Facilis descensus Averno:
Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, Hoc opus, hic labor est.


What is the work? What is the labour?
The descent is easy but to retrace your steps back to the stars is very difficult.
This is our task.

St Peter's Golden Key
(personal thoughts/reflections on the Bible)

I've been mulling on the Bible recently.

Traveling & other things interrupted my plan to cull data from Genesis - though I haven't forgotten about that - but when it came down to it, I only had Bullinger's 'How To Enjoy The Bible' to keep the pot warm. (Don't be fooled by the unfortunate title of that book, it's anything but a 'happy-clappy' book).

There's an autumnal scent in the air, it was around this time - a little later in the year - but almost 12 months now since I began reading the Bible. It was some struggle for me. Never quite enjoyable, yet always there was a sense of a romance, reading this book, a feeling of connecting with something rare. Still it was never easy, never truly a pleasure, almost always a slog, a real effort. Like I couldn't wait to put it behind me intoning with satisfaction such things as 'done', 'finished', 'never-again'.

I think back now, trying to understand what it was, what it is - because if I were to make another reading NOW, like starting tonight - I don't expect it would really be all too different. It would still be effort all the way, I'd still feel that romance. Everything would be stood as it was a year ago. Difficult to communicate - it's not even straight forward, saying what I got out of that reading. It was just this far mountain. I've been there & now that it's a done thing - unlike the done things in life - I know nothing about it. I know only interior things, I mean states that I experienced on the way.

It's like listening to a piece of music, hearing the same piece over & over again. Yet just as soon as it stops playing you can't recall how it goes. It niggles because you know you know it but you can't remember it - it's there & you can feel it, but you can't hear it anymore, you can't sing it. It's just out of reach. The Bible strikes me as being similar. Then occasionally it's there.

I feel it.

What I feel on these occasions is a peculiar thing. If generally I'm thinking, what was that, what kind of book was that, what exactly was that all about? Then in these rarer moments, it's ... different, though it conveys something, yet still an elusive thing.

Maybe what it does is change, at least hone one's perceptions of & relationship to the World, the creation in which one lives as a part of - having some role in it all (though I say this implying nothing grandiose or important, but simply in the sense that a fly eating dung has a role).

During that first reading of the Bible I acquired this interest in reading 'history' - & on reflection it seems this is something the Bible gives, an unexpected & intense sense of one's own history. I don't simply mean the 30 + years I've been glibly skipping around in this body - personal history - but rather a much greater history that precedes, in some sense, this time now - & goes beyond it, beyond Time. This is definitely in the category of mystery - the Bible is a mysterious thing. I don't think one actually needs to read it to know that, but to feel it as part of one's own being, then it must be read.

It's September 11th 2002, the sky is blue, away in the distance are large cumulus clouds. Sunlight streams down through the foliage of a mature ash. A cut crystal hangs in the window, diffracting the light in umpteen shades of rose. Between the window panes & the verdant background, tufts of 'fluff' from seeding rosebay willow drift on the air while flying insects whizz in every direction. This man sits on a chair, his lower back aching, listening to JS Bach's C major Suite. Before him, a picture of William Morris's 1865 stained glass design (for the restoration of St Nicholas's Church, Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire) of St Peter holding the Golden Key. A sense of creation happening. Everything - all this solar matter - going about it's business in the only way it can. All life & all death is here. Knowing whence I came, and whither I go. What the Knight doesn't want is a horse that will throw him to the floor.

REV 2:5 Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen,