Anton Rublev

Twenty years ago I first saw the Russian film Rublev. It is the story of the monk and icon writer Anton Rublev. The film was shot in black and white as it relates his life in an incredibly violent age but then at the very end as some of Rublev's icons are shown in switches into colour. I still remember how overwhelmed I felt sitting in the theatre seeing the beauty of Rublev's icons. But icons aren't meant to be works of art but rather windows to another reality.

Here are Henri Nouwen's words on Rublev's famous icon of the trinity from today's post on "Speaking to the Soul."

Hardly a day passes in our lives without our experience of inner or outer fears, anxieties, apprehensions and preoccupations. These dark powers have pervaded every part of our world to such a degree that we can never fully escape them. Still it is possible not to belong to these powers, not to build our dwelling place among them, but to choose the house of love as our home. This choice is made not just once and for all but by living a spiritual life, praying at all times and thus breathing God’s breath. Through the spiritual life we gradually move from the house of fear to the house of love.

I have never seen the house of love more beautifully expressed than in the icon of the Holy Trinity, painted by Andrew Rublev in 1425 in memory of the great Russian saint, Sergius (1313-1392). For me the contemplation of this icon has increasingly become a way to enter more deeply into the mystery of divine life while remaining fully engaged in the struggles of our hate-and-fear-filled world.

Andrew Rublev painted this icon not only to share the fruits of his own meditation on the mystery of the Holy Trinity but also to offer his fellow monks a way to keep their hearts centered in God while living in the midst of political unrest. The more we look at this holy image with the eyes of faith, the more we come to realize that it is painted not as a lovely decoration for a convent church, nor as a helpful explanation of a difficult doctrine, but as a holy place to enter and stay within. As we place ourselves in front of the icon in prayer, we come to experience a gentle invitation to participate in the intimate conversation that is taking place among the three divine angels and to join them around the table.

From Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons by Henri J. M. Nouwen (Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria Press, 1987).

More thoughts on Rome #4

And still more from Doerr:

The vast percentage of any mushroom, it turns out, lives underground, in a network of extremely fine fibers, or hyphae, that prowl the soil gathering nutrients. A single cubic centimeter of dirt might contain as much as two thousand meters of hyphae.

Rome is like that, I think. The bulk of it lies underground, its history ramified so densely under there, ten centuries in every thimbleful, that no one will ever unravel it all.

Since returning from Rome I’ve been reading more of its history and more about the art I saw. I’m overwhelmed by how much there is to learn about it all. I’ve fallen in love and I can’t get enough of my beloved’s story but I’m beginning to realize that I couldn’t learn it all if I dedicated the rest of my life to it.

More thoughts on Rome #3 (modified)

More from Doerr

In the Tom Andrews Studio I open my journal and stare out at the trunk of the umbrella pine and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.

The same can be said of the routine of worship. In my first sermon after returning from Rome I spoke of how the difference between visiting Rome as a tourist and visiting as a pilgrim were the moments when, beyond the awe of the beauty of churches, beyond the incredible feeling of being in churches where Christians had prayed for almost 2000 years, I felt connected to the Christians praying beside me. We didn’t share language, culture, or rite but in that moment we shared a common faith, a common love and we abided together in that love. As I spoke these words and looked out at these people I gather with once a month, people I’m coming to know, I was struck by how what I found in Rome is something I experience regularly here. The familiarity of worship in Southern Alberta had obscured for me the joy and miracle of coming together in a common faith with a community of people which whom I might not otherwise have come together with.

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

T.S.Eliot from The Four Quartets

More thoughts on Rome #2

More treasures from Doerr:

He spends much of his year in Rome reading Pliny the Elder’s, Natural History:

Read in a certain way, the Natural History is preposterous, full of erroneous assumptions and cast-off mythology. Read another way, it is a window into Roman understanding two millennia ago. Read another way, it is a tribute to wonder itself.

Later he will write of his boys:

Diaper rashes creep up the boys’ chests and backs. Still, their enthusiasm for the world astounds. Everything—a role of tape, a telephone jack, each other’s hair—warrants investigation. Whoever says adults are better at paying attention than children is wrong: we’re too busy filtering out the world, focusing on some task or another, paying no attention. Our kids are the ones discovering new continents all day long. Sometimes, looking at them, I feel as if Henry and Owen live permanently in that resplendent, taut state of awareness that we adults only reach when our cars are sliding on ice through a red light, or our airplane is thudding through turbulence.

“Paying attention” – it comes up in the work of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, and in the advice of spiritual directors and counselors. Danny Gregory wrote a lovely little book about how paying attention to the world around him and drawing it helped him to make sense of the new reality of his life when his wife was left in a wheelchair after falling in the New York subway.

