At Christmas time this year, I had the good fortune to be able to catch up with family on boxing day. As part of this I went with My Uncle Geoff, Geoff Plant which some of you mooters know, to see his art studio and some of recent paintings.  His Art Studio is based on an estate previously where Eric Gill lived, who was an artist, sculpture and design person, who was responsible for some of the art and Lady Chapel at St Matthews Westminster, the first home of the Moot Community.

Whilst we were there, my Uncle expressed his frustration with some of his art.  He knew he could draw people, but wanted to get beyond the construction and technical bits of art, to be able to express the essence by getting beyond his own limitations.  It struck me that this is the same process as meditation and prayer, about getting beyond the self by using some form of method of prayer and meditation, to be able to reach beyond yourself to be able to encounter the essence which is God.

When I did my MA, one of the courses I completed was on art, literature and a theology of the imagination.  This basically traced the theme of creativity and imagination as the sphere for encountering the Holy Spirit, as the medium when the human and the divine encounter in the I-Thou relationship – whether this was intentional or not.  I have always seen prayer and meditation as an expression of this, as it requires you to get beyond your thinking and your feeling to be able to see beyond the self.   I have never thought that art and the process of making art, as a similar process.

So my Uncle and I could appreciate my comment that art then, seeking the essence outside of our self-preoccupation and self-deceptions, is like prayer and meditation, seeking to reach beyond, to seek the essence.    Prayer is hard work, just as art is hard work, but both are an essential expression of the spiritual path of seeking to reach out to the essence beyond, seeking the divine.

In this more reflective podcast, Ian Mobsby leads a time of lectio divina on the words of Jesus around praying the Lord’s prayer followed by a reflection and a short homily. This podcast enables you the listener to actively stop, listen and respond to the words of Jesus, a meditation and homily on why we should pray in times of trial. This podcast was recorded at the Moot Community Eucharist, in the Guild Church of St Mary Aldermary in the City of London on Sunday 16th October 2011.

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The Clock is ticking until we start a new venture – our first inhouse retreat in our new home – the Guild Church of St Mary Aldermary led by Padraig O Tuama, a long term friend to the Community. The idea of a retreat is to give you plenty of space to stop, engage in spiritual reflection and prayer, as well as room to explore and quest creatively with deepening your personal christian spirituality.  We will be exploring the themes of baptism, and end with reaffirming our baptism vows… So it is going to be great… For the full information, timings and registration please click here.

I don’t know how you experienced programme 2, but I have done a lot of crying through it and after it.  It is so true that silence and going into silence requires support and careful consideration, because when we stop and enter it – and attempt to be true to God, true to ourselves and true to others, then we start by meeting our brokenness and pain.  As I watched the programme, I was reminded of my own fragility, the pain of previous bereavements, the pain of unfulfilled yearnings, unmet dreams and hopes, and sometimes the sense of deep loneliness of my own soul.

And yet, the programme reminds me that if we are brave, and stop running away, that God meets us in our pain, that we get beyond the perpetual adolescence that general life and culture holds us in, the false ego, and the thoughts that distort no longer have total hold of us.  In silence participants in the show had to face their own anger, fear, pride and pain, and what was so beautiful, was how God was in there with them.  As I watched the programme from my highrise flat in Battersea, I felt a hunger to be closer to the natural environment, and feeling that God and nature seem so far away from me at the moment.  But when the programme stopped all I could hear was an orchestra of bird song outside my window, and a deep sense that in all my own eccentricity and complexity, that I am deeply held and deeply loved by God.  Something I just can’t put into words and keeps me alive …..

How beautiful is that, God is that close.  Now I am not saying life is easy, because right now, my life feels far from easy and it feels at times very hard to keep going.  But how beautiful is it that God is there and God is love.  My life in itself, has never felt easy – but one long struggle in some ways, where God has not made things ‘surprisingly’ opportunistic in anyway.  Yet in that struggle to live, it is so important that I know where to find love and the root of my being, which is in a participating spiritual relationship with a benevolent and loving God.  I remember that I impoverish myself by not seeking God in my everyday. So the programme is so important for me to remember that encountering God is an important part of my self-care, and spirituality is about being immersed, supported and nourished by God in this way.

I found it fascinating that some of the participants were worried about returning home, because the world is so cynical about spiritual and religious experience.  They were worried whether they would fit again back into the world, and that their friends might think they were nuts!  Very true.

