Poets and artists have long walked along the border of their cultures, with their antennae alert to what’s in the air and underground, with their eyes open to the light and dark. Poetry, myth, prayer attempt to translate, to bring across into words, the soul’s journey to wholeness. They do not offer easy answers but a language which travels and comes home, a speech of heart truth, ecstatic or sorrowful. This soul-language is a language of doors, a language of windows and mirrors, a language of light and dark, a language of fire and water, radiance and depth, a language that somehow (I’m never quite sure how) always includes silence.
J. Ruth Gendler, from Changing Light
Whilst I was still a teenager my Dad took me out to a pub lunch and listened to me express my loneliness. Amongst his responses he said, ‘Kate, you are a born cultural missionary. That will mean you are always on the edge, always distinctive, always slightly set apart. It is a lonely, but important, place to be. Your creativity can help others see and meet God.’
For years I ran away from being that woman. I did my best to ignore God and the values my upbringing had instilled in me. On the few occasions I did cry for God I could see no sign that God noticed I was gone. I received no comfort. God was utterly elusive to me.
Eventually, unsurprisingly, all my systems broke down. I had become someone so unrecognisable from the person I knew deep down I wanted to be. At that point I began, with the help of many God-sent people, to begin again my search for a soul-language that fitted me and my relationship with the Beloved, the One who longs to meet me in the everyday details of even my darkest days.
On good days my soul-language is being found with a camera, a paintbrush or a pen in my hand. It is exciting when I sense amidst the murk that I’ve glimpsed something important about God’s world and might - just possibly - be able to convey that to others. On really very precious days I even sense, for a fleeting moment, the immensity of that Presence come near.
I know now I will continue that life-long search for my soul-language, the individually-nuanced language which is exclusively mine and which God gives to each of us, regardless of whether we call ourselves creative. I will continue to seek the Treasure no now matter how hard the days to come might be, no matter how difficult it might become to see, hear or sense God.
Hope is with you when you believe
The earth is not a dream but living flesh,
That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,
That all things you have ever seen here
Are like a garden looked at from a gate.
You cannot enter. But you're sure it's there.
Could we but look more clearly and wisely
We might discover somewhere in the garden
A strange new flower and an unnamed star.
Some people say we should not trust our eyes,
That there is nothing, just a seeming,
These are the ones who have no hope.
They think that the moment we turn away,
The world, behind our backs, ceases to exist,
As if snatched up by the hands of thieves.
‘Hope'
Czeslaw Milosz
sure it’s there. iPhone image.
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