The Resurrection

I have never understood people who claim to be Christian but don't believe in the resurrection. That surely is the whole point of Christianity and it demonstrates who and what Christ is. If it's not true, Christianity is built on a lie so why bother with it even if you think its moral teachings are helpful? I grant that the resurrection can be seen as a metaphor but it's a true metaphor. It's the point where myth and reality coincide. For the life of Jesus was the one occasion in history when something utterly real has happened on Earth. Everything else approximates, to a greater or lesser degree, to transcendent archetypal pattern but Christ is the pattern embodied in its perfection.

I see the resurrection as something you would never have thought possible before it happens but then when it does happen you realise it actually makes complete sense. We all suspect that death is somehow an offence to life, a cruel insult, and to see it defeated in this way has a kind of cosmic logic to it that goes far beyond mere earthly reason. It is confirmation of a truth felt in the heart but not known outwardly until it actually takes place when it seems (for Christ, it would not seem so for anyone else) almost inevitable.

The surrounding events of the resurrection also fall into a pattern of deepest truth. The ignominious death representing the nadir of disillusion and despair. All is lost, all hope and joy destroyed. We have reached the very bottom. But then the wonder of the resurrection and the confirmation that Christ really was who he said he was. You might say it's all too good to be true but that saying only has any rationale to it in the context of a meaningless universe. If the universe has meaning, which if course it must or we would not even have the conception of meaning nor would we feel the lack it, then nothing is too good to be true. Truth and goodness are one and the same. That is why we all crave goodness as we do truth, and recognise them as right. 

And after the resurrection Christ didn't just disappear completely straightaway or else carry on teaching as before, making grand public appearances in Jerusalem. That too seems right. We have entered a new cycle. To return to his previous ministry would have somehow been vulgar and ostentatious. He has risen from the dead but he's not a show off! He doesn't want to force people to believe in him. He wants them to come to him because of an inner movement towards truth in their own hearts. So he stays and he teaches for a certain period and then he ascends into heaven with his risen and transformed body, leaving his disciples to spread his word. All is just as it should be. The important qualities of dignity and beauty are observed. There is glory but there is also reticence. There is no brash shouting about this momentous event but it is left to speak for itself. It is a sacred thing and is treated as such.

Nowadays many people apparently don't even believe that Christ existed never mind that he rose from the dead. The churches have not done this story any favours by reducing both it and Christ to a humanistic level in which the main message is to be nice to each other and treat everyone as equals in terms of this world. But this was not the message of Christ at all. He came to give us the life more abundant and save us from the spiritual death of a materialistic existence. He pointed us towards the higher life centred in the reality of God and demonstrated what this was by dying to his earthly self and then being reborn in a new spiritual state in which the old nature was not destroyed but transformed into something higher. But this old self could not be reborn until it had been allowed to die, and the lesson is that we cannot become like Christ until we too allow our old natural self to die, and this includes the relations it has to the world and to other people on its own level. 

It seems to me that the modern churches don't emphasise this anywhere near enough when it should be central. They don't say that the old self must die to be transformed, but that it must just become better. Stay the same, keep its old centre but be more inclusive and brotherly. This was summed up by C.S. Lewis as the difference between nice people or new men. To be a new man requires the death of the old man not his improvement. He does not become better, he must become new. Not changed but transformed. Resurrection must always be preceded by death. Jesus taught this and he demonstrated it. It is the central fact of his life and mission.

If the resurrection were just a metaphor, it would be worse than a lie because it is purported to be true. Which is not proof it literally is true but if it is then that changes everything. You can reject it if you like but if you do you are rejecting something fundamental about God and his self-revelation to the world. You cannot say it is just a symbol and keep Christianity. It is a symbol but that of which it is a symbol is only possible for us because it was acted out in this physical world by Christ thereby creating the possibility of spiritual rebirth for all humanity. Without the energy released by his crucifixion and resurrection, we would still be living in darkness with escape from this world through the rejection of self the only spiritual possibility. Christ redeemed the material world because he sanctified it through first embracing it and then transforming its darkness, thereby making possible the salvation of creation and its eventual integration with spirit. 

The resurrection is the triumph of spirit over matter but in this victory matter is not rejected, dismissed or denied but raised up and glorified in and by spirit.

