Made flesh – 23 December 2016

Christmas is upon us now.  I did my best to keep it at arms’ length during four weeks of Advent.  But I am asking, what does this Christmas mean to me, at my age and stage, and in a world increasingly strange to me.  I fixed on two quotes.  The first is from the Gospel for Christmas:

And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us… [John 1:14]

The other comes from one of the medical staff in what was a week or so ago the last actually functioning hospital in Aleppo:

Aleppo is a place where the children have stopped crying.

We are acquainted with the journey from Auckland to Wellington.  Bethlehem, where Jesus was born, is about that distance from Aleppo where children have been starving, living in terror, shot at in the street, barrel-bombed and gassed.  I have been trying to think whether any culture, any society, any religion, really ever has had a good record with children over the centuries.  The harshest words Jesus spoke were for those who harmed children.

God’s definitive Word to us was not a command or instruction, carved into stone or copied down on sacred parchment.  It was not that the heavens opened and anyone heard a voice.  It was not a sermon or a papal edict.  God’s Word was a baby, born to a peasant couple, and as vulnerable, as frighteningly dependent, as any baby newborn in the Middle East or anywhere else. 

And if we are to hear God’s Word, it will be by receiving and loving this child.  So God is speaking first to our hearts, to that part of us that immediately knows the cost of such love – that were it required we would unhesitatingly take that child’s place in suffering or death.  God appeals to the best in us, at another level altogether than all our thoughts and ideas and religions and prejudices, all our possessions, plans…  This Word, if we hear this Word, takes precedence.

It’s not a word we speak or read.  This Word is made flesh, a baby, unique and irreplaceable.  We understand that, in the mystery, this child is the icon of the invisible God.  This is God’s Word.  It is not a word of power, but it is a word of rebuke.  It is a word that calls us to silence, and to hearkening, and to humility. 

Google Maps would not give me a route to drive between Bethlehem and Aleppo, presumably because no one in their right mind would try that.  So I asked for a walking route instead, and got a trail up around the hills which, they said, I could do in 6 days if I kept walking and if presumably I was a mountain goat.   But all the way I would need to hide from men of violence, men assuming that disputes are resolved by killing and maiming, men who have known no other life, and no other way of remedying things.  Far away from there, as far as you might want to go… to the USA, to South America, to Africa, to South-East Asia… there are more and more men and women who assume violence is the way forward, including inevitably the exploitation of children, of women, of the needy. 

I do hear, from where I am, recognisable echoes of that Word from time to time, sometimes from surprising places.  But there is also now all the din of secularism that has no time for the church, in any of its variations or reformations or presentations.  The Word is clearest and nearest, it seems to me, where the simplest aspects of Jesus’ teaching are known, humbly and quietly, not stridently, and followed… where people are friends with silence, and refuse to have enemies… where grown-up faith can be strong and wise for others as well as ourselves… where fear is conquered because our lives are hid with God in Christ… 

Muddled, I know… but those are my thoughts this Christmas.

Awake in Advent…4 – 16 December 2016

Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God… to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles… including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, to all God’s beloved in Rome… Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. [Romans 1:1-7]

You may have noticed the phrase, the obedience of faith…  It is surely a curious expression.  If obedience means doing what we’re told, straight away, then in the spirit of the 21^st century it sounds unlikely – although sometimes, as we know, what we might call simple unquestioning obedience is necessary.  But in biblical use this word is much more nuanced.  Paul does not mean doing what you’re told, or any slavish obedience to church precepts or rules of faith.  The Greek word he uses here (hupakoē, υ͑πακοη) is much closer to the old English word hearken… it is a particular quality of listening, attending to someone, or to some task, or to some duty or obligation…  It is the attention necessary to master a skill, a profession, a language or a science.  Often it is the attention needed to understand, rather than simply assuming we understand.  My private bête noir is the person who interrupts you, mid-sentence, with some banality, and then says, “Sorry… go on…”  This person may be listening in a way, but is not hearkening or attending, and is more present to him/herself than to you.

So Paul writes of the obedience of faith…  This obedience is attending to God, so far as we can, with the whole self.  In contemplative life and prayer we use various words for it such as being present, and consenting...  In our wider lives it develops into an awareness of God everywhere around, and even when we are giving our attention to other matters altogether, as we often are, this consciousness of a listening and attending heart, and awareness of God, is never far away. 

