devotional W


The search for reality Florence Allshorn


hat is happening in the minds of those people – poets, artists, philosophers – who are more sensitive to the Realm of Reality than we ordinary people


are? Tey are telling us two things: that there is a Reality beyond our realities, and that in the mind of man there has grown a real nausea of selfhood. Te artists and poets seek for Reality from a different


direction than we religious people do. Tey have first a hunger for search, secondly they find their technique, and to find that they stumble across discipline. I imagine it would be true to say that the seeking powers in us are less strong than the longing for self-improvement – and that these men have something very true to teach us. But it is the religious people – Karl Earth, Heim, Niebuhr,


Maritain – who are trying to search for the reason of our ‘out of touchness’ with reality.


The waste land What has happened in the larger sphere of humanity is


described by Earth as ‘a shatering halt in the presence of God’. Te despairing man says, ‘We stand in a waste land in which we wander and from which we do not find the way to


sacred vision H


aving just cast my vote in the current election for a new General Synod, I return to a theme that continues to fascinate me: the integrity and self-assurance so powerfully conveyed in medieval pictures of women saints – the virgin martyrs in particular. In the world of action, deeds,


narrative, Everyman is indeed a man, because (perhaps) men are able to do a wider range of things including, most importantly, fighting. In a renaissance and humanist context, mankind is presented as masculine – think of Leonardo’s nude inside the square and circle, his feet both together and apart – there he stands confident, self-defining, in control. But the person? As person, you might say, apart from a


narrative of deeds, and other than the thrusting champions of the new learning. As the ordinary Christian – someone whose life is largely controlled by others, or by outside forces, someone who suffers, someone whose life is constrained


12 ■ newdirections ■ October 2010


escape…’ Te moment is made more catastrophic because sin is in the world as something vast, intracable and furious. How far we enter into that deep true experience of our


age depends on our own desire; and that desire is eager just in so far as we are allowing that Reality beyond our Reality to have its way with us. If we are following the road of our own wills and ways we shall not feel it very deeply – but we shall have no message that will in any way satisfy the seeking young life of our generation. We religious leaders need to look very much more deeply. We can so easily have talks with people and they can say we have helped, write us grateful leters, even stand steady for a time till the juice we have put into them has run out, but we may have brought them no hunger for God (because that hunger is no ache in our own heart) or anywhere near to the end of Self.


Leading God’s children But I think it would be true to say that most of us have


entered into that experience of the waste land – a longing to escape from Self to something bigger. And we are the people who are supposed to have the message of how not to escape it, but to go through and lead out. We have to be quite sure we are not dodging our waste land. If we could come to a place where we stand uterly stripped of both the clothing of characer and customs we have built up around ourselves, and in despair of ourselves, we might be at this time I believe most happy. Because it would mean that God was trueing us for the leading of his children out of their waste land. Have we learned enough to do it?


From the Notebooks of Florence Alshorn, Founder of the Julian Community ND


St Catherine - 15th century


by circumstances, but who nevertheless by the powerful grace of God maintains her integrity, and enhances her status as person. Our Lady, of course, expresses this quiet integrity better than any, but it is understandable if she is regarded as a special case. In her medieval role of penitent sinner (unlike her modern role of apostle), Mary Magdalene stands for each believer, male or female. But St Catherine of Alexandria, with only a legendary back story, offered the most popular expression of this vision of personal integrity. Note the male king, with his henchmen, who sought to rape her,


furtive and aggressive. Note the blood-thirsty violence of her wheel, destroyed and destroying. And in the centre the calm self-assurance of the saint herself. We cannot be absolutely sure, but the artist-illuminator was most probably a man, portraying her universal status and significance.


Nigel Anthony


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