Calvary may not have been Fra Angelico’s favourite theme; Vasari records the pious tradition that ‘whenever he painted a Crucifixion the tears would stream down his face’. John Pope-Hennessy would not have us disregard the story simply because it has no contemporary sanction for, quoting William James, he reminds us that ‘many saints ... have possessed what the Church traditionally reveres as a special grace, the gift of tears.’

In the mid-1430s Fra Angelico painted a Crucifixion with Mary and Saints John and Dominic on the refectory wall at St. Dominic’s Priory, Fiesole, but from quite early in its life the fresco suffered from damp and was frequently restored. In 1879 it was photographed, detached from its wall, mounted on canvas and sold, ultimately to the Louvre. The taushaped cross stands some twelve feet high on its conventional mound and the inscription panel is attached to the top with a lath.

Angelico was to use this design more than once. The composition is built on an upright rectangle whose top is the horizontal beam of the cross, ABCD in Figure 1. Diagonals AC and BD intersect axes IG and EF at point H in the diagram, coinciding with the Saviour’s feet and linking the bystanders with the cross. Geometry, however, is only the basis of the plan, which is developed as a symmetrical rhythm in Figure 2.

A Newman Association day conference at Warwick University on the 9th March brought together nearly seventy delegates from different parts of the country to debate the rights of religious minorities in our society and to examine the potential for conflict between religious fundamentalism and secularism. Three specialists working in the field of inter-faith and intercommunity relations addressed the complex nature of these issues. They were the Reverend Dr. Clinton Bennett, the Reverend Dr. Christopher Lamb and Professor Edward Hulmes. Dr. Bennett is Executive Secretary for Inter-Faith Relations at the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland, Dr. Lamb is Community Relations Advisor for the Diocese of Coventry and Professor Hulmes is Spalding Professorial Fellow in World Religions in the Department of Theology at the University of Durham and Fellow of the Centre of Theological Enquiry at Princeton in the USA.

Against the background of the Rushdie affair and the community tensions generated by the Gulf War the conference focussed on the contrasting attitudes of Islam and Christianity towards secularism. It also examined the different ways in which Christians respond to religious pluralism. Does the decade of evangelisation which all the churches have endorsed conflict with inter-faith dialogue? Should evangelism be directed at those in our society who have no religious belief rather than at theists like Muslims and Jews? What lessons has the Church learned from the gradual process of secularisation of British society and how should Catholics communicate those insights to their fellow citizens of other faiths whose culture and background make it difficult for them to engage positively with secular culture?

An article under this heading, as part of a series on how God speaks to us, is presumably meant to presuppose that revelation and contemplation are two ways or contexts in which God does so. I want to suggest that the two are inseparable, and that they have much more to do with mundane realities than is commonly thought. To illustrate both points here is an extract from John M. Hull’s account of what it is like to be blind:

This seems to me to be at once a revelatory and a contemplative experience. It is also about something so ordinary that sighted people take it for granted, namely rain. Hull’s account of this moment provides an extraordinarily vivid example of de Caussade’s doctrine of the sacrament of the present moment:

Timothy McDermott’s piece in New Blackfriars, March 1991, raised a number of fascinating themes. In this article, inspired by his, I would like to bring together two areas of thought not usually connected: the study of chance and coincidence and the study of the function of the human mind in the construction of its own perceptions. The link between the two will be a consideration of the metaphysical status of literature.

McDermott quotes Jacques Monod on coincidence: ‘The convergence of two totally-independent causal chains of events, the convergence itself being causeless.’ There is nothing unusual about either chain considered in itself. It is in the bringing together of the two chains that the coincidence lies. A coincidence only springs into existence when perceived by an appropriate, a ‘skilled’ observer. For example Leicester’s Moslems were recently excited by the discovery of the word ‘Allah’, in Arabic script, formed by the seeds on the inside of an aubergine. Many were the speculations about what this article portended. Had that aubergine instead been opened in the Leicester of 1931, few would have realised that they were in the presence of wonders.

And what is that, this something than which nothing greater can be thought? Why it is God of course.

‘Now we believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be thought’ (Anselm). Here is the stuff of philosophy, or at least of a certain sort of philosophy. Here are thoughts and things and relations between them, and God also. Anselm tied them together in such a complicated knot that thinkers have had difficulty untying them ever since. But perhaps Anselm’s knot is like the knot of the conjuror, a sleight of hand, and all one needs to do is to pull the rope taut and the knot will disappear?

Brian Davies (‘Quod Vere Sit Deus. Why Anselm Thought that God Truly Exists’, New Blackfriars, 72 (1991), 212—221) has also suggested that Anselm’s knot is often misunderstood, that, for example, Kant untied Descartes’ and not Anselm’s knot. But Davies still thinks Anselm’s knot a good one. When properly understood (tied) it works. Whether Davies has really untied and retied (understood and explained) Anselm’s knot or a similar but different one, just like Gaunilo, Descartes and Kant before him, is not here important. What matters is that Davies has an argument for God’s existence and that he thinks it is a good one.

It was a late afternoon when frantic parishioners were clamouring at the front door of the rectory. There had been an automobile accident just three blocks from the church. By the time I approached the location, a large crowd of people had already encircled the scene of the accident. Still a half block away, I couldn’t help but sense an eerie silence pervading the air. The scene had none of the usual circus atmosphere that characterizes spectator curiosity in face of such circumstances, with the din and shoving movements of people positioning themselves for a better look.

Upon arriving at the site I could see that although two demolished cars dominated the centre of the circled crowd at the intersection, all attention was riveted upon a woman holding a limp child tightly in her arms. She was moving about the inner circle of people stooping quickly here and there to pick up what looked like pieces of debris resulting from the fierce impact of the two cars. No one had the courage to intrude upon her business. A holy awe and respectful reverence pervaded the scene.

As it turned out, the woman was grasping the body of her dead son close to her bosom. She was stooping to pick up pieces of his head that had been scattered in the street from the furious impact of his body upon the pavement. In a desperate attempt to restore his life she was trying to put pieces of his head back together again. What else could a mother do? She had no time to think. The reactive panic of losing her only son compelled her to do this act of madness. Who could interfere?

Every day in the farm where I live the shrill scream of the wild geese flying overhead is heard. The cry is so strident as to make us stop our activities and ask, ‘To where does the wild goose fly?’ The well-known line from John’s Gospel comes to mind: ‘The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes...’ (3.8) For the wild goose is an ancient Celtic symbol of the Holy Spirit—made popular in contemporary spirituality by the Iona Community in Scotland. The cry of the wild goose—and the sheer power of its wings—evokes a sense of the unknown, that wild transcendence and yearning for freedom which lifts us from our daily frustrations. And that is why faith in the Spirit seems to offer hope and renewed possibilities to a ‘tired’ tradition: it is certainly why Feminist Theology attempts to develop a Theology of Spirit as a means of redeeming the oppressive structures of patriarchal theology and Church.