18 December 2015

Advent and two photos - Advent IV, 18 December 2015


I confess that I have little affinity with the prescribed readings for Advent IV.  Mary sings the Magnificat for us, Elizabeth sings the Benedictus, just as the church prescribes.  It’s lovely, it’s familiar, it’s poetic, it is often set to music, and all is well.  All we wait for now is the magic of Christmas Eve.

But as we know, all is not well.  Nothing, not the most sublime Magnificat, makes up for two photos I saw.  The first showed a very small North African child, maybe three years old.  The child is naked, starved and hopelessly dehydrated, kneeling collapsed with head on the ground, drained of all energy.  Behind this child is a vulture, waiting until breathing stops.  I presume the photographer – I hope the photographer – picked the child up and showed some care.  The child was clearly dying.

The other photo was of what they themselves called “An ordinary American family”.  It is their Christmas photo to go out to family and friends, and there they are, all smiling, all clad in Christmas red, with holly and tinsel around.  There are two grandparents, maybe three adult daughters, one son-in-law (it’s not clear who they all are), and four grandchildren.  Each adult is wearing, or carrying, visibly and proudly, a lethal firearm.  Even grandson Jake, aged abut 6, right in the front, is clutching a gun clearly too heavy for him.  That, it seems to me, is child abuse.  The story informs us, It’s up to Americans to protect America – we’re just your ordinary American family.  We are given also a list, an inventory, of the weapons they keep oiled and ready, in their happy hospitable home.  The names of the weapons mean nothing to me, but they certainly sound malign and deadly.   At any rate, it would not be a smart move to enter their home uninvited or unexpected.

I can’t cope with this, and I am seriously out of my depth.  All I can suggest is that we remember that the Christian Christmas festival is about peace and joy.  (And with the debate going on with secularism at present, it is worth remembering that Christmas is a Christian festival, and it is not compulsory…) The best option for Christian believers is not despair, but reality nevertheless.  The world is not as the Warkworth Santa Parade depicts it.  The world of the close of 2015 is a sad and desperate place for millions of people.  Among them are an almost incredible 30% of NZ children officially below the poverty line.  We now know that nothing whatever is resolved by violence – guns, bombing, or the violence of words and attitudes.  Nothing is resolved by closed minds and anger.  Nothing will be resolved by tanks and artillery and blowing people and their homes to smithereens.  Why would anyone ever think it would?

As always in history, it will be people of peaceable hearts, people free within themselves, people of wisdom and quietness, who may know accurately what to do next.  People, that is to say, not frightened all the time, people who have learned to live with difference and colour, mystery and uncertainty.  People not obsessed with their own privileges, comfort and safety.  Some of them will be Christians, some Buddhists, Moslems, Sikhs, Hindus, some of them will be atheists, agnostics, crystal gazers, even some Presbyterians. 

I can’t imagine this sad world will ever be heavily populated by such people, but there will be a few, here and there, and these are the ones we should look to for enlightenment.  Quite a lot of them will be followers of Jesus.  That would be even better.  Meanwhile it is important, where we are, to have a happy Christmas, to bear the pain of the world, and to hear the angels sing. 

Our Warkworth Christian Meditation group is now in recess over Christmas and January.  We will resume, and these postings will resume, on Friday 5 February 2016. 

11 December 2015

Children of Abraham - Advent III, 11 December 2015


Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. [Luke 3:8]

Anyone who has been to Palestine knows that there are stones everywhere.  If you are looking for a strained or broken ankle, that is where to go.  It is a landscape of stones.  In the heart of the cities, in the countryside, among the trees, right beside modern buildings… stones and rubble and dryness prevail. 

Stones figure also everywhere in the literature.  The Judean wilderness is not sand dunes, it is stones.  Jesus was tempted to turn the stones into bread.  On another occasion he prophesied that the holy temple would soon be a heap of stones, which it was.  The people were about to throw stones at the woman caught in adultery – it was a convenient and costless mode of capital punishment.  The government of Israel has just increased the sentences for anyone convicted of throwing stones at the police or the military – but stones are the only ammunition they have, and they are plentiful.  Jacob made one stone his pillow, and dreamt of a ladder to heaven.  Jesus told about seed which fell on stony ground… everyone knew what that meant.  The name of one of his disciples, Peter, in both Aramaic and Greek, means a stone – so Jesus made a pun on it, which soon became a metaphor for an unshakeable and eternal church, built upon a rock.

