Walking the Territory - Spring

Among the ivy there is new green


and the hawthorn trees are in exuberant fresh leaf

Everything isn't lovely however - among the nettles (no, I don't do nettle soup) are unfolding leaves of giant hogweed. It looks quite attractive when it's new, but it's decptive. It towers to about seven feet high, shading everything else out, seeds as prolifically as dandelions and has roots that go down as far as hell. And, as if that wasn't bad enough, they sting worse than nettles and can cause terrible burns to unwary children. Our council is quite good at spraying the stuff on the roadsides, but it seems impossible to keep up with it.

On the other hand, however, we do have the cuckoo flower, just getting into its stride. The pear blossom is out and the early flowering cherries,and I heard the first skylark.

A 5th PAUSE IN LENT

On the 5th Sunday of Lent the readings in our church are on the themes of life and death, with the over-riding motif that God is not about sentencing to death, but about raising from the dead - we start with Ezechiel's "I am going to raise you from your graves, my people" and go on the the story of Lazarus.

A lot of people think that Christianity is all about the next life, as a kind of trade-off for all the bad stuff we have to put up with in this (along with a nice side dish of seeing people we don't like in hell-fire).

I'm thinking that the way we view death shouldn't be an excuse to postpone living in the moment, but on the contrary, it should make a radical difference to the way we live our life here and now. How would you feel if that annoying person who is giving you so much grief landed up in Heaven next to you? (You do believe in the forgiveness of sins and redemption and all that don't you?)

Here is the most challenging witness to life after death that I know of. Imagine not only forgiving your murderer, but greeting him as a brother in Heaven. When I reviewed the film "Of Gods and Men" (which was cited in the Observer yesterday as one of the best films of all time - I agree!), I lamented that there wasn't a decent translation of Chretien de Cherge's Testament on the web, and a very kind woman in Germany sent me a copy (see below). Her name is Monika Farhrenburger.

I may say that since that post I have come across a Moslem conservationist from Algeria called Hichem, who is trying to live this message out from his tradition. I feel very privileged to have got to know him and Monika.

Testament of Dom Christian de Chergé

                                                                    (opened on Pentecost Sunday, May 26, 1996)


                                                                                                                                    Facing a GOODBYE.... 
If it should happen one day - and it could be today -
that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf
all the foreigners living in Algeria,
I would like my community, my Church and my family
to remember that my life was GIVEN to God and to this country.
I ask them to accept the fact that the One Master of all life
was not a stranger to this brutal departure.
I would ask them to pray for me:
for how could I be found worthy of such an offering?
I ask them to associate this death with so many other equally violent ones
which are forgotten through indifference or anonymity.
My life has no more value than any other.
Nor any less value.
In any case, it has not the innocence of childhood.
I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil
which seems to prevail so terribly in the world,
even in the evil which might blindly strike me down.
I should like, when the time comes, to have a moment of spiritual clarity
which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God
and of my fellow human beings,
and at the same time forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down.
I could not desire such a death.
It seems to me important to state this.
I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice
if the people I love were indiscriminately accused of my murder.
It would be too high a price to pay
for what will perhaps be called, the "grace of martyrdom"
to owe it to an Algerian, whoever he might be,
especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam.
I am aware of the scorn which can be heaped on the Algerians indiscriminately.
I am also aware of the caricatures of Islam which a certain Islamism fosters.
It is too easy to soothe one's conscience
by identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideology of its extremists.
For me, Algeria and Islam are something different: it is a body and a soul.
I have proclaimed this often enough, I think, in the light of what I have received from it.
I so often find there that true strand of the Gospel
which I learned at my mother's knee, my very first Church,
precisely in Algeria, and already inspired with respect for Muslim believers.
Obviously, my death will appear to confirm
those who hastily judged me naïve or idealistic:
"Let him tell us now what he thinks of his ideals!"
But these persons should know that finally my most avid curiosity will be set free.
This is what I shall be able to do, God willing:
immerse my gaze in that of the Father
to contemplate with him His children of Islam
just as He sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ,
the fruit of His Passion, filled with the Gift of the Spirit
whose secret joy will always be to establish communion
and restore the likeness, playing with the differences.
For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs,
I thank God, who seems to have willed it entirely
for the sake of that JOY in everything and in spite of everything.
In this THANK YOU, which is said for everything in my life from now on,
I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today,
and you, my friends of this place,
along with my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families,
You are the hundredfold granted as was promised!
And also you, my last-minute friend, who will not have known what you were doing:
Yes, I want this THANK YOU and this GOODBYE to be a "GOD-BLESS" for you, too,
because in God's face I see yours.
May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both.
AMEN !   INCHALLAH !  

