23 December 2011

Advent IV - 23 December 2011

... I feel
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come, see the oxen kneel
In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.


Thomas Hardy’s wistful words. And I wonder how much of the adult enjoyment of Christmas is actually vicariously through the children. We enjoy their enjoyment, and their wonder and excitement can remind us of our own childhood Christmasses. Hardy mentions what our childhood used to know. But he himself is in gloom -- I should go with him in the gloom. He wrote this in 1915, in the middle of the First World War’s deepening abyss of grief. Hardy himself had been bruised and wounded by life and by the pain of his own relationships.

I don’t think he wants to recapture childhood simplicities and credulities. That could never happen. Becoming as little children doesn’t mean that. But he has a longing for something real, a word from God perhaps, some meeting of his bruised life with the truth and the light. Generally, as we know, what happens in practice is that the truth of Christmas gets submerged under much food and drink, almost compulsory sentimentalism, perhaps spending money we can’t afford, polishing up or renegotiating our family or tribal myths and legends... I was happy not to have to buy, on easy terms, a $2000 state of the art barbecue that put me in mind of the main flight console of the Starship Enterprise.

I should go with him in the gloom, hoping it might be so. This appeals to me far more than all the proclamations and certainties, or the silly ploys trendy clerics get up to. It is the opportunity to be still and silent, receptive and undistracted, open to wonder, to mystery and of course to the ever-present host of unanswered questions. God’s word is received in the heart, once we have ceased the noise and clamour. And this is God’s word. Nothing trumps the fact of a new baby surrounded by the total love of simple folk. God’s word is not placarded, however cleverly, loudly or provocatively. The Word made flesh, St John writes, full of grace and truth. Let’s hope it might be so. For plenty of mature people of faith and prayer, honest and humble hope is all that they can manage. I suspect that it is quite sufficient.

16 December 2011

Stability - 16 December 2011

One of the promises a Benedictine Oblate makes is the one we call the vow of Stability. I think it originally meant mainly that a monk or a nun did not go flitting around from one monastery to another in order to get a better abbot or a better bed, or a better cook. Whatever else stability meant, it certainly meant that the monk or the nun was committed to one monastery for better or for worse, and the Holy Rule was the structure within which they lived there peaceably and without grumbling. Benedict was very much against grumbling.

But we don’t live in monasteries. Stability, whether we live in a monastery or not, comes to have a very much richer meaning. We tend not to live in one place, even in our senior years, and life is a journey. Everything is mobile now. Even the elderly and the dependent may have to move. So the analogy of the pilgrim very much applies. It becomes important to life and faith that we know when and how to change -- whether it is our way of doing something, our opinions, our attitudes. We move along the road and the scenery here and the challenges and the truth we apprehend are not the same as they were last week.

So Stability is deeper. There is a part of us which, somewhere along the way, has made some choices. My Scottish grandmother, who must have been quite a girl in her day but now was old and feeble, told her son, “I didn’t leave it until now to get my roof properly thatched.”

I can’t say strongly enough that this place of stability is not any hidden form of dogmatism or bigotry. But unless there is a centre which has become still, settled, and I would say deeply loving and grateful, then no matter what our expressed opinion and actions are, out in the world and on the road, we may be what St Paul calls sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.

Stability is a function of Christian maturity -- not so much a function of age, as of the factors and experiences along the way and down the years that made us more humble and more loving, and most important of all, less afraid. In the discipline and stillness of Christian Meditation we simply come closer to that place where God’s Spirit can make these changes in us. Wisdom turns out to be not the sum of everything we know, but the stillness and simplicity that opens our hearts to wonder and goodness, enables us to bear pain including the pain of others, and always helps us to be unafraid of the truth.

09 December 2011

How come Advent is turning me into a grumpy old man? - 9 December 2011

How come Advent is turning me into a grumpy old man? Advent is one of the two great so-called penitential seasons of the Christian Year. Advent is not Christmas, a point which is either not believed or widely ignored. But its proximity to Christmas, at any rate in our culture, destroys its special meaning and beauty, and its importance. And so now this time of the year gets to be all about food. We have multiple eating events. We prematurely sing Christmas carols all over the place. But never mind... I turn on the secular Radio NZ Concert Programme last Sunday morning and get the most sublime true Advent music, including the mighty Bach Advent chorale Wachet Auf... So I felt better.

Penitential does not mean we become grim and put on sackcloth and ashes. Penitential may be actually the wrong word. Archbishop Rowan Williams suggests there are two things we can do in Advent. The first is to pay attention to the enormous hunger for God, for meaning, for some word of assurance, that utterly pervades our secular culture. This hunger emerges in a thousand ways, some of them perverse, in our literature, our entertainment, our uses of leisure, our art, in our illnesses and mental health, in our social pathology... In Advent our discipline can be to recognise this hunger, in ourselves and all around us, these longings, the appalling moral anxiousness of our age -- just as the Jews long ago waited and yearned for what they called salvation, a messiah, a meaning for all their pain.

Secondly, says Rowan Williams, Advent may be when we take inventory of our idols. We will be surprised at what they actually are. One of the colourful ancient prophesies says: In that day we shall cast our idols of silver and our idols of gold, which we made each one for ourselves to worship, to the moles and to the bats (Isaiah 2:20). Advent is when contemplatives make sure that we know how easily we domesticate God to some idol reflecting ourselves and what we want. So Advent is when in a way we become Jews again, in obedience to the First and Second Commandments.

The God who comes may not be the God we expect -- and yet, in our stillness and silence we dare to hope for what one theologian calls a God of total and presuppositionless love. “Watch and pray”, signed off one pious friend in his Christmas email to me. Well, he is right. And we emerge from Advent with a clearer sense of what can be consigned to the moles and the bats.

02 December 2011

It’s not about me - 2 December 2011

St Paul has these tantalising sayings about life and death -- sayings we probably know about from hearing them in church, but have never quite come to terms with: ...as dying, and see, we are alive! It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And I can certainly remember as a youth being puzzled about some of these things -- Paul actually says in one letter that he would prefer to die, but for the present he seems expected to continue living.

The journey a contemplative person is on is very much a matter of confronting the personal issues which may make us afraid of death, afraid of any signals of losing personal control of things or events. In meditation, to relinquish our illusion of ordering of our universe, even just for 20 or 25 minutes, is immediately to confront some of our fears. Mercifully, the hidden secret which we eventually discover is that what we can scarcely do ourselves starts to get done in us anyway, as we find the grace to be still and consent. This is why stillness matters -- our only tasks right now are to be still, physically and mentally, and say our word.

It makes the time of silence both easy (because all we have to do is say our mantra), and hard (because the door now opens a chink to the distant protest of our inner demons). And the best teaching I know remains the same -- just say your word. Be still, be silent, consent to the presence of God.

We have 25 minutes without our defences actually up there in front of us. In a group this is good because we are all doing much the same. Each time of meditation is an announcement to ourselves that one day, and we really don’t know when, this is going to happen anyway.

You may remember Jesus’s story about the man who had too many possessions, and so he went away sorrowful. We are not going away sorrowful because we are refusing in this time to be defined by our image, or our lifestyle, or our possessions, our achievements, our reputation. These things are not bad. But we are preferring to be named and defined by God and by the truth. The truth requires humility and consent, and the best we can do about that is to be still and silent.

25 November 2011

Attention, the essence of contemplation - 25.11.2011

Attention is the essence of contemplation. Paying attention. Attention, says one dictionary definition, is the cognitive process of paying attention to one aspect of the environment while ignoring others. So it is deliberately selective -- we are choosing to pay attention somewhere and not elsewhere, during the time of prayer. The mantra is intended to assist us in this, because left to ourselves our monkey minds are all over the place.

Of course in other parts of our life, being able to attend to fifteen things at once is widely admired. This is now called multi-tasking. People add it to their CVs. Others of us, usually male I understand, are more or less unable to multi-task. And that I imagine explains why I am not CEO of Air New Zealand or Archbishop of Canterbury. I am generally unable to do more than one thing at a time. Well, while it may indeed be admirable to multi-task, in contemplative prayer and life what matters is that we learn how to focus attention to the present moment and to God’s presence. God is paying attention to us. This is a discipline that needs to be practised and developed.

