Recess

Our Christian Meditation group at Warkworth will now be in recess over the summer holiday period.

We will resume on 7 February 2014.

Our usual time and place of meeting:  8.30 am, Fridays,

at

the Christ Church (Anglican) lounge in Warkworth.  All are welcome. 

Grace and peace – 20 December 2013

Here are a few words from the Epistle reading for next Sunday, right at the beginning of St Paul’s Letter to the Romans.  Paul is writing to a distant Christian community he has not yet met, and he addresses them as...

...yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, to all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ [Romans 1: 6-7].

Grace and peace...  One of my colleagues over many years, an old friend, usually addresses people in his correspondence including his emails in that way.  He wishes us grace and peace.  To say the least, it makes us pause and think – this is what mature Christian faith conveys: grace and peace.  Hospitality at its best confers grace and peace.

They are two rich words which are diminished when we try to define them.  The best way to learn them is to experience their reality in life.  Grace – the lovely Greek word χαρις -- is Nelson Mandela choosing not to walk the path of retribution at the very moment he had ample power to do so, and ample reason to do so.  Grace is the father running to greet his returning son who had squandered everything.  Grace is never reasonable and very rarely deserved.  It is Godlike. 

Peace is the Hebrew word shalom.  It means somewhat more than the absence of noise, although that in itself is not a bad start.  Shalom is a fundamental rightness, a sense that things are tending as God intends.  It includes our health and wellbeing – but the hard thing to grasp is that shalom does not wait until every problem is solved.  Someone whose body is falling to bits can know the gift of shalom. 

St Paul wishes these Roman Christians grace and peace.  Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  St Benedict said we must also have grace and peace from each other.  One reality of the birth of the baby is that you know that baby has no quarrel with anyone right now.  One of the miracles of our time is that, in a culture whose media is thriving on public blame and shame, on seeing people suffer, on sickening self-righteousness and lack of wisdom about human frailty and error, in a cruel culture of retribution – there was this one man, with no great pretensions to religion, with all his own human frailties on show, who flatly refused to condemn and punish at the moment he was in a position to do so.  It was a shaft of grace, and our media could only report it as a strange and wondrous thing.  Then came Archbishop Tutu and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  If you told the truth, the slate could be wiped clean.  Grace and truth, wrote St John, came through Jesus Christ.  Grace is the receiving of love, unmerited and unconditional.  Grace to you and peace...  Grace and truth...  These are at the heart of the strong message of Advent and Christmas.  Grace to you and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Learning patience – 13 December 2013

The epistle for next Sunday is from the little-used Letter of James.  Martin Luther famously called it an epistle of straw.  It is nothing of the kind:

Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near. Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged. See, the Judge is standing at the doors! [James 5: 7-9]

It’s all very well to talk about being patient, when advancing decrepitude means you don’t have much option.  You can’t run any more anyway, and you are retired and there’s not much reason to rush around as there once was.  Multi-tasking turns out to be not only difficult but dangerous.  It’s smart to learn the virtues of patience.  You are amazed at the people who get on the escalator at Countdown and still actually walk or even run up or down it.  They can’t simply stand still and wait.

But all this is to misunderstand what the word means.  Patience is from the Latin word, to suffer.  Being patient is a mature quality, knowing how to take the rough with the smooth, how to postpone or do without satisfaction. Patient is not passive.  A patient person not only is able to bear pain, but has learned that pain and injustice are everywhere.  It is an unjust world.  James reminds Jesus’s followers that they are not living in some safe cocoon of faith where all is well. 

That is why he also says, Beloved, do not grumble against one another.  And here I may be walking over eggshells... but James is saying that the kind of patience which marks Christian discipleship and Christian fellowship is accepting or at least understanding of human perversity and silliness.  It bears with other people – in which enterprise, I may say, a lively sense of the ridiculous helps quite a lot.  St Benedict knew that in any monastery there will be monks with smelly feet, nuns with blocked sinuses, people teetering towards lunacy accompanied by halitosis – and so, in his Rule he repeatedly warns against grumbling (sine murmuratione).  Grumbling badly damages the community.  It is a matter of discipline in a Christian fellowship that we do not grumble.  Put positively, it matters that we have learned patience, that our expectations are sensible and realistic, that we make room for human difference.  We come to gain pleasure from difference and eccentricity.

Moreover, this is Advent teaching.  James writes about waiting in patience.  He says the Judge is standing at the doors.  He wrote in the early Jerusalem church where they were always threatened by real oppression and persecution.  Patience and endurance is necessary equipment, and a sense of what matters and what doesn’t.  Our contemplative stillness and silence can equip us with a large and generous spirit.  Sometimes, even at my great age I confess, I am considerably tested in this regard.  But we get there.  At any rate, all our impatience and grumbling gets folded into the stillness of prayer, where Christ’s Spirit is making us into better disciples. 

To the moles and the bats – 6 December 2013

Here is part of a real flesh and blood Advent reading – the kind of reading ministers may be tempted to avoid if they can, but if it does get read, people’s eyes start to glaze over:

The haughtiness of people shall be humbled,

 

            and the pride of everyone brought low;

the Lord alone will be exalted on that day.

The idols shall utterly pass away.

Enter the caves of the rocks and the holes of the ground,

from the terror of the Lord,

and from the glory of his majesty…

On that day people will throw away to the moles and the bats

their idols of silver and their idols of gold

which they made for themselves to worship…  [Isaiah 2:17-20]

Rowan Williams identifies two very personal issues in Advent.  The first is to realize yet again that there are things we cannot do for ourselves.  Alone, as we know, we can’t learn language and communication.  Alone, we can’t learn to love and to be loved.  Alone, we can’t know whether we are worth anything or not, or actually visible to anyone or anything.  It is trendy now to have taken leave of God and religion and to be self-sufficient.  And our generation is left with what Rowan Williams calls paralyzing unhappiness and anxiety.  We would love to hear a voice of recognition and reassurance, but it must be on our terms and say the things we want to hear. 

So – and this is the second thing -- we make idols.  We project on to the empty space before us the voices and images we want – typically in western culture they include wealth and power, sex and so-called freedom, sport and entertainment, family first and last, happiness, the illusion of safety, personal appearance…  For Jews the covenant was always about the forsaking of idols.  We cannot make God, least of all in our own image.  We cannot domesticate God to our own life and preferences and what we imagine are our needs.  In the Christian Advent we become, as it were, Jews again.  We are reminded how, surrounded by all our goods and fortified by all our knowledge, we still need to be touched into life by a word from God – a word which brings all our idolatry to judgement. 

The wondrous thing is that, after our weeks of Advent waiting, this word turns out to be spoken in the birth of a baby, in a story which the secular world and much of the church have turned into a charming nursery tale.  In our contemplative life and prayer, our thoughtfulness and attention, but also in our silence and stillness, we are not strangers to mystery and awe, to the truth that may lie in the shadows, and the love which never lets us go.  And we are very ready, when we see our idols, to cast them to the moles and the bats.

What to do about Advent – 29 November 2013

Advent starts in two days.  Here is something, pretty simple, which I wrote for my fellow Benedictine Oblates about the approach of Advent.  I have altered the bits that are addressed specifically to Oblates...

Advent is a strange time.  The church insists it is a penitential season, like Lent.  But it rarely feels that way.  As we know all too well, Christmas gets prematurely “celebrated” in the shops and in the expectations of children.  Schools and supermarkets have mindless carols and nativity clutter, to say nothing of Santa and reindeers, in the middle of Advent. Known widely as I am for my calm and even temperament, I can be reduced to helpless grinding of teeth when the sheer spiritual richness of words such as “God of God, Light of Light / Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb...” is made mindless wallpaper music for the supermarket – and it’s not yet Christmas anyway.   We are citizens of 2013 in all its secular sentimental banality.  Not only is Advent not Christmas, but it is not capable of being secularised and commercialised without being distorted and destroyed.

No one who has listened to the Mozart or the Verdi requiems, the huge minor chords of the Dies Irae, and understood what is being conveyed there – and who pays attention to our world – is ready before Christmas Eve to celebrate Christmas.  Of course all that kind of thing is dreadfully inconvenient when you have to plan food and arrange presents and cater for the clamant expectations of modern grandchildren. 

We (Oblates) can do a little bit better, however.                                            

• During Advent we can find someone upon whom the Day of Wrath has descended in one form or another, and do what we can. 
• We can pay attention to the (sometimes very) difficult, even unpleasant, biblical readings of Advent, bearing in mind that the dire events set forth seem similar to what many are indeed experiencing around the world. 
• We can assess to what extent, in our life of contemplative stillness and silence, we are shedding the need to defend ourselves, to justify ourselves, to make ourselves safe at any rate, and are shedding the fear of mortality. 
• We can read, in our Lectio, what Benedict says about Humility [RB7], and be readier to greet the news of the helpless incarnate Christ in humble, awed delight. 

Love to the loveless shown,

That they might lovely be...

The Noonday Demon (3) – 22 November 2013

The previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has this luminous passage in his book, Silence and Honeycakes: 

God does not stop working in the church when we Christians are wicked, stupid and lazy.  The church is not magic, much as we should love it to be – a realm where problems are solved instantly and special revelations answer all our questions and provide a short-cut through all our conflicts.  It is rather – pre-eminently and crucially – a community of persons…, a place where holiness takes time, and where the prose of daily faithfulness and yes, sometimes, daily boredom, has to be faced and blessed, not shunned or concealed.

Perhaps in many ways the church has always been a community whose people are, in the phrase from the desert fathers we used last week, pledged to the walls.  The “local church”, we call it.  This is even more visible in places like Manila or Johannesburg, Buenos Aires or the slums of Rio – most recently of all perhaps in those Philippine cities and towns flattened by the typhoon.  People living and believing their faith in the best ways they know how.  Naturally we welcome any miracles that come along, but we know better than to expect them or rely on them.  Among us are always some who do want to live by miracles and excitement and instant solutions, but most of us know that reality is otherwise – and it is right there, in reality, in the present, that we are to love God and our neighbour.  The church is stodgy and boring only if we expect it to be separate from stodgy and boring life and reality. 

The trick, the spark of wisdom, the leap of faith, is to see God right there.  It is the secret of the Eucharist.  Jesus is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh – like us, pledged to the walls. 

The desert fathers and mothers teach us what the Benedictines came to call stability.  It means not running away.  It means that acedia may be temporarily relieved by a new kitchen, or a cruise around Iceland, but we will return to what we wanted to escape.  One of the ancient Greeks said, you will have a change of air but not a change of heart. 

The hardest lesson…  I am the one who has to change, here where I am, among these people I didn’t choose, in these circumstances, with all these memories and unresolved issues.  It is my ego I bring into the silence and the stillness, simply by being still and repeating the mantra I have chosen.  It is not that my ego is bad – in fact it is necessary – but it may not occupy the place that belongs to God. 

The noonday demon (2) - 15 November 2013

One of the desert fathers said: If a trial comes upon you in the place where you live, do not leave that place...  Wherever you go, you will find that what you are running from is there ahead of you.  So stay until the trial is over...

It is reinforced by another desert story:  There was a brother who had a rather turbulent temperament.  He often became angry.  So he said to himself, "I will go and live on my own.  I shall live in peace and my passions will be soothed."  He lived in a cave.  One day when he had filled his jug with water, he put it on the ground and it tipped over.  So he picked it up and filled it again -- and it tipped over.  He filled it a third time, put it down, and over it went.  He grabbed the jug and smashed it.  Then he realised that he had been tricked by the devil.  He said, "Since I have been defeated, even in solitude, I'd better go back to the monastery.  Conflict is to be met everywhere, but so is patience and so is the help of God."  So he got up and went back. 

One of the greatest spiritual secrets is as prosaic as it could possibly be.  If we keep wanting to try something else, in order to get rid of acedia, the noonday demon, we are probably out of luck.  My life is boring, or unhappy, or troublesome, or worrying – so I will go and live in Australia, or I will move to another house, or I will get out more, or I will change my partner, or I will have a course of Botox or a tummy tuck or some tattoos...  I will spend some money.  I will try another church, take multi-vitamins, hire a life coach...  Any or all of these things may be good to do. 

But the ego is remaining supreme and unchallenged, in control.  I cringe these days when yet another person tells us about their dream, this shining light on their horizon.  You must have a dream and be somehow realising your dream.  When Martin Luther King had a dream, it was about reality and the way things were.  It was about others, not himself.  Our first task is to be present in the present moment, not living in a dream.  The reality, the present, for better or for worse, is where God is.  Contemplative spirituality is a process of being present, being attentive, being true and being real, bearing pain as well as pleasure, hearing more than the noise of my own ego and all its feelings and demands.  Our prayer is just that, a matter of being present and real, to God, and to all the reality of the present. 

One desert brother was told by an elder, Go, sit in your cell, and give your body in pledge to the walls.  It is almost a ferocious metaphor of refusing to live in fantasy and dreamland, or anywhere else but the present and how it is.  Then see what happens.  Breathe deeply, be still, shut down your own noise, pay attention as God is paying attention...  Life then begins to open, attitudes start to shift and change, a way forward opens up, one step in front of the other. 

The noonday demon - 8 November 2013

From the earliest times, Christian spiritual wisdom and experience has known and recognised one prevalent adversity.  The scholars gave it a respectable name.  They called it acedia.  That word is very Greek.  The prefix "a" means not, or not at all.  The rest is the Greek noun kedia, which means care.  Acedia is not caring, not bothering, not giving a damn.  It is also no longer caring that we don't care.  Someone else, Evelyn Waugh I think, had the insight that acedia is also the refusal of joy.  Many of the monks and nuns however, who could scarcely be bothered with the scholarly definitions, knew acedia well but knew it simply as the noonday demon. 

These days everything must be described, differentiated, classified, labeled, and then written up in the NZ Listener and the Woman's Weekly, with photos.  So it is that depression is familiar in its many forms and degrees of severity.  I think however it is not the same as acedia, although they may have aspects in common.  In my childhood things like this were put down to "overdoing it", or some such concept.  Children were frequently decreed to be "run down" and therefore in need of a tonic.  There was a bottled yellow tonic called Minadex, which tasted quite nice, and I didn't mind being run down at all. 

Acedia is not being run down.  One of the great early fathers, Evagrius Ponticus, in the late 4th century, told how acedia attacks the monk about the fourth hour until the eighth hour.  The day seems fifty hours long.  The monk keeps looking out the window to see if anything  better is going on.  The noonday demon begins to instil in the monk a hatred of the place and of everything else.  He becomes very critical of his brethren.  Do not risk annoying or irritating the monk at this time.  He starts to ask himself about the possibilities of getting out of here, and doing much better somewhere else. 

In our time, life and culture, among normal, reasonably well functioning Christian believers, acedia is indeed the lurking noonday demon.  That statement may be a mystery to some --  but to some of our important teachers such as Kathleen Norris acedia is an old friend and adversary.  It is the sense that life and faith, to say nothing of daily tasks and relationships, should be better but aren't.  And aren't getting any better.  Worship and tedium go hand in hand, along with the forbidden question: What's it all for anyway?  The one thing they can't abide is Christian triumphalism, pompous dogmatists, glib solvers of problems. 

This demon is confronted and exorcised by simplicity and attention.  I would like to have more to say about this next week.  But the monk afflicted by acedia went back to his basket-making and to his discipline of prayer.  The demon does not like that one little bit.  It is like returning to the mantra from distraction.  St Benedict told his brothers and sisters, Prefer nothing whatever to Christ.  Simplicity and attention for us means very simply disciplined silence and stillness -- the space in which, as the days and years go by, we consent to the simplifying of life and possessions, to grateful and awed awareness of the love we know, and to the shrinking of the ego, preferring nothing whatever to Christ. 

