Happy new year? But, oh what a year it’s been!
What can be written? Here’s a few of the whirlwind of reflections that come to mind. Please forgive the length - and even this leaves so much unsaid. Anyway, here goes, the tip of the iceberg of my own path through this craziest of years...
The picture above was of the beautiful colours of sky yesterday morning. Yet as I was writing this, an unexpected flurry of snow was coming down outside our windows, on this the threshold of the third day of 2021, covering Hereford streets in a transforming blanket of snowiness, covering grey-green concrete and glistening in the cold, white streetlights. Nothing looks the same after a covering of snow. What could be written about the flurry of 2020 though? Like a snow blanket, reality looks so different now the flakes of 2020 have fallen… What do we make of this? Everything has changed, for all of us.
2020. Surely it will become the dictionary definition of annus horribilis for decades to come. This is a hinge year - on which the doorway of our reality here on earth as the family of humanity is veering into… into what? Into oblivion?
This year threw introspection at us like packed snowballs to the face, knocking us clean over. As I consumed headlines like some vicious monster, reality became like a disaster movie, except more exceptionally nuanced. Like a movie trip it sucks you into a surreal zone, attaching you to an ethereal connection to internet headlines, all while I was doing very little physically but sitting on the computer at home. Like Ready Player One, we entered our virtual realities and I feasted on mine like some obscene bystander at the Roman colosseum, and reality became like a foggy dream. Reality, for me, was less dramatic than the headlines, with much less drama and much more… greyness. I used a newfound addiction to online Guardian articles and Twitter trends as a form of escapism - an exceptionally messed-up one where one feasts on drama to escape your own suffocating mundaneness.
Greyness. If there is one word that summarises the negative aspect of 2020 for me, this is it. A load of greyness. Foggy narrowed horizons, drawing me back into what I thought was my own tiny mind. And I was horrified by what I found. Alluded to above, I saw myself as a narcissistic, self-obsessed onlooker devoid of compassion, pleased by how interesting all the headlines had become. People became 2D rectangles on a Zoom screen, the neatly folding Gmail icon coming up on the screen became a dread, video editing at all hours, but an overwhelming feeling of, “What is the point?” An overriding feeling of, “How can I do this when my heart is so hard?” How can I make encouraging videos, which speak of the love of God, when this grey year has exposed my rotten heart?
But God. “But God…” Those two words, the divine, glorious hinge of Ephesians 2. “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us…” But God, rich in mercy, limitless in creativity, knew how to take my rotten heart and shine. And oh how He shone! He did not snuff out the smouldering wick. I always feared He would do - but oh no, He brings the flame back to life!
Greyness. Introspection forced like an avalanche. A turning inwards to a place that I dreaded, that I hated - the inside of my own heart, my own mind, my own soul. For as long as I can remember this has been a place of narrowness, of suffocatingly small horizons, a place of runaway thoughts and wilderness, lack of control, greyness and slavery to my own uncontrollable affections, which overwhelmed all my weak will. Music has been my drug - my Spotify playlists always named things like “Horizons of Vision” or something, longing for the lifting of 80s nostalgia, a decade I never lived in but deeply felt its emotions, or the passion of worship music, but finding less and less that they satisfied. This year was too much. My heart was raging all over the place. I still love music, as a gift from God to us. But I was using it to escape from my own mind. Music was a balm, but I needed something more.
More specifically, I was escaping from the conversation God had been inviting me to all this time. I played loud worship music into my ears for hours to blare out my own thoughts. And sometimes it worked, but it worked less than it had done. What was I to do? Where could I go? I have doubted You so many times, O Lord! Whenever I see the disaster of my own heart, then I struggle to believe that You ever could make me Your dwelling-place. Come on, even the way I write sounds narcissistic, self-obsessed! But God made this place of greyness, the place of broken dreams, dulled expectations - He made it a place of new life. The thickness of the fog only made my search for the sunlight more earnest, more zealous. And this year, this year of greyness, God broke in, like the sunlight beams tearing through fog’s dreary veil.
I realised something massive was stirring this summer, in Ireland, visiting Nomi’s amazing family, being taught through them the true meaning of ‘brother’ and ‘sister’. What a healing time this was! Late nights spent listening to worship videos from YouTube, Upper Room being my go-to channel. I just loved seeing my brothers and sisters worshipping, and saw this as a vision of what I longed for - a reality where all of humankind would be filled with delight at meeting their God. I wanted to pray for billions of souls to be drawn into this beautiful connection to their Creator. And God broke through to me and showed me His wonderfulness on so many nights. It was an August of dreams.
This August also spent time with one of my most cherished brothers in Christ - Charles Spurgeon. Over 100 years my senior, it didn’t matter - I had been listening to the audiobook version of his autobiography. His life and the power of God working in him, and his deep devotion to Jesus, his intimate love and the way he spoke of our Lord, lifted me. Now - just as an aside - lest anyone think me a bookworm, I have been terrible at reading for many years now, but the discovery of audiobooks has absolutely changed my life. Now reading has become my greatest hobby, more than that, my sustenance to lift me out of the greyness of my own perspective. And to hear the words of love of a brother or sister, even one who lived centuries ago, for our God, began to thrill my soul in a way I cannot even explain. It was as though I was feeling the emotions of those I read. It was like the lyrics of songs, except in an even deeper way. The ‘reading bug’ (or more accurately, the ‘listening bug’) really does bite! I sought out any writer I could find who seemed to speak deeply on their own relationship with God. What I yearned for is to feed off the devotion of others to God. And I was absolutely blown away by the realisation that, by just reading, I could through their eyes experience the emotions that the very authors, my brothers and sisters in Christ, were feeling. I would become carried away with love of God in deeper ways than I had ever known.
So by the latter Autumn, just as the leaves became all so colourful, God was painting new colours in my soul. Then came what I can only describe as my ‘contemplative awakening’. That’s not meant to sound pretentious, it’s just the phrase that kept sticking in my head. Basically, the back story here is I have (inwardly at least) been horrendously dismissive of what I perceived as ‘quieter’ forms of worship. Anything that was quiet, reflective, ‘contemplative’, was dismissed by me as boring, and, more seriously, heartless. I made the baseless supposition that what was quiet was shallow, meaningless, ‘going through the motions’, as evidenced by the lack of external expression, or so I thought.
But then God hit me with the Carmelites. Who were they? It’s a Roman Catholic monastic order that emphasises ‘contemplation’ - which I learnt was not ‘sitting in silence and feeling nothing’, as I had presumed, but ‘a loving gaze on Jesus Christ’. It was stillness, yes, but intensely passionate stillness. This was the reality of ‘gazing on the beauty of the Lord’ that I had long been captivated by in Psalm 27, but had not understood. Being 27 this year, on the 27th January, I had taken this Psalm as my own in some way, but did not know that by the end of this year God would have blown open the meaning of this concept like never before. St Teresa of Jesus (also known as Teresa of Avila) and her descriptions of her experiences of God became overwhelmingly wonderful to me. And that is an understatement. What I had loved and been so captivated by in Charles Spurgeon, I also saw in her. And then I saw that so many of her brethren also were captivated by this concept of a deep and loving gaze on Jesus. And it dawned on my that my stupid partisanism (for stupid is the only adequate word) that I clearly held onto though I tried to hide it and pretended I was much more ‘ecumenical’ than I really was, was utter rubbish. To my shame, I admit I used to dismiss these Catholic forms of spirituality - but then realised that there was no difference. It was all about loving God. And Spurgeon, in his deep calvinism - which had its own treasures that I was beginning to appreciate more and more - and Teresa of Jesus - with her Carmelite contemplation, were one and the same. But why was I surprised! For we are all one Church, one family in Christ, one Spouse of Christ, one, one, one. It is what I had given lip service to. But now it was manifest.