Another thing we hear a lot about is attention span. Commercial advertisers seem to be of the opinion that we have very limited attention spans, and so they have to speak to us in rapid sound bites and suchlike. A lot of people have an extremely low boredom threshold. Suddenly, very soon, they need to be entertained in some way. In contemplative prayer and life we work on our attention span. We set aside times for prayer in silence and stillness, and sometimes these can be quite demanding. During these times we are awake and alert and paying attention.

The ability to pay attention starts to spill over into the rest of life. We begin to find that it is possible and important to be able to give someone else our undivided attention -- this is a gift, often a healing gift, which we can both receive and give. Total attention... I remember seeing one teaching monk, who was in great demand at a crowded meeting, and getting pecked to death by devotees -- but he was giving his undivided attention to one person who had asked, and he would not be diverted. It was an object lesson for me, lest I be one of those ministers with shallow automatic responses to people, their eyes always flickering around elsewhere in the room in case there is something they are missing. The development of the gift of attention spills over in all sorts of ways -- it may also produce a growing impatience with shallowness and triviality.

18 November 2011

Blessed are the poor - 18 November 2011

In an article in the Tablet, Fr Laurence Freeman introduces us to Dr Pierre. Dr Pierre is co-ordinator of all the meditation groups in the Caribbean nation of Haiti. He is also a very bright doctor who is medical director of the one major hospital not demolished in the recent devastating earthquake. Although it was not that kind of hospital, Dr Pierre was obliged to take in a lot of patients with spinal cord injuries, and then set about getting the proper staff and equipment for them.

Eventually, also, he started a Christian Meditation group with these patients. In his spare time -- in his case a concept hard to understand -- he provides assistance and encouragement for Christian Meditation groups all over that ravaged land. Most of these are poverty-stricken people in a land of tragedy, endemic corruption, and exploitation. And yet, interestingly, suicide in Haiti is virtually unknown -- almost as though it is more a disease of affluence.

I don’t know how you teach Christian Meditation to desperately poor people. Perhaps you would need to be one yourself, as Jesus was. And yet, there is a sense in which contemplative life and prayer makes us all poor. Blessed are you poor, taught Jesus. Meditation introduces us to the poverty which is a gift for us to receive at levels deeper than all the knowledge and achievement, and of course all the outward show. This poverty is not anything bad or reprehensible. It is not a problem. When I am poor, wrote St Paul, then I am rich. Empty hands and a receptive heart are the necessary ground for love and grace.

Fr Laurence reminds us that prayer is more than consolation or relief from misery or anxiety. You can teach Christian Meditation to the poor precisely because it is a political act. It introduces people to a new personal dignity, it clears the mind, purifies the heart and releases wisdom and compassion. And so Dr Pierre adds to his medical skills the wisdom to teach not only the poor, but also men, women and children in long, probably partial recovery from spinal injury, to be still and silent. Who knows what healing this facilitates -- in the brain and spinal cord, or in the psyche, in the memories, the relationships, the courage to hope… and most certainly in the fears we have.

11 November 2011

The opposite of love - 11 November 2011

One of the major steps on our journey is the discovery that the opposite of love is not hate, but fear. There is no fear in love, we read in the First Letter of John, but perfect love casts out fear. In a way, this is not what we expect. Love and hate seem to be opposites. But in fact, psychologically and one might think perversely, love and hate can be quite closely related.

It is the miracle of love, the sudden, surprising security of love, that gets rid of our fear of God. You can’t read great literature -- Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dickens -- without becoming aware of the primal fear of God that much religion seems always to have engendered, fear of what God might do. It infects so much of the human story. Music such as sections of the Mozart Requiem depicts terror of a just and implacable God - Dies Irae, Day of Wrath... So many people assume that adversity must be some kind of punishment, deserved or undeserved. If it is undeserved, then God is a tyrant indeed to be feared. To counter such superstition St Augustine wrote: Fear is a suffering that oppresses us. But look at the immensity of love. We actually don’t have to be afraid.

All tyranny thrives on fear. Religious tyranny is no exception. Of course we do have a built-in fear mechanism, reflexes that are necessary to our survival -- I am not talking about that. It is our sometimes subconscious recognition of danger, leading to fear and flight. That much is simply the provision of a good Creator. The fear I am referring to, which is the opposite of love, is something altogether corroding and debilitating. It stops love, because love is always by its nature vulnerable. This fear causes you to be forever trying futilely to eliminate risk, to protect people from the perilous world and from nasty realities. In Coronation Street the children are immediately, by reflex, told lies and sent upstairs, by adults themselves afraid of the truth. Fear becomes the default position, and then love becomes impossible -- only relationships that masquerade as love are possible.

Silence and stillness are necessary while we discover how to be open to God who is unconditionally loving. Each time of prayer for a contemplative is an act of faith, because we are setting aside our normal defences and risk-limitation strategies, in order to sit still and receptive where God is, in our hearts. And as we keep on saying, if we need to assess or review our meditation -- what are we getting out of it? -- we need to ask ourselves, are we becoming more loving -- that is, less afraid?

04 November 2011

Being in the world differently - 4 November 2011

One of the important contemplative teachers of our day is the American Benedictine nun, Sister Joan Chittister. A lot of the art of teaching, it seems to me, is being able to say the simplest truths in a fresh and simple way. So it is that Sr Joan Chittister writes: The contemplative life is about becoming more contemplative all the time. It is about being in the world differently.

And so, if what we want or expect from faith in God, from loyal and busy attendance at church -- and I have to say, for many people, from simply being good -- is stability, a reduction of change in our lives, protection from adversity and pain, then as contemplatives we are seriously out of luck.

Paying attention to God does mean change. It is a life of being in the world differently. It becomes increasingly difficult to live superficially. We start seeing things we may not have seen before. We find we can pay attention more to aspects of things we hitherto didn’t want to know about. But basically, we ourselves are changing, even at our great age. Sr Joan puts it this way: What needs to be changed in us? Anything that deludes us into thinking that we are not simply a work in progress, all of whose degrees, status, achievements, and power are no substitute for the wisdom that a world full of God everywhere, in everyone, has to teach us.

This is a kind of freedom, you see. Personal change, whether it is merely in the ways we do things or react, or whether it is much deeper, in the thoughts and fears we may reveal to no one, is always the result of discovering we are free to change. We may have thought we weren't. We are not locked into any determination of our background, or upbringing, or past sorrows, or beliefs we were taught. God’s spirit is working in us at the level of our fears, including our fears of mortality and not being here any more.

And so, to be contemplative is to be a work in progress, as Sr Joan puts it. As our fears about that reduce, our surprise quotient reduces also -- there may be things we intensely dislike, but we are no longer so surprised, horrified, aghast, threatened, because we are free to be still and because we are understanding better. It is a kind of wisdom, as Sr Joan says. I tend to be amused when people quote St Teresa’s most famous statement, that all will be well and every manner of thing will be well. It demands the Tui Beer response: Yeah, right. But St Teresa was speaking from her personal inner freedom. She wasn’t afraid any more.

28 October 2011

Speaking up - 28 October 2011

In the TV drama Downton Abbey, the execrable aunt who has caused a lot of damage by her plain speaking says to the wonderful Dowager Countess of Grantham, “My dear, I always say what I think...” “Why,” asks the countess, “no one else does.” There are people who have never experienced what it is like to think it perhaps, but choose not to say it.

One of the most famous of the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 3rd and 4th centuries was Abba Moses the Black. He was probably an Ethiopian, and tradition says he had been a robber, a highwayman. One of the many stories tells how a council was being held in Scetis, and some of the fathers there treated Moses with contempt, saying “Why does this black man come among us?” But Moses kept silence. Later, some asked him, “Abba, did that not grieve you at all?” He said to them, “I was grieved, but I kept silence.” On another occasion, when one of the brothers had committed a fault, Abba Moses was asked to come and help with the judgement. He took a leaking jug, filled it with water and carried it with him. The others said, “What is this, Father?” Moses replied, “My sins run out behind me, and today I am coming to judge the errors of another.” When they heard that, they said no more to the brother but forgave him.

