PENTECOST marks a heightened awareness of the presence of the Holy Spirit at the end of a joyful Eastertide, and marks the beginning of what ought to be a new and vibrant spiritual life for Christians as we grow spiritually during the Trinity season.
Unfortunately, the realities of life do not always allow this. It can be hard simply to switch moods. Conflicts, unexpected crises, or day-to-day fears and difficulties do not vanish, as they appear to have done — momentarily, perhaps — for the frightened disciples, in the upper room. They remain obstinately with us.
If we are preoccupied with anxiety or sadness, it is hard to engineer our thinking into a more joyful place to fit the Easter season, especially when we try to pray. We are distracted, and it becomes hard to focus on other things. The time usually allotted for prayer, when we are reasonably rested and our brain is free of extraneous clutter, may not be available, or we have guests staying whose needs must be attended to.
There may be somewhere that we need to be by a certain time, or the day has been fraught with difficulties that are hard to set aside. But, when it comes to prayer, if the mood or circumstances do not fit the season, perhaps it is because we are trying too hard.
ST SILOUAN the Athonite, an Eastern Orthodox monk, writing from his monastery on Mount Athos at the beginning of the 20th century, enjoins his followers to “keep [their] minds in hell and not [to] despair”. We are not to deny the realities of the human condition or the moods of the moment, but to embrace all of these in hope.
Artists, poets, and musicians — of every faith and none — help us to face into reality without despairing. They are called to enable prayer. The paintings of Francis Bacon and Edvard Munch, both depicting a screaming figure, hold nothing back. Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth who “die as cattle”, or W. B. Yeats’s poem The Second Coming are indictments of societies spiritually akin to our own. Yeats writes, “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold . . . the falcon cannot hear the falconer.” The reader is left with little alternative but to cling on in prayer.
Having been a painter myself, I know a little of what that artistic depiction entails. You have to get beneath the surface of things. You do not represent things as they are, or even as you may see them according to your own aesthetic judgement. You release something in them — or in a situation — that connects with a yearning for the holy. This is what is generally thought of as inspiration. There is something of this yearning in all of us.
People I have spoken with who describe themselves as agnostic, or who are opposed to the idea of faith altogether, are also often waiting to be connected in some way to the Spirit that gives life — a Spirit that they cannot name, a Spirit that inspires. It is in the “not naming” that we often find common ground. We can also agree that we know when we have found it.
Art and music can give voice to what many of us, in our different ways, might call the holy. The holy is both the source and the inspiration for art that provokes a spark of recognition — of something already known, but for which a person has no name. James Joyce would have called such moments “epiphanies”.
WHEN we speak of prayer as something that is inspired, in the way a painting or a piece of music might be inspired, we are actually talking about truth. Truth is a dangerous word because it is too often constricted into a one-size-fits-all definition, as something empirically provable. What is not provable is then false.
But the truth that is to be found, or stumbled upon, in both art and prayer is of a quite different order. It does not really have a name or definition, but it is the truth for which the disciples of Jesus abandoned their nets and — leaving their father to carry on the business — followed the master. It is truth known and recognised in a single “epiphany” moment.
Ephiphaines, or epiphany moments, can also be experienced as a coming together of all things in a flash of understanding, which gives meaning to a person’s whole life. This may happen as they are taking their last breath or it may give clarity and purpose to work that a person is yet to undertake. This clarity of understanding is what is meant by “calling” or “vocation”.
The artist must understand their own specific calling as something that is inherently life-giving and that does not depend in any way on the outward or material trappings of affirmation or success. Only very great artists have been capable of this level of detachment in regard to their work, which is why so many of them live in penury and remain unknown, often until long after their death.
SUCH a level of detachment also captures something of the nature of Christian prayer. Detachment is not about separating oneself from the realities of daily life, from the world around us, or even from our own personal needs and concerns (including our need for affirmation and acceptance). It is more about taking a giant leap into the unknown while embracing all these things.
Inspiration, or a yearning for the holy, plays a part in this. A person may recognise the holy as a particular truth or reality from the minute they begin to pray or to pay attention to God. They will discover that this truth is something they have always known — even if, in this particular moment, they know it for the first time.
The Revd Dr Lorraine Cavanagh is an author and a priest in the Church in Wales. lorrainecavanagh.com