29 June 2012

Seventy times seven – 29 June 2012

A brother in Scete happened to commit a fault, and the elders assembled, and sent for Abba Moses to join them. He, however, did not want to come. The priest sent him a message, saying: Come, the community of the brethren is waiting for you. So he arose and started off. And taking with him a very old basket full of holes, he filled it with sand, and carried it behind him. The elders came out to meet him and said, What is this, Father? The elder replied: My sins are running out behind me, and I do not see them, and today I come to judge the sins of another! They, hearing this, said nothing to the brother but pardoned him.
That is one of the most famous of all the desert stories. The desert brothers and sisters, in other words, did not gather outside the courthouse to scream and jeer at some convicted criminal, or to inform the media that the sentence is a joke and they have lost faith in the justice system. Abba Moses did not want to see someone suffer, whatever he may have done. Neither did he want to lose sight of the fact that the church is the company of the wounded, fallible and fragile. He knew that a sinful act did not make anyone radically different. Forgiveness is a hot issue. It evokes all manner of reactions. Everyone, I would say without exception if they think about it, has some reason to forgive and to be forgiving. Every time we go to church we pray, Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. This is incomprehensible to much of the secular world, except to those who have discovered the practical fact that nothing is gained if the road ahead is to be vengeful, full of bitterness and recrimination. To more and more people, justice has come to mean punishment. To more and more contemplatives, punishment, restriction, public humiliation, labelling, rendering someone powerless and placarded as worthless, could scarcely be more contrary to the way of Christ. But before we tackle those huge issues in social ethics, we have first to consult what is going on in our own hearts. There is a need to be still and silent, with all our own memories and anger, disappointments and failures, abandoned hopes, our fears about the past and the future – all of this – along with all that is good... Not to think about it, let alone try to puzzle it out, but simply to let it all down while we remain still. We are the ones who have to change. As Jesus put it, Abide in my love.

22 June 2012

Paying attention – 22 June 2012

Prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.
That was written by the extraordinary young French contemplative who died of starvation during World War II, Simone Weil. Attention is an elusive concept. We know it when we experience it, or are given the grace of attention. But you won’t find contemplatives trying to define it. Perhaps it is very close to what Jesus meant when he talked about being awake. I think myself it has something also to do with what Jesus in the Beatitudes called purity of heart. Purity of heart, said Kierkegaard (I think) is to will one thing. Simone Weil makes two important points about attention. She says that attention is a gift, a grace we begin to receive once we are still and silent, and consenting to God. We don’t generate attention, she writes, by contracting the muscles, gritting the teeth, fighting to shut out all the distractions. We do what we can to be still and focused – and on some days, as we know, that isn’t much – and then we wait. That’s it. We say our word, our mantra, gently and regularly, returning to it whenever we find we have roamed off somewhere… and we wait, paying attention. You sometimes hear contemplative prayer described as “restful”, or “blissful”. It may indeed be that, or it may not. But it is important to be warned of what the ancient teachers came to call the pax perniciosa, the false peace, turning prayer into a cosy comfortable reverie. We must stay awake, says Jesus. Simone Weil also says that attention is availability. Paying attention to God is equally paying attention to our neighbour. This in practice is love. Simone Weil again: The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him/her, “What are you going through?” I would add that the love of God means saying Yes to God. So of course it requires being awake, being fully present in the present moment, gathering together our scattered wits and putting them at peace for 20 or 30 minutes while we pay attention.

15 June 2012

Minds being remade – 15 June 2012

Adapt yourselves no longer to the pattern of this present world, but let your minds be remade and your whole nature thus transformed. St Paul writes that to the Christians at Rome. We tend to be a little cynical about our minds being remade – ambivalently, perhaps, because we may feel reasonably comfortable the way we are after all these years; perhaps because we doubt whether much change is possible anyway; and perhaps because we assume our opinions and reactions are kind of set, like jellied beetroot, and that’s just us. Well it’s not just us. It’s the ego, and the ego is only part of us. It is an important part of us, and it is not our enemy. But it is never the truth about us. But the ego unfortunately tends to think it is the whole of us. It is the self that has been formed over the years through all our experiences of acceptance and rejection, joy and pain, the need to survive, the need to appear well to others. St Paul writes about your whole nature being transformed. It starts with the willingness, the consent. And this is the essence of contemplative prayer and life, the constant assent to God, from a deeper place than the ego, to whatever the Spirit seeks to make of us. The remarkable fact about silence and stillness is that we come to see it as the space in which our consent is possible and welcome. It is, within us, what Jesus called the Kingdom of God. And it is without words, a kingdom of love given and received. It is permissible to be perfectly still. Part of a poem of Mary Oliver: Lord, what shall I do that I can’t quiet myself? Here is the bread, and here is the cup, and I can’t quiet myself… I will learn also to kneel down into the world of the invisible, the inscrutable and the everlasting. I will move no more than the leaves of a tree on a day of no wind, bathed in light, like the wanderer who has come home at last and kneels in peace, done with all unnecessary things; every motion; even words.

08 June 2012

Sounds of silence – 8 June 2012

In contemplative prayer, silence is always a relative thing. Pure silence never happens. Thomas Merton, shut away in his hermitage in the woods, away from all the distractions of the monastery, including all its religious noises, learned to laugh at himself. In the woods he still had the sounds of the wind and the trees. He got irritated at the faint and distant sound of some farmer with his tractor, and a far-off aircraft conveying gamblers to Las Vegas. And all that was before all the noise of mental distractions kicked in. We shouldn’t expect silence if we mean the absence of noise. That occurs nowhere. In a sound-proof room there is still the noise our body makes, breathing and churning along. But none of that matters. The silence that matters is at another level, where we have started to still our monkey minds, which are habitually all over the place. There is that in us which is frightened of a vacuum, immediately wants to fill up a space, gets nervous or guilty if we are not “doing something”. Meditation is in one sense simply where we are learning, over weeks and years, to shut up, close down the agendas, and be internally still. Simple perhaps, but not easy. Neither, however, are we listening for God. To a lot of earnest Christian people this may come as a bit of a surprise. We are not expecting messages or visions, inspirations or revelations, ecstasies or raptures. The older teachers say that levitation is rigorously discouraged. Indeed, in a sense, we let go of these things and these needs… the need to have results, encouragement, something for me. Our only task is to consent to what God is doing in our hearts when once we are still. It is this consent that matters, our deep inner Yes to God. It is also where we encounter God’s unconditional Yes to us. And so it is the end of fear. In the silence we are able, as time goes by, to let go of childhood images of God, primitive fears and superstitions. Simply to be present, as God is fully and lovingly and unconditionally present to us, means these things start to evaporate, replaced by an enhanced capacity to love and to be loved. Abide in me, says Jesus – abide in my love.