One of the consequences of a contemplative discipline in which, so far as we can, we are paying attention to the real world rather than day dreaming or fantasising, and to human brokenness including our own rather than blaming, judging, labelling, is that we seem to have less and less to say. If God teaches us in the silence to make peace with ourselves, as Jesus taught, then it becomes less difficult to understand what C S Lewis called this bent world. At any rate we pause now on any threshold of passing judgement, and often as not we say nothing at all.

It doesn’t mean at all that we lose our sense of justice and our indignation when people and our precious environment are maltreated by the misuse of power. But it is not possible to come from the silence and resume the old strategies of label and divide, name, blame and shame. The silence extends out far beyond the time of meditation, the mantra follows us off down the road, and there is something in our hearts put there by God which tells us that speaking up judgmentally and hurtfully will not improve anything. And if we are compelled to speak up, it is likely to become a rare event, and it will always somehow reflect what we have come from in the silence and stillness.

Isidore of Pelusium, one of the later Desert Fathers, put it this way: Living without speaking is better than speaking without living. For a person who lives rightly helps us by silence, while one who talks too much annoys us. If, however, words and life go hand in hand, it is the perfection of all philosophy.

21 October 2011

Inner peace - 21 October 2011

Why are we meditating? Of course there is a variety of reasons, motivations. What we frequently hear when we ask is a desire for inner peace. People are meditating because it is so different from the other aspects of their lives, which may be busy, noisy, demanding -- and for some, full of anxiety or fear, or regret. For a while they can be still and rest, with permission as it were to set down the load. And that’s fine. If that’s what it is, “not a problem” as everyone seems to say these days.

Christian Meditation however invites us to rather more than that. If our motive is personal inner peace, there are perhaps two things to say. The first is that there are many offers of peace of mind around, such as Transcendental Meditation, TM, and much of it is simply part of the consumer culture. Secondly, it may not work. In half an hour’s time we are back where we came from, amid all that is not peaceful. What we have had is a rest. In the classical Christian teaching, that “rest” was known very well. They called it the pax perniciosa, day-dreaming, a kind of alpha consciousness, an escape from reality.

In Christian Meditation it is important that we are awake and alert, and not hiding from reality. I think the word rest is not appropriate because there is in fact a lot going on. We are the ones who are still and silent, but we are consenting to the work of the spirit over the days, weeks and years, eroding the false self and calling the true self, which was always there, and which God always saw. The much-used hospital cliché has some relevance here -- informed consent. We are consenting, and sometimes that is quite hard work, because it means facing our reality and the present moment.

One frequent question is about results -- what do I get out of this, if not an amazing and instant inner tranquillity...? You see the consumerism again... there has to be some reward, some benefit. If we must look for a result, we should look for it in the area of our relationships. Are we more loving... of ourselves in the first place? Less judgemental and inclined to labels which are exclusive of some and inclusive of others. Are we acquiring more understanding or sympathy with human difference, including our own human frailty and fallibility?

It is a long process of being brought closer to the Way of Christ, to some of those sublime requirements such as the Beatitudes which may have always seemed far above us. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard said that most Christians typically treat the Sermon on the Mount rather as they set their watches deliberately ahead of time, so that they will at least possibly approximate. The work that is going on in our stillness is something we learn to trust, and it becomes apparent in our hearts and in our relationships.

14 October 2011

Paying attention - 14 October 2011

Sitting still and paying attention, according to our experts, is a very complex human problem. While tens of thousands of our compatriots have no difficulty paying close, focussed attention (if not sitting still) for over an hour to a rugby game they want to watch, and can recall every detail of it later, I for one am bored rigid in the first five minutes. I think that is because, wildly exciting as it may be, it seems to me not to matter.

And indeed, those who compile our TV programs are assuming at present, I think, that our attention is successfully captured for serious lengths of time only by relentless sport, or by the preparation of food to the accompaniment of much drama and tears, or by TV and pop icons locked in battle with their hormones. One bloke on a food program cooks what he himself has hunted and killed, so that combines two criteria, as it were, if indeed hunting and killing is a sport.

Paying attention is a large subject, I do realise. Our attention span depends on many things. When the New Zealand Anglican Prayer Book was published in 1989 it was such an excellent thing it seemed to me, except for what they did with the Psalms. The old 1662 Prayer Book had instructed in the Preface: The Psalter shall be read through once every month... Obviously not everyone paid attention when it was, but some did, and expected it, and it tended to result in a red-blooded church in which, as one Benedictine Abbot pointed out, God was not expected to behave in ways prescribed in the manuals of doctrine. But now in 1989 the Psalms got selected for our tender sensibilities, and abbreviated for our attention span, the language was cleaned up, and they have become in our worship like little approved sound bites as it were. Some Psalms we never hear now because they might upset someone.

Well, when we come to pray as contemplatives, we are taking whatever attention span we might have -- and of course it will differ from day to day, depending on a lot of things -- and we are making it completely available in the present moment, whether it encounters difficulties or not, as it will. I had a lovely teacher in Standard 3, Mrs Stephens -- I think her husband was killed in the war, in that year, because suddenly we felt very sad for her without knowing why -- nobody told us. One day Mrs Stephens said, I would really like it if Ross Miller would pay attention and stop staring dreamily out the window. Well, Mrs Stephens, I have got better at it now. I have learned to sit still for 20 to 30 minutes and pay attention as completely as I know how to the present moment. I hear everything that happens in that time within my auditory range -- but I now know to decide not to start thinking about all that. I am content to be where I am at this moment, and to be still, and to be aware that I am in the presence of God, as is always the case, except that now I am paying attention. I am not expecting emotions or revelations or any such thing, and I would be very surprised to start levitating -- that would wreck my attention.

And that is all. My loving presence here is my very best response to God’s loving presence here, since God is always paying attention to me. And that in the end is the whole of prayer.

09 October 2011

Spiritual or religious - 7 October 2011

It seems trendy these days to claim to be spiritual but not religious. Religious apparently means going to church and doing religious things, so that’s a no-no. But spiritual is such a handy word in the contemporary climate because it can mean anything, like whatever I want it to mean. And also spiritual, whatever it is, can be done without messing up all the other things we might want to do.

Well, it might be quite important to be neither of these things. Labelling, in any case, usually isn’t helpful or specially informative, and in a mature faith we require less and less of labelling of ourselves or others, because it always obscures the truth.

Jesus didn’t invite his followers to become spiritual or religious. He invited his followers to leave self behind, and that is another pathway altogether. When he did employ any labelling it was in a negative sense -- don’t be like the pharisees. And what was the matter with the pharisees...? They were deeply aware of self, ego, image, reputation. They had official selves. They were role-models, visible, important. The pharisee Jesus pictured in the temple actually thanked God that he was not like other people. He was very spiritual and religious, and quite exemplary. I am sure he was also sincere. Jesus invites us to say goodbye to whatever vestiges of the pharisee are in us, large or small.

So, what we experience in contemplative life and prayer, as time goes by and the life of stillness builds, is the steady enfeebling of the ego. Our official self, what we hope is our visible self, even if it is widely admired, is not the same as the self God made and sees, knows and loves. Love, in the disciplines of stillness and silence, but actually wherever we find it, somehow attenuates the ego in ourselves and even in others, as we begin to see the truth more clearly.

Love and truth are always intimately related, and it is the true self which God made and which Jesus brings to birth, always, as we are still and consenting. This is never something we strive for. The best we can do is be still. God’s breath of creation does it in us.

30 September 2011

Being and doing - 30 September 2011

A person emailed me with the perceptive comment that a lot of this contemplative business and Christian Meditation seems like unknowing, unlearning.

