Nothing to give – 21 December 2012

One level of Christmas awareness, the most prevalent one, understood by most, tells us that it is a time for giving gifts.  And so I watched a young mother at the supermarket, with a toddler and various items of food in her trolley, thoughtfully taking down from the high shelves two large parcels of exciting things for a child – hair brushes and mirrors, tea sets, dolls and other playthings – all pink, shiny and plastic under their clear plastic lids.  Gifts are compulsory, somehow, even if they can scarcely be afforded – and O O Henry wrote that classic short story, The Gift of the Magi, about a destitute young couple in New York.  He somehow managed to buy her a hair brush for her exquisite long hair, but she had sold her hair to pay for a gift for him. 

The Wise Men brought gold, frankincense and myrrh, not quite what you need for a young baby, but an absolute gift for Bible interpreters of symbolism, ever after.  I hardly imagine most people are thinking of gifts for the Baby Jesus.  It is more a matter of computations about how much to spend, what is appropriate, what is affordable, what would be welcomed, what the other person has given me.  Some give reckless gifts, knowing there will be a reckoning later.  What matters is the giving of gifts, and the response of appropriate gratitude.  Almost the entire commercial world is depending on people making generous decisions about gifts.

But Christmas is actually a Christian season for Christian believers.  It is a time of light and love because of God’s gift.  It is a time for treading softly in the awareness of mystery.  Something has happened we didn’t deserve, don’t understand, something we need to receive before it drowns in sentimentalism and activism – something which has no affinity whatever with the Santa Parade.  It is our season and our high feast.  It is above all a time for being still and receptive. 

And the extraordinary discovery is that we have no gifts.  C S Lewis coined the amazing phrase, Surprised by Joy.  He received a gift.  He felt that nothing in him was sufficient or appropriate for a gift in return.  We receive the gift, and we respond by quieted, softened and joyous hearts.  That is the point.  I think also it is a time in which, in stillness, we can bear part of the pain of the world, lift a bit of the load, in our hearts.  I can’t imagine what it is like at Christmas in those American homes with a child missing because of hate and violence.  The gift is a gift of peace and love.  Receive the gift.  

 

 

 

Our Warkworth Christian Meditation group is now in recess over Christmas and January.  We expect to resume on Friday 1 February, and the next blog entry will be then.  Good wishes...  Ross Miller

Protecting Advent from Christmas – 14 December 2012

Advent, it seems to me, brings to the fore those aspects of Christian faith people find unsettling, the problems many don’t want to think about.  Why doesn’t God make everything right?  Why do good people suffer?  Where was God at Auschwitz?  How come Christ’s church is so sinful, hypocritical and embarrassing?  Why doesn’t simple faith protect me from anxiety, at least, if it’s not going to protect me from disaster?  Well, at least in Advent we are encouraged to look up and say honestly, No, the questions are not answered for us.  Faith then becomes faith again – that is to say, the faith of Abraham who went out at the call of an invisible God, not knowing where he was going.  Abraham was at God’s beck and call, not the other way around.  You have not chosen me, I have chosen you, said Jesus.  Faith, says the writer to the Hebrews, is the conviction of things not seen. On Whitsunday 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the United Nations, wrote in his diary:  I don’t know Who – or what – put the question, I don’t know when it was put.  I don’t even remember answering.  But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone – or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

In December almost everyone is tearing around in a complex activity called Getting Ready For Christmas.  I think it illustrates how energetically we respond to familiar things that comfort and reassure us.  Family, for instance, and children.  Money, if we’ve got it and can spend it.  The sentimental carols and candlelight.  The memories of the past.  The comforting assurance of food and drink.  The prospect of sunshine and warmth.  Doing something for others in need.  The Christmas tree and all the lights, the nativity scene, the presents.  For some, the wonderful familiar gospel nativity stories.  So it’s a good time, and I have to be careful that I do not even seem to be critical of good things.  I keep my cool, even at the solemn recital in the supermarket of I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus.

Advent, after all, is hard to describe or sell, particularly to children.  It’s for grown-up people anyway.  Advent is when, with the Jews, we face our yearnings and hopes, and realize yet again what it is like to see through a glass, darkly.  For many there is actually nothing much they can see clearly.  Advent is when we reach out for a word spoken to us which tells us we are known, named, and loved.  It is when, if we don’t actually tear down our idols, we at any rate see them for what they are – and laugh a little bit.  Idols don’t like that very much. 

In the stillness and silence of our prayer Advent may enter, even if Christmas is clamouring all around us everywhere else.  So perhaps that is Advent at its best, in silence, mindfulness and attention. 

Becoming Jews again – 7 December 2012

One modern teacher comments that Advent is when we all become Jews again.  Partly, he is referring to the sense of waiting.  Down the centuries of Hebrew history, but particularly since the Return from exile in Babylon, successive conquerors marched across their promised land, and most recently in Jesus’ time the Romans.  Through it all, down to the present day, has flourished the hope of the Messiah, the Anointed One, who would usher in Israel's deliverance.  In our times, Israel, as usual surrounded by enemies, knows it is prudent not only to await the Messiah, but to equip itself to defend by all means available what they call Ha’Aretz, The Land. 

Many supposed messiahs have come and gone.  To faithful Jews, Jesus of Nazareth, however admirable, is not recognizable as their Messiah.  So to Judaism, faith remains very much a matter of waiting.  They have waited through dispersion to the ends of the earth, and through centuries of persecution culminating in Auschwitz.

Our secular culture has a very much reduced capacity for waiting.  We are increasingly conditioned for instant response and satisfaction.  People go hopelessly into debt because what they want they must have now.  And because what so many want so deeply is relief from anxiety and pain, and from the terrible fear of loneliness and need of reassurance, our culture constantly makes idols, deliverers, messiahs – whether it is Lifestyle, Money and the illusion of power, even Family or Race can become an idolatry, and so can fundamentalist religion.  But God informed Moses:  No gods before me.  Advent is a time in which, in our waiting, we stop and look at our gods and idolatries. 