Stones predominate, and here Jesus presumes to say, You assume you are notable and accepted because of who you are, your natural and spiritual lineage…  Hebrew, Jew, sons and daughters of Abraham, privileged, powerful, pre-eminent, educated, successful, famous, iconic, role-model, born into some ruling caste… with us in our day it could be white, Christian, civilised, decent, democratic, even sang in the choir.  But Jesus presumes to say, God can raise up 100 like you from these stones.  Jesus was not out to win friends and influence people.  It was never a question of who you are.  It was always a question of what you are.  Jewish literature has always known, and written, that God looks on the heart, on the person, on the motives and all the inner struggles, sees, understands and pardons the negatives and failures.

It can never be a matter of status or attainment, wealth or power.  What matters, says Jesus, is fruits worthy of repentance.  We touched on that word repentance last Friday – it does not mean feeling sorry, it means being changed.  It means doing life in the ways God intends -- to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly.  Jesus exemplifies this for us.  The new life of his death and resurrection, mediated to us by the Spirit he promised, makes all things new.  Our practised silence and stillness --  not only when we are actually doing it, but equally at all the other times, whatever we may be doing, our hearts remaining still and receptive -- are an important way in which we are open to God’s Spirit of change. 

If Jesus did indeed say that about Peter being a rock, upon which the church would be built – and plenty of scholars have serious doubts about that – then we might be tempted to think it was an unfortunate analogy.  The image of a rock, solid and unchanging, appeals to many, including parishioners I remember well.  John’s image of the wind is rather more helpful.  Stones…?  God could raise up any number of impeccable and unchangeable believers, cornerstones of the church, no doubt.  But what matters these days is openness to change, to justice, love and mercy… with all the risks pertaining thereto.

04 December 2015

A word from God - Advent II, 4 December 2015


…the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. [Luke 3:1-2]

Every time I have set myself to get the history of this period straight in my mind I have wound up in confusion.  It is impenetrable.  Tiberius never wanted to be emperor, but he was – that should have been quite a good sign, but in fact he was what my mother would have called, “Not very nice at all”… to say the least of it.  And if you ever are tempted to think you belong to a dysfunctional family you should take heart.  These people all emerged from families marked by murder and plots and nepotism – Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, Herod Antipas, Philip, Lysanius, and the High Priests Annas and Caiaphas – represented a coterie of corruption and crime, as toxic a bunch of political unpleasantness as you would find in any age including our own. 

Then, into this climate of fear and oppression comes a word from God.  Most of our contemporary dysfunctional culture would not give two minutes of attention to any alleged word from God.  But in any case it is not as though God somehow intervenes with some news, some instruction, some wisdom, that hadn’t been heard before.  It is more that a prophet, a person disciplined to listen, announces that there is a word from God we need to know.  There are prophets in our day also, and they prophesy in a world environment in many ways strikingly similar – but like John the Baptist they are out on the margins and scarcely noticed, certainly not on the official Christmas card list.

What John the Baptist hears is a message about repentance.  The Greek word Luke chooses is µετανοια (metanoia), and plenty of scholars regard the English word repent or repentance as a serious mistranslation.  John the Baptist was not inviting people to feel sorry for their sins.  God’s word is a command to change, to move into a new life, more accurately to be changed – metanoia means change.  The best response to a world of corruption and violence, lies, injustice and the misuse of power, is to be different from that – as Jesus put it, It shall not be so among you -- within the world, of course, loving and hospitable, but different.  Baptism signifies this entry into the new obedience and response to God and life.

As we know, our culture quite often does not agree that it is OK to be different.  If you are in any way different, you may make some people feel insecure, even angry – but, like any contemplative, you simply and gently be it without needing to justify it.   Christians, all followers of Jesus, have at their best always been at odds with a world scorning to hear any word from God.  Sometimes we join that world, and sometimes we retreat from it.  But never could we feel that our home is in the world of violence and lies, even in our families and among those we love.  Jesus taught us another way.  It entails change at the level of the heart.  That is metanoia.  Benedictines have a vow called conversatio – it means openness to conversion and change by the Spirit of God in Christ, each day.  That is the point of our prayer, Christian Meditation, to be silent and still in what Jesus called the πνευµα, the wind of the Spirit – blowing, as a local prophet, James K Baxter, pointed out, both inside and outside the fences. 