The Last of Logres

The ruins of Glastonbury Abbey

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There is one particular aspect of the Arthurian mythos which, as far as I am aware, has not been reflected on as much as it should. After the Last Battle and Arthur's voyage to Avalon, a number of surviving knights join a monastic community which, in Rosemary Sutcliff's retelling, The Road to Camlann (1981), later develops into Glastonbury Abbey:

'Within half a year came Sir Blamore and Sir Bleoberis, and little by little certain others of the old lost brotherhood of the Round Table. And when in due time the ancient Archbishop died, Sir Lancelot, whom he had made a priest while he yet lived, stepped into his place and celebrated Mass for the rest as he had done and for all who chanced to pass that way.

'So they continued for seven years, living in prayer and poverty and giving their help and comfort to all who sought it; and keeping the last light of Logres alive as they kept the honey-wax candles burning on the rough altar, while the darkness flowed in over the rest of the land. For though Constantine, Duke of Cornwall and a young kinsman of Arthur, had taken the High Kingship and led his troops to battle under the dragon banner, he was not Arthur, and there was little that he could do against the Sea Wolves and the Old People from the mountains and the North.'

What is notable here is that the knights seem to intuit that the time for action is past and the time for contemplation has begun. Martha cedes place to Mary, you might say. The knights could, of course, have carried on the fight, pledging their allegiance to Constantine or forming a resistance movement in the hills. But no, they understand that fighting is behind them now and that the Round Table has served its purpose, leaving behind a glorious legend that will inspire the men and women of Albion for centuries to come. They recognise that something different is required from them, a prayerful, inner-directed counterpoint to the years of struggle and striving in the outer world. And this new orientation bears fruit in unexpected ways. After Sir Lancelot's death:

'Sir Bedivere and several of the brotherhood remained at the little church and its hermitage all the rest of their days, gathering others to them, so that at last the place became an abbey again; and later still, mighty and beautiful stone buildings arose where the little wattle church and its surrounding bothies had been. And men began to call it Glastonbury.'

The Sea Wolves sweep across the land, but the little church keeps the flame of faith alive, becoming a 'mighty and beautiful' abbey, a foretaste of the Christendom that gave us the great cathedrals which stud the land like jewels, from Carlisle to Salisbury and Canterbury to Durham. These mighty edifices - these 'sermons in stone' - are storehouses of spiritual energy, worthy successors to the stone circles of the Celtic and neolithic eras, and becoming increasingly popular. Visitor figures have been up for a while now, with Choral Evensong especially well-attended. Their finest hour may still be yet to come.

It is good to reflect upon these themes on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, two days of apparent defeat and despair. As Saturday evening in Jerusalem shades into Saturday night, nothing seems to be happening at all. There is nothing more to happen in any case. All is over, finished, consummated. Or so it appears.

But how deceptive appearances can be. Transformation is a mysterious, unquantifiable thing. Its ways are not our ways. Think of the tiny seed in Jesus's parable which grows without fanfare or headlines into the mightiest tree in the forest. This should give us hope on the micro-level too - all those occasions when we feel stuck, frustrated and shorn of inspiration. 'I've nothing to show for my life', we sometimes say, but we don't know that yet. We don't know it at all, in fact. For Jesus's followers on Holy Saturday, everything looked done and dusted, yet all the while He was setting the spirits of the dead free in Hades and breaking the power of death. The real work - Christ's Harrowing of Hell being the great archetypal example - goes on in secret and in silence.

Why are there no good leaders, and only bad leaders, in modern Albion?

I believe that we need to have confidence that events are extremely malleable to Divine Influences - such that God can arrange matters so Real Life provides the experiences we personally need to learn-from - and when these recur it is because we have not yet learned.

By Real Life I means your life and my life, specifically - I am not talking about people you know about only by Hearsay... from the mass media, reading books, seeing movies or whatever.

Here and now we in Albion live in a world without good leaders, and no good leaders are even 'on offer'. We must assume that if leaders were going to be helpful, then we would have them - at the least we would be given the opportunity to choose good leaders.

God can do this! God has done it often in the past when the right person has emerged at the right time and done the right things - but God is not currently doing it.

As all our major leaders are incompetent, corrupt, indeed active agents of evil; then we should assume that this situation contains a lesson we need to learn and have not learned.

England Led the World Into Materialism

England was probably the first country to adopt the mindset that led to the materialisation of consciousness and the present-day attitudes in which God has no place. It was a pioneer in many areas that formed the contemporary world. You can't trace this back to any single formational event or time but Protestantism was certainly one step towards the separation of the natural and supernatural worlds, and then the English Civil War was another. One religious, the other political. The fact that both of these things may have had positive elements to them is beside the point. The basic truth is that they opened up a gap between the spiritual and the material which, once opened, could be expanded exponentially until the point was reached at which the spiritual was so far removed it no longer existed in any real sense and could just be denied reality. That is now. Consciousness has effectively contracted to the material which is not just perceived as primary but as all there is. This has affected even religion which is largely earthbound and moribund these days. That contraction may have been beneficial in some areas, such as the development of certain qualities of selfhood and the exploration and dominance of the physical world, but these cannot be said to compensate for the spiritual loss that has accompanied them.