Algiers, 1st December 1993 
Tibhirine, 1st January 1994 

Christian + 

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abrams

David Abrams is a magician as well as an anthropologist and critic, so has a really interesting take on the concept of 'spell'. It comes down to the fact that when a person knows somethng intimately and practices a craft to the point where it becomes second nature, it looks like 'magic' to an observer. But it isn't - it's knowledge and skill.

But this combination of knowledge and skill isn't somthing our culture is good at. We are very good at learning vast quantities of information; we are pretty good at organising and storing and accessing information, and astonishingly good at communicating it (less good at evaluating it, however!).

What Abrams points out is not only that information is different from knowledge - it's static, verifiable, presumed to be universal when verified, and requires intellectual detachment - but the pursuit of information rather than knowledge changes our relationship to the world in which we live - greatly to our detriment. Not only do we lose access to the skills and knowledge acquired by the 'magician', but we become increasingly isolated from the earth, and ignorant about the way we need to treat it. In primitive societies people lived in dialogue to all the living creatures, and even the earth itself. Once we became literate, or more accurately, privileged the kinds of knowledge conferred by literacy over the rest, we tallked only to other humans, or perhaps only literate humans, and since the internet gives us access to so many people that we must be selective, only to those humans who reflect our own world vision.

It's a compelling argument, and backed up by a lot of interesting and convincing research. I have reservations however. I don't think those skills and that kind of knowledge arequite so lost as Abrams imagines. Anyone who practises a craft, works with animals with any dedication, tends a garden or tries to observe wildlife; anyone who looks after small children or provides care for the sick or for people in difficulty, is learning other ways of knowing and relating to the world around us. Many of the experiences Abrams has to go to indigenous tribes to discover are a regular part of life for urban western people who aren't confined to a university or a bank. But it is true, and dangerously true, that this kind of knowledge and skill, that implies relationship rather than detachment, experience rather than validation, and is fluid, adaptive and relative rather than static and verifiable, is despised in certain quarters. And those are the quarters who have the money and the power and where decisions are made.

Also I must admit that I have a soft spot for the static, verifiable, scientific kind of knowledge. I am by nature impulsive, emotional and adaptive. I do the relational sort of response all the time. It's not always the right thing to do. Often it makes decision-making incredibly difficult and it leaves you fairly vulnerable to bullying and manipulation. An ability to sort things out, get organised,detach yourself from the whirlwind or the bog of the immediate situation, make comparisons and evaluate your information can be pretty damn' valuable now and then.

Anyway, if we stopped being literate, who would read this book?

A Poem for an Artist

Here's a poem I wrote for the dyer and eco-alchemist India Flint. I hope to include it in the poetry collection which is due to come out in August.
India's Alchemy
For India Flint
How she simmers mashed leaves,
shredded roots, pounded bark and berries
until the colour flows, and bleeds
into kettles, and stains her hands,

how the mordant bonds and brightens,
and how the air transforms
the white to rust and umber,
green indigo to bright blue,

and how some stains are welcome.
Silk drinks up the sap of leaf and flower,
colours different every time, and shapes
a ghostly faded permanence, like memory,
like what our hearts are steeped in.

India has a new post on her blog Not All Who Wander Are Lost about a project she did called The Colours of Home. It's not only an inspiring concept, it produced some wonderful fabrics. You can see them here

the gleam of light on water - 4th pause in Lent

The theme for this Sunday in our church was light, or vision. It's a theme that matters a lot to me.

The 'gleam of light on water' is an ancient Celtic metaphor for a moment of delight, or enlightenment - a glimpse of the 'otherworld'. It's the metaphor I used to underpin Lúcháir, though I don't think the enlightened world is so very 'other'. As Christians we're supposed to believe in the resurrection of the body, not some disembodied etherial blissed out state of mind, which means there's a definite place in our spirituality for a deep love and commitment to the world we're in.

