69. The Noise of Eternity and the Noise of Argument.

Dearly Beloved,

Many years ago I sat on the west facing cliffs of the Island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel. It was winter and huge waves forty feet high were rolling out of the Atlantic from the West and breaking on the vertical granite cliffs. The noise was tumultuous; the bang of the impact was combined with the rushing of water back down into the sea, the fizzing of the surf and the sound of wind whipping through the grass on the cliff tops. Gradually the noise of the breaking waves became like a huge tolling bell and the white flecks of the spindrift were like white flowers blooming and then dying. Gradually the scene disintegrated in the mind's eye to become a vision of eternity where everything that had ever happened was occurring at the same single moment. The scene was full of noise, light and fleeting forms. Time disappeared.

Yet in other ways timelessness does not bear thinking about. Ideas of timelessness and the ineffable nature of God have led to furious arguments over 2000 years about freewill (ie if God knows what you are going to do in the future, are you necessarily deprived of freewill?) and, consequently, the action of God's grace (is grace necessary for amendment of life or can we exercise free will to that end?). These arguments have became heated and divisive. Pope Clement VIII (1598-1607) had to adjudicate on such an argument and having done so, reduced the adversaries, two of the most powerful groups of thinkers in the Roman church, to the status of boys fighting in a school playground by adding to his adjudication that the Jesuits were forbidden to call the Dominicans “Calvinists” whilst the Dominicans were told that they must not call the Jesuits “Pelagians”. The former believed that God alone determined the elect and the damned whilst the latter is reputed to have believed that the new born did not inherit Adam's sin so humans could do much to live a sinless life through exercise of their, originally sinless, free will.

Benedict of Nursia, if I remember correctly, experienced a timeless moment but the way he ordered his monks and nuns had nothing tendentiously theoretical about it. Rule 53 for his order of monks states “Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ, for He is going to say, "I came as a guest, and you received Me" (Matt. 25:35).  That at least is something we can realistically aspire to whatever difficulties we humans may encounter as we attempt to fulfill the spirit of that injunction. In that way we work with God rather than struggle with his ineffability or get lost in frantic arguments with our Dearly Beloved. Just like those mediaeval theologians, experiences of timelessness and, necessarily, God's ineffability, run well beyond the capacities of my human intellect.

Peace,

Paul

Completed 26th June 2020


Photo: Paul Munton

Last Judgment and Christ in Majesty, 12th century 
Abbey of St Pierre,  Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, Corrèze,  France,



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
76. On The Anti-Christian Nature of the Small State Ideology. Nearly Beloved*, The first time I heard the cry for a “Small State” in the political context, it was uttered by those involved in a dispute over US grazing lands. The “s cofflaw” , Cliven Bundy, refused to pay the Federal Grazing Fees or recognise his obligations to the US government's Bureau of Land Management (BLM) on whose lands his cattle grazed. In 2014 and 2016, the Bureau's response was to round up his cattle and remove them. That led to the congregation of armed anti-government activists, including the Proud Boys. These armed groups forced the BLM to back down because the Bureau was worried about the safety of its staff and of the public and felt unable to protect them. The US Government failed to support its own laws and regulation in the face of armed threat. This, and similar range land incidents, occurred prior to the assault on the US Capital by armed activists in an attempt to reverse the result of t...
Read more
Image
  An Introduction to T he Manifold Letters. These letters were produced as part of a brilliant project managed by the Rev. Robert and Sarah Van de Weyer. During the Covid-19 pandemic. Letters were written every day for two and a half years by both ordained and lay members of the congregation of St Clement's Church in Cambridge and distributed to others both in the congregation and people outwith St Clement's as Dearly Beloved letters. (DB letters). They dealt with manifold issues including psychological survival during the pandemic, personal stories and experiences of life, philosophy and theology, music, the beauty of creation, wildlife and secular and church politics, the mysteries of the Christian faith and the exigencies of the pursuit of a Christian life. Each letter was accompanied by a photograph all of which can be enlarged by clicking on them. The Rt Rev. Rowan Williams was a contributor for six months whilst he worshiped and officiated at the St Clement's during...
Read more
Image
24. On War. Dearly Beloved, It is difficult for us to cope with a war in Europe so close to home, especially because it is a war within Christendom between Christian communities. Apart from the civil war in Herzegovina, there has been peace in Europe for 77 years. My father was 28 years old and my mother 22 when war broke out in 1939. My father was already in the Royal Navy and my mother joined the Auxillary Territoral Service. “The War” in my family continued in talk and discussion long after the fighting had actually stopped. It was the background to my childhood and was made more prominent when my mother organised her family to fly us out to Malta in 1953 where my father's ship lay in Sliema Creek. We lodged close by whilst he finished an extra year of service obligated by the Korean War. One my earliest memories is of looking down from a prop driven Vickers Viscount aircraft at the ships on the Mediterranean sea shining in the sun far below. That was the same Mediterrane...
Read more