Joy without a cause – 7 September 2018

"But you and all the kind of Christ
Are ignorant and brave,
And you have wars you hardly win
And souls you hardly save.

"I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

"Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?"

It’s G K Chesterton, Ballad of the White Horse, written over 100 years ago, 1911, as he watched events building up to the First World War catastrophe – and, as a convinced practising believing Christian, he watched the posturings of a compromised church blessing battleships.  Then it was for him, as it is now for many of us, increasingly and urgently a matter of how to express the way of Christ in a world rife with menace and mendacity – the sky grows darker yet, the sea rises higher -- when the church too seems to have lost its way… but to remember also the joy that remains at the heart of it all, in Christ – joy without a cause, faith without a hope, writes Chesterton…  It is reminiscent of another of Britain’s 20^th century poets, T S Eliot:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.[1]

It is the poets who come to our help, the psalmists, the Hebrew verse we usually ignore in the Book of Job, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, not afraid of mystery and unanswered questions, speaking to our hearts, often in imponderables, paradoxes, expressing our conflicts.  Did you notice in Eliot…waiting without words… the faith the hope and the love are all in the waiting, he says… wait without thought… the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing.  He describes exactly what we do in Christian Meditation.

I profoundly believe, our basic duties in discipleship -- doing justice, loving mercy, walking humbly -- will need to be sustained in the church and the world of the days ahead by simple disciplines of silence, stillness and consent to God.  It is what the poets call waiting.  Down that road lies what St Paul named joy, the fruit of the Spirit that comes next after love.[2]

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[1] T S Eliot: East Coker, in Four Quartets.

[2] Galatians 5:22