Yet to love someone is an art. It does not come simply or cheaply but is a lifetime’s work. It remains a huge risk to entrust the fragile barque of identity to the wide and precarious depths of another person’s life. There will be storms. There will also be times when the emerging beauty of the voyage will bring unexpected joy. Deeply buried hurts will resolve and release themselves. Shakespeare distils this in Sonnet 30:
But if the while I think on thee (dear friend)
All losses are restored, and sorrows end.
Healing light will flow into the unknown region of the heart. It is as though twilight were awakening in the inner night. It is astounding how love can change a person. Where there was fear, courage begins to dawn. Trapped confusion gives way to fresh clarity. In old walls, unexpected doors open and the heart awakens with the desire ‘to live everything’.
The decision to enter into a lifelong commitment is to cross a decisive threshold. This decision focuses the two lives and cuts them clear from everyone else in the world. Goethe speaks of how commitment not only deepens the unity between two people, but also invites providence to open towards them with new gifts and the special shelter of even greater kindness. They have taken a huge risk. In the world of business risk is always precarious and when one is in the arena of quantity, a risk can mean one will lose everything. In the world of soul, I have seldom seen anyone take a risk for growth that was not rewarded a thousand times over, for to trust to experience is to grow, to learn, to develop.
Yet to choose is to stand out, to cut oneself off from the shelter of the group and future possibility, it is an invitation to steer a direct course into an unknown future. When one becomes so visible and definite, one leaves cover and becomes visible to other forces, forces which might be quite hostile. This is the poignancy at the heart of the commitment ceremony. The two new pilgrims set out on their unknown voyage. They want to begin, to take the first steps of their new life in the house of wise and intuitive shelter, the house of God. They join together first inside the circle of blessing, which their friends draw around them. The grounding recognition here is that the journey ahead is a great adventure. It is also a step into the unknown, a journey for which there is no map. Anything could befall them on the way.
T
O THE
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OUSE OF
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EAUTY TO
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LESS THE
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OURNEY
TIME LIVES DIFFERENTLY IN THE HOUSE OF GOD. WHEN YOU DRIVE through a city, town or village, the house of God stands out. It is unlike any other house. The contrast was infinitely clearer in former times. Many modern churches lack architectural beauty; they imitate the surrounding blandness. In former times when people were much poorer, they struggled sometimes for decades to build a church. Resources and moneys were gathered from every corner in order to erect a beautiful house where the divine presence could trust itself among us, a beautiful house where the reverence of great ritual could at special times unveil the glory of the divine. Beauty in its ultimate presence is divine glory. I have had the delightful experience of travelling through some small French village and visiting a local church. Outside the day is seared with summer light. Then you enter the beautiful kept-darkness of the church. Magnificent stained glass absorbs the white fire of outside light; it harnesses the fire into its narrative of colour. And among the sleep of dark stone a sequence of cobalt blue, indigo or golden yellow comes alive. To the pilgrim who breaks his journey to come in and pray, they offer shy yet beautiful light that restores your seeing. And you remember who you are. For a while you come to sense the providence that secretly shapes and guides your life. Your burdened mind relents and your soul comes to ease in the shelter of the divine.
In a great religious tradition, the house of God is a special place. The church, the temple, the mosque is where a community gathers to hear God. Cumulatively, over years the interior becomes threaded with the desires, intimacies and longings of a community. The interior of God’s house is not a vacant space; it is the place where the spiritual Eros of a community collects. This interior is richly textured with the aura of those who have worshipped there. When one enters there one does not simply enter a building; rather one enters unknowingly the gathered memory. This house is a living archive of transcendence. This is the space where the voice of God became audible, where that tranquillity which the world cannot give waits to comfort the mind. People have come into this house with burdens of heart that could find healing nowhere else in the world. They have come in here for shelter when storms have unravelled every stitch of meaning from their lives. And they have come in too to give thanks for blessings and gifts they could never have earned. The house of God is a frontier region, an intense threshold where the visible world meets the ultimate but subtle structures of the invisible world. We enter this silence and stillness in order to decipher the creative depths of the divine imagination that dreams our lives. Somewhere in this kept-darkness the affection that created us waits to bless and heal us.
T
HE
S
ANCTUARY OF
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UBTLE
P
RESENCE
In silence we must wrap much of our life, because
it is too fine for speech.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
THIS SANCTUARY HOLDS A SPECIAL PRIVACY. WITHIN THIS EMBRACE there is no barrier between you and the intimacy of the divine heart. Nor is there a barrier between you and the dead. The outside world is relentless in its urgency and stress; the politics of the obvious dominates everything. Subtle presence is largely unable to register its companionship with us. The dead are abandoned in their graveyards to grow deeper into the stillness of the forgotten. But in this sanctuary their subtle presence hovers nearer; here is where time deepens to reveal its eternal embrace. For eternal life is eternal memory. In its natural silence and deep rituals, space opens here to coax the eternal more fully among us. Within this sacred space, time loses its linearity, its loneliness. It opens up and suggests itself as an ancient circle of belonging in which past and future, time lived and time to be lived, form ultimate presence. From ancient times people have understood the house of God to be the sacred ground from where it is wise to begin a journey: initiation as the journey of life in Spirit, and requiem as the beginning of the invisible journey.
In all our talk about the institutional church in the West, in our anger and disappointment at its theological blindness and abuse of power and person, we have fatally forgotten the harvest of healing presence that dwells in the house of God. In our desperate search for meaning and healing, we rush through our towns and cities on our way to work, therapy or doctors. We pass by these huge sanctuaries of absolute presence, totally oblivious of the divine welcome that awaits us, a welcome that is waiting to embrace us and call us.
A B
LESSING
B
RIGHTENS THE
R
OAD
THIS SANCTUARY IS THE PLACE WHERE THE NEW COUPLE INVOKE blessing and protection on the fragile world of ‘betweenness’ that has begun to develop and grow from that clear space where once they were strangers to each other. In some intuitive way, it is as though this sacred beginning already knows more than them. The beauty of a blessing always issues from a deeper place in time. Though the words are intoned on a particular day on a special occasion, the light of the blessing reaches towards them from eternal time where memory and future live within the one circle. The blessing of their journey already knows more about the journey than the new couple do. The Celtic Imagination had a profound sense of how a blessing could awaken and evoke the deepest potential of a situation. The Celts understood that all beginning risks the unknown; a blessing was intended to be a shelter of light around the pilgrim and the place. A blessing brightens the road; the heart is no longer completely vulnerable to the dark. The journey can lead anywhere; it can even bring new guests to the earth.