Shibboleth I

I'm told it's the Meek that will inherit the Earth.

If you’ve only just found me, you might want to read my Welcome post before diving in here.

‘Then another clear voice, as young and as ancient as Spring, like the song of a glad water flowing down into the night from a bright morning in the hills, came falling like silver to meet them’

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

A few years ago, my life was ambushed by The Lord of the Rings.

I’d watched the films, but never managed to complete the books. And, having found a solitary spot to listen to the last of Andy Serkis’s 64 hours of masterful reading, sobbing from the core of my being, I realised there was no turning back. My world was now peopled with Elves.

Which seemed a pretty pointless thing to celebrate at a moment of heightened pain around the world.

Russia had just invaded Ukraine and the horrors of war quickly kicked in, closer to home than the others already raging around the world. Devastated people and lands. Mass dislocation. Cultivation of hatred. Violence. Fear. Abductions. Gas-lighting. Confusion, death and deceit.

With friends across the political spectrum, it quickly became apparent how irreconcilable our various world views were becoming.

And my response was to reach for a book about Talking Trees and Elves.

And an extremely violent book at that. One that can be read as both racist and xenophobic. The Orcs (and most of the other ‘darker’ creatures) are of course entirely bad, which allows the reader to celebrate their destruction with no cause for lament (something we humans don’t seemingly need much encouragement to do).

But, in spite of its limits - perhaps even because of them - I found in it what I needed. A story that was stronger than the one I was hearing. That could counter what felt like the slow rise of awfulness in the world around me. A story that had threaded through it a ‘song of glad water’ that was never entirely silenced. That flowed wherever it was needed. That trained me to listen for its sounds, in the knowledge that such a song can break even the toughest ground. The fiercest resolve. Awaken us to beauty.

And that song is found most clearly in the voice of a woman (Lady Goldberry, daughter of the River-Woman...as described in the quote above). One of only about four women in the whole book it has to be said, and left out of the films. But, nonetheless, she is remarkable.

As I listened to TLOTR, that song of gladness became like a tuning fork.

Whenever it sounded, my whole being vibrated. There was resonance with my deepest longings. And, as with all encounters with Beauty, perhaps a subtle re-orientation of my internal life. My spirit was astonished. And revived.

And, you would likely agree, the world feels only more pained today.

Spoken by one who has grown up in a country not ransacked by war, and protected, by privilege, from the ravages of poverty and oppression. So naively still shocked by how awful we can be to each other.

It feels like my journal image at the top of the post. A great complex noisy hoard of severed pain and beauty. Multiple worlds within worlds.

I painted that image in 2019, at a point when I hoped I was coming out of a short dark-night kind of time. My life as I had known it had kind of fallen apart a year earlier and I’d had twelve months of insomnia and being encountered by the unresolved pain I carried around in me.

I had left London, landing in my friend’s gloriously safe little flat overlooking the sea, and had given myself permission to just feel and grieve and learn and witness and heal. To let myself fail.

And here I was at last, emerging from the underworld, towing my hoard of treasure from the deep. Stars. Fruits. Boxes. Limbs. Worlds. Tunes. Energies. A kind of singing chaos.¹

And I could see that I was walking towards a stream where I would, presumably, pause a while and wash and tend to all I had found.

I can remember sharing with friends that I had emerged back in to the light at last, and that I would soon begin to write my blog and get on with being more vocal in the world again.

But it turns out that I had underestimated the nature of said stream.

This water, flowing so directly from the mountains and their own bright morning, was a glad stream. It didn’t just wash, it sung. And its song was so pure...its waters so ruthlessly fresh...that allowing it to wash my hoard felt more like death than life.

It’s a bit of a cliché mentioning Tolkien and Lewis in the same breath, but I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s allegory of heaven and hell, The Great Divorce, where characters exit the bus that has taken them to the heavenly realm to find the grass so real that it’s too sharp for some of them to walk on.

Such was the level of unreality in my own life, even after fifteen plus years of church and community and leadership and times of therapy, that being washed in glad water felt like having my insides repeatedly scraped by such a blade. As if needing to free the villi in my gut from layers of gunk.