Back in the 14th century an anonymous English mystic wrote an all-time classic of spirituality entitled The Cloud of Unknowing. When we pray, he or she taught, we are sitting between two clouds. That in itself is interesting news for anyone who is expecting clarity, solutions or certainty, reassurance, revelations or miracles. All we see is cloud, opaque. The cloud above us is the Cloud of Unknowing. This cloud tells only of mystery. It is not full of meaningful symbols or instructions or commandments, thoughts for today or helpful hints. Below us, says the writer, is the Cloud of Forgetting, which lies there between us and all our normal worldly business and concerns and all the noise of our lives, including our church lives. In prayer, in stillness and silence, we drop our distractions into the Cloud of Forgetting, and through the Cloud of Unknowing, says the author, we send “little darts of longing love”.

John Main, one of the great teachers, wrote that we are unlearning much that was conditioned by our education and training, and that is now inadequate for mature spiritual life. What we are learning, however … is something too direct and simple for us to understand, except in and through experience. That is to say, by doing it rather than considering and assessing it. We ourselves may be too complex and self-conscious for the experience when we begin. So some teaching, not only by example (the best teaching) but also by words and ideas, is needed to keep us on the way that we are now travelling…

Over the years we attend study groups and seminars, some of them very good. I have taught a lot of these myself, and even some of those ones were passable. I once ran a church seminar for some weeks on issues emerging from Coronation Street for the edification of the faithful. People came to these things eager to understand basic issues better, even solve some of their philosophical or biblical questions. I am a little cynical now, perhaps -- if we felt intellectually stimulated we felt better. I have been speaker at Sea of Faith and other such meetings where furrowed brows were the order of the day, and the inner message of Christmas or Easter seemed far too simplistic.

But it is as though wiser years are simpler, and what matters is not so much to understand God as to encounter and be in the mystery and love where God is. The eyes of your heart, wrote Paul, being open, that you may know…

23 September 2011

Who qualifies? - 23 September 2011

If you enjoy reading biographies, a couple of basic facts may have become clear early on. The first is the difference between good biography and what we call hagiography. Hagiography is what happens often at funerals, a dressed-up and somewhat selective account of a person’s life, while knowing that some people present could tell alternative versions. Perhaps understandably at funerals, we usually draw a veil over anything discreditable or puzzling.

The other fact is what we find in good biography -- that most persons’ lives are replete with contradictions and shadows, and that includes the life of every sainted Christian leader I have read. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, Martin Luther King, Hensley Henson the saintly Bishop of Durham, George Augustus Selwyn, John Betjeman, William Wilberforce, St Augustine, Desmond Tutu... the list is endless, and they are just a few of the males...! Episodes in their lives reflect St Paul’s as he reports in the Letter to the Romans: I do not understand my behaviour; I know what is right but I can’t do it... Or they fell into the abyss of depression, and the guilt of assuming they should be better than that. Or they allowed themselves to be led off somehow against their vows and promises.

Occasionally you do hear of someone who arrives on the western slopes of life, as it were, saying: I regret nothing, I would do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing... No regrets...? Yeah, right.

St Benedict warns his brothers: Do not think yourself as holy before you really are. The subtext there is that if you ever become truly holy, then thinking it is the last thing you will think. Benedict knew that we are all flawed, “mutilated” as Archbishop Rowan Williams dares to express it. The best way to find that out, actually, might be stay for a while in a monastery. Anyway, we shrink to think of ourselves as holy precisely because we know it cannot be so. It is Christ who is holy, and the truth is that our wholeness is in owning and acknowledging our whole past and present. This is our poverty, and it is what we bring to our prayer. It is also what unites us with the whole of humanity. We are not better than others, we are the same stuff. We may have done slightly better at times, but we know where the shadows are.

And so we come to prayer, not because we are good at it, and not because we have goods to offer or even things to ask... We qualify here, not because we have done well, and despite the fact that we did badly. None of that is relevant here. We are here because unconditional love and grace draw us. We have dignity because God in Christ bestows dignity on us as beloved daughters and sons.

16 September 2011

Suffering and affliction - 16 September 2011

Simone Weil was a remarkable young woman who lived in France during the Nazi occupation, and died in 1943 from “malnutrition”, aged 34. She was a Catholic but refused baptism. Much that we know about her is from her correspondence with Father Perrin, a Dominican priest in Marseilles. In one of these letters she writes about the difference between affliction and suffering.

Suffering is universal. We all know suffering, whether it is toothache or the ache and pain of bereavement, the limitations of ageing, the grief of a broken relationship, tragedy and hardship... a multitude of causes of pain. That is suffering. There are usually things we can do about suffering, its causes or its effects. We are not entirely powerless. The Buddhist teachers tell us that accepting it may be the way forward, since it is a basic fact of all life. But we also know that how we react to suffering is profoundly important. We see many examples of people making bad choices in their suffering, hanging on to anger, resentment and hurt, unable or unwilling to forgive or to understand anything or anyone beyond their own pain.

Now, Simone Weil sees another human condition which she labels affliction. She wrote in French, and the French word is malheur, and I’m unsure whether affliction translates it adequately. Affliction, she says, is something apart, specific and irreducible. She gives one example -- slavery, being owned, having no freedom. Under the Nazis, the Jews were experiencing affliction. She calls affliction a more or less attenuated equivalent of death. There is pain in life which cannot be resolved or relieved, or understood. Our mortality is just that, the ultimate loss of both possession and control. Simone Weil notices that often as not a lot of people simply try not to think about it.

Jesus, she says, experienced affliction, he believed he was forsaken by God. One of the greatest mystics, St John of the Cross, has given his classic description of affliction which he calls the Dark Night. There are passages in the Book of Psalms which clearly come out of affliction, such as the extraordinary Psalm 88. Now listen to what I think is Simone Weil’s most insightful passage about this: Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time... more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell... The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least go on wanting to love, though it may be only with an infinitesimal part of itself. Then, one day, God will come to show himself to this soul and to reveal the beauty of the world, as in the case of Job. But if the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something almost equivalent to hell.

In stillness and silence, no longer trying to possess or control, we consent to the way things are. It absolutely does not mean that we withdraw from the fight for justice and peace and change in the world. But for ourselves, we are asking primarily the grace to say yes to life and to death, and to opt deeply and inwardly for love.

09 September 2011

Passing judgement - 9 September 2011

Out in the desert, Abba Arsenius was not renowned for disciplining himself specially hard. This offended one of the scrupulous young monks, who used to work as a shepherd, always slept on the ground and ate sparse meals of gruel. So the young monk went to one of the elders, but the elder asked him: Do you know what Arsenius did before he became a monk? No I don’t. He was a tutor to the imperial family, and he slept between sheets of silk. Arsenius has given up rather more than you have.

One of the things you notice about contemplative people -- not always but often -- is that they become less and less interested in passing moral judgement or pinning labels on people. When Benedict in his Rule makes some regulation, he likes to add that this may need to be modified for other monks -- at any rate, the Abbot not only can but should arrange what he thinks best. Fr Laurence Freeman likes to remind us that God does not take one person’s side against another, a notion which may come as a surprise to some.

But (you may also have noticed) the secular culture these days is hugely judgemental. We need to know whom to blame for any untoward event. Our newspapers every day sniff out alleged hypocrisy and moral failure and find plenty of it, and hold it up to public view. A cultural window such as Coronation Street is simply an unending record of the ways people fail each other and accuse each other. This is all very curious, because the secular culture is also dedicated to the view that it is religious people who are the censorious hypocrites.

If you simply can’t be bothered with all this, then stillness and silence are the antidote. When they confronted Jesus with the woman caught in adultery for his judgement, he said nothing. He wrote in the dust with his finger... and eventually spoke not to them but to the woman: I don’t condemn you. Go and don’t sin again. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, writes that because of our baptism we are bound to the patient, long-term discovery of what grace is doing with us over the years. In meditation, introduced to our own empty-handedness, our own inner silence where God is, we may glimpse how our own inner frailty and poverty are always known and loved by God, and are in the process of change, and so we find we scarcely know how to pass judgement on ourselves any more, let alone on anyone else.

My favourite desert story, perhaps because of all the years spent in parish churches, tells of the brothers who went to ask advice of Abba Moses because one of their number was regularly falling asleep each evening during the late office. Abba Moses replied: Well, for myself, when I see a brother getting sleepy, I let him rest his head on my knees.

