All the long days. Weariness is done, I'm free at
last to do just as I will. Take up my pipe, admire the
setting sun, practice the art of simply sitting still.
Thank God I have this briar bowl to fill.
I leave the world with all its hopeless hype, its pressures and
its ever ringing till and let it go in smoke rings from my pipe.
The hustle and the bustle. These I shun, The tasks that
trouble and the cares that kill. The false idea that there's a
race to run. The pushing of that weary stone
uphill. The wretched iPhones all
insistent trill, whingers and whiners, each with their own
gripe. I pack them in tobacco leaves
until they're blown away in smoke rings from my pipe.
And then, at last, my real work is begun.
My chance to chant, to exercise the skill of summoning the muses
1 by 1 to meet me in their temple.
Touch my quill. I have a pen, but quills are
better still. And when the soul is full, the
time is ripe. Kindle the fire of poetry that
will breathe and expand like smoke rings from my pipe.
Prince, I've done with grinding at the mill.
These petty pelting tyrants aren't my type.
So lift me up and set me on a hill.
A free man blowing smoke rings from his pipe.
Welcome to the Imagination Redeemed podcast where we follow
the great stories further up and further in in pursuit of the
life of Christ. Beautiful Malcolm Guy, thank you
for sharing that. I'm Brian Brown with Malcolm and
Matthew Clark. We are here to talk about smoke
rings from our pipes. We have been spending the summer
talking about different topics related to ordinary time and
entering into the work of God and the relationship between his
work and ours. And we needed a moment of
stillness in the middle of that. And so we thought we would go to
someone who we hoped against hope might also need a moment of
stillness in his busy life and busy projects.
And perhaps, gentlemen, it would be best to start with a, a few
logistics. We're going to talk about
stillness and the art of stillness and how pipe smoking
is a case study in it. But I, I I feel we should also
start by what we are smoking and what we are smoking it in.
Right, very good. So I'm, I'm smoking some Kendall
black cherry, which is a dark Cavendish with a cherry flavour.
Kendall is the place. I mean, obviously it's not grown
in England, but it's mixed in England.
Kendall is this the little place in the Lake District, which is
right at the heart of the Lake District, where where Wordsworth
and Coleridge often gathered. Coleridge was a pipe smoker, not
Wordsworth, but he was often sort of dipping into ale houses
and pot houses as they were called them, not in the American
sense of the word pot, but a pot is a vessel from which you drank
And, and anyway, so I quite like smoking a tobacco which has some
association with the Lake District.
I'm a great fan of Peterson pipes.
I have a variety of them. This is, I just took it out for
special occasion. This is a quite unusual
Peterson. There's a, there's a, a apart
from Peterson's own shop on Grafton Street.
There's another very old tobacconist on Grafton Street
that's been there for a couple of 100 years.
And they had their 150th anniversary and they
commissioned Peterson to make a set of 150 pipes to
commissioned. And this, if you can't really
see it, but on the band, the band, the Silver Band has quite
a nice sort of Celtic kind of inlay sort of effect on it.
It's very, very faint there now. Beautiful.
So I happened to come across one of these and I I pushed out the
boat and bought it because I like pipes that have a bit of
history and a story to tell. And it's quite unusual having
the amber stem as well. That's quite nice.
I feel that. When in fact, I don't know if it
was Pearl or amber somewhere point in the Lord of the Rings,
the hobbits are given by Theoden or somebody a really beautiful
pair of pipes. And I think they have made by
the elves or so I so I think this is the nearest I get to a
kind of at least a quasi elven pipe.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Beautiful. All right, Top that, Clark.
This is this is not a competition I don't want.
To I should have got out of a ordinary one, but it's I don't
smoke very often so it's actually quite nice.
Well, this pipe is People have given me pipes over the year.
I think I've smoked this pipe with you, Malcolm in at one of
at the last Oxbridge maybe? Oh, great.
Yeah. I love when you're given pipes.
I've got. I mean, there has to be a whole.
Eventually, if you get to know him at all, there'll be a whole
section of your pipe rack called Gifts from Jerry Root.
Because Jerry Root, the great Lewis scholar, is such a such a
good man, but he's a man of such generous heart that it's, it's,
I didn't know this when I first met him, that it's really
dangerous to admire anything that he has, you know, I regard
as a pipe. Oh, that's a beautiful pipe
here. It feels he immediately gives
away anything you admire. I have a couple of very fine
pipes from Jerry. Well, I need to meet him.
You definitely too. Yeah, we need to.
Become friends. I've heard a lot about him, but
this pipe, actually it was my first pipe and is my main pipe
and it was my granddad's pipe, my granddad.
That's really good. You have talked me now.
That's great. It was my my mom I I never got
to meet either one of my grandfathers.
They both died before I was born and I was going through my
granddads kind of dressing room one time years ago.
And I hadn't actually told anybody that I was smoking a
pipe or looking for one to smoke.
But I found this in a drawer and I asked my grandmother if I
could have it. She said, yeah, sure.
So I don't know what it is. It's it says Royal Scott on the
side. And I I asked my tobacconist
friend John David Cole, who runs the Country Squire, back.
Oh, you put me in touch with the country, Squire.
That's right out there, yeah. And I but I don't know that he
ever really got a good lead on it.
But it's a, it's a just kind of a simple briar pipe.
But I love it connects me to my. I like having things that
connect me to people and and not having a.
Nice long Shank of briar itself. Hold it up again.
That's quite a good thing. If you have that much briar
before you get to the vulcanite stem, that shows you how big a
block of briar they were carving because that's not stuck on.
That's all one piece. So that's not a luxury item to
have that much briar on the stem.
Really. Yeah.
I didn't even know that. That's wonderful.
That's encouraging. I love it.
And the tobacco. So about 3 or 4 years ago it was
my birthday and my brother Sam went down to the country Squire
and he got a custom blend made for me.
