WHEN I used to be a young person, affected by anorexia, someone gave me a picket holding cross. I’m very much ashamed that I don’t remember the giver who showed such clever intuition about what would help me through. I even have all the time considered myself as someone who lives primarily by words, but I even have learned, over and once again, the importance of the opposite senses in spirituality and worship. The picket cross is carved to suit into the hand, with the fingers curled around it, so that you may hold it securely, and feel your body and your mind anchored around it. It helps me to wish.
The words from “Rock of ages” do normally float through my mind — “Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to thy Cross I cling” — but I do know that my curled hand is doing greater than my busy mind. The picket cross resonates. The wood is each the Tree of the Fall and the Tree of Salvation, but additionally the actual tree, rooted deep in earth. I even have a holding cross created from olive wood from Israel, which takes me straight to the agony of the world, and the imperative of intercession. Someone held a cross in front of Julian of Norwich as she lay on what she thought was her deathbed, and it spoke to her of God’s love and faithfulness. All of this and more is there as I hold on to the cross, however the unsaid is as vital because the said.
DOES anyone read Elizabeth Goudge any more? I discovered her as a doorway between worlds — not just like the wardrobe into Narnia, and yet imaginatively vital because she, too, writes as if faith belongs: you possibly can construct a world around it, not only write sermons and essays. It is tough to make your mind up which of her books to write down about. In The Scent of Water, with its deeply sympathetic portrayal of the illness of depression, Aunt Mary meets an elderly priest who has suffered from episodes of depression all his life. He passes on three life-giving phrases: “Lord, have mercy”; “Thee I like”; “Into Thy hands”. They don’t “cure” him, or Mary; but they abide, and that gives strength to carry on.
The Rosemary Tree has an outline of mysticism from a toddler’s standpoint. It jogs my memory of Monica Furlong’s Travelling In: such a special book, and yet the identical easy, limpid view of the symbiosis of natural and mystical sight. But, ultimately, it’s The Dean’s Watch that has been the certainly one of Goudge’s books I return to most often. She writes of deeply flawed people who find themselves yet able to change and love; and she or he knows that history — and the places that hold it — still lives and shapes us, for good and in poor health.
MY THIRD article has not been with me for so long as the holding cross and Elizabeth Goudge. And it’s, to be honest, as much a few person as about an object. It is a kiwi feather that was given to my husband and me by Beverley, the widow of Sir Paul Reeves. Sir Paul is certainly one of my Anglican heroes (and we actually need those in the intervening time). His intelligence, drive, and charm took him everywhere in the world, and into deep and sophisticated political and ecclesiastical settings. But it seemed clear that his anchorage was in being a Maori and a Christian.
As a priest and a bishop, Sir Paul worked to construct community, and to make sure that Maori voices helped to shape the Church; and, as a Governor-General of New Zealand and as UN Observer for the Anglican Church, he continued to do the identical. He is quoted as saying that he learned methods to do the politics by being a bishop — being with people, and helping to make a spot where all can belong. The Church doesn’t all the time know itself, or what it has to contribute, if only it might look out somewhat than in. Sir Paul could teach us so much. The feather sits on my dressing-table, and our grandson knows it well and loves it, though I’m undecided that he yet knows what a kiwi is, or a bishop, or the Church. I hope that his learning will probably be positive, and worthy of the blazing white kiwi feather.
Re-reading what I even have written, I realise that it’s all about what you possibly can hold on to: articles of religion as a bedrock of stability, in order that we have now the courage to hope and pray for change.
Dr Jane Williams is the McDonald Professor in Christian Theology at St Mellitus College.
