The privilege of listening – 30 November 2012

The one thing most people vaguely know about Cranmer’s 1552 Prayer Book of the Church of England (if indeed they have heard of it) is that the marriage vows ask the bride to promise to obey, along with serve, love, honour and keep.  All through the years I officiated at marriage ceremonies this was a source of scorn, not to say ribaldry, and hell would freeze over before most brides would remotely consider promising obedience to the light of their life.  The word obey is not expected unless you’re in the army or under arrest.  To any modern western ear the premium is on individual autonomy, freedom of choice.  And it sounds strange when we read how Thomas Merton described his entrance into the strict monastic life as a postulant:  So Brother Matthew locked the gate behind me and I was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom.

Obedience is an English word which comes from the Latin oboedientia.  And it is of interest that the same Latin word means also to give ear, to listen.  It seems to me no accident whatever that two outcomes of our busy, active, self-centred culture, are that what people call blind obedience is routinely scorned, and also that real listening is a dying art, an increasingly scarce commodity.  The art of listening, and hence understanding, such a gift for anyone, is often not present at all.

But oboedientia in this sense is utterly basic to contemplative prayer.  Obeying in the best and widest sense is what we are doing.  Our prayer is still, and silent and patient listening – and it goes with the inner willingness, the deep inner consent, to be obedient to God’s word in our hearts.

I have never forgotten an occasion years ago when a contemplative monk came to our church to lead an evening on Christian Meditation.  At the end of the evening people were milling around, and I watched as one woman went to this monk wanting to talk with him about something.  He gave her his total attention, to the exclusion of everything else.  And while I watched, one of the very busy organizing women came bustling up, needing to interrupt with something she thought was urgent.  The monk never budged an inch.  He was listening completely to what the first woman was telling him or asking him.  What a gift, I thought.  This contemplative man knows the gift he has received and the gift he can pass on.  His prayer is listening, and his life becomes one of… well, not only listening, but hearing.  That is obedience, I think, and it flows from God’s total loving attention to us. 

The obedience the monks promise is not blind obedience, and the abbot is not a policeman or a sergeant-major.  Benedict insists that the abbot, most of all, must be a listener.  It is a mutual thing.  Without this dynamic our parishes eventually run into trouble.  Contemplative prayer constantly reminds us about attention, mindfulness, listening and understanding.  It is what we do in prayer, and it is what we do in life – ideally.  We may be very shaky on this, but each time we return to silence and stillness and the mantra, we are reminded.   

Blessed are the poor – 23 November 2012

A slightly troublesome subject for contemplatives is poverty.  Blessed are the poor, said Jesus.  But we are not poor – neither do we wish to be, as the word is normally used.  Last week here we were having a little discussion when we arrived about the problems of downsizing our homes and shedding possessions we no longer have space for.  There may also be the matter of shedding possessions anyway, before our children or others have to sort out and dispose of all the gear we have left behind.

Well, we can slightly clarify one aspect of this, I think.  St Benedict did not mention poverty much, if at all.  I think most of them were pretty poor anyway.  What he does stress is the spirit of sharing.  So Benedict’s poverty is not really that of St Francis -- the giving up of all things, divesting oneself of goods and ownership.  Benedict stresses that his monks may have all sorts of things, but in common.  It is the community that matters.  Whoever needs more should feel humble because of his weakness, not self-important because of the kindness shown him.  In this way all the members will be at peace… [RB 34: 4-5]  I took a kind of wry amusement last week when I was writing this, but also riffling through one of those glossy real estate supplements;  it was featuring $2-3 million lifestyle mansions in various places, and I thought, according to Benedict these folk should be feeling humble because of their weakness.  You know how sometimes when you borrow a book from some slightly old-fashioned person, it might have a sticker inside the cover which says Ex Libris…, reminding you that it is not yours but mine.  That is because even Christians, down through history, can be the most charming thieves.  The Benedictines however sometimes inscribe their books with Ad Usus…, for the use of.  It acknowledges that the book is not their private property.  And perhaps, when you cast your mind over the things you own, some of which may be valuable, others sentimentally important, and mentally place over them all  the label Ad Usus, it is satisfying and freeing.  It clarifies how we stand to these things, and increases our gratitude. 

Real poverty however is a very prevalent social state in our world, and perhaps our most pressing social issue.  So it matters that contemplatives sort out our own relationship to wealth and possessions.  What we possess is Ad Usus.  We do not go around proclaiming that all we have we have worked hard for and it is ours.  Even less do we want to claim that our many possessions are a sign of God’s approval of us and our righteousness – some people do sincerely believe that.  We do not wish to be identified with or judged by our possessions.  We know how to enjoy them, but do not choose to be defined by them.  We have clear ideas about greed and avarice, and we know it when we see it.  And these are things which, as we are able, we teach our children and grandchildren, ever questioning and undermining the culture which says you are what you own. 