27 November 2015

Being on guard - Advent 1, 27 November 2015


Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man. [Luke 21:34-36]

In one episode of Fawlty Towers, one of the hotel guests dies in his sleep.  Of course, in the morning, when this is discovered by Basil with his unique ineptitude, we get total chaos.  One of the permanent guests, the Major, asks Fawlty, Stabbed, was he…?  No, says Basil, he died in his sleep.  Ah, well, says the Major, you’re off your guard, you see.   

Advent, we are informed in the lectionary, is about being awake, on guard, remaining alert.  It sounds a little tiring to me.  People living in Paris at present might have a better idea what it means to be on guard.  It seems interesting that, according to Jesus, the opposite of being alert and on guard is dissipation, drunkenness and the worries of this life.  So, I am confused.  In our contemporary culture, dissipation and drunkenness are widely seen as an efficient way to forget the worries of this life.  So much so, that the surest and quickest way to have scorn heaped upon you is to say, or even remotely suggest, or even unwittingly hint, that partying and revelling may not be a good and fulfilling life.  It is partly because of the worries of this life – and they are very real – that a culture accumulates useful avenues of dissipation. 

The worries of this life, however, depend on who you are and how you’re placed.  For a refugee family from Syria or Libya, the worries of this life are probably about survival, food, shelter and obtaining a helping hand or two.  For some New Zealanders I can think of, the worries of this life are more likely to flow from being possessed by their possessions – or in other cases simply paying the bills, finding employment, saving for retirement.  Or the worries of this life may be how to keep going in chronic ill health or pain – and we can think of yet others for whom the worries of this life encompass family strife and feuds and ugly memories, and trying to keep at least the illusion of control of life, events and the future.

Jesus suggests here that we can be so preoccupied with ourselves, whether with enjoying ourselves and being entertained, or with our fears about all sorts of things – or more likely, with all the things we have to do -- that we spend our lives missing what God and life are saying.  What actually matters comes from the silence and stillness.  Our very discipline of Christian Meditation teaches that we must be awake and aware and in the present moment.  We teach mindfulness and attention.  The distractions, as we call them, which inevitably come in our meditation are simply an opportunity to return, gently but firmly, to the simplicity of the mantra.  It helps us to continue being fully present and consenting to whatever God may give or change.  If we are on guard, it is against whatever might shift us from life and paying attention.  We are now in a world of frightened people, an ungracious and violent world.  Perhaps it was always so, but now the media leave us in no doubt about it.  It is a time for steadiness and depth and wisdom.  It is still God’s world, and it matters that God’s people know how to be alert and attentive.

20 November 2015

Alpha and Omega - 20 November 2015


I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.  [Revelation 1:8]

What is happening in us, when we come to these regular times of silence and stillness?  We know very well, if we are paying attention, that we are in the presence of God.   But also we rapidly find out that we are very much in the presence of ourselves.  We have all sorts of issues that rise up in the silence and space.  So there is a tension.  But it is a perfectly proper encounter, between me with all my memories and fears and hopes – me as I normally am, in other words, not some religious version of me -- and the Spirit of God in Christ the Creator, Lover and Healer.  In this encounter, I have learned to be still and silent, as well as I can.   This is the rhythm of contemplative life and prayer, the diminishing of the ego – that is to say the Me which is the accretion of all the ways I usually try to be happy and secure -- and the emerging of the true self, original, recognised, known, probably much nicer, welcomed and unconditionally loved. 

Contemplatives have made a discovery.  Two contradictory things can be true together.  I am in the presence of God – I am in the presence of myself.  I am loving – but quite often I am unloving.  I am a person of faith – I am a person also of doubt.  Zen Buddhists know how to express this, in what they call koans, contradictory statements which sound like nonsense to our logical and analytical minds, but which invite us to consider that the truth may not be down that road.  I may interpose that Benedictines also seem typically to love unresolved issues.  A story from the earlier Desert spirituality tells us:  A novice brother asked an Elder, “Father, how do I overcome all these problems?”  The Elder asked, “Son, have you had your breakfast?”  “Yes, Father,” he replied.  “Then wash your plates.”  The sublime and the prosaic come together.  Any contemplative is happy with that.  It is not now a matter of whether God and the world meet with our agreement – merely with our consent.  Consent is what we bring to the silence and the stillness, and all the unresolved issues.