But we have to see it differently. See it as it is, not as we want it to be (or are afraid it might be). See it as a masterpiece of creation, not a snare or a delusion. And see every fact we can establish about it as a gift from God (so there's no room for pretending evolution didn't happen). It has been a tradition in my family, which is heavily biassed in favour of the sciences, that all truth leads to God. If you think there's a contradiction between faith and science, then you probably don't understand one or the other (and possibly both).

I was going to go on about this, but frankly the whole thing makes me cross. I know that people on both sides are just lining up along the party lines because they hate the other lot. I've heard Catholics sneer at the Big Bang theory, and I can see that if they realised that one of the leading scientists involved in discovering it was a Catholic, they'd change sides without breaking step. And some Protestant fundamentalists talking about the earth being 6000 years old, who would drop it like a hot potato if they knew that this calculation was made by a bishop (and well after the Bible was written!). And there are some atheists who find it hard to accept that any Christian can be a scientist at all.

Seeing with the eyes of faith doesn't involve switching your brain off. It involves switching your heart on. Then maybe we can hear the insights of people we don't agree with, and learn from them, without sacrificing our own integrity. And that would be a whole other world!

the territory of rain

The rain got here! the garden definitely needed it, but I am so glad I took the chance to garden yesterday. I cleared the bit around the pond, to give a bit of breathing space to the yellow flag irises I grew from seed

and the woodland bed under the birch tree, getting rid of excessive aquilegias (it would break your heart to do it, as they are so lovely, but everything else needs room too! I also planted out some sweet violets here in the hope that they will produce more of the intensely purple - almost liquid in its depth - flowers and less leaves.

I forked over the herb patch and added some more sage and thymes, some st john's wort and some wood violets

and planted out a seedling fennel in the rose bed. I sowed three sorts of tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, carrots and beetroot, calabrese, courgettes, and rosemary seeds as an insurance, because my new bush that I planted this year looks as if it got walloped by the frost and it's struggling some. Finally I planted five root cuttings of comfrey. I could regret this - comfrey plants spread like mint - but they are so useful for providing liquid feeds for all those tomatoes, that it's worth it.

Oh, and I picked the first rhubarb, too.

Going Outward

This is Brantwood, the setting for our Geopoetics conference "Going Outward" this weekend. It is a beautiful house, set in 250 acresof lovely Lakeland countryside and overlooking Coniston Water. It was the home of John Ruskin, and the setting for some of his experiments in farming and gardening, and where he spent years studying and drawingand encouraging local crafts and industries.

I hadn't known much about Ruskin apart from his art criticism, which established the reputation of Turner and inspired the Pre-Raphaelites, but it turned out there was a lot more to him than that. He was interested in education and social welfareand the environment, and the place of art and creativity in the lives of ordinary working people, not just a cultured elite. He was a competent but not a great artist, (which gave him a perceptive insight into the process of painting) and a serious geologist, not to mention a prolific writer.

The Brantwood Trust who own and manage the property now, continue his aims by managing the estate with a view to sustainable farming and conservation of habitat as well as making it pleasant and accessible for visitors. There is a gallery for local artists and they run courses in gardening, and drawing, and a very pleasant and comfortable venue for conferences like ours.

We learned about Ruskin and visited the garden - many of us took a walk around the estate, but I didn't, being defeated by the distances and the steep hills involved. I looked around the herb garden full of plants useful for dyeing and medicine and food and cosmetics, and watched the ducks on the lake and visited the house, which is kept very much as Ruskin left it.

We talked about the connections between Ruskin and geo-poetics, and between geo-poetics (and poetry in general) and film-making and watched some very stunning films. We had a social evening with poetry and singing and stories, and were introduced to the work of Mariusz Wilks (particularly his Journals of a White Sea-Wolf) a Polish Writer who practices geo-poetics in Russia, and heard poetry from England, Scotland, Wales, Poland and Venezuala. All in all, it was a great weekend - even the weather was lovely!

You can find out more about geopoetics here