Month: January 2020

The word ‘God’ can be a stumbling block, partly because of the anthropomorphic image, cultivated over the centuries, of an aged man with a long white beard. The Arabic word ‘Abba’, which Jesus used, means both parents, mother and father, as well as the divine source of all being. Yet, even to refer to God as father and mother is to remain stuck in anthropomorphic imagery. Meister Eckhart wrote, ‘God is no thing.’ For myself, Hamlet’s use of the word Divinity (i.e. a force, an energy) is helpful, as when he says, ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.’ And the image that comes closest for me is St. Paul’s reference to God as ‘an ocean of Love … in which we live and move and have our being’.

Gustav Mahler wrote that ‘Tradition is the handing on of the flame, not the worship of ashes’. It is all too easy for spiritual teachings to become enshrined as part of an organisation with rules and regulations. It is often forgotten that Jesus said, ‘I have come to bring fire to earth and what will I but that it be spread!’ The simple practice of meditation is one important way in which we can keep that flame alive within us.