After reflection, I would like to add that we are drawn in two directions: God-wards and towards created beings. This brings us back to the cruciform shape of our being and experience.

Quotation from a Czech Nobel Prize winner in 1996, Wistawa Szymborska.

"... I value that little phrase "I don’t know" .. highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include spaces within us as well as the outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended."

9th October

One of my pen-friends from Birmingham, who has been writing to me ever since she saw Suburban Sisters in 1996, told me something about our present youth culture, and how even some babies in her locality have one ear pierced and adorned with a stud. Then she went on to her own youthful reminiscences - another intelligent person bored at school.

Chester is still full of litter - utterly disgusting - thrown into hedgerows and on paths

My reply to another friend: "I don’t think that one needs a ‘figure-head’ for one’s beliefs. It is helpful if one knows to what one can consent - the desire for honesty, integrity, compassion etc. - and act accordingly... If there are other basics which help you to stand firm, then these foundational values will support you. Since I am engaged in the quest for religious understanding, I chose to accept a basic ‘stance’ - eine Weltanschauung - which would help me to see more deeply into human nature and spiritual development and regression. A figurehead is, actually, no good - it is the foundation which matters. If one then sees this ‘embodied’ in others, whether human or divine, then one can take another step. From there, one has to decide if one is aiming for anything, and what it is."

I peeled apples while listening to a play on Radio 4 (fictional) about Graduates coping with no prospect of work, and then deciding to do what they really wanted for a few weeks. It was good. I know so little about the young people of today.

I have been reading an interesting book by Orhan Pamuk. The blurb says:

"In Istanbul, in the late 1590s, the Sultan secretly commissions a great book: a celebration of his life and empire, to be illuminated by the best artists of the day - in the European manner. But when one of the miniaturists is murdered, their master has to seek outside help. Did the dead painter fall victim to professional rivalry, romantic jealousy or religious terror?"

I read much of the book because of the wonderful descriptions of both Persian art, and of the ‘seductive’ Western developments both in perspective and portraiture. Persian art did not use perspective because perspective reduces important things in comparative size and not show things as they really are (as I discovered when I was meditating on the perspective of the laburnum walk some months ago.) Portraiture was not allowed for religious reasons, I think.

18th October

I began writing on Sunday 11th October because the week was going to be busy. Now it is 18th October, and the week has left so little trace of its passing...

14th October

Last night I called you in the dark, walking along the laburnum path.

My head was uncovered and I had bathed.

All was calm . Eventually you came,

a dark shape, rejoicing in the soft night.

I held you in my arms: you purred!

15th October

Beams of light showed one path rippling over the grass;

the paving stones another, intersected by shadow.

I chose the patterned path, grass-edges clean-cut,

and the drops of rain made my hands tingle.

20th October

Golden leaves and golden fur, memories of golden hair

swept by the wind....

It is dark now. Wind-wrapped I pray.

INCENSE

Fruit bubbling on blue-flamed fire, blending the scent of our harvest,

and wafting it through the whole house.

Judas could not have complained about that: or could he?

Saturday 17th October I gave a talk to the Neston Anglican Group who came here for a quiet day. That very morning I had found the poem "The Blind Men and the Elephant" by J.G.Saxe, based on a famous Indian legend. The moral was:

So oft in theologic wars,

The disputants, I ween,

Rail on in utter ignorance

Of what each other mean,

And prate about an elephant

Not one of them has seen!

I think this struck the right note! We are all ‘blind’ and can all contribute our small portion of insight to each other.... (The Elephant, of course, I was using as an image of God).