And as I read more of Teresa’s descriptions of ‘contemplative’ prayer, I was captivated in a way that is very difficult to state properly. Her massive insight to me was to find God as dwelling within you - the reality I had long cherished in 1 Corinthians 6:19 - “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you…”. I also became amazed by the idea that we are made “one spirit” (6:17) with the Lord Jesus, that there was one and the same Holy Spirit in Jesus and me. Paul was right to write ‘Or do you not know…?’ Yes I thought I knew it, but also knew my heart was too rotten, surely, and so doubted its reality for me. But Teresa, my sister in Christ of almost 500 years ago, who might have a different theology in so many ways, had an insight here that was incredible. She would speak of finding God as dwelling in our own souls, like a “little heaven”. And she would tell of the ‘prayer of recollection’, where you spend time with the God who doesn’t only dwell in heavens, or even only in the same room as you, but actually dwells within you. What closer friend, closer Father, closer Beloved one could there be? And she would tell of the ‘prayer of quiet’, something I would have absolutely dismissed as boring and emotionless just months ago, but became a fascination - the idea of God filling us with delight at His presence within us, and us just quietly kneeling there and enjoying the wonderful way He delights us in Himself. I felt, when she wrote about these things, that I was almost tasting the experience of them.
Following on from this have been some of the deepest moments of prayer I have ever known. They have enabled me to find a wonderful haven with Jesus, who has been so kind as to make His home within me, even in the greyest days. They have provided a home for me of warmth beyond anything found in my addiction to news articles, or even my love of music. Beyond the most blissful human experience I have ever known, without a hint of exaggeration. Greyness had now been replaced by golden light.
And what was opened to me, in contrast to my earlier view of the narrowness of my own mind, and hence dread of introspection, was a vast world of my own soul, of the rich potential of my inner life. I came to realise that the human heart is created by God capable of vast emotions, and a consciousness of an incredible diversity of ideas. After all, we perceive the real world in so many ways, and all of this is only because our mind is able to create a representation within itself of what it perceives with its senses. I began to see that, while we are infinitesimally tiny compared with the wonderful infinity of the Mind and Heart of God - and I would not want it any other way - that God actually made our hearts, minds and souls to be vast worlds of potential. Potential for imagination, potential for devotion, potential for dwelling, potential for love. And none of this needed to be tied to my external experiences. No matter what was happening outside, if God were within me, He has a vast world with which I dwell with Him. I cannot express how big a discovery this was for me - as though my mind has gone from the tiny place I used to dread it was, crammed full of grey and acid stressful thoughts, to a humongous world where God loved to dwell. And He was working on my heart there. Finally I feel I have hope that this rottenness in me is in the process of being healed.
What is the height of all this? The greatest commandment, the highest moral absolute, the pinnacle of holiness, is unequivocally stated by Jesus as:
‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ (Luke 10:27)
This is the greatest thing! To love God with all of ourselves, with all the vastness of capacity for love that exists within me, to love the God who has already made His own dwelling in us. To love Him with everything. What a calling! To love is to find great joy in the One loved. The loving one delights in the Beloved. There is no greater joy than to love. And to love with all our heart, soul, strength, mind, to pour this love on the most beautiful One, on God Himself, this is heaven itself! I am so far from this. But the invitation enthralls me forever, and makes me want to just plunge myself into this ocean of love for the God who dwells in me, whose work in me creates the very fruit of love that I long to love Him with.
Often out of the darkest times come the most golden and glorious sunrises. And this discovery of wonder, absolutely rapturous, wondrous love of God, this year, in the midst of my blandness and greyness, is a gift that I am endlessly grateful for, and will change the whole of the rest of my life. So God took my 2020 fog, and gave me a 2020 vision I never expected - which was a taste of His infinite beauty.
One thing I have asked from the Lord, that I shall seek:
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
To behold the beauty of the Lord
And to meditate in His temple.
(Psalm 27:4)