KINGDOM COME
IN WESTMINSTER HALL
Rachel Dunckley-Jones, of the Christian Life Communities reflects on a picture that was us ed during the recent Ignatian Spirituality course in London.
In May and June, Westminster Hall was the setting for a series of six talks on themes from the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, organis ed jointly by the Christian Life Community (CLC) and the Westminster Centre for Spirituality.
The title was, ‘Kingdom Come - the Spiritual Exercises in the Variety of Human Experience' and there were two speakers each week. the first a person in public life or the arts, the second someone train ed in Ignatian Spirituality. I manag ed to attend almost all of them, and each one touch ed me, deepening my understanding of the Exercises and inspiring in me a desire to deepen my own prayer.
The talk on the second week of the Exercises, Sue Graves, an art historian at the Royal Academy, was on ‘Christ in the House of Martha and Mary'. Afterwards I went to get a closer look at it in the National Gallery. The foreground shows Martha, a look of hurt and anger on her face, with the ingr ed ients of the meal she is preparing in front of her. An elderly woman is at her side, pointing beyond Martha to an inset in the corner of the painting, which could be into an adjoining room, an image of what happens next. The inset shows Christ and two women, one of whom is clearly Mary, sitting at his feet. The other could be Martha herself, as the figure is gesticulating towards Christ. It is a beautiful painting, and it l ed me into my own imaginative contemplation, where I was identifying with Martha. I found myself furious with Christ for being so unappreciative of her efforts. How dare he not see that someone had to bother about what he and everyone else was going to eat? How could he be so callous as to make the overburden ed Martha even more miserable by putting her down in front of her sister?
‘Martha, Martha,' Christ says, ‘ you worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are ne ed ed , inde ed only one. It is Mary who has chosen the better part, and it is not to be taken away from her' (Luke 10:41-2). My prayer circl ed around this over the next few weeks. What exactly was the ‘one ne ed ful thing?' The passage suggests that it is listening to Christ, but doesn't explicitly say so. Gradually I mov ed to praying: what is the one ne ed ful thing in my life right now?
Richard Hayes, whose talk was pair ed with Sue Graves' slides, explain ed that the question running through the second week of the Exercises is ‘What is Go d inviting me to consider, so that I can fulfil my purpose for this period of my life?' The aim of imaginative contemplation, then, is to see my own response and the ways in which I would like to grow in fre ed om, to be more like Christ. When I look at the scowling face of Velazquez's Martha, I see some of the ways in which I am not free, and I pray for the grace to stop seeing life as a series of jobs that urgently ne ed to be attend ed to. I pray to be more present.
In my experience, where someone has found their one ne ed ful thing and root ed themselves in it, it comes across in their way of being. Certainly that was the case with the speakers in the series, who communicat ed as much by the way they were as by what they said.
Another highlight was Jonathan Aitken, the former Tory minister, sharing some of his story. He fell from grace quite spectacularly, and serv ed a sentence for perjury in Belmarsh prison in South London. What is less well known, though, is what happen ed while he was there. He describ ed how prior to his trial he had taken part in a week of guid ed prayer at the House of Commons, guid ed by Gerry Hughes SJ. The experience did not go very deep at the time, he said, but when he was hit by ‘the full house of the disasters that can happen to a person' - public disgrace, divorce, bankruptcy and imprisonment - he return ed to the Exercises and took a copy with him to prison.
In HMP Belmarsh, he quickly became a scribe for his fellow prisoners, penning letters for those who were not able to read or write themselves. One such inmate was an Irishman nam ed Mick, who, very grateful for a letter Aitken had written, offer ed him a thank you present of anything he want ed from the stash of pornographic magazines under Mick's b ed . Aitken refus ed the offer, confessing that he was trying another way. ‘What would that be?' ask ed Mick. ‘Well, I'm trying to follow the way of Jesus Christ. ‘Mick took in this unexpect ed response and then said, ‘You know, I wouldn't mind trying that way myself.' He then demonstrat ed , according to Aitken, the qualities of a good recruiting sergeant. He gather ed together, forming an ad hoc listening group to share their experiences of the prayer. Listening to Aitken, I had a powerful sense of a man who had made peace with himself and had undergone a very real experience of forgiveness and conversion. It was a lovely example of what the series set out to explore, namely the Spiritual Exercises at work in the variety of human experience.