I learned the Greek alphabet in (I think) 1954 – age 19, Greek Stage I, at what was then Auckland University College.  Alpha is the first letter, Omega the last.  That became clear on Day One, rather as they teach pre-schoolers with the alphabet across the top of the blackboard, although not in our case with pictures of elephants and little furry forest creatures.  Then came Homer and Euripides, Plato and Paul the Apostle.  At the same time I embarked on Hebrew, and so ventured into the world of the Jews, and yet another alphabet, and yet other ways of talking about the invisible God whose name was unpronounceable.  It was back then, I now realise, that we began to learn a decent reticence in the ways we talk about a God we can’t even name.  Today in the lesson from the Book of Revelation we read some mystic of the early Christian church under extreme threat and stress and suffering, who describes God as the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.  It is not a description or a definition, it is not a name.  It is a statement of the ineffable and of hope.  It is a reminder of whom we encounter when we calm down, and stop fretting about whether we can believe or not.  It may indicate to us that unconditional love is first and last, whatever its cost, and its cost may be total.  At any rate, the Alpha and the Omega God is not available to be enlisted in our cause against other people.  We are best to be still and silent. 

13 November 2015

Birth pangs - 13 November 2015


When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs. [Mark 13:7-8]

Jesus has a premonition of the imminent destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.  As the disciples are admiring the great stones and the beautiful building, Jesus senses what lies ahead.  In the year 70 CE, Titus and his Roman legionaries raped and pillaged Jerusalem with hideous effect and suffering.  Jesus gives his disciples a kind of apocalyptic check-list -- you’ll find it in Matthew and Luke as well as here in Mark – and it still applies in our day, 20 centuries later.  Wars?  Yes.  Rumours of wars?  Yes.  Earthquakes?  Yes.  Famines?  Yes.  False teachers?  Yes.  Pestilences?  Yes.  Persecution of religious believers?  Yes.  Betrayal within families?  Yes. 

Then he says two things we might find puzzling.  He says all this is just birth pangs – it is the beginning, not the end.  The analogy of birth suggests that the end might be something good.  Secondly he says:  Don’t be afraid.   There are different Greek verbs in use here.  The one Mark chooses actually means, Don’t panic.  It is a time for steadiness and clarity.  Luke has another word which is more like don’t be dismayed, don’t spiral into despair.  But again we are reminded that Jesus, right through his teaching, frequently says, Don’t be afraid… why are you fearful…?  Living in fear is problematic for Christian discipleship.  Love, writes John, casts out fear.  To have become a person of faith and love is to be taking leave of our fear of life and death. 

Nevertheless, anyone in a sane mental state would be alarmed at what the Romans inflicted on people, or what other tyrants have done through history, or what is happening in our day in Syria, in Libya, in parts of Burma, Burundi, Nigeria…  In our recent memory, in Ireland, in Israel and Palestine, in Iraq, in the Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea…  Abominations and atrocities.  We now have whole peoples on the move across Europe, where sometimes they are welcome and sometimes certainly not, rejected and humiliated.  Ancient Christian churches are being cruelly persecuted and hounded.  The never-ending battle against famine and disease has become desperate. 

Don’t be afraid, says Jesus.  I think we are allowed to be slightly concerned.  Perhaps it’s more that it is no longer fear for ourselves.  It is seeing others suffer, especially children… what this evokes, I find, is not so much fear as rage.  Women being stoned to death in Afghanistan, surrounded by sanctimonious and ignorant men…  Convicts in American prisons waiting years to have their sentences of death confirmed, and being clinically drugged to death so that some victim’s family can feel something called closure…  It is barbarism and there is as much of it as in the days of Titus.  Many forms of racism including the mindless poison of anti-semitism are on the rise again. 

As Jesus said once in another place, It shall not be so among you.  We do not live that way.  We choose otherwise.  We choose Christlikeness, and the strength of the Holy Spirit of Christ.  This is our life, and this is our prayer in stillness and silence. 

06 November 2015

Everything she had - 6 November 2015


He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.” [Mark 12:41-44]

Please let’s not sentimentalise this story.  Standing there watching what worshippers give in their offerings is slightly eyebrow-raising, I would have thought.  Moreover, it seems perfectly proper that the rich people should be giving larger sums.  The picture is sullied for me by an early memory of a preacher vividly picturing these rich ones ostentatiously throwing their money into the temple treasury with a clatter, hoping to be noticed.  That misuses the pulpit -- there is not a word to suggest that happened, either here in Mark’s account or in the corresponding narrative in Luke.  They may have made their offerings quietly and decently, as any of us would.  The contrast with the widow, who had only two coins totalling one penny, which she gave -- that is something which might happen in any church on a Sunday morning, unnoticed.  The point is what Jesus said about it: She out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on. 

