Paul Chambers

At 10 am on the Saturday of Greenbelt a few thousand of us gathered to remember our friend. Both Gareth and I were privileged enough to know John and honoured to speak at his memorial service. This is what I said – we were asked to keep it brief – 2 minutes:

In the words of Randy Newman;

‘When somebody loved me, everything was beautiful…. every hour we spent together lives within my heart.’ 

 

Whether you spent one hour or one thousand with John you were left with one abiding memory…beauty.

 

Every now and then someone comes along whose life and words offer a deeper mystery: a sacramental presence even. John was one of those rare people, his words acting like invisible stepping-stones, holding a tenderness and a beauty of a time that most have forgotten, forming the texture of our soul by offering the broken beauty and fragrance of Gethsemane.

 

There’s a scene in Thornton Wilder’s play ‘The angel that trouble the waters’ that for me embodies the life of John O’Donohue; a doctor suffering from melancholy comes to a magic pool with healing powers to be healed of his troubles and his gloom and sadness but the angel guarding the water tells him he cannot enter. The man says, ‘but how can I live this way?’ the angel again says, ‘I’m sorry this moment is not for you, this healing is not for you’. So the doctor again pleads ‘but I have to get into the water, I can’t live this way’ and the angel then says…no this moment is not for you, and he says, but how can I live this way? And the angel says to him, doctor, without your wounds, where would your power be? It is your melancholy that makes your lower voice tremble into the hearts of men and women, the very angels in heaven cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children of this earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living…in loves service, only wounded soldiers can serve.

 

His legacy? Maybe John taught us that our soul is the invisible geography that invites us to new frontiers, and the ‘ordinary’ is a seminal stepping-stone in the journey. One of the things I remember most about being with him was that I knew that if I had the eyes to see, there was beauty everywhere, even when nature was barren or sloppy, and not just when God had tarted things up for the spring.

 

I’m guessing heaven now smells of firewater and John is taking God to task over one or two things…we miss you John.

“I find solace in places I never could have imagined: the quiet sprinkling of my child’s head in Baptism, a gospel choir drunk on the Holy Spirit in Memphis, or the back of a cathedral in Rome watching the first cinematographers play with light and colour in stained glass stories of the Passion. I am still amazed at how big, how enormous the love and mystery of God is — and how small are the minds that attempt to corral this life force into rules and taboos, cults, and sects.” 

BONO

I have resisted a Greenbelt reflection post as everybody and their mother seems to have done one. I guess if i did have to pick a ‘moment’ it would be a touching exchange with a beautiful man - Pádraig O Tuama.

He gave me this poem and explained that some of my ramblings (my word, not his) had inspired part of his work. As I’ve said before, God was having a good day when she began forming this man…this is stunningly beautiful:

Oh firefly of mine

for ten nights I dreamt about our

lives entwined

and fantasized and dreamt about

our

children

and how their eyes would shine

like mine

when I am

around you.

 

And when I died

because that is truly how it felt

I felt bereft

as if death had reached

its pit

in me.

 

The dream

the hope of family,

the sense of belonging

all abandoned

and I had entered

so joyful, young, and full of hope

But I learned to cope

and I started seeing things

more truthfully

because we all will die alone

and no one else will live

this life of mine,

or tell the lies that only

I will live and die by.

 

Oh twilight lady of my longing

was it wrong to hope

that we could find

belonging in each other’s

shelter?

I will never know.

 

And in the end we’re all alone,

as Donnie Darko tells us

abandoning all hope that

the frozen lake will thaw, and so

we will draw some comfort from

our keening

there is meaning in the telling of a

story.

 

And if my arms

are the only ones to hold me,

then I will hold me

fast and true and holy,

and when I hear an echo of this story

in the caverns of another

I will open up my covers

saying nothing,

saying nothing

there is nothing I can hope to say

that may enduce a change

or make the world spin faster

but we can write a chapter of

survival

in this bible of our history.

 

We are alone

we hear another’s breathing.

