Saving and losing - Lent II, 27 February 2015

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. [Mark 8:34-35]

In fact, it seems to me, both things are always happening, all through our lives.  I rather wish someone had pointed that out to me about 60 years ago.  Sometimes we are able to set ego aside – at other times we seem to defend it, protect it, feed it, pamper it, proclaim it, advertise it, study ways to enhance and develop it. 

It may seem confusing, however.  Seriously denying myself can be, if you think about it, a very handsome exercise in ego.  “From now on I will devote myself to selfless service… look how humble I am becoming…!”  And as for what Jesus called saving your life, and the modern world calls taking care of Number One – well, God in his goodness has equipped us with necessary aggressive and competitive instincts, self-protection mechanisms, flight reflexes, the capacity for justified ambition and pride, abilities for high achievement and hard work… These are gifts we perhaps should not suppress. 

The contemplative disciple however sees a river of grace running through it all. A vital aspect of prayer is simply our consenting to this process.  It is a process in which the ego, which itself is a gift of God, is losing its priority as time goes by.  The saddest thing about ageing in much of our culture is the way it comes for so many to be seen as an enemy.  Ageing is not for wimps, is one of our current clever clichés – no, ageing is for the wise, for those becoming free to lose their fears.  It is sad when this time gets to be used instead to fight off ageing, to recapture some lost youth or retain control of people and events, to be in despair about wrinkles, to hang on desperately to the form of faith that captured our imaginations 50 years ago, or to join the serried ranks of elderly grizzlers.   The contemplative path is a journey of learning to live by grace… 'Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far and Grace will lead me home. 

The phrases Jesus used, denying oneself / losing one’s life, are not pointing to some mighty decision we make one day, that from now on I will be different.  It is, as our experience teaches us, the process of grace, initiated and energised by God as we learn to be still and silent and welcoming to God’s Spirit.  The ego, which may have served us well in many ways, but not in other ways, becomes steadily more attenuated, perhaps even a source of wry amusement to us, or amazement…  It is being supplanted from within by what St Paul calls simply Spirit, what Jesus in John’s Gospel calls the Spirit of Truth.  St Paul wrote about this to the Corinthians [II Cor. 3:17-18] --

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.  And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being changed into the same image, from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

Wild animals and angels – Lent I, 20 February 2015

He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. (Mark 1:13)

Wild beasts and ministering angels sounds like the way lots of people experience life – perhaps many of us at some time.  Jesus had been baptised by John, and that had been clearly a profound and vivid experience for him.  The narrative in Mark can only be a memory from Jesus himself, told by Jesus, and Mark recorded it years later in these very colourful images.  The Spirit, it says, straight away drove him into the desert – the Greek literally means “threw him out” into the desert.  It is a kind of compulsion some may recognise, when there was something we knew we had to do, and it was as though we had no choice.  Perhaps if that happens it is a moment of grace when we are not for once being driven by our habitual busyness, or by social agenda or tribal convention, or by the need to feed our egos.    

There in the desert he remained for forty days.  “Tempted by Satan” indicates to me a critical inner conflict about what kind of person he was to be from now on.  He was seriously tempted during this time to settle for the wrong choices about being powerful or spectacular, popular, a star, an icon.

He was with the wild beasts, says Mark.  The picture is not that they were threatening or attacking him.  Wild beasts are what is untamed in any of us, what may emerge when we are not safely behind our respectable public persona and firewall mechanisms – our shadow side, normally shut down with the lid on, might appear.  It is something that happens in silence and stillness, when we are listening and attentive.  That is why we sometimes say that meditation is not always comfortable, that sometimes it is hard work.  The Spirit is confronting Jesus with his inner truth.  Our inner truth may not always be the truth we like to hear.  But if it is the truth, it is as well to recognise and acknowledge it.

And the angels waited on him…  In the Greek, the word is ministered, served.  It is a lovely picture of God with one hand instigating pain by the piercing light of personal truth, and with the other hand ministering peace and healing, strength and hope.

It is the whole process of our contemplative prayer and life.  Truth… and healing.  We realise the angels have been ministering when, perhaps at other times altogether than the times of prayer, we discover that our attitudes have shifted, that we reacted untypically in some difficulty, that we are aware of a joy or a hope we hadn’t noticed before, or an acceptance of some limitation or adversity, some fact we can’t change.  The silence – some people run away from it, instinctively, because they sense that there are wild beasts, as it were.  Well there are, and there are angels.

