Walk humbly - 31 July 2015

Walk humbly is the third requirement, says the Prophet Micah. What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. While I still wonder what walking with God actually means, it does seem to be clear that really walking humbly in the world is in one way or another walking with God – I mean, even if you’re an atheist or don’t know what you are. Walking arrogantly, on the other hand, or as the proprietor of all we survey, or as one of the world’s bullies, however religious we may believe we are, is not walking with God. Moreover, I rather suspect that someone who really walks humbly will tend to do justice and to love mercy. Humility, however, as we know, is a very tricky thing. ‘umbleness, Uriah Heep called it in David Copperfield. C S Lewis wrote that humility is not thinking less of yourself – it is thinking of yourself less. That may be one of the keys to it. You can’t be humble if you’re preoccupied with yourself – even if, like Uriah Heep the preoccupation is about how ‘umble you are. Perhaps there are three things to say, and the first follows from C S Lewis’s insight. Thinking of yourself less… One of the evident gifts of contemplative life and prayer is the steady retreat of the ego. This ego is the self which is principally concerned with itself – the ways in which I think I am perceived by others. I am constantly aware of what I believe is my reputation, or my outward appearance, my curriculum vitae (however fictitious). I am constantly checking my safety, my prospects, my plans and agendas, my family which is a credit to me… and the list goes on for ever. Behind and below and beyond all this is the self God sees and knows and loves, and created, the true self -- and in the silence and stillness we practise it is as though it is able steadily to emerge. That self is humble and grateful. Above all, in this process of grace, an inhabitant of 2015 might say, we get over ourselves. Walking humbly with God means an end to defending and promoting ourselves. The second point about humility is that it is a gift. It is not something we can ever generate within ourselves. The gift is from God, and it implies our willingness to be still and receive it cordially and gratefully. It is expressed beautifully in the opening verses of Psalm 42, picturing the vulnerable, spindly-legged deer coming to drink at the river: As the deer thirsts for water, so I yearn for you, my God… It is another preoccupation than myself. And thirdly, this gift of humility seems to be more easily received in our later years. Of course, if there was some way of finding out, we might well discover that plenty of younger adults do in fact have humble hearts – but of necessity in the worlds they inhabit they are obliged to exercise a sort of shadow side of proud achievement or ambition, simply in order to get things done as expected. It may come as a huge relief to find one day that we don’t have to do that anymore.

Loving mercy – 24 July 2015

According to the Prophet Micah, God’s second requirement of us -- after doing justice -- is that we love mercy.   It interests me that while justice is to be done, mercy is to be loved.   That is to say, not only done but sought and enjoyed.  It is as though choosing mercy is one of our highest human functions.  Anyone can punish, anyone can exact retribution, anyone can make sure the punishment fits the crime, anyone can make someone else suffer for what they have done…  But it is more human and more Godlike to understand and to show mercy.  As Robert Burns put it:  What’s done we partly may compute, but know not what’s resisted.

The Hebrew word which Micah used is chesed – it is often translated as loving-kindness.  The Greek word is eleos – in Greek it is close to the word which means olive oil, a soothing and healing thing.  But mercy is something widely seen in our day as wimpish at best, even perhaps embarrassing when someone says they prefer mercy and forgiveness as their response to being hurt.  The media typically never quite understand it.  And there are huge ironies, anyway.  One of the 99 names of Allah is Allah the Merciful, yet the Middle East is currently swarming with sons of Allah exacting hideous vengeance on all sides.  In Jewish history the Hebrew God in one place commands a tenfold vengeance… while Hosea the prophet portrays God as agonising over the sins of his people and asking, How can I give you up, Israel?

One of my earliest lessons in ministry was from a senior minister I worked with over a couple of summers.  That down town parish had plenty of homeless and pathetic derelicts and alcoholics – and this minister said to me early on, Make sure you’re kind.  Nothing is achieved if we are judgemental.   I am not sure I really learned that, but I certainly never forgot it.  It did help to realise that Jesus was not always kind and merciful.  He was openly and blisteringly angry against the legalists, the people who beat needy people over the heads with rules and regulations, the people who require that you must first satisfy their protocols before you are acceptable.   Quite often that has been the church, failing in mercy.  Jesus portrayed a merciful God.  Neither do I condemn you… he says to a publicly humiliated woman.  In our day she would already have been paraded through the mills of a self-righteous media. 