Simple psychology informs us that our idols, one way or another, turn out to be reflections of ourselves.  We make idols to meet our needs, and the primary idol is our own ego – what I want, how I imagine myself to be.  But to be a Jew means forsaking all idols.  We are given sense and worth and identity, recognition and meaning, by the summons, the word, of God in our hearts. 

For instance – and this is one seminal example in our memories – we cannot make sense or in any way explain or domesticate the principal nightmare of our lifetime, the Holocaust, and its relentless implacable choice of utter cruelty and injustice.  Christian folk and atheists keep asking, Where was God at Auschwitz?  But that is not the point.  A Jew does not expect such a thing to be capable of sense or explanation.  The point is to refuse comfort, to wait.  This was eventually clear to me one day at Auschwitz when we came upon an inscription in Hebrew.  It was a quotation from the Book of Job, and it said, Oh God, cover not my blood, and let my cry find no resting place.   Advent is about the courage, the faith, to stay with the pain in life and the unanswered questions, to refuse to make idols or adopt slick solutions, to be still, silent, consenting. 

If we want to be free from pain and anxiety, there are 101 ways to attempt that – and good luck with them all.  But the journey of faith entails knowing how to wait, how to take the rough with the smooth, how to set ego aside, how to make space for love and freedom.  And I think members of this group know that very well. 

The privilege of listening – 30 November 2012

The one thing most people vaguely know about Cranmer’s 1552 Prayer Book of the Church of England (if indeed they have heard of it) is that the marriage vows ask the bride to promise to obey, along with serve, love, honour and keep.  All through the years I officiated at marriage ceremonies this was a source of scorn, not to say ribaldry, and hell would freeze over before most brides would remotely consider promising obedience to the light of their life.  The word obey is not expected unless you’re in the army or under arrest.  To any modern western ear the premium is on individual autonomy, freedom of choice.  And it sounds strange when we read how Thomas Merton described his entrance into the strict monastic life as a postulant:  So Brother Matthew locked the gate behind me and I was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom.

Obedience is an English word which comes from the Latin oboedientia.  And it is of interest that the same Latin word means also to give ear, to listen.  It seems to me no accident whatever that two outcomes of our busy, active, self-centred culture, are that what people call blind obedience is routinely scorned, and also that real listening is a dying art, an increasingly scarce commodity.  The art of listening, and hence understanding, such a gift for anyone, is often not present at all.

But oboedientia in this sense is utterly basic to contemplative prayer.  Obeying in the best and widest sense is what we are doing.  Our prayer is still, and silent and patient listening – and it goes with the inner willingness, the deep inner consent, to be obedient to God’s word in our hearts.

I have never forgotten an occasion years ago when a contemplative monk came to our church to lead an evening on Christian Meditation.  At the end of the evening people were milling around, and I watched as one woman went to this monk wanting to talk with him about something.  He gave her his total attention, to the exclusion of everything else.  And while I watched, one of the very busy organizing women came bustling up, needing to interrupt with something she thought was urgent.  The monk never budged an inch.  He was listening completely to what the first woman was telling him or asking him.  What a gift, I thought.  This contemplative man knows the gift he has received and the gift he can pass on.  His prayer is listening, and his life becomes one of… well, not only listening, but hearing.  That is obedience, I think, and it flows from God’s total loving attention to us. 

The obedience the monks promise is not blind obedience, and the abbot is not a policeman or a sergeant-major.  Benedict insists that the abbot, most of all, must be a listener.  It is a mutual thing.  Without this dynamic our parishes eventually run into trouble.  Contemplative prayer constantly reminds us about attention, mindfulness, listening and understanding.  It is what we do in prayer, and it is what we do in life – ideally.  We may be very shaky on this, but each time we return to silence and stillness and the mantra, we are reminded.   

Blessed are the poor – 23 November 2012

A slightly troublesome subject for contemplatives is poverty.  Blessed are the poor, said Jesus.  But we are not poor – neither do we wish to be, as the word is normally used.  Last week here we were having a little discussion when we arrived about the problems of downsizing our homes and shedding possessions we no longer have space for.  There may also be the matter of shedding possessions anyway, before our children or others have to sort out and dispose of all the gear we have left behind.

Well, we can slightly clarify one aspect of this, I think.  St Benedict did not mention poverty much, if at all.  I think most of them were pretty poor anyway.  What he does stress is the spirit of sharing.  So Benedict’s poverty is not really that of St Francis -- the giving up of all things, divesting oneself of goods and ownership.  Benedict stresses that his monks may have all sorts of things, but in common.  It is the community that matters.  Whoever needs more should feel humble because of his weakness, not self-important because of the kindness shown him.  In this way all the members will be at peace… [RB 34: 4-5]  I took a kind of wry amusement last week when I was writing this, but also riffling through one of those glossy real estate supplements;  it was featuring $2-3 million lifestyle mansions in various places, and I thought, according to Benedict these folk should be feeling humble because of their weakness.  You know how sometimes when you borrow a book from some slightly old-fashioned person, it might have a sticker inside the cover which says Ex Libris…, reminding you that it is not yours but mine.  That is because even Christians, down through history, can be the most charming thieves.  The Benedictines however sometimes inscribe their books with Ad Usus…, for the use of.  It acknowledges that the book is not their private property.  And perhaps, when you cast your mind over the things you own, some of which may be valuable, others sentimentally important, and mentally place over them all  the label Ad Usus, it is satisfying and freeing.  It clarifies how we stand to these things, and increases our gratitude. 

Real poverty however is a very prevalent social state in our world, and perhaps our most pressing social issue.  So it matters that contemplatives sort out our own relationship to wealth and possessions.  What we possess is Ad Usus.  We do not go around proclaiming that all we have we have worked hard for and it is ours.  Even less do we want to claim that our many possessions are a sign of God’s approval of us and our righteousness – some people do sincerely believe that.  We do not wish to be identified with or judged by our possessions.  We know how to enjoy them, but do not choose to be defined by them.  We have clear ideas about greed and avarice, and we know it when we see it.  And these are things which, as we are able, we teach our children and grandchildren, ever questioning and undermining the culture which says you are what you own. 

Poverty may be a loaded word and sometimes quite frightening, but simplicity of life ought to be acceptable.  In our silence and stillness we are open to our attitudes being changed, even in those areas we thought were most basic to our identity, where we were most timid of change.  The process is gentle, strong and persistent, over the weeks and months, as we elect for silence, stillness, and the mantra.  

Silence and Taciturnitas – 16 November 2012

There is nothing so much like God as silence, wrote Meister Eckhart back in the early 14^th century.   And yet, as we know, silence can make people anxious, sometimes even disturbed or frightened.  Silence needs immediately to be filled up with speech or music or some mindless noise.  I said last week that St Benedict used two different words in this regard.  One is taciturnitas, which means restraint, of speech or other noise – clearly a necessary thing in a monastery.  But we are also advocating taciturnitas when we teach children (if we do) not to interrupt, not to yell and scream inappropriately, and so on, not to bang doors.  I think taciturnitas is a virtue almost lost, needing to be recovered and practiced, in large sections of our culture, including the church, where we are nervous of silence.

So how is this different from Benedict’s other Latin word silentium, silence…? Father Laurence Freeman comes at it in this rather unexpected way…  Whatever is purely natural, not trying to be anything other than itself, is silent…  Silence, authenticity, does not mean merely keeping noise levels low; it is the condition of pure truthfulness.  Silence is what is left when the noise we are making, interiorly and exteriorly, ceases.  It begins to be glimpsed when the noise is turned down.  This is because God is not known by thought and debate, but by love.  I am not the sum of my knowledge and experience, even less am I the sum of my possessions and reputation.  Some of that might be interesting, but it is not the authentic person God made and knows, sees and loves.  Silence is when we eliminate the noise of all that and begin to encounter God, as Jesus put it, in spirit and in truth. 

So we can say that taciturnitas is a discipline, a learned behavior, and we practise it among family, friends and colleagues.  It is an acquired habit of listening rather than speaking and interrupting.  It is a prerequisite for understanding.  It is a product of wisdom.  Silence, silentium, is first of all a gift from God.  It is a gift we receive in the stillness we can create.  It is an encounter with truth, God’s truth, my own truth, the truth of the present moment, and that truth is love.  It is the end of fear.  We practise the mantra because our thought and memories and fantasies, for the moment, are all forms of inner noise.  We habitually identify ourselves with these recurrent, ever-changing states – it might be exciting, it might be interesting, but it is not the truth.  Meditation, says Fr Laurence, is not what we think.  The ancient Christian understanding of Logos, the Word of God (John ch.1), leads to a deeper understanding of silence, he writes.  Silence is the source of creation.  The Word proceeds from the abyss of the silence of the Father. That word is love.

Perhaps then, we find what contemplatives mean by silence just a little puzzling.  It is always going to be difficult to explain silence with words – the more the words, the more the obscurity.  It is not explained.  It is encountered, given.  And the sign of this silent interiority is love.  Whoever loves, writes St John, is born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God… (I John 4:7-8)

Taciturnitas rules – 9 November 2012

Silence is not always a good thing.  As the writer in the Book of Ecclesiastes knew, there is a time to speak and a time to be silent.  When St Benedict taught his brothers about restraint of speech he did not use the Latin word silentium, which means silence, but taciturnitas, a much richer word, and it has more to do with restraint, and thoughtfulness.  This is a silence which somehow begins to be planted within us, as we practise the contemplative disciplines week by week and year by year.  I think this is usually a surprise to us -- we begin to realize that these days we are preferring restraint and thoughtfulness, to noise and chatter.  They are not mutually exclusive – but Benedict’s brothers and sisters very soon found that in noise and chatter they seldom actually heard anything accurately, let alone understood.  Inner silence is certainly the way to hear things.

So taciturnitas is also about attention and mindfulness.  In the community of Jesus’s disciples it is vital that we know how to listen.  Martha’s busyness was commendable and indeed valuable – they all had to eat.  But Jesus still said that Mary had chosen the “better part”.  What Benedict requires in his Rule is that there must be a balance.  His brothers and sisters are equally acquainted with prayer and work – and taciturnitas rules over all.  This is what he calls restraint of speech, not prohibition of speech.

I do find myself recoiling from the noise and compulsory joy that signals much contemporary worship.  On Sunday mornings a very energetic (and assuredly very admirable) church occupies the hall right next to the Mahurangi East Public Library.  For a start, everything in their worship evidently needs to be greatly amplified with microphones and much electronics.  In our culture you can’t speak to an audience except through a hand-held microphone up under your nose.  Perhaps they are all slightly deaf – perhaps I can suggest why.  What I do know is the effect on the pagans next door in the library.  They are unlikely to rush off to church.  Then, there slowly crept upon my awareness that we now have some phenomenon called Messy Church.  I think it was invented in the Church of England, where of course it would have been civilized, decent and in order.  But now it seems to be a form of worship in which everyone is talking simultaneously, with heavy admixtures of food and drink.  We are a long way from the Gregorian Chant here.  I do not understand it, so it’s wrong to be critical.  But I do wonder if God really does get worshipped, or whether it’s more another mode of occupational therapy.  Samuel in the Hebrew scriptures, as a boy in the temple, said, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” We have to take care that our prayer hasn’t become “Listen, Lord, for your servant is speaking.”

I am sorry if I have gone too far about this, but in our silence here this morning we are turning off the sheer racket of our culture, and what goes on in many homes and churches.  Perhaps next week we can say a bit more about the content of taciturnitas, about its richness and texture in our lives.

No spiritual gluttony - 2 November 2012

This is more of the speech by Dr Rowan Williams to the RC Synod of Bishops in Rome, last month...

In his autobiography Thomas Merton describes an experience not long after he had entered the monastery where he was to spend the rest of his life (Elected Silence, p.303).  He had contracted 'flu, and was confined to the infirmary for a few days, and, he says, he felt a 'secret joy' at the opportunity this gave him for prayer -- and 'to do everything that I want to do without having to run all over the place answering bells.'  (But then) he is forced to recognise that this attitude reveals that 'All my bad habits... had sneaked into the monastery with me and had received the religious vesture along with me:  spiritual gluttony, spiritual sensuality, spiritual pride.'  In other words, he is trying to live the Christian life with the emotional equipment of someone still deeply wedded to the search for individual satisfaction. 

It is a powerful warning;  we have to be very careful not simply to persuade people to apply to God and the life of the spirit all the longings for drama, excitement and self-congratulation that we so often indulge in our daily lives.  One writer says: the words of the gospel are addressed to human beings who 'who do not yet exist'.  That is to say, responding in a life-giving way to what the gospel requires of us means a transforming of ourself, our feelings and thoughts and imaginings.  To be converted to the faith does not mean simply acquiring a new set of beliefs, but becoming a new person, a person in communion with God and others through Jesus Christ.

Contemplation is an intrinsic element in this transforming process.  To learn to look to God without regard to my own instant satisfaction, to learn to scrutinise and to relativise the cravings and fantasies that arise in me -- this is to allow God to be God, to come alive in me.  Only as this begins to happen will I be delivered from treating the gifts of God as yet another set of things I may acquire to make me happy, or to dominate other people.  I discover how to see other persons and things for what they are in relation to God, not to me.  And it is here that true justice as well as true love has its roots.

The human face that Christians want to show to the world is a face marked by such justice and love, and thus a face formed by contemplation, by the disciplines of silence and the detaching of the self from the objects that enslave it and the unexamined instincts that deceive it.

Contemplative Prayer and Life - 26 October 2012

On 10 October 2012 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, addressed the RC Synod of Bishops in Rome.  That in itself was amazing and historic.  What he said was striking and important -- and I thought you should hear a little bit of it here as a brief alternative to my words...

To be contemplative as Christ is contemplative is to be open to all the fullness that the Father wishes to pour into our hearts.  With our minds made still and ready to receive, with our self-generated fantasies about ourselves and God reduced to silence, we are at last at the point where we may begin to grow.  And the face we need to show to our world is the face of a humanity in endless growth towards love, a humanity so delighted and engaged by the glory of what we look towards that we are prepared to embark on a journey without end, to find our way more deeply into it, into the heart of the trinitarian life.  St Paul speaks (in II Cor 3:18) of how 'with unveiled faces reflecting the glory of the Lord', we are transfigured with a greater and greater radiance.  That is the face we seek to show to our fellow human beings.

And we seek this not because we are in search of some private 'religious experience' that will make us feel secure or holy.  We seek it because in this self-forgetting gazing towards the light of God in Christ we learn how to look at one another and at the whole of God's creation.  In the early church there was a clear understanding that we needed to advance from the self-understanding or self-contemplation that taught us to discipline our greedy instincts and cravings, to the 'natural contemplation'that perceived and venerated the wisdom of God in the order of the world, and allowed us to see created reality for what it truly was in the sight of God -- rather than what it was in terms of how we might use it or dominate it.  And from there grace would lead us forward into true 'theology', the silent gazing upon God that is the goal of all our disciplieship. 

In this perspective, contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom -- freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them.  To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture, and our chaotic and unexamined emotions, encourage us to inhabit.  To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need, so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly.  It is a deeply revolutionary matter.

Ways of praying – 19 October 2012

Whoever wrote the Letters to Timothy listed different ways of praying.  He wrote:  First of all then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings, should be made for everyone… (I Tim 2:1).  This is generally what we do – although we should avoid the excesses of the Afro-American woman, Aibileen, in Kathryn Stockett’s amazing novel, The Help, who could make people straighten up simply by threatening to add them to her prayer list.  On the other hand, it was indeed moving to see large groups of Moslem worshippers in Pakistan, and in the UK, praying for Malala Yousufzai, age 14, shot by the Taliban and now desperately ill – all because she had been encouraging girls to go to school to break their cycle of ignorance and slavery to men. 

John Cassian was a travelling ascetic who for a while was taught by the early Desert Fathers.  He later wrote about this, and he describes how Abba Isaac taught him about prayer.   Abba Isaac said that eventually in our journey there comes what we now call contemplative prayer, in which we are still, and in which very little matters more than being still.  Even avid practitioners of words and deeds now begin to feel they might let go of words, of thoughts, of images, and of the need to be justified by results.  It is a very big prescription.  We can scarcely do it ourselves.  And so we do what we can, we sit, still, and silent, and say our word, our mantra.  That is what we mean by poverty, in prayer, because that is all we can do. 

Jesus said to go into our room and shut the door.  Well, we can do that.  It works, if other people in the house understand the message of the shut door.  If they are threatened or irritated by it, or amused, then that is something to negotiate.  Meditators I have talked with say that toddler grandchildren are the worst.  Contemplative prayer may not be possible with a demanding prepubescent in the house – or for that matter, certain teenagers, or an inhabitant with dementia or something else very needy.  All of those situations are represented in the people I know in the Benedictine Oblate community. 

But then, Jesus’ statement can be read more intelligently.  The door that is to be shut, for the time being, is the mind’s door to words, thoughts, images.  God is already there.    It is akin to the Holy of Holies in the Jewish temple, the innermost room, where there was nothing, no furnishings, no instructions, no protocol, nothing you could hide behind, or possess, control or manipulate or own.  Nothing to do but be there.  There was no liturgy for use in the Holy of Holies, words had ceased.  There was silence and stillness, and what Rowan Williams called enigmatically a ray of darkness.  And those of us who may have reached a little maturity in the Christian pilgrimage, and have seen a thing or two, may indeed find something familiar and reassuring about that.