So, with the wider world as I had known it entering its own dark night, I began to let myself be washed in the gladness of these abysmal waters.²

And, to be honest, The Tuning Fork will sing, when it does, from this understanding that such times of purging can be a strange and terrible gift.

An opportunity for people and communities (perhaps even worlds³) to loose themselves, if they dare, of their inner contradictions and disrupt their damaging behaviour patterns. To dig deep and pull out toxic roots (particularly imaginal and theological ones). To confront addictions and fast from that which causes harm.

The practice of repentance (teshuvah- תְשׁוּבָה), or turning and walking in a different direction, is presented, in the Bible, as a gift. ‘G_d has granted repentance that leads to life’.⁴ ‘The sacrifices of G_d are a broken spirit, A broken and a contrite heart’.⁵ ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’.⁶

It is curious to me that both sides of church - both those whose ‘Biblical values’ tend to lean them left, and those whose ‘Biblical values’ tend to lean them right - often overlook this core Biblical lens of repentance being a gift from G_d that we should eagerly desire for ourselves before expecting it from others.

That having our own (individual, collective and systemic) harmful practices exposed is the first step in a process that ‘leads to life’.

Jesus was, after all, a walking apocalypse.

‘...Christ’s life, from the manger to the cross, was an affront to the established powers of his time, just as it is to the established powers of our time’.

Wendell Berry, Christianity & the Survival of Creation

If the meaning of the word apocalypse is a kind of revealing, or unveiling, then the word presupposes that a destructive tearing, or removing, must happen in order for that which needs to be seen to become exposed.

And wherever Jesus went, he tore through familiar religious, political, social and economic veils. Not because He was an ‘apocalyptic doom-monger’ (a tired trope often used to dismiss the warnings of prophets and truth speakers through the ages), but because, to use the analogy of the tuning fork again, He vibrated at a frequency that resonated with...and therefore awoke and activated...all that was real and true and good around Him.

When a song of Beauty arrives, worlds crack open.

And here we edge closer to the title of this piece, Shibboleth - I needed to swim towards this crack of a word through these abysmally glad waters.

***

I sometimes see things. By which I mean I have kind of waking dreams and visions.

I’ll be washing up, or doing something that doesn’t require much brain power, and will realise that I am watching a scene unfold on some imaginal plate in my mind.

A good while back, I had a waking vision of a large crack emerging down the centre of the North American land mass. It was dark, and it was deep, and I saw people, understandably, running away from it as fast at they could, some to the far left of the land, and some to the far right, terrified of the emerging abyss.

There was much to pay attention to in all of the movement, but both my eyes and my ears seemed fixed on the abyss itself, looking deep in to the darkness of the crack, as if something was wanting to be seen, or heard...willing me to stay with the fear and the difficulty, rather than run from it.

And, as I let my attention rest there, I began to hear distant sounds from the deep. But they weren’t the sounds of horror and pain that you might expect to emanate from our understanding of the abyss in Western culture. Rather, I could hear bustling sounds of trade and warm shouts of greeting and laughter. Wheels on cobblestones. Animals. Children. Sounds of a beautiful aliveness.

And as I listened more intently, and the sounds became clearer, I realised I was descending in to the crack, drawn both by the warmth of the sounds and a distant glow of light beneath me.

I was no longer thinking about the dark cliffs to my side, nor my fear of falling. I was weighted by curiosity...and longing...and, for a flash of a moment before the vision ended, I glimpsed a world alive at the base of this abyss that was busy and thriving. Full of chatter and laughter and trust and care. And, importantly, trade. It was a market street. And what I was witnessing was a joyous ‘oikonomia’ - a way of exchanging goods and labour that honoured relationship and brought joy. But, cobbled streets aside, it didn’t feel like a nostalgic return to the past. It felt like a deepening in to the core of the present.

And the whole scene was lit by a curious light that didn’t seem to have a source, which reminded me of the verse in the book of Apocalypse (or Revelation), which speaks of a city which ‘had no need of the sun or of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of G_d illuminated it’.⁷ It was as if the life going on down there emanated its own light.