What comes to the world through Jesus – 1.11.13

Contemplative life and prayer for Christian believers, part of which is what we call Christian Meditation, is very much a matter of finding anew each day, and living, what comes to the world through Jesus.  Although we may sing Tell me the old, old story…, and although there may be something more in that hymn than sentimental nostalgia, the truth is that what comes to the world through Jesus has to be seen afresh and reinterpreted in every age and generation.  What one generation saw is not the same as the following generation sees.   Indeed, some teachers would say that you can’t assume simply on waking up each morning that you know already what it’s about, that your accumulated experience of Jesus and discipleship are going to be just the same today.  Fr Laurence Freeman is one teacher who makes much of Jesus’ question to his disciples, who do you say I am…? 

The truth about Jesus, about God, about faith, hope and love, has to be appropriated afresh, with what St Paul calls the eye of the heart.  This is unsettling to those who need to believe that truth is defined, packaged, sewn up in doctrines – or for that matter, in an inspired Bible.  It shakes the foundations of their secure world.  He comes to us as one unknown, wrote Albert Schweitzer.  Obviously both the church and the Bible bear witness to Jesus – but often as not, that witness is blurred and distorted by centuries of cultural interests and what people at different times find comfortable, as also by plain human error and perversity.  In my lifetime the church has realized that the call of Jesus is equally to women, and changed itself accordingly.  Only two hundred years ago it was the matter of slavery -- some devout Christians were coming to the view that slavery was a sin.  Jesus teaches us as we move along the road.  We discover, crucially, the perils of idolatry – how easy it is to fashion God in our own image.

The contemplative spirit, then, is open by its nature to be taught, unthreatened by change, or by difference.  We expect Jesus to guide us in new ways, to challenge our wrong assumptions, to calm our fears about the storms we encounter.  Jesus reminded Nicodemus, a Pharisee, we are told, a leader of the Jews, yet who was clearly rethinking and changing, and who came to Jesus by night:  The wind blows where it wills.  You hear the sound of it, but don’t know where it has come from or where it is going.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit [John 3:8]

One of the corollaries of this spiritual life is that we are happy to meet contemplative people wherever they are, in other Christian denominations, in other religions or in none.  This is not so much any kind of friendly, generous disposition – it is, as the Psalmist puts it, deep calling to deep [Psalm 42:7].  We recognize someone else living not by the need for safety and security, as by the wind that blows on us – both inside and outside the paddocks, said James K Baxter -- the spirit we are finding daily reaffirmed and renewed in Christ, in our hearts and thoughts, and in our stillness and silence. 

This our brother – 25 October 2013

John Knox was one of the great protestant reformers, along with Luther, Calvin, Zwingli – and in England, Thomas Cranmer and many others.  Those were fierce and robust years.  Right was right and wrong was wrong – and wrong, often as not, was requited with hideous penalties.  Yet, there were some issues they saw through the eyes of Christ, and in the middle of it all, John Knox wrote in the Book of Common Order for the Scottish Church, 1564, an order of worship for The Reception Again of a Forgiven Offender.  I will read it to you.

Reception back into the congregation of a forgiven offender

[From Knox’s Book of Common Order, 1564]

The Minister says to the congregation:

If we consider his fall and sin in him only, without having consideration of ourselves and of our own corruption, we shall profit nothing, for so shall we but despise our brother and flatter ourselves;   but if we shall earnestly consider what nature we bear, what corruption lurketh in it, how prone and ready every one of us is to such and greater impiety, then shall we in the sin of this our brother accuse and condemn our own sins, in his fall we shall consider and lament our sinful nature, also we shall join our repentance, tears and prayers with him and his, knowing that no flesh can be justified before God’s presence, if judgement proceed without mercy.

The Minister then turns to the penitent and says:

You have heard also the affection and care of the church towards you, their penitent brother, notwithstanding your grievous fall, to wit, that we all here present join our sins with your sin;  we all repute and esteem your fall to be our own;  we accuse ourselves no less than we accuse you;  now, finally, we join our prayers with yours, that we and you may obtain  mercy, and that by means of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Minister addresses the congregation again:

Now it only resteth that ye remit and forget all offences which ye have conceived heretofore by the sin and fall of this our brother;  accept and embrace him as a member of Christ’s body;  let no one take upon him to reproach or accuse him for any offences that before this hour he hath committed.

I really would not expect anyone outside the church to understand this.  But we do expect professed Christian believers within the church to understand and follow it.  It is our gospel.  To contemplative Christians it is simply instinctive truth.  It follows from all we encounter in Christ.  In his company our charism is understanding, mercy and love.

Pay attention – 18 October 2013

The New Testament scriptures have quite a lot to say about people of faith being awake.  Whether it’s the story of the foolish bridesmaids who were half asleep and not ready when the bridegroom showed up, or the brisk warnings in the apocalyptic passages about being alert and ready – scripture does not really permit us to hang around in a dozy frame of mind, in a comfortable religion, needing only to be spiritually entertained and mildly stimulated. 

