A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

I recently wrote a blog entitled ‘An Awesome Fact’ in which I reflected on a wonderful poem by the Polish writer Wislawa Szymborska, in which she draws our attention to how utterly unique we each are at birth. More recently I bought a birthday card for a friend who was celebrating his 70th birthday. It read ‘You are 70 years old, a man of 18 with 52 years of experience’. That struck me as very perceptive: I recently celebrated my 80th birthday, but I feel in many ways the same as when I was 18, although clearly 62 years of subsequent experience, quite unique to me, will have shaped and changed me in a multitude of ways. Which is the real me: the man whom God knows? The child I was, the old man I am now, the man I’m yet to become?

I remember that not long after my mother died an aunt gave me a collection of photos of her as a girl and a young woman, well before she’d met my father and long before she conceived me. It was a lovely gift not least because I saw my mother as I’d never seen her before and was able to appreciate and love her in ways that I hadn’t before. I could recognise my mother in the young woman in the photos, but I now had a richer sense of her as a complete person. I began to think of her as Alice rather than Mum, and the two were not quite the same. The world that young Alice inhabited was not the same as the one that my Mum did. In which world was she most really who she is?

Over a lifetime we stay in some ways much the same but continue to evolve & develop, and in doing so inhabit many different worlds. Who is the person that God knows? All of them? One of them? I guess that the same line of thinking applies to our understanding of God. The God Whom I knew as a child, was a bit different from the God Whom I knew as a young man, or as an old man. Presumably the mysterious God is all of them and more than all of them. Could that be true of Alice and of me too?