So the obedience of faith has much to do with the great watchword in Advent… awake!  Wachet auf! in German, and the subject of one of the greatest hymns of Christian faith:

Zion hears the watchmen singing,

And all her heart with joy is springing;

She wakes, she rises from her gloom…

Obedience of faith then is hearkening, listening for a word, bearing pain, discerning the time for change, or even suspecting that the time may be near, turning to a neighbour, asking in love (as Simone Weil put it), What are you going through…?  Obedience of faith is consenting to change in ourselves, as the Spirit of Christ may ask.  It is claiming freedom from habits and rules and requirements which inhibit fresh understanding.  It is stability, confidence in the way we are being led, especially when the way ahead is not clear.  Obedience of faith is recognising our fears, and in prayerful disciplines of silence and stillness seeing them eroding and losing their power… all from hearkening, from the obedience of faith. 

Awake in Advent…3 – 9 December 2016

Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord.  The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.  You also must be patient.  Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.  Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged.  See, the Judge is standing at the doors! [James 5:7-9]

I’m a bit embarrassed to come over all lyrical about yet another couple of Greek words – but there are two of them here, and they matter if we are awake in Advent.  This time we are not in St Paul, we are in the Letter of James.  I enjoy James, partly because some of the big names have had problems with it.  Martin Luther allegedly called it the epistle of straw.  So my rebellious and contrary spirit alerts me that James must have something going for it.  Also, here in James we are back among Jews, Jewish Christians.  Maybe we are even in Jerusalem. The writer of this letter is traditionally James, the brother of Jesus.  It’s possible, but nobody knows for sure.

The first of our words is patience… be patient…  They are impatient for Jesus to return.  So here we have the first teaching of a quality of heart and mind which mature Christians will have learned in any age.  God has not intervened to make everything right, and may not.  Some might even say, it is not typical of God to intervene.  We are to learn a faith, taught by Jesus, which is not hanging around for everything to come right.  The writer repeats being patient three times in three consecutive sentences.  The Greek word is makrothumia (μακροθυμια) -- in 21^st century idiom it is something like being in for the long haul.  Our faith needs to be formed and suited for reality as well as hope.  Once we have accepted that, we begin to see how truthful and liberating it is.

But more than that, we need the contemplative quality St Paul expressed when he wrote, I have learned to be content… [Phil. 4:11]  In adverse circumstances we may indeed suffer but we choose not to become victims.  Being patient is having decided that Christ’s risen life is now, not later when everything may be as it should.  So it also entails seeing what I can do to make things better.  And it is never forgetting how to give thanks. 

Then, the writer drops into his letter something utterly practical and immediate:  Beloved, do not grumble against one another…  The Greek word originally means what medicine calls a narrowing, stenosis.  Grumbling constricts life.  Gossip tries to derive life out of other people’s hardships and sorrows (Schadenfreude).  Grizzling simply unveils our own inner poverty.  In the Christian community all that behaviour is deeply destructive.  Benedict forbad grumbling from his congregations.  His Latin word was murmuro, murmuring (wonderfully onomatopoeic), muttering in complaint and criticism – and nothing constricts and poisons a fellowship quicker. 

So be still, and silent, and centred in reality, and in the present, and in the presence of God who is always in our presence.

Awake in Advent…2 – 2 December 2016

May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. [Romans 15:5-6]

In 1944, a senior American federal judge with the unlikely name of Judge Learned Hand was administering the oath of citizenship to a group of immigrants in New York.  He spoke to them about liberty, and this is what he said:  What then is the spirit of liberty?  I cannot define it.  I can only tell you my own faith.  The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit that weighs their interests alongside its own without bias… the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten, that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.

Paul is writing to the Christians at Rome.  Being a Christian in Rome was illegal, or very soon became so because Christians typically refused to join in the compulsory Emperor cult – and various emperors starting with Nero made their lives perilous and uncertain.  And so Paul refers to God as the God of steadfastness and encouragement…  A couple of rather nice Greek words in there.  “Steadfastness”, in 21^st century English, we might be more likely to render as “steadiness”.  The Greek hupomonē (ύπομονη) means staying put, not running away.  It’s one of the three classic Benedictine vows, the vow of Stability.  As always, this steadfastness is firstly God’s steadfastness towards us – but then likewise, in a confusing, tempting, often abusive secular culture, the followers of Jesus are to learn quiet steadfastness.  This is not obstinacy or any refusal to change.  It is knowing humbly but surely, and gladly, to whom we belong.  And it is a product of having come to terms with mortality, fear and the fact of an unfair world.