It might be pointed out that these external events were just the manifestation of inner changes in consciousness which brought them about and therefore they were secondary, and that is perfectly true. Nevertheless, they also hastened the process of materialisation and grounded it in a way that enabled it to proceed and spread much more rapidly. And it was in and through England that this largely (though not exclusively, of course) came about.

The development of the physical sciences really started to take off in England in the 17th century with the founding of the Royal Society a seminal moment, and thereafter there are too many English scientists at the leading edge of their disciplines to count. Newton and Darwin are obvious examples of people whose work changed the world but there are many more. Again, this was not something that was limited to England but if anywhere was the centre of this work then it was England which was also where the industrial revolution first took hold. The same is true with regard to the new socialist political movements. When I lived in France I used to enjoy teasing the French, still viewing their Revolution through rose tinted spectacles, that the English had killed their king long before they had killed theirs.

So, blame England for the modern world!

But there is another side to this story. Alongside the prosaic, matter of fact qualities of Englishmen of the 18th and 19th centuries there existed the romantic Englishman, best exemplified by her poets whose names are too well known to require mentioning, but also appearing in other forms of literature and perhaps too in a special concern with landscape and natural beauty. And I would say that it was chiefly in England in the 19th and 20th centuries that new approaches to spirituality began to be explored, often in clumsy ways, it is true, but the intentions were generally good, and the aspiration to higher things real. The reaction against materialism first took place in the country that was principally responsible for it.

At present, any opening to spiritual awakening that seemed possible at various times over the last 150 years appears to have gone away. We are currently more locked into materialistic attitudes than ever. Even the revivals of the New Age, self-indulgent and foolish as they often were, seem to have faded away. Perhaps the damp squib that was 2012 was responsible for that. Some people look to Brexit as indicating a stirring of some sort but that seems wildly optimistic to me. Brexit is a patriotic reaction to the destruction of this country's individuality but in the vast majority of cases the people who voted for it were not considering spiritual factors.

Nevertheless, I do consider that Britain still has a part to play in the spiritual awakening of the world. As does America which is one reason why these two countries are relentlessly attacked and their inner integrity constantly undermined by the powers dedicated to the destruction of spiritual truth. Sometimes great light and darkness are to be found in the same place which makes sense when you consider that the devil would naturally focus his guns on the areas of greatest threat to him. So, although there is much darkness in this country there is also light but, paradoxically, that is less easy to see largely because it is a spiritual thing and works mostly behind the scenes. But it is there and we have to do our best to foster it, both in ourselves and in the world around us. Even if a few little candles of light remain that will eventually be enough to light others and eventually banish the darkness.

England led the world into materialism. That had a purpose at the time but its time is past. It is now time for England to remedy the situation and try to lead the world back out of the materialistic despond. She must rediscover the spiritual light at her heart and set it up on top of a hill so that it can be seen by and inspire all. She will not be alone in this but it is possible that, just as Rome was first the centre of an empire and then became a spiritual centre, so the pattern might be repeated in England or the United States, the destinies of both countries being intertwined to a degree, I believe.

Aidan Hart - Iconographer and Sacred Artist

Christ the All Merciful

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Jesus said, 'This is what the Kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain - first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.'

Mark 4: 26-29

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It is easy to feel down-heartened about the state of Christianity in Britain today. Church attendance, we are continually told, is in free-fall, while practicing Christians are bundled out of the public square with almost celebratory haste. Yet the parable of the growing seed encourages us to look at the situation differently. The Kingdom of God is mysterious and unquantifiable. It cannot be measured, weighed or counted. It grows in secret ways and places that are foreign to the linear, rationalistic mind. Night and day it grows, whether we sleep or get up. We need eyes to see it though, and ears to hear, neither of which are easy to obtain in this spiritually obtuse age. The good news, however, is that signs of renewal can in fact be found all around us, often in independent, non-official, non-obvious places. The sacred art of Aidan Hart is one of these places.

Hart was born in England in 1957, though he spent most of his early life in New Zealand, where he trained as a secondary school teacher and began practicing as a sculptor. He became a member of the Greek Orthodox Church in 1983, returned to live in England and started his career as a professional iconographer. He lived for two years as a monk on Mount Athos, then spent six years as a hermit in Shropshire. He is now married with two children.

