A Prayer to commence:
It is not you who shape God;
it is God who shapes you.
If then you are the work of God,
await the hand of the Artist
who does all things in due season.
Offer the Potter your heart, soft and tractable,
and keep the form in which
the Artist has fashioned you.
Let your clay be moist,
lest you grow hard and lose
the imprint of the Potter’s fingers.
St Irenaeus, second century Bishop of Lyons, student of Polycarp, disciple of John the Apostle.
This is my final day with you, at least in this capacity as Acting Rector. As each day has unfolded you have given me opportunity to share with you my vision for a world where love is loosed to heal. Together we have reflected on the changes that shape the way we live our lives and expand our horizons. Sometimes with disappointment, more often with hope we have engaged the changing fortunes of our church in its community.
These have been six important months for me. I began by setting myself a goal of writing out each Sunday’s address in full. Until now, I had only ever done this on special occasions: I decided that for this six month period, every Sunday I would carefully shape a picture of a world where love is loosed to heal. In this personal commitment I wanted love to stretch between us so that together we might ‘await the hand of the Artist who does all things in due season’. In that spirit I have sketched twenty-five meditations exploring different images all based on a common theme that love might awaken us to desire.
A friend in my last parish wrote these words to a hymn which still echo in my mind:
All my desire is found in God,
in serving Him, my one concern:
the unity of the Father and the Son
my great desire, abiding aim.
Let all the world take its own course,
still I will fight its desires and goals.
And as the Son loved the Father’s ways,
so God create our love for Him too.
And let the beauty of God’s intent
rest in my heart and in my will.
And may the vision, the truth of God,
be in my eyes and in my heart.
And when the fortune of this world is gone,
and we stand hand and hand with our Lord,
so shall our praises ring round His throne,
and nevermore to part from that joy.
Those words became a theme song for our relationship with each other and for our work with those struggling with desires that limited and controlled. We searched for a better way where ‘desire [might teach us], not just by gratification, but by constantly undercutting itself, by never being entirely satisfied’ (Mark Epstein, Open to Desire, p.58). Desire is the quality of the adventure of being human. Desire is not conquest; it is an embrace of possibility.
All through these six months I have been conscious of the power of words that shape ideas and of ideas that translate into action. They have helped me re-focus my own journey and I hope they have added to your determination to recover love as the primary energy of our humanity.
The year 1989 was a turning point in our ministry. Margaret and I re-entered parish life frustrated with the sexual and gender debates of the denomination and thoroughly distanced by its doctrine of blood sacrifice. These were confining ideas: but faith shapes in generous non-judgmental relationships. God dwells in the hidden places of life yet is wonderfully seen in the face of those around us. Here is the very mystery of desire: it reveals a yearning for each other that revels in their freedom. Our mistakes and sins need never be the end of the story: desire can lead us into fresh creative discoveries of life and love.
In more recent years, Zen and Sufi mysticism have captured my imagination. They have added to my understanding of the depth of sorrow that lies in all our hearts and of our awakening to desire. Desire senses the transience of all things yet is captivated by moments of beauty and discovery. Desire is not about fulfilment or gratification or possession: desire is an open-hearted vision for a world where love is loosed to heal. Desire is simply about being.
For more than twenty years we have bumped into each other, passing the time of day and sometimes pausing long enough to explore the journey each of us was taking. We are both still sufficiently moist clay for life’s tragedies and life’s surprises to shape us in fresh directions. I have never needed to ask – never thought to ask – what held her in the street community; I can’t imagine the question being relevant. We are simply momentary companions who desire a vision for a world where love is loosed to heal.
Some months back she caught up with me on William Street and after a few pleasantries, enquiries after health and best wishes to Margaret, she said softly and distinctly: ‘you are the candle light of my life’. The words stay with me. I can’t imagine what events may have stirred her to say this: but they affirm that instant in all our lives when we simply share the art of being human. What an honour to be the flickering candle-light in another’s life.
I love the image because it is so fragile. And that is the way of all our relationships. There are broken moments of ecstasy, there are days of indifference, there may be months even years where doubt or despair impede us – and then, the touch of hope, the flicker of light; desire awakens. Someone simply says your name:
you respond by offering the Potter
your heart, soft and tractable,
and keep the form in which
the Artist has fashioned you.
In that moment of naming you are like the woman walking in the Garden of Gethsemane with a sudden flickering sense of presence. The stranger approached. Was he perhaps the gardener? The only clue was her name spoken: ‘Mary’ – and she knew. ‘You are the candle-light of my life’ – and I knew. Mary knew and I knew that love awakens ‘the heart … soft and tractable … keeping the form in which the Artist has fashioned us’.
This is not a call to serve or meet each other through pity or sentimentality – our humanity alone bonds us. Love has a much more powerful agenda. As a priest I have at times succumbed to the expectation that my role is to badger people into conversion and holiness. I have stark memories of being pressured to stand on the steps of the now Downing Centre and preach to a crowd spilling onto Liverpool Street. I remember fellow students unable to go to bed till they had preached salvation to one person. And then that Sunday evening, when a senior student told our gathering that his sermon on hell had resulted in a child leaving the church screaming. If those are 50 year-old memories I hear their repetition among those who still tell us that bombings, cyclones and natural disasters are divine judgment.
What is lost is the embrace of our common humanity as ‘the work of God awaiting the hand of the Artist who does all things in due season’, and with it the vision for a world where Love is loosed to heal. To sustain the image ‘our clay must always be moist’. Hear me explore this with another famous line from Irenaeus’ writing: ‘the glory of God is a human being fully alive’. Now that is a life goal I want to pursue for the rest of my days. It is to allow the flickering candle-light of my life to cast both light and shadow on another’s path. Like me, they will live with the contradictions and confusions of their humanity, but hopefully become open to desire.
For the past six months you and I have been companions in community and in service to each other. Now and then we have welcomed some new person to our group and farewelled others. Today it is my turn to move on and we will never again share in the way we have for these six months. But I hope that when we meet casually in the street we will continue to be a candle-light in each other’s lives.
Desire brings us in touch with our real selves. It affirms the artistry of love and compassion at work in us all, and it evokes creative responses; it engages the divine in our humanity and offers us a vision for a world where love is loosed to heal.
A Prayer to conclude:
It is not you who shape God;
it is God who shapes you.
If then you are the work of God,
await the hand of the Artist
who does all things in due season.
Offer the Potter your heart, soft and tractable,
and keep the form in which
the Artist has fashioned you.
Let your clay be moist,
lest you grow hard and lose
the imprint of the Potter’s fingers.
St Irenaeus, second century Bishop of Lyons, student of Polycarp, disciple of John the Apostle.
Series Final – A Meditation Homily based on an image of the potter from today’s reading of the prophet Jeremiah chapter 18 and a prayer based on that image by St Irenaeus.
Bill Lawton
2 September 2013