Thoughts on Rome

Before I went to Rome I read Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome. It is a memoir of the year Doerr, his wife and 6 month old twins spent in Rome on a fellowship from the American Academy of the Arts. I had come across it at Chapters when it first came out and gave it to a friend of mine because reading a bit of it in the store I thought she’d like it. She did and when I started to prepare for my trip I decided I would read it. I loved it, referred to it often in conversations with Betta until she was sick of it, and decided I would read it again when I returned. So while on retreat this week as I’ve been reflecting on my time in Rome I picked it up again only to discover that it was like reading it for the first time.

The first time I read it I loved Doerr’s descriptions of their apartment, the streets where they walked, their struggles to communicate in Italian, their adventures buying groceries and communicating with doctors. Much of what he described resonated with the year I lived in Germany studying at the Universität Tübingen. There is nothing more humbling than struggling to buy bread when you are used to taking your ability to communicate for granted. My supervisor told me that he had a button he would wear when he lived in Germany as a student. It read, “I’m really very intelligent in my own language.”

This week when I read it again, however, it wasn’t just the experience of being a foreigner that I was remembering. I was remembering the places he was describing, I could smell the smells, and hear the sounds. It was such a delight to be back in the Pantheon remembering the power of looking up into the dome and seeing the Oculus. But mostly I gave thanks that his beautiful descriptions of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza prompted me to seek it out.

He and his wife had stumbled across it and you’d have to. It isn’t one of the churches on the ‘must see’ tourist lists and it is off the street inside a courtyard. It isn’t a big church either – essentially it is the chapel for the oldest university in Rome. It was designed by Borromini and finished in 1660. His description captures part of how stunning it is – I experienced vertigo looking up into the ceiling and we sat down quickly so that we could gaze up safely.

You notice first how white it is. A few railings are touched with gold, but all the rest is white: white six-pointed stars, white windows, white balconies. And you notice how unlocked it feels, free of pillars and registries and choir stalls and auxiliary chapels. Strands of sunlight lean through two of six high windows. It seems less a church than a tabernacle, less a temple to God than a temple to light.

....

We sit in the corner and try counting the six points of the star as the architecture climbs toward the lantern, but we quickly get dizzy and lose count; we are honeycombed, we are trapped inside the molecules at the center of a snow crystal. The pews, the crucifix, the dwarfed altar--they all seem completely irrelevant. It is all space, all geometry, all ceiling. In the restless walls I glimpse patterns: mountains and streams, snow blowing across the freeway, a train of climbers winding along the edge of a glacier. Everything forms and re-forms. We sit on our little bench and feel the church coil and twist above us, a wintry heart, a tornado of plaster.

I will always be thankful to Doerr for the gift of this church.

Words to make us uncomfortable

Lamenting that the great, flowing milk of divine beneficence had all but dried up in the hands of the church, Hildegaard said, "Woe to those who are given a voice and will not shout, woe to those who have breasts and will not nurse God's children!"

Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace

Walking and Falling with the Velveteen Rabbi

I love this! The whole post by the Velveteen Rabbi is lovely:

Like Laurie Anderson says:

You're walking. And you don't always realize it,
but you're always falling.
With each step you fall forward slightly.
And then catch yourself from falling.
Over and over, you're falling.
And then catching yourself from falling.
And this is how you can be walking and falling
at the same time.

Facing our own violence

I'm reading Frances M. Young's book Brokenness and Blessing: Towards a Biblical Spirituality as a part of my Lenten reading and I'm really struck by these words of Youakim Moubarac connecting the experience of working in L'Arche and the desert fathers:

In as far as I understand Jean Vanier, daily dealings with people who have handicaps makes those involved face their own violence. Confronted by the irreducibility of the other, the one whom they mean to serve but whose condition they cannot ameliorate, they discover with horror that they are capable of striking them, or even wanting to do away with them. It is this, then, that I call a privileged desert place. The ancient anchorites took themselves off to the desert, they said, to fight with Satan on his own territory. We know now that is is enough to pay attention to the most defenceless people among us to find ourselves given up to our interior demons. But if only we force ourselves not to lose heart, if only graces comes to the aid of our weakness, we apprehend that to spend time with the poorest of all is not to do them charity, but to allow ourselves to be transformed by them and to apprehend God as gentleness.

Young relates this to her own experience of caring for her disabled son. I'm finding the book engaging and challenging and look forward to reading more.

Words that resonate with my experience

Authorities I trust, from Wendell Berry to Sri Ramakrishna, all remind me that the particular is the only means we have for touching the universal. We arrive at what is true for all by committing ourselves to particular beliefs, tasks, persons, and places that are true for us.

