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.