Vicarage Notes: Chiaroscuro Music, Blackberries, and Holding Fast

What are the ways of light and how may we chase them?

Anna Boganis

My friends,

The world is tumultuous these days. Summer gallops ahead. Headlines boil. Hot days crash headlong into languid evenings. Controversies roil and rage. And the scroll of a screen is an easy refuge for a tired mind. Have you noticed this?

I often think that half my struggle with a disciplined use of my screens comes down to sheer exhaustion. It’s such an easy default for a tired moment, the sly, paradoxical refuge of an overstimulated mind. Let us comfort your shattered body and weary mind with a shattering of your attention - you’ll forget how tired you feel (even if our ‘cure’ is the antithesis of rest).

How do we combat this?

I asked a friend this question as we sat in a riverside pub late in the evening last week. The river sang in the darkness, the air wet and cool, the wind brisk. I came there by way of a concert. Thomas had been all week at a Patristics conference (leaving echoes of Origen, Irenaeus, and Augustine in our home) and suggested I slip into the concert of Orthodox church music playing in the cathedral that night as a treat after my extra hours with the children. I did. Tucked in a corner in the stiff old pews I stilled my body, tried to still my mind. Let my hands rest in my lap as my eyes roved gold stone and the high, dark corners of the cathedral: chiaroscuro space set for a kind of chiaroscuro music.

Chiarocscuro: an artistic term used to describe the contrast between darkness and light.

The music was both bright and dark: I let it wash over me; chanted prayers with deep, resonant harmonies in languages I did not speak . I glanced at the lyrics in my programme before each song, often ancient liturgies celebrating God’s light, words sung out of the great darkness of those who prayed, and suffered, and waited. One ran thus:

O Gladsome Light of the holy glory of the Immortal Father, heavenly, holy blessed Jesus Christ. Now we have come to the setting of the sun and behold the light of evening. We praise God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For it is right at all times to worship…

Right at all times… it may be, but it never ceases to be a wrestling thing to believe in the triumph of God over all the forces of shadow, to worship immortal Light while we yet live in, and suffer, the darkness. It’s why we have to work so hard to remember, remember, remember.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about memory. I’m haunted sometimes by the description in Revelation that in the last times even those who know God and love him will ‘fall away’. What does it mean to lose sight of the thing you most love, the lodestar to your universe? ‘Falling away’… it sounds like just losing your grip in an offhand way, one afternoon when things got a bit busy and work was stressful and people difficult or the headlines just beyond bearing and you just… lost faith.

I don’t ever want to, but sometimes I feel it necessary to hope I don’t. In these exhausted years of young parenting, my capacity to attend, to be as disciplined as I hope, to be rigorous in anything besides a doggedly chosen kindness to my children and husband feels negligible. Or is it the state of the world? I don’t think it’s wrong to say that the world right now is fuelled by a heightened volatility and violence, and that’s just the world of flesh and blood, before we even reach the virtual arenas of angst and anguish that dominate our inmost eye. Scrolling the screen can be a kind of unravelling you don’t even choose… except you do, when you look.

How do we keep the faith? How do we hold this world in compassion… and objectivity? How do we hold on?

‘Blackberries are a good way to start,’ said my friend.

The music had made a great, dark, comforting space inside my heart that I carried into the night air, and from its gentle shadows, I found the grace to chuckle. I had just related the day I spent with my children picking blackberries enough to make a generous crumble. My children went out armed with baskets that drippy morning, exclaiming in repeated shock and triumph with each new addition to the rising mountain of berries in their baskets: ‘the basket is almost full!’

‘But really,’ said my friend. ‘Blackberries, and walks and eating crumble together and reading and… anything to shove away the screens, the patterns of disaster.’

I mulled this. I’m still mulling it several days on, with the chiaroscuro music still echoing in my mind. Can it be that simple? The more time we can fill with ways of living that are rooted in attention and love, the more we are able to dwell in faith, keep walking in the ways of hope?

Chiaroscuro. The contrast of light and darkness. It’s easy to spot in great paintings like those of Caravaggio, whose most poignant works are inexorably linked with the term. Harder to spot in the dim, melded middle of the ordinary, where brightness and shadow chase each other in circles round the worry and need of the every day and end up in a mystifying twilight.

The Conversion of Saint Paul, Caravaggio

I want great, in-breaking lightnings of divine goodness. I want spotlights from heaven telling me what to do and how to live. But perhaps my friend has a point, and what is asked of me is to chase every tendril of brightness I can find. To be a dogged follower of holy brightness, hunting down every footprint of light in the shadowlands of our world. Perhaps this is faith in a difficult age. Perhaps this is the way we hold on past all exhaustion: a simple choice to identify and choose the ways of light, the narrow, precious roads of brightness in the very midst of our ordinary.

What are the ways of light?

Blackberries? All right. Poetry. I find a few lines of verse have a kind of medicinal effect upon my mind. Quiet; just a few moments to attend. Deepened breath. Long, deep breath, so that the words I speak, the choices I make are not snap reactions by an overextended nervous system. Stacks of books, whether picture ones for the children or novels and theology for me, great stacks of books we read as often as we can so that we can glimpse the widened horizons of hope in those who wrote and reached for it. Dirt. Damp, stubborn earth, riddled with snails, yet yielding me tomatoes and dahlias and basil… if I remember to water and weed. Another small way to walk in light. The offer of a meal to someone weary, simple perhaps, but nourishing. The making of space for a conversation, the stilled, attentive listening that is real compassion. Prayer. This wildly strange practice of quieting my soul in a snatched moment in order to speak to, listen for the breathings of… someOne outside time. The ordering, again, of a home disordered by many people and projects. Rest. Rest. Do you know how radical a thing it is to choose to sleep when exhausted? To choose sleep instead of a scroll? Rest is my embodied statement that I am not the source of my own flourishing.

That’s in the hands of Another…

Ah, yes. All these little, defiant acts by which I reach toward the light, they help me to turn my face toward the Sun, to remember the light that made me and keeps me in life. This is the point, not simply to push away distraction or engage the real (rather than the virtual) world, but to reclaim hope. To grip and live it. Reorient - did you know it means quite literally, a turning to the east, to the place where the sun rises?

And what is faith but an inward turning to the risen Christ as he draws us and the whole world after him into light?

Is there a right space for holding the grief of the world? For watching the headlines and bearing compassionate, aching witness to the grief of all who suffer, who need, who stumble, confused, in the darkness? Of course. Of course. But dwelling amidst the unholy litany of disaster that comes to me in an endless scroll has little practical redemptive power. Those tiny acts of love though, those chasings of light by which I push away the refrain of the fallen world in its ferocity are also the way that my body lives out hope, my life takes on the shape of the Goodness toward which I reach.

Our acts of following light are a dance and a reaching. And His?

Well, I think Julian of Norwich says it best:

And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God. In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.

May you know yourself richly kept by God today, friends. May you turn your face to where love rises upon the dark horizon of our world. May you be a dogged chaser of light. And may blackberry moments attend your way.

Love,

Sarah

PS - I think it incumbent upon me to tell you that my new book Reclaiming Quiet is now available for pre-order! I shall be writing more about this soon, and am planning some special pre-order incentives so keep an eye out, but for those asking, yes! You can take a peek HERE or HERE.