Psalms of confident faith - 28 August 2015

The Psalms of Orientation sing about a stable creation, about a God of justice and goodness, and about happy, prosperous family and social life.  In these Psalms we get to sing hearty praise.  In some of them we find ourselves glad because enemies have been punished, or even wiped out.  In some others, God is seen to have protected particularly the weak and the needy.  These Psalms sing about a reliable and generous faith, a sure, confident defence and foundation:

You are kind and full of compassion, slow to anger, abounding in love.

How good you are, Lord, to all, compassionate to all your creatures…

The eyes of all creatures look to you and you give them their food in due time.

You open wide your hand, grant the desires of all who live… [Ps 145]

Well, certainly in the parish church on a lovely warm sunny Harvest Festival morning…  Or, it may be, at either a wedding or a funeral:

The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want; he makes me down to lie

In pastures green, he leadeth me the quiet waters by.

My soul he doth restore again… [Ps 23]

I imagine these Psalms are sung sometimes more in hope than in faith.  Perhaps the poetry is importantly soothing and reassuring.  I find it very hard to be critical, because these are very ancient songs and they have supported Jews and Christians through hideous times:

It is the Lord who keeps faith for ever, who is just to those who are oppressed.

It is God who gives bread to the hungry, the Lord, who sets prisoners free,

The Lord who gives sight to the blind, who raises up those who are bowed down,

The Lord, who protects the stranger and upholds the widow and orphan.

It is the Lord who loves the just but thwarts the path of the wicked… [Ps 146]

Well, good luck with that, you might think.  There are plenty of times when this kind of faith can seem forlorn indeed, or simply naive.  But one of the lessons of the Psalms is precisely that we can’t pick and choose.  Scholars may find it useful to separate the Psalms into categories – Orientation, Disorientation, New Orientation – but life is not so easily categorised and neither are people.  Life is usually quite a mess.  We can live all three categories at once -- sometimes backwards.  And the Psalms taken together, as a whole, reflect just that.  Meanwhile…

I lift up my eyes to the mountains; from where shall come my help?

My help shall come from the Lord who made heaven and earth.

The Lord is your guard and your shade; at your right hand he stands.

By day the sun shall not smite you, nor the moon by night.

The Lord will guard you from evil, he will guard your soul.

The Lord will guard your going and coming both now and for ever.

 

Our real hymnbook - 21 August 2015

The Book of Psalms, in its unexpurgated version, is seriously important to the life of contemplative prayer.  We don’t exist on nothing, we exist on the Word of God, lovingly, openly approached, interpreted with intelligence and with imagination.  If we made better use of the Psalms, they would come to live in detail in our memory and awareness, their rhythms and cadences, their ferocity and their odd bits, their honesty, their beauty and their strength.  The Psalms have been the ancient hymnbook of Judaism through all its pain.  Jesus quoted the Psalms even in the deepest suffering at Calvary.  And the best teachers I know tell us that the Psalms matter deeply to a gown-up life in Christ.

One such teacher, Walter Brueggemann, is a consummate Hebrew scholar.  He says there are really three types of Psalms.  There are what he calls Psalms of Orientation, in which the faith and confidence we rely on are stated and celebrated.  Then there are Psalms of Disorientation, in which life is different -- we hear even brutally of suffering and loss, including loss of faith.  Those Psalms speak for a lot of people.  And thirdly we have the Psalms of New Orientation -- faith is not only restored but is different, changed and renewed, deepened and widened.  It is the genius of Jewish faith that it can hold all three aspects of our life in powerful tension, but together. 

The Christian Church has not always done so well.  Typically we have avoided the Psalms of Negativity, Disorientation, the complaints, the cries for vengeance… all of which are there to be sung because they are what we encounter in our hearts when darkness takes over.  Brueggemann writes:  Much Christian piety and spirituality is romantic and unreal in its positiveness… We have censored and selected around the voice of darkness and disorientation, seeking to go from strength to strength, from victory to victory… It is a lie in terms of our experience. 

One dear lady, long ago, in some ways the most faithful and dutiful of all our parishioners, nevertheless attended something called Women Ablaze, during the week, because there she got solidly reassured, equipped and fortified for more of my sermons.  Perhaps, now I think about it, that may partly parallel the genius of the Book of Psalms.   Brueggemann points out how the Psalms are profoundly subversive of our culture.  They refuse to deny the darkness and the situations in which we are helpless – but they insist that even in the abyss there is One to address, who promises to be there with us.  Brueggemann quotes the Jewish writer of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, who wrote of the Psalms, Poets (the Psalms of course are poetry)… poets exist so that the dead may vote.  Think about it.  The Psalms matter because they give the suffering a voice, often about unfairness and injustice, they give us a prayer, when we have no words of our own any more. 

Lord, make haste and answer;

for my spirit fails within me.

Do not hide your face

lest I become like those in the grave.