Hart's website - www.aidanharticons.com - illustrates the quality and quantity of his work as well as the sheer variety of his oeuvre: panel paintings, frescoes, carvings, illuminated manuscripts, mosaics, and more. He is also in demand as a teacher, speaker and writer, and his website gives numerous examples of his written and spoken work. He has written two books, Techniques of Icon and Wall Painting (2011) and Beauty Spirit Matter: Icons in the Modern World (2014), and was elected a fellow of the Temenos Academy in 2015. He now has over 900 commissioned works in private and church collections in over 25 countries.

What I find especially cheering is that this great wellspring of spiritual and artistic energy should be bubbling up from the heart of our country. Aidan Hart lives and works in Shropshire, one of the quietest and most sparsely populated counties in England. Maybe some of that calm and stillness carries over into his art and strikes a chord with a public desperately in need of the peace and centredness that only contact with the Divine can bring. Modern men and women, as T.S. Eliot observed in Four Quartets, are 'distracted from distraction by distraction', but these distractions can only numb the ache of a life lived without ultimate point or purpose. They cannot save or heal. Aidan Hart's icons, on the other hand, can help do exactly that, imbued as they are with the salvific, restorative peace that Eliot in the same poem calls, 'the still point of the turning world.'

Hart's icons have a particular resonance, I feel, for those of us with a connection to the British Isles, simply because his work features so many British and Irish saints. This icon of the sixth-century saint, Kentigern of Strathclyde (also known as Mungo), for instance, is a fine example:

Hart's abundant body of work, emanating from the quietness of Shropshire and informed by his monastic experience, plays an analogous role, I feel, to the lives and work of St. Kentigern and the other British and Irish saints of the late Roman and early Anglo Saxon periods. This was a time not unlike our own in many ways, an age of uncertainty and incipient chaos, where the moral and social values that underpinned the Pax Romana for centuries were falling apart, undermined from within and without. St. Kentigern, as a young man, wanted to take a step back from the Empire's collapse, living a life of prayer, simplicity and solitude in a small cell near an extinct volcano. But as with the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt a century previously, he discovered that others came seeking him, recognising in the life he was living something of the meaning, authenticity and integrity that the Western Roman world had to all intents and purposes already lost.

Aidan Hart's work punches precisely at this level. People encounter it once, then come back for more, just as the men and women of the fifth century came to St. Kentigern. There is a depth and a seriousness to it, together with a joy and a radiance, that cuts right through the tightening mesh of contemporary life - the soulless bureaucracy of the state, the spirit-sapping squeeze of market forces and the adversarial, increasingly polarised nature of political debate. His icons speak the language of Truth, and people respond to that. When you look at his art, you feel at home. The human heart was made for God, irrespective of all the decline we see around us. It will always resonate - no matter how unconsciously or inarticulately - to an icon, a piece of music or a poem (Four Quartets again, for example) which speaks at that level.

It is also important to challenge contemporary misconceptions as to what religious faith entails. Aidan Hart does this very well in his talks and essays. All too often, we suppress the stirrings of our hearts and turn away from a relationship with God because we feel it will somehow cancel out our personality or consist of nothing more than adherence to a strict set of rules. In his talk, The Icon Tradition From Within, Hart shows us that the opposite is true. A life lived in faith is a liberation, not a prison sentence. There is nothing legalistic or self-annihilating about it. On the contrary, it rescues us from the dead ends of individualism and sets us on the path to community and love, a fertile place of life and growth where our true calling and identity can shine forth:

'Although our walk with God is according to the commands given to all, the details of this walk are unique because each one of us is unique ... And one's true, God-illuminated self is the greatest gift we can give to others. White light is made of many colours, and our task is to be one of these colours.'

Our ultimate destiny is not a fixed and final state of 'eternal bliss', but rather a dynamic, two-way relationship with Christ, leading us 'further up and further in' - as C.S Lewis put it in The Last Battle - to the beating heart of the Holy Trinity. As Hart told his listeners in a talk at All Saints Anglican Church, Baschurch, Shropshire:

'We are all called to be transfigured. We are called not merely to follow Christ at a distance, but to be Christ-bearers, to shine with the same glory, the same light of divinity with which he shines.'

To contemplate the work of Aidan Hart is to take a first step on that journey. His sacred art frees us from the prisons of our egos and helps us frame our joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, triumphs and frustrations in a wider, more spacious context, packed full of meaning and love and brimming over with 'that peace which passeth all understanding.' As such, his iconography stands as an outstanding counterpart to the diminished spiritual horizons of our age, 'shining with the same glory, the same light of divinity with which he shines.'

The Mandillion