The other attribute of God Paul cites here is “encouragement”… the God of steadfastness and encouragement.  This time the Greek word ought to sound familiar:  paraklēsis (παρακλησις).  Paraclete – it’s usually translated in the English bibles as Holy Spirit, or Comforter, or Advocate.  The paraclete is the person who comes and says, you are not alone… the person you most want to see arrive.  It is the one who says, I can join my resources to yours.  That is what God does, the God of… paraklēsis. 

Grown-up faith has discovered that freedom is not and never was freedom to have things the way we might want, even in religion.  It is an inner freedom within the circumstances we have been given, whether Rome of the 1^st century or the bewildering facts of 2016 and the looming perils ahead.  Judge Learned Hand saw it as a freedom to live without walls of our making – actual walls or social walls or religious walls.  Paul writes:  May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ… he writes to the Church at Rome.  Well certainly, silence and stillness teach us that lingering divisions and disputes, ancient memories and resentments, fears and hatreds, may be set aside.  They have no power over us, and they have no place in the kingdom of Christ.

Awake in Advent…1 – 25 November 2016

Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; let us live honourably as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires. [Romans 13:11-14]

Paul doesn’t mince words… Let’s do a bit of housekeeping first.  For instance, there is the fact that our brothers and sisters of the 1^st century church assumed they were in apocalyptic times.  The end of the world was nigh.  It generally meant the expectation that Jesus would return.  This is fringe belief now, despite earthquakes, cyclones, tsunamis and wars, because we know a lot more about history and human behaviour, about geology, seismology and meteorology.  But back then, Paul, writing to the church at Rome, which he has not yet met, warns them they had better wake up and be ready.

Secondly, we need always to qualify what Paul means by “the flesh”.  In English “flesh” is a rather loaded word, but for Paul “flesh” means self at the centre rather than God.  It is what is often now meant by Ego... priority for self, and the illusion of control of life and events.  It is the opposite of what Paul calls living by the Spirit, a radically different way of living … in which we draw, derive, expect our life from God.  Life in the flesh, as Paul sees it, is typified by revelling and drunkenness, debauchery and licentiousness, quarrelling and jealousy… and in many ways, in NZ society of the 21^st century, that is not far wide of the mark.  So when he says, make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires, he means for instance that it’s possible to celebrate without getting legless.  It is possible to live without feuds, enemies and strife – not in quarrelling and jealousy – that too is “flesh” because of its concern with self.  Life in the flesh, Paul sees, is largely a matter of trying to find happiness in all the wrong places.

You know what time it is, says Paul.  There’s that Greek word kairos again – the time of God’s challenge and call, the time of hearing a word to us, the time of God’s opening door of faith and change – wake up time.  For Jesus’s disciple it is always God’s time.  In God’s time it’s best to be awake.  You can sleep-walk through a life of self; all you have ever to decide is what you want or what you like or how you feel. 

He advocates laying aside the works of darkness, living in the light – that is, openly, transparently… honourably, he says, as in the day…  Paul was well aware that Romans and other Gentiles, non-Jews, were joining the company of Christ.  Paul had been largely responsible for that.  The infant church was changing.  So you can imagine conflicts between believers who came from a somewhat austere Jewish background, and others who came from a culture where, in Kipling’s words, there ain’t no ten commandments, and a man can raise a thirst.

Of course, as we well know, anyone who seems even mildly critical of the prevailing hedonism, the assumption that we can and will please ourselves, gets labelled a party-pooper, a kill-joy.  But there are big issues here…  We will mention them during Advent.  The first step is to take on board those basic words:  Awake… Come from darkness into the light…  Live in the Spirit…  Know what kairos, what time it is.

Living in the Tragic Gap…3 – 18 November 2016

Sarah Bachelard’s third point about living contemplatively in the Tragic Gap is that we begin to discover how to live beyond being “right”.  The way she puts it is: …how moving beyond the need to get our lives “right” frees us to be fully ourselves and to receive our lives, as it were, from the future.  (Puzzled brows…)

The urge to be right, surely, is something we take for granted.  Who wants to be wrong?  I can think of people who insist they’re right when everyone else knows otherwise – and they do it because it’s intolerable to have been wrong, even if they were.  This is by no means unknown in religion.  That’s what I believe, it’s what I’ll always believe, and you can’t convince me otherwise… 

Of course concepts of right and wrong matter.  It is important that we choose some paths and not others.  One of the real difficulties now is that, to many, especially younger people, right and wrong seem often so confused that you might as well simply please yourself.  Why not respond to what I believe I want, get what I think or hope will make me happy…?  Religious faith is rejected, because it is perceived as restrictive – and also because, as it seems, the paladins of religion can’t agree among themselves anyway about what’s right and what’s wrong.  So we find no important place in our lives anymore for religious faith.  The same with politics… one public demagogue believes one thing is right, and another public demagogue says exactly the opposite… so why bother choosing, understanding, voting? 