Poverty may be a loaded word and sometimes quite frightening, but simplicity of life ought to be acceptable.  In our silence and stillness we are open to our attitudes being changed, even in those areas we thought were most basic to our identity, where we were most timid of change.  The process is gentle, strong and persistent, over the weeks and months, as we elect for silence, stillness, and the mantra.  

Silence and Taciturnitas – 16 November 2012

There is nothing so much like God as silence, wrote Meister Eckhart back in the early 14^th century.   And yet, as we know, silence can make people anxious, sometimes even disturbed or frightened.  Silence needs immediately to be filled up with speech or music or some mindless noise.  I said last week that St Benedict used two different words in this regard.  One is taciturnitas, which means restraint, of speech or other noise – clearly a necessary thing in a monastery.  But we are also advocating taciturnitas when we teach children (if we do) not to interrupt, not to yell and scream inappropriately, and so on, not to bang doors.  I think taciturnitas is a virtue almost lost, needing to be recovered and practiced, in large sections of our culture, including the church, where we are nervous of silence.

So how is this different from Benedict’s other Latin word silentium, silence…? Father Laurence Freeman comes at it in this rather unexpected way…  Whatever is purely natural, not trying to be anything other than itself, is silent…  Silence, authenticity, does not mean merely keeping noise levels low; it is the condition of pure truthfulness.  Silence is what is left when the noise we are making, interiorly and exteriorly, ceases.  It begins to be glimpsed when the noise is turned down.  This is because God is not known by thought and debate, but by love.  I am not the sum of my knowledge and experience, even less am I the sum of my possessions and reputation.  Some of that might be interesting, but it is not the authentic person God made and knows, sees and loves.  Silence is when we eliminate the noise of all that and begin to encounter God, as Jesus put it, in spirit and in truth. 

So we can say that taciturnitas is a discipline, a learned behavior, and we practise it among family, friends and colleagues.  It is an acquired habit of listening rather than speaking and interrupting.  It is a prerequisite for understanding.  It is a product of wisdom.  Silence, silentium, is first of all a gift from God.  It is a gift we receive in the stillness we can create.  It is an encounter with truth, God’s truth, my own truth, the truth of the present moment, and that truth is love.  It is the end of fear.  We practise the mantra because our thought and memories and fantasies, for the moment, are all forms of inner noise.  We habitually identify ourselves with these recurrent, ever-changing states – it might be exciting, it might be interesting, but it is not the truth.  Meditation, says Fr Laurence, is not what we think.  The ancient Christian understanding of Logos, the Word of God (John ch.1), leads to a deeper understanding of silence, he writes.  Silence is the source of creation.  The Word proceeds from the abyss of the silence of the Father. That word is love.

Perhaps then, we find what contemplatives mean by silence just a little puzzling.  It is always going to be difficult to explain silence with words – the more the words, the more the obscurity.  It is not explained.  It is encountered, given.  And the sign of this silent interiority is love.  Whoever loves, writes St John, is born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God… (I John 4:7-8)

Taciturnitas rules – 9 November 2012

Silence is not always a good thing.  As the writer in the Book of Ecclesiastes knew, there is a time to speak and a time to be silent.  When St Benedict taught his brothers about restraint of speech he did not use the Latin word silentium, which means silence, but taciturnitas, a much richer word, and it has more to do with restraint, and thoughtfulness.  This is a silence which somehow begins to be planted within us, as we practise the contemplative disciplines week by week and year by year.  I think this is usually a surprise to us -- we begin to realize that these days we are preferring restraint and thoughtfulness, to noise and chatter.  They are not mutually exclusive – but Benedict’s brothers and sisters very soon found that in noise and chatter they seldom actually heard anything accurately, let alone understood.  Inner silence is certainly the way to hear things.

So taciturnitas is also about attention and mindfulness.  In the community of Jesus’s disciples it is vital that we know how to listen.  Martha’s busyness was commendable and indeed valuable – they all had to eat.  But Jesus still said that Mary had chosen the “better part”.  What Benedict requires in his Rule is that there must be a balance.  His brothers and sisters are equally acquainted with prayer and work – and taciturnitas rules over all.  This is what he calls restraint of speech, not prohibition of speech.

