There is now a large and ever growing volume of writings about contemplative life and prayer, certainly more than I can keep up with. Much of it is from America. We used to be more or less in the desert, as it were -- you really had to hunt around to find anything new being taught. And in a way that was good because the best prayer is what we do ourselves, and the best experience is what we discover ourselves. But now there is no end to what we can find in print and on the web. Some of it is junk. The word contemplative is in danger of being hijacked. Some writers can’t help trying to “add value”, as we say, to what actually needs nothing of the kind. Some can’t help lapsing into sentimentalism, and we get nice photos of roses and sunsets. Others can’t resist trying to formulate rules, recipes and spiritual flow charts -- you must do this or that. Yet others, of the psychology persuasion, seek to describe what is happening in our psyches in the stillness and silence, and tell us about it. I do however have a more kindly feeling towards the historians, who need to show us how contemplative teachings have always been there, down the centuries. A lot of this is admittedly interesting, and any of us could spend the rest of our days getting more and more informed. The trouble is, it’s not the way to learn to pray.
We say again, we learn to pray by doing it. And mostly, by following the advice of Jesus -- behind closed doors, in secret, in silence. As we rapidly find out, there are all manner of practical issues about that. Our own programme and busyness. Grandparent duties. Most family homes are set up for just about everything but prayer. And of course, external interruptions and internal distractions. I recall one meditator who was very keen, but she said, there was no way she could disable the phone. The idea was anathema. Someone might be trying to get her. And I can see, for her that fact would be an overwhelming distraction -- someone needing her and she wasn’t there. She could not conceive her finger off the response and control button for 25 minutes. I am happy to report that it dawned on her that she was not indispensable after all, and that the world could struggle on for that brief time.
Fr John Main’s most famous teaching is, “Just say your mantra.” It comes down to utter simplicity. Be still. Be quiet. Be attentive. Be fully present, here and now. Stop trying to control the universe.
30 March 2012
23 March 2012
The truth in love - 23 March 2012
One of the memorable events of this past week, it seems to me, is the resignation of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He is to go back to academia, to be Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge. This gentle and brilliant scholar will distance himself from the bruising maelstrom of church politics, crises and schisms.
My personal memory of Rowan Williams was listening to him each day for a week, in Sydney in 2001. He was leading a seminar for meditators, on the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4th and 5th centuries, and I have never forgotten the impression of a truly wise and spiritual man, a natural and humble scholar.
It was interesting to me that Dr Williams, Primate of Wales but about to become Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke feelingly about the role of contemplative people in the church. Of course we are not any kind of elite, and I doubt that anyone here is remotely tempted to imagine we are. But some people in the church wonder what on earth we are for, anyway. Extended periods of silence... and then we go home...! That’s not a proper meeting! We don’t even have food.
In our discipline of silence and stillness, Rowan Williams thought, people of contemplative life and prayer are helping to purify the language of the tribe (those are T S Eliot’s poetic words). Our attention to God and to what is real and now, without asking for anything, somehow witnesses to the tribe a language as free as it can be from the games of control, fantasy and evasion that take up so much room in the church and the world. Another English poet, G K Chesterton, saw it too, and wrote of all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men. The spirit in our hearts in the stillness starts to teach us another speech that is loving rather than aggressive or competitive. Let your yes be yes and your no be no, teaches Jesus -- simple and truthful speech. St Paul writes about speaking the truth in love. St Benedict taught his monks what he called Restraint of Speech. We begin to learn it in a discipline of contemplative life and prayer.
I think I am at a point -- one might say a cultural crisis -- where I will find Coronation Street simply unbearable after some 48 years, simply because of the vile ways they speak to each other, confrontational, in-your-face as we say, violent words. And yet so many think this is normal communication or appropriate reaction to events. It is much the same in wide areas of NZ society, including much of our press and TV.
Well we are living and learning another language for the tribe.
