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.