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…
30 September 2011
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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