Tag: truth
Creating Encounter in Colour: Robin Redbreast
Your sacred heart emblazoned in scarlet feathers, a bib of tomato-soup brightness where the embers of the Christ-child’s fire were brushed just in time from your chest. Caught light inside though, where the chambers of love beat loudly, bursting into song that lifts us higher than we know how to be. Beauty given breath from beauty, catching us up into the heavenly realms, a foretaste of flight and joyful worship we can only approach in wonder, sidling towards an understanding like an opera fan listening at the stage door or Moses peeking at God’s glory from a cleft in the rock.
Text and artwork © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt Painting inspired by a reference photo by Paul Green, with kind permission. The text is an excerpt from my book of devotionals, Garden of God’s Heart.
Creating Encounter in Colour: Fireball
I hold in my hand a ball of flame so hot and fiery, so vast and powerful, that it is rightly to be marvelled at. It is all your troubles, my beloved, called into flame. For just as a candle melts away as it burns, matter will always be transformed into different energy.
In the same way, all your sorrows and tears will become light for the world. Inside the white-hot sphere, at the centre of this new sun, swirls the rainbow that makes up the spectrum of your sufferings, and the hues hewn from hurt become a dance of joy, colliding colours in a kaleidoscope of changing shapes and patterns the universe has always known.
You read the desert father’s advice, “Why not become flame?” and you heeded it. Rest your weariness here in the palm of my hand, and grow with my powerful love even as you are rightly consumed.
Text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt Composite art by R R Wyatt © used with permission.
Creating Encounter in Colour: Mud Bath
God calls me into the loam pit, and I wonder at its name. Here is a place that sounds like home and is full of nutrients to drink up through my roots, to softly connect into with my mycelia. I sink and softly twist into the mud, as though I were truly the tree that I am being called to be, or perhaps a holy hippo, ready to roll and languish in the squelching goodness.
Brown the cool earth, the colour of everything mixed together, all skin colours and barked armour broken down into a melted pot of delicious oneness, so that none can claim difference to lord it over others, nor does anyone feel they do not belong. Here we partake of the crib and the cross, the stillness of forests, the ages of oak and olive, the rotted matter of long gone leaves, we revel in the richness of all that has fallen apart, and prepare for resurrection.
Text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt Photo from Pixabay
Creating Encounter in Colour: Honey
They are gentle souls we slip into like a gateway to that idyllic childhood we never had, always patiently waiting. He sits spooning hunny from one pot into another, often missing by way of his mouth. A bear does need to eat after all, and there is quality control to think of.
Like Jonathan in the forest, your eyes will sparkle anew on eating the sacred gathered gold poured from flowers. Tea and story time is all a-drip with butter, honey and imagination, running and plentiful, deliciously treacled on toast, drizzled on scones and sustaining us through the reality of being grownups, which, frankly, is bothersome.
And in the middle of Rabbit’s rabbiting and Owl’s pontificating and Eeyore’s gloom, unperturbed by Tigger’s bouncing and Roo and Kanga’s family, holding hands with Piglet’s blinching, is rotund saffron Pooh, calmly joyful and serene, reminding us that wisdom and tolerance are better than even just a little brain.
Text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt Composite art by R R Wyatt © used with permission.
Creating Encounter: Story
Two writer friends, Amy and Fiona, asked an interesting question on social media this week. Will there be books in heaven? My first response was to think, of course, but no Jeffery Archer. Which just goes to show how quickly our instincts fly to exclude those we don’t deem worthy. But I think that probably it is God who chooses the stock for the libraries of heaven, just as he decides who gets to sit where at the feast.
As a writer myself, and someone who was an avid reader when I was well, I can’t imagine an existence without books. When I was tiny, nothing was so magical as sitting cross-legged on the library floor, transported to another world. We are wired for story, and it has a deep and presiding influence in our lives and learning. We learn about good and evil from fairy stories, whilst myth and legend help us to understand life by stretching overarching narratives across it, like skin on a drum frame. Archetypes, heroes and villains are all helpful tools for navigating reality, and story can be both fiction and non-fiction. We talk, don’t we, about Bible “stories” and we read about the lives of famous people and saints formulated as story in biographies and autobiographies.
