Pen and Ink Reflections - Pen and Ink Reflections

icons of belovedness

1/12/2025

image: Arian Baptistery in Ravenna

When I hear today’s story of the baptism of Jesus, what often comes to my mind is a stained-glass window in the Anglican church of St Luke Toowoomba. It was certainly a handy teaching aid over the years I presided at baptisms there. After all, there is much truth in the well-known saying that a picture can paint a thousand words. That is certainly a strength of churches like St Luke Toowoomba, which also has a number of other even more significant stained-glass windows, accompanying its Gothic Revival architectural features. Not all those windows are also reflections of other ages on another continent. The great western window above the baptistery is a particularly beautiful contemporary stained-glass window. This, with its mandala-resonant patterns, highlights a wide range of Australian animal, cosmic, and other natural features, and resembles a kind of dot-painting as a whole. The church is thus in some ways a veritable picture book, as well as a key city centre space for worship, music and other artistic and festival events. In a similar manner, our current liturgical season of Epiphany is also like a picture book. It too contains various images to encourage and challenge us: significant stories which are icons of God’s love. Let us therefore reflect today on the baptism of Jesus, which is a particularly powerful icon of God’s love, and of our beloved place within it. Indeed, in some Orthodox traditions, it is much more important than the birth narratives of Jesus. After all, they are an amalgam of different stories in only two Gospels, whereas the baptism of Jesus appears as a vital narrative in all four Gospels. Crucially, for example, in the Synoptic Gospels it is found immediately before the stories of Jesus’ temptations. Its central declaration of the beloved-ness of Christ, and our associated beloved-ness, is therefore the vital antidote to the threats and traumas of our world. Let us then look at three particular features of today’s iconic story, with the aid of three significant contemporary painters of the scene, and, thereby, encourage us too to share and become icons of divine beloved-ness ourselves…

beyond embarrassment: the cry of the blind

10/27/2024

healing of Bartimaeus by William Blake

Deep faith is often embarrassing. Maybe that is a reason we human beings avoid it. We typically prefer to seek to live ‘good’ lives, or the opposite: to seek to be respectable in our opinions and behavior, or, alternatively, to find value and reputation in kicking against, or rorting, the system. Admittedly, in choosing radical pathways, we may also conceivably live out of the vulnerability of a type of deep faith. Yet that also risks centring ourselves in our own egos. Deep faith however is not only about letting go of human conventions but also about letting go of ego, into God in godself. The expressions of this can be quite embarrassing, even alarming. Maybe that is why organised religion, including much of our Uniting Church traditions, often tries to keep deep faith under control, in liturgy and in church life. Imagine, for example, if, like Francis of Assisi, we were indeed to heed Jesus’ to the rich man and give away all we have to the poor. What if, like the original Quakers and Shaker communities, we were to be so overcome by the fire of pentecostal love that we would literally move in the Spirit, shaking and quaking, in our prayer and witness? No wonder, faced by the zeal of early Methodism, that Bishop Joseph Butler famously told John Wesley that ‘enthusiasm is a horrid thing.’ That, surely, is not simply a classic English reaction to faith’s embarrassments. It also expresses much general unease about the consequences of letting go into God. For deep faith is beyond embarrassment, as we see in today’s Gospel story (in Mark 10.45-52)…

on not being kaka - regarding demons and eagles' wings

2/4/2024

on wings of an eagle (image by David Clode on Unsplash)

One ancient way of approaching spirituality, especially in the Orthodox Christian traditions, is to speak of three kinds of birdlife. The first of these, sometimes known as the ‘carnal’ life, is represented by farmyard chooks. These birds peck at the dust, clucking around, and sometimes fighting each other: confined to an enclosure, with their products used by others or being fattened up themselves for slaughter and consumption. The second, sometimes known as the ‘natural’ life, is represented by the rooster. This bird, with more intellectual capacity, is able to rise above, and see beyond, the farmyard dust; and, whilst remaining tied to it, is able to influence and manage aspects of the world of the chooks, at least to a degree. The third bird however is the eagle: who flies free, majestic, and far beyond, the limited horizons of both the chooks and the rooster. Not for nothing has the eagle thus been highly revered, across many cultural and faith traditions, not least among many First Nations peoples: being typically regarded as symbolic of great and deep strength, leadership, and vision. Now, there is of course the danger in such analogies of forms of spiritual elitism, a disregard of the ‘ordinary’, and disdain towards the material. Yet, as we hear Isaiah 40 verses 21-31 today, we are encouraged to be lifted up as ‘on eagle’s wings’. So to what kind of bird do we choose to look? What kind of life do we choose?...

tomorrow's world?

1/1/2023

image by Sebastiano Iervolino on Pixaby

How do you, how do we, approach new things? On this New Year’s Day, how are we feeling about what is happening and may happen? My sense is that some of us are hopeful and excited, but others less sure and anxious. Some of us see fresh possibilities, and others renewed burdens. What does tomorrow’s world look like, and feel like, to you?

the angels are here! look, hear - here!