Garret Keizer, A Dresser of Sycamore Trees: The Finding of a Ministry

What the Fathers Sought most of all was their own true self, in Christ. And in order to do this, they had to reject completely the false, formal self, fabricated under social compulsion 'in the world.' They sought a way to God that was uncharted and freely chosen, not inherited from others who had it mapped out beforehand. They sought out a God whom they alone could find, not one who was 'given' in a set, stereotyped form by somebody else.

Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert

Planning your day

My friend Lorraine just put this on facebook and I love it - gotta share:

E.B.White
"I arise in the morning torn between the desire to savour the world or save the world. This makes it hard to plan my day."

Lewis on the Vulnerability of Love

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. C.S.Lewis

Christ is Risen!

In the letters Paul wrote, there are fifty-three references to the resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection of Jesus is the even that sets and keeps in motion the entire gospel enterprise. Most of these resurrection texts assert either the centrality of Jesus' resurrection or the certainty of our final resurrection from the dead, or both. But six of these resurrection citations explicitly identify our present and ongoing spiritual formation with Jesus' resurrection (see Romans 6:4; 8:11; Ephesians 2:6; Philippians 3:10; Colossians 2:12; 3:1). In other words, this is not a future resurrection but a present resurrection -- which is what we're interested in right now.

Clearly, Paul's witness is that resurrection is not only a doctrinal/historical truth to be believed about Jesus, and not only a doctrinal/eschatological truth to be believed about our final destiny, but also the focus for our spiritual formation -- formation-by-resurrection.

From Eugene Peterson's Living the Resurrection, p. 102

Lewis on love

I'm getting ready for a wedding on Saturday and came across this in my wedding file:

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
~C.S. Lewis

And all shall be well

This morning at Ascension was lovely. We sang some favourites, we welcomed back folks who have been away, and we welcomed visitors. I preached on traveling light (beginning with reflections on my own struggles to get rid of clutter) and how this is grounded in trust. Then I explored the relationship between trust and hope and the choices we make to be trusting and hopeful.

There is a quotation from Viktor Frankl that comes to mind now that really sums up what I was trying to say:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

It seems to me that hope isn't so much about hoping for some particular thing (whether it be descendants or winning the lottery) but a more basic attitude of trust that God wants good for us.

I realize I could have used the well-known words of Julian of Norwich:

All shall be well,
and all shall be well,
and all manner of thing
shall be well.

The problem is that we do experience things that cause us to question God's goodness. (I've been sitting in on my friend Paul's theodicy course and thinking about this a lot lately) I spoke about the children's memorial at Yad Vashem - you enter a dark room in which the names of the 1.5 million children who died in the Shoah are read. A candle is reflected off of a thousand mirrors creating the image of the stars in the sky. My friend Paul talks about the power of the rebuke of God as the promise made to Abraham that his descendants would number like the stars in the sky is contrasted to the death of so many children under the Nazis. I talked about this in light of the readings from Genesis and Hebrews about the promise made to Abraham and his faithful response and the Jewish struggle to make sense of God's covenant post-Shoah.

Then I talked about the challenges to faith we often face in our own lives. And I talked about an attitude of hopefulness that choses to look at the reasons we have in our own experience to trust in God. (See the Buechner article below)

As I look out at these people I love so much knowing some of the things they've suffered I am so moved by their faithfulness. They are so hopeful and so gracious in the face of suffering. This is why we can't be solitary Christians. When my faith is shaken or uncertain I count on the prayer, the support, the example of these people to carry me when I'm unable to walk for myself. Father Bob Cowan, may his memory be a blessing, said to me once when he was dying that when I was praying for him I wasn't just interceding for him but I was literally praying in his place because he was unable to pray the office any more.

Being a part of this community is one of the reasons I trust in the goodness of God.

Sunday at St. Theodore's

I went out to Taber this morning to take the services at St. Theodore's and enjoyed it as I always do. They are a very warm parish and I miss going out there regularly. When they were without a priest I was out there about once a month and really enjoyed myself. This morning the music at the 10:30 service was especially wonderful.

One of the things I love about them is that they always welcome Robbie. He is pretty good about sitting up in a pew and listening to the service. As he's getting older he doesn't settle as well as he used to though and I worry more about him being a distraction. He loves it there though and I so enjoy seeing him enjoying being with people. Knowing that his time is limited makes these moment even more precious to me.

The Gospel this morning was the Lord's Prayer and I preached on the petition, "Give us this day our daily bread." As a part of my sermon I talked about Sara Miles' book, Take This Bread. I had read some reviews of this book and some discussion of it over on Father Jake's blog so ordered it. It came this week and I couldn't bear to put it down. It is a powerful story of a woman, left-wing, secular, journalist, gay, who walks into an Episcopal church on a whim, takes communion and is converted. She makes a deep connection between the food she had shared with the poor when she was working as a journalist in Central America, the Eucharist, and sharing food with the poor living in the area around the church. She starts a Food Pantry, which distributes groceries to over 200 people a week at the church. When she starts receiving major money to support the work she starts more Pantries in the neighbourhood. It is an amazing story.