How we narrate our own lives, how we tell our story to ourselves and others, is a hugely important thing. We might see ourselves as victim or hero, and more often than not, write a triumphal narrative into the facts, whether it exists or not, because we need to have hope that it all works out in the end. Meaning is the mainstay of a human life, and story gives it to us.
What heaven is like, is something we can have great fun imagining. I feel sure that whilst we are coming home to God when we die, and finding union with his loving being, that we are also going, on some level, to keep becoming more truly ourselves, and that implies that there will continue to be an element of growth. Story, learning and creativity will always play a part in that.
When God has been gracious enough to give me glimpses of my heavenly future, I have always been doing something creative. Embroidering altar cloths as I minister to the broken, or kneeling on the back of a lapis lazuli sky, etching intricate patterns and words into its surface. We serve a creative God and I think this reflection of who he is in our beings will be part of what is next. Added to which, I truly believe that the stories I have written have been given to me during the stillness of deep prayer. They sadly have the mark of my human expression that cannot capture God’s heart well, but they feel like a holy endeavour.
If we ever, like Richard Dawkins, begin to think that story is superfluous, and that fiction is about lies, rather than heavenly magic, we might do well to remember that Jesus chose to teach us, not by dissecting the universe into facts, nor by preaching clever theology, but by telling stories.
Text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt Photo from Pixabay
Creating Encounter: Birdwatching
Having a sedentary life enforced upon me, and being very rarely able to leave the house, even to venture into our small garden, the birds that visit our feeder outside our kitchen window are a spiritual lifeline and blessing of huge proportions. I don’t think that that Jesus told us to consider the birds only as a lesson in God’s provision and deep care, but also because they are joy-bringers. Our hearts lift and soar as we watch them flying, and to see one of the Father’s bright and beautiful creatures up close is an encounter that opens our heavenly eyes.
When we can look at a bird, however small, and however dull its plumage, and see God’s handiwork, we enable an encounter with the maker of heaven and earth that is transformative. The subtlety of a sparrow’s myriad of brown hues, or the breath-taking iridescence of a starling or pigeon’s neck feathers, or the stunning colours on a goldfinch, are gateways into wonder. This awe has only increased as I journey deeper into being an artist, for the ultimate artist has his masterpieces gliding all around us, and his skills are phenomenal.
Watching birds is also something that pretty much everyone can enjoy. If you have access to a view of any kind, even just one small window can be an entry point for the song and the sight of our feathered friends. Here is one of the pieces from my book “Garden of God’s Heart” to illustrate the point I am trying to make:
Blue Tit
“A bubbly sing-song bird, bright and true, sky blue and sunshine yellow, your only hope of camouflage is high against a summer cloud. But who would hide such a treasure, a darling bud, a chirping, lively flitter between trees, between worlds? Heaven painted you with a lapis hood and cloak, and clothed you in a buttery jerkin, to bring cheer and loveliness to any dreary heart, and hope in goodness to any unbeliever.”
text © by Keren Dibbens-Wyatt Photo from Morguefile
Creating Encounter: Poetry
A lot of people think of poetry as a sublime art form, a reaching into the metaphysical for eternal truth. They think of Shelley and Keats, of Plath and Bukowski, perhaps not of Pam Ayres and Roger McGough. Poets really ought to be lounging in smoking jackets with eyes shut in imaginative ecstacies, or writhing in the throes of suicidal depression, not normal people with, say, toddlers running around their feet, or standing in the kitchen gazing out of the window at geraniums.
The truth is that poetry is always sublime, even when it is ridiculous, and that absolutely anyone can be a poet, just as anyone can be a writer. It is harder to be a good poet, of course, and completely subjective. One of my very favourite poems consists of two words, is entitled “Fish” and by Ogden Nash: “Wet pet.”
When it comes to using poetry as a place to create encounter with God, we have some wonderful precedents. I would urge you to take a look at Daniel Ladinsky’s translations of spiritual greats, “Love Poems From God,” which gives us truly beautiful renderings of the verse of poets, mystics and saints.
I personally often write poems at times of great personal distress or ill humour, because I find the writing process cathartic, and prose just doesn’t seem able to contain depths of pain in such a concentrated way. At the same time I ask God to meet me in that pain, and the words therefore often feel like the results of encounter.