This is certainly reflected in our practice of Christian Meditation.  As soon as we are tempted to think that this is a pleasant and welcome time of relaxation and rest, we are reminded that the point of the stillness and the silence is to facilitate attention.  We are not in a trance or a reverie – we are awake and paying attention.  Having said that, I think it does need to be added, as a simple practicality, that meditation is difficult to the point of serious distraction if one is seriously overtired or unwell, unable to stay awake. 

We pay attention to the mantra, not to analyse it, not to think about it, but as a point of focus.  It is what we return to from wandering away, a kind of personal beacon.  Jesus in the Beatitudes said that the pure in heart are blessed.  He is not talking here about moral purity, but about singleness of attention.  Purity of heart, said Kierkegaard, is to will one thing.  We are still and silent in the still and silent presence of God.  So with God we are sharing a common language.  All our chatter and all our fine intentions are stilled for the time being.  Our attention is to the gentle repetition of the mantra – and in that space, intermittent as it may be, but the best we can manage at the moment, God is able to teach us and change us, and we consent to that.  I am reminded of the words of St John of the Cross at the start of his great poem, The Dark Night -- …my house being now all stilled.

This level of attention is difficult, because we normally don’t live that way.  We make a virtue of being pulled in various ways at once, multi-tasking, we call it being busy and involved.  I saw a TV clip about the need to turn off your mobile phones in a cinema, and one youth said there was no way he would do that.  He absolutely had to remain in touch with all his clamorous world.  He might miss something.  Someone might try to get me and think I’m dead or something, he said.  Something might happen and he wouldn’t know about it.

I think it is difficult also because it is a kind of poverty.  Meditation is done with empty hands.  We are not relying on our store of knowledge or wisdom.  It is not some device or strategy for getting what we want or need.  The mantra is all we have, and our choice to pay attention to it at this time at the expense of all else.  And so, back in the Beatitudes, there is a strange resonance not only with purity of heart, but also with Jesus’s mention of the poor in spirit – theirs is the kingdom of heaven;  those who hunger and thirst for righteousness – they will be filled;  the pure in heart – they will see God.

Having faith – 11 October 2013

Diarmid MacCullogh is a historian, a church historian, a very great scholar, an Oxford don and the recipient of many academic honours, ordained deacon in the Church of England, last year knighted by the Queen.  When the time came for him to be made a priest, his homosexuality was seen as a problem, and Dr MacCullogh said: I was brought up to be truthful, and truth has always mattered to me. The Church couldn't cope and so we parted company. It was a miserable experience.  He now describes himself as a candid friend of Christianity. 

I mention all this because MacCullogh’s most recent book is an amazing work about silence in the history of the Christian faith.[1]  He describes how, from the outset, the church has generally tended to be a noisy and busy thing, from the trumpets and panoply of Westminster Abbey to the yelling choirs of Fiji or the loud dogmatic preaching so much admired in numerous places.  Through it all however, down the years, has always been another stream.  For a myriad of reasons many people of faith have had to walk a more silent path.  MacCullogh calls them Nicodemists, after the man who came to Jesus by night.  I don’t have time to go into this in detail, but it is as well to be aware of a stream of faith which is more hidden and quieter, not always orthodox. 

Of course there may be those who live their faith in silence or invisibility because they have something to hide.  But here we are talking more of the many whose journey, whatever they may have wished, has distanced them from the church’s familiar sounds and sights, and activisms.  They express their faith inwardly – some might say, selfishly – and typically with more doubts and hesitations than would normally be considered decent. There is a mature faith which looks not so much for inspiration and encouragement, nor for constant reassurance, as for a subtle inner consent and a cordial but humble acceptance of mystery.  These are the silent people in the church, and on the outskirts of the church.  Some of them like me are at an advanced age and of a crotchety disposition. 

I think the real point here is that faith, however it is lived and expressed, needs by its nature to keep growing and developing.  It is necessary to set aside whatever stunts that growth.  St Paul wrote about this quite clearly.  The church is not always helpful.  Simone Weil feared the church as a social structure.  Actually the church can’t help much with the journey of contemplative life and prayer, and it’s hardly fair to expect that it should.  It is what Robert Frost called the road less traveled.  There is much silence along it, and perhaps much solitude.  And yet, it contains the wisdom the structural, institutional church will need from now on if it is to live and grow.

---

[1] Diarmaid MacCullogh: Silence, A Christian History (Allen Lane, 2013).

 

Returning – 4 October 2013

The rhythm of the mantra, that is to say, the simple discipline of gently, interiorly, repeating the mantra – and then, finding that we have strayed from it, that we have got distracted -- and therefore gently and simply returning to it…  this is at the heart of Christian Meditation.  It is actually all we do.  To some this seems altogether too naïve to be true.  It’s not even meritorious.  There is no formula for success. Sometimes people think we ought to help things along by lighting candles, playing reverential music, reading some inspiring thoughts, to give the impression that we’ve done something. But like the treasure hidden in the field, this is the whole point of taking time in our busy and important lives to stop all that, to be still and silent.  We shut down our family lives, our business lives, our religious lives, and even our personal lives.  They will all be there when we’ve finished.  And in that silence, in which the only landmark is the mantra, returning to it is the point.  Someone complained to Fr Thomas Keating, My 30 minutes of meditation was useless.  I was distracted 10,000 times.  And he said, How wonderful.  You had 10,000 opportunities to come back.