So, whatever is in this woman’s heart, it has led her recklessly to give all she had.  We would say, I hope, that what is wrong here is her poverty.  No one should be living without the means to buy food and shelter and have personal dignity.  We might even go on to say that the rich Jerusalem temple might have provided her with some help.  Perhaps Jesus and his disciples might have got her some food and shelter – we don’t know what, if anything, anyone did.  I am inclined to take a bleak view of it.  It is not enough to say this wonderful woman’s desperate offering was in fact richer than all the others, which is what I was taught in Sunday school.  The incident depicts a wide social income injustice which remains today.

I think there are two things to be said.  The first is that we don’t know why the woman did this, imprudently to give away all the money she had.  It may be that she thought she had nothing to lose – perhaps she had a superstitious hope that if she did that her luck might change.  Or it may be, as I think Jesus meant, that she was a true worshipper, able to find love and gratitude even in her dire circumstances, and she expressed that in her offering. 

The second thing is what all contemplatives know, or are in process of finding out – we don’t love in instalments.  Spiritual growth means that life is becoming less and less compartmentalised.  There are not gradations of love.  We love or we don’t.  Everything in our journey, one way or another, increasingly aligns us to our love for God and for God’s world.  We give thanks for the possessions we have, as also for life itself, and breath, for friends and lovers, for Kawau Bay and for native wood pigeons (kereru), asparagus and Cadburys Dairy Milk chocolate.  We do not go around saying, “I’ve worked hard for all I have, and it’s mine…”  We have found that all of it, without exception, even when we have very little, we have received.  It is a freedom from ego and ownership, possession and control.  Whatever her actual motives, the woman at the temple treasury is reminding us whom we have to thank.

30 October 2015

Being not far from the kingdom - 30 October 2015


Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and beside him there is no other’; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbour as oneself’ —this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”  When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”  [Mark 12:32-34]

This scribe sounds to me a little condescending.  “You are right, Teacher”.  These days I tend to react negatively when someone informs you, you’re right, or you’re wrong, as though they, or I for that matter, determine such things, or as though they are marking an exam paper.  Truth is not like that.  Truth is usually subtle, nuanced, multi-hued and multi-faceted, and appreciates a little humility.  This scribe informs Jesus that he is quite correct.  It was because Jesus had quoted the Law, the First Commandment in fact – along with a smart addendum about loving your neighbour.  Full marks. 

Then we get to the important bit.  The scribe says that the essence of the Law is a changed heart.  He says this love, loving God and the neighbour, must be with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength.  It must be total and life-defining.  That is more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.  Religious observance is pointless if it does not come from a heart that loves God and loves the neighbour.  It is that insight from the scribe which leads Jesus to say, You are not far from the kingdom of God.

“Not far” is a tantalising thing to say, not least because of the implication that there are some very religious people who are in fact far from the kingdom of God.  The kingdom, said Jesus in another setting, is within you.  It is at the level of your thoughts and wishes and motivations, and in the ways you relate to people, especially people who are different.  A veil gets drawn over this kingdom within if we choose to be unforgiving, or to belittle someone else’s pain, or to pin labels on people and imagine that defines them.  The light of the kingdom is hidden under a tub, as Jesus said, if we live to prefer our own safety or reputation or possessions.  The kingdom is obscured when we religious people erect moral barriers or become unreceptive to human frailty and need, blind to our own error and fallibility. 

The kingdom is at hand when we are still and silent and consenting – at those important moments when we are not by reflex trying to defend ourselves or protect ourselves or explain ourselves or justify ourselves, but simply being present and paying attention, because we remember we are created and answerable, loved and capable of loving.  I think this scribe knew that.  He is stumbling up to the gates of the kingdom, and Jesus sees his good heart. 

23 October 2015

Taking leave of idols - 23 October 2015


The Second Commandment forbids the making, let alone the worshipping of idols.  The commandment is very ancient, and it comes to us from an idolatrous time – nature gods, gods of hills and shrines, gods of fertility and of good luck, gods of sudden murderous rage who needed to be pacified, propitiated.  All these gods exist also in our day in modern dress and are fervently served.  Our age is no less idolatrous than any other age in the human story.