My personal memory of Rowan Williams was listening to him each day for a week, in Sydney in 2001. He was leading a seminar for meditators, on the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4th and 5th centuries, and I have never forgotten the impression of a truly wise and spiritual man, a natural and humble scholar.
It was interesting to me that Dr Williams, Primate of Wales but about to become Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke feelingly about the role of contemplative people in the church. Of course we are not any kind of elite, and I doubt that anyone here is remotely tempted to imagine we are. But some people in the church wonder what on earth we are for, anyway. Extended periods of silence... and then we go home...! That’s not a proper meeting! We don’t even have food.
In our discipline of silence and stillness, Rowan Williams thought, people of contemplative life and prayer are helping to purify the language of the tribe (those are T S Eliot’s poetic words). Our attention to God and to what is real and now, without asking for anything, somehow witnesses to the tribe a language as free as it can be from the games of control, fantasy and evasion that take up so much room in the church and the world. Another English poet, G K Chesterton, saw it too, and wrote of all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men. The spirit in our hearts in the stillness starts to teach us another speech that is loving rather than aggressive or competitive. Let your yes be yes and your no be no, teaches Jesus -- simple and truthful speech. St Paul writes about speaking the truth in love. St Benedict taught his monks what he called Restraint of Speech. We begin to learn it in a discipline of contemplative life and prayer.
I think I am at a point -- one might say a cultural crisis -- where I will find Coronation Street simply unbearable after some 48 years, simply because of the vile ways they speak to each other, confrontational, in-your-face as we say, violent words. And yet so many think this is normal communication or appropriate reaction to events. It is much the same in wide areas of NZ society, including much of our press and TV.
Well we are living and learning another language for the tribe.
16 March 2012
God’s kingdom - 16 March 2012
In Jesus’s teaching about prayer his fourth basic point is about its God-centredness. This sounds like stating the obvious, until we look again at what is much more common in practice. So much prayer is “beseeching”, in the old terminology -- seeking to make use of God, one way or another, or to make ourselves feel better. Last week an intelligent, active and highly involved woman wanted me to know how she had given up on the church because of the ways she felt she had been let down by the church. She had been brought up in a very conservative Christian family of Plymouth Brethren, I believe, and she loudly assured me, “I still believe it all” -- she meant the doctrine. I wanted to say to her, “But it’s not about you. It’s not about what you believe. It’s about God.” Jesus said:
Set your mind on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well.
In contemplative prayer that is our task. So far as it lies with us, we become still, silent, available to God, consenting to God. We are asking for nothing, imaging or imagining or fantasising nothing, simply fully present as God is fully present to us. In the much warmer words of John’s Gospel, where Jesus is explaining the contemplative life to his disciples, he says: Abide in me, and I in you... It is a mutual abiding. In our prayer he abides in us, we abide in him, he abides in the Father. And thus, somehow, ineffably, we become involved in the very life of the Trinity. That is God’s kingdom, and God’s justice, where things are the right way up, where right and truth prevail. It is the place of unity and love.
I don’t understand these things, and I probably can’t explain them to you any better than that. And it is a truism that we learn prayer by doing it, in all our ignorance and neediness. The woman I mentioned earlier is struggling. She believes she first needs questions answered, wrongs righted, the church reformed, and all the damage of the past somehow transformed. It won’t happen. And in any case it is not about her, or me, or you. It is about God before all else, and where we place the attention of our heart.
Cynthia Bourgeault, a contemplative writer says, We've made such a mistake and done such disservice right from the start of our interior life of equating prayer with saying prayers and contemplation now with silence. Silence is not the absence of noise, it's the absence of selfishness.
Set your mind on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well.
In contemplative prayer that is our task. So far as it lies with us, we become still, silent, available to God, consenting to God. We are asking for nothing, imaging or imagining or fantasising nothing, simply fully present as God is fully present to us. In the much warmer words of John’s Gospel, where Jesus is explaining the contemplative life to his disciples, he says: Abide in me, and I in you... It is a mutual abiding. In our prayer he abides in us, we abide in him, he abides in the Father. And thus, somehow, ineffably, we become involved in the very life of the Trinity. That is God’s kingdom, and God’s justice, where things are the right way up, where right and truth prevail. It is the place of unity and love.