Coming back means that we have reset our priorities for the moment.  All the important things, the things we have to control, the things we believe depend on us, the agenda of things to do today, we have chosen to set aside for the moment.  For now, we do not admit them to our presence where God is present.  That’s the easy part.  As we know, the minute we have made a start on that, choosing the mantra, the mind gets seriously anxious and fills up the space with memories and regrets, ancient and modern – and if all that fails, along come the thoughts (as Jesus said) about what we will eat and drink, and how we will be clothed.  Every time, returning is the thing that counts. 

It’s a very biblical concept.  The Hebrew word return is “shub” שוב, which connotes coming back to where we always belonged.  In quietness and trust will be your strength, writes Isaiah [30:15], in returning and rest will you be saved. The Greek word is “metanoia” μετανοια, and it means turning right around.  Jesus’s story of the prodigal son hinges on the fact that the young man decided, I will get up and go to my father… a picture movingly and forever depicted by Rembrandt in The Return of the Prodigal. 

Meditators and all contemplative people come to know a place which is almost impossible to talk about.  It is what would remain if everything else disappeared.  It is good because it doesn’t depend on us.  We glimpse what is meant by the narrow gate and the eye of the needle – we come back to this place repeatedly with empty hands but a full heart.  And it is the mantra that points the way. 

The mantra – 27 September 2013

Having and using a mantra in prayer probably strikes most church people as very strange indeed.  We have never heard our parish ministers use that word, at least approvingly.  It sounds very “eastern”.  It evokes pictures of Tibetan lamas mindlessly droning guttural sounds – or spinning prayer wheels which mechanically say their prayers for them.

But we do teach the use of a mantra in Christian Meditation.  We point out that there is nothing new about this.  The Desert Fathers and Mothers prayed this way.  John Cassian, who taught St Benedict, taught him the use of a mantra.  The writer of the well-known Cloud of Unknowing very specifically advocates praying what he calls a word, a mantra.  Having said that, we also point out that it’s not in any sense a rule or a requirement or a prescription.  True contemplative prayer happens also without a mantra – and indeed Fr Thomas Keating and the followers of what is called Centering Prayer teach that the mantra may eventually disappear into the silence of simply being present to God as God is present to us.  Here are some notes I wrote for a seminar a few months ago: 

Meditators find it important to understand the reason and the way we use the mantra.  We choose our own mantra.  It can be a word, probably a biblical word, or a simple rhythmical phrase.  We have a saying that you change your mantra only once.  That is to say, if you feel you want to change it at all.  Then it is wedded to you. 

Over the days and months and years of contemplative life and prayer it becomes something vital in your life.  We don’t discuss our mantra with others, let alone swap, compare or recommend mantras.  I can tell you that many meditators settle on the biblical word Maranatha. because it is a biblical word, it is Aramaic which is the language Jesus spoke, it means Come, Lord – and it is rhythmical, it can be said in four syllables: Ma-ra-na-tha.  But also, plenty of meditators use some other word or phrase.

In the stillness and silence we gently, inwardly, recite our mantra from the beginning to the end of the time.  Some do this in tune with their breathing, some not.  And that is all we do.  When we realize we have been distracted away from the mantra, we simply and gently return to it.  This returning is very important, as we come to understand.  We return to the mantra gently and without any sense of failure or guilt. 

We do not think about the meaning of our word or phrase.  It may have a very spiritual and uplifting connotation, it may evoke all sorts of memories and associations for us, but that is not the point right now.  All we have to do is gently, interiorly, recite it.  Eventually we find it is coming not so much from our wills and minds as from our hearts.  And then one day we may find it is not so much that we are reciting it, as that we are listening to it coming to us from some very deep place.

Peace I leave with you – 20 September 2013

Peace I leave with you, said Jesus.  Perhaps it’s time to go over yet again basic things we have said often in the past – fundamentals about Christian Meditation and how we understand contemplative prayer and life.  Most people come to meditation from busy and involved lives.  Some levels of tiredness and anxiety typically accompany us into the meditation room.  A lot of meditators initially come because of the opportunity for a blessed respite, silence and stillness, maybe half an hour without the clamour of tasks and responsibilities, the extraordinary gift of 20-30 minutes of silence.  I know people who are unable to sit down and read a book without feeling guilty.  Actual permission, then, to be still is valued and even treasured.

But it’s more than that.  “Peace” in Jewish language and culture is shalom.  It is more than the absence of noise or bustle.  It is more than the absence of conflict.  Shalom is a positive, active thing.  It denotes a state of rightness, being on the right path.  Inevitably there is ageing and suffering, pain and death, but we remain in touch with hope and truth, love and goodness.  The real enemies of shalom are, for instance, constant eroding anxiety – in this same word Jesus says, let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.  Fear and shalom can scarcely go together.  Preoccupation with agendas, and with control, and with what others are doing, obsession with particular things, addictions – all these thrive in the absence of shalom. 

It is important to note that Jesus sees shalom as a gift.  It is what he leaves with his disciples.  They do not generate it within themselves, by self-improvement programmes or by cutting out carbohydrates.  We come to shalom as we learn to be still and silent, consent to set aside what is unhelpful.  Shalom is the life of what Jesus called the kingdom, and he said the kingdom is always near, imminent, even within you. 

