a set of 27 photos taken from her work through the Advent season in 2018. She says of this series,
This project began as a personal challenge. I hoped to set aside time every day during the advent season (4 weeks leading up to Christmas) to meditate on the beauty of our Messiah’s coming. Every year during this season our family walks through the lineage of Christ, as recorded in Matthew and Luke, in order to consider and remember the promise of God. But in 2018, on the first day of advent, I wanted to create as I considered the Scriptures pertaining to His coming. I pulled out a clean 24×24 canvas and began working on Day 1, the Beginning – “In the beginning, God…” After a few hours, I wondered what it might be like to wake up every day for the next 26 days and do the same thing.
I didn’t have 27 canvases and honestly I doubted I could fully carry out the challenge. So the next day I woke up, took the very same canvas I had painted the day before and worked right on top. To cover the previous day’s work under the beauty of a new focus and set of Scriptures became both an offering and a sacrifice. I wasn’t worried about meeting someone’s expectation or coming back to rework it later. I was simply conversing with the Lord over the truth of His Word in those wonderful moments on that particular day. Every day I created upon the same canvas, but with a new layer holding the next part of the story, worked out in paint, paper, and pastel.
Source: Advent project
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click on the link below.