Move to the personal sphere…  A parishioner who lives in my memory claimed that there was nothing in her life history she regretted; she would, she said, do it all over again just the same... she wouldn’t change a thing.  This was important to her, to have been right.  I think of a book by a senior policeman at the time of the 1981 Springbok Tour riots, about his philosophy of life, and the book was entitled, Never Back Down.  We once had a Prime Minister whose theme song was Frank Sinatra’s, I Did It My Way.  To be able to say, I was wrong, if I was, is a rare and humble gift.

There are two kinds of life, as in Robert Frost’s timeless image: two roads diverged in a wood…  One road is indeed largely a matter of being right, getting it right, justifying myself, being sure, being seen to be right, fulfilling expectations, achieving goals, meriting praise, receiving awards… and of course these days we have to add, feeling right.

We may come to the other, the road less travelled, he calls it, the fork in the road, perhaps later in life.  Sarah Bachelard says it is when we see, it dawns on us, that we can receive our lives from the future.  That is the future that used to frighten us.  This is what the biblical writers have always meant by faith, since Abraham.   It is when we find we can lay down the burden of anxiety about the past, the weight of memory, particularly about wrongs and regrets, but also about triumphs and the big satisfactions.  They are all there, with our frequent need to keep control of life and events, and they’re unlikely to go away, but we are ready to leave them, as we can, at the side of the road.  And now, helped by stillness and silence, and our awareness of God’s presence in Christ, we learn increasingly to be unafraid, to receive life from what is given along the way, to say Yes…  We learn to respond, quietly and gently, to listen to the world and people, to bear pain, to be present and attentive in our world… much as Jesus was.  It is what Jewish and Christian scriptures know as Sophia, Wisdom.

Living in the Tragic Gap…2 – 11 November 2016

Last Friday we thought about what Sarah Bachelard calls the Tragic Gap.  This is the gap between what ought to be and what is – if you’re sophisticated you say… between idealism and reality.  So the Tragic Gap is where we are living unless we retreat into some preferred dreamworld or fantasyland, which is always a popular option.  Quoting a few words from last week, thegap is… between a peaceful world and the world we’ve got; or the gap between what I wanted in life and what actually happened; perhaps the gap between reasonably good health and the fact that I’m coming apart; the gap between youth and ageing, religion in our family and irreligion in our family…  I went on to suggest that standard Christian perception and teaching, truth be told, makes not a lot of difference in the Tragic Gap except to help us feel better or hopeful.   We are unlikely to change the world.  Our real task as people of faith is to be faithful, to be the persons whose lives are not inevitably shaped and determined by the gap and all its demands and disappointments, but by our open hearts, open to love and goodness and freedom in Christ. 

And so it is that Sarah Bachelard goes on to teach that, living in the gap, we are mistaken if we think our options are either to fix what is wrong or to ignore it.  This is her second point about the Tragic Gap.  She instances a colleague who lapsed into a prolonged clinical depression.  Later he reported that some friends and associates for whom it was all too difficult or mysterious stayed away because they didn’t know what to do or say.  They felt they couldn’t understand it and couldn’t change it.  He suffered also from others wanting to make him feel better, somehow, anyhow…  He actually had to try to hide his feelings from them.  But there were others who did make a difference.  One of them showed up regularly to massage his feet, rarely ever saying much.  This person was neither evasive nor invasive, but was there, present, in the gap, available, attentive, accepting, and in some way lifting some of the load and taking some of the pain. 

To live in the gap meaningfully we need to find our own personal ways of being properly present.  Of course, if something can be fixed, someone should fix it, and that is often precisely what happens.  But as we well know, there are things that can’t be fixed.  Mortality itself comes to mind, and the processes of ageing.  Dementia, as it seems at present, and also those who are caring and coping in that situation.  Grief, often, can’t be fixed… nor other forms of deep loss.  Being present might mean massaging their feet, as it were… it might mean mowing their lawns… it certainly means listening and actually hearing...  As meditators know, really being present starts when words no longer predominate, including “helpful” words.  It means that we are now not trying to exert control or fix things – let alone having our own helplessness or our own fears or our own experiences intrude.  Telling our own stories and what happened to me, or what I believe, is not being truly present… as we saw last week: The gap is not about me.  For some that may be a hard thing to let go.

