In the little poem 'Contrasts' I read earlier, I drew a contrast between the Gods and Goddesses of classical antiquity - the lofty Olympians - and the humility of the one true God. I want to bring that down to earth, and talk about the contrast between the ruler who is named in the Christmas story, Caesar, and the Prince of Peace, who was born, in the Christmas story.

Caesar held a census so that he could tax the people. Caesar decreed from afar that everyone should up sticks and move at his convenience, so that he could exact something from them - he was enrolling the world, so that he could take from the margins, and enrich the center - in Rome.

Meanwhile, even as this decree of a census is given out, another king - the king of kings - wants all the world to be enrolled. Why? He knows all things as God; His knowledge is always the knowledge of the great creator, looking down on creation. But now He gets the inside knowledge of hearts that hurt - the knowledge of what it is to be 'in the dark'. You might say it's one thing to write Hamlet, quite another to be Hamlet.

In contrast to Caesar, who stays in the centre and expect us to move for him, Jesus came to us and to come to know us. This wasn't registering in the sense of an outer registration, but God became human so that He could register with Himself all the things that we can feel in the flesh. Caesar registered to exact; Jesus to share, and to give...

The Christmas story is about light and darkness, both good and evil. There is a tendency to subvert the story and make it out to be just about joy and happiness. However, this becomes an exercise in denial and pretense. If we make it that, it doesn't last. We can deny the darkness of this world, we can pretend that everything is sweetness and light, but denial and pretense collapse and reality comes crashing in - even perhaps before the Christmas celebrations are over.

Christmas is about light and darkness; it is about how the light shines in the darkness, and how the darkness can never overcome it. It is about good and evil; it recognises that there is much evil in the world. It is about how a strong and resilient kind of goodness was planted in this world, and is working to redeem it.

Matthew and Luke both have the same take home message - there is darkness, but it doesn't overcome the light...

The church gets too preoccupied with what people think about Christ; there's a time and place for a theology of Christ, but it's not what I want to focus on this morning; instead, I want to focus on the experience of Christ. After all, it's our experience of Christ that transforms us, rather than what we think about Him.

I want to look this morning at some of the different ways in which people experience Christ. Some of you may know the book William James 'The varieties of religious experience'; what I have to say this morning could be a sort of appendix to that book: 'the varieties of the experiences of Christ'.

There are people to whom Christ appears - as He did in the gospels. You may think that only happened in New Testament times, but it doesn't: it goes on to this day. One such appearance happened not far from here, in Trumpington Church, about 50 years ago, when Christ appeared to a recently widowed lady, and wept with her as He stood in the sanctuary.

Sometimes Christ can appear through representations of Him, His radiance shining out from a picture. Sometimes Christ appears to people who are very ill...

Last time we spoke about Julian, we did an overview of her life and talked about her most remarkable achievement - she was the first woman to write a book and have it circulated in her own lifetime. Her book was an astonishing advance in theology - a tremendous gospel of compassion, just when England and the church was being riven by dissention; she was a woman of extraordinary vision, praying to Christ that she might be made ill to participate in the sufferings of those around her that were dying of the plague.

This time we focus on Julian's parable of the servant. The parable of the servant can be examined in (1) in its universal sense, as a clear revelation about the fall of humanity and its restoration; we will also look at it (2) in Julian's own, historically context and finally (3) in the context of the sad divisions in the church today.

The parable describes a servant who stands before his Lord, who goes to do his will, who falls into the pit, who suffers, and to whom the Lord promises a restoration. In a sense it's a retelling of the fall of Adam, but it focusses on sin as a form of woundedness that prevents us from seeing what is truly there and what should truly be...

What is the church? The church exists on two levels: at one level it is a human organisation; at another level it is what the prayer book calls the 'blessed company of all faithful people' - the mystical body of Christ which is 'the blessed company of all faithful people'.

So there are two sides to the church - the spiritual side and the human side. In much the same way, a piece of needlework has two sides - the working side where you can see the rough ends, and the picture on the other side, which is the point of it all. The working side is necessary but it's not what it's all about.

The human organisation side of the church is not what it's all about, (even though it's essential), but it has a tendency to take over. The church needs constant renewal: it needs to remember that it is above all a spiritual community.

The church is subject to a number of temptations: power easily corrupts the church; 'extremist' purity, where we fail to acknowledge our own impurity; pride, and particularly spiritual pride, and a tendency to get pleased with itself - pride here is ultimately self-defeating.

The church needs to move beyond these temptations: it must be the mystical body of Christ...

Where shall wisdom be found? What is wisdom? Is wisdom more than clever people or scholarship? If so, how is wisdom different from learning and cleverness?

The discoveries that clever people make are often ephemeral: things need to be rethought as time goes by. Wisdom in contrast is concerned with eternal truths: truths that transcend particular times and places and paradigms.

Learning and cleverness are no guide to how to live. Clever people can be unwise and immoral. Wisdom in contrast is linked to goodness; if you want to become wise, you also need to become a good person: the paths to goodness and wisdom go side by side. In contrast to cleverness, wisdom has moral implications for how to live.

Wisdom knows its limitations. Clever people are inclined to be arrogant; the human intellect operates on the assumption that it can get to the bottom of things. But wisdom is probing at a deeper level where there are no easy answers. It ponders, for example, the 'unfairness' of life. Cleverness always assumes it can get on top of things; wisdom admits there are some things it will never understands. It grows deeper by pondering unfathomable mysteries...

Each century sees progression in Christian understanding. There were several developments in the 20th century; for example, there was a deeper understanding of the suffering of God, and His identification with our own suffering. Another development of the 20th century concerned the role of doubt, and its contribution to faith.

We are complex people: none of us are entirely believers, or entirely doubters. Most of us are a mixture of the two. The faith of a person who has also known doubt is stronger than that of someone to whom doubts have never occurred. Doubting Thomas journeyed through doubt to faith, and finally to the point where he could say in a truly heart-felt way 'smy Lord and my God'.

So to those who have doubts: doubt is alright; doubt is part of the journey to faith.

How can doubt benefit faith? Relationships are often strengthened through testing times. So it is with doubt.

Doubt at least shows you are taking things seriously; you are thinking them through. Further, it's not just what we believe, but how we believe that is important. This is the contrast between a merely intellectual faith, and a faith that is heart-felt. Doubt gives us the time to explore things thoroughly and to make them our own...

We take the opportunity once a year to think about the reformation, particularly in and around this church, a time when new translations and scholarship became available, and people began to blow the dust off their New Testaments and find the Word illuminating all. Last year we talked about Latimer; this year we will focus on Cranmer.

Cranmer was at Jesus College and may have preached from the pulpilt of St Edwards. He was a generous and an accommodating man.

With respect to his being accommodating: he had both the strengths and the weaknesses that go with that word. An accommodating person makes room in his mind for multiple points of view in a time of real foment and controversy. Cranmer didn't rush to a single point of view. He was also accommodating in the literal sense, particularly to wayfarers from the continent, literally providing house-room for them. His accommodating mind made him a very good teacher and scholar, and was part of the genius of his work on the liturgy - if you want a book called `Common Prayer' then it must be rich and large enough to accommodate and make room for all the many different thoughts and feelings that a congregation may be having when using that liturgy. Cranmer also accommodated both the new and the old - and included in his book of Common Prayer the traditional and the novel...

In this season of epiphany, we recall the visit of the magi to Jesus; those wise men looked to the skies, saw and followed a star to Bethlehem, and in T. S. Eliot's imagined account in the journey of a magi, their lives were changed forever by what (or rather who) they found there. We returned to our places, these kingdoms, no longer at ease here in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death. They find their compatriots 'an alien people'; something profoundly disturbing and unsettling has happened to them.

And it's connected too with the book of common prayer's description of this feast of epiphany as the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles; something strange and new is made manifest, and to new people, in the birth of the babe of Bethlehem. And in our language occasionally people still speak of having an epiphany - a time or occurrence in which something changes at the very core of our being or way of perceiving the world. We might describe, for instance, what happens to Peter as an 'epiphany moment' - it's suddenly made clear to him that his old perceptions of to whom God might be made manifest, and how God might be made known, through the outflowing of the spirit, will not be limited by, in Eliot's words 'old dispensations'.

I'd like read a description of another epiphany moment: But during the long February nights, with the ewes in labour, looking out from the shelter into the flashing stars, he knew he did not belong to himself. He must admit that he was only fragmentary, something incomplete and subject; there were the stars in the long heaven travelling, the whole host passing by on some eternal voyage, so he sat, small and submissive, to the greater ordering. That comes from D. H. Lawrence's great novel, The Rainbow. Now Lawrence is not the first writer one might imagine being talked about in a sermon on discerning the holy in literature. And in some ways Lawrence would entirely agree. Nevertheless, whilst he was in the midst of an early draft of what become The Rainbow, Lawrence wrote this to his editor: ...but primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depths of my religious experience... And a year earlier, whilst correcting the proofs of Sons and Lovers, he wrote a letter to visual artist friend: I often think one ought to be able to pray before one works, and then leave it to the Lord... ...one has to be so terribly religious to be an artist.

This service is called Gentle Wounds - the title of the first song - and I guess that there is some touch, or connection, between that song and that moment in the gospel (feel love's stinging sword cut deep and catch the joy that's bleeding out of gentle wounds. In some translations it doesn't say and a sword will pierce your soul too; rather, it says a sword will pierce your heart - that the hearts of many may be revealed.

And a little earlier in the same gospel we hear that Mary treasured all these things in her heart; yet the heart that contains this inestimable treasure is wounded. This passage, amongst other things, introduces an element of realism early in the gospel; it was never going to be a gospel about 'shiny happy people having fun'; it was going to be an initiation into such complete and open-hearted compassion that there will never be a time that we are not stung or wounded. Indeed, if anything, our growing sensitivities and awareness of love will actually prevent us from growing over ourselves those shielding, numbing, ultimately de-humanising layers and masks whereby people tone down the volume of the world's suffering...

Throughout this epiphany season we've looked at a series of moments of epiphany, or revelation, unveiling, showing forth, manifestation in the Bible and particularly in the different ways in which in the coming of Jesus the light of God shone out. And the season of epiphany as it were takes its point of departure, its leap into our lives, from Christmas, from the Incarnation, from the Word being made flesh, and you may have noticed that as we looked at the different moments of epiphany that our readers read to us, every one of those had its point of departure in the solid actual really and now.

Dante sees an actual Florentine girl, an 18 year old girl that he first knew when he first met her at the age of nine at a children's party, and even at the age of nine some extraordinary revelation happened, and his life was changed. But she was a real person; Florence was a real city and it was the actual and particular that was transfigured and became, to borrow another of his phrases, God-bearing for him.

For Thomas Traherne the streets and fields that he is looking at are the streets and fields where he lived; the corn suddenly became orient and immortal the children living jewels. It was not a flight away from the particular, it was not a flight out of life, it was not, thanks be to God, a spirituality that is wavering somewhere way up in some spiritual world and has no concern for this restless flesh; no - it was a fully embodied revelation. And that is the very hallmark of the Incarnation - from here on, we have Emmanuel - God here, with us...

We all of us have things in our past that need healing, and let me begin by touching base with some of that human reality. If you're like me you have things in your past that make you cringe with embarrasment when you look back on them - faux pas that I blush to remember - often not very serious in their consequences, and maybe the other person didn't notice them as much as I did - but when I remember them they are like sharp stabbing pains. And then there are times when I let other people down in ways I feel mortified by, like the time I failed to turn up to conduct a wedding (we did the wedding in the end, and the couple were incredibly forgiving...). We all have times when we let people down, and those times stay with us. But I think it's the close relationships that go wrong that hurt most deeply. When those relationships implode or come under severe strain because of what we did, or because of what the other person did, the pain never really quite goes away. And the story of Judas in the gospel really epitomizes all that - Judas' deep regret for his betrayal of Jesus.

How do we heal the past? How do we heal those raw jagged memories from the past? Christianity has rich resources for doing this. First of all there is a reframing of the past, looking at it with fresh eyes, looking at it perhaps more with a God's-eye perspective rather than a view from our own egocentricity. That gives us a greater perspective and detachment, and that is helpful in itself...

It's good to have a baptism in Eastertide, because the two things help us to understand each other. It's not surprising that there was an ancient tradition of doing baptisms specifically and only at eastertide, because the two things are so very closely intertwined, and the common theme is that death leads to resurrection; it's a kind of principle of the spiritual world, if you like. Natural scientists look for laws of nature, and have been remarkably successful at finding them; there are also laws of the spiritual world that have not been so thoroughly explored, and I want to explore one of those this morning - the one that says that death leads to resurrection. It is not a law unique to the spiritual world: some of you may recently have pruned back your roses, but out of that 'death' they shoot up with great abundance: there's a kind of risen life that shoots up out of a severely pruned rose - and this is a sort of analogy in the natural world.

It's not easy to state when you try to get precise about it; death can be followed by resurrection, death often is followed by resurrection; there is no resurrection without prior death. And whether death is followed by resurrection depends on how much the grace and power of God is at work, and that in turn depends on how much we are open to it.

The core example of death and resurrection is of course the good Friday to Easter Sunday sequence in Jesus Himself; that death and resurrection blazes a trail; it sets up conditions that make it more likely that death will be followed by resurrection in other people subsequently...

It's a very remarkable Sunday of the church year - this Sunday after ascension day - a kind of hiatus between the great festival of ascension day, the climax and natural conclusion of Easter, a great upward movement, everyone looking up, and the feast of Pentecost, a great downward movement, where heaven itself comes pouring down to earth, the Holy Spirit like a mighty wind, comes down to breathe upon the earth; once again the Spirit of God moves on the waters. We need both Ascension and Pentacost to have that exulted sense of the sheer glory of God - the moment of exultation, of ascension - and that promised Spirit bathing us right here and now back on earth.

There is a false Spirituality whereby people are 'so heavenly minded that they are of no earthly use'; the counter to that is in that line of that beautiful Easter hymn ...that we, with our hearts in heaven / here on earth may fruitful be. The most fruitful people are, as it were, constantly moving on that axis between hearts in heaven and action on earth...

At the end of Luke's gospel, there is the command to the disciples to stay in Jerusalem, and wait for power from on high, the Holy Spirit. In this sermon - the last of three on waiting for the Spirit - I want to try to understand what was involved in preparing for the Spirit in Jesus' original disciples. I'll say something about the implication of that for us; but my main focus is going to be on the process of transformation that took place in them, from the crucifixion on good Friday to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. I'm going to be using the 'Farewell discourses' in St John's Gospel to give us some insight into that process of transformation. I'm going to bring to bear on this some of my background as a psychologist, to look at how the disciples' grief at the crucifixion led over a period of about 50 days to the experience of being reunited with Him through the gift of the Holy Spirit. I don't want to mislead you; I'm certainly not saying this is a purely human process; I'm not being reductionist about it; of course I think God was at work here, at work in the resurrection, at work at Pentecost - but I think God works through ordinary natural and ordinary human processes. I think it helps to look at the human side of the transformation - without saying that is the whole of the story.

You might imagine that when people are bereaved, then that is the complete end of their experience of the deceased, but if you think that you are wrong...

I want to speak this morning about living in the light, about what it means to be children of the light; it is an absolutely central theme in the New Testament, as our readings this morning have made clear, but I realised, as I was preparing to talk, that it's a subject on which I never heard a sermon in my long decades of attending church as a layman.

I'm not going to be talking much about that raw uncreated light that is God Himself (I'll come to that briefly at the end); I'm also not going to talk much about the daylight by which we see (although I suspect there is more than a metaphorical connection between the inner light that guides our eyes and that daylight by which we see).

I want to talk about the inner light that guides our lives. I think there are three aspects of this: there is the intellectual light of understanding, there is the moral light of discernment, and there is the spiritual light that gradually transforms us. I want to talk in turn about each of those, and want to emphasise how distinctive these types of inner light are to human beings.

God who said, let there be light has shone in humankind, to draw them into relationship with Himself.

Let's begin with intellectual light - a light that shines in a distinctive way in humans. Only we have extensive language, and that takes the light of understanding to quite new levels. Other species have practical, intuitive thought, and it's remarkable what can be accomplished with that. But we know what we know - we are self-aware. But that light of understanding shines in only a fitful and faint way within us...

It's an extraordinary moment that Luke reveals to us - that moment in Nazareth where Jesus reads those words from Isaiah; it's a moment of connection, of confirmation, of fulfilment, but also a point of beginning, the opening up of a seed long hidden, finally beginning to bear fruit.

I want to start with the sense of it being a moment of connection and confirmation at the personal and human level for Jesus - Jesus fully God and fully human, but in becoming fully human He emptied Himself; He, the Word, became an infant - infant, meaning without speech; He, the meaning behind all meaning had patiently to learn His Aramaic at His mother's knee, but it was not just His Aramaic, but also His identity that He had to learn, who He really was, in a series of unfoldings and discoveries and recoveries of what He was here to do.

And Luke is particularly bold in revealing these moments in which Jesus 'comes to Himself' - I think Luke, or one of Luke's sources, must have sat with and listened very patiently to Mary. It's Luke who gives us the story of Jesus staying behind at the temple; when His frantic, anxious parents come rushing back and He says to them didn't you know I would be in my Father's House. But now we have Jesus reading that scroll in Isaiah, and suddenly seeing written there clear and plain as day, who He is, and what it is He was meant to do - the whole of His Messiah is here, in this scripture. There is His conception, His baptism, His mission to proclaim good news, the year of the Lord's favour; and having read those words aloud, He recognises both the words and Himself in a profound and new way...

Interestingly, the Greeks come into both our bible readings, and indeed Arcadia came into the song that went between them, and had I given you the full text of the passage from Pilgrim's Regress there would have been a reference to Dionysis, so we definitely have a meeting here of Christ, and of the richest and greatest fruits of pagan culture; I called this whole evening A pagan place - which is the title of the first Waterboys album.

I want to start with Paul in Athens before I move through to Arcadia. It's very remarkable - the passage about Paul in Athens - because Luke goes out of his way to tell us, at the beginning, in verse 16, that whilst Paul was waiting, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols, and this is the classic 'yuck' factor feeling of a good Jewish man, brought up with the sense of the utter transcendence of the divine 'I am', before whom every human image flutters uselessly to the ground, and he had been schooled to fear that any shaped or imagined representation of the divine was almost bound to be a snare or a delusion - that was where he was coming from, culturally and philosophically.

But, thanks be to God, he was also fully in the hands and filled with divine Spirit, and the Holy Spirit was moving his sails and moving him; and the Holy Spirit was already beginning to change and shape him and to get him to cross many barriers; of the many miracles that are detailed in the Acts of the Apostles, I think the greatest - and most unnoticed - miracle is that of the quiet conversion of empathy and a sense of observation of the other, that the Holy Spirit works in Paul.

From verse 16, where Paul is 'stomach-churned' with what he sees, to just verse 22, where he doesn't say: men of Athens, you disgusting, filthy idolatrous foreigners - boy do you need reforming (it's too bad that many of the missionaries following in Paul's footsteps did something of that ilk); rather he said: men of Athens, I see that many of you are very religious... ...he that you worship as unknown, Him, I preach...

I've called this sermon Practising resurrection. But what does it mean to 'practise resurrection'? What might it mean really to begin to live with the radical view that we will not be overcome by death; that the letting go, the dropping of the seed into the ground as Christ called it, the letting go in order to receive again, would mean that in any act of letting go, there is a giving back from God? What might it mean to say that God has validated all that was said and done by the man we nailed to the cross, and raised him?

Well, if there's anyone who might know what resurrection means, what that cycle of letting go only to receive again in a new form, is all about, it would be a farmer, someone who season by season is letting go and planting the seed, season by season seeing it clothed with a new body, seeing a growth given for which he has prepared, for which he has made the space and opened the furrows, but ultimately, which he has received as a gift. The two words in the phrase 'practise resurrection' seem to summon up a lot of what I find in Wendell Berry's work; the word 'practise' suggests the hard-earned labour of becoming wise; the word 'resurrection' set beside the word 'practise' speaks of grace, of gift, of the kingdom, speaks of the touch of eternity into time, speaks of renewal and hope, and these also are both profound themes in his work - as they are of course in any Christian life. But who is Wendell Berry...

So the gospel today gives us a glimpse of what we might very properly call a mountain-top experience, both because it is set on top of a mountain, but also because in a deeper sense it represents one of those moments of clarity, insight, broadened vision, a kind of pinnacle experience - it's a particular gift of vision that is given at a mountain-top moment, not so that we can escape constantly up to that mountain top, but so that we can bring that vision down with us into the plain or even deeper into the shadowed valleys into which we may have to be walking. It's interesting that if we look back at the other two figures glimpsed together with Jesus - Moses and Elijah, we would find that both of them had had mountain-top experiences; of course they represents the whole of the religious inheritance into which Jesus had come, the Law and the Prophets. Of course Elijah is carried not just to a mountain top but into the heavens; Moses climbs the holy mountain which everyone else is afraid even to touch, and there he beholds God - he hides behind the rock and glimpses the 'hinder parts' of God as He passes before him, and even that little glimpse transfigures Moses.

So we might try to set things out in a nice ordered chronological way; we might try to think of the Mount of Horeb over there, and Tabor over there, and here are all these mountain-top experiences taking places in different places and times; but that's not what the gospel suggests - the gospel suggests there is really only one mountain-top experience, and that everyone who ascends, everyone who is carried up by a sudden visionary grace from God, everyone who ascends by meditations gradually ascends from out of the dim veils amongst which we pass most of our times - the gospel and epistle suggests that ultimately, we all come to the same mountain top, and meet the same shining bright presence, and enter into that same cloud of the glory of God, the Shekhinah, as they call it...

God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. What is wisdom, and where shall wisdom be found?

We live in a university town where there is a lot learning and scholarship; a lot of cleverness, but there is more to wisdom than that. In Cambridge there a lot of clever people - but clever people aren't always wise, so what is wisdom, and how is it different from learning and cleverness, because it is wisdom that we are called to in the spiritual life.

The discoveries that clever people make are often ephemeral; science goes through what are called paradigm shifts; what we thought we knew, has to be rethought in the broader context, and a lot of what we imagined to be true, turns out to be only true for some particular cultures, for some particular times. Wisdom, in contrast, seeks out eternal truths, truths that transcend particular cultures or paradigms; wisdom goes deeper, and there is a deeper level where truth doesn't change.

And then again learning and cleverness are no guide to practical living. Clever people can be very unwise, self-destructive, as all of us who live and move in the university know all too well. In contrast wisdom is linked to goodness; if you want to become wise, you have to become good too; the two are inextricably linked. None of us is a completely good person, but if you are seeking wisdom you will also have to be on the road to becoming a good person, or you will never find wisdom. Wisdom has moral implications about how to live. That's not true of intellectual achievements. It was a supreme scientific achievement for Rutherford to split the atom here in Cambridge, but it did nothing to make him a better person. Wisdom does help to make us better people.

And wisdom knows its limitations. Clever people tend to be arrogant. The human intellect operates on the assumption that it can get to the bottom of things...

I'm going to speak directly from my own experience of solitude. I shall first of all explain the circumstances that led to my own captivity; I shall then talk about the experience of living almost totally alone for almost five years, and then draw one or two conclusions from that particular experience.

A number of years ago when I was working as an advisor to the then Archbishop of Canterbury I had many problems that came to my desk, and not least were the problems of people who had been taken hostage in various parts of the world. It was part of my responsibility to attempt to give support to the families of those who had been take hostage, and also to do what one could to secure their release. One was able to secure the release of individuals in Iran, Lybia and Beirut, but it was in Beirut that I fell foul of political duplicity and found myself as a captive.

The circumstances in which I was contained were sparse; first I was in an underground cell that was completely tiled; I recollect as I first entered that cell that my blood ran cold - because I realised that such prisons are tiled because they are easy to clean after people have been knocked around. Of course that led me to reflect on what the future held for me. There were several small cells underground - it was an underground prison, completely independent of the building above. There I lingered alone for the first two or three weeks.

As I sat on the floor contemplating my fate, three things came to mind. I remember them distinctly. No regrets, I said to myself; don't regret what you've done. If you regret, you will be demoralised, and you can't afford that. I didn't mean, of course that everything I'd done had been absolutely perfect and right. I simply meant I was not going to allow myself to regret putting myself in the situation that had led to my captivity. Secondly, no self-pity; don't feel sorry for yourself. There are so many people around the world who are in a far worse situation than yourself. If you begin to wallow in self-pity, you will surely again be demoralised. Thirdly, no over-sentimentality. By that I meant: don't say to yourself 'if only'. If only I'd been a better husband, father, spent more time with the children... there is nothing you can do about the past. You have lived as you have to this point, and therefore it is useless to have regrets of that nature and be over-sentimental. I can't say that during the whole of the experience I kept to these three points absolutely, but when the temptation came, I remembered those first few hours in captivity.

I was frequently moved, sometimes to a building above ground, where metal shutters were put in front of the window so no natural light came in. Sometimes there was a candle, sometimes a limited amount of electric light, much of the time it was dark. I slept on a mattress on the floor; I was chained by hands and feet to the wall, and I had one visit to the bathroom a day. The remainder of the time was spent chained in this one room. There were no books or papers for over three years, no radio of course, no companionship. When a guard came in the room to give me food, I had to put a blindfold over my eyes so as not to see him. So it was an unusal situation of rather extreme isolation and solitude...

As Fraser said in the notices, this is the beginning of a little sequence of meditative reflections for prayer and the senses: it's been called praying 'with the senses', and it's not only going to be a celebration of the senses outwardly, but also inwardly and spiritually. There's a lovely line in a hymn about the sacrament which says faith, the outwards sense befriending, makes the inner vision clear. There is a false understanding of spirituality which sometimes suggests that spirituality and deep prayer and a life of connected meditation involves the utter renunciation and repudiation of all the senses. It may involve a kind of abstinence from some of the senses for a while, but all of the most profound expressions of spiritual life are tingling and alive with references to the senses, and indeed the early church fathers and many of the medieval mystics spoke of us having five inner senses as well as five outer senses, and they continually used almost untranslatable phrases such as in the mouth of your heart. I don't think there is a quarrel between the inner and outer senses, and the more you rest in and reflect on and rejoice in the gift of each of your actual five senses, and spend time in prayer just delighted that you can hear, just tuning in... ...the more those outer senses are to some degree strengthened, the more there is a transfer from the outward to the inward, and the inward senses can be strengthened too. And for many of us there is that movement from the outer grasp of something - the learning as a child of the outer forms of religion, perhaps the first attraction to a church because it had lovely music - those are not unworthy motives for going to church, but we can believe that each of those moments of outer touch and connection can, in God's grace, become a doorway, into which we enter more deeply into His heart.

I want to focus, particularly, now on what it means to listen in prayer...

We are continuing our reflection on the gifts of the five senses, and the way in which the five outer senses - whereby we apprehend and glimpse and get some sense of the phenomena of the world - have their counterparts in inner senses whereby we hear the unheard and see the invisible. Today I want to reflect on the theme on sight, and the cognate ideas of light and vision running through the scripture, and I want to talk about what they mean both outwardly and inwardly - the outward and visible being a sign of the inward and the spiritual.

If we glance across the bible, this notion of light and vision is there throughout, from the very opening of Genesis - let there be light - light that precedes all things. And there is a paradox throughout the Old Testament, where on the one hand we are called to open our eyes and look, and there are signs and wonders, and we glimpse and glance things in the outer world that call us through themselves, and yet at the same time and counter to that is the idea that nothing that we can see or imagine, or carve, or make an image of, nothing that the outer eye has ever glimpsed, is quite adequate to the truth of an inner vision. So on the one hand the great story of the redemption in Exodus begins with something catching Moses' eye - as he sees the burning bush; if you look at the narrative, Moses is on his 'daily commuter run' in the humiliating position of just looking after his in-laws' sheep - a failed man - having previously been an Egyptian prince, just getting on with the job... and suddenly - when there is the blaze of light of glory in the midst of the ordinary: heaven in ordinary as George Herbert would later say - he is drawn to this bush that is not consumed... and he has one of these moments when the veil is removed and he glimpses in and with, with his mortal sight, but with more than mortal sight, a glory from which God speaks to him, and as a result of which, his, and his whole nation's life, is turned around...

There is a sense in which for any of us, at any moment, at it were on our daily commute or in the midst of our routine, the veil might suddenly part, and we too might see the heavenly in the ordinary...

What does the world consist of? The answer we instinctively want to give to that question is 'matter' - hard stuff, solid stuff, stuff that doesn't squash up. But 20th century physics has thrown out of the window the idea that the world is actually composed of hard matter. We instinctively feel it is, but it's just not true. What seems to us to be matter, can equally well be energy, and when we try to probe down to what basic particles the world consists of, it's a chase that has no end - we never find the basic particles of matter; it all dissolves away into components that sometimes seem to be particles, sometimes to be waves; we find ourselves entering a strange basement world, the so-called quantum world, where what we thought was common sense just doesn't apply. There's more creation than we realise.

Religious people have long been saying that there's more to creation than is apparent to humans, and they've largely framed that theory of the hidden unseen part of creation in terms of angels. Angels are not God; like us, they are part of creation, but they are a part of creation that is normally hidden from us, not normally part of the world of sight and hearing and so on; angels belong to the unseen part of creation, or you might say, they belong to the spiritual side of it.

It seems to me that science and religion have converged on a kind of two-part theory of creation; there's one part of creation, the everyday world, the world of matter, the world we know through sight and hearing, and so on, the world where common sense applies, and both science and religion agree that there is another part of creation that is normally unseen to us. They don't agree entirely about that other part of creation, but they do agree on what it is not. It is outside the range of what we can detect with our senses. It is not a world composed of solid matter. It's not a world where common sense applies. And that's equally true of the angelic world and the quantum world of modern physics.

You can see the theory of angels as a kind of pre-scientific theory, anticipating, without the aid of modern science, some of the conclusions that physics has reached in the 20th century. Let me briefly some of the key points of the theory of angels that Christians developed; it was one of the great achievements of the late middle ages...

In this series on the senses we've looked at hearing and seeing, but coming now to touch, we come to the most particular, the most physical, and the most intimate, of all the senses. And it's extraordinary, if one uses a concordance or other means of looking through scripture, you get a remarkable picture as you think about the scriptural perspective on touch.

In the Old Testament, there is a great deal about not touching; it's about knowing that God is there, but fearing to approach Him. There is an entire system to make sure that the unclean never touches the Holy. And there is all the ritual washing and cleansing, so that should anything touch the Holy, it will at least have been ritually cleansed. Alongside this goes fear. That, of course, is why, in the story of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite cross to the other side of the road - lest they become unclean. There is a feeling of powerful separation, a gap across which no hand can reach. Yet in these passages there is a longing for connection with the divine...

...By contrast, in the New Testament, mentions of touch crowd in, and are almost invariably positive. There is therefore a sense of fearfully glorious release, when that which we could never touch gets in touch with us, and comes down - the Word was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us, and because He is there, full of grace and truth, there is the sense of wanting to come forward and at last touch and make that point of contact. And the New Testament becomes in a way a great celebration of the blessing of matter, the blessing of bodies, the physicality of God coming to us, being made flesh. And there is a way in which we ought to dwell in that more...

So we're coming this evening to the end of this journey through the senses. We started with hearing - tuning into that particular voice, we looked at sight - and those glorious moments of exchange of intimate glance that happen in the Gospels, last week we looked at touch - the amount of touch in the Gospels, and the contrast between the Old and the New Testaments, and the phrase 'the Word was made Flesh'... but we come now to the last of the senses, to something particularly evocative, personal, and intimate: taste and smell, two senses intimately related to each other. What is disclosed as good news to us - deepest scandal of all - is that God comes close to us to be tasted. Of course, there were hints of it in the Old Testament: Oh taste, and see that the Lord is good. In Leviticus we see there is a lot of dividing of the roasted meat up, and giving it to the people: making the journey to the temple was related to both profound holiness and communal feasting...