Barnes in Common

the magazine of Churches Together in Barnes
May/June 2005

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Pastoral Letter

from Father Paul Holland, St Michael and all Angels

Dear Friends,

If you go into any major bookshop a new feature over the last ten years has been the section "Body, Mind and Spirit", a diverse collection of spiritual matters ranging from Tarot cards and astrology to discovering your guardian angel. A heady mix of magic, mysticism and mind expansion.

It is an interesting exercise to spend some time simply observing who comes and browses and what books they take off the shelves to dip into, or to buy. There is clearly a great thirst for the mysterious, for something or other that points to another dimension, another way of seeing the world around us and different ways of being in it. We can see a similar thirst when we visit our national art galleries. Major exhibitions have never been so popular. The number of visitors to the "Seeing Salvation" exhibition in the year 2000 exceeded the promoter's wildest dreams. The more recent display of Caravaggio's last pictures looks like doing the same. Even the BBC national news gave time to discuss some of the religious imagery. Galleries have become the new cathedrals, where people come to look, contemplate and wonder in quiet reverence. Pictures have become the modern sacrament of the age, pointing the viewer to a world beyond them.

Observing these visitors observing the pictures you cannot but be aware that a search is in progress. We are all looking for that encounter which will enrich, give meaning and perhaps change the way we view ourselves and the world around us. This desire for a brief glimpse into another world can also be seen in our busy underground trains where poetry has found a place among the adverts. Commuters are now invited to read Keats' "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold" on a crowded Central line, or attempt to memorise a sonnet between Leicester Square and Hammersmith.

These poems provide a solace, a relief, turning sullen faces into smiles, offering momentary refreshment for the soul in a place where you would least expect to find anything remotely poetic. Poetry, whose sales have soared in recent years, has now become the new scriptures in our busy world, where insight and revelation are found in the language of shared experience. I can hardly go into a bookshop without acquiring a slender volume of poems to read while enjoying my Espresso.

This is just to say
I have eaten
The plums
That were in
The icebox
And which
You were probably
Saving
For breakfast.
Forgive me
They were delicious
So sweet
And so cold.
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

There is clearly a search going on to quench a thirst that lies at the heart of what it is to be human.

Émile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology, understood this. He saw that in all of us there is a need to be awakened to realities beyond everyday life, a desire for the transcendent, without which we remain dissatisfied.

The upsurge of interest in aesthetic experience, be it found in an art gallery, a concert hall, or the quiet reflection on a poem, reveals this ongoing quest is alive. The routines of normal existence are unable to satisfy or quench the thirst for transcendence, a longing which seems to be built into who we are.

I rejoice that a poem in the Underground, a picture in a gallery, or a book lifted from the shelves of a bookshop, all have the potential to keep alive the rumour that we are not just flesh and blood, but spirit as well.

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