theology and unity
living spirituality network
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The Space Between
Do Words Have Voices is the title of the Turner Prize-winning installation by the Scottish sculptor Martin Boyce. Speaking to the BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz after the award ceremony in Gateshead, Boyce said of his work It's all about landscape - the psychological landscape, the physical landscape. It's about being in the space - the space between the sculptures is as important as the sculptures themselves.
Writing of another major, though very different exhibition, The Times Chief Art Critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston said of Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, currently at the National Gallery in London: Where one painting might make anyone marvel, his works altogether weave an ever-more intricate web. You can grasp hold of the threads. But it's the untouchable spaces between them that create the fragile miracle.
The alchemical power of the space between is a recurring theme in poetry and spirituality, as well as in art. It‘s the silent space into which TS Eliot's words reach once uttered. And again in Eliot's words, it's the stillness between two waves of the sea.
The space between is the central metaphor in Gethin Abraham-Williams' new book, Seeing the Good in Unfamiliar Spiritualities: the physical spaces between the Jordan and the Tigris, the Ystwyth and the Rheidol, and the psychological spaces between magic and mystery, religion and atheism, heaven and hell. In David Tacey's book, The Spirituality Revolution, the space between is historical, so both physical and psychological. We are caught, he says, in a difficult moment in history, stuck between a secular system we have outgrown and a religious system we cannot fully embrace.
The space between is a place of insecurity as well as creativity. For Tacey it's a stuck place, out of which we must somehow change the myths and narratives that we live by ... so that spirit and soul can be included again in the common understanding of what it means to be human. For the contemporary American Carmelite, Constance Fitzgerald, the space between is a place of impasse, before the fragile miracle of renewal and transformation can take place. For Fitzgerald, the transformation will only come if the path into the unknown, into the uncontrolled and unpredictable margins of life, is freely taken when the path of deadly clarity fades. Like Tacey, she knows our need of new myths and narratives, and knows too that these can only emerge from the space between: Behind every new spirituality and any creative re-visioning of the world - at the root of any real theology - is an experience of God, she writes, yet every religious experience comes from a meeting with a new and challenging face of God in one's own time and social situation... The experience of God in impasse is the crucible in which our God images and language will be transformed.
How then might we live this moment, this space between, consciously, receptively and creatively? I'm drawn again to Tacey, and also to the seemingly contradictory convictions of two poets. For Ruth Pitter There is always a way for those who must go over: always a bridge from the known to the unknown, while David Whyte cautions: But still, there is no path that goes all the way.
Suspicion and doubt yield poor rewards, says Tacey, but if we enter into life with an open heart and a recovered innocence, the world of spirit unfolds before us. What better thought could there be for that magical, mysterious space between Christmas and the coming year?
With warmest good wishes for Advent,
Christmas and the New Year,
Eley