02 September 2011

Distractions - 2 September 2011

It may be a good idea to revisit the matter of distractions in Christian Meditation. Distractions, like death and taxes, are always with us. This may seem disappointing. Once in a while we come across a contemplative writer or teacher who seems to imply that a day may come when totally undistracted stillness floods in upon us... Well, it hasn’t happened to me, and I have yet to meet anyone to whom it has.

One of the important lessons we learn in all this is to stop generalising from our own experience. Each of us is different, mercifully, and each of us reacts differently to whatever happens. A book which I think is marvellous may leave someone else cold -- and vice versa. What I think “works” for me may not be at all of universal application. And in any case, we are not looking for experience, or for what “works”. We are looking to be fully present to God -- and in a group like this, to each other -- in stillness and silence, present and paying attention, in an attitude of quiet consent, asking for nothing.

The mantra is all we have. We have laid all our social skills and ploys aside. But of course, the minute we stop everything else to sit still and silent, our busy minds are not so compliant as to shut down for a while, to go obligingly into standby mode as it were.

What I do notice, however, with people on this journey, is that eventually they say this simple discipline becomes central for them. Perhaps it is partly that it has taught them to stop expecting miracles, perfection and bliss. Perhaps they discovered the utter simplicity and poverty of what Jesus called purity of heart and poverty of spirit: Blessed are the poor in spirit, theirs is the kingdom of heaven; blessed are the pure in heart, they shall see God. We may have arrived at a place we recognise as actually Christlike, where he is present, not because of any triumphalism or sense of achievement or completion, or ecstasy, but because it seems to be a place of belonging, and above all of love.

The distractions are part of our journey, part of the scenery, part of our ego which will one day be Christlike. The mantra is intended to show us our way back, our return. And so the teaching says: When you find you are distracted, simply return to your mantra -- and say it, interiorly, gently, from the start to the end of your time of meditation.

26 August 2011

Fidelity - 26 August 2011

The teachers of contemplative prayer and life often come back to the word Fidelity. Fidelity, faithfulness, is a concept to know about and to appreciate. It manifests in Christian Meditation most simply of all as fidelity to the mantra. Whatever our mantra is, we are faithful to it. The mantra signifies a great deal for us, after all -- it signifies attention, paying attention, to stillness and to silence in prayer. It signifies to us where we may have wandered from in our lives generally. It signifies our poverty in prayer and life, the poverty of empty hands and a receptive heart, because the mantra, when we come to pray, is all we have to say.

Now, this is rather different from much that we normally experience. Much of life is necessarily coping with change. Faithfulness has to be therefore negotiable, fidelity to the old way may become inappropriate or silly. One of the earliest Greek philosophers said everything changes, παντα ρει, all is in flux. We have to change, and the ability to manage change is important. We change our minds. We change our abode, our lifestyle, our dietary patterns, sometimes our friends. We are constantly invited to change our body lotions, dog food and deodorants. Consumer wisely advises people to shop around, there may be a better deal. Some people move from church to church in the hope of a better experience. The first chapter of the Rule of St Benedict is a very funny dissertation on restless monks who shop around different monasteries in the hope that they might find something more congenial.

And of course we are not opposed to something new or better. Fidelity however is referring to a central part of each of us where we have actually made a decision or two. We may not have done this consciously and deliberately -- it may be more that God has brought us to this point of faith and faithfulness. Amid all the change around us there is a place in us that is still. It is not that we now know exactly what we believe -- it may be a place of mystery in many senses. It is certainly a place where love is possible, because God is there.

But in any case we don’t describe it by words. We know it by being there, by becoming still and silent, by our choice of fidelity to the simplest things, the mantra, the stillness, and the silence.

I have set my soul in silence and peace. A weaned child on its mother’s breast, even so is my soul. [Psalm 131]

19 August 2011

I don’t have the time - 19 August 2011

Christian Meditation, and indeed meditation within any of the great faiths or none, brings us to think differently about time. So much of our life is about the spending, prioritising of time. Often, at various stages in our lives, there seems scarcely enough time to allocate. But when it comes to meditation our teachers tell us not to worry about the passage of time. And at first that is one of the harder tasks. The usual difficulty with starting to learn meditation is that “I simply don’t have the time”.

We had a neighbour where we used to live who was simply unable to be still while she was awake. In her childhood her father would not allow her to sit down with a book. He would demand, “Haven’t you got something to do?” Now in later life she is totally justified by works and is known as a good and kind, busy and outgoing woman.

It can be quite funny at a serious silent retreat -- retreatants are invited to come without their laptops or cellphones or detective novels or edifying books. But they usually shamefacedly smuggle these items in.

Father Laurence Freeman tells about spending one Easter on Bere Island, a very small island off the Irish coast. He and some others decided to awake early on Easter morning and watch the sun rise from a place where there were some very old sacred stones. When they staggered out of bed and up the hill it was just becoming daylight. Fr Laurence says he had forgotten the long wait between the light of dawn and actual sunrise -- it can be up to an hour before the sun appears on the eastern horizon. They were cold and bleary, and they wanted their breakfast or at least some hot coffee. He says it was a long wait -- he found himself wondering whether the sun would rise -- he decided it probably would.

But this, he thought, is exactly the life of faith. Faith is waiting in hope -- the writer to the Hebrews calls it the hope of things not seen. Immediate gratification may have to be set aside. He notes how the chatter of he and his friends settled down to a silent waiting, as though silence were more appropriate. And then, of course, the Easter sun began to blaze and rise in the sky. In meditation we are waiting in faith. And that is all. The mantra is our reminder not to follow down the byways of distractions.

The discipline begins to reshape our usual sense and experience of time. The things that bother us start to change, or reduce in number, or both. We are becoming still enough, perhaps even poor enough, to receive the fruits of the Spirit. The ego, and whatever facade we may hope is what others see of us, begin to reduce. In quietness and confidence is our strength, writes the prophet.

12 August 2011

No graven images - 12 August 2011

Sometimes I think that contemplative prayer must be a confession of our helplessness as much as anything. Most of our thoughts, most of our days, are about memories, hopes, desires, fears and worries, things that have happened... or plans. I can be very happy sitting in the winter sun and reviewing what I should have said to Mrs Thundermuffin 30 years ago. We don’t see people, places, situations as they really are, but rather as coloured by our reactions to them, our opinions, prejudices, experience and emotions. So really, to that extent, we walk around in a landscape of our own mind, our own thoughts, sometimes even a world of illusion of our own construction. We get caught up in our own narrative; it seems to be the only reality that exists.

Moreover, contemplative people are bothered by the fact that, the minute we start to imagine God, through the filters of our own opinions, hopes and fears and whatnot, to say nothing of the residue of what we think the church and our parents taught us about God long ago, we have started constructing an idol. Jewish wisdom understood this, and hence the absolute prohibition of “graven images”, idols. God is in fact encountered only as God’s self determines -- and for that we need to be still and silent, our agendas and all our best thoughts set aside. God seems to be best present to the humble of heart, say the Hebrew scriptures. There are various ways of saying this -- not in the earthquake, wind and fire, but in the still, small voice; Elijah needed to have exhausted all his own wisdom and strength before he could hear it, on Mount Carmel.

I suppose there are, somewhere, some wonderful contemplatives who are much closer to these mysteries than I have ever known. Mostly, we see it from afar; something may happen which suggests that we have moved a bit further along the road of pilgrimage, and that’s very good. What we do is what we can. We sit still, and we decide not to rush off anywhere right now. We shut down the agendas of our lives. It doesn’t matter that this is only for 20 - 30 minutes. It is not tokenism, it is an important gesture and an important discipline. Sometimes I like to think it serves notice on all the rest of my life and consciousness that it had better be very worried. For that brief time we are as real as we know how. We are not saying anything -- but if we were, it would be that we are content to be here because we don’t have to do anything or appear in any way which is not truthful. The person who is present here and now, then, is the person God made and loves.

Christian Meditation Group, Basic Information

Christian Meditation Group
General Information


Our group meets in the hall at Christ Church, Warkworth, on Fridays at 8.30 am. Normally we will be away by 9.15 am, or soon after.

