Day 35 - God of all

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.

(Revelation 22:13).

The Uncertainty of the Poet by Giorgio de Chirico, 1918

Tate Modern, London; oil on canvas; 1232mm x 1125mm

In the first scene of Nick Hamer’s 2021 documentary, Brotherhood: The Inner Life of Monks, Brother Liam Strahan, a monk of over 60 years and now on his deathbed, explains that when he first came to the monastery prayer was ‘something that you did’. He then goes on to say, ‘Now I don’t pray. Prayer is the atmosphere in which I live. My whole life is a prayer to God. The presence of God is something that I am aware of all the time. I’m just living in the presence of God’.

God is everywhere. God is everything. The Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.

Ancient minds were interested in the transcendent, that which exists beyond the time/space/matter world. As time has moved on, has there been a decline in mystery in our world? For, our studies of science, astronomy, technology, and medicines, may have transformed how we live, but do we spend enough time and effort contemplating truth, goodness and beauty?

De Chirico was an Italian-Greek artist, who founded the Scuola Metafisica movement, which became an influence on the surrealists who followed, especially in regard to being and possibility. The Uncertainty of the Poet may be puzzling to our minds. It is not immediately obvious what it means. The painting combines the absurd and sensible, artificial and natural, fleeting and eternal, and the overt and mysterious. Within the picture we see the mundane and extraordinary, the complex and simplistic. May it encourage us all to open our minds to ponder that which we will never know, to attempt to expand our often narrow viewpoint. For God is not simply the God of what we know, but the God of all.

As Congregationalists, a look at the syllabus of one of our great dissenting academies of the early eighteenth century, that of John Jennings, just down the road from where I write here in Leicestershire, shows subjects such as rhetoric, logic, aesthetics, and pneumatology. How open minded and expansive this seems in comparison to that of our modern National Curriculum. In our world of iPads and AI we seem to know more than ever, yet our field of understanding seems to shrink.

So let us all try to throw off the shackles that influence our contemporary thought and show an appreciation for everything. In doing so, may our very lives, like that of Brother Liam, be a deep and humble prayer in the presence of our God. Our God of all.

Gwyn Davies