WHEN I was a teenager, suffering from anorexia, someone gave me a wooden holding cross. I’m very much ashamed that I don’t remember the giver who showed such wise intuition about what would help me through. I have always thought of myself as someone who lives primarily by words, but I have learned, over and over again, the importance of the other senses in spirituality and worship. The wooden cross is carved to fit into the hand, with the fingers curled around it, so that you can hold it securely, and feel your body and your mind anchored around it. It helps me to pray.
The words from “Rock of ages” do usually float through my mind — “Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to thy Cross I cling” — but I know that my curled hand is doing more than my busy mind. The wooden cross resonates. The wood is both the Tree of the Fall and the Tree of Salvation, but also the actual tree, rooted deep in earth. I have a holding cross made from olive wood from Israel, which takes me straight to the agony of the world, and the imperative of intercession. Someone held a cross in front of Julian of Norwich as she lay on what she thought was her deathbed, and it spoke to her of God’s love and faithfulness. All of this and more is there as I hold on to the cross, but the unsaid is as important as the said.
DOES anyone read Elizabeth Goudge any more? I discovered her as a doorway between worlds — not like the wardrobe into Narnia, and yet imaginatively important because she, too, writes as though faith belongs: you can build a world around it, not just write sermons and essays. It is hard to decide which of her books to write about. In The Scent of Water, with its deeply sympathetic portrayal of the illness of depression, Aunt Mary meets an elderly priest who has suffered from episodes of depression all his life. He passes on three life-giving phrases: “Lord, have mercy”; “Thee I adore”; “Into Thy hands”. They do not “cure” him, or Mary; but they abide, and that offers strength to hold on.
The Rosemary Tree has a description of mysticism from a child’s point of view. It reminds me of Monica Furlong’s Travelling In: such a different book, and yet the same simple, limpid view of the symbiosis of natural and mystical sight. But, in the end, it is The Dean’s Watch that has been the one of Goudge’s books I return to most regularly. She writes of deeply flawed people who are yet capable of change and love; and she knows that history — and the places that hold it — still lives and shapes us, for good and ill.
MY THIRD article has not been with me for as long as the holding cross and Elizabeth Goudge. And it is, to be honest, as much about a person as about an object. It is a kiwi feather that was given to my husband and me by Beverley, the widow of Sir Paul Reeves. Sir Paul is one of my Anglican heroes (and we certainly need those at the moment). His intelligence, drive, and charm took him all over the world, and into deep and complex political and ecclesiastical settings. But it seemed clear that his anchorage was in being a Maori and a Christian.
As a priest and a bishop, Sir Paul worked to build community, and to ensure that Maori voices helped to shape the Church; and, as a Governor-General of New Zealand and as UN Observer for the Anglican Church, he continued to do the same. He is quoted as saying that he learned how to do the politics by being a bishop — being with people, and helping to make a place where all can belong. The Church doesn’t always know itself, or what it has to contribute, if only it would look out rather than in. Sir Paul could teach us a lot. The feather sits on my dressing-table, and our grandson knows it well and loves it, though I’m not sure that he yet knows what a kiwi is, or a bishop, or the Church. I hope that his learning will be positive, and worthy of the blazing white kiwi feather.
Re-reading what I have written, I realise that it is all about what you can hold on to: articles of faith as a bedrock of stability, so that we have the courage to hope and pray for change.
Dr Jane Williams is the McDonald Professor in Christian Theology at St Mellitus College.