I live with my brother, I've lived with him for about 10 or
11 years now and he's a very funny guy.
And so he handed me this for my birthday.
I don't know if you can see this is my own personal pipe tobacco
blend called Old Squirrel Butt. So I'm smoking the very last of
Old Squirrel my my last batch of Old Squirrel Butt today with you
guys. Hope you feel honored.
I do, yeah. I wish.
At some point, the technology of the Internet will allow us to
savor each other's tobacco. You know, they'll be on Zoom.
There'll be a share fumes button.
Don't you just wish? Well, I I dearly hope not,
because when when one likes to I mean, first of all, I don't, I
don't know how often I'd want to smell Matthew's fumes.
But second of all, the the the there's.
I wouldn't want to lose yet another value of the face to.
Face. Oh, no, no, absolutely no.
This is a pale simulacrum, right?
What we really need? Which?
Is to give us together. Well, I'm smoking a this is a
Larson from Copenhagen. Oh yeah, very nice Danish pipes,
yeah. Yeah, this was a a gift as well.
2-3 years ago I had, I had completely burned out.
I was having all kinds of health issues from prolonged stress and
working too hard. And I had two different friends.
1 was my one of my high school mentors, and then one was a a
dear friend from here in Colorado, both of whom took it
upon themselves to introduce me to a life of improved stillness
by getting me into pipe smoking. And this was a gift from from
one of them and the and I'm smoking country Squires, black
and tan land, which is a burly Cavendish.
So Matthew, that's your fault as well.
Oh. Excellent.
Well, gentlemen, perhaps we should start with just the the
basic question. Why is stillness A desirable
thing? We live a very fast-paced life.
On some level that might That might seem an obvious question,
but as something to cultivate as opposed to simply wish for, why
is it a desirable thing? Well, I mean, there are many
ways you could into that. There's a fine phrase in one of
GS Eliot's poems where he talks about being at the still point
of the turning world. And that's a very helpful
metaphor. The things are whirling round
around. They're whirling around some
kind of centre, which is still. This is why the pole star, the
North Star, was deemed to be so important, because the other
stars sort of revolved around it.
So finding a still point doesn't necessarily mean retreating to
epiphery in a periphery. It may be a kind of centre, the
other thing, which is from another tradition.
But in the Eastern traditions of meditation and contemplation,
and particularly in the sort of Zen and Buddhist sayings,
there's always a very nice analogy they use of how if you
keep stirring water that's already muddy, it just gets
muddier. You can't clear it by stirring
it, but if you leave it, eventually the mud settles and
the water becomes clear. So there is some kind of, I
mean, those two metaphors between them would suggest that
stillness has something to do with finding a centre and it has
something to do with clarity. And of course, the third, which
caps both of those, you know, the poetic and the the Zen
analogy is of course, the the Scripture and specifically the
verse in the Psalms that says be still and know that I am God.
Or again, in the story of Elijah, you know, going off at a
real Elijah is definitely, if you read the book, totally
suffering from burnout. I mean, it's like completely
finished and he wants to die and everything, you know, And he
goes and then there's a massive storm and there's all these
things. But God, the voice of God was
not in the storm and it wasn't in the the Thunder.
But then, you know, then it wasn't in the earthquake and
then there came a still small voice.
And there's something about hearing God in the stillness, I
think. Yeah, I've, I've, I was
wondering if that was Elliot because I couldn't remember
where the the still point. And then there's another poem
and I Malcolm, you need to help me figure out.
He talks about the centre will not hold the.
Oh yeah, that's Gate. So that's the H's extraordinary
prophetic point in the second coming where he says things fall
apart. The centre cannot hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
I feel like we're there now. And he says about that time this
wouldn't be true of all times. He says the best lack all
conviction was the worst of full of passionate intensity, you
know, so that fear that if the centre cannot hold, then mere
anarchy is loosed upon the world.
I mean, he's hardly thinking. I think he's thinking about in
political terms about a centre and the need for a centre, and
that he's writing out of the distress that the Irish Civil
War has not yet happened, but he can see it coming, just as he
could see the 1st that was written before both the First
World War and the Irish Civil War.
But he could see it coming. And both of those are crises
arising from the failure of the Centre to hold.
I want to tug on that thread for a moment.
What is the virtue of stillness in the face of something like
that, Whether it's impending disaster that you see coming or
see might that might be coming or that you may feel is is all
around you. What's the virtue of stillness
in that context as opposed to springing into action on the one
hand or, or just sort of crying out at the world and that that,
that perhaps the other end of the spectrum?
Well, maybe springing into action.
You know, Napoleon had a phrase if he was ever accused of
retreat, he would say rouquet pour MU.
So fall back in order, better to advance.
And there's something to be said.
I mean, I don't think there's a necessary choice to be made or
contradiction between stillness and action, but I think action
often goes awry if it's not preceded by stillness.
So another book that would be very pertinent to our things if
we suddenly pulled it off the shelf is the classic collection
of pieces by Thomas Merton, the Monk of Gethsemane in in
Kentucky, Great American Cistercian monk.
He wrote a collection called Contemplation in a World of
Action. That's not Contemplation against
a World of action, it's contemplation in a world of
action. So I don't think obviously some
people are called to a life of complete stillness and prayer
and contemplation, and we benefit from their doing that.
They do that on our behalf. But I think particularly people
whose life involves action of one kind or another, whether
it's social action or political action or in, you know, Matthew,
musical and literary action or my literary, you know, we are
doing things in the world, but we have to do them.
We mustn't be on the outside of the spinning world, just whirled
around and round endlessly. We have to find the still point
before we then move out into the motion.
Yeah, this is. I was talking a couple of weeks
ago with Jonathan Rogers, another Rabbit Room guy, and and
we're both big fans of Yosef Peeper.
Oh yeah. And talking about his idea of
contemplation and that we are pilgrims, that what a human is,
is a Pilgrim on a pilgrimage of beholding.
