Imagine the sight in the dim light, a minister priest deacon
With a silent sickle marking time and waiting for you
But that’s not what I mean, as T S Eliot’s Prufrock (in a frocked coat?) said, that is not what I meant at all.
I’ve been down that road, where anger consigns all ministers to James Hogg’s darkest caricature of Calvinism in his Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
No, at last I’ve learned to resist objectifying Gxd, self and other. No, no, I mean verb, not adjective.
This darkness is not the pitch black of Lucifer’s kingdom. Instead, it’s a poignant memory from the 1980s.
“Praise the Lord, all ye servants of the Lord –
Who minister within God’s house by night”
We used to sing that to a soft rock beat, and listen endlessly to the CD by the Scottish singer Ian White, and it seemed full of a sacred something.
It is, but back then religion was at best for me only two or three things; a sense of community, a virtual spiritual experience in the aesthetics of song, and a vaguely anguished longing for some sort of Gospel to be real in my life, instead of this pervasive feeling of Christian inadequacy. But I onward Christian soldiered on.
Of course it is indeed full of meaning that I didn’t then see, because I wasn’t able to, but no matter, it was pretty much or maybe almost good enough at the time.
It’s Psalm 134, in the archaic King James Version.
Now I see the meaning it holds for me at a deeper level, the level able to ask itself, what does ministering by night mean?
The Catholic composer Olivier Messiaen stated that the purpose of all his (huge) musical output was to glorify Gxd. However, when asked if he felt a sense of sacred inspiration while composing, he replied that he was far too busy working on the technicalities. As far as conscious connection with Gxd went, he was writing in the dark.
This gives me enormous hope.
Often, I’ll slog and strain at work I believe to be morally right, but I simply am too immersed in the task at hand to be consciously pious. It gives me a vague sense of anxiety and shame that I’m not in constant prayer, seeking guidance.
Saint Teresa of Àvila believed that doing the chores was an act of prayer, and I know what she means when I feel that wellness of creating order and sparkling cleanness in my house (which doesn’t happen often enough). The act of washing the dishes, cleaning the windows, polishing the ornaments, has a strangely meditative rhythm. So too can working on a factory assembly line, a job I never despised.
But this is a different kind of ministry. This is the kind of demanding, anxiety provoking work on the edge: giving a talk for Extinction Rebellion, participating in a working group. Work where I’ve flung myself in, usually to a deadline and feeling stretched to the edge of my social and intellectual limits. The stillness of prayer feels light years away and again, I’m soldiering on without that sense of Gxd which has only come to me by a miracle in later life.
So I suppose in terms of conscious contact with Gxd I’m working in the dark, just as Messiaen did, And yet he had the self-belief to say that in his music there were moments which truly gave the hearer what he called a ‘breakthrough to the beyond’: a glimpse of Gxd.
That assurance is what, in moments of stillness, I want to evaluate. Has my work really achieved any glorifying of what in my best moments I choose to call Gxd? In some moments, if my ego has stayed at bay, perhaps yes.
But there’s more.
The Psalmist is telling me not only to minister by this night, which takes a certain courage, but to do it “within His house.”
Surely I’ll also need to believe, as increasingly I do, that the earth and every part of it is Gxd’s house, known by whatever name there, or none.
The next sentence in this Psalm gives me even more hope.
“Lift up your hands, within the sanctuary,
And praise the Lord.”
This is not house, this is sanctuary; somewhere particularly and specially holy.
It’s a stretch (the upward stretch of lifting of hands to Gxd in sun salutation?), as I’m reading this Psalm in English, not in Hebrew or Latin Vulgate, but this is how this version of the Psalm speaks to me.
I have permission, even in this dark apparent distance from Gxd, to lift my hands in joy of Gxd still there. The exercise (and this is work) might even do me good. I can assert that even in what seems the most outer space of my orbit, I’m still in that sanctuary.
If I remember that, much of my anxiety will melt away, like a candle in the night.