Writing poetry can be a form of prayer, and in fact, the central point of this series is that everything can, though perhaps creativity in particular. If we are ever in doubt that poetry is a holy endeavour, we might read some Gerard Manley Hopkins. For me, he was the master of spiritual poetry.
Poets who frame pain in beauty, like Alice Walker and Maya Angelou (two more masters) are talking in spiritual language for me, even where they are deeply grounded in earthly happenings and visceral words. My husband and co-founder of Lakelight, Rowan Wyatt, is a wonderful poet and I hope he will share something of his process later in this series.
The writing of poetry can also be open to God in the sense that we are trying to find the words to form order out of chaos, matter from the void. Trying to clothe with the flesh of words, things that seem unsayable. We worship the Creator God and the Great Redeemer, who can help us shape our clay even as we work with feeble fingers. Giving God the process, asking him in, dedicating the words that form in the silence to him, all make space for encountering his character and his truths.
To illustrate that I’ll end this piece with one of my absolute favourite poems,
SAINT FRANCIS AND THE SOW BY GALWAY KINNELL
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Galway Kinnell, “Saint Francis and the Sow” from Three Books. Copyright © 2002 by Galway Kinnell.
Creating Encounter: Pots and Pans
My husband is the washer-upper in our house. I used to be able to do a bit now and again to help him, but at the current time am too weak. I can’t stand at the sink or repeatedly lift or wash the crockery. It’s hard for me to not be able to help him, but it is also a lesson in being grateful for him and all the ways in which he takes care of me and our home.
Washing up is hardly a creative pursuit, and like so many things in our daily routine, it is just a chore that has to be done. Even if you have a dishwasher, it needs loading and unloading. So, what does it have to do with creating encounter with God? Is he interested in us to such a degree that we can even meet him in a boring, repetitive task? I believe he is, and Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth century French Carmelite monk believed this too. He said, as did his Carmelite predecessor, Teresa of Avila, that God could be found “among the pots and pans.”
“Don’t think that if you had a great deal of time you would spend more of it in prayer. Get rid of that idea! God gives more in a moment than in a long period of time, for His actions are not measured by time at all… Know that even when you are in the kitchen, Our Lord is moving among the pots and pans.” – St Teresa of Avila
“The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.” – Brother Lawrence
It is a question of devotion, of giving every moment and action, thought and deed, over to God, all about where your heart is focussed. It is something that needs to be practised, a gradual process, and a deliberate act. Even in the act of washing dishes, we can choose to meditate on God as potter, on treasures in clay jars, on the act of cleansing and forgiveness, the washing away of sin, on baptism, and so a common chore becomes a gateway into prayer, of setting one’s mind and heart on God. And even if we are not putting in any effort with such thoughts, but simply opening the activity and the time up to God, it is made holy.
“And I make it my business only to persevere in His holy presence, wherein I keep myself by a simple attention, and a general fond regard to GOD; which I may call an actual presence of GOD, or to speak better, an habitual, silent and secret conversation of the soul with GOD, which often causes me joys and rapture inwardly….” – Brother Lawrence
As we make this spiritual practise every day which Brother Lawrence called “the practice of the presence of God” (also the title of the book in which his thoughts are collated), so we work through frustrations and it becomes second nature to us. We discover a wondrous thing, which is that even Fairy Liquid can become a sacred unction, and dirty dishes the holy articles of the Tabernacle. God is indeed everywhere, and all things belong.
text © by Keren Dibbens-Wyatt Photo from Pixabay
Creating Encounter with God
Our main theme at Lakelight Sanctuary for this year is going to be how we make space for God in our lives. This will include creative and artistic practices, but also how we invite God into the ordinary daily activities of our lives, like eating a meal, walking the dog, doing the chores.
If everything is indeed holy, then we can be sure that the sacred is willing and waiting to inhabit every part of our days and nights, as well as the works of our hands.
We want to be thinking about how to give everything over to God, whether big or small, and whether it is of our choosing or something that has been thrust upon us. We want, in essence, to explore what it really means to become “living sacrifices,” and to “pray without ceasing.” We hope you will join us on this learning journey.
“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God–this is your true and proper worship.” (Romans 12:1 NIV)
“Rejoice always, 17pray without ceasing, 18give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” (1 Thessalonians 5: 16-18 ESV)
Artwork and text © by Keren Dibbens-Wyatt
Lakelight Sanctuary 