I do find myself recoiling from the noise and compulsory joy that signals much contemporary worship.  On Sunday mornings a very energetic (and assuredly very admirable) church occupies the hall right next to the Mahurangi East Public Library.  For a start, everything in their worship evidently needs to be greatly amplified with microphones and much electronics.  In our culture you can’t speak to an audience except through a hand-held microphone up under your nose.  Perhaps they are all slightly deaf – perhaps I can suggest why.  What I do know is the effect on the pagans next door in the library.  They are unlikely to rush off to church.  Then, there slowly crept upon my awareness that we now have some phenomenon called Messy Church.  I think it was invented in the Church of England, where of course it would have been civilized, decent and in order.  But now it seems to be a form of worship in which everyone is talking simultaneously, with heavy admixtures of food and drink.  We are a long way from the Gregorian Chant here.  I do not understand it, so it’s wrong to be critical.  But I do wonder if God really does get worshipped, or whether it’s more another mode of occupational therapy.  Samuel in the Hebrew scriptures, as a boy in the temple, said, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” We have to take care that our prayer hasn’t become “Listen, Lord, for your servant is speaking.”

I am sorry if I have gone too far about this, but in our silence here this morning we are turning off the sheer racket of our culture, and what goes on in many homes and churches.  Perhaps next week we can say a bit more about the content of taciturnitas, about its richness and texture in our lives.

No spiritual gluttony - 2 November 2012

This is more of the speech by Dr Rowan Williams to the RC Synod of Bishops in Rome, last month...

In his autobiography Thomas Merton describes an experience not long after he had entered the monastery where he was to spend the rest of his life (Elected Silence, p.303).  He had contracted 'flu, and was confined to the infirmary for a few days, and, he says, he felt a 'secret joy' at the opportunity this gave him for prayer -- and 'to do everything that I want to do without having to run all over the place answering bells.'  (But then) he is forced to recognise that this attitude reveals that 'All my bad habits... had sneaked into the monastery with me and had received the religious vesture along with me:  spiritual gluttony, spiritual sensuality, spiritual pride.'  In other words, he is trying to live the Christian life with the emotional equipment of someone still deeply wedded to the search for individual satisfaction. 

It is a powerful warning;  we have to be very careful not simply to persuade people to apply to God and the life of the spirit all the longings for drama, excitement and self-congratulation that we so often indulge in our daily lives.  One writer says: the words of the gospel are addressed to human beings who 'who do not yet exist'.  That is to say, responding in a life-giving way to what the gospel requires of us means a transforming of ourself, our feelings and thoughts and imaginings.  To be converted to the faith does not mean simply acquiring a new set of beliefs, but becoming a new person, a person in communion with God and others through Jesus Christ.

Contemplation is an intrinsic element in this transforming process.  To learn to look to God without regard to my own instant satisfaction, to learn to scrutinise and to relativise the cravings and fantasies that arise in me -- this is to allow God to be God, to come alive in me.  Only as this begins to happen will I be delivered from treating the gifts of God as yet another set of things I may acquire to make me happy, or to dominate other people.  I discover how to see other persons and things for what they are in relation to God, not to me.  And it is here that true justice as well as true love has its roots.

The human face that Christians want to show to the world is a face marked by such justice and love, and thus a face formed by contemplation, by the disciplines of silence and the detaching of the self from the objects that enslave it and the unexamined instincts that deceive it.

Contemplative Prayer and Life - 26 October 2012

On 10 October 2012 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, addressed the RC Synod of Bishops in Rome.  That in itself was amazing and historic.  What he said was striking and important -- and I thought you should hear a little bit of it here as a brief alternative to my words...

To be contemplative as Christ is contemplative is to be open to all the fullness that the Father wishes to pour into our hearts.  With our minds made still and ready to receive, with our self-generated fantasies about ourselves and God reduced to silence, we are at last at the point where we may begin to grow.  And the face we need to show to our world is the face of a humanity in endless growth towards love, a humanity so delighted and engaged by the glory of what we look towards that we are prepared to embark on a journey without end, to find our way more deeply into it, into the heart of the trinitarian life.  St Paul speaks (in II Cor 3:18) of how 'with unveiled faces reflecting the glory of the Lord', we are transfigured with a greater and greater radiance.  That is the face we seek to show to our fellow human beings.

And we seek this not because we are in search of some private 'religious experience' that will make us feel secure or holy.  We seek it because in this self-forgetting gazing towards the light of God in Christ we learn how to look at one another and at the whole of God's creation.  In the early church there was a clear understanding that we needed to advance from the self-understanding or self-contemplation that taught us to discipline our greedy instincts and cravings, to the 'natural contemplation'that perceived and venerated the wisdom of God in the order of the world, and allowed us to see created reality for what it truly was in the sight of God -- rather than what it was in terms of how we might use it or dominate it.  And from there grace would lead us forward into true 'theology', the silent gazing upon God that is the goal of all our disciplieship. 

In this perspective, contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom -- freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them.  To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture, and our chaotic and unexamined emotions, encourage us to inhabit.  To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need, so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly.  It is a deeply revolutionary matter.