25 May 2012

Learning to pray - 25 May 2012

I find I am teaching Christian Meditation and contemplative prayer and life, not because I do it very well, but because, as we know, the best way to learn something is to teach it. There are very few teachers who know everything already, although my daughter did have one in about Year 7. There are some brilliant contemplative teachers and writers in our day, and we can learn a lot. But still, I find myself going back to the ancient teachers, the Desert fathers and mothers, St Augustine, the Cloud of Unknowing, Julian, St Teresa and St John of the Cross… there are many of them… despite that they saw the world as teeming with demons and spirits and they rarely if ever had a bath. But having reached a great age, it dawns on me that I have learned to be very wary of counsels of perfection, anyway. What draws me to St Benedict is partly that he knew that everyone is struggling and barely getting there. Counsels of perfection don’t help much. Neither do triumphalism and stories of shining achievement. One wonderful woman remarked to me after a funeral we had both attended, that she would have to hurry up and do something notable so that they would have something to say about her at her funeral. They will actually have plenty to say about her. The reality is however, that we are teaching prayer, silence and stillness always to burdened people in the midst of life. Memories can be stressful, and so can the results of all manner of events in the past. Home and family routine and family worries, may be sometimes joyous, but often bothersome and burdensome. Ill-health, chronic pain, ageing… And to this we add the bearing of the burdens of others, which is something we do. My point is that life doesn’t normally facilitate a calm and seamless flow into contemplative life and prayer. It is important to know that we are all pilgrims, on the way. We haven’t got there yet. The most we can do is describe the place we have reached today, and the view from there. We may have gone backwards. I think not, but it may seem so. But each time we become still and silent, inwardly consenting to grace and to love, of course we are moving along the trail. We are shedding our own presumed omnipotence, which is a silly fantasy anyway, and opening to grace and love – for ourselves, and through us to others.

11 May 2012

Telling the truth – 11 May 2012

St Benedict, about 1500 years ago, wrote what he called a Rule, which set out how Christians could and should live together. It sounds daunting, but it is actually both liberal and flexible. Benedict called it a little rule for beginners. In it he says among many other things that you can’t have Christian community without truthfulness. Sister Joan Chittister is a Benedictine nun of our day, and this is what she writes about truthfulness: Dissimulation, half answers, vindictive attitudes, a false presentation of self, are all barbs in the soul of the monastic. Holiness, this ancient rule says to a culture that has made crafty packaging high art, has something to do with being who we say we are, claiming our truths, opening our hearts, giving ourselves to the other pure and unglossed. This is not the same as the person who says, “That’s just the way I am, you have to take me as you find me, what you see is what you get…” That is really as much a façade as anything else. But it does have everything to do with the real person emerging from the shadows in the gentle processes of contemplative life and prayer. The real person, the person we glimpse in our better and humbler moments, the person God always sees and knows and loves, becomes able to be truthful and open without fear, and lovingly. It is what St Paul called learning to speak the truth in love. I have been trying to better understand one of our culture’s prime buzz-words, Lifestyle. A woman in the news told the court she needs $140,000 a year from her separated husband to maintain her lifestyle. You can have a lifestyle property. You put yourself in a beautiful setting. Your friends and family, and others too, see you there, and so you feel quite safe. Somewhere inside that beautiful perimeter, lurking as it were in a broom cupboard, is the real you, which would still exist, lifestyle or not. It is this person God begins to call forth in silence and stillness. This person may never since earliest childhood been allowed to live except behind facades of one kind or another – managing image, how others see you. What will other people think? But now what matters is the truth. St Paul’s great insight was that the truth and love go together. The true person is a loving person. It is the way God made things.

04 May 2012

Letting go - 4 May 2012

One of the primary rhythms of all contemplative life and prayer is that we are, perhaps imperceptively, relinquishing our hold on possessions and on other people. We are losing the need to personally control life and events and the future, a control which was in any case mainly illusory. Every time we choose the stillness and the silence, in preference to everything else we could be doing and thinking and planning, we are creating a space, what Greek scripture calls a kairos (καιρος), a special time, in which the processes of letting go are gently applied. Buddhists understand this quite well. Ideally you arrive at the end of life with nothing. Well, we are not in that tradition, but we gather truth where we find it. Jesus taught clearly that possessions can be a problem. He showed clearly that it is fear, not sin, that is the underlying problem. Fear that we might lose what we own and control… Fear of the future… Fear of mortality and death… He showed that it is love that is the antidote of fear – abide in my love, he says. But the relinquishment is more radical and more subtle than we expect. Over the years, and over the days and weeks of meditation, we find that it is not so much that we are relinquishing anything – more that things are being taken away from us, gently and almost imperceptively. Typically we see it happening in retrospect. It is the work of the Holy Spirit, and it is always like the wind, unpredictable and strange, and surprising. I came upon a moving example just recently. Leonard Cohen, the now elderly singer and poet, and his poem about letting go: “Going home”: Going home without my sorrow Going home some time tomorrow Going home to where it’s better than before. Going home without my burden, Going home behind the curtain, Going home without the costume that I wore… We are letting go of attitudes, of poisonous memories, of remembered guilts… steadily, and day by day. We are conforming to Christ, by being still.