Words, words, words

Time goes on and I have less and less to say. Or, to be more accurate, I find it harder and harder to explain myself. Old age creeping on, I guess.

So here I am doing what I love most, which is teaching small groups. I'm in Taranaki taking part in a taught, silent retreat on contemplative prayer. 20 or so people have battled their way here through the rain, and several times a day I'm required to say something they might find intelligible. So I have to think about what it is that needs explaining, and how I might go about explaining it. The complicated stuff which fills my head in the wee small hours, lying in the dark of my bedroom gets condensed and ordered and wrapped into language which is understandable. Or at least, I understand it, and that's personally helpful. 'If you want to learn something teach it to someone else.' Yep. Works for me.

Thunderstorms rattled around the mountain all last night. All day long the winds were brisk and the rain cold. My bed is narrow and hard, so there were plenty of opportunities for the Holy Spirit to whisper in the darkness.

I'm reading Mary Oliver and Thomas Merton, a poet and a mystic. And, oddly, they seem clear and sharp and bounded and full of light. By contrast I am finding less and less patience with the bloated opacity of academic writing. Not that I had much to begin with. And I inwardly groan at much liturgy, where words seem laded on in heaping helpings to hedge against the sorts of ambiguity where God might be hiding. It's in the silence and the spaces and the cracks that I find myself looking. And sometimes finding. I try to explain what I am seeing there. I explain with stories, and by feeling into the characters in the pages of the Bible, and by pointing out the stuff we never knew we knew.

In telling I have the blessing of clarity. I also have the blessing of sitting with people as they voice their uncertainties. I listen as hard as I can, knowing that the more words I use the less they (and I) will discern. I hope I have used few enough. I hope I have not talked myself into the space between them and God, and blocked the view.

Comments

Kate said…

I have always marvelled at how clearly your words express simple ideas that I never noticed I was on the edge of realising.
(Simple not, of course, being simplistic)

16 September 2018 at 14:53

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