‘Live to love
Love passionately, tirelessly
To attract that sublime grace
That makes you fearless
In plunging headless
Into that darkness
In which manifests Unknowable God.’
Hadewijch
Pomegranate
for Bridey
Heavy in my hand, my heart, my belly, sweet and sore.
A weight of palest apricot, a child’s pink cheek and screaming crimson, the colour of a man’s shame.
Motley with scars.
A shine, but more complex by far.
Marks, bruises, wounds – untold and unremembered.
A navel eye betrays your birth and death.
Its zest as thick and hard as a mother’s bitterness.
But oh, the cushion flesh of an infant!
A soul.
Unyielding to the blade of change and compassion.
Yet… opens and spills its blood as freely as a child’s confusion.
Disclosing a repository of ruby cells.
Wet kernels of invitation as new as diamonds, transfix and draw me, a miner of delight.
I dig and stain my hungry fingers, healing a lonely heart.
Rewarding my belly with the fresh fruit of truth.
By A G van Dantzig
Easter reflection 7 April 2024 Contemplative Eucharist, John 20: 19 – 31
by A G van Dantzig
As a student teacher, I was fortunate to receive teaching from a charmingly curious lecturer of Chinese heritage, who taught that it wouldn’t matter how well we eager-beaver students learned to teach, if a child/student was seriously hungry or distressed, she couldn’t learn. The needs of the body were paramount to any intellectual development: a child needs the safety, stability and peace of a full belly, and then she can develop. Trauma writer, Judith Helman also asserts that safety is a fundamental priority to any healing therapy.
St John writes a similar lesson in today’s gospel. He teaches that movement towards healing, spiritual growth and theological development happens firstly through an encounter with the safety, stability and peace of the risen Christ. It’s a mysterious peace that grounds and delights us, a surprising cool breeze, a sweet soft kiss, soothingly fragrant oil on skin. Jesus honours the needs of the body – the peace of the knowledge that he is alive, at peace, victorious over death. It’s okay: we’re okay.
Secondly, Jesus leads the disciples through their trauma into growth, healing and spiritual development through explicitly sharing his wounds that enables the disciples to be united with him in his risenness and aliveness.
Thirdly, Jesus empowers the disciples through the Spirit, by breathing new energy, new life into them. Our capacity for faith in the aliveness of Christ happens through the Spirit breathing new conviction into us.
I would like to suggest a fresh interpretation of Thomas, an alternative to the ‘doubting’ disciple of ‘weak’ faith. I am deeply thankful to Thomas for his expression of pain. Thomas is one of a select few NT figures, who gives voice to his anger and grief following Jesus’ death: he is red raw with misery and not embarrassed to lament his anguish. Nonetheless, even someone as tormented as Thomas, can develop an openness to the peace of the risen Christ. Thomas is highly defensive and transactional in his language and behaviour, ‘unless I put my fingers in ….’ Moreover, Thomas refused to join the other disciples on their first assembly after the horror of Jesus’ death: a marked defensive division. Suffering Thomas behaves as I know I do; he tries to create safety for himself through conditions and divisions. How does Jesus respond? He makes a beeline for the bleeding, broken Thomas and shares his peace.
Afterwards, in his love for Thomas, Jesus shares his wounds with him in the most intimate way. He offers Thomas unity, with and in his resurrected body. I like to think that in the closeness of their bodies as Jesus shares his wounds, he breathes new conviction and life into Thomas. Thomas’ powerful theological affirmation of ‘My Lord and my God,’ expresses dramatically his new confidence and unity in the resurrected Jesus. May we join with Thomas and the disciples in experiencing the peace of the risen Jesus and may we come to know the elation of union in his scarred, victorious body. Alleluia! Alleluia!
Contemplative Eucharistic reflection 2 June 2024 Mark 2: 23 to Mark 3: 6.
By A G van Dantzig
These two vignettes present an appealing earthy image of Jesus and the disciples travelling with some Pharisees. They walk in the quiet of the Sabbath through grainfields and attend a synagogue. Contrasting with the peace and sensuality of the settings is a burning conflict. The Pharisees obsession with religious regulations feels heavy, accusatory and judgemental. ‘Don’t you know the rule?’, ‘Aren’t you guilty?’ ‘What’s wrong with you?!’
Nonetheless, the Pharisees compulsions slide off Jesus: he is as defiant as a comedian, citing the amusing reference of a hungry David, his ancestor, and an obliging priest Abiathar, who uses the sacred bread for practical and seemingly ‘irreverent’ nourishment. It’s a darkly funny anecdote but it’s not all levity. The brooding foreboding is revealed in the final line. ‘They went out and conspired … how to destroy him.’
Nonetheless, until they withdraw, the Pharisees are part of the group. They are the curly, snaky voices of fear and judgment that are no doubt part of all groups and all individuals. The Pharisees engage Jesus as they do me. They are alive in me especially on my bad days!
In today’s gospel, we’re offered a challenge or choice. Can I respond with courage and levity or anger or grief as Jesus does to voices of compulsion, delusion, fear and judgment in myself and in others? Can I defy them? Can I laugh at them?
I like to think of Jesus laughing at crazy conventions and delusions that divide us from each other and separate us from engaging with God. In an era where the horse was a sign of wealth, power and prestige, Jesus’ choice to ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, seems like the best joke.
Jesus, like David, honours humanity and sensuality. The Son of Man is quite literally, the human One. The sensuality of picking and eating fresh grain off the stalk, the unabashed physicality of a paralysed body astonishingly restored. Jesus defies certain codes and structures that hold people in fear and judgement and prevent them from engaging in their bodily sensuality and truth be told, structures and ideas that stymie their life in God. What an irony that the Pharisees conflict is happening on the Sabbath!
When we are caught up belonging to protocols and usages, we lose sight of our real belonging to our sensual being, to God. Julian of Norwich makes the point that we discover simultaneously our earthly heritage and our being in God in that very sensuality, if we are open to it.
However, as mystics counsel, prophetic action shown by Jesus and David is only possible with spaces for contemplative engagement. Happily, our focus here is on contemplative practices and contemplative living. On my good days, like Jesus, I know that I am God’s. On my good days, I belong to God, to my body, to the earth and not to this or that custom or tradition. On good days, I allow time and space for contemplative engagement and discover with mystic, Angelus Silesius that ‘God is my centre when I close God in, and my circumference when I melt in God.’