The meetings are very simple. We meet essentially for a time of Christian Meditation as a group. At least some of us will be practising Christian Meditation daily in our own circumstances. The group meetings are important for encouragement, and for learning the practice.

It matters that we are punctual. It is part of the discipline. Each meeting begins at 8.30 am. If you are unavoidably late, please enter quietly and without fuss or comment.

The leader (at present Ross Miller) will give a very brief talk, and then there will be between 20 minutes and 30 minutes of meditation, silence and stillness. At the end of the time we give some space to any questions or comments. Then there is a brief verbal prayer and we leave.

Please wear whatever is necessary to ensure you are not too cold or uncomfortable. It is fine to bring a rug if that helps.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
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The space for questions, comments, discussion, is limited. However you can always feel free to email Ross -- rossmill@orcon.net.nz -- or go to the special blog/website -- http://nzccmwarkworth.blogspot.com/ The intention is to post each Friday morning talk on the website so that you can read it at your leisure if you wish.

The website already includes background material about Christian Meditation. Related websites are: The World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) http://www.wccm.org/ -- and the NZCCM http://www.christianmeditationnz.org.nz/index.php

05 August 2011

Walking wounded - 5 August 2011

Suppose it makes not one whit of difference to God that we are actually quite weak and fallible persons; that while we may not know ourselves very well and puzzle ourselves at times, what we do know well is that we are rarely as good on the inside as we hope we appear on the outside. Suppose God is actually not as upset about our apparent sins as we are. Suppose, as we are getting on in life, as it were, we are increasingly concerned that we have not improved to quite the same extent as we had hoped, and we are unsure how much time there may be left to make a few necessary renovations and display a better version of ourselves to the world.

Contemplatives know that all that may be true, and perhaps rather more than that. We are more interested however in God, as we encounter God in stillness and silence, who is not condemning us, God who is flatly declining to take one side of things against another, God depicted in Jesus (St Paul says Jesus is the icon of the invisible God) who was one with our mortal and fallible flesh, the God whose presence is always love.

Contemplatives understand the church perfectly well to be the community of the walking wounded. We are, each of us, bruised and scarred, often from early in childhood, as we know. We also know that the last thing we now choose in our mature understanding is to live as victims of our life, history and circumstances.

So we appear with our wounds in the silence and the stillness, not parading them of course, but bearing them, because they are the truth about us and about our history. Not dwelling on them, but simply acknowledging them.

What God sees is the heart that was always reaching, perhaps feebly, for faith, always actually loving, the real motivations even of the mistakes and deliberately wrong choices. It seems to me that the church has never taken seriously the wisdom that God looks on the heart. In an age of utter superficiality and sentimentality, when people spend thousands on appearance and being free of wrinkles, it is probably incomprehensible anyway. St Paul has this lovely phrase: The eyes of your heart being open, that you may know... The eyes of your heart. In the silence and the stillness we seek by grace to open the eyes of the heart.

29 July 2011

Unlearning and unknowing - 29 July 2011

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn but to unlearn. That was said, among many other things she said, by the American feminist and activist, Gloria Steinem. Whatever she meant by it, I think she is right. Contemplative prayer and life is very much about unlearning.

One of our greatest spiritual classics -- and we don’t know who the author was -- is entitled The Cloud of Unknowing. In that title are two deliberate images -- the image of a cloud, rather than any image of clarity and certainty; and the strange word unknowing, divesting, dispossessing ourselves of perhaps cherished assumptions and props. To a lot of people this seems not at all what they thought religion was about.

If you consult what Jesus teaches about prayer, you find that prayer is to happen in an inner room with the door shut. The Jews of his day, the people to whom he spoke, did not have inner rooms or doors. This, rather, is how Jesus refers to inwardness. He describes the importance of being still and silent. He also says we are to shed anxiety. Anxiety is pandemic. I can think of people who seem anxious that if they shed their anxieties there would be nothing much left. Worry is their default response to life. Prayer is the way we set it aside, says Jesus.

Prayer is the relinquishing of possession and of our illusion of control of our lives, or of events, of other people, of doctrine and belief… and, we must add, our control of God. A most basic part of that is that we come to terms with our own mortality.

In the stillness we consent to God’s process rather than our own. We unlearn, unknow much that we habitually assume, our reliance on some god who is our personal domestic idol, or the protector of our belief system, perhaps even fashioned in our own image, we start to unlearn our self-protection mechanisms, dismantling our propensities for looking for happiness in the wrong places. We choose to pay attention to the God Jesus called Father, and that is all. Like Mary of Bethany, simply be present and pay attention.

22 July 2011

About silence - 22 July 2011

Silence is a key component of contemplative prayer. But as we rapidly find, silence is exceedingly difficult. The best we can manage is a relative silence, perhaps a little quieter round about than is usually the case. It is a noisy world. People who come to visit us at Algies Bay typically remark how quiet it is. So it seems to them. But the vehicles still roar up and down the road at intervals -- and that’s just the upright local citizenry carting their kids to school, or the blokes cruising around on their tractors or quad bikes or starting up chain saws in case there might be something to hew down. Thomas Merton in his hermitage far out in the woods of Kentucky complained about hammering he could hear distantly down the hill, or some farmer’s far off machinery.

Well, the lesson about this is that our prayer is never about escaping from the real world. We needn’t try. The noisy world is real and it’s there and we inhabit it, it is part of us and we are part of its clamour.

The real challenge with silence is interior silence. As soon as we become still and start to pay attention to the present moment we are reminded of the degree of noise and indiscipline in what has been called our monkey minds. St Teresa compared it to a ship whose crew has mutinied, tied up the captain and is chaotically taking turns to steer the ship. Jesus teaches: Therefore I bid you put away anxious thoughts about food and drink to keep you alive, and clothes to cover your body. Surely life is more than food, the body more than clothes.

We aim to be in the present moment, which is the only moment of reality, of encounter with the God who is “I Am.” Yet within seconds we are thinking thoughts of yesterday, making plans for tomorrow or weaving daydreams and wish-fulfillment in the realm of fantasy. Do not be anxious about tomorrow, tomorrow will look after itself, says Jesus.

So, we only approximate to interior silence as well. But Christian Meditation is the discipline in which we come back to our approximation each day, and with the help of the mantra bring our monkey minds back to the centre again and again. A silence and stillness begins to settle into our lives at the other times. Simply discovering that we are, however poorly, free to place our attention elsewhere than on ourselves is the first great awakening. It is the beginning of the deepening of consciousness, which allows us to leave the distractions on the surface, like waves on the surface of the ocean.

15 July 2011

The future contemplative church - 15 July 2011

Whatever the church of the future is like, it will need to better understand the many people who are sitting on its margins, or just outside the camp or perhaps further away. Some of these people had years of activity in the church, but not now -- for whatever reason that changed. Others are absent because they think they can’t meet the church’s expectations, whether it’s in doctrine and belief, or in the manner of their lives, or because of something from their past.

A writer I admire is a woman named Doris Grumbach. One day she told her vicar, I have been afflicted with a kind of spiritual inanition... And her letter to him ends with these words: I find the business of the church keeps me from the real enterprise of prayer. While there is still time I must be about the journey I have started on.

What interests me is, first, that what she calls spiritual inanition is a very common thing indeed among mature Christian believers; inanition in the OED denotes “exhaustion resulting from lack of nourishment”; the spirituality term for it is acedia. In Doris Grumbach’s case it flowed from what she calls the business of the church. Acedia, inanition, usually leaves good and involved people feeling weary of it all and bewildered. Secondly, she now sees her way forward in the prayer of silence and stillness and in developing those contemplative disciplines.

More and more teachers of Christian spirituality seem to be saying, one way or another, that the church of the future will need to be contemplative. Its people will need to know how to be still. And that means doing it. It means finding out for ourselves what is personally possible each day for being still, being silent, paying attention to God who is always present. All of this is directly counter to our secular world of consumerism, activism and rampant egoism.