Finally Mooters, an observation and a challenge.  Some I have spoken to about the programme, seemed to be concerned about the programme, and fearful of watching it, because it means you might have to face yourself or avoid dealing with stuff.  As with everything in Moot, I just want to encourage you to watch both programmes, and not to fear.  What we are trying to do in Moot, is provide a safe place, an opportunity to not have to run away anymore.  But to start facing yourself and your depths to begin a journey of healing and restoration of your humanity, in your human becoming.  This is what it is all about for me.  Us growing in spirituality and our humanity, so that we can begin to love God, love ourselves and love others and out planet.  So be brave, and do watch it – link here. If the programme evokes stuff for you, and you would like to meet up with someone to talk about stuff, then let me know, very happy to support anyone and everyone in spiritual growth.

A suggestion has to be, to take your experiences and discuss these in your mini-moots.

In a recent broadcast with the Australian Broadcasting Authority, Laurence Freeman of the World Community for Christian Meditation led a number talks on the subject of meditation and spirituality in the modern life. Laurence is a Benedictine Monk, and the World Community have a community house in Kensington. We hope to do a podcast interview with Laurence sometime in the near future. To listen to the podcast, see below.

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Since Aaron’s post about how transformative he’s been finding the virtues postures and practices, and the discussion it started about anger, I’ve been doing a bit of research. I’m troubled by Old Testament wrath / New Testament mercy ‘flip-side of God’ theology. I don’t believe God changed, ‘like shifting shadows’ as James says, nor that God has moods or gets provoked and vindictive.

So I looked up some Hebrew words for ‘anger’ used in the bible last week, and found that physical imagery is inherent in many – aph depicts flaring nostrils; charah and chemah are about heated indignation. God is often described (about forty instances across the Old Testament) roused to wrath of the nostril-flaring variety. This troubles me.

But something that puts God’s wrathful moments in context for me is the as-frequent phrase ‘slow to anger’, also written as ‘long-suffering’, and to me that deliberately illustrates exactly how I’d aspire to see myself deal with anger when it flares in me, in my true, most whole or healthy self, just as with moments of gluttony, selfishness, pride or apathy. Hence ‘be still and know’, ‘wait on the Lord’, and ‘flee from anger and bitterness’.

I think Jesus was doing this when he crouched and drew in the dust, instead of reacting at once to the people ready to stone the woman they’d caught in the middle of adulterous sex. I think he was asserting space for momentary, flared-up anger to diffuse, both theirs and possibly his own.

Also, the very fact that these are physical words presents their illustrative quality to me. I am not massively into turning everything into metaphor, but I do think it’s safe to say God is not being described to us as a being with actual nostrils to flare, or blood pressure to rise. Nor, I want to suggest, is angry action innate to God’s being – God is love. God is not justice, – God holds and wields all justice. But he does not simply hold and wield love. He is love.

I happen to agree with Christopher Jamison and the Desert Fathers he cites, that anger isn’t really a good sign of anything. I don’t think getting angry is ever really just about the thing that we think, in the moment, that it’s about. I think I, and all of us to a greater or lesser degree, are sitting on a big old keg of old hurts and injustices. And when we get angry about things in a particular instant, I think that keg of anger comes into play.

A couple of mooters pointed out to me the danger here of getting into dualistic territory: ‘anger = bad’; ‘getting frustrated = bad’. I’m glad to have the community round me to navigate this territory.

And righteous energy for a cause is true and a good thing – I’m a bit of a cause-carrier sometimes – but when it’s provoked by anger, I have to take time to think and to still that, until it has aired and become something more calm and constructive.

To stay in my anger is to sit in the murkier bits of my psychology. To feel it, acknowledge it, but to be slow to it and patient with it when it comes – these I think reflect a God of love – healthy care of myself and exploration of all my feelings and their roots, but also therefore enabling my outward actions to be wholly love.

This is ‘slow to anger’ – taking the space to consider both my own reaction, and also to consider whoever has provoked me as a whole human being, with more going on than I can justifiably feel irritated with. Love is not only for some human beings, according to what they’ve done. “To know all is to forgive all”. Even love for one person, a victim, I don’t believe should ever provoke us to retribution towards another. And that pause to bring us back to a place of complete love, I think, is what Jesus was doing when he wrote in the sand for a while.

This months little service homily on the theme of breathing as prayer is now available on the mootpodcasting site. Click here to listen to the podcast, or here to subscribe to moot podcasts for free through itunes. If you are a pc user and don’t want to use itunes to subscribe to moot podcasts through yahoo, click here. If you do not use windows or mac and want to subscribe to the feed, click here

We aim to publish two podcasts a month to provide spiritual sustenance to the growing network of the moot community and its supporters.