... 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.
23 December 2011
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.
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.
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.
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.
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