I don’t understand these things, and I probably can’t explain them to you any better than that. And it is a truism that we learn prayer by doing it, in all our ignorance and neediness. The woman I mentioned earlier is struggling. She believes she first needs questions answered, wrongs righted, the church reformed, and all the damage of the past somehow transformed. It won’t happen. And in any case it is not about her, or me, or you. It is about God before all else, and where we place the attention of our heart.
Cynthia Bourgeault, a contemplative writer says, We've made such a mistake and done such disservice right from the start of our interior life of equating prayer with saying prayers and contemplation now with silence. Silence is not the absence of noise, it's the absence of selfishness.
02 March 2012
Anxious thoughts - 9 March 2012
The third of Jesus’ central teachings about prayer may well be the one we have most trouble with in the western church. It is where he talks about our material anxieties:
I bid you, put away anxious thoughts about food and drink to keep you alive and clothes to cover your body...
Well, we can say right away that Jesus is not trying to turn us off the basic necessities of life. Not only do we have food and drink, we enjoy food and drink, and we give thanks to God for it. Greed and gluttony are another matter of course, and I have my doubts about neenish tarts and chocolate lamingtons. Clothes also are also quite a good idea. Quite apart from warmth, our physical configuration seems not to improve with age, and wearing nice clothes is a gift we offer to the world around us.
Jesus is not against food and clothing. He is against anxious thoughts about food and clothing, especially at the time of prayer. Perhaps contemplative prayer is likely to be difficult for the convener of the parish social committee. I learned on the radio the other day that a girl can’t have too many shoes. Does anyone actually worry about that? A woman on TV said: All my lifestyle dreams have been shattered -- those were her words -- because someone had built a pylon 9 meters outside her boundary. Her dream lifestyle was in ruins.
We all have at times plenty of real reasons to be anxious. But the time of contemplative prayer is when we quite specifically choose not to be ruled by anxiety. Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. We are content to sit still and silent in the presence of God, in life and in death itself. It is the time when, quite specifically and deliberately, we cease looking for happiness in the wrong places. Our faith is expressing itself in silent trust.
The most famous saying of the English mystic and hermit, Lady Julian of Norwich, was: All will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of thing will be well. But on her lips this was never some blind denial of hard facts of life and real reasons for worry. She knew very well what life is like. The teaching comes straight out of her contemplative experience, and the faith that all pain will be swallowed up in the mercy and love of God who meets us here in God’s silence.
I bid you, put away anxious thoughts about food and drink to keep you alive and clothes to cover your body...
Well, we can say right away that Jesus is not trying to turn us off the basic necessities of life. Not only do we have food and drink, we enjoy food and drink, and we give thanks to God for it. Greed and gluttony are another matter of course, and I have my doubts about neenish tarts and chocolate lamingtons. Clothes also are also quite a good idea. Quite apart from warmth, our physical configuration seems not to improve with age, and wearing nice clothes is a gift we offer to the world around us.
Jesus is not against food and clothing. He is against anxious thoughts about food and clothing, especially at the time of prayer. Perhaps contemplative prayer is likely to be difficult for the convener of the parish social committee. I learned on the radio the other day that a girl can’t have too many shoes. Does anyone actually worry about that? A woman on TV said: All my lifestyle dreams have been shattered -- those were her words -- because someone had built a pylon 9 meters outside her boundary. Her dream lifestyle was in ruins.
We all have at times plenty of real reasons to be anxious. But the time of contemplative prayer is when we quite specifically choose not to be ruled by anxiety. Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. We are content to sit still and silent in the presence of God, in life and in death itself. It is the time when, quite specifically and deliberately, we cease looking for happiness in the wrong places. Our faith is expressing itself in silent trust.