The choice of mercy is a human, Godlike, Christlike and loving choice.  Of course it is risky.  And of course there are times when someone does have to be restrained and sanctions applied, for reasons of simple common sense.  But we are to prefer the option of mercy.  More than that… we are to love mercy, says Micah.  We have received mercy, says St Paul.  And in the silence and stillness which we practise we may become daily more merciful in our hearts and attitudes. 

It is worth pointing out that to exercise mercy in our attitudes and decisions usually means letting something go.  It may mean letting anger go, or the luxury and safety of the moral high ground, or the assumptions and prejudices in which we were brought up.   It may mean stepping outside the gossip circuit, or simply not joining with the majority who want heads to roll or someone crucified.  It may mean deciding not to say anything, or to express an opinion, but merely to think our own thoughts and send our own prayers.   All of this is attended to in silence and stillness, away from the clamour of a frightened and retributive world.  We can become people who prefer loving-kindness, who love mercy.

Doing justice – 17 July 2015

Some 800 years before the time of Jesus an obscure Hebrew prophet named Micah produced this luminous insight into what God is asking of us:  What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God [Micah 6:8].  Those three things.  Everything we might faithfully do to please God and to be useful in the world, in other words to be right, is summed up here.

And the first is: Do justice.   The Bible routinely links justice and truth – they are twins, and inseparable.  Lies and deceit, pretence, and also our fears, are implacable enemies of justice.  Moreover, says the prophet, we are to do justice, not merely admire it or praise it, or recommend it, let alone approximate to it. 

Our task at the moment is to see the relationship between doing justice, and contemplative life and prayer.  The best clue is truth and truthfulness.  The workings of grace within us in the disciplines of stillness and silence bring us ever more firmly into the realm of truth, rather than the cloudy land of dreams, fantasies hopes and regrets.  In John’s Gospel Jesus refers to the Spirit as the Spirit of Truth – making friends with reality and the present moment.

The first challenge, which never goes away, is to be truthful to ourselves, about ourselves – in other words, to do justice to ourselves.  The enemies of this, naturally, are all our excuses, alibis and the masks we have on hand to wear if necessary.   Other enemies are plentiful.  They include putting ourselves down as unworthy for all manner of reasons in the past, as though these things were outside love, mercy and understanding.  Truthfulness about ourselves, doing justice to ourselves, may eventually mean seeing ourselves, or glimpses, as God sees us – children of God’s, created, known and loved.

It is fundamental to grasp two things about doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly…  The first is to remind ourselves each day that we do not generate these qualities – they are gifts of God, instilled in us as we are still and accepting.  The second is that they depend on each other.  Justice requires mercy and humility.  If you are truly humble, you will be just.  If you love mercy, you will certainly have found humility and justice. 

Doing justice is a matter of the heart, before it is ever a matter of the law.  Doing justice means being a just person.  I am still in process of discovering what that might be, but I am sure it has to do with my attitudes to other people.  It is not just if I exclude anyone because they are different from me, or because they have done me harm (Jesus makes that clear enough).  I am not just if my own safety, let alone comfort, outweighs everything else.   I am not just if I cannot forgive.  Doing justice has implications also for the ways we conduct ourselves in the minefields of family life, the lacerations and resentments that can be generated – a contemplative person doing justice will be quiet, wise and thoughtful.

These are huge issues.  In the silence we are permitting our lives to be more and more conformed… in this instance to doing justice, in our actions of course, in our attitudes, in the ways we speak about others, in the causes to which we give support.   

Not thinking – 10 July 2015

If in contemplative prayer I am not seeking any conscious image of God in my mind, then what will be in my mind?  Among the first things I learned is that I do my best not to dwell on thoughts and inspirations, however worthy, not to ponder words and meanings, not to picture scenes or memories however precious or comforting or tranquillising – instead, as the teaching goes, I become aware of these things, and then I let them float quietly on down the river, while I return firmly to the gentle repetition of the mantra.  So then… am I thinking of nothing…?  No, I am not.  I am simply not thinking, not attempting to think, understand, plan or control.  I am doing my best to stay away from discursive and analytical thought, for now.  However good it is, however well-equipped I am to figure things out, however important my thoughts may be in themselves, I am setting them aside… or doing my best!