Attending with love to the everyday – 12.10.2012

… there is no substitute for learning to be a Christian by being in the presence of significant lives made significant by being Christian. … Significance suggests importance… lives that make a difference and that demand acknowledgement.   But the lives of significance I began to notice were not significant in any of those ways.  Rather, they were lives of quiet serenity, capable of attending with love to the everyday without the need to be recognized as “making a difference”.  (Stanley Hauerwas:  Hannah’s Child)

Stanley Hauerwas is a prominent American theologian.  He grew up in a Methodist home in rural Texas, but never could manage to get converted, he says, so he became a theologian.  His previous career was bricklayer, and about that he wrote:  I write like I learned to lay brick. You do it because you have to get it done before it rains.  He is one of the most loving, insightful and irascible Christians I know of.

He thinks then that the point is to be capable of attending with love...  But he also says we don’t achieve this all the time.  Christians fall down and get up again, over and over, as the early monks discovered.  We are capable of attending with love.  A lot of people are not.  Perhaps as time goes by it becomes more and more our nature.  The word attending matters.  We know about attending, attention, paying attention, because this is at the heart of our contemplative prayer.  It is something we learn and practise, in silence and stillness.  We become less scattered and more focussed.  It becomes less threatening for us to pay attention through the rough times as well as the smooth. 

Attending with love, he writes.  The test of our prayer, the only test of whether it is “working”, whether we are “getting anything out of it”, is the question whether love is being released and facilitated in us.  If the prayer is for anything, if it has a payoff, to put it crudely, it is that we find ourselves to have become more capable of love, more lovingly insightful, lovingly patient. 

Then he says, Attending with love to the everyday...  Not necessarily the big things, although they happen too.  But pickling the beetroot, talking to some old bloke, and making a couple of sensible decisions, may well be the area and scope of attending with love today.  In the Rule of St Benedict, ordinary tasks matter just as singing the Psalms , and the garden tools of the monastery are to be cared for the same as vessels of the altar.  It is very much the opposite of the throw-away society – the everyday is where we practise our faith.  Stanley Hauerwas’s wife was bi-polar.  He knew over some 25 years of this what it meant to attend with love to the everyday. 

And then he writes, without the need  to be recognised as making a difference...  Some people seem to come with a kind of inner built-in meter, which monitors, measures and permanently records how much others were grateful – or how they were insufficiently grateful.  It is necessary in the world of careers to have an up-to-date CV –I think the trendy word is resumé, which details all our shining achievements thus far, more or less accurately.  But people of significance, Hauerwas discovered, are those of quiet serenity, capable of attending with love to the everyday without the need to be recognized as making a difference. 

Is it all about me? – 5 October 2012

Am I the only one who has to try not to wince when some shining-faced young athlete or other achiever, entirely admirable, tells us about realizing their dreams…?  Dreams are what you’ve got to have.  People without dreams don’t get anywhere.  A young couple dream of their dream-home – or else watch their dream receding as financial realities take over, or some other disaster intervenes.  A few dreams have evaporated in Christchurch.  People are now conditioned by consumerism from their earliest years.   And the consumer world is all about me.  Father Laurence Freeman observes that the bookshops, for those who still read, are full of the latest advice on self-help. The bestsellers are about handling self-criticism, expressing your feelings, developing balance, asserting yourself, eating well and doing exercise – most of it, I would think, very worthy.  Of course there are extremes, and there are many exceptions.  But only a total egoist could take seriously the recent complaint of some Christchurch women that the rough state of the city’s footpaths and roads since the earthquakes had made it impossible for them to wear their expensive and very high heels. 

So it’s all about me, when the great open secret is that life and death are not all about me – certainly not in the sense that my comfort and happiness and success are what it’s all for.  Contemplative prayer is not only about setting our various burdens aside and being peaceful and receptive.  It is also about the process of setting ourselves aside – that is to say, our public selves, the self we know much of the time isn’t completely true.  The gentle but persistent ministries of the Spirit of God help us, day by day and year by year, to resign what is false and unreal, and to greet the emergence of the self God created and always knew and recognised and loved. 

The earliest mystics began to understand that this process begins once we are still and silent and consenting.  They also knew very well, from their own painful experience, that it is not a process we can do ourselves.  He must increase, I must decrease, said John the Baptist – and he added, for this reason my joy is fulfilled.  Perhaps the turning point for some of us is when we realise that we are looking for happiness in the wrong places, that our deepest joy lies deeper than the ego, the facade – when we also realise that we have no need to be afraid.  We can trust, and as Lady Julian of Norwich memorably put it, All will be well, and every manner of thing will be well. 

Anger – 28 September 2012

The Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4^th century thought that anger is the most dangerous of all the human passions.  They ranked anger as more destructive than greed or lust.  Anger, they said, is our biggest obstacle, not only in prayer, but in all of life.  Abba Ammonas said that he had spent fourteen years in the desert asking God day and night to grant him the victory over anger. 

These people knew that anger plays tricks on us.  If we absolutely have to correct another person in a spirit of anger, they said, we should do it quickly and simply, and then let it go.  Don’t get entangled in any expectation of results.  Evagrius, one of the later desert monks, says we easily sin with anger when we misapply it and use it to punish someone.  He said that prayer is the seed of gentleness and the absence of anger.  But prayer is also a warfare, these people knew, because it was when the monk sat down to pray that he was most likely to be distracted by unresolved anger – old grudges, the memory of old wrongs, even schemes of retaliation and revenge.  They could even get into trouble when their anger tricked them into feeling righteous.  There are numerous desert stories about monks trying to resolve their anger by seeing others as less holy than themselves.  Evagrius wrote:  Better a gentle, worldly man than an irascible and wrathful monk.  St Benedict in his Rule cautions:  Don’t think of yourselves as holy before you really are.  The trick there, if you think about it, is that by the time you really are holy, the last thing you will think is that you are.  And in any case, if you are aware of anger against someone, you are not very righteous at all. 

But anger remains utterly basic and imperative in all our contemporary life and culture.  In many quarters it is considered very trendy.  Much of our journalism is expressing anger about this or that, and some writers work hard to express it eloquently or even elegantly.  Vicious anger and violence are important forms of entertainment for people. 

