Heaven

“Or If He Pleaseth, Through it Pass, and Then The Heaven Espy.” Reflections on a Visit to The Islands of Mull and Iona.

/ stephencwinter / 2 Comments

It is not necessary to die in order to go to heaven. St Catherine of Sienna, a 14th century Italian mystic teaches that for those who are going to heaven every step is heaven. I wish that I could practice this all the time but sadly I don’t. Most of the time I just see the ordinary and not, as the 17th century poet and Anglican parish priest, George Herbert put it in his poem on prayer, the “heaven in ordinary”.

Thankfully there are occasions when I really see the heaven in the ordinary and they encourage me to keep on going. Last week, in a visit that Laura and I made to the Scottish islands of Mull and Iona I enjoyed such an occasion. I will return to my regular blog on Wisdom From The Lord of the Rings again on Saturday but I would like to think about this experience today. Do let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

My photograph of St Columba’s Bay on Iona where the saint first landed 1400 years ago.

Those of you who have followed this blog for some time will know that I love the work of William Blake and that I have often gone back to lines from his Auguries of Innocence, 

To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower, 
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand 
And eternity in an hour.

The point about what Blake is saying here is not that the sand needs to be arranged perfectly as it would be in a Zen garden or that the wild flower needs to be especially beautiful and in a beautiful setting as it was for Sam Gamgee in Lothlórien when he felt that he was “inside a song” amidst the elanor and niphredil upon Cerin Amroth. It is possible to see heaven in any wild flower, in any sand or in any hour. But we are people whose inner eyes are weak through lack of use and so most of the time we miss the glory. I needed to see the light on the holy island of Iona and the quiet beauty of the Abbey there that was first built by St Columba there 1400 years ago. I needed to struggle up Ben More to look across to the mountains of the Scottish Highlands eastward and out to the Hebridean islands westward.

Haldir shows Cerin Amroth to Frodo. Beautifully reimagined by Anke Eissmann.

And perhaps the fruit of a week in which I began to look again at heaven in the many wild flowers I saw last week was two entirely unexpected glimpses of heaven on our last morning on Mull before returning to the mainland and beginning our journey southward to our home once more. We visited a café and farm shop at Scriob-ruadh just outside Tobermory just to enjoy an early morning coffee. We decided to share a cheese scone together and as I bit into my half I had that experience that the food critic has with a plate of ratatouille in the film of that name. An ordinary thing became heavenly. You can be certain that I went into the shop in order to purchase the cheese that had been an ingredient in the scone. I hope that I can prepare my senses, both bodily and spiritual, in order to enjoy the cheese when I eat it with friends who are visiting later this week.

And then, surpassing even this moment if such a thing could be possible, was a meal in the Gallery Restaurant in Tobermory at lunch time. Wonderful Italian food was served at unbelievable prices and I ordered a langoustine risotto that was delicious. But the moment that surpassed everything was when I tasted a simple rocket salad. I put some of the rocket into my mouth and entered heaven directly. I have never tasted a dressing like it before and maybe I never will again. I spoke with the young Italian chef before leaving who told me that he was going to be leaving in the next couple of weeks. I told him that if that if this was true then I had been truly blessed to eat his food before he left.

I am aware that these last two paragraphs read a little like a TripAdvisor review and I intend to leave them for others to read there. But the point I wanted to make was that Blake’s point about wild flowers is that an experience of heaven is not limited to wild flowers alone but can be extended to cheese scones and a rocket salad, exquisitely dressed. In fact it can be extended to any human experience. I want to return to George Herbert before I close today. He teaches us the secret to seeing heaven through these experiences. The secret is that we need to choose to look through something and not merely at it. What we have to do is to make it our daily practice to do this.

A man that looks on glass
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heaven espy.

See you all again on Saturday.

Frodo Teaches Us about a Condition of Complete Simplicity Costing not less than Everything

/ stephencwinter / 6 Comments

Almost as soon as I reread the final sentence in last week’s blog posting, “The Darkness Cannot Overcome the Light”, I began to worry about it. For those who need to be reminded of what I wrote here it is again:

“Hell must be harrowed because Hell is but a negligible thing so vulnerable to the invasion of light and so easily overcome by it.”

It is not the negligibility of Hell that is in question. Its expression in The Lord of the Rings is, of course, Mordor, the kingdom created by Sauron during the Second Age that is the centre of his seemingly irresistible power and whose name alone is capable of striking fear into the hearts of those who hear it. Nothing it would seem can possibly withstand it and yet it will fall to two hobbits whose lives could be taken in a moment with one well aimed blow of an orc’s scimitar. Last week I wrote about the hobbits at the city of the Ringwraiths, Minas Morgul. At that point of the story they have already undertaken a journey that the greatest warrior of Gondor would not dare to take and yet how easily they potter past it and onward up the stair of Cirith Ungol. I believe that this perspective is no accidental discovery on my part but a deliberate intention of Tolkien’s and we will come across expressions of it many times as we journey through the remaining pages of his great story. It is a perspective that C.S Lewis expressed in The Great Divorce when the guide to the heavenly country, George MacDonald, affirms that “All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste.”

No, Hell really is negligible and it is profoundly vulnerable to the invasion of light. That is not in question. It was not that statement that bothered me but the last words of the sentence, “so easily overcome by it.” How could I describe the journey of Frodo and Sam as easy when I know how much it cost them? At first I wanted to change what I had written by some simple act of editing but the more I thought about what I wanted to write the more I knew that I needed to write something a little more substantial. I needed to affirm both Hell’s negligibility and the cost of overcoming, harrowing it. In the Christian tradition this is what is understood as the triumph of the cross, the astonishing paradox by which the execution of an accused man is the means by which Death and Hell are utterly defeated. In The Lord of the Rings it is the act by which Frodo and Sam lay down their lives in taking the Ring to the fire. In Peter Jackson’s film this is wonderfully expressed when the screen is darkened for a moment when the flames of the fiery mountain surge about the two friends as Mordor falls into chaos.

Why we can say both that Hell is negligible and yet to overcome it will cost us our lives is the strangest of paradoxes. The butterfly in the heavenly, the Real, world can eat all Hell and yet not even be aware that it has done so and yet it must take the life of the Son of God to overcome it. At the end of T.S Eliot’s The Four Quartets he expresses perfectly the wisdom that may not understand the paradox  for paradoxes are not meant to be understood but to be lived. Eliot speaks of:

“A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)”

This is the simplicity that Frodo and Sam achieve at the moment they leave the comparative security of Faramir’s refuge in Ithilien, placing themselves again into the hands of a malicious guide who wishes to do them harm. At the moment they walk away from Faramir they give up their lives. If we are to know the conquering of Hell in our own lives then it will be when we find the same simplicity paying the same cost.