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.