What we do not see – 31 May 2015

For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. [Romans 8:24-25]

But hope doesn’t seem nearly enough, for many people.  It is much more reassuring to have certainty, clarity, definitions.  “Don’t you know what you believe?” asked a parishioner once, when I may have been getting a little too oblique or poetic for her taste.  People have abandoned the church because it can’t give assurances.  Others walk out because the church they encountered was altogether too confident and dogmatic about mysteries and large questions about life and death.

St Paul’s world was every bit as hostile as ours.  Disease, violence, widespread injustice, dispossession, unbridgeable gulfs between rich and poor, slavery, constant uncertainty.   I imagine the main difference between Paul’s world and ours is that we have much more efficient means of killing people.   Our world would not have been foreign to him in its evil. 

Hope – St Paul’s word -- normally means some nice blending of what we would like and what we expect.  We hope that what we would like and what we realistically expect are the same.  Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield lived in hope of something turning up, especially something of a pecuniary nature.  I hope Christ’s Church will one day be united, and be a light to the world.  Paul says we hope for what we do not see.  I hope for a better distribution of wealth in New Zealand.  I hope succeeding generations are not going to be battling more and more extreme weather and natural disaster.  That’s more or less what we mean by hope.

I think St Paul meant more than that.  The way he writes of hope and the way he writes of faith are pretty well indistinguishable, so far as I can see.  The fact that both hope and faith are grounded in Christ, crucified and risen – and not just in “hoping against hope” – is precisely the point.  What we don’t see, we may see by the eye of faith.  What we hope for is already happening in us, in our hearts, in our best longings, because we are changing.  Even our despair, at times, happens precisely because we know the better and we aren’t seeing it right now from where we are.

So, says St Paul, we wait for it with patience.  Contemplative people learn how to wait.  A sign of mature discipleship is the ability and the willingness to live and love amid what is probably, usually, predictably, anything but perfect.  I would add that a sense of humour helps, and a strong sense of the ridiculous – maybe St Paul knew that too, but I assume he forgot to say so.  Waiting with patience is totally contemplative, it is the absolute precondition of wisdom – and perhaps even seeing, fleeting, in the distance, a glimpse of God’s love and truth coming to fulfilment, a New Jerusalem.

The Spirit intercedes – Pentecost, 22 May 2015

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. [Romans 8:26-27]

Pentecost Sunday presents us with language and concepts just like that -- Christian truths difficult to talk about clearly.  Age, experience, and perhaps even wisdom, have led us away from wild excitements and enthusiasms about the experience of God’s Spirit, the Spirit of the Risen Lord.  St Paul is really quite suspicious of signs and wonders, extravagant claims, tongues and prophecies, miracles and healings, and talk of power and might and charismatic personalities.  In John’s Gospel Jesus tells Nicodemus that the Spirit is like the wind; you don’t know where it has come from or where it is going.  In this text from St Paul we find the Spirit’s presence described as sighs too deep for words.  Clearly it’s better to be humble and reticent and receptive, and listen a bit.

God searches the heart, Paul reminds us.  So, in prayer there is actually nowhere to hide.  Whatever facades we may normally adopt, stories and excuses, life-styles and images, are pretty useless here because they are not what God sees.  Our hearts are being read instead with love and mercy and understanding.  God is seeing all the aspects of us which we ourselves entirely miss or ignore or deny.  Prayer deals with truth. 

This passage from St Paul is about praying.  He says we don’t know how to pray as we ought.  It always seems to me, when we get some great Christian occasion of worship – a funeral in Westminster Abbey, a solemn commemoration following some tragic disaster, or the simplicity of Christmas Eve in some great church, for instance – that we get beautifully crafted prayers in noble, rhythmic English, sonorously delivered and often very moving.  When I write prayers, which is seldom these days, I think they say more about Ross Miller than about the yearnings of creation.  But this is the value of silence and stillness.  All of that, whatever its value, along with far more noisy charismatic occasions, is set to one side.  The point is what St Paul said:  The Spirit is reading our hearts and is already praying the prayer of our hearts, which is at another level than our best words and concepts and images.  The Spirit is doing this for us and in us. 

It is not magic, it is not spooky or even specially mysterious.  Good things start to happen, which couldn’t happen before, once we decide to be still and silent.  Precisely what Jesus promised, another “Advocate” – Paraclete [παρακλητος], the counsellor who stands alongside you and knows you and speaks for you – comes and makes prayer possible to us in what St Paul calls our weakness. 

Nothing harsh, nothing burdensome – 15.05.2015

St Benedict wrote a Prologue to his Rule, and here are a couple of sentences from the Prologue…

Therefore we intend to establish a school for the Lord’s service.  In drawing up its regulations, we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome.  The good of all concerned, however, may prompt us to a little strictness in order to amend faults and to safeguard love.  Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away…

This is so Benedictine, and it helps to have a sense of humour…  Nothing harsh, nothing burdensome… but… a little strictness, to amend faults and to safeguard love.   Benedict’s pathway is gentle.  We keep saying this, because it is not what people expect.  The expectation so often is that if it is going to be good for you it must taste bad, if it tastes good it must be bad for you, if it has cost an arm and a leg it must be the best, if it hurts it must be healing, there is no gain without pain.  Jesus said, My yoke is easy and my burden is light.  Benedict’s way is the gentle enticement of love.  There is always provision along this road for return and rest and a fresh start.  There is always understanding of human frailty and fallibility, and the need to avoid passing judgement on people. 