Fr. Jake posted this quotation from the book:

...Service is thanksgiving, because it means not only giving freely, but understanding how greatly we’re loved. I remember an afternoon at the food pantry when I was trying to open up, while an impatient throng of people shouted at me and at each other in three languages. I’d been unloading crates of oranges as fast as I could, and bossing the volunteers around, but we were still behind schedule. We were short a crate of snacks, and the two old Cuban sisters who always show up hours early were out front, bickering noisily. Three hyper little kids were pestering me for candy, and the crazy guy with apocalyptic theories kept trying to corner me and explain the secret messages he’d received. Some visiting minister was standing around, but I couldn’t get a minute to talk to him; new volunteers kept asking me what to do, but somehow nothing was getting done. Everything felt hectic and irritating and on the verge of chaos, and my feet hurt. I was sick of poor people, sick of church people, utterly sick of myself.

And then a woman pushed her way to the front of the crowd. She was Chinese, with a quilted jacket, and she was thrusting a package at me. I couldn’t understand what she was trying to say, but she kept smiling and coming closer. “Here,” she said, and handed me a piece of fish wrapped in waxed paper, still warm. “Food, for you”...

You can see why I couldn't put it down. I made the link between Miles' experience of working at the Pantry with my own experience of feeding students at the college and university. St. Theo's has helped us with that by providing campus care parcels every term. In fact, they provide as many bags as they have people in church - pretty amazing participation.

So it has been a good day and now I'm going to read Descarte's Meditations for Paul's class on theodicy.

T. S. Eliot

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Choruses from the Rock, I

Quoted by Richard Burridge in his article "Wisdom, Spirituality and Community in the University,"
Theology 104(2001)169.

Evening Reading

I've been spending evenings watching some wild movies and reading some great books. The other evening I read Annie Dillard's The Writing Life. I love her books - they have such an interesting rhythm. She writes:

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Barbara Brown Taylor said something similar at our clergy conference a few years ago. She said you should always preach with the idea that someone in the congregation has less than six months to live and you don't want to waste their time.

One of the films I've watched this week is Y tu mamá también . I don't know if I knew that I had only a short while to live that I would want to go on a road trip with two sex crazed teenagers and try to teach them how to be better lovers but it was an interesting movie. Okay, so I'm stretching for a connection here. But the film is worth seeing if you can handle the sex and language (I give this warning because I got blasted once for recommending a movie in a sermon and not clarifying that it had rough language).

Don't know what I'll watch tonight. It is summer time and I haven't watched the Godfather trilogy yet. It is usually my ritual to welcome summer. That and Mr. Baseball, Field of Dreams, and Bull Durham. I'll let you know.

Walking

My van is still in the shop so I'm walking and busing it these days. One of the advantages of living downtown though is that walking places isn't a hardship. So today I set out to meet a student for lunch and then putzed my way back, stopping for a latte at the Round Street Cafe. As I noticed things I don't normally notice when I'm driving I was mindful of something Daniel Taylor wrote about walking on the island of Iona: "Walking is the maximum desirable speed for seeing things fully enough to name them. And when we name things then we begin to value them. No wonder that we all want to be named and known." Our technology has a way of distancing us from our environment. In the van not only am I separated from the weather, sounds, and smells of the city, but I'm too caught up in paying attention to other vehicles and lights to pay any attention to houses, pedestrians, flowers or anything else for that matter.

I remember reading something about how train travel changed publishing. When people traveled by carriage they were going slowly enough that they could pay attention to what was around them. But when they started to take the train they went too quickly and were removed from what was around them so they started to read on the train. So there were all sorts of magazines and penny novels produced for this new market.

Sr. Helen Prejean writes in the beginning of Dead Man Walking that not having air conditioning in New Orleans means that you have to move slow in the heat and humidity. Wendell Berry chooses to only write by natural light so he can only write during the day time. There have been a number of things written lately about stress and how the fact that technology allows us to work around the clock has been really hard on us.

It will make life a lot more convenient when I have my van back but there are things to be learned from an enforced slowing down.

Socrates Cafe

There ought to be a law against rainy cold Victoria Days. Instead of working out in my garden I'm inside worrying that all the bedding plants I put in pots yesterday are getting very cold. (Observation: in Manitoba they are called bedding plants. Here they are called bedding out plants. Where else but out would you bed them?)

So in preparation for Unchurch I'm reading Christopher Phillips' Socrates Cafe. Interesting book - interesting concept. Create opportunities for people to come together to talk about philosophical ideas and they will come and engage the examined life.

From the book:

"Contrary to popular belief, the more questions you have, the firmer the footing you are on. The more you know yourself. The more you can map out and set a meaningful path for your future."