Rowan Williams has his own way of describing this.  He says a secular culture is always facing the threat of paralysing unhappiness and anxiety.  Also, I would add, the terrible menace of being bored.  So we make sure we are replete with idols to meet our needs.  Money of course… idols in themselves are neither good nor bad – it is the worship of them, or dependence upon them, or obsession with them, that is idolatrous.  The Bible does not say money is the root of evil, it says the love of money is the root of many kinds of evil [I Tim 6:10].  Sport, lifestyle, appearance, power… all with some good in themselves easily tip over into idolatry.  Nothing makes people so angry with you as when they sense you are criticising their idols.  Some Christians insist on turning the Bible into an idol, seriously misrepresenting what the Bible actually is, and inflicting huge injury on the church and on truth.  It is called bibliolatry, and it is a subset of idolatry. 

And so in a real sense, for Jews as well as for Christians, spiritual growth and understanding is very much a matter of taking leave of idols – casting them to the moles and the bats, as one Hebrew prophet put it.  The Second Commandment insists that there will be no other God but the unseen God who addresses us through his word.  Visible gods, closer gods, more amenable gods, more exciting gods, even dangerous gods, may seem preferable to this God you can’t see or command or domesticate, demonstrate or prove.  But true faith will always be our response, our Yes, to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God Jesus called Abba, Father.  St Paul wrote that he, Jesus, is the icon, the image, of the invisible God.  All others are idols.

Contemplative prayer then is a simple (but that does not mean easy) matter of choosing to pay our best attention to the God we can’t see or imagine, but whose word comes to us in Christ and through the Bible, and in all the experiences of life.  We choose to take time to be still, silent and deeply consenting.  In the Benedictine tradition it is often pointed out that the very first word in the Rule of St Benedict is “Listen…”  In Latin it is very close to the word “obey”.  It is not that we hear voices, of course – at any rate, I hope not – but that, having as it were set aside our idols, having ceased for the time being to pay attention to them, we are free to attend to God who is ceaselessly attending to us. 

There is a word beyond ourselves.  To be still and silent is to listen and obey. 

16 October 2015

Mature spiritual paths - 16 October 2015


A mention of Richard Rohr last Friday caused a bit of interest.  Fr Richard Rohr is a Franciscan Friar and a significant teacher of Christian spirituality.  His latest book is about the second half of adult life, being a Senior Citizen, and this is something he says… At this stage I no longer have to prove that I or my group is the best, that my ethnicity is superior, that my religion is the only one God loves, or that my role and place in society deserve superior treatment.  I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services…

He says that therefore we turn to giving back to the world something of what we have received.  Well, maybe.  My immediate reaction to how he describes the mature, even elderly half of life is Yes! he’s right, and it’s a kind of liberation which, tragically, some Senior Cits never discover.  For some in the latter part of life it seems necessary to remain anxious, possessive, acquisitive, even dogmatic about religion (for or against).  I am no longer interested in proving the truth of anything much.  That may sound smug.  But it is a time when we are freer, if we choose, to pay attention to wider and intractable issues of understanding and reconciling, and enjoying variety.

Fr Rohr goes on about this time of life:  (Our) God is no longer small, punitive, or tribal…  That’s something to ponder.  God as the Miraculous Finder of Parking Spaces, is a small god, and I would say an idol.  God who sends disease upon alleged sinners, zaps people out of the blue, is a punitive and capricious god, and an idol.  God who loves us best because we follow Jesus and go to church is a tribal god – and yes, an idol. 

We know that we have come within sight of this fruitful time on the journey if we are finding ourselves impatient with old debates, especially wrangles about sexuality which we settled in our own minds long ago.  Debates about Christian orthodoxy became a non-issue once we decided that we are unlikely to be disturbed by you because you are a Moslem, a Buddhist or an Atheist – but very likely to be disturbed by you if you are divisive or unloving, strident or dogmatic.  We have become aware of the God Jesus called Father, whose rain falls on the just and on the unjust – or as one modern writer put it, the scandalous grace that loves not only the morally ambiguous, but even the homophobes and bigots who condemn them.

Then there is the bit that Fr Rohr put in there about… I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services…  I think the important word is preoccupied.  We are not seeking, in the biblical image, to pull down our barns and build greater – I hope.  Yet it is as well to remember that we do remain in the richest 10% of humanity.  Moreover, to a greater or lesser degree we enjoy the degree of comfort we have, the freedom to buy something extra, our life style and possessions and what we can offer to visitors and strangers.  If we can improve it, doubtless we will.   But what preoccupies us more these days is within.  It has to do with the meaning of things, making sense of memory, the example of Jesus, the huge questions of violence, homelessness and tyranny afflicting millions.  Not that we have solutions ready to hand – but it is something to have become people of prayer and quiet wisdom, and to have acquired a modicum of humility.