Contemplatives learn another way.  It begins with the steady healing of our own internal anger, the drawing of the sting of memories and the poison in our reactions to people and events.    And this process happens as we are still and silent, and as we find the grace to let go of anger. 

Passing judgement – 21 September 2012

I notice that we puzzle quite a lot over this matter of judging and being judgemental.  They are two different things.  We all have to make judgements.  For judges it is their job.  For the rest of us, we expect to be able to form opinions, come to decisions, about people and events.  And sometimes our judgements do have to be, rightly we hope, negative and condemnatory.  If we have a Christian conscience we hope our judgements are accurate and charitable, even generous.  We also hope we recognize those times when it is unnecessary to judge someone, even if everyone else is doing so.  Jesus refused to pass judgement on the adulterous woman in John’s gospel. 

Judgementalism however is another matter.  This is an attitude, a habitual reaction -- even for some, including some Christian believers, a way of life and a righteous responsibility.  Emily Dickinson remarked about one preacher she heard, The subject of perdition seemed to please him, somehow.  

Judgementalism is when we pin indelible labels on people, write people off, consign them to some place somewhere else but not here.  It usually entails a willful blindness to the good in people, or to the possibility of reform.  It is a lack of care about another person.  Judgementalism generally proceeds from our own anger and fear, to say nothing of our ignorance.  I think it was because of the perils of judgementalism all around him that Jesus said, Judge not, and you won’t be judged.  The world we know is full of judgementalism.

In the still and silent world of contemplative prayer we are consenting to the long-term and gentle work of the Spirit in us, achieving changes in us which we can never engineer ourselves.  And so it is that the judgementalism in us starts to attenuate.  We begin to notice it and don’t like it.  We find ourselves doing without it.  We notice that the judgementalism in our friends begins to irritate us.  We find ourselves more inclined to patience and understanding with human error and frailty, with all its risks.

Partly this is that we are learning to live freer of fear and anger.  The world and all its dangers are unchanged.  But in silence and stillness, somehow, we find ourselves much better able to meet Jesus’s frequent question to people, “Why are you afraid…?”

Living with mystery – 14 September 2012

Kathleen Norris writes:  I sometimes think of prayer as a certain quality of attention that comes upon me when I’m busy doing something else.  It’s one of those insights these people seem to have, which can be told in simple words, briefly and clearly.  Perhaps people like me then start to obscure it.

Prayer is… a certain quality of attention that comes upon me when I’m busy doing something else.  Unfortunately, as it seems to me, she then goes on to write about the common experience most of us know, when someone or some situation springs to mind, and it becomes a quiet personal prayer.  That’s a kind of running intercession, appropriate and perfectly fine. 

But Kathleen Norris’s insight is better than that, and I felt sorry she didn’t follow it up.  There are two things in what she wrote and in the way she wrote it.  First, she called prayer a certain quality of attention.  We have visited this idea before in our group.  Prayer is paying special attention.  It is deeper and more disciplined than the scatter-gun attention we normally give to things, or the so-called attention possible in multi-tasking, which is much admired.  The attention prayer requires is the result of being fully present and fully awake.  It is the attention possible when we have set our own agendas to one side and have stepped in front of all our internal and external chatter.  It is the attention we come to know in our consent to God, in silence, in stillness and in mystery.

Secondly, she says it comes upon her when I’m busy doing something else.  She is not now referring to the time of prayer.  What meditators eventually start to report is that their mantra, with all its connotations of stillness, silence, focusing, paying attention, spills over into the rest of life.  We become aware of its resonance in stressful situations, at busy and occupied times, in tiredness or anxiety.  It is as though part of us is now living in a kind of constant presence, what the Greek of the New Testament calls an αναμνησις (anamnesis), a remembrance.  We are more and more learning to be present to God, and to other people, in ways not possible when we are living behind our defences and facades.  In company we may see what others don’t because of all the chatter.  When we are alone, we come to realize that there is no space between our thoughts of people and our prayers for them.  Boundary between life and prayer has become thin or attenuated, even invisible. 

Detachment - 7 September 2012

It quite often seems to people who don’t practice contemplative prayer and life that those of us who do are lacking a healthy sense of engagement with the world, we are aloof and we lack concern for others.  We retreat away from the real world into prayer.  And perhaps some meditators do have that motive.  It is a refuge, some kind of cocoon, a blessed peaceful haven.  Well, let’s not despise that.  Jesus knew that a lot of people are very wounded and afraid.  He said, Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden – I will give you rest… 

The Desert Fathers and Mothers had other motives.  Detachment, for them, meant that at the time of prayer no worldly concerns, including good ones, would distract them from being present to God and to each other.  That was the point of all their discipline.  One of the monks, Abba Dorotheus of Gaza, puts it in an interesting way.  Detachment, he said, is being free from wanting certain things to happen.  The burden we lay down in prayer includes a whole load of our desires, whether things we desire for ourselves or for others, for good or for ill.  You can’t be a Buddhist without learning from the outset that our desires are the root of all unhappiness and suffering.  It is one Buddhist truth which urgently needs to be translated into Christian understanding. 

To be free of desire may be something we can’t even begin to imagine.   But then Abba Dorotheus gives as it were the other side of the coin.  He says that we can find peace in what is happening.  It is important to be clear about this.  He does not mean we agree with or like what is happening around us.  What is happening may be very hurtful or unjust.  But in the presence of God another door opens which we hadn’t noticed.  Where does it lead?  It leads to a deeper level where we are at peace with what we can’t change.  It is a level of trust.  Once we have seen this, and perhaps seen it in others, we begin to see it also for instance in the Psalms.  It is the resolution of the Book of Job. 

Kathleen Norris tells a lovely story from the USA.  A woman middle-aged school bus driver suddenly had her bus, which was full of mentally handicapped children, taken over by a deranged man with a gun.  When reporters later asked her how she had managed to talk the man out of using the gun, her reply was, “I pray a lot.” That’s the kind of response I love – it seems absurd to most people, and it really gets up the noses of the atheists.  Notice, the woman did not say, “I prayed a lot.”  What she indicated was that she was generally not far from prayer.  In that sense at least, she was a contemplative person.  And the encounter between her and the man with the gun was not quite what he expected, evidently.    

