Passing judgement – 21 September 2012

I notice that we puzzle quite a lot over this matter of judging and being judgemental.  They are two different things.  We all have to make judgements.  For judges it is their job.  For the rest of us, we expect to be able to form opinions, come to decisions, about people and events.  And sometimes our judgements do have to be, rightly we hope, negative and condemnatory.  If we have a Christian conscience we hope our judgements are accurate and charitable, even generous.  We also hope we recognize those times when it is unnecessary to judge someone, even if everyone else is doing so.  Jesus refused to pass judgement on the adulterous woman in John’s gospel. 

Judgementalism however is another matter.  This is an attitude, a habitual reaction -- even for some, including some Christian believers, a way of life and a righteous responsibility.  Emily Dickinson remarked about one preacher she heard, The subject of perdition seemed to please him, somehow.  

Judgementalism is when we pin indelible labels on people, write people off, consign them to some place somewhere else but not here.  It usually entails a willful blindness to the good in people, or to the possibility of reform.  It is a lack of care about another person.  Judgementalism generally proceeds from our own anger and fear, to say nothing of our ignorance.  I think it was because of the perils of judgementalism all around him that Jesus said, Judge not, and you won’t be judged.  The world we know is full of judgementalism.

In the still and silent world of contemplative prayer we are consenting to the long-term and gentle work of the Spirit in us, achieving changes in us which we can never engineer ourselves.  And so it is that the judgementalism in us starts to attenuate.  We begin to notice it and don’t like it.  We find ourselves doing without it.  We notice that the judgementalism in our friends begins to irritate us.  We find ourselves more inclined to patience and understanding with human error and frailty, with all its risks.

Partly this is that we are learning to live freer of fear and anger.  The world and all its dangers are unchanged.  But in silence and stillness, somehow, we find ourselves much better able to meet Jesus’s frequent question to people, “Why are you afraid…?”

Living with mystery – 14 September 2012

Kathleen Norris writes:  I sometimes think of prayer as a certain quality of attention that comes upon me when I’m busy doing something else.  It’s one of those insights these people seem to have, which can be told in simple words, briefly and clearly.  Perhaps people like me then start to obscure it.

Prayer is… a certain quality of attention that comes upon me when I’m busy doing something else.  Unfortunately, as it seems to me, she then goes on to write about the common experience most of us know, when someone or some situation springs to mind, and it becomes a quiet personal prayer.  That’s a kind of running intercession, appropriate and perfectly fine. 

But Kathleen Norris’s insight is better than that, and I felt sorry she didn’t follow it up.  There are two things in what she wrote and in the way she wrote it.  First, she called prayer a certain quality of attention.  We have visited this idea before in our group.  Prayer is paying special attention.  It is deeper and more disciplined than the scatter-gun attention we normally give to things, or the so-called attention possible in multi-tasking, which is much admired.  The attention prayer requires is the result of being fully present and fully awake.  It is the attention possible when we have set our own agendas to one side and have stepped in front of all our internal and external chatter.  It is the attention we come to know in our consent to God, in silence, in stillness and in mystery.

Secondly, she says it comes upon her when I’m busy doing something else.  She is not now referring to the time of prayer.  What meditators eventually start to report is that their mantra, with all its connotations of stillness, silence, focusing, paying attention, spills over into the rest of life.  We become aware of its resonance in stressful situations, at busy and occupied times, in tiredness or anxiety.  It is as though part of us is now living in a kind of constant presence, what the Greek of the New Testament calls an αναμνησις (anamnesis), a remembrance.  We are more and more learning to be present to God, and to other people, in ways not possible when we are living behind our defences and facades.  In company we may see what others don’t because of all the chatter.  When we are alone, we come to realize that there is no space between our thoughts of people and our prayers for them.  Boundary between life and prayer has become thin or attenuated, even invisible. 

Detachment - 7 September 2012

It quite often seems to people who don’t practice contemplative prayer and life that those of us who do are lacking a healthy sense of engagement with the world, we are aloof and we lack concern for others.  We retreat away from the real world into prayer.  And perhaps some meditators do have that motive.  It is a refuge, some kind of cocoon, a blessed peaceful haven.  Well, let’s not despise that.  Jesus knew that a lot of people are very wounded and afraid.  He said, Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden – I will give you rest… 

The Desert Fathers and Mothers had other motives.  Detachment, for them, meant that at the time of prayer no worldly concerns, including good ones, would distract them from being present to God and to each other.  That was the point of all their discipline.  One of the monks, Abba Dorotheus of Gaza, puts it in an interesting way.  Detachment, he said, is being free from wanting certain things to happen.  The burden we lay down in prayer includes a whole load of our desires, whether things we desire for ourselves or for others, for good or for ill.  You can’t be a Buddhist without learning from the outset that our desires are the root of all unhappiness and suffering.  It is one Buddhist truth which urgently needs to be translated into Christian understanding. 

To be free of desire may be something we can’t even begin to imagine.   But then Abba Dorotheus gives as it were the other side of the coin.  He says that we can find peace in what is happening.  It is important to be clear about this.  He does not mean we agree with or like what is happening around us.  What is happening may be very hurtful or unjust.  But in the presence of God another door opens which we hadn’t noticed.  Where does it lead?  It leads to a deeper level where we are at peace with what we can’t change.  It is a level of trust.  Once we have seen this, and perhaps seen it in others, we begin to see it also for instance in the Psalms.  It is the resolution of the Book of Job. 

Kathleen Norris tells a lovely story from the USA.  A woman middle-aged school bus driver suddenly had her bus, which was full of mentally handicapped children, taken over by a deranged man with a gun.  When reporters later asked her how she had managed to talk the man out of using the gun, her reply was, “I pray a lot.” That’s the kind of response I love – it seems absurd to most people, and it really gets up the noses of the atheists.  Notice, the woman did not say, “I prayed a lot.”  What she indicated was that she was generally not far from prayer.  In that sense at least, she was a contemplative person.  And the encounter between her and the man with the gun was not quite what he expected, evidently.