As I exited the vision, and returned to focussing on my washing up, I remember a sense of grief that, by (understandably) running away from the dark crack both sides of the population of that land (which in the vision was North America, but relates, I think, to rest of the ‘developed’ world too - I don’t mean to be another Brit lecturing America) had no idea of the beauty at its base, and were too far away to hear its song of gladness that might otherwise draw them in.

And it got me wondering how we could become less scared of the dark. Less repelled by the wounds. The cracks. Better able to remain still⁸ long enough to hear the sounds of promise emanating from the Deep.

I considered all of these to be spiritual concerns, yet our modern spiritual practices in the West had not, for the most part, discipled us in the practice of hoping darkly.⁹ Partly because we weren’t listening (as if we still need all that redundant religious shit, right). But also because, in its historical turn towards the light of knowledge (the cataphatic...that which is knowable) and away from the dark of mystery (the apophatic...that which is unknowable), much religion in the West had forgotten its own negative traditions.

This vision helped prepare me for a time of darkness in my own life. Provoked me to find sources that would train me to move towards, rather than away from, the dark. The wound. But it also sketched the shape within which I have held, and therefore understood, much of what’s gone on in the world since then.

And I began to seek out communities versed in hoping darkly. I knew something of that already in places of poverty and exclusion. But now I found the dark hope of the mystics. And the dark longing of those who love the Earth. The negative wisdom of those who practice looking down.

Which brings us to our landing place. The crack of (very remarkable) Doris Salcedo’s 2007 art work, Shibboleth, at Tate Modern in London.

Columbian artist Salcedo created a fissure in the floor of Tate Modern which ran the length of the vast converted Turbine Hall. It wasn’t wide enough to provoke fear, but it was profoundly disconcerting, seemingly reaching to the foundations of one of Europe’s most respected cultural institutions.

And, unlike the crack in my waking vision, this abyss drew people (including me...I visited multiple times) towards it. Kids would lie on the floor and stretch their arms down. Adults would lean their bodies over and peer deep in to it. Walk the length of it. Puzzle over the meaning. Why such an establishment would allow its floor to be ruined. What to make of it.

Looking Down at Tate Modern

In modern usage, a shibboleth is a kind of linguistic password. A (brutal) short cut to determining whether someone is in or out of your group or tribe. Shibboleths are used in times of war to weed out enemies and spies, and in times of ‘peace’ to keep communities ‘pure’. If someone is unable to use a word or phrase in a particular way, that person can be identified as an outsider and kept at a distance or punished accordingly.

(I wonder which shibboleths are live for you right now? Which words or phrases help you figure out who is ‘friend’ or ‘foe’? Who you’ll let ‘in’ and who you’ll keep ‘out’?)

The word shibboleth is taken from a story in the Hebrew Bible where one tribe, the victorious Gileadites, want to prevent another tribe, the defeated Ephraimites, from fleeing back across the Jordan River to their own land. Each person trying to cross had to say the word shibboleth, which was impossible for the Ephraimites, who had no ‘sh’ sound in their dialect so pronounced the word with a ‘s’ and were therefore exposed as the enemy and slaughtered (even though they were essentially all ‘brothers’).

Salcedo’s crack invites us to look down, in to the experience of those we exclude and reject. Her work always focusses on political violence, and here she highlights the dangers of crossing borders, or thresholds. What those of us with power do with those of us that don’t fit. That we don’t want. The inhuman conditions many experience in the apparently ‘developed’ world, and how often those people are immigrants (a live subject, once again).

Salcedo considers Columbia to be in a permanent state of ‘catastrophe’, but in Europe many have had the ‘privilege’ (until now perhaps) of being able to pretend that isn’t happening beneath our feet. Back in the Turbine Hall, if we look down in to the crack we witness ‘catastrophe’. But the spaciousness of the hall, and our familiarity with cultural institutions, trains us to look up. In which case we can carry on regardless, barely noticing the tear in the foundation of the Earth. The Silent Cry.

‘I have always seen the world from the perspective of the defeated people...I want to bring a question mark, a disruption...what is it like to see the world from down there?’

