“I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can’t really call being alive.”  ― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings

Today (Sunday morning) round about 7am, I received an alarm call and woke up. I was already up and about. The alarm came when I opened the door from Launde Chapel onto our little graveyard. My eye was caught and stayed on the largest stone cross for it was festooned in spiders’ webs. It was a misty morning but the sun was rising and one instinctively knew that there was a beautiful clear sky just beyond the gauzy mist. Caught by the low sun the extraordinary and intricate works of art that are spiders’ webs demanded attention. I had to pause, look and stay.

Moments like this go back into childhood. I remember stopping and looking at orb webs, the classic spider’s web shape, clustered with dew diamonds, on my walk to primary school; being transfixed by sheet webs, the type that lie like blankets on the grass in the very early morning. Today a beautiful orb web hung on one side of the cross and on the opposite was what I think was a cob web. It looked like a string basket but was flat, not a funnel – obviously a different design from a different member of the spider family.

I in my rather lazy way have used words laxly. I have often used the word “cob web” to denote any kind of spider’s web, not consciously taking on board the different types of spider even though the evidence was there before my eyes. Yet again I realise that I have not attended. I, like Mary Oliver, have walked through the world with my mind filled with things of little importance, “in full self-attendance.” I have often had what I know is the common human experience of walking automatically to a destination and realising when I got there that I had no conscious memory of what I walked passed at all. I simply wasn’t present.

But someone inside us does wake up sometimes, and the more we practice trying to wake up the more it happens. Often the moment of waking feels like a response to something other than ourselves, something outside, as in the case of the spiders’ webs and the rising sun this morning. At other times it feels as if we are jarred awake internally, and we are not sure what has woken us.

Rather late in the day I have come to believe that this trying to wake up is one of the most important tasks of being human; one that is very hard for us to do in our western culture with its dependence on constant distraction and speed. But wake up we must, if we do not want to sleepwalk to death.

The words above come from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke called “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” and reading this poem the other day alongside some others reminded me of a part of Richard Attenborough maiden speech in the House of Lords. Not surprisingly he spoke of the Arts.

“The Arts are not a luxury. They are as crucial to our wellbeing as eating and breathing.”

At nineteen I was listening to all things “Pop.” Then my older sister introduced me to the last movement of Beethoven’s “Ninth” and “Nimrod” from Elgar’s “Enigma Variations” – and I was hooked. It was the beginning of a an idiosyncratic journey of discovery that I made and am still making. Friends introduced me to music they enjoyed and if I liked the pieces I would buy my own copy. I discovered the music my mother had always loved and played but which I hadn’t been ready for. It was a delight to come upon compositions that were so familiar and now moved me.

In my thirties my husband introduced me to paintings. I took him to the theatre and he, in turn, introduced me to what he loved. We went to art galleries. At first I felt intimidated. I felt as though there were things I should like and that the fact that some pictures or sculptures left me entirely unmoved was due to my lacking something. Then one day a painting spoke to me so deeply that my whole idea of God was challenged and I received something so precious that it has never left me. A little while later I realised that we had now been to so many exhibitions that I knew something about the subject. I knew, moreover, that I had to wait on a painting, give it time to speak to me. I knew what I liked, was open to learning from artist new to me and didn’t worry when something wasn’t for me.

Like most young people growing up in the fifties and sixties I did poetry at school. I am glad to say I still quote with relish poems I learnt from the age of ten, eleven and twelve. Others are not so easily remembered, and apart from falling for T S Eliot madly in my early twenties (a passion that has never left me) I didn’t really read much poetry until a few years ago. Advent and Lent books with a poem a day to consider alongside some thoughts about the poem have enriched the experience hugely. I have realised what so many have seen before me: there are some things so much too deep for words (as in logical, reasoned, and discursive) that only the words of poetry (paradoxical, imaginative, affective, mysterious and of the heart) can begin to touch them. We find our own complex experiences illuminated, penetrated and examined. Sometimes it makes me sad because in the reading of poetry I realise how much of my life I have not lived, not been engaged with – what I have allowed to pass me by.

The Arts do many things for us but one of the things they do is to “see” us. On occasions they reflect us to ourselves. We see our own limitations. Sometimes they help us make a step that we would never have made otherwise – I can remember plays that have changed my outlook on life. Always, they invite us to live life more fully, to be more deeply engaged with our own life in all its minutiae.

“Who do you say I am?”

Jesus, asking this profound question of his disciples is the gospel reading for today (Mark 8: 27 – end.) It is a tipping point moment in the gospels and was one for me in my very early days as a grown up Christian. I remember the sermon when the preacher put that question to us, asking each of us individually how we would respond if Jesus stood in front of us today and questioned us. It was, I think, the first time anyone had put me on the spot like that and I am really glad they did. That was the moment when I first named Jesus to myself as Lord. In the gospels, it is the first time that any of the disciples calls Jesus, “the Christ.” Peter takes a huge step as he says this, but the next moment we see how limited his understanding is of Jesus’ mission, Jesus’ way of being Messiah, when he tells Jesus off for foretelling his future arrest and death.

I thought I knew this story pretty well until this last week when I was on the local diocesan clergy conference. We had a speaker from South India, a man who had grown up as a Dalit (meaning “oppressed” in Hindi and Marathi, the self-chosen political name of the castes in India who were formerly considered “untouchable” according to the Hindu varna system.) Our speaker came from a village which in the mid nineteenth century had converted as an entire community to Christianity and changed the name of their township to Nazareth.

“Who do you say I am?”

As we were invited to consider this question again we were invited to do so not through the eyes of white, largely middle class respectable and respected people from the Midlands, but through the eyes of the world Church. What had made a whole community of people change their faith allegiance in a country that didn’t know what the word “Christ” meant?

When we have to translate a word for someone we have to go back to its basic meaning. In translating Christ, our speaker told us, the early missionaries did not talked about a culture far away but put the story into their listeners’ experience. Christ was the answer to these peoples’ deepest desire in life and their deepest need for meaning. As Dalits, looked down upon by everyone and virtually enslaved by money lenders, their greatest need was to be respected and to be free. In the gospel of Christ, the Son of God, and in the human person of Jesus they found that God loved them, respected them and gave them freedom: an internal freedom of self-value they had never known before.

Having explored the image of Christ in the eyes of some people from South India, we then looked, through paintings and pictures, at how Christ is seen by all sorts of other cultures throughout our world. Not for them the blue-eyed Hollywood Jesus with the shoulder length oh-so-clean hair, but the Chinese and the West Indian, the Nigerian and South Korean.

We have turned the name ‘Christ’ into Jesus’ surname or we use it academically. But in a world that needs God so much but can’t cope with the God as presented by traditional religion, surely we need to ask what are we actually offering when we talk about Christ? Who do we say Christ is? Who do people need him to be? Surely, he is the answer to ours (and theirs) deepest desire and longing for meaning.