I sometimes feel that the hardest thing, the sharpest enemy of shalom, is the prevailing fact of injustice in the world, seemingly everywhere, and often very close.  An unfair world -- which of course, were we able, we would order quite differently…  But Jesus also experienced this unjust world.  He taught a shalom which is at the level of our hearts and all that inwardly motivates us.  Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.  Jesus’s gift of shalom is not contingent on everything else first coming right.  Before it is a matter of doing things and changing the world, it is a matter of being, of receiving, of deep and steady inner change. 

Monte Oliveto – 13 September 2013

(As a welcome respite from my words, here is an article from my own Benedictine tradition, by Fr Laurence Freeman, written for “Tablet”.)

In the dry heavy heat of a Tuscan afternoon the bus drops off retreatants, from several continents. They now have to walk carefully down a steep path toward the guest house and monastery.  The path is a parable, made of narrow, ancient terracotta bricks, many crumbling, missing or replaced with new ones. . . Even as they watch their step down the beaten path they see the views over the wooded valleys and breathe in the pungent scent of ginestra. They are also worried about their bags, wondering what their rooms and food will be like. But they are already forgetting London, Houston, Singapore and Geneva and, to their surprise they have already begun to feel at home. They have arrived.

I have seen this for 25 years now, the reactions of those coming for the first time to the annual silent Christian meditation retreat at Monte Oliveto Maggiore, the mother-house of the Olivetan Benedictine congregation. The sheer physical beauty of the place, just south of Siena, is disturbing at first, like being introduced to a very beautiful person. The peaceful is-ness, the self-confidence of the place and the at-homeness of the white habited monks who live here becomes more amazing as you get used to it. There are not many places in the modern world where there is such a combined sense of stability, harmony and hospitality. Your first thought might be that it is so much of a home to someone else that you are condemned to being an outsider. But it proves to be one of those rare places with the grace of making everyone feel at home –meaning you feel you can let go, be yourself, remember who you are.

In an age of religious fundamentalism it is enlightening to find a deeply religious environment, which welcomes people of diverse views and cultures. That does not immediately pounce on differences or apply labels of approval or exclusion. That does not harshly judge and condemn or acquit in the name of Christ or Allah or Yahweh. I guess it is this, the friendship of the body with the mind in an environment of natural beauty, the wondrous friendship found in contemplation with strangers, the being together in a living stream of tradition that has not been dammed and gone stagnant, that makes people feel at home.

God, as Aelred of Rievaulx bravely said, is not only love. God is friendship, with oneself, others and the environment. Those who are not in friendship can know nothing of God - even, and especially, in the most heartless certainty of the religious fundamentalist that they are defending God against his enemies. The anxious homelessness that characterizes our fragmented society, however, has engendered a contemplative homing instinct even deeper than fundamentalism. In a place like this, the homing instinct for God intensifies among human warmth, tolerance, hospitality and gentle religion. It is part of the spiritual search of our time to long for such a feeling of connexion and mutual trust, for a religion that nurtures community rather than division. And perhaps it is this inclusive, catholic sense of being at home with difference that is the meaning of the real presence.

When Bernardo Tolomei, a rich Sienese nobleman came here to seek God 700 years ago he was abandoning a comfortable home for what was then a dangerous wilderness. He lived in prayerful solitude and when companions joined him, adopted the Rule of St Benedict. St Catherine of Siena, a Joan Chittister of her day, berated him, as she lambasted bishops and clergy for their lukewarmness, for accepting too many monks from wealthy families, and he obediently widened his vocation base. . . .When plague struck Siena he left his new contemplative home and returned to care for the dying in his old city where he too soon fell sick and died. The cycle of his journey shows that the peaceful sense of being at home is not restricted to one place and that the more you let go of it the more you are at home. If you really are at home with the self in God you will find yourself at home, in peace and compassion, everywhere.

 

Cost of discipleship – 6 September 2013

Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple  [Luke 14:27]. 

All through the years, Jesus’s uncompromising statements about discipleship have seemed to me something of a stumbling block.  Jesus did not live in  the world I live in, our capitalist, consumerist, competitive western society...  He certainly did not experience the realities and compromises of a middle-class suburban parish, to whom I was supposed to teach these things.  First century peasant farmers and fishermen, their wives and families, might be willing and able to leave all and follow him.  It’s more complex for those of us raised with our cynicisms about idealism, and all our self-protective mechanisms.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer could write, When Jesus calls us, he calls us to come and die.  But that was in the desperate circumstances of Nazi Germany, and the very real, very likely lethal questions about who is my Führer, Hitler or Christ...? 

I haven’t read to you the gospel lesson for next Sunday, but when you hear it you will see what I mean.  It is the bit which includes: Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.  And I at any rate choose to state the obvious in reply:  It’s not either/or.  My love for my family is not in competition with my love for God.  As for my love of life...?  It is enhancing my faith.