And but that how hard it is to to be constantly choosing to be
still, to contemplate, you know, think of that other Psalm that
talks about what I desire more than anything else is to behold
your beauty to to wait on you and your temple and contemplate
before you and, and then at Psalm 46 to be still.
And everything is crazy in that Psalm.
It's just the the sort of surrounding circumstance for the
psalmist is, is bananas. And he's and he's saying, but
I'm going to, I've got to somehow find a way to get back
in touch with what is ultimately real.
Yeah. The Realist recently.
We were mentioning Yates, his poem, one of his, his finest
poems, the most famous poems, of course, is the Lake Isle of
Inishfree. And everybody assumes that he
was on this beautiful lake island in this utterly
contemplative still space, writing a gorgeous poem.
You know, that's great for Yates.
You know, I'm stuck commuting. But in fact, he was in London
and he was walking down this very busy street with everybody
going past him, and he stopped in a little.
There's a little jeweller's shop with a display in the window.
And somebody had set up like a shell with a little fountain
going up in it. And seeing the fountain made him
then remember the lake Isle of Inishfree.
And then he says the poem is actually saying it's when I'm
out on the streets that I hear lake water lapping.
And he says I hear it in the deep hearts core.
So somehow his time in places where he has, you know, how long
he says he's tried treading the pavements grey.
But then he I hear like water lapping.
I I hear it in the deep hearts core.
And they're just, you have to thank Yates just for the phrase
the deep hearts core. I mean, is it great?
Well, great phrase maker? Obviously the centre cannot hold
is a phrase that's been taken from his poem and used
endlessly. And I remember once I had a
conversation with the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who's
I think, you know, inherits Yates mantle in every respect
and then entirely sits well on his shoulders.
And he said he thought that it is best what poetry offered.
It might not even be the whole poem that you remember.
He said poetry offers phrases that feed the soul and you know
the centre cannot hold and by its contrary, its contrast, the
deep hearts core are both phrases that feed the soul that
we draw from Yeats. Yeah, I remember you talking
about that at some point. That really stuck with me that
that idea of phrases. And you don't know what the
phrases are not be might not be the phrase that you thought was
the best phrase in your poem. Yeah, that is always surprising.
Yeah. Well, because that's part of the
idea of like when you're making, you're always participating in a
reality larger than yourself. Absolutely.
Things will always mean more than you could ever mean for
them to mean. Yeah, well, I always sometimes
think, you know, that the only thing that gives me the, the
temerity to call myself a poet is the conviction that all the
words I use are older and wiser than I am.
You know, they they they're long, old words.
They know things I don't know. And if I set them in this
particular order, I kind of overhear their conversation.
And then, you know, a poem may emerge, but it's from them
rather than from me. Just since we've been quoting
Yates twice and we're talking about pipes.
I just don't know. Just reached it over for my
pipes. This was sort of the first gift
I ever had from the great Jerry Reed.
So going back to what I told you, I told you about the long
stem. So he, we were in Grandchester
Meadows in Cambridge and he'd bought a group of people over
from the Kilns in Oxford and I'd been asked if I would take them
around Cambridge and show them the CS Lewis's Cambridge as
opposed to CS Lewis's Oxford. Obviously he was much happier in
Cambridge than he was in Oxford. Here's without saying, but so he
walked out from Cambridge and we came to Granchester Meadows,
which is rich in poetic associations and, and the
subject, and they all started cutting out their pipes and
smoking. And I felt in my pocket I didn't
have a pipe. Of course, he's terrible.
So don't worry, I've got a spare.
So he gets this pipe out, this astonishing pipe, right?
And he passes it over to me and I look at it, I said, that's a
pre Republic Peterson. And he says, how do you know
that? I said, well, I'm kind of
nerdily into Peterson's. And he said, well, it is.
Yeah. So enjoy it.
So we I have filled this great huge bowl, which is like, oh,
you know, full evenings. And we sat and talked and I
started this little game with him.
I said, let's try and think about all the great Irish poetry
that's been written since this pipe was made in Dublin, you
know, in the 20s. So we started quoting Yeats and
then we spoke quoting Kavanaugh and, you know, we finished doing
all this stuff and at the end of the and then we quoted probably
the very Yeats poetry. So I said, just think, you know,
somebody was reading that poetry while they were smoking this
pipe when that poetry was only just out.
So, so at the end of the session, I, I reverently and
gently gave him back the pipe and said it was an honour to
smoke that. And he, he says, no, no, it's
yours. You know, you can't do that.
You know, like I, there's my when I first they said, no, no,
no, no, no, no. The fact that you knew what it
was and that you thought of reciting the poetry means it's
your pipe. So I said to him, look, I'll
tell you what I'm going to do. I'll keep this pipe, you know,
well into my datage or even my anecdotage.
But I'll, I'll at some point I will meet some younger man who's
into pipe smoking and he will get this pipe.
You know he'll the pipe, it's like the ones choosing the
wizard, like the pipe will show me who that person is and I will
give him this pipe together with the stories and it'll pass on
that way. That's the way to do it.
That's so great. So you just alluded to something
that I think is very important, which is the in in the space of
one story, you hit past and future.
We spoke earlier about, you know, be still in the
scriptures, but something that's said even more often than be
still in the scriptures is remember, what is it?
It it feels to me like when you are still, you have a great
store of remembrance to to pull from, both in the the the
biblical sense and in the the more modern sense of the word.
I think a lot of our listeners could be forgiven for listening
and thinking, if only I knew all those things.
If only I had an encyclopedic knowledge of poetry.
If only I were a great film buff.
If only I. If only I.
For.
It's sort of a question for both of you, but I, I, I, I
particularly want to hear your answer, Malcolm.
For, for that person who's almost afraid to be alone with
his thoughts 'cause he's, he doesn't want to face them, or
just wonders if there's even going to be anything there.
Where? Where does remembering fit in to
stillness? Well, I think stillness is
certainly the time and place for remembering.