But contemplative practice of life and prayer, day by day, year by year, forms us this way.  In a discipline of silence and stillness we are practising being present, because that is what our prayer is about.  We are learning discernment… that is, starting to sense, gently and peaceably, what is really going on, in me and around me.  We are learning to live by relinquishing the illusion of control of life and events.  It is a freedom, and a relief.

Living in the Tragic Gap…1 – 4 November 2016

One of our effective teachers of Christian spirituality is an Australian Anglican minister, Sarah Bachelard.  Along with insight she has the rare gifts of brevity and clarity – her little book entitled Experiencing God in a Time of Crisis[1] is a model of readability, lucidity and good sense. 

What she calls the Tragic Gap is the gap we all know, usually unbridgeable, between what ought to be and what is, what might have been and what wasn’t.  The Tragic Gap, then, is where we live.  The gap between a peaceful world and the world we’ve got; the gap between what I wanted in life and what actually happened; the gap between reasonably good health and the fact that I’m falling to bits; the gap between youth and ageing, religion in our family and irreligion in our family…  One of our problems with much familiar Christian faith and teaching is that, truth be told, it often makes not a lot of difference in the Tragic Gap except to help help us feel better or be hopeful.

Sarah Bachelard however sees ways we do find liberation and new life from God in this gap.  This she finds in the simplest disciplines of contemplative life and prayer.  First, she says, the gap is not about me.  Second, she says, I am wrong if I think my only options are to fix it or else ignore it.  And third, I need to move beyond being right. 

Today, let’s have a look at the first of those:  The gap is not about me.  Sarah Bachelard instances a person who has spent all his life in the cause of peacemaking, only to see, at the end of his days, endemic wars and violence.  We can multiply that story 10,000 times.  We have met parents who consistently modelled decency and respect, love and care, only to see their son or daughter peel off into just the opposite, the myriad forms of self-concern and irresponsibility.  Neither is it right that a healthy young mother succumbs to some cruel malignancy or pointless accident.  Plenty of things are simply not right.  That’s the gap.  The media typically express this by one or another version of:  He didn’t deserve… whatever happened… as though it might have been better if he did.

Sarah Bachelard suggests we ask ourselves, here in the middle of the gap, not whether we are being effective in changing things, but whether we are being faithful.  Secularism can’t answer that question.  You are either effective or not, achieving goals or not.  You can scarcely be faithful without a faith.  So the question, for us, is not so much whether I have made a difference or saved the world, but whether my inner life and motivations, thoughts and hopes and the decisions I hold to, were, are in fact the way of Christ... as Jesus taught.  That is absolutely the most I can do – wedded indissolubly with humility, gentleness and kindness. 

If anyone still wants to charge out gallantly into the gap, into No-Man’s-Land, to put down injustice and destroy the tyrant, then good luck with that…  The real and longer-term battle is the changing of hearts, one by one. 

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[1] Bachelard, Sarah: Experiencing God in a Time of Crisis (Convivium Press 2012)

The present moment – 28 October 2016

To the most experienced meditators it is still commonplace that, as one person put it, the moment our bodies are stilled, our thoughts start to do the walking… We wander about in daydreams, down memory lane, planning, hoping, worrying; internally we are still filled with perpetual noise and movement, the mad whirl of disconnected thoughts.  I know we keep returning to this subject of distractions, but it can be a worry for meditators and sometimes lead to a sense of defeat.

I think there are two basic things to say.  The first is that our noisy minds, our distractions, are normal, utterly predictable, inevitable, and they are not our enemy.  Neither will the distractions ever completely disappear in meditation, so that one day we can guarantee to be floating around in blissful uninterrupted serenity.  When one woman asked Fr John Main how long it would be before she was undistracted, he replied, Oh, the first 30 years are the worst.  We introduce the mantra into our silence to be a stable, neutral focal point, the free alternative to any and all distraction, something to return to – usually over and over again.

What matters then is that we greet these thoughts, memories, anxieties, images, whatever they are, gently and simply as they appear, honour them by noting them -- and turn back to the mantra.  (Another classic saying about this is that while you can’t stop the birds flying overhead, you can stop them making nests in your hair.)  So this is what we do for the whole time of our prayer.  It is always gentle, no irritation or impatience, no recrimination… indeed, the thought, “I’m just not getting it right… I’ll never be