The gifts and the giver

TIME AFTER TIME I came to your gate with raised hands, asking for more and yet more.
You gave and gave, now in slow measure, now in sudden excess.
I took some, and some things I let drop; some lay heavy on my hands; some I made into playthings and broke them when tired; till the wrecks and the hoard of your gifts grew immense, hiding you, and the ceaseless expectation wore my heart out.
~ Rabindranath Tagore, Fruit Gathering 26

When I was young, I received presents from my grandmother (my father’s mother) every Christmas and on my birthday. I remember one fascinating encyclopaedia she sent me that had great pictures. One of the post-celebration trials was to send a thank you letter. This was the extent of my connection to her. She lived on the Devon/Cornwall border, which was a long way from Essex back in the 1960s, and although we visited her once, I have no memory of her. She and my grandfather lived separate lives, and I have only the vaguest of a vague half-memory of either of them. As I look back now, I can only imagine that there had been some rift between my father and his parents, who separated when he was young.

Nevertheless, the presents kept coming until she died in 1969. When I turned 18, I learned she had left some money for me, which helped me through my university education. Now I am older, I feel their absence. I wonder about their story and their relationship to me. I have some old black-and-white photographs of them from the 1920s and 30s that are precious to me.

In the last few months, I have been imagining their presence and making a connection with them. I don’t have a theology for this, and I don’t want to examine it too closely or develop a mythology around it, but the sense of their presence is palpable. I feel it, especially in my back. It is as if these two people, estranged from each other and absent from me when they were alive, are now saying, “We have your back.” A thread of life runs through them, into my father and onto me. We are connected. Anything I do on my soul’s journey benefits all of us. I feel the responsibility for this that is purposeful, vital, and joyful.

In The Cloud of Unknowing, the unknown author invites their student to lift their heart to God with a gentle stirring of love. They are to let go of the Creation and turn their attention to the Creator. The author is fiercely absolute in this instruction. Every time one’s attention is turned to anything, with a thought, a feeling, a reaction, an imagination, including the most sublime mentalisation about God, one is to let it go and return the attention to God. Increasingly, any sense of who or what God is, any idea or image or sense of God, is put down. One’s attention is turned toward God as God is without anything to grasp. No foothold, no handhold, no firm ground. The author invites the student to rest in the most fundamental reality of Being. I have being; God is Being.

Some of the passages in The Cloud and its later companion, The Book of Privy Counsel, can sound dismissive and rejecting of the glory and beauty of the world.

Lift up þin herte unto God wiþ a meek steryng of love; & mene Himself, & none of His goodes. & þerto loke þee loþe to þenk on ouȝt bot on Hymself, so that nouȝt worche in þi witte ne in þi wille bot only Himself. & do that in þee is to forgete alle þe creatures that ever God maad & þe werkes of hem, so that þi þouȝt ne þi desire be not directe ne streche to any of hem, neiþer in general ne in special. Bot lat hem be, & take no kepe to hem.

Lift up your heart unto God with a meek stirring of love; mean God, and not God’s goods [Creation, Redemption, the whole caboodle]. To this end, be loathe to think of anything but God, so that nothing works in your mind [intellectual faculties] nor in your will [affection, desire, intent] but only God. Do what you can to forget all the creatures [including yourself] that God ever made and the works of them, so that neither your thought nor your desire be directed nor stretched to any of them, neither in general nor in particular. But let them be, and pay them no heed.
(Cloud, 3.1)

Look that nouȝt worche in þi wit ne in þi wil bot only God. & fonde for to felle alle wetyng & felyng of ouȝt under God, & treed alle doun ful fer under þe cloude of forgetyng. & þou schalt understonde that þou schalt not only in þis werk forgete alle oþer creatures þen þiself, or þeire dedes or þine, bot also þou schalt in þis werk forgete boþe þiself & also þi dedes for God, as wel as alle oþer creatures & þeire dedes.

Look that nothing works in your mind nor in your will but only God. Endeavour to put a stop to all knowing and feeling of anything under God, and tread all down full far under the cloud of forgetting. You shall understand that in this work you shall not only forget all creatures other than yourself, or their deeds or yours, but in this work you shall forget both yourself and also your deeds for God, as well as all other creatures and their deeds.
(Cloud, 43.1, my translations)

This negation of all but God can feel in agreement with certain cults of Christianity that denigrate the world and this life.

What if there were another way to understand this?

When I was a child, my grandmother sent me presents. I loved them and was thankful for them. I looked forward to receiving them. Her presents told something about her, about her care for me, about who she was, and that she was. But I am left with a lacuna, an unknown, barely felt presence. I wish I knew her. She is an uncertain, shadowy figure, barely there in our family life. Now, I am feeling my way to a relationship with her. I feel it in my bones rather than in my memory.

God showers us with gifts. How surprising and amazing it is to live! – to experience the rapture of being alive! New every morning. This is the day! And I am a gift. To be alive is a gift. To relish this is fundamental to human being. Christianity is the celebration of these gifts, most importantly the Incarnation, the gift of God with us, a reality we shall revel in at Christmas.

There is more! Who sends these gifts? Whence? I want to know the Source. It is a cliché to say that the way we celebrate Christmas, the desperate consumption and the giving of gifts to those who need no more, obscures the surprising and perturbing underlying Truth.

’tis only the splendour of light hideth thee.

To know the Source and the Truth, I must do two things. I must put down the gifts. I must turn my attention to the Giver. It turns out that these simple instructions are startlingly difficult to achieve. Not only do I have (ever so gently) to stop thinking about things, people, possessions, projects, tasks, desires, memories, ideas, plans, worries, and so on, but I also have to stop thinking about myself. I am one of the gifts I must put down. This is the most difficult thing of all. Fail. Fail again. Fail better.

Letting go of the gifts is not the important thing, however. I must turn to You, the Giver, who is not a Who or a What or any Thing I can get a grip on.

And then, in brief moments, there are glimpses of the possibility of relief. I am here – and I disappear from view. My heart and chest open to that which cannot be spoken or imagined or grasped.

Take, oh take has now become my cry.
Shatter all from this beggar’s bowl: put out this lamp of the importunate watcher: hold my hands, raise me from the still-gathering heap of your gifts into the bare infinity of your uncrowded presence.
~ Rabindranath Tagore, Fruit Gathering 26