At the same time we have a little strictness.  There are some things a disciple of Christ needs to know.  It is pointless to have disciplines, however simple, if they get set aside.  One key factor here, especially for our day and age, is that feelings and emotions and personal inclinations no longer decide everything for me.  This is unintelligible to many people.  How I am feeling at the moment may be important to note, but in the silence and disciplines of this journey it is determining less and less what I choose and what I think.  Benedict says that this strictness is to amend faults and to safeguard love.  And that is exactly what happens, along the way – not because we are gritting our teeth and making it happen, but because in contemplative life and prayer we are discovering that we can be still and consenting and allowing God to do it in us.   A little strictness is always a sign to us that we have a road we are walking by love and faith.

So, he says, Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away.  When oblates come to their full vows eventually, one of the three vows is the commitment to Stability.  Stability means an end to running away, to seeing whether the grass is possibly greener elsewhere.  The principle behind this vow is that God does not have to be sought.  God is not somewhere over the rainbow, or at the end of some arduous pilgrimage.  We are not tracking down the Holy Grail or following our egos to this or that shrine.  We are here, and God is here, and was here before we got here, full of grace and truth.  There is nowhere to run to.  Anywhere I go, what I will have brought when I get there is the same self I am here.  That is the self that is already the subject of unconditional love and mercy.  I am learning always to say YES to that.

Different from the world’s way – 8 May 2015

Your way of acting should be different from the world’s way; the love of Christ must come before all else.  You are not to act in anger or nurse a grudge.  Rid your heart of all deceit.  Never give a hollow greeting of peace or turn away when someone needs your love.  Bind yourself to no oath lest it prove false, but speak the truth with heart and tongue.  [The Rule of St Benedict, ch 4, The Tools for Good Works]

Different from the world’s way…  Well, there are substantial forces around us urging us not to be different.  St Benedict is pointing out that sincere allegiance to Christ will always be different from the world’s ways.  And indeed, what he teaches here is neither more nor less than Jesus taught.  One of the best modern commentators on the Rule of St Benedict is Sister Joan Chittister, and this is what she has to say:  Dissimulation, half-answers, vindictive attitudes, a false presentation of self are all barbs in the soul…   She points out that Benedict is addressing now our culture which has made crafty packaging a high art.  Life with Christ and in his community, she says, has something to do with being who we say we are, claiming our truths, opening our hearts, giving ourselves to the other pure and unglossed.

Always in our decisions and choices there is the question of priority and what is not negotiable.  The love of Christ must come before all else, says Benedict.  This love is expressed by our living as he taught.  It may be erratic, of course; we may not have a high opinion of ourselves at times – indeed, it’s preferable if we don’t.  But even our sense of coming short evidences that in our hearts is the will to prefer Christ, as Benedict puts it in another place.  It is the heart that God sees.

You are not to act in anger or nurse a grudge.  Notice that he is not saying anger is wrong.  He is talking about how we act towards others.  In the contemplative life nursing grudges is going to bring everything to a halt.

Then there is deceit…  Rid your heart of all deceit.  Never give a hollow greeting of peace or turn away when someone needs your love.  Bind yourself to no oath lest it prove false, but speak the truth with heart and tongue.  As we know, the hollow greeting of peace is quite common.  Turning away from someone in need…  Speaking the truth must be with heart as well as tongue, says Benedict.  It doesn’t mean beating someone over the head with what we perceive to be the truth or the facts – it means first encountering the truth in our own hearts and understanding as well as we can, even if we actually say nothing.  In the contemplative life we learn how it is not necessary always to react in words to everything we see or hear. 

Benedict’s main point here is the difference – different from the world’s way.  It is not that we are superior, it is not elitism.  It is simply a preference for Christ.

No fear – Easter 5, 1 May 2015

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. [I John 4:18]

Fear has to do with punishment…  Guilt and fear go together.  But guilt, fear and punishment are among the foundation assumptions of our secular culture – and also, I fear (!), quite a bit of our Christian version of it.  It seems logical and just to people that offenders be caught and punished proportionately to their offence.  When victims complain that they have not got justice, what they usually mean is that the offender has not been sufficiently punished, named and shamed.  Fear is seen as necessary if you are guilty.  Threats of revenge, payback, are meant to instil fear.  The frequent cliché is that people who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear.

But it’s deeper than all that.  God is seen as exacting retribution, making us pay for our sins, real or imagined.  Someone upon whom calamity has fallen asks what they did wrong.  A child harmed is always somehow an “innocent” child, as though that was ever the issue, as though it might be better if the child had been wicked.  Never mind that Jesus explicitely damned all this kind of thinking in what we know as the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere, and that his teachings have been read and taught in church for 20 centuries… we still persist in seeing life as a matter of rewards and punishments.  I have conducted funerals in which the deceased was lauded as a kindly old bloke, when in fact, as everyone knew, many to their cost, he was rancid old tyrant whom only God could love.  Once or twice I suggested as much, with results which live in my memory. 

Jesus teaches, St Paul teaches, and here St John teaches, that the Spirit of the Risen Christ brings us day by day, year by year, as we consent, to a life in which love has progressively less room for fear.  Faith is not, and never was, about reward and punishment, divine or otherwise.  The greatest fears, the fear of death, of pain, of separation, of loss, of helplessness, even the fear of shame – we become aware eventually that these fears in us are looming ever smaller.  It is that the ego is being relegated to its proper place, which is not in control.  The ego is learning not to be afraid, not to defend itself so much, not to stand guard all the time.  It is a freedom.  A freedom from fear. 

This is one of the central issues of contemplative life and prayer.  As time goes by, we find we are less interested in control, and we are shedding our fear of guilt, of mortality, of human frailty, of what might happen.  The quiet confidence of love is replacing fear, and we deeply consent to be “in Christ”, in life and in death.