This is deeply inward Christian allegiance. It places at risk a lot that we may have assumed until now. It realigns our priorities. It deepens and clarifies our love for our friends and also our enemies. However, it’s not a very smart idea to start making resolutions about being more contemplative from now on... What we can do is simply to be still and silent now, with the utter simplicity -- what some call the poverty -- of the mantra, yet alive and alert, fully present in the present moment, not asking for anything, in the presence of God who knows us utterly and all our needs.

08 July 2011

A daily discipline - 8 July 2011

Part of the general teaching about Christian Meditation encourages us to adopt some daily discipline of meditation. No one should be frightened about this. The discipline will vary a lot from person to person. If you consult someone like Father Laurence Freeman, he will say simply that we should meditate for between 20 to 30 minutes, twice a day. It is what he does, and he believes it is the basic discipline for a contemplative person. And of course it represents a considerable rearrangement of our personal lives and schedules and priorities. Plenty of people do that.

But it depends on a lot of things. For some it depends on their many other at present unavoidable tasks and responsibilities. I do not see how a mother at home with preschoolers can meditate twice a day in stillness and silence. It also depends on our state of health, on the understanding of other people in the house, and so on... numerous things. I come back to the basic principles, that whatever we do, it is always to be a gentle discipline -- we do what we can, not what we can’t. In our maturity we may have discovered that times and seasons change, and that what was impossible at one time of life may be able to blossom some other time.

But there is a deeper point underlying this. The teaching says that if and when the moment arrives for meditation, we do it whether we feel like it or not. We discern the moment, and choose to respond, whether we feel like it or not. Feelings are put to one side. This is a decision about priorities. And it always strikes me as being profoundly counter-cultural. It may be that for those of us who have seen a thing or two, getting on with something we don’t feel like doing is not a strange experience at all. We can manage that perfectly well if we choose to. I was once invited to “explain”, as they put it, Christian Meditation to a church youth group. And that bit of it was incomprehensible to them. Doing something they didn’t feel like doing, or thought they didn’t like... Why would anyone do that if they didn’t have to?

Meditation, contemplative life and prayer, teaches us to set aside emotions, feelings if we have to or if we choose. In the welter and pressure of emotions, which we always have anyway, we choose something else, to become still and wait. That is a very rich decision. It is a decision, in the stillness, to be directed elsewhere than ourselves. In the normal course of our lives it may be something that happens nowhere else. Even if we see our lives as outgoing and caring of others, which may well be true, this is different. It is paying attention to God, with empty hands and with all the love and stillness, silence and simplicity, that are God’s gift.

01 July 2011

Returning and rest - 1 July 2011

In returning and rest will you be saved,
In quietness and trust will be your strength.
[Isaiah 30:15]

This word “returning” cropped up last week when there was a comment about the simplicity of returning to the mantra when we realise we have become distracted. In fact “return” is the little Hebrew word “shub”, which turns out to be of very serious importance in the Bible. This little Hebrew verb means simply to go back to where you belong. It’s not a religious word -- it was simply part of the language. And it is exactly the meaning in Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son, when the son, destitute in the far country decides, “I will go back to my father...” In the Hebrew scriptures, not only persons but cities and nations can choose to return to where they should be.

It is the Hebrew verb to repent. Amazingly there are passages where we find even God can “repent” -- the same Hebrew word -- even God chooses to return to the relationship of love and mercy. Repentance is not primarily feeling sorry, ashamed, guilt-laden, gutted, or any such thing -- and we should not judge anyone’s repentance by those criteria. Repentance is going back, however you feel. So it is a little awesome to consider that, with all the activism and anxiety of the church, the meetings, the planning, the work that goes on, the kernel of it all may actually be not in that, but in returning and rest, quietness and trust.

I remember once talking with a Benedictine nun who had come to a retreat to recover from her many tasks including studying for a doctorate. She said, “You know, we really don’t have anything, do we. The mantra is all we have.” Not only do we return, but we return empty-handed. This is what the mantra signifies. We return with considerable relief. Contemplative people typically refer to what they call the poverty of the mantra. Blessed are you poor, said Jesus, yours is the kingdom of God.

Well, it is a lovely list of four words: returning and rest, quietness and trust. And all of it is counter to the normal rhythms of our lives. The mantra we say is a kind of song of return. And at other times, when we have to be far away from meditation, the mantra may come back into our consciousness as a steadying resonance, a reminder that all our busyness, however worthy, may not be our true self. The self God sees and knows and loves is better than that -- just as Jesus, while grateful of course for Martha’s care and work, said nevertheless that Mary had chosen the better way.

23 June 2011

Taking the next step - 24 June 2011

Here is a classic story from the Desert Fathers of the 4th century.

A brother asked one of the elders, “What shall I do? I’m obsessed by this nagging thought -- ‘You can’t fast and you can’t work, so at least go and visit the sick because that’s a loving thing to do.’” The elder said to him, “Go. Eat, drink, sleep, just don’t leave your cell.” For three days the brother did just this, and then he was overcome with acedia (spiritual lassitude and apathy). But he found some palm leaves and started trimming them. Next day he started plaiting them; when he felt hungry he said, “Here are some more palm leaves; I’ll prepare them and then have something to eat.” He finished them and said, “Perhaps I’ll read for a little before eating.” When he had done some reading he said, “Now let’s sing a few psalms and then I can eat with a good conscience.” And so by God’s help he went on little by little.

Did you ever hear such a prosaic, undramatic story. But it is exactly what faith is like. The church and things we read may be exhorting us to all manner of radical change and heroism. But faith is mainly a matter of putting one foot in front of the other and taking the next step. And for a lot of the greatest humble heroes in the church, that is all they can do for the most part.

What God asks of us is the next step. And this is mirrored in our prayer, where all that we do is silently, interiorly, repeat our word, our mantra. The mantra in itself is utterly insignificant. It has no spiritual or magical qualities. Whatever it means of itself, we are not meditating on its meaning. We simply repeat it, lovingly, particularly, so that it is still there when we have become distracted and have to return to it. That returning is the act of faith, the next step.

Perhaps our ego would like to do more than this, to change the world, to make a difference, to leave a mark. Recently I was at a funeral where as usual we had heard all about the triumphs and achievements of the deceased -- and afterwards a woman said to us, “I’d better hurry up and do something so that they have something to say at my funeral.” It was a joke, of course -- she has done plenty.

Contemplative prayer is about surrendering the ego and its need for recognition and satisfaction. Whatever we might want to pray about is gently put aside, and replaced by the simple repetition of the word, the mantra -- thus making space for whatever God seeks to achieve.

31 May 2011

About Christian Meditation

Christian Meditation is a way of praying.

There are many ways of praying. If you attend the liturgy at church -- that is a way of praying. Lectio Divina is best seen as a way of praying. Journalling and Examen may be seen as forms of praying. Children’s prayers, intercession groups, prayer chains... all sorts of things are ways of praying, because one way or another people are opening their consciousness to God.

Christian Meditation belongs to the so-called contemplative school of praying. That is because it is silent, still and inward, wordless except for the use of a mantra, and imageless. So it is in those respects very different from other ways of prayer.
Two things at the outset:

• No one learns to pray by talking about it, reading about it, or hearing about it and discussing it. We learn it by doing it. And all my experience is that people learn contemplative prayer and life by embarking on it in a disciplined way, and usually by joining with others in a Christian Meditation group.

• We need to have a little clarity about this word contemplative, since it gets hijacked by all sorts of people. Contemplative does not mean thoughtful. Plenty of people are thoughtful, and it’s no doubt a good thing to be. But that is not what we mean. We do not mean insightful, or quiet and gentle, or that we have an affinity with the trees and the distant vistas and the sunsets. It would be good if we were all these things -- but contemplative means receptive. It means that we know how to be silent and still in the presence of God, and that our lives have come to include this discipline of silence and stillness; that we know how to set aside our own thoughts and wishes, however noble, even the good and holy thoughts -- how to set aside the noise of our lives, including our religious lives, and certainly our frightened, clamorous and voracious egos, and be still, simple and receptive in the presence of God. I think we’ll come back to this word contemplative as we go along -- it is often seen by what it is not.

