Faith: Something at all times understood

PENTECOST marks a heightened awareness of the presence of the Holy Spirit at the tip of a joyful Eastertide, and marks the start of what must be a recent and vibrant spiritual life for Christians as we grow spiritually in the course of the Trinity season.

Unfortunately, the realities of life don’t at all times allow this. It will be hard simply to modify moods. Conflicts, unexpected crises, or day-to-day fears and difficulties don’t vanish, as they seem to have done — momentarily, perhaps — for the frightened disciples, within the upper room. They remain obstinately with us.

If we’re preoccupied with anxiety or sadness, it is tough to engineer our considering right into a more joyful place to suit the Easter season, especially once we try to wish. We are distracted, and it becomes hard to deal with other things. The time normally allotted for prayer, once we are reasonably rested and our brain is freed from extraneous clutter, will not be available, or now we have guests staying whose needs have to be attended to.

There could also be somewhere that we have to be by a certain time, or the day has been fraught with difficulties which can be hard to put aside. But, with regards to prayer, if the mood or circumstances don’t fit the season, perhaps it’s because we are attempting too hard.

ST SILOUAN the Athonite, an Eastern Orthodox monk, writing from his monastery on Mount Athos originally of the twentieth century, enjoins his followers to “keep [their] minds in hell and never [to] despair”. We aren’t to disclaim the realities of the human condition or the moods of the moment, but to embrace all of those in hope.

Artists, poets, and musicians — of each faith and none — help us to face into reality without despairing. They are called to enable prayer. The paintings of Francis Bacon and Edvard Munch, each depicting a screaming figure, hold nothing back. Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth who “die as cattle”, or W. B. Yeats’s poem The Second Coming are indictments of societies spiritually akin to our own. Yeats writes, “Things crumble, the centre cannot hold . . . the falcon cannot hear the falconer.” The reader is left with little alternative but to cling on in prayer.

Having been a painter myself, I do know just a little of what that artistic depiction entails. You must get beneath the surface of things. You don’t represent things as they’re, or whilst chances are you’ll see them based on your personal aesthetic judgement. You release something in them — or in a situation — that connects with a craving for the holy. This is what is usually regarded as inspiration. There is something of this craving in all of us.

People I actually have spoken with who describe themselves as agnostic, or who’re against the thought of religion altogether, are also often waiting to be connected in some strategy to the Spirit that provides life — a Spirit that they can’t name, a Spirit that inspires. It is within the “not naming” that we frequently find common ground. We may agree that we all know when now we have found it.

Art and music may give voice to what lots of us, in our other ways, might call the holy. The holy is each the source and the inspiration for art that provokes a spark of recognition — of something already known, but for which an individual has no name. James Joyce would have called such moments “epiphanies”.

WHEN we speak of prayer as something that’s inspired, in the way in which a painting or a chunk of music may be inspired, we are literally talking about truth. Truth is a dangerous word since it is just too often constricted right into a one-size-fits-all definition, as something empirically provable. What shouldn’t be provable is then false.

But the reality that’s to be found, or stumbled upon, in each art and prayer is of a quite different order. It does not likely have a reputation or definition, however it is the reality for which the disciples of Jesus abandoned their nets and — leaving their father to hold on the business — followed the master. It is truth known and recognised in a single “epiphany” moment.

Ephiphaines, or epiphany moments, may also be experienced as a coming together of all things in a flash of understanding, which supplies intending to an individual’s whole life. This may occur as they’re taking their last breath or it might give clarity and purpose to work that an individual is yet to undertake. This clarity of understanding is what is supposed by “calling” or “vocation”.

The artist must understand their very own specific calling as something that’s inherently life-giving and that doesn’t depend in any way on the outward or material trappings of affirmation or success. Only very great artists have been able to this level of detachment in regard to their work, which is why so lots of them live in penury and remain unknown, often until long after their death.

SUCH a level of detachment also captures something of the character of Christian prayer. Detachment shouldn’t be about separating oneself from the realities of day by day life, from the world around us, and even from our own personal needs and concerns (including our need for affirmation and acceptance). It is more about taking a large leap into the unknown while embracing all this stuff.

Inspiration, or a craving for the holy, plays a component on this. An individual may recognise the holy as a specific truth or reality from the minute they start to wish or to concentrate to God. They will discover that this truth is something they’ve at all times known — even when, on this particular moment, they comprehend it for the primary time.

The Revd Dr Lorraine Cavanagh is an creator and a priest within the Church in Wales. lorrainecavanagh.com