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.

The two tasks – 20 July 2012

There is nothing difficult in the contemplative life. It is difficult to understand the Higgs Boson, and how it somehow gives mass to everything else, such as us. I didn’t know I had the Higgs Boson to blame. It is difficult to understand logarithms, and how Auckland City water rates are calculated. But nothing in contemplative life or prayer is essentially difficult. For centuries the church perpetuated a myth that contemplative life and prayer was mainly for the spiritual giants, the elite, most of them in monasteries – people prepared to deny themselves and practice all manner of ascetic disciplines. One of my fellow Benedictine Oblates was told years ago by her parish priest, “Oh you don’t want to worry about that stuff. That’s for the real professionals.” She said that choice bit of advice actually set her back years before she began to learn better. Fr Laurence Freeman writes that there are two tasks we do in meditation, and each one is a kind of risk. The first task and risk is to be ourselves. He writes:

Meditation allows no self-deception. We see ourselves as we are. It is impossible to avoid seeing the ways in which we are phony or hypocritical; our illusions, self-deceptions, fearful insecurities, and compulsions stand out clearly; and the way we judge and dismiss others so arrogantly will strike a dagger in our conscience when we see it. But by facing this dark side of ourselves, we enlighten it. We see it with a light that shines from somewhere deeper in ourselves. And this light of our spirit burns away our self-hatred with the ultimately unavoidable and revolutionary truth that we are good and lovable.

The second task is to take the risk of letting others be themselves. He writes:

Perceiving their reality as distinct from our own is the way to do this. And to see them as real is to love them. Iris Murdoch once wrote that “love is the perception of the individual. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than ourselves is real.”

This is all risky because we can’t say what the outcome will be. We learn to live contemplatively in all that we do.

Activism rules – 13 July 2012

Most people who have learned to meditate, and practice it regularly, are also active people in their own churches. Some are very active indeed. Some are more active than they really intended to be. Also typically, meditators often have considerable commitments in the wider community and in their own homes. There is no danger that a practice of Christian Meditation is going to lead them down the perilous path of idleness and uselessness and wasting time. It is also not the case that most meditators are elderly and really looking for some comfortable place of reassurance and peace. Around the world Christian Meditation is being taken up, learned and practiced by people of all ages – children in schools and at home, students at university, professional people, in prisons and places for rehabilitation. It is very difficult to see what the church of the future will be like, except that it will rapidly become very different from the church of today. In many cases our own sons and daughters, brought up in Christian homes, now have little interest in the local church in its present formats. Of course there are exceptions. There are still insightful and charismatic people doing traditional things. There are still some inspirational leaders, prophets and priests, and amazing things can happen. Into the midst of all this maelstrom of change, God inspired a rebirth, a rediscovery of contemplative life and prayer. It is the mode of being in which we make ourselves available to be fully present to God, without words, without noise, without fuss and humbug, without images, without pretences or dressing up, but rather as we are, trusting entirely in grace and love. We are not bringing our skills or our knowledge or the work we have done. We are simply responding to love by being present and still. And whatever the church of the future is like, it will have rediscovered contemplative life and prayer. Whatever the world of the future is like, the Christians within it will need to be contemplative. Activism on its own won’t do. We will need to know where love and wisdom, mercy and grace, are to be found. As Benedict found in the 5th century, we will need a proper balance of activism with a discipline of stillness and silence in prayer.

The hall of mirrors – 6 July 2012

One of the first things to happen, typically, when we choose Christian Meditation, is that we find ourselves wondering how did I get on with that. Was that a good time of meditation, or did it seem like a waste of time because I was so distracted? Perhaps the worst – or at any rate experienced meditators would think it the worst – is when we think, Wow! That was really something. Now I think I’m getting somewhere. I am often reluctant to recommend books for meditators to read, although there are a lot of good ones. It is, I think, because some teachers seem to think they are writing a recipe book. Do this, don’t do that… when the fact is, each of us is different. I have been around long enough to know not to trust rules and prescriptions overmuch. God deals with each of us in a unique way, and not only do I not have to try to follow some recommended pathway, it may be actually better that I don’t. Good abbots in a monastery are those who can make a balance between the rules and human individuality. St Benedict knew that his Rule, for his monks, would need to recognize special needs, not as some school these days has to recognize and cater for a few special needs students, but rather as a normal thing. We are all special needs meditators. So perhaps an early hurdle in the contemplative life is understanding that the Spirit of God will help me, as I consent to that help, to get out of the circle of self. “How am I doing…? Am I doing this right…? Should I change my mantra…? Will I ever be free of distractions…?” This is the circle of self. It is like a hall of mirrors. Whichever way we turn, what we see is some aspect of ourselves – and in a proper hall of mirrors, as you may know, these images are typically distorted anyway. The best teaching says, simply be still, be silent, and when you realize you are distracted, return to the mantra, gently and without self-recrimination. And to that gentle extent, we are setting self aside, stepping outside the hall of mirrors, going back into a space where it is not all about me, but about God and me. And as we seem to keep pointing out, this choice, setting aside self, is clean contrary to our contemporary culture. It is not considered the way to get on in the world. We will never turn out to be role models or idols of the media. How sad is that…!