Not running away – 31 August 2012

Father John Main, seized by a sudden simplicity, wrote as follows:

Meditation is a discipline of presence. By stillness of body and spirit we learn to be wholly present to ourselves, to our situation, to our place. It is not running away.  

Not running away.  Sometimes we shed light on something by saying what it is not.  It is not running away, finding who or what is to blame as though that were a solution, finding excuses.  It is not living in denial.  It is not living behind some façade.  It is simple acknowledgement of our fears.  It is sitting for a while outside our dreams and fantasies.  When we sit down in stillness and silence we are doing so in full awareness of the many things whose solution, if there is one at all, which there may be not, certainly doesn’t lie with us. 

In meditation we are doing the best and truest thing we can.  We are paying attention, devoting our attention to what is real and now – I am here, and this is how I am and what I am -- and away from what is unreal, illusory, past regrets or future hopes.  Contemplatives sometimes call this mindfulness, and it is best done in silence and stillness, without words and without images. 

We have stepped outside the web of our own self-reflective weaving, says John Main.  I find that very interesting.  Sitting there and trying to puzzle things out, for instance, is self-reflective weaving.  We are trying to frame our solutions or our explanations.  All well and good, no doubt, but the issue now, in meditation is not that, but to be still, in the humility of only the mantra, and the presence of God.  Moreover, sitting there and trying to image God… that too is self-reflective weaving, because the image will be, like all idols, some reflection of ourselves, inevitably. 

John Main calls meditation a “discipline of presence” -- wholly present to ourselves, to our situation, to our place… not running away.  God is wholly present to us. 

Perhaps then, as some would say, the whole thing is just self-indulgence.  Well no, it is not.  Just the reverse.  Meditators find the disciplines of contemplative prayer are quite life changing.  They begin to see ways forward invisible before.  They learn the deeper meanings of faith.  They start to live without the facades and pretences.  Problems which seemed insoluble now appear to have some light shining through them.  The silence and stillness, the attention and mindfulness, simply do honour to God in love and in truth.

Compassion – 24 August 2012

One of the most striking features of the Desert Fathers and Mothers was their considerable reluctance to sit in judgment on others.  Squarely in front of any need for judgment they saw a prior need for understanding and compassion.  Numerous stories of these people illustrate this.  They said judging is perilous to the one doing the judging.  They saw that when we do judge others, it is inclined to be an expression of our own woundedness.--- -

So what are we going to think about a person who is, so far as I know, beyond moral redemption – reaching for words we find, for instance, recalcitrant, or the old ecclesiastical word, contumacious -- someone who is indeed refusing moral help, who does not acknowledge guilt, who is placing himself beyond normal civilised moral codes?  Another old-fashioned word for that is reprobate.  The word means not approved, rejected entirely from favour.  In Christian theology there have always been some who thought that God reprobates certain people anyway.  They are then beyond redemption, outside the pale, cast into the abyss.  This may be because of what they have done, or not done – or it may be, as Calvin thought, entirely the sovereign and inscrutable choice of God.  Robert Burns pillories all this in his poem, Holy Willie’s Prayer.  I think any Christian believer would need to work hard to believe that stuff today.  But  now, it’s at least interesting to me that whole chunks of secular society seem eager to believe it.  You may be reprobate and we don’t want you anywhere near our town.  You should be cast out, as the lepers were driven outside the city walls in ancient times.  It was not only the fear of contagion from them, but also the assumption that God had shown his rejection of them by their visible disease.  So we don’t now care about you or what happens to you.  You are outcast.

So society becomes very ugly.  People come to be motivated by their fear.  No one has any actual solutions, simply because the problem is intractable.   It is without any satisfactory and safe solution.  People then start to say silly things.  They threaten vigilante action.  They demonise their fears by media-labels such as Beast.  Mob psychology and hysteria start to emerge. 

Contemplative prayer and life teach me that nothing whatever is gained by fear and anger.  It also teaches me to be very wary of self-righteousness.  These things are what the ego grasps at.  That the other person may be intractably wicked does not mean that I am in any position to climb on to the moral high ground and give interviews to the media.  Jesus reminds me that I am unable conscientiously to throw the first stone.  The only one who could – Jesus himself presumably – quietly refuses to.  And indeed, in Jesus’s company I can’t remotely imagine myself ever doing so.  Contemplatives know there are always various circumstances in life which are without solution, and that danger in a human and social sense is always present somewhere.  If we want to be safe in human terms we are out of luck.  But in the company of Jesus and in the silence and stillness, we are learning another way.

Sit down and shut up – 17 August 2012

James Bishop spent 10 years in prison. During that time he began to practice Christian Meditation in a group taught and led by Sr Benita Lankford, a Benedictine nun. Later, still in prison he became a novice Benedictine Oblate, and eventually took his final vows. Fr Laurence Freeman describes how that happened one day when the prison was in lockdown because of some incident, but the officers allowed the meditation group to meet and James Bishop to take his vows. Now he is out of prison, and he has written a book called A Way In The Wilderness. He calls it “a commentary on the Rule of St Benedict for physically and spiritually imprisoned people.” I have just begun to read this commentary. Already it is remarkable. James Bishop writes simply, directly, succinctly, lucidly. I am starting to wonder if he is putting to shame those of us who, as Disraeli said about Gladstone, are intoxicated with the exuberance of our own verbosity. The first word in the Rule of St Benedict, as is often pointed out, is “Listen…”

Listen, my son, to the precepts of your master, and incline the ear of your heart…

One of the three Benedictine vows is the vow of Obedience -- and obey comes from the Latin verb meaning to listen. Listening is more important than speaking and having opinions. It is also humbler. To listen is to remember our obligation to be teachable, so to listen is to be a disciple. In James Bishop’s words:

It is to sit down and shut up... Sitting down stills the body. Don’t move around and wriggle. Just sit quietly and calmly. Shutting up means more than not speaking; it means quieting the mind…

I watch Coronation Street in horror and fascination because it depicts, it seems to me, the precise opposite of a listening faith and life. On Coronation Street they respond to every person and every event verbally and often as not abusively. The words are frequently a preliminary to much yelling and accusation and punch-ups. No one tells the truth – it is a diet of silly, futile lies. Egoism reigns supreme. Although admittedly extreme, it is reflected quite chillingly in various aspects of NZ culture. James Bishop found a way to be still and silent in the horror of a prison. He used earphones to signify that he was unavailable for interruption. Of some 7 months in solitary confinement, officially called Administrative Segregation and which the prisoners called The Hole, with no TV or radio, never allowed outside, he wrote: The advantage of being there was that I could meditate very well.

