a little piece of nothingness…
beside my bed i keep a little piece of blue velvet cloth. its one of the only items in my life that carry a religious significance for me. i’d like to try to explain why, in this post.
it comes from a service i helped lead at moot with mike. the theme was, very simply, presence. for me, the themes that emerged throughout the service surrounded the absence of god in my personal life. i’m not even sure if i’d say that i feel god to be absent. maybe its that i have arrived at a place of doubt, which verges on/amounts to unbelief. during the service mike and i lifted up a large sheet of velvet cloth which had been draped over something at the front of the church throughout the service. it was blue velvet. very dark, almost black. then, very calmly, but rather dramatically, we ripped the cloth in two halves, revealing a large icon of christ. i then proceeded to cut up the cloth into small pieces so that everyone present could take home a piece.
i took my piece home with me that night, and it has been significant for me ever since. being very dark in colour, it partly symbolises for me a kind of mobile black hole. wherever i set it down, its like a black hole opens up to reveal the absolute openness, or emptiness of god. thats not to say i think god doesn’t exist, quite the opposite. but its not a very personal god, or a very easily defined god. in this sense, god has become the question for me, the mystery of life. no, this is not a hopeful image. but its significant for me because it reflects my utter disillusionment with (or loss of faith in) dogmatic religious faith. its important for me, somehow, to affirm what i don’t believe in. within this however, is the hope that i’ll meet god – revealed/concealed in unknowing/darkness – just like the icon. like a kind of curtain, similar to the hebrew temple curtain that separated people from the holy presence of god.
more positively, it is essentially about faith for me. for better or worse, i have presently no faith in any one of the common representations of the divine/religions. but i recognise that these are not god. such representations are, to me, just human constructs. or as pete rollins says of theology – it is that which is done in the aftermath of the divine. a fumbling, clumsy, very human attempt to make sense of an experience of god. thats not to say that theology/religion is useless, but that it is temporal, contextual, failing and not ultimately representative of “truth”. realising this fact has led me to peer out into the abyss and chaos of existence outside of the safe surrounds of a “statement of faith”, or a water-tight worldview. its a truly life-giving place to be for me. i really feel i am ‘trusting’ something, something so vast that i am at once lost and found in its presence.
i would like to thank mike actually, for his input into the service – all the best ideas were his.
thanks for reading.