There are two initial and very basic questions people have when they hear about Christian Meditation and the contemplative life:

1. How do you do it?

2. What is it for? What benefits does it carry?

How do you do it is best answered by quoting from the website of the World Community for Christian Meditation.

Sit down. Sit still with your back straight. Close your eyes lightly. Then interiorly, silently begin to recite a single word – a prayer word or mantra. We recommend the ancient Christian prayer-word "Maranatha". Say it as four equal syllables. Breathe normally and give your full attention to the word as you say it, silently, gently, faithfully and above all - simply. The essence of meditation is simplicity. Stay with the same word during the whole meditation and from day to day. Don't visualise but listen to the word as you say it. Let go of all thoughts (even good thoughts), images and other words. Don’t fight your distractions but let them go by saying your word faithfully, gently and attentively and returning to it immediately that you realise you have stopped saying or it or when your attention is wandering.

Now, the fact is, every meditator develops personal variations on this. Contemplative prayer and life is certainly not about rigidity, rules and procedures. We experience these disciplines as freedom.

Posture matters -- the point is to be able to be still for 20 - 30 minutes, and different people do that in different ways. Real silence and stillness come with practice. We use a posture which enables us to be still, but absolutely awake and alert. Part of the discipline is managing our environment so that we can be uninterrupted.

The mantra is an issue for some. Not all meditators use the word Maranatha, but lots do. Generally, we don’t discuss our individual mantras. And we have a saying, that you change your mantra only once. So the mantra may require a bit of thought at the outset, but after that any worrying about it is simply another distraction. The point of the mantra is that it is always there, it is what we return to as soon as we realise we have become distracted, and in meditation we prefer the mantra even to good and worthy thoughts or pictures. We are not meditating on its meaning. Eventually we begin to listen to it rather than recite it. In one sense the mantra is simply a device to help us. But meditators find that, in another sense, their mantra becomes very important in life, always there, always reminding them, echoing in their consciousness at all sorts of times, functioning as a point of stability, a resonance which they hear even in times of stress.

Let go of all thoughts, says the website. Of course that’s easier said than done. It is counter to just about everything else in our lives. Letting go of thoughts means letting go of control, or more likely of our illusions of control. I have an abiding memory of an old parishioner who knew she was dying. Perhaps the most powerless and contemplative moment of her whole life. All her life she had been active among the church women and had done many things. And with her dying breaths she told us to make sure someone had remembered to get milk for the tea and coffee after the funeral. Christian Meditation is the opposite of control. It is with empty hands. It is the relinquishing of power, and (we hope) of anxiety. It is leaving it to God.

However, as Jesus knew, most of our distracting thoughts are more to do with utter trivialities. “What shall I eat, what shall I drink, what shall I wear…?” says the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:25). Every meditator knows that as soon as we create a silent and still space, there is something that hates this vacuum and wants to fill it up. We immediately receive a flood of usually trivial distractions to do with food, drink, clothes, agendas, tomorrow, yesterday, whatever… Or our distractions are about important things -- someone’s sick, someone’s sad, all that. We have long ago learned to recognize the distraction, honour it if it is honourable, note it, and set it aside, gently replace it with the mantra. Eventually it dawns on us that it is this returning that matters, because it is the setting aside of the ego, making vacant the place where God belongs, so God can occupy it again.

But remember, our second question was: What is it for? What benefits does it bring? It is easy to see what intercessory prayer is for, or the prayer of the liturgy. For years now, people have been attracted to Buddhist practices, Transcendental Meditation, some forms of Yoga, Tai Chi, Zen meditation -- generally to achieve some goal of peace or serenity. And these are indeed benefits of any process of being still and silent. You may also lower your blood pressure for a while, and avoid rows at home. One woman told me her psoriasis had cleared up.

Christian Meditation is about none of that. It is a way of responding deeply to God in Christ, and I can’t help noticing that it appeals more and more to people who may have been in the church all their lives, or even left it, but have never actually wanted to take farewell of God. There are lots of these people. Christian Meditation is deeply Christian because it relies totally on the heart’s openness and the heart’s hospitality to the risen Christ.

The idea that something is simply good in itself is profoundly counter-cultural these days. This pragmatic, ego-obsessed culture needs to know what I will get out of it, what’s in it for me? Will it calm my fears and solve my problems? We think we need value-added religion. If it is not “delivering”, then is it not a waste of time? Moreover, the discovery that Christian Meditation is very much about relinquishing control, or the illusion of control we like to have, is deeply threatening to some.

There is nothing new about Christian Meditation in Christian history. Contemplative prayer was well known in the monasteries. Its roots go back to the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4th and 5th centuries -- it was from them that John Cassian http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giflearned to pray, and brought what he knew to Europe where he taught Benedict and others. Largely since the Second Vatican Council the monasteries have been commissioned to open their teachings “beyond the walls”, and that is a major route by which Christian Meditation and Centering Prayer have come into the practice of so many around the world. The Benedictines Fr John Main and Fr Laurence Freeman, the Cistercian Fr Thomas Keating and numerous others, have been the principal teachers. The World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) is now in many countries of east and west. Its website is: www.wccm.org The NZCCM is at http://www.christianmeditationnz.org.nz

-- Ross Miller rossmill@orcon.net.nz

Prayers at Meditation


Opening Prayer

Dear God, open our hearts to the silent presence of the spirit of your Son. Lead us into that mysterious silence where your love is revealed to all who call. Amen.

Closing Prayer

May this group be a true spiritual home for the seeker, a friend for the lonely, a guide for the confused.

May those who pray here be strengthened by the Holy Spirit to serve all who come and to receive them as Christ himself. In the silence of this room may all the suffering, violence and confusion of the world encounter the power that will console, renew and uplift the human spirit.

May this silence be a power to open the hearts of men and women to the vision of God, and so to each other, in love and peace, justice and human dignity. May the beauty of the divine life fill this group and the hearts of all who pray here with joyful hope.

May all who come here weighed down with the problems of humanity leave, giving thanks for the wonder of human life. We make this prayer through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Simple, but not simple - 17 June 2011

Warkworth Meditation Group, 17 July 2011

In meditation, all our normal and worthy busyness comes to a halt, for the moment. No doubt we have a busy day ahead. And doubtless, most that we have to do today needs to be done and is stuff we like to do. However, for the moment, we set it aside. We will pick it up later. It will still be there.

The point now is to be still. And that requires patience and practice, it needs that we pay attention, or in the biblical words, be awake. First it matters that we are physically still. Sitting still, feet flat on the floor, busy hands comfortably at rest. Neck and shoulders relaxed... So far as we can, we permit joints and muscles to take a rest. For most of us in latter life joints and muscles can be rather an issue -- but in this, as in all of meditation, we are gentle with ourselves and we always do what we can, not what we can’t.

Then it matters to be mentally still. This is always difficult. We become as still as we can manage right now. The mantra, the word we have chosen, comes in to help us. The mantra has a rhythm, a resonance -- and our task is to say our mantra, our word, interiorly, gently, from the start to the end of our time of silence. When we realise that we have strayed from stillness, we gently come back to the mantra, and that is all.

Remember, we are not looking for signs and wonders, experiences, or any such thing. What we are doing is quite simply being still, coming to a stop. We are consenting now to be receptive. Not giving, or producing, or achieving, but receiving. Indeed, consenting is what we are doing. We are deeply consenting to God. Remember that for most of the rest of the hours of day and night we are too preoccupied to do any of this.

Faith is this consent to God. It is faith because we don’t know what the outcome will be. We are trusting that God is true and loving, just and faithful, and present, even when are experiencing God as absent. We are not asking for anything. There is no need to do that.

So, contemplative people say meditation is simple, yet not simple. What is hard is to consent to the quieting of the ego, and that never becomes simple. The ego somehow experiences the silence and the stillness as a threat -- and so we find the silence very rapidly gets filled up with every manner of thing, lumped together under the heading, Distractions. Don’t fight them. Don’t feel defeated. Don’t punish yourself. Simply return gently to the mantra every time, rediscover its rhythm and peace.