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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.