Never Bribe Your Own Conscience

Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, (Part 38)

Hello friends, we had a wonderful evening for the opening of the INIS OIRR exhibition this week, thank you to all who came and my dear pal Glen Hansard coming all the way from Dublin to bless us with his music. Those further afield who’d like to take a look, you’ll find a link to the catalogue here: Inis Oirr, Field System.

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The Trinity cushion: Three in One. St Andrew’s Church, Ashburton , November 2024.

‘Make peace with yourself, and both heaven and earth will make peace with you.’

St Isaac the Syrian

Being Called Out

Last week’s meeting at Canterbury Cathedral gate (see last week’s post: Everything Faster Than Everything Else) has stayed with me. At that moment I was irritated by guards carrying card machines blocking the way into the cathedral. I could have done with at least a whiff of the transformational before the monied-grind of the transactional. But, once I had cooled my boots, I realised my own complicitness with the scenario. I had wandered over after a nice breakfast and coffee, not remotely pilgrimed, just wanting it all laid out with zero effort. The guard mirrored my bare-minimum attitude. We were all tied up in the same thing. And, just for the record, I do know these places cost a fortune to maintain. But I was surprised at myself. How I was able to immediately slip back into a consumptive mind.

There’s an odd juxtaposition I know, between consumption and consumptive, but I can’t help but feel they are related. That the unthinking consumerism that Christ so railed against is, by its nature, at heart, a wasting disease. And in the granular snapshot of the encounter at the gate we are troubled into a far bigger malaise often going on in the wider Christian experience. Nothing is really being asked of us providing the church continues to grow and the balances get balanced. Well, that’s not always the case these days, and in that very – supposed – decline there is the opportunity for something else to happen. A genuine green shoot. In this week of the American election I think about my great uncle Hamer Broadbent:

Even when the powers of the mightiest empire are put in the Church’s hands, they do not enable her to save the State from destruction, for, in abandoning the position which her very name implies, of being “called out” of the world, and of separation to Christ, she loses the power that comes from subjection to her Lord, exchanging it for an earthly authority that is fatal to herself…. as the churches increased, the first zeal flagged and conformity to the world and its ways increased…

E.H. Broadbent, The Pilgrim Church, 1931

Oh Rose, thou art sick.

William Blake

Wow, fatal to herself.

I can’t be serving two Guvnors. Christians can’t be serving two Guvnors. I saw something big in that grain-of-sand that was the moment at the Cathedral gates.

But let’s not just be slagging the lad with the card machine. Let’s think some small, personal thoughts and work out from there.