09 October 2015

Hiding behind religion – 9 October 2015


Thich Nhat Hanh, a well-known Vietnamese Buddhist monk, said one day to Thomas Merton:  We don’t teach meditation to the young monks -- they are not ready for it until they stop slamming doors.  Another teacher, Richard Rohr, cites this in order to show that spiritual practice really does mean and require ongoing change from within.  It is easy to use religious or spiritual profession to present oneself otherwise than we really are.  I imagine we have all done it.  It is even easier, I have to say, once you have clad yourself in a cassock and gown, a surplice or a clerical collar, a mitre or a cope. 

Anthony Trollope in The Warden, the first of his wonderful Barsetshire series, introduces us to the Rev Septimus Harding, who is entirely without guile, a man apparently incapable of pretence or dissimulation.  Trollope’s story tells how such a man scarcely survives in the church, let alone in a devious world.  He would be eaten alive today.  In the saga he is contrasted with his son-in-law, Archdeacon Theophilus Grantly, and with the new Bishop of Barchester, Dr Proudie, to say nothing of the lamentable Mrs Proudie -- and not forgetting his chaplain, the execrable Rev Obadiah Slope – all of whom spend their days plotting how to get what they want and still come up smelling of roses.

We do it more subtly these days… perhaps.  But I have had parishioners who took pride in never changing, or had some heavy investment in refusing to forgive, or in assuming that they were somehow exempt from the clear teachings of Jesus.  As Kierkegaard put it, religious people regard the Sermon on the Mount much as they might set their watches deliberately a little fast, so that although seeming to be late they might still get there on time. 

Contemplative life and prayer is a journey, along which, what we might become in Christ and what we are in fact now come closer and closer together – much as a chemist might add something to a cloudy liquid and as we watch it clears and becomes transparent.  Classical teaching explains the changes in us as the gracious action of God, diminishing the ego -- the ego being the accumulation of our various masks and social strategies and what we do to be accepted; it includes the power of memories over us, our care of self first – and bringing to life the true self, the person God always saw before we were born, and knows and loves.  It is not so much improving us as changing us, finding us, not so much renovation as retrieval or even resurrection. 

And so the young Buddhist monk will have to wait until it dawns on him that his impatience and bad temper, all his emotions and reactions, are not the issue.  Growth means change.  It means discovering how to sit lightly to these things, or even to let go of them and relinquish control, how to avoid taking ourselves so seriously, how to make friends with risk or doubt or mystery – and how to stop slamming doors. 

02 October 2015

A different way to be human – 2 October 2015


N T Wright, who prefers to be called Tom Wright, is a former Bishop of Durham.  Here he is writing about prayer, and this is what he says:  Prayer stands cruciform at the place where the world is in pain, to hold together Jew and Greek and slave and free. To hold together male and female, to hold together a battered and bleeding world and say, "No, there is a different way to be human. 

The sense of real pain and helpless loss felt by millions at the sight of a little boy lying face down, drowned, alone and lifeless on a beach, was pure prayer.  And for most it was entirely without finely crafted words.  Prayer, like the Hebrew Psalms, is at its most real when we are acutely aware of our inadequacy to heal the world.  It is good when we have arrived at a stage of life, or even a time of the day, when whatever may happen to us personally is scarcely the issue – and we are willing to bear in the presence of God whatever pain and sorrow we are seeing and hearing about – when we are free to express our love of our neighbour by asking, in the words of Simone Weil, What are you going through?... and actually needing to hear and understand the reply.

We know in our hearts, from the example of the Book of Psalms for instance, that Christian prayer is bound to be most meaningful at the point of pain.  That sounds gloomy or even dire, but it is true and it matters.  We cannot pray any prayer, even prayers of happiness and thanksgiving, in sanitary and safe isolation from human plight and distress.  Prayer means stepping outside our personal support and comfort systems.  In teaching about spirituality there is a nice Latin name, which I can’t remember, for the state of unconcerned bliss some people seem to hang out for, a foretaste of heaven, a retreat into a cocoon of peace and a sense of private well-being.  You can achieve that indeed by various spiritual ploys in any religion, or none – these techniques work, some teachers have got rich teaching them, but they are not Christian prayer. 

