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.

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 your vocation, home and church.

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