The title was, ‘Kingdom Come - the Spiritual Exercises in the Variety of Human Experience' and there were two speakers each week. the first a person in public life or the arts, the second someone train ed in Ignatian Spirituality. I manag ed to attend almost all of them, and each one touch ed me, deepening my understanding of the Exercises and inspiring in me a desire to deepen my own prayer.
The talk on the second week of the Exercises, Sue Graves, an art historian at the Royal Academy, was on ‘Christ in the House of Martha and Mary'. Afterwards I went to get a closer look at it in the National Gallery. The foreground shows Martha, a look of hurt and anger on her face, with the ingr ed ients of the meal she is preparing in front of her. An elderly woman is at her side, pointing beyond Martha to an inset in the corner of the painting, which could be into an adjoining room, an image of what happens next. The inset shows Christ and two women, one of whom is clearly Mary, sitting at his feet. The other could be Martha herself, as the figure is gesticulating towards Christ. It is a beautiful painting, and it l ed me into my own imaginative contemplation, where I was identifying with Martha. I found myself furious with Christ for being so unappreciative of her efforts. How dare he not see that someone had to bother about what he and everyone else was going to eat? How could he be so callous as to make the overburden ed Martha even more miserable by putting her down in front of her sister?
‘Martha, Martha,' Christ says, ‘ you worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are ne ed ed , inde ed only one. It is Mary who has chosen the better part, and it is not to be taken away from her' (Luke 10:41-2). My prayer circl ed around this over the next few weeks. What exactly was the ‘one ne ed ful thing?' The passage suggests that it is listening to Christ, but doesn't explicitly say so. Gradually I mov ed to praying: what is the one ne ed ful thing in my life right now?
Richard Hayes, whose talk was pair ed with Sue Graves' slides, explain ed that the question running through the second week of the Exercises is ‘What is Go d inviting me to consider, so that I can fulfil my purpose for this period of my life?' The aim of imaginative contemplation, then, is to see my own response and the ways in which I would like to grow in fre ed om, to be more like Christ. When I look at the scowling face of Velazquez's Martha, I see some of the ways in which I am not free, and I pray for the grace to stop seeing life as a series of jobs that urgently ne ed to be attend ed to. I pray to be more present.
In my experience, where someone has found their one ne ed ful thing and root ed themselves in it, it comes across in their way of being. Certainly that was the case with the speakers in the series, who communicat ed as much by the way they were as by what they said.
Another highlight was Jonathan Aitken, the former Tory minister, sharing some of his story. He fell from grace quite spectacularly, and serv ed a sentence for perjury in Belmarsh prison in South London. What is less well known, though, is what happen ed while he was there. He describ ed how prior to his trial he had taken part in a week of guid ed prayer at the House of Commons, guid ed by Gerry Hughes SJ. The experience did not go very deep at the time, he said, but when he was hit by ‘the full house of the disasters that can happen to a person' - public disgrace, divorce, bankruptcy and imprisonment - he return ed to the Exercises and took a copy with him to prison.
In HMP Belmarsh, he quickly became a scribe for his fellow prisoners, penning letters for those who were not able to read or write themselves. One such inmate was an Irishman nam ed Mick, who, very grateful for a letter Aitken had written, offer ed him a thank you present of anything he want ed from the stash of pornographic magazines under Mick's b ed . Aitken refus ed the offer, confessing that he was trying another way. ‘What would that be?' ask ed Mick. ‘Well, I'm trying to follow the way of Jesus Christ. ‘Mick took in this unexpect ed response and then said, ‘You know, I wouldn't mind trying that way myself.' He then demonstrat ed , according to Aitken, the qualities of a good recruiting sergeant. He gather ed together, forming an ad hoc listening group to share their experiences of the prayer. Listening to Aitken, I had a powerful sense of a man who had made peace with himself and had undergone a very real experience of forgiveness and conversion. It was a lovely example of what the series set out to explore, namely the Spiritual Exercises at work in the variety of human experience.