Back to Basics…3 - 13 February 2015

The prayer we practise here, Christian Meditation, belongs to grown-up faith.  But this is a difficult point to talk about, because we are instinctively uncomfortable with making distinctions, let alone value judgements, between the ways different people express their faith, and we don’t sit happily with any kind of elitism or superiority.   Everyone knows some good Christian who loves animals but whose attitudes to people who are different range from fearful to ferocious.  Everyone knows some devoted Christian who prays to some strange god who miraculously finds her a parking space.  Everyone knows the moment when we asked the god of miraculous interventions to make some special rescue, to heal or to keep safe, while knowing that human peril and human mortality remained the same for everyone else on the planet. 

Grown-up faith has begun when we have grasped what both Jesus and the New Testament writers have said about fear.  Why are you afraid?...asked Jesus.  Love casts out fear, writes St John.  Fear of the future, fear of risk, fear of pain, of ageing, of dependence, of mortality…  This fear seems all very human, realistic and necessary.  A lot of it was instilled into us in our earliest years, parent recordings we call them, by those who naturally wanted to keep us from harm.  But you can’t protect people from life and death.  Life is dangerous to health.  We observe that money and lifestyle are little if any protection.  There may not be some sublime celestial plan for my life.  It may actually be up to me.  God made it and I live it.

And so, in the stillness and silence we are not building up protective walls – on the contrary, if anything, we are opening the doors.  We are not accumulating knowledge and knowhow – on the contrary, we are opening ourselves to wisdom, which is another matter, to an ever new relationship with God, to a fresh – and oddly, even a childlike, as Jesus said -- perception of Jesus and his teaching.  We are not strengthening our defences against evil or finding ways to feel better – on the contrary, we begin to recognise the joy that lies at the heart of pain, and our essential oneness with people in pain for any reason.

Contemplative prayer is a very basic Yes to God.  It is a Yes at the deepest levels we know.  It is not any kind of conditional Yes…If… or Yes…But... or Yes…And…   It is the Yes of love and finality.  Prudent legal documents have lovely Latin phrases indicating all manner of provisos and precautions.  None of that is in our prayer.  Our prayer is unconditional, because along the way we have laid aside our fears of what might happen.  Perhaps more likely, we have discovered that these fears were removed from us anyway.  It has become grown-up prayer, a prayer of freedom.

Back to Basics…2 – 6 February 2015

Our time and culture place huge importance on results, on value for money, on attainable goals and measurable outcomes, on clear and often instant gratification.   People often come to Christian Meditation for the first time hoping to see good effects, to become happier, or to cope better.  It seems reasonable to expect results.  Even if life is going on quite well – “Not a problem…,” as my optometrist says every second sentence – we are still inclined to assume that the investment of significant time in Christian Meditation will carry some dividend. 

We are brought up and encouraged to believe that activity is both virtuous and productive.  It is important to be busy.  Our prayer however depends on coming to a stop for a while.  Our breathing and our heart rate return to their default position – that is to say, what we require to be sitting comfortably and paying attention.  To do this we put in place the mantra we have chosen.  It is a simple word or phrase.  It is there, and to it we constantly return.   We need to give ourselves permission to be still and silent, because it is not something we normally do.  Devotees of much more active forms of prayer sometimes wonder what on earth we think we’re up to.  Some ask if we are a little unhinged.  I can think of one or two who gave a shudder and said, Oh, I could never do that.  They may be right.  They take the view that reward comes from work and worthy activism.  This is deeply implanted and deeply assumed.  

But for all that, we know that a discipline of contemplative prayer actually makes a profound difference.  The classic reply of teachers when someone asks, What do I get out of it? – is, if we must look for results, we should look for them in our capacity to love and understand, our capacity for compassion, in a reduced willingness to pass judgement.  If you press experienced meditators on this sort of thing, you will get eventually stories of how they found their reactions to someone or some difficulty had changed, or how some poisonous memory had lost its sting, or how they had seen a way through addiction, or through grief, or through handicap.  You may hear how life had opened up in some unexpected way.  I think of Matheson’s phrase about Joy, that seekest me through pain – something that becomes comprehensible to us when we have become friends with silence and stillness and deep inner consent to God.

Openness to God is inevitably openness to the pain and injustice of God’s world.  Our inner and the vast outer worlds are inseparable.  Contemplative prayer and life means the end of using religion as a personal comfort blanket and insurance against bad things happening.  As we know, we live with the permanent and ancient dilemma, that there seems little we can do in any practical sense to heal the world, end the violence, save the children.  Many good people live a lifetime of brilliant service – and the world goes on to behave as savagely as ever.  But as Jesus taught, our task is to fulfil the law by love.  Our role is to be sure we live justly, love mercy and walk humbly, in Robert Frost’s words, this is the road less travelled. 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.