The most famous saying of the English mystic and hermit, Lady Julian of Norwich, was: All will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of thing will be well. But on her lips this was never some blind denial of hard facts of life and real reasons for worry. She knew very well what life is like. The teaching comes straight out of her contemplative experience, and the faith that all pain will be swallowed up in the mercy and love of God who meets us here in God’s silence.
Babbling on - 2 March 2012
The second important point Jesus makes about prayer is simple enough, especially in the way he puts it: Do not go babbling on like the heathen who think the more they say the more likely they are to be heard. And it never fails to astonish me how easily this teaching gets ignored in much of the church.
I think we can say that Jesus felt quite strongly on this point, because of the language he chooses. “Blabbermouth”, is how whoever heard him rendered it in the Greek of Matthew’s Gospel. Timid translators have rendered it, “heaping up empty phrases”. Anyway, Jesus says it’s what the heathen do -- and a remark like that these days would earn him all manner of indignant letters to the editor.
Do not go babbling on... Your Father knows what you need... One of the beauties of good liturgy, which of course does have to use a lot of words, is still its economy. Thomas Cranmer knew how to say something succinctly and clearly.
We do contemplative prayer as much as possible without words or images, not because they are wrong but because Your Father knows... The minute we forget this, we start adding to the noise, the human clamour, which actually makes real prayer harder and harder.
I had a sharp lesson in this respect, once, many years ago -- called at night to the maternity hospital where the newborn baby of one of my parishioners had just died. It was actually impossible that this baby could have lived, but still, the family had not been expecting this to happen. They wanted me to say a prayer. I was shattered and helpless. There was nothing to say that made any sense, or would make them feel better. I said, “We’ll be silent for quite a while, and still. God is here, and God knows what we don’t understand.” And that was it. It was the best I could do. And a ward sister of the kind we used to have long ago said to me as I was leaving, Thanks for not going on about it -- you have no idea what happens here sometimes.
I think the silence which comes out of our frailty and human mortality, sadness and loss, confusion, unanswered questions and painful places, is the prayer God actually hears. So is the silence which may be flowing from our mature discovery over the years that any words we might have for God have begun to get fewer anyway, and that we would rather leave it to God. This kind of prayer may be inarticulate but it is true and it comes from our truth.
I think we can say that Jesus felt quite strongly on this point, because of the language he chooses. “Blabbermouth”, is how whoever heard him rendered it in the Greek of Matthew’s Gospel. Timid translators have rendered it, “heaping up empty phrases”. Anyway, Jesus says it’s what the heathen do -- and a remark like that these days would earn him all manner of indignant letters to the editor.
Do not go babbling on... Your Father knows what you need... One of the beauties of good liturgy, which of course does have to use a lot of words, is still its economy. Thomas Cranmer knew how to say something succinctly and clearly.
We do contemplative prayer as much as possible without words or images, not because they are wrong but because Your Father knows... The minute we forget this, we start adding to the noise, the human clamour, which actually makes real prayer harder and harder.
I had a sharp lesson in this respect, once, many years ago -- called at night to the maternity hospital where the newborn baby of one of my parishioners had just died. It was actually impossible that this baby could have lived, but still, the family had not been expecting this to happen. They wanted me to say a prayer. I was shattered and helpless. There was nothing to say that made any sense, or would make them feel better. I said, “We’ll be silent for quite a while, and still. God is here, and God knows what we don’t understand.” And that was it. It was the best I could do. And a ward sister of the kind we used to have long ago said to me as I was leaving, Thanks for not going on about it -- you have no idea what happens here sometimes.
I think the silence which comes out of our frailty and human mortality, sadness and loss, confusion, unanswered questions and painful places, is the prayer God actually hears. So is the silence which may be flowing from our mature discovery over the years that any words we might have for God have begun to get fewer anyway, and that we would rather leave it to God. This kind of prayer may be inarticulate but it is true and it comes from our truth.
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