Make me know the way I should walk;

to you I lift up my soul…   [Ps 143]

Recognising a blessing - 14 August 2015

Here is something written by Kathleen Norris in her fascinating book “The Cloister Walk”:  It is the aim of contemplative living, at least in the Christian mode, that you learn to recognise a blessing when you see one, and are able to respond to it with words that God has given you.  YES, in response to that wildly colourful yet peaceful sky; YES, I could say back to God, with a line from Psalm 65 – “The lands of sunrise and sunset you fill with joy.”

We learn to recognise a blessing when we see one…  But this is tricky and subtle, because “blessing” has long become a pious cliché.  The old gospel song Count Your Blessings tells it all.  A blessing turns out to be something I am pleased about, which I think God has conferred on me – other folks may not have been so blessed.  A blessing can be unexpected money, or a recovery from illness.  For some it is a miraculously free parking spot in the town.   A grandmother told me her grandson was “our little blessing”, although I knew that was not quite the word that sprang to the child’s mother’s lips.  So a “blessing” in popular usage is typically all about me.  There shall be showers of blessings, says another gospel song.  Those blessings are often seen as a reward for our faithfulness.  Count your blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done… a sort of balance sheet of spiritual rewards. 

But actually contemplative life and prayer is less and less about me, and growing up in faith means that this ego that thinks it is  all about me, is tending now to wither and attenuate.  That is a kind of growing freedom, and as Kathleen Norris says, you learn to recognise a blessing when you see one, and are able to respond to it with words that God has given you.  As far as she is concerned, the word God has given us is YES – yes, to quiet beauty; yes, to the whole of life, its mistakes and setbacks as well as its victories; yes, to ageing, to mortality, to the advancing years. 

Kathleen Norris, as Christians ought to be, is steeped in the Psalms, because they so often articulate what we need to say but can’t, or think we shouldn’t.  And she quotes Psalm 65:  The lands of sunrise and sunset you fill with joy.  The land of sunrise is youth and vigour and all that promise and energy; the land of sunset is the years of age and memory and the processes of letting go and simplifying.  Both, says the Psalmist, you fill with joy.  That is blessing.  Blessing makes us still and content, and fills our hearts.  It is never a gift of deserving, but always a gift of grace. 

Part of the gift is the wisdom which learns to note and attend to the blessing, as Kathleen Norris says – we learn to recognise a blessing when we see one.  And it is God who fills the experience with joy.  I looked at the Hebrew.  I think it says: ...you fill with your joy.  It is God who is delighted, it is God’s joy we are encountering, and sharing.  Ego is not part of it.  We are enjoying what God is seeing.  So it’s good to have learned, in the land of sunset or even earlier, to know a blessing when we see one.  God is seeing it too.

Clarifying what we do - 7 August 2015

Meditation is becoming ever more popular at present. It is being promoted in companies and law offices, schools and universities, and on supermarket notice boards – as a way to relax and relieve stress, to become more "mindful" (that word has now been appropriated, although I suspect there is only the haziest idea what it means), more focussed, to cope with parenthood… I suppose people have endless private hopes for trying out meditation. Methods of meditation offered are drawn from Buddhist and Hindu sources, from TM (Transcendental Meditation), Hildegard of Bingen... In my view we need not be critical of any of that, if people find it helpful. What we practise and teach is Christian Meditation. It is one form of Christian prayer – but the word “prayer”, to many these days, connotes religion and all that stuff they don’t want any more. The meditation we practise is Christian because we understand we are in the presence of the risen Christ, the icon of the invisible God, whom Jesus called Father, and we believe we are being conformed ever more closely to the image and the way of Christ. It is meditation because in this form of prayer we are as still and silent as we can manage, we are not using words or litanies, we are asking for nothing, simply being present and consenting to God. Our mantra helps to keep it simple. If we are curious about results or benefits, we know to look for them in changes within us, often subtle or unexpected. Christian Meditation is a discipline. “Discipline” means that it requires us to be serious and pay attention, but it also means that we are learning things as we go, we have open, receptive hearts and minds. In Christian Meditation we do not “empty our minds”…! We hear from time to time of the fears of some that “emptying our minds” – as though we could ever do that anyway – somehow “lets in the devil”. It is a baseless fear. One of the effects of a discipline of Christian Meditation is that those infantile superstitions and fears slide away. Indeed, fear in our lives, including the over-arching fear of mortality, tends now to get replaced by love and gratitude and a constant awareness of mercy and grace. Love, writes St John, casts out fear [I John4:18]. Christian Meditation is a kind of doorway to true contemplative life and prayer. There is nothing whatever new about it – it has been known and practised in the church since earliest times. But at times it was typically seen as difficult and suitable only for monks and nuns. The great gift of our day has been that teachers have released meditation and contemplative life and prayer from its captivity to the church’s so-called professionals, and brought it to the rest of us. It is grown-up faith. We must no longer be children… writes St Paul… Speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into Christ who is the head… Clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God… [Eph.4:14ff].