finding God

I haven’t blogged for weeks – a really busy month has robbed me of the time and space for the kind of reflection (and energy) that gives me something to write about.

 

Finding God in a busy world is something I have returned to on and off over the years.

 

I’ve led one or two devotional days on the theme, but done so from the perspective of a fellow traveller rather than with any pretence of expertise.  I have tried to share how I have encountered God in both expected and unexpected places.

 

Formal Christianity offers many moments for encountering God, through sermons, times of worship and devotional reading.  We must not become jaundiced about this, especially if we are in leadership or if we have been Christians for many years.  What once thrilled us can become mundane unless we work at reinvigorating our relationship with God.  What once thrilled us can still thrill those younger in the faith.  A cynical pastor is a sad thing!

 

But if God is someone we encounter on Sundays alone, then our understanding of God will be seriously deficient.  Finding God in the everyday is not a luxury to be experienced as an occasional treat but a real necessity if we’re to live lives that accurately reflect our declared belief in the God who is in the world.  This is the God who cares about our lives and loves, our work and our worries, our hopes and dreams, our successes and failures.  This is the God who walks with us to the summit, and is there to meet us in the depths. This is the God who moves in harmony with us.

 

Twenty years ago I was reading J V Taylor’s wonderful book The Go-Between God and came across the drawing above – The Trinity by William Blake.  I thought it was absolutely stunning and I still do.  It was a moment of profound encounter.  I tracked it down to the British Museum, and in the days before the internet asked if they had a poster (no); was it on display so I could visit (no – it was in their archives); could I get a photograph of it (yes - £80 – in 1991 that was a lot) which I paid and I have the photograph hanging at home since.  And incidentally, it triggered a fascinating conversation with the man who framed it for me, a man of no apparent faith but who marvelled at the energy captured in the simple, swirling lines!

 

Music is an obvious place to find God also. What is it about music that causes the human spirit to soar like an eagle one moment and plumb the depths in the next?  It can be orchestral, rock, vocals – take your pick!  Only two weeks ago I went to a concert featuring Peter Knight’s Gigspanner.  Peter Knight was once the Steeleye Span fiddle player and their musicianship was of the highest order, and truly mesmerising.  (You can see one of the tracks they played here but understand the percussion especially is nowhere as intense as on the evening.)   In the midst of such rhythmic music, momentarily you can be ‘lost’ and at that same moment be ‘finding’.

 

Then there are books – and for me, few surpass Hemingway, except maybe Steinbeck, and for me his greatest work The Grapes of Wrath.  I defy anyone who has read the whole book and who doesn’t know the ending to reach the last two pages and not well up in tears at the raw humanity, and the echoes of divinity in what is recounted there.  God is to be found in those pages for sure, and in the works of so many wonderful novelists and playwrights.

 

In truth there’s so much – after a while its impossible not to find God!  Carlos Santana playing Samba Pa Ti, Roger McGough’s poem Let me die a young man’s death; Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, and just those moments when you lean back from the table and watch your friends laughing.  But now I’m just being indulgent.

 

You may say that all I’m describing are moments when we are moved emotionally. And to some extent that’s true.  But this is the rhythm I spoke about earlier.  Its as our human spirit rises and falls, we can, by an act of the will and with a sensitised heart, find that the Spirit of God moves in harmony with us, allowing us to find God in the everyday.

 

David Kerrigan

Comments

[Geoff Colmer]

Hi David!
I've only just looked closely at the picture on your blog design and seen that it's the Gormley figures - wonderful!! I've just been to his most recent installation at the White Cube near the Royal Academy.

I resonate with so much of what you say. What is fascinating is that not so long ago, what you and I say about encountering God through the arts would be regarded with deep suspicion by many evangelicals. I guess that some still think that way. In its crudest form it would be Word and Spirit only and anything simply tingle-factor.

I came across this passage by Tom Wright which I find puts some theological creativity onto the issue:
‘Though I am not so confident as [Dorothy] Sayers that one can argue a kind of natural theology by starting with artistic integrity and going right the way up to the Christian doctrine of God, I am certainly prepared to think in terms of the revelation of God in Jesus and the Spirit moving towards us and meeting artistic integrity coming the other way. Without the first, the artist is in danger of producing form without substance, a classic problem of both modernity and post-modernity. But without the second the theologian and preacher, struggling to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches, might easily fail to speak the full truth.’ (Tom Wright)

[David Kerrigan]

Hi Geoff - yes, the Blog header is Gormley's installation at Crosby Bay entitled "Another Place". In fact the picture illustrates this theme well. I have used that photograph to encourage groups to contemplate the possibility that "one of those figures is you and the other is God - now from that, begin to think what this might mean". There have been some wonderful discussions, moments of insight and dare I say, revelation.

Thanks for the Tom Wright quote - as ever thoughtful.