Well now, having cleared the ground a little, we get down to business... All the teachers of Christian contemplative life and prayer emphasise, one way or another, the basic necessity of consent.  And this is the key to it.  Our stillness and silence are the arena in which, while we are awake and paying attention, we breathe our unconditional Yes to God in Christ.  Surrounded and interrupted by all the distractions, memories, reminders, hopes and anxieties, doubts and regrets, and all our day-dreaming, yet in our discipline we repeatedly return to this consent, this Yes to God.  It has taken priority.  It is certainly not that we “hate” anyone or anything – I don’t know why Jesus said that – perhaps it reflects the desperate choices sometimes needing to be made in the early church under persecution.  It is rather that we have chosen God at the centre, and we are in no doubt or hesitation about that.  We have not waited until all our questions were resolved and our doubts assuaged.  Indeed, we are very well aware that much remains opaque and mysterious, perhaps even more so as time goes by. 

Carrying the cross, it seems to me, is a specially vivid image.  It implies that our consent, being unequivocal, may include adversity, pain and death.  No one in a healthy state of mind wants any of that.  But it is everywhere in our world.  We may, as Dylan Thomas put it, rage against the dying of the light.  We may work day and night to relieve warfare, suffering and disease, and deal with their causes.  But our pathway remains the one Jesus took, no kind of escape or special personal protection, but always deep into life and mortality.    

Lunch and dinner – 30 August 2013

He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbours, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid.  But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” [Luke 14: 12-14]

This gospel is actually quite fun.  Jesus says, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or your rich neighbours, to lunch or dinner.  The reason is that they might reciprocate and invite you to their homes.  But that is precisely what we get up to, and what we think matters.  In this way a lot of people derive pleasure and companionship, and make sure nothing happens they don’t know about.  There are those who love giving hospitality in their homes, and love preparing good food.  Along the way, and maybe after the guests have gone, we sometimes indulge in games of comparison about homes and decor, and food, always in a kindly way of course.  Jesus, undaunted, moves right along:  Make sure instead you invite the crippled, the lame and the blind.  The reason...?  Simply that they can’t repay you.  Well, there are some dangers lurking there I would think, particularly if we are tempted to come over all virtuous or even superior. 

Now, yet again, with these narratives, it is better not to have left our brains and imagination at home.  Mahurangi in 2013 differs in some respects from Galilee in 30 AD.  Who are now the crippled, the lame and the blind...?  In contemplative life and awareness, in the disciplines of silence and stillness, we begin to make friends with our real selves behind our facades and the ways we hope we appear to others.  And we discover that in important respects we are the needy.  At any rate, we come to see that it is simply unsustainable and certainly unsatisfying to regard ourselves as serenely in control, arbiters of taste, management success, or of wisdom.  We have greeted humility, learned and acquired through our experiences, and we have found we were not essentially different from the crippled, the lame and the blind – if maybe for the time being a little more mobile and independent.  Part of humility is also that we found along the way that we often don’t possess answers or even satisfying responses to life’s difficult questions. 

You will be blessed, says Jesus in this gospel.  Can it be that the blessing is simply the gift of being grateful that we have been sustained.  I have learned to be content, writes St Paul, with whatever I have [Phil 4:11].  The Greek word Paul chooses here meaning “content”, αυταρχης, actually has little or nothing to do with how we are feeling.  It means literally “independent, self-sufficient” – on the one hand grateful, on the other hand needing nothing more.  I like to think the joke in this story is that each person at our dinner table is crippled, lame or blind, in some respect at least, just like me, whatever they say.  Isn’t that amazing.  Jesus noticed these things.    

The priority of the donkey – 23 August 2013

^...But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?  And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” [Luke 13:14-16] 

The two ends of religion, any religion, confront each other in this incident.  Jesus heals a woman whose condition, whatever it was – I was raised never to ask a lady what was the matter with her – had her bent double for 18 years.  But Jesus does this on the Sabbath Day.  The leader of the synagogue sees only an offence against the law of the Sabbath.  And he is quite reasonable – there are six days, after all, to line up for healing, so why do it on the Sabbath?  Jesus seems not to mind starting a fight.  He seems actually quite angry.  This is hypocrisy, he says -- these good people never hesitate to lead their ox or donkey out to water on the Sabbath Day.  Evidently some people assume the needs of the ox or the donkey trump the needs of the woman, who of course is supposed to be mainly invisible anyway.    

This debate is without resolution.  Centuries before the time of Jesus, as we read in the Hebrew scriptures, the prophets are confronting the legalists.  Each thinks the other is dangerous for healthy religion.   What God requires, in the words of the Prophet Micah, is that we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly – not that we fulfil some quota of religious observances or moral protocols.  God does not want our burnt offerings if they are not from changed, merciful, loving hearts.  Isaiah 58, for instance, sets it out in pungent prophetic prose.

Let’s always honour the legalists for what they are trying to protect -- order, dignity and decency, their perception of truth.  Jesus’s argument against them was not that they had rules, but that eventually they started giving room to hypocrisy and injustice.  People are prior to the rules.  If the donkey’s needs, rightly, can be attended to on the Sabbath, why can’t the woman’s?  Yes, Jesus is indignant, not only because they would have denied the woman healing because it was the Sabbath, but also because she was a woman and not a man or an animal.  It reminds me of the priority for hot bath water in 18^th century English homes – first the men, then the dogs, then the women, then the servants.  A jolly Saturday bath night when everything was as it should be.  But Jesus dares a special space for women in his society and culture.  It is part of healthy spiritual understanding and practice for those of us who follow his way.   It is not the rules that set life the right way up, but what the Dalai Lama calls the Good Heart.  Our religions meet at their deepest truths.