This is something my busy brain instantly dislikes, but the discipline develops over time, as I am still and accepting about it.   It is very much a shedding of control and competence.  For the time of prayer at any rate, I am not trying to keep myself safe, I am not planning or organising.  I am being who I am in this place at this moment, a child of God, capable of love. 

Of course, what we are doing is not what we normally do.  We are normally obliged to plan and organise our day, if not also other people…  Therefore, in contemplative prayer, we require a simple discipline embracing posture and attentiveness, reciting the mantra, to do something completely different.

Among the aspects of us we consciously set aside in this prayer is our captivity to how we are feeling right now, our emotions.  The teaching says that we come to this prayer irrespective of how we are feeling.  This amuses me because our entire culture is ruled, dominated by feelings – How did you feel when your house burnt down…? asks the TV interviewer.  It is incomprehensible to most that feelings either should or could be set aside.  In this discipline however we inform our emotions that their rule over us is temporarily suspended… we are now otherwise occupied.

“Discipline” is an interesting word.  In the protestant tradition in which I grew up it carried an almost entirely negative connotation – discipline was what ensued if you broke the rules.  But it is a Latin word from the verb “to learn”.   Jesus’s disciples were learners.  Our disciplines in prayer are so that we might learn, by the grace of the Spirit’s influence in us when we are finally still and silent… that we might learn deeper and better ways, that we might be taught what really matters and what doesn’t, that we might become more Christlike…  These are outcomes that may surprise us, subtly, later, in daily life and work and relationships. 

A way of unknowing – 3 July 2015

…a memory from long ago.  We were in some kind of retreat, and we were all sitting around in a circle, and the leader, an earnest soul, announced that each of us in turn around the circle was going to answer the question, “What is my image of God?”  I sensed, way back then, that this question is silly and wrong.  It is not for nothing that the great monotheist religions such as Judaism and Islam forbid any image of God… You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in the heaven above…  The danger is that any image of God ends up being some projection of ourselves.  Inevitably we fashion God in our image – or as some representation from our childhood, an indulgent father, or as tyrannical or unpredictable or judgemental, a God who needs to be cajoled, propitiated, even flattered.

In contemplative prayer we teach that the aim is certainly not to form any representation of God in our minds, however uplifting – just as it is not to be looking for thoughts and inspirations, oracles, visions or revelations.   I understand how stern or austere, to say nothing of surprising, this sounds to many.  In the Christian scriptures we learn from St Paul that it is Jesus who is the icon of the invisible God [Col 1:15; Rom 8:29; II Cor 4:4].  Jesus himself teaches that the central question is the one he posed:  Who do you say I am? [Luke 9:18-20]  The consequence of imagining God is either that God becomes an enemy or adversary of some kind, in any case a problem – or that we wind up trying to co-opt God to our own needs and purposes, even to our opinions and prejudices.  Either way, this God is an idol and what we are practising is idolatry. 

Thomas Merton was sure that contemplative life and prayer in the end can’t be taught.  It is learned by doing it, by experience.  Testing reactions and feelings, seeking experiences, is not contemplative prayer.  Contemplative prayer begins as we are as still and inwardly silent as is humanly possible, following simple disciplines of posture and time and mantra – and as we inwardly consent to the presence of God.  We do not awaken God, says Merton, God awakens us.  Part of the experience may well be the demolition of idols, of inherited or manufactured images of God – including any need to make use of God to accomplish things we consider important, or to drum up miracles.    Unknowing is how the wonderful anonymous English writer described it back in the late Middle Ages – The Cloud of Unknowing.  To quote:

Thought cannot comprehend God.  And so, I prefer to abandon all I can know, choosing rather to love him whom I cannot know.  Though we cannot know him we can love him.  By love he may be touched and embraced, never by thought.  Of course, we do well at times to ponder God’s majesty or kindness for the insight these meditations may bring.  But in the real contemplative work you must set all this aside and cover it over with a cloud of forgetting.  Then let your loving desire, gracious and devout, set bravely and joyfully beyond it and reach out to pierce the darkness above.  Yes, beat upon that thick cloud of unknowing with the dart of your loving desire and do not cease come what may. 

[Cloud of Unknowing, ch.6, ed. William Johnston].