12/25/2022

image: Gareth Harper on Unsplash

I want to begin by inviting you to look up - Look – here! at this trinity of angels, symbolising Courage, Compassion and Joy. Jyllie Jackson, the artist who with her team created them, saw these as qualities particularly embodied – incarnated indeed – here in our community at Pitt St Uniting Church. Those of us who worship here regularly – can we see ourselves I wonder? It is hard sometimes to see ourselves as others see us! And those of you visiting here today – I wonder what aspects of yourselves you see here in our angels? For they are icons of incarnation...

called to be priests of creation, in light and shadow

9/4/2022

photo of part of Tianli Zu artwork in the Where Shadows Meet exhibition, at Casula Powerhouse

One of the puzzles Christians have sometimes set themselves is to work out what light is being referred to in the first few verses of the Bible. For, apart from modern light forms, we are so used to thinking of light from the sun and moon, which, in the Genesis account, are only created later. Various possibilities have therefore been suggested by the great theologians. Some (such as Ephrem of Syria) have thus suggested the light was a pillar of fire, or (like Basil of Caesarea) that the essence of the sun without its actual substance, or even that the light came for the angels (in the case of Augustine of Hippo). However, in so far as we might respond, I think I would go with the Orthodox Church’s understanding of ‘the uncreated light’ of God in Godself. For, when we come to the first chapter of Genesis. we are speaking here of divine mystery, depth, purpose and ultimate meaning, not literal or even limited symbolic explanation of Creation. Rather, like our second reading today (For Light by John O’Donohue), the nature of Genesis chapter 1 is poetic and prayerful, seeking to lead us into sacredness. For above all, such texts are designed to renew our sense of wonder and participation in divine creation and our role as priests of God’s Creation…

Transfiguring Love

2/27/2022

Transfiguration Mandala; Jack Haas

How do we picture transfiguration? Do you like the transfiguration mandala of Jack Haas for example? It is better than many as a prompt for reflection today. For the story, symbol, and spirituality of Christian transfiguration is rich and profound. Yet it can be a puzzle and portrayed in very limited dimensions, and can then seem quite distant to some of us. Let me therefore offer four pathways into the reality and meaning of Christ’s Transfiguration: four pathways on the model of the spirituality wheel of which Penny Jones spoke to us a few months ago, and to our Ministers Retreat this week. For transfiguration, as Jack Haas suggests, is like a biblical mandala, of enriching colour and creativity for our lives: a kaleidoscope revealing divine transforming love…

look twice at your eggs

4/12/2020

When you see an egg, do you see the risen Jesus? This is what Christians have done from the earliest times. There is an Armenian picture from the eleventh century that shows the angel and the women at the tomb with a huge egg inscribed with the words ‘He is not here. He is risen.’

So why an egg. Well firstly eggs are elliptical in shape – they are infinite, having no beginning or end, and so are symbolic for God. There is no end to God’s creativity, God’s love, God’s compassion.

Secondly an egg symbolizes the potential of new life. In some sense it is a microcosm, a miniature version of everything that is. It reminds us of the potential that each of us has for new life and a new beginning, today on Easter Day and every day.

Thirdly, for a chick to emerge from an egg, the shell must be broken. This symbolizes for Christians the rolling away of the stone from the front of the tomb, so that the risen Christ could emerge. It reminds us that for the new to come, the old has to be fractured and let go – an important message in these days, where so much of what is familiar to us has to be left behind.

Eggs tell us that God cannot be contained; that resurrection is possible and life is stronger than death. In recent memory Christians living under the severely repressive Albanian government, used to dye eggs red for the blood of Christ in the Orthodox fashion, and then take them out in the dark of Holy Saturday night and place them on the steps of town halls and places of government. By doing so they asserted the power of love over hate.

So, what do you see when you see an egg? Take a little time today to contemplate an egg and ask God to help you see there the reality of new life even in the midst of death. And look twice – for it can be a messenger of hope and resurrection to you today.

Penny Jones, for Easter Sunday 12 April 2020

On myrrh-bearing and being the third 'king': transcending gender

1/6/2019

What are your experiences of nativity plays? They can be extraordinary events, can’t they? At times they are full of bathos, clumsy and comic. At other moments they can be wondrous and moving, full of pathos. These days of course all kinds of characters can sometimes be found in them: space folk, aliens, rocket ships, and even Harry Potter. Mostly however we have the traditional cast: with the so-called ‘three kings’ perhaps the most striking of all. What do you make of them, I wonder? As we mark the feast of Epiphany, perhaps it is worth a closer look, not least at the often passed over gift of myrrh. For, in my view, much more than gold or frankincense, myrrh takes us to the heart of Christian discipleship and the love of God in Jesus, and certainly beyond 'conventional' gender, and other, nativity norms…

why the feast of the holy cross?

9/14/2017

I’ve been in two minds the last couple of days about which of the two sets of Australian Anglican lectionary readings for today to use. In the end I‘ve gone for marking the feast of the Holy Cross, for which incidentally there is no alternative in the Church of England’s lectionary for today. Does this perhaps perhaps a stronger Reformed emphasis in the Australian Anglican Church? If so, I have some sympathy. For there is a danger that the cross can become objectified, even venerated as an artefact, rather than being at the existential, metaphysical heart of Christian faith. The feast of the Holy Cross, in my view, is certainly one of those adiaphora, or non-essential, elements which are neither commanded nor proscribed by a healthy reading of holy Scripture. Yet, to that extent, it any yet assist us more deeply into the paschal mystery at the centre of our Faith. After my own theological wrestling with this, let me therefore briefly offer three, good Anglican, reasons for marking the feast today…