The non verbal world!

The spoken word must have had its origins when the first primates approached one another either in love or in anger and decided to form themselves into a community or family. Reason and speech have together formed us into how we interact in the human family of peoples. But we all have the capacity to appreciate the non verbal aspects of our capabilities as humans. Art, sculpture and music couldn't have been far behind when speech first arose - albeit in primitive form. Or did the artistic side of us - the non verbal - precede speech? All these imponderables belong to a far off age and we may never be certain which came first. What is certain is that they belong together in daily life as they have also belonged together in the history of the Christian Church. So the re-telling of the narrative of the gospels among Christian communities both in Palestine and further afield preceded the writing down of the gospels probably by at least three decades. And the spoken word as well as the reading of these writings remained an important part of worship from the mid second century onwards until today. Similarly, prayer in community worship, and also for the individual, remained the prayer spoken aloud to God. We see this in the sparse references in Paul's letters - either to forbid the women to speak or to those who spoke in tongues to have an interpreter!

But by the late third century there were people within the church who preferred to go aside to be quiet, silent, in the desert or on the outskirts of the towns and villages. They preferred to be like Mary sitting at the Lord's feet, or as Jesus himself on the mountain in prayer where he was transfigured in his waiting upon the Father in prayer. Benedict of Nursia gave no 'rules' about how one should pray except to say, 'Just go into the church and pray.' There was also from the beginning a flourishing non verbal, artistic life as seen in the graphical representations in the catacombs and elsewhere - the signs of the ichthus, the fish, and the Chi Rho, expressing the initial letters of Christ in Greek.

Today, the ubiquity of the iPod on the streets and in the tube and buses and trains, represent the need for us to have the non verbal forms of human creativity to hand in the busyness of modern life. Not a turning away from reality but the need to feed from the resources of music, enhanced by our creativity throughout the centuries. In many ways the changes of the past half century have meant that the old compartmentalised scheme of living - time for work, time for listening to music, time for eating - have been transcended in ever more creative ways through the possibilities of modern technology. So the purity of the musical tone of the iPod is far beyond what was possible until quite recently and young people (and others!) are able to access this deep well of music. (Choral music, songs and the modern pop music weds the verbal and the non verbal - but that would be another subject!) Art, painting and sculpture also provide a significant non verbal input for many people today, It is to find oneself in another world when one meets and drinks in the great masterpieces of painting and sculpture of today as well as of the previous centuries. In these timeless spaces we recover our 'balance' - even a refuge from the talkative age that we live in.

So far I have not mentioned professional dance - which is a matter of self-restraint considering my very recent, wonderful experience with contemporary dancers! - see the previous letter 59. Dance in itself is a non verbal medium of extreme power and beauty received by the viewer through the movement and rest, attitude and reaching out from the resilience of the dancers' bodies to bring hope and the desire for true relationships in love. Like music and the other arts dance is, in the widest sense, a spiritual medium which enters into our whole personality of body and mind.

Christian prayer encompasses both the verbal and the non verbal, tuning in, as it were, to our experience in life of both forms of expression and listening. In England we have always been conscious of the fall out from the argument between the Church of England and the presbyterians and others at the time of the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 when the Anglicans refused to agree to the request to include informal spoken prayer into worship. Ever since, there has been suspicion on both sides between Anglicans and the free churches that what the other thought of as 'true' prayer was wrong! The balance might have been better arranged if the long tradition of non verbal prayer had been recognised at the time by both sides in the dispute. We have a 'right' to practise both forms of prayer - and in reality there is only one prayer which is our relationship with Jesus the risen Lord and the Father. There is a great deepness in remaining in the relationship with Jesus through an inner attention, in love and enfolding others into that prayer - which can be practised anywhere - on the tube, in the quietness of one's own home or in church. There is also a special blossoming of that relationship with others in a small group which, as it were, hands over its concerns in the verbal prayer of love to the Lord. If Jesus' approach to us is always in love - as Julian of Norwich wrote, 'Love was his meaning' - then the non verbal and the verbal in prayer is the full blossoming of that relationship in our lives.