Posted on by Glenn Mower

Guide me away from dangerousness

‘The most dangerous man

(or woman Mr Merton?) in the world is the contemplative who is guided by nobody…The world is covered in scars that have been left in its flesh by visionaries like these.’

I have been trying to respond honestly to a couple of enquiries about who and what sources do I draw from? So what follows is a meandering around the visionaries who currently seem to be my most significant guides:

Mostly I realise that many of my guides are magnificent, humbling and, alas dead! Yes, Thomas Merton whose words from above have moved me to day, is probably the biggest influence at the moment. I love his ‘Seeds of Contemplation’ and maybe more so his ‘Intimate Diaries.’

And then there is Richard Rohr and Shuntaro Tanikawa (how thankful I am that these two are still ‘breathers’), ah yes, and at one point Henry Green (who was especially influential in my teens when I read and re-read ‘Living’)

But who else has shaped this weirdly constructed 53 year old?

Meister Eckhart and Jan Van RuusbroecR, both peripherally come into view. Both maybe a trifle too dense and distantly complex for me to wholly digest and embrace. I still find it hard to be immersed in them and their writings, but I am greatly refreshed by spending regular times communing with snippets from their mysterious writings.

Guides, more present and tangible? Certainly, my father-in-law who unknowingly in his advancing age offers wisdom accrued through 87 years of dedicated Christian journeying. He offers a surprising openness to my need to spread wide across spiritual disciplines and faith groups. He has helped me form and thread my spiritual path, (sometimes by me internally clocking and rebuffing his Scriptural recitations over a shared Sunday lunch of salad and processed ham and always by our open-hearted entering into discussions about daily living and growing up continents and generations apart).

My wife, she is central: her direct, loving, no-nonsense exterior, her drive to be kind to others, her ‘Pa! what nonsense,’ approach to my over-sensitive over-clinging insecurities that billow out time and again. Her thoughtfulness, her steady love and our mutual trust that has blossomed over the past 27 years.

Nothing has been more grounding and fundamental to my growing and letting go into newness than she.

And what of others who have guided me along the way: Brian Thorne (as I struggled to find a male voice to guide me through my initial counselling qualifications), and I want to say Titch Nhat Hanh, who after my fathers death nearly ten years ago, gave me the openings and encouragement to begin upon a road of peacefulness within very present and sometimes overwhelming suffering.

But latterly I have found that the more of him I read the more repetitive his message has become. Simple, grounding and refreshing but kind of lacking within the omnipotent deity department.

My goodness can I really say that of the writings of such a wonderfully present spiritual soul?

Maybe not, maybe I am clumsily trying to express, to recognise my need for a deeper more spiritual heart to times of meditation, to stillness and to my present living. I love his book ‘Living Buddha, Living Christ,’ and still try to live alongside and within the ‘Five Mindfulness Trainings,’ transmitted to me on a Plum Village inspired UK retreat in June 2016. But last two years of journeying into Contemplative Prayer Meditations has unwrapped and amazed me within different dimensions altogether.

Llama Surya Das and Natalie Goldberg, Martin Laird, Michael Mayne and Rilke (how I love your ‘Book of Hours’), all of you, by your human love and humorous gentle honesty infused within your writings, have inspired me. And oh my goodness, yes, Neil Douglas Klotz (I love, love love to read and re-read your ‘Wisdom of the Desert Fathers’ and revel in the gorgeousness of ‘The Prayers of the Cosmos’)

Neil Douglas Klotz, yes, you have, so recently opened my eyes and heart to poetic translations of the Aramaic sayings of Jesus of Nazareth. These multi-layered, delicate and expansive offerings have been nothing more than an ever-unfolding revolutionary revelation.

And then there is the wealth with Sufism, within Sufi Contemplation, Rumi and Hafiz and…… breathe,,,,breathe so

Breathing into Stephen Cherry’s gentle guide to walking with Jesus (‘The Barefoot Disciple’) I re-remember how his words encourage me each time I flip open a page and absorb the goodness therein.

It is as if the more I write the more I crumble at the thought of how many wonderful works I have missed, I am ignorant of, I have dismissed, forgotten or misunderstood.

My delicious resting in contemplative meditation comes back to me, yes it certainly guides, uncertainly teaches me in untastable, unknowable and yet deeply felt ways. In ways beyond this present litany of self-absorption.

I look back over this emerging list and more and more names topple forward. Hero’s Hero’s Hero’s one and all. And I have a sudden urge to include Julian of Norwich, more for the fact she was a woman than for her overall effect on me. I wish I was more moved by her Showings , but repeatedly find them too Christ centred. She is a Shero all the same.

As is Emily Dickinson and the wonderful, painful and inspiring diaries of Ettie Hillesham, and the profound Sharon Salzberg offering ‘Loving Kindness’ and Evelyn Underhill espousing ‘Practical Mysticism,’ to the modern man of 1903.

Memories of journeys, of readings so moving and influential and yet right now not much more than mere graspings of time and place and sense gone by.

I am none the less enthralled, unravelled and dug deep within layers and layers of otherness. I am sunk within compostes of goodness and yet nd yet their actual words, (humming quietly within the closed pages of my diaries), are often beyond my current, specific recollection.

And so I also attempt to grow by physically touching this earth while giving thanks for all sources of spiritual richness, all my ancestors and breathers alike. By physically touching this earth with my forehead, by privately giving fulsome thanks to all those who stand steadfast and grow deep roots into my soul, praises and thanks to all sentient beings and star dust that continue to emit goodness, to all those who inhabit this wonderful multi-dimensional space, I bow in softened recollection, within growing obedience and supplication to all that is far and away beyond this bundle of skin and blood and ageing bone.

Posted on by Glenn Mower

This shadow skinned in the noon day sun

Jan Van Ruusbroec

 

from your 14th century Espousals, please

oh please, plentifully Arouse all my senses

‘In each and every new filled now,’

as this brow of mine re-touches

Mother Earths starry dust

somehow, let me believe that,

‘God Divine,’ is indeed,

‘born again within the very dark and deep of us.’

 

And when I’m done with all now’s

active nothingness

When I lift the navel of contemplation to resit

re-read, re-phrase, to extrapolate upon

more of your Praise onwards

ever onwards from Paragraph 1528

I wonder what it actually means

‘To annihilate all my free will,’ right now, to

‘Re-ignite my burning love, unfurl

this Heart’ to taste the ‘Spirit Storms’ that press above

and beyond my simple rational consciousness. Breathe

 

Oh,

 

words of Word please Breathe in me.

 

Oh,

 

Holy Spirit, Dharmakaya, Living Buddha, Cosmic Christ

Whoever you are, rise higher and as One,

return the call to gently empty this shell-like Body

this shadow skinned in the noon day sun

and then, if Your will is genuine, hear this

humble mumbled soft request to, begin again,

refill, renew Your ever-present interest in all that

moves this anatomically bereft blood and bone

and void filled chest.

Posted on by Glenn Mower

Six degrees of desolation

 

On top of my mantle shelf I have a silvered old army photo, shimmering like dew  between green glass, hidden behind later digital additions to my Mower family archive. It is of a grand-father I never knew, a man that my dad hardly knew either. He has kindly eyes and my overlarge nose.

He is to me a fatigued silvering ghost, merely a man whose urge to serve became his untimely watery grave, and more so than this, he has over the years, become an intimate deeply seated sliver of the ‘untarnished mirror in which Eternal images constantly dwell.’

Did he, did this figment of my lineage, manage to free himself from the confines of that landing craft? Or were you, Mr Mower Snr, shredded by shrapnel upon that fateful World War 11 Anzio beach? Or were you merely mown down in the waters before your feet hit the rocks and sand?

April 5th 1944. Shot. How many times I do not know, but Dead, you were most definitely shot dead only three days after my father’s second birthday.

When was it written that that swim was to be your drowning last?

How long did you believe the offensive lies, how long before salt brine and Italian sand mixed with you and your blooded brothers in arms?

William Edward Mower: Wiltshire Regiment. My unknown grandad, ripped from this world aged 31. Permanently stripped from kith and kin on that April day. Sacrificed to be dug deep, alongside 2,025 other souls whose eyes and mouths and flesh were raked with bullets and mortar and then scraped upon sand to be disappeared within the regimental lines of Italian marble and stinking mud.

I know the facts that came after you, but none about you as a living breathing man.

I see a digital copy of a grave stone that says ‘In ever loving memory of a dear husband and daddy, we loved him so dearly.’ Such tender words concocted by my grandma, not so long before she quickly remarried and birthed two new additions to her three grieving sons, who in turn became uncles and aunties who gave cousins aplenty, that in between the funerals are largely invisible to me.

But what emotion for the loss of William Mower can there really be inside of me? What connection can I have to the history of a name which, until my late teens, I never even knew existed. What connection to a name I never saw in the flesh?

To a name as distant to me as the non-related:

William Henry Mower: a Deck hand, lost at sea aged 23 on November 3, 1914. A ‘Drifter, husband and much-loved son’, a body never found, a name among 36,068 etched into marble plaques at Tower Hill.

and

William Charles Henry Mower, a Lance Seargent, dead to this world on May 18, 1915 aged but 24, but one of the 13,482 dead and deeply lost in the rows of Le Touret Memorial, in the Pas de Calais cemetery.

and

William Mower, you, a Private Royal Scot dying from unrecorded events within the 13th Battalion on the 11th day of May, 1916. You with no middle name and no age to die. You, also snuffed out to lay with another 20,661 in another memorial in the offending death sprawl of Pas de Calais cemetery.

and

William Percy Elves Mower, a Light Railway Sapper of the Royal Engineers who died 18 July 1917, aged 25, ‘One of the dearest, one of the best, now in Gods keeping, Safe at rest,’ buried with 10,120 more in West Vlaanderen, Belgium.

and

William Harry Mower, the Sick berth steward, aged 33 whose family paid 3 ½ d per word to change your profession to Royal Navy Petty Officer, to honour your July 9th death, re-chiselling new words sometime after your 1918 demise. New words to weather upon a headstone to cover your bones while buried at home in Norwich. You too a William Mower long dead and buried with 533 of your fellow wartime casualties.

 

You six: carrying the same name but not necessarily the same blood-line as I.

You six: nestled beneath the sod and stone with 80,884 other disparate desperate souls.

You 80,890 dead: mere fragments of the millions upon millions destroyed, maimed and grieved during wartimes aplenty.

You: countless human beings blooded together into State sponsored graves by Governing bodies who charged families for headstone inscriptions, no doubt as some form of balm for officially guiding sons and daughters, husbands and wives, into a kill and be killed vortex of mad desolation.

You: countless endless mass of disappeared flesh and bone, Should I stand to honour you upon this upcoming eleventh hour, of the eleventh month of our yearly gathering of collective despair?

Should I stand to grieve for an unknown intimate family member? Should I hang my head for all courageous cadavers ever unseen?

Should I stand to say, ‘Shame on you, you insatiable wasteful warring whoring Nation States?’

Should I stand to say, ‘There but for the grace of God go I?’

Yes, this year I think the answers ‘Yes.’

This year, with renewed hope, with white and red poppies held aloft, I will in silence make my stand.