Why meditate? – 10 August 2012

For the last couple of weeks we have been groaning under the weight of achievement and success. Gold, silver and bronze. It dawns on me that we now have something called High Performance coaches, who presumably differ from the kind of coach I might be allocated, that is to say, remedial. The pinnacle of all our culture and striving, to stand on that podium having overcome all odds and one’s opponents, and now to be a national icon, a role model, a hero. Children with shining eyes are being motivated to great and wonderful things. Per ardua ad astra, was the motto of my old school, which we translated as through tights to heights – not that it had any noticeable effect on me. This result-and achievement-oriented culture often has echoes even in Meditation. And indeed, as one teacher, Kim Nataraja, wrote very recently: It is wonderful to stop the endlessly chattering mind and release stress and tension. It feels great to have ‘time out’ from the concerns, anxieties, hopes and fears that generally beset us, to stop the drain of energy of a mind going round and round in circles. I do see the point she is making, although she may have forgotten for the moment that our teaching says that meditation is independent of feelings. “Whether we feel like it or not,” is what we teach. Emotions, including the drive to exceed and excel, are a big part of what is brought into obedience and conformed to reality. Meditation is about transformation at another level than how fit we are. It has a lot to do with what St Paul wrote to the Romans:

I appeal to you therefore... to present your bodies as a living sacrifice... Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

We emerge, as the months and years go by, with another, better, more Christlike way of thinking and reacting to events and to people, less fearful, less threatened, less defensive, more understanding and compassionate, more mindful and insightful. And it is not from having attended night classes with high performance teachers, but from having been still and silent and paying attention. Fr John Main always said, if you have to look for results, then look for them in a deeper capacity for love, understanding and compassion.

The dwelling of the light – 3 August 2012

I have previously mentioned Simone Weil, the brilliant young woman who died during the Nazi occupation of France. In her writings we find this statement: Our love should stretch as widely across all space, and should be as equally distributed in every portion of it, as is the very light of the sun. Christ has bidden us to attain to the perfection of our heavenly Father by imitating his indiscriminate bestowal of light. Well, she wrote that in darker and more dangerous times than we have known. When the key themes all around her were survival, or revenge, fear and hatred, she writes of spreading light indiscriminately. In John’s Gospel particularly, light is an indispensable distinguishing feature of Christian profession. I am the light of the world, says Jesus. Christ will give you light, writes St Paul. John enigmatically suggests that the so-called religious “light” that is in you might be darkness. And indeed, the church often has and often does cast a shadow in the world, rather than shed light. St John insists that there is always a choice between darkness and light – Men chose darkness, he writes, because their deeds were evil. And so it is a very radical thing to stop where we are now to wait in stillness and silence. In Christian terms this is to step into the light. It is to choose to be still and pay attention to the light which, in Simone Weil’s words, shines indiscriminately. It is not and cannot ever be a matter of deserving or worth. It is not a question of whom we know or what we have done, good or bad. Questions of acceptability end at the threshold of the light of God. We choose the humility to be still and to consent to be warmed, enlightened, known and loved. And yet it is not a private, self-indulgent thing. We carry the burdens of others, as we sit here. We have been admitted to a lot of pain along the way. A very large part of the total burden is that so much pain is without solution, beyond repair as we say. Well, we bring that burden too into the light and see how it looks. We express our love and trust with the simple repetition of the mantra – each repetition another step of faith and love, in the light of Christ.

Faith is an elusive thing – 27 July 2012

Faith is an elusive thing. It is a bit risky to imagine we see clearly what faith is. Faith is usually not heroic or conspicuous. It is emphatically not what someone once called believing six impossible things before breakfast. And certainly it has little to do with what Kathleen Norris describes as the relentlessly cheerful and positive language about faith associated with the strong-arm tactics of “evangelism”. Jesus doesn’t talk about faith much – it is more that he responds to it when he sees it in other people. I am inclined to disbelieve anyone who says they have unshakeable faith. It’s as though they simply haven’t been paying attention. Faith has a lot to do with what the Benedictines call stability. Stability means that where we are now is where God is seeing us now. Sometimes in life we do have to make changes, and it is then important that we do if we can. But at a deeper level there is a deeper truth. The Desert Fathers and Mothers were very much against running around looking for excitement or something better. My problems are here, and if I run away I simply take them with me. The best-known desert saying of all is from Abba Moses: Sit in your cell. Your cell will teach you everything. Moving to another house, trying another medicine, changing to another church, buying a new outfit… all may be helpful, but also, maybe not. It is a fundamental principle of contemplative prayer and life that God is not somewhere else. And what the Desert Fathers and Mothers knew is that faith is probably boringly prosaic. It is usually a matter of taking the next step, putting one foot in front of the other, doing what now needs to be done. Abraham, the biblical exemplar of faith, it is said, went out, not knowing where he was going… The point is that he did what faith demanded, he took the next step, and then the next… And in our prayer, in meditation, that is what we do. We take the next step, we repeat the mantra. We find we have strayed. We take the next step, we return to the mantra. The next step in our prayer is to say the mantra. It is mindless, one might think, but it is actually mindful. In a place of the best silence and stillness we can manage at this moment, paying attention, we are saying Yes to God, in faith, in life and in death. And whatever we may be doing three hours or three years from now, we will still be saying Yes to God.