Doris Salcedo, of her work Shibboleth

And my question, to link back to my talk of Elves and gladness and cracks down the length of a continent, is...well...what happens to Western spirituality...or spirituality that is rooted in the Jewish Christian tradition...when it remembers (as many, particularly the poor and marginalised, have never forgotten) that Jesus walks along the base of that crack?

The word ‘shibboleth’ can mean ‘stream’. Hence the resonance of the singing stream of my journal sketch, the glad song of the dark crack in my vision, and this practice of being drawn, at the Tate, to the edge of the abyss. Looking down in to the suffering of the world.

What would happen if we washed further upstream for a while? Closer to the mountains. In water more alive with the gladness of the bright morning.

What if we left the murkiness of our current shibboleths for a moment...those that alert us to ‘-isms‘ and ‘-obias’, ‘-ogynys’, ‘-okeness’ and collectively wash our hoard in faster flowing fresher waters that ruthlessly purge our souls. Which doesn’t meant those judgements aren’t valid. But perhaps we can hold them with a little more humility.

What if we step towards the cracks? They will swallow us up at some point anyway. So rather be intentional? And what if those of us that fear them can learn from those of us that don’t?

What practices can lead us there? Can give us courage to stay long enough to hear gladness through the pain of renunciation. To listen for notes from the resounding Deep.

Jesus tells us quite plainly that it is the meek that will inherit the earth.¹⁰ Or the gentle-strong, as my poet friend

David Benjamin Blower

calls them in this exquisite song. Somewhere along the way that knowledge must have got lost.

What if that word...meek...is the shibboleth for these times? And what if most of us can’t say it?

What if washing in abysmal waters is our only way to retrieve such a word. Waters that wrench from our grasp not just our worst, but our best too. Leaving us, if only for a moment, empty handed. Just like those crossing borders, from whom life itself has often taken everything.

I may lose my world, but perhaps I inherit the Earth.

*****

May we find courage to wash further up stream.
May those abysmally glad waters refresh us. Make us meeker.
May Beauty crack us open. Give us ears to hear gladness at the core of the Earth.
May we look down.
And may we be astonished.

In the name of all that is good and true and beautiful (including the Elves),

Amen.

A bit more...

You might want to watch this incredible conversation with Doris Salcedo (I will write more about her work in a later post).

And you might want to follow

Adam Wilson

’s experiments with a ‘joyous oikonomia’.

I am learning so much from

Caroline Ross

’s hope-full work around practices that help us to look down, and her stunning book Found & Ground: a practical guide to making your own foraged paints.

And, whilst writing this piece, I felt deep resonance with this poem, Past Curfew, that

Andrew

just gifted us.

Finally, if you are looking for others that are fumbling for co-ordinates in the dark...looking for practices that draw us further upstream...you might want to join this five week online-space (pockets, patterns and practices), hosted by Anna and

Dougald Hine

which starts on 6/7 November.

1. My thinking and writing is shaped by my understanding of the ‘chaos’ of Genesis 1:2 (which is in turn shaped by my experience of being a creator...an artist) from which the universe unfolds in that story.

2. The Deep in Genesis 1:2 (Tehom in the Hebrew) is often translated ‘abyss’ and, as I will explore in my next post, gets loaded with a weight of fear...a nihilism...that I don’t think is really there in the original text. When I use the word ‘abysmal’ through this piece, it is referencing this awesomely-generative ‘Tehom’ of Genesis 1:2.

3. In the Bible, the ‘world’ and the ‘Earth’ can mean different things. Worlds...human civilisations...the humanly habitable parts of the Earth...can fall, whilst the Earth remains.

4. Act 11:18

5. Psalm 51:17

6. Matthew 5:3

7. Revelation 21:23

8. In the Hebrew Bible, ‘stillness’ is an amazing word. It does have a sense of peace and rest to it, but that comes through being ‘disrobed’ of our false ideologies and allegiances. It is an apocalyptic kind of word. I’ll write more about this soon.

9. The theologian Catherine Keller writes beautifully about hoping darkly in her wonderful book, A Political Theology of the Earth, which I will be referencing a lot through my writing. I love it.

10. Matthew 5:5