It allows memory to rise to the surface rather than being pushed
aside all vents. And that's why a lot of people
are afraid of stillness, because they're not sure what will come.
And we all have difficult memories and we we tend to
suppress precisely the memories of those times when we've made
fools of ourselves or said the wrong thing or hurt somebody we
love. Or do you know what I mean?
So you have to be prepared for those to come, and you have to
be. That's why why being still in
the presence of God is incredibly helpful, because God
already knows, as it were. God sees in the present the
things that are in the past for us.
He's already, he's like, they're eternally present to him, so we
can give them to him. In fact, confession in whatever
form you take it, I mean, I'm an Anglican, so I take it in quite
a liturgical form. And I actually think making real
confession to an actual priest is occasionally helpful.
But the point being, if you look back at the times that now come
to your memory and you're still of where you screwed up in
various ways or you felt, you know, if you really think about
when you where you went wrong while you were in the midst of
that sin, whatever it was basically at that time, you were
forgetting God. If you'd remembered God, you
wouldn't have done that, right? So when the memory comes in the
present stillness, you have a chance to remember God as well
in God being present in that. Do you know what I mean?
And that actually leads to a healing of the memories.
It leads to the characteristically and the
beautiful Christian experience of forgiveness.
In fact, Carl Bart in his chapter on the forgiveness of
sins in Dogmatics in outline, the opening sentence of that
chapter is brilliant. It's just says when a Christian
looks at his past, he is looking at the forgiveness of sins.
Amazing. Yeah.
It's good. So first is not to be afraid of
the difficult memories as they come because you remember them
now in a presence. So there's that.
But then when you've dealt with those, actually other things can
come and you find your mind is much fuller than you thought.
You don't think you remember things, but in fact you do.
I mean, I take the view that actually nothing, everything
that goes into our heads remains there.
It's just a question of how we access it.
And some people have easier channels or habits of access
than others. But everybody can improve that.
Everybody can try and record. Lots of people who've found
themselves in captivity have discovered this, that they can
access books they read ages ago. You know, they just have to wait
in the stillness of the prison cell until it comes to them and
then they've got it, you know. So, you know, there are initial
things that we fear. We have to overcome those fears,
but then we we do. But the other thing, memory is a
paradox because obviously remembrance is remembrance of
things past, you know, the great novel of Marcel Proustelle,
Recher Chandler, Tom Perdue, you know, in In Search of Lost
Times. So on the one hand, mate, you're
remembering something in the past, but on the other hand,
your act of remembering that past thing is itself in the
present and therefore the past memory.
Even though the occasion of the memory is past, the memory comes
into the present and allows some kind of access and, you know,
possibility and potential because it's present for you
now. So there's a, going back to TS
Eliot, there's a very great phrase, he has an essay called
Tradition and the Individual Talent, which is about how do
you become an original writer in the when you're at the tail end
of a massive tradition, how do you not just become a, you know,
Milton, Wallaby or whatever? And that's an immensely
difficult artistic question. But anyway, in this essay he
says a poet must be conscious not only of the pastness of the
past, but of, and this is his exact phrase, the present moment
of the past, the present moment of the past.
Now the word moment is not idly chosen by Elliot there.
I mean, he could have said the present instant or minute, and
that would have given it only a temporal meaning.
But of course, moment is a remarkable word because moment
also means importance. This is a matter of some moment.
But the reason the the the hidden, the forgotten metaphor
in the word moment when I say this is a matter of great
moment, is a reference back to the word momentum.
It's about the weight and push. It's about when something, it's
like that Newtonian cat's cradle where the, you know, the ball at
the end hits and then the other ones don't move, but a force is
being transmitted through them. The little one out the end does
that. That's momentum.
And one of the things that if we don't acknowledge the moment or
the momentum of past events, whether it's in our own life or
in the life of our nation, they act with force nevertheless.
But it becomes a blind force. You know, we can see so many
wars and crises arising out of the a blow that was struck 300
years ago still reverberating. Yeah.
So the question of we're taking a moment, the moment that you're
in now to consider the moment of the past and either to, to, to,
to, to cleanse it or have it forgiven or to have it
transfigured or transformed so that a strength from the past
becomes available to you without the bitterness.
None of those things can be done except in the present moment.
I'll tell you the place that I think you know, if you want to
think about why the present moment in the screw tape
letters, the 15th letter, which is the letter about time.
And he says the creatures, human creatures live in time, but the
Lord destines the enemy, destines them for eternity.
And you know, then he says which mode of time is most like
eternity. They think it's the future, but
the future's completely unreal, hasn't really happened.
The past is frozen and no longer flows.
But, and then I'm quoting Lewis directly now, but the present is
all lit up with golden rays. The present is the point at
which time touches eternity, which is one of those phrases
of, you know, you never forget once you read it.
So to the person who's saying, oh, I don't remember anything,
the answer is be still and you'll be surprised how much you
do remember. I love that it reminds me of
that Blaise Pascal. Oh yes.
You know that all of man's problems come from not being
able to sit alone. Yeah, Neparest is still Don
Seshunbury. Yeah.
Yeah, that's a great thing. It's true, of course.
Properly speaking, all the world's tolls, you know, if
everybody just stayed in their room.
But they'd have to eat sometime. He's right.
But you mentioned being afraid of what you might remember being
afraid of the thing. It's kind of that idea of for
me, I've been looking what really ordinary Saints got me
onto the idea in David Ford's book, and then Roger Scruton's
book, The Face of God got me onto the idea of facing and you
and Bruce and Jack. Oh, yes.
Face me, Face the face. Yeah.
The ordinary Saints. Confusingly, there are two books
called Ordinary Saints. There's a collection of essays
to which you may be contributing for the the The Square Halo
published. And there's a book of paintings
by Bruce Herman with poems by me.
I'm thinking of your y'all's project and that got me onto the
idea of facing but and then the woman at the well has been a big
scene for me, a favorite. Scene of the Lord.
