Trainscape

Train departing Scarborough. Wikimedia Commons

There is something liminal  about pulling out of a train station. It is a moment in which we have to let go of whatever has been left behind, not only the station, but specific life experiences, a holiday, or a failed love affair. Perhaps we are experiencing the frightening edginess of leaving home for a new country. We also have to let go of the bizarreness of the situation itself as the train gathers speed, of hurtling along in a tin box on rails. In such a context it is sometimes best not to think too much, or at least not to over analyse or dwell on the physical reality we find ourselves in.

Perhaps it is better to dwell, instead, on the unique perspective which train travel brings to our lives and to the world we currently inhabit. Leaving the station, as we become part of an accelerated transition from urban to rural environment , we are reminded of the difference and complementarity which exists between towns and the countryside and of how much we need each other. If we let go of habitual anxieties pertaining to train travel we can begin to look at the view from the window in a different way. We witness in a passing moment the interdependence which exists between all living things.

Letting go of the habits of anxiety which tend to surface, and then spoil such vacant travelling moments, allows us to become  part of a regenerative life, a life which connects us to itself and which is infinitely greater than the narrow confines of the one we inhabit most of the time. This wider, deeper space, or life, is what we might call reality. It is not the same as the reality we create for ourselves by the way we think, or the day to day life choices we make. These thoughts and decisions need to be substantiated and given purpose by a degree of mental effort often mistakenly thought of as ‘productive’.

As with the maintenance of a ‘life style’, the mental effort, or anxiety, needed to maintain a habitual thought world is in fact counter-productive because anxiety is usually caused by a skewed perception of what is real, and therefore of what matters. The real, as it is usually perceived, is what appears to sustain us in life. The real, perceived in this way, is also the logical. It is what ‘makes sense’. When the real, as we have always known it, becomes blurred or is interrupted, we experience various kinds of emotional and mental disturbance. In this frame of mind, anxiety claims everything, where before it could be limited to certain thought processes or to people on whom we depend, or who depend on us. In a sense, anxiety kept those areas real and the people about whom we were anxious, including ourselves, ‘safe’.

Anxiety gave us a sense of solid reality, a reality which could ultimately be managed and controlled in a logical way. Being anxious seems to hold things in place and so, paradoxically, gives a certain sense of security. We know where to find our worries when we need them. So letting go of anxiety is both irksome and exciting, but it is a  life skill which we all need to learn if we are to retain a hold on our sanity in a turbulent world and in our often turbulent lives.

The letting go, the departing from the station towards an uncertain future and the travelling which will take place before we get there, all amount to the vital work of prayer. The work of prayer goes on in two contexts, that which we might loosely call the self, and that of the world around us, the two being interconnected. Put more prosaically, it means engaging consciously with life as it really is for us as autonomous selves and with the real dirt of life on the ground in the harsh realities of war and injustice. In prayer, we can ‘free fall’ into the worst situation, including those which pertain to our own anxiety, and be part of the life which literally ‘rescues’ or drags us and the world we inhabit back up from what the bible calls ‘the abyss’.

Think, for a moment, of dirty politics. As I write, there is talk of Israel having spied subversively on the Iran peace talks. Nothing has yet been proved, but politics being what they are, it would not be surprising if it is true. This is a situation, among many, which requires that people of prayer ‘free fall’ into it. It does not matter what stage of your own spiritual journey you are on, or whether the particular situation has played itself out in a certain way. We do not yet know what results these talks will yield, anymore than we have seen the end of Isis. We do not yet know what the ultimate fate of Tikrit will be, but we know that the conflict is a dirty one.

The same kind of free falling applies to our own lives. We are called to free fall into the love of God and take the world with us. We fall into what the writer, Meister Eckhart, called the ‘ground of our being’. Then we allow our thoughts, whatever they are, to be taken down to that place. We do not need to have started on a spiritual journey, or to have been formed or trained through any particular method in order to do this, but we do need to be prepared to open up to that good grounded place and to travel deeply into it. There is no telling what we will discover once we get to our destination, if we can call it that, and there are no particular landmarks along the way. It is uncharted territory, the life of God’s spirit at work in us.