The hidden marker of all this is its humble sense of truth and rightness.  The NT writer to the Hebrews spoke of Jesus, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross [Heb. 12:2], a paradox, but true in experience.   Bishop Tom Wright identifies that in the context of prayer, what he calls cruciform prayer, as St Paul wrote long before, there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all are one in Christ Jesus [Gal. 3:28].  These distinctions are inappropriate and irrelevant in Christian prayer.  It is certainly a different way to be human, says Tom Wright. 

In the silence we practise there are no fences in sight, no high barbed wire to keep us safe, no notices restricting the sacred space to people we approve of.  It is really immaterial whether you are a Moslem, an atheist, or a lapsed Presbyterian.  If we are not ready for such heady exposure, if the thought makes us nervous, then it may be that the discipline of silence itself will slowly bring us this different way of being human.  The people who find silence most difficult are those unable to relinquish the illusion of control in life lest something bad happen, or lest they hear something they don’t want to hear, or learn something that might require change.   Silence and silent consent to God is the trail that leads towards the different way of being human.

25 September 2015

Edified by silence – 25 September 2015


Here is one of the classic episodes from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers:  Abba Theophilus the archbishop came to Scetis one day.  The brethren who were assembled said to Abba Pambo, “Say something to the archbishop so that he may be edified.”  The old man said to them, “If he is not edified by my silence, he will not be edified by my speech.” 

Well you might think that’s a little hard on the archbishop.  Abba Pambo is not going to make even a polite and brief speech of welcome.  Imagine that on a marae.  It would be seen as rude and neglectful.  But in general, bishops were only marginally welcome out in the desert.  Bishops, church leaders, organisers, inspirational motivators, were one part of what the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 3rd and 4th centuries had escaped.  Indeed, there were Desert Fathers who had been themselves bishops, once upon a time.  They fled to the desert to save their faith.  What do you think is the modern equivalent?  Anyway, Abba Pambo is altogether too unimpressed and underwhelmed to be in raptures at the episcopal presence.  Abba Pambo chooses silence.

Contemplatives have their own set of clichés about silence.  Silence is the language of God… for instance.  Or the injunction, Don’t speak unless you can improve the silence…  But these sayings, however clever, are only more or less true.  What is true is that once you have made friends with silence, so that you look forward to it, and are certainly not afraid of a time of stillness, silence, even solitude, there is often a developing impatience with nice speeches and all the warbling on most of us have had to do at times, as we thought it appropriate.  The other end of the spectrum from chosen silence may be seen at Hanmer Springs, the lovely alpine town surrounded by mountains and replete with giant trees – and yet it is thought necessary there, at the height of the tourist seasons, to provide bars, casinos, eating places everywhere with deafening amplified music, lest anyone feel bored or unentertained. 

The archbishop, poor old Theophilus, no doubt had something he wanted to say.  Abba Pambo thinks the archbishop should learn silence, and that in this regard he might be edified by the silence of Pambo and his brothers and sisters at Scetis.   In his book Silence and Honeycakes, Rowan Williams, another perhaps better informed archbishop, writes at length about the Desert tradition – and in one place he contrasts Abba Arsenius, who sat with the Holy Spirit of God in complete silence, with Abba Moses (Moses the Black, he was called, evidently an Ethiopian, and he was famous for having been at one time a highwayman).  Abba Moses was found out in a boat on the Nile with the angels of God and they were all eating honey cakes.  But Abba Moses was part of the same contemplative tradition as Abba Arsenius.  Perhaps on the boat they ate honey cakes silently, but I doubt it.  We have all types, and in contemplative life we have come to cherish the difference between discernment, which is understanding, and discrimination, which divides. 

Silence is more and more, in our kind of world, an essential part of Christian discipline -- for Abbas Arsenius, as equally for Abba Moses.  Silence is something to be learned and practised, and befriended.  Rowan Williams wrote (and he wrote this in the midst of huge turmoil in the Anglican Communion: A church without some quite demanding forms of long-term spiritual discipline – whether in traditional monastic life or not – is a frustrating place to live.  That was a heartfelt comment from a beleaguered archbishop.  He himself knew where the silent springs are to be found, but he grieved for all others, inside the church or not, as we do, who think differences are solved and healed on the level of who wins in argument or conflict.  It is not so.  It is in our hearts, and it is there we are changed and brought to silence.