Lord kept me for many years. And that scene seems to be all
about how difficult it is to face yourself unless you have
first been faced in love by God. And so here comes this woman to
the well in the middle of the day, and she has this encounter
with Jesus, who she has no idea that she's actually going to the
well to meet God in the flesh. She wouldn't have gotten out of
bed if she had known that was going to happen because she
couldn't have imagined that it could be a good thing.
But but something happens in this moment between them that's
you don't really. It's not described exactly what
happens. You just see the result of what
happens because she goes running back to the town singing.
She has a new song and the lover is singing, but something, some
kind of stillness, I think, happened.
There's a moment where she's about to turn and go, and in
this, this moment, this momentum, this momentum.
I love Jesus's phrase at that point where he says if only you
knew. If only, yeah.
If only you knew who is asking you, you would ask him.
You'd turn it all around. You know, I often think that the
Jesus is walking around with us, you know, standing beside us as
we get ourselves into some Stew and going like if only you knew.
Yeah, yeah. But I, I think too, that I love
what you're saying about forgiveness and one of the ideas
of thinking, thinking a lot about in our culture,
storylessness, decontextualization.
We talk about disenchantment, but there's just kind of an
overall decontextualization where I don't know where I came
from. I don't know where I'm going.
How can I possibly locate myself meaningfully in a fabric of
narrative here and now? And I don't want to look at the
past. I don't want to look at the
generational things that have been passed down or the history
of ideas that have got us to this point, because it's really
kind of terrifying to face. But if I could face it with
Jesus, then I can look back and I can see forgiveness and I can
see possibility for the future. And then also thinking of time.
We did this thing at at an Anselm Imagination Redeemed
conference some years ago. And I talked about time, but it
got me thinking about there's a difference between mechanical
time that has to do with this little thing you keep on your
wrist that you feel like is controlling your life, or this
thing you keep in your pocket. Versus social time or moral
time, where what you're discovering is that God has
given this gift where there's time to see what kind of God God
is, where he can make a promise, and then that promise has space
to unfold so that you can learn this is someone I can trust.
This is someone I can put my life, my times in his hands.
Yeah, what The Who he is. And then he comes in the
fullness of time. Now that's very good.
Yeah. Of course, the Greek of the
Greek New Testament has these two different words for time,
Konos and Kairos. Kronos is time as measured, if
you like, by chronometers. It's that mechanical time you
saw Kairos is a is a time of crisis or meeting or
opportunity. So sometimes you have to use a
lot of English words. So in the authorized version
where he's weeping over Jerusalem, he says, oh,
Jerusalem, Jerusalem. You know, how often have you if
only you had known the time of your visitation?
It says in the Authorized version and but in Greek it just
says, if only you had known your Kairos, you know.
So again, there's a sense in which what is Kairos?
Kairos is never in the past nor in the future.
It's only possibility is to be now.
So then you get later in Paul. Behold, now is the acceptable
time. Now is the day of salvation.
And I somebody I think has written a book comment there's a
book called The Sacrament of the present moment.
And I think there's a lot to be said.
It's not that you shouldn't remember and it's not that you
shouldn't. It's necessary to anticipate the
future. I mean, I needed to anticipate
the future in order to be with you now.
But those are functional things, whereas the the Sacramento thing
is right now the actual moment. That reminds me of a day, a day
called today. Like the in Hebrews, God has set
a a day and he's called it today and today.
If you hear his voice, don't harden your remarks.
If there's some kind of moment being created for a response,
but it's. It's on, yeah.
This is the day the Lord has made.
We will rejoice and be glad in it.
Tomorrow isn't the day that the Lord has made, because he hasn't
made it yet. Yesterday's the day the Lord has
already made, you know. But this is the day the Lord has
made. And don't miss it, be here now.
I'll be here now and be present to it.
OK, But I want to push back on this a little bit because we've,
we've talked about this, this idea that if that's true, in a
sense, it's true of, of place as well as time.
The the I, I, I'm doing the dishes right now.
So I have the opportunity to meet the great story, to enter
into the great story in the kitchen sink.
I think probably at least 3/4 of the people I know would hear
that and immediately feel a sense of pressure.
Oh dear. Because you can accurately say
that there's a sense of if, if, if my calling is to bring
eternity, to participate in the work of Christ, in bringing
eternity and bringing the divine to this place, claiming this
little moment, this little space and time for Christ.
Oh my goodness, the pressure. So how does the insight you just
provided, Malcolm, how does that translate to stillness?
Well, I think the very thing you said, Oh my God, I've got to do
this. This is part of our sort of, you
know, what they call the Protestant working because as
opposed, I presume to the Catholic play.
I think, I don't know. But anyway, the The thing is,
we, we are very task oriented. It's arguable that we've been
made task oriented and also filling every, you know,
filling, fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of
distance run and all that. That's actually a product of not
only the invention of clocks, but the sort of capitalist
invention of the production line and all of those kinds of
things. You know, and it's ironic when
we say, now I've got, you know, there is a sense in which my
vocation is to make myself utterly available to Christ so
that Christ may in some small way through me be present in
this moment. That's true, but that's not my
work. That's his work.
I have to be despoenible as the French.
I have to be available and I should try sometimes consciously
to make myself available. But I may be available to him
anyway. I mean like he'll work with
anybody. He, you know, when he couldn't
get Balaam to prophecy, he prophecy through Balaam's ass,
you know, So like he, he can work with difficult material.
Very resourceful. Yeah, the main thing is that he
gets, you know, that it's him doing it.
So I really think, you know, like thine is the Kingdom, the
power and the glory. I don't think it's a big task
that you and I don't even think you have to yourself be like
Uber conscious of the Christ moment, you know, as it comes or
something like that, and then make a quick note of it and
write a book of theology about it later.
I think you just have to be there, you know, and in
returning and rest, as you know the scripture says.
So I would say as soon as you're beating yourself up about duty,
you've already got locked into the circle of self.
It may be self reproving self, but it's still the self turned
in on itself. As Augustine says, you drop that
and then you make this open gesture with your palms, which
is really here am I for you. And the for you bit means that
that God does his stuff. And as Paul says, his strength
is made perfect in weakness. So like if you say, say you're
in the course of your day, you've decided I'm going to say
10 minutes aside, simply just sit and be still with or without
the aid of a pipe. If you immediately start, as it
were, putting your hand on your pulse and taking your religious
pulse, you know, and temperature, all that.
So how's it going? You know, can I have a status
report on this? You know, has there been any
value added in the last 50 seconds?
You know you've completely lost it.
Just enjoy the pipe, enjoy the morning, listen to the bird
song. Don't feel there has to be a
product for Jesus out of that, because Jesus is both the end
and the beginning and the way, and His strength is made perfect
in weakness. You can just know that you're
with Him, He is with you, and He will achieve what He wants in
the world through you. But you don't have to be
constantly sending back a status report on it.
There was a line in your opening point in the the ever ringing
till. Yeah, it's pretty.
Yeah, the world with all its hopeless hype, its pressures and
its ever ringing till. And I've been thinking, yeah,
I've been thinking about the idea of gift economy and Isaiah
55 and you come, you who have no money and buy and, and how this
is my thoughts are higher than your thoughts because I know
that this way of living and thinking in the gift economy is
so foreign to you. But I'm going to send my word
down like rain and snow to water and make the world flourish and
my people will be endowed with beauty.
And so just thinking about the idea of how there's this totally
foreign economy that God is asking us to participate in, but
we're so we're so saturated in accomplishment and achievement
in the ever ringing till that it's really hard for us to sit
still and actually believe in that other way of life, which is
the life of the Trinity. And I've been reading Sarah
Clarkson's book Reclaiming Quiet and she talks so much about
being a busy parent of I think 4 kids at this.
Point. And she talked about how she is
learning that difference between this, this thing that I have to
accomplish, this quiet that I have to generate myself versus a
quiet that it already exists and is kept in God and that I need,
I can visit that place. I can visit that that other
world, in this world. And part of that is really to do
with the theology of Sabbath, I think, as it's in Genesis that
on the 7th day, God rests. Well, the 6th day is already
over, so this is still the 7th day.
You know, there's an eternal Sabbath.
So the Sabbath is something you don't make.
It's what you enter into. So now let's talk about phrases
that feed the soul. Yeah, You know, you Americans
have got one of the still alive, thanks be to God, one of the
great poets of our of our age, which is Wendell Berry.
Yeah. And that collection of his, This
is the Day, which is all the Sabbath poems, is written on
Sabbaths. So there's a phrase in one of
those early Sabbath poems which says he's going walking out to
the woods right from off the field where he's leaving his
tasks and his cattle where they're lying down and all the
jobs of the farm in Kentucky's walking into this little wood.
And he says, once again, I enter, this is such a great
phrase. He says I enter the standing
Sabbath of the trees. Now, obviously there's a sense
in which the trees are standing, you know, and he's so that's
their Sabbath is a standing Sabbath.
But obviously standing means standing over, not being washed
away. And he's actually riffing on a
phrase in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, where he's
discussing the difference between time and eternity.
And he's trying to get across to you the idea that eternity is
not an, is not Infinity, It's not an infinite succession of
separable moments, each to be won and lost and found it.
He says this is exactly his phrase in the Latin of the text.
He says eternity is a nunc, stands a standing now, an
eternal now and now. That's always available.
And he, I think Wendelberry, is saying the trees are already in
the Sabbath. God is already in the Sabbath.
God is in this Sabbath. Looking at the trees in this
Sabbath. It is a standing Sabbath.
It's like a standing order. It's always and all I have to do
is enter into the standing Sabbath of the trees.
Is that the same idea of like we have a standing meeting like
every Tuesday? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
This thing, but I just have to show up for it.
It's. Yeah, it's a standing.
Yeah. Yes, it's standing and with, you
know, it's stand and withstand, of course, is a famous phrase
again in, you know, in Pool taken up by Luther.
But yeah, I love that idea that the trees are already keeping
this perfect Sabbath. I just have to walk in there and
enter the standing Sabbath of the trees.
That makes me think about my dad is a tree farmer.
And so we have, we have all this acreage of a lot of it's pine
trees, a lot of it's hardwoods. We call it a hardwood stand
actually, or a pine stand. And so, you know, we grew up my
dad was a really gung ho Deer Hunter.
But what I figured out later in life is that the reason he likes
to go deer hunting is because it was a chance to go and sit
completely still and quiet in the woods for hours and hours
and hours, which was a bit much for me as a kid.
I was too squirmy for that. But now I love it.
I love to just go sit and be silent for three or four hours
and just stare at the and then talking about things you notice.
It's really amazing. If you stare at the same patch
of woods for three or four hours, you begin to get very
tuned into every little movement.
You see a bird over here, you notice everything and all the
sudden this thing that you might have scanned quickly past
becomes so full of life. And of course, all the time
you're noticing your trees, the trees or the woods or the
movements, you are blessedly and mercifully not noticing
yourself. Yeah, yeah.
So. One of the Pistons you have to
get out of the way in silence is the self.
And one of the that's why it's so difficult, because the first
thing that happens when you go into science is all your junk
comes to the surface. And yeah, you long for
distraction so you won't see your junk.
And you just have to say that is going to drift away.
The stream is going to carry that down.
Yeah, no, I mean, and you have the streams.
I don't think it was found very helpful.
There's a there's a guy called Robert Llewellyn who's he's died
now, but I got to know him when I was a student and he's a
Christian priest. But he had, he was actually the
keeper of the shrine of Julian and Norwich at Norwich, so
deeply into Julian. But he had also travelled
extensively and had actually been to Japan and done a full
Zen retreat, but done a Zen retreat as a Christian, you
know. So he said, you know, the, oh,
it's quite difficult at first. You'd be sitting in this Zarzan,
you know, kneeling in this Zarzan Hall.
And then there'd be a plane going overhead.
And then Zen master would say, don't listen to the plane.
And then he would say, don't try not to listen to the plane.
And then anyway, he passed on to me a thing this guy, this Zen
guy had said to him, which I found incredibly helpful and
completely constant with Christian things.
He said when you're entering into meditation, he said, think
of yourself as being on a bridge, looking down at a
flowing stream. And down the stream comes all
your stuff. It's the stream of your thoughts
and there are ships on it and boats on it and they're piled
with all your stuff. Don't think you have to ignore
them. Don't say by all means see the
boat approaching. Notice the weight it's carrying,
whether it's listing to one side or another.
See all the stuff as it comes towards you.
Let it pass under the bridge. Let the next one come.
You can look at it as much as you like, but he says don't jump
off the bridge onto the ship, stay on the bridge.
And I found that incredibly helpful.
In fact, I often do a lot of my still standing where I'm
fortunate to walk in places where I can stand on bridges
with streams going underneath them.
And I find that metaphor of the bridge incredibly helpful to
stand still on the bridge and let it go because I used to
think I had to ignore the stream and ignore the the ships on the
stream. And you can't do that.
But you cannot jump onto them. You cannot get carried away by
the stream of thought. You can simply let it flow
through you as you stand in this still place on the bridge.
I love that that reminds me of an image I'm I've been rereading
Elizabeth Gooch's Pilgrims in. I haven't read it but.
But there's an image toward the end, and it's an image about
forgiveness. Going back to the idea of time.
There was a a Faulkner quote that said the past is not dead.
It's not even past. And she gives the image of this
stone that's in the middle of a stream and everything's getting
caught, like all the debris, the branches and the pine straw and
all these things are getting hung up on this stone and
they're piling up and they're clogging up the stream.
And then there's this moment of forgiveness where the, this,
this stone is removed and everything is dislodged and it
can flow on and, and now this person, as she puts it, this
person can become who they really are now.
And I feel like that a lot when I try to get still, I just feel
like everything is bunching up and getting hung up on all the
little obstacles in the water. And it, it takes me a while.
It takes a while to slow down for the Lord to come in and kind
of move some things around and dislodge some things.
And that can be really frustrating because my
expectation is shouldn't this should be happening quicker?
This should be happening, but it really learning learning to to
wait for that. Yeah.
I don't know if you saw just recently in the last day, this
extraordinary power cut that came out of nowhere and
afflicted the whole of Spain and Portugal and some parts of
France, right? Literally everything, some
cascade thing happened. And at a certain point in the
day, everything was turned off. I mean, it was chaos in the
sense that trains couldn't go, traffic lights stopped working,
card transactions, petrol stations, everything, literally
everything went off. And obviously there's complete
panic. And obviously all the people for
whom it had gone off didn't know if it's just a local thing
because they had no access to sources of news or information.
But there've been a few, you know, obviously people all
telling their stories now because their power's back on.
But a few people are saying that they found it strangely
liberating. They were completely helpless.
Like there was absolutely no way they could keep the appointment.
And there was no way that they could tell the people why they
couldn't keep the appointment. There was no way they could know
whether the people with whom they weren't keeping the
appointment also couldn't keep the appointment.
They, they had completely helpless.
And they were restored for a moment to the condition that
most of humanity has been in most of the time, which is not
being constantly in touch with everybody and knowing what time
it is. Yeah.
You know, now, I mean, I'm not saying we should all have power
cuts like that all the time, but I think it was quite salutary.
Right. Brian, I don't want to interrupt
you if you're about to say something, but there was one
more idea I wanted to bring up and ask you about Malcolm and
ask you also, Brian, I was listening to Ken Myers on
Marshall Audio Journal this morning and he was talking about
Arvo Peart, the the composer. Oh yeah.
And he was interviewing the guy who had apparently made a
graphic novel biography of Arvo Peart.
But one of the. Things I talked to.
Yeah, I haven't seen it yet. This is news to me, but it
sounds amazing. And he was interviewing that guy
and they were talking about Arvo Parrot's idea of of the
silences, of leaving these silences in the music.
And this idea that sometimes God is silent.
And that's very frustrating is maybe that silence is
uncomfortable or it leaves all this room for things to pop up
in my head that I don't want to think about.
But the way he put it really was helpful to me because he said
it's like any good conversation. God is leaving room for us to
participate. He's creating a space in the
conversation so that we can enter into it.
Because he was saying that's Arvo Parrott's idea is that he
wants to make music but leave enough room between notes so
that the imagination of the listener can actually enter into
the music. Oh.
It's beautiful. And, and then the, the visual
artist was saying, there's a, there's a visual analogue with,
if you're drawing panels, like in a comic book, that a lot of
action happens between the panels.
You have a stance and then you have, something has changed by
the time you get to this next panel.
And it was actually in between those images in the silence that
something took place. The story has moved forward in
the characters have have developed.
And so I was thinking about that frustration of God's silence,
but how God is all. And I've also been reading Pope
Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth, the first of those.
And there's this undercurrent constantly of union.
And one of the God is drawing us up into participation in the
life of the Trinity. But one way he does that is by
this this hospitable conversation.
That's very good. The thing about silence again,
going back to your great poet Wendell Berry, he's got a poem
called How to Be a Poet Brackets to remind myself, which I have
pinned up in my little writing Hut.
I sometimes never get past the third line.
So the first 3 lines are make a place to sit down, sit down, be
quiet. But the poem goes on to say,
accept what comes from the silence.
Make the best you can of it. Try to make a poem which does
not obscure the silence from which it came.
Yeah, Bieber talks about that too, about music and silence.
That essay in Only the Lover Sings.
As perhaps a last turn to our, our conversation, I, I'd love
for us to talk a little bit about how this object and the
habits we build around it can push us toward this, not only as
a, as a, as a distinctive thing, but as a case study.
Because when I was, when I was growing up, I mean, the
Christianity as, as I encountered it was very, it was
very gnostic. It was very, you sort of step
away from the world in order to, you know, close your eyes to,
to, to pray. If, if you love something, it's
probably, it's probably bad. It's probably going to make it
into an idol. And there are very legitimate
concerns and fears in all of that that led to all of those
things. However, pipe smoking this
object for me, for starters, it was in in my own story was was a
vehicle for healing when I first encountered it.
But it, but it's also an object and it has an activity around it
that allows us to not only enter into stillness, but practice
stillness. So I, I have my own anecdotes on
that, but I want to hear each of each of yours.
How does the pipe and the Art of pipe Smoking help you to
practice stillness? Well, there's a paradox here, I
think, and there's a particular thing about pipes and pipe
smoking. You're doing, you're really
smoking a pipe in order to do nothing, in order to have that
still. That's the end.
But in fact, you are doing something, but it's something
very outward and simple. You have to take the pipe off
the rack. You fill the pipe.
You quite often real as you probably saw with me, you're
realizing it and this is actually taking all the energy
of distraction that might otherwise just be in circulating
dumb thoughts about yourself or whatever.
It's actually in this. It's the equivalent for us of
what telling beads was in prayer and it gives the monkey mind
something to do. Well, if you like the Christ
mind can finally surface and and be its thing.
I mean, I'll see if I can just find out a phrase in the when I
wrote this essay for for the Square Halos Ordinary Saints
book. I have this sentence where I say
so when I smoke my pipe. I am active to that degree.
I am admittedly doing something, but I'm only active in order to
be passive. I do these little things in
order at last to do nothing. And then, surprisingly and by
sheer grace, in that mellow, smoky space, something of beauty
is born, something for which there would have been no room if
the pipe had not commanded me to relax.
Beautifully put. Yeah.
How about you, Matthew? Well, it made me think of a
couple of things. One, I'm I'm a fan of Esther
Lightcap Meek, and she's a Christian epistemologist that
I've gotten to know. She's really.
Good. I had a conversation with her in
the In the Eagle in Saint Bennett St. in Cambridge just
recently. She's she's wonderful.
I really love she's. Really good, yeah.
But she talks a lot about the thickness of things and and so
there's something about I can I can feel this thing in my hand.
It's an it's really here. And in some sense it's reminding
me that I'm really here too. I can get so lost in my head and
another Ken Myers things. We're not just brains on sticks.
You know we're we're well God has bodied forth some part of
his imagination in US even and there's something ratifying
about that. There's something that says an
Amen to the goodness of the things that God has made.
And that's another part of people's work is is like he says
one of my favorite parts is you. You can't tell somebody happy
birthday and mean it If you agree with start that existence
is absurd, he said. But if you really agree with
what's going on at the center of things that.
That God has said, I like this stuff, I like this world that I
made, this is my dream and it's coming true and I love it.
Then I can hold the and I can feel the warmth of this pipe in
my palm and I can smoke it and I can enjoy letting it drift out.
And even that can become this way of agreeing with God about
what He has said is good. Well, I think entering into the
Sabbath is entering into God's looking at the world and seeing
that it's good. It's letting go of our partial
judgements. Just seeing that God sees all
these things, He's including us, that He is at this moment
contemplating us. I mean, it's hard to believe,
but He's counting up, placing us with pleasure.
Of course, He sees the sin and He knows how to do with it.
He sees the completed person. He sees the idea he had, and He
sees the idea He had becoming itself through time, Time being
another idea that he had. Yeah.
And so getting to to enter into that, that mutuality, if, if he
is contemplating and enjoying us, well, maybe I can
participate in this, this incredible world that he's made
and say, well, Lord, I I'll enjoy you back.
I'll enjoy. Your returns exactly right.
And this is a way to do that. Just one little way.
Simple way I'll. Enjoy you back as a good phrase.
I think there could be a song in there, Matthew.
Well, I'll work on that. Maybe we can work on it in
Belfast. There you go.
Yeah. The other thing, I, I I I find
that life as I know it, the the busyness, the pace, the the
hamster wheel, however you want to conceptualize it tends to
scatter me. I go through a lot of days
feeling, you know, like, like Bilbo Baggins put it like butter
scraped over too much bread. And, and this little fellow
who's older than I am tends to force me to recollect myself in
both senses of that word. I have to be fully present to
the pipe. But what typically happens is
shortly thereafter, I am then fully present to whatever the
silence brings. And sometimes it's just looking
up and seeing my kids running through the yard laughing and
I'm able to just fully enter into my delight in their
laughter. But we've also, we've also all
seen it in social contexts. Oh yes, let's get together with
a few other guys and smoke pipe, smoke our our pipes for an hour.
And next thing you know, it's been 4 hours and everyone is
saying things they wouldn't have said before the pipe smoking or
wouldn't even have said one hour into the pipe smoking.
But all of a sudden vulnerability is happening and
connection is happening. And because they're all fully
present to each other. Absolutely, yeah.
Well, gentlemen, I want to be respectful of your time because
that is a thing that we have to do in the world that we occupy,
even in the face of everything that we have just been talking
about. But thank you both for joining
me for this conversation. I appreciate both of you sharing
your wisdom. And I thoroughly enjoy doing a
podcast where I get to mostly listen and where it's well worth
doing. So the Imagination Redeemed
podcast is a production of the Anselm Society.
It's easy to see this world as disenchanted and to give up hope
that there's more. But you were made to see the
world with the eyes of heaven and to live a bountiful life
that participates in the life of God.
Like in the great stories, the Anselm Society is a place where
you can come in and experience that beauty, joyful celebration,
and ancient wisdom and go out renewed, bringing that life to
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renaissance of the Christian imagination together.