Renewal of the Spirit: The Blessing of covid?

Renewal of the Holy Spirit: The Blessing of Covid?

 

With what we have been through these last few months I never thought I would write the above title – but as before the clues were in Blake’s drawings. We now move some way forward to Job’s sacrifice. The plate illustrates the passage from The Book of Job 42: 8 when the Lord addresses the ‘comforters’:

 

‘Now therefore take seven bulls and seven rams, and go to my servant Job, and offer up yourselves a burnt offering, and my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has done.’

 

Job’s posture is now one of open acceptance to the will of the Lord and the open book below gives us the injunction from the sermon on the Mount:

 

‘Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those that hate you and pray for those that despiseth you and persecute you’

 

Throughout the series of prints of Job’s trial the heavenly forces have been represented figuratively: first Satan with his dancing, grinning gait and then the old bearded figure of God the Father ‘speaking from the whirlwind’. In this print no heavenly (or hellish) apparitions appear. Round the edges are our old friends the angels but now the movement is from earth to heaven as a great plume of smoke arises in Job’s heart and moves up to meet the great Sun of Creation. This is the first sun we have seen since the beginning of the series when Satan appeared as the sun set. His wife and the comforters adopt a suitably penitent pose at Job’s feet. Wheat begins to grow as new life emerges from its sleep.

          In the last plate we encountered the Trinitarian problem at the heart of Blake’s message – the absence of Jesus Christ can be troubling for many Christians. Yet here, to my eyes anyway, just as in the previous plate Christ was implied so the third ‘member’ of the Christian trinity is implied here – the Holy Spirit. According to Christian theology the ‘comforter’ comes to help convey our prayers to the Creator. After His dramatic appearance in the whirlwind the Creator has now returned to his inscrutable presence at the ground of all creation (‘unless I go He cannot come’). From Job’s breast, now renewed and upright, the Holy Spirit arises and, as Job decorates the margins of the plate, exhorts us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

          We began our covid vigil at the beginning of Lent and for many of us the lockdown now begins to an end as we approach Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit. In the spirit of Blake’s plate let us pray for the renewing force of the Holy Spirit to help us rebuild our lives, cities, relationships and world as the ‘curse’ of covid reveals its ‘blessings’

 

Peter Tyler, Pentecost 2020

 

         

The Sons of Morning

Blake’s Job: The Sons of Morning

 

As the world begins to wake from its covid sleep we come to Plate 14 in our journey with Job and Blake through covid. The Plate illustrates the lines of renewal from the Book as God describes the creation of the world:

 

‘When the morning Stars sang together, and all the Sons of God shouted for joy’

 

As is fitting for the subject Blake produces one of his most beautiful and profound plates. Job, his wife and comforters all kneel in suitable astonishment as God for a brief moment unveils the mysteries of creation. The six days of creation from the Book of Genesis are depicted around the edges as within we see the morning stars and the ‘Sons of God’ dancing and singing together in what appears to be a rather stately 18^th Century galliard. More stars appear on the edges: the belt of Orion and the Pleiades, ‘the Seven Sisters’. And as these heavenly beings all rejoice in their renewal below we see the dark forces of chaos and creation, the leathery scales of Satan and his dragons, lying obediently and meekly tamed.

          Much has been made of Blake’s fourfold division of the central panel between earth, heaven, the moon and the sun and Jungian commentators point to the ‘mandala’ of this fourfold representation.

          For the purposes of these reflections two points come to mind. First is the sheer inevitable renewal of creation. As we slowly begin to throw off the shackles of covid who can deny that nature has been one of the great sources of comfort in these difficult times. Here in Northern Europe we have enjoyed one of the most beautiful springs we have had for years and our towns and cities, cleared of pollution, have sparkled with morning and midnight stars. A robin has been nesting in my garden and now daily brings food to the chicks while goldfinches have feasted on the forget-me-not seeds in the beds. One of the ‘blessings of covid’ has surely been our renewed appreciation for the natural world and God’s creation around us.

          The second point is more theological. Christians may be troubled perhaps that Christ does not appear in Blake’s Book of Job. If Christ were to appear then this plate would be the point at which it would happen. The last plate depicted the awesome ‘otherness’ of God the Creator – speaking ‘out of the whirlwind’ as a great cosmic force. ‘The Sons of God’ depicted in this plate are therefore the natural response to the ‘abyss of the Father’ – the intimate touch of the divine in our own hearts as represented by Blake as the ‘sons’. Religion seems to evoke two responses – the awe of the transcendent and the intimate passion of devotion, what the Sanskrit tradition calls bhakti. For Christians there is but one ‘Son’ who mediates between the transcendent unknown ground of Being and ourselves and is the focus of this devotion. For the past six weeks after Easter, Christians have been enjoying the presence of the Risen Lord. Soon, on Ascension Thursday, we shall celebrate the ‘return of the Son to the Father’. However Christ states that ‘unless I go the Holy Spirit cannot come’. We shall explore this promised coming of the Holy Spirit in our next post.

 

Warm wishes

 

Peter

 

 

Divine Harmony: Zoom Conference on 23rd May 2020 - All Welcome!