We cannot sleep

we’re held in meaning

that confounds us

and surrounds us

it is our ground

and the air around us

it is the death that

will drown us in its sorrow

we hope tomorrow might be better

we hope tomorrow might be

midwifed by a night

of deeper dreaming

 

Oh my firefly of hope,

keep us believing

in all we have to touch here.

-       the irony

-       the grieving

-       the ability to cope

-       and breathing.

 

Pádraig O Tuama  

Sat in a coffee house waiting for a bus and this is on the wall…what a quote (and film) – for a moment I wish I was an alcoholic….

“You are lucky because you caught me in a transitional phase. I was sitting here, eating my muffin, drinking my coffee and I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity”.

Pulp Fiction

…if only….

…where a Royal Flush can never beat a pair…”

Tom Waits

Been thinking about that bit in Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus, whilst entertaining (or being entertained) by the dregs of society, says he came not for the ones who think they have it all sorted, but rather the fuck ups of this world (Chambers translation!).

I like Matthew’s Gospel more and more, I reckon its the most spiritualising of the Gospels. Whereas Luke reports, ‘Blessed are the poor’, Matthew writes ‘blessed are the poor in spirit’. Whereas Luke tells the hungry that they shall be satisfied, Matthew tells those who hunger and thirst for righteousness that they shall inherit the earth.

Another perspective is this – in the traditional iconography of the Church, Matthew is the most human. Mark is a lion, Luke a bull, John an eagle – but Matthew is a man. It’s as if the tradition is telling us that the spiritual is the most human. 

Surely, according to our Scriptures, this is true. God fashioned humanity in her own image. In Eden, he breathed ‘Holy Spirit’ into moulded clay, bringing all of us to life. I would argue that that we are most fully ourselves when we most closely resemble God. You can’t separate theology and anthropology – both for good or ill.

There is in every religion a tendency to fashion images of God – Idols – in our own image. Nineteenth century scholars, like Ludwig Feuerbach, go so far as to say that God is nothing more than a projection onto the sky of what we most wish to be: powerful, in control, safe from harm and always right. From the beginning, there was a tendency to see God as a divine lawgiver, the leader of the heavenly parliament. And yet almost as soon as that idea emerges, it is challeged by the prophets, who have the word of God in their mouth.

‘The word of God’: Now there’s a concept that is hard to unpick. In Hebrew, it is not just what is spoken, but what is brought about. God speaks the world into being. God’s word is never empty…rather the good book says it will endure forever. The Greek (sorry this is all getting rather theological) gives the concept even more colour. The word, ho logos, is Reason or rationality – but not exactly in the sense we might immediately recognise it.

In the ancient world, to give the Reason for something was, as it is for us, to give an explanation. God’s word on the other hand is more an explanation of all things. And that explanation, for Aristotle, at least, and hence for Aquinas and now for the Church – includes not just to answer the questions ‘what is it made of?, ‘how is it designed?’, ‘what caused it to happen?’, but also ‘what is it for; what is its purpose?’.

Our conceptions of God – our focus on divine power, on divine kingship – are not just mistakes about God; they lead to a serious misunderstanding of the purpose and meaning of human life. Thus, when Jesus turns these ideas on their head – focusing on the picture of God as a doting, forgiving parent, on strength perfected in service – he is not only teaching us about God, but teaching us about our truest nature. And, of course, he doesn’t just talk about it. In Jesus, the Word of God in human form, Wisdom incarnate, we see the purpose, the telos, the destiny of humanity. The Word of God is never rationalisation in the status quo, but a challenge to sin.

God challenges sin in a way that sits somewhat alien to my upbringing; not fighting violence with violence, but rather confronting violence with a truth that both sobers and wooes; forcing the wicked to face the reality of our own deeds. That is the awful wisdom of God.

I often envision the last judgement as being made to sit and watch your life replayed, with a commentary on the consequences of each and every action, each and every decision; in other words, being made to see ourselves as we really are. Then shame can do its work, and lead us to repentance, whilst forgiveness gets on with healing…

…maybe heaven is the only place where a royal flush can never beat a pair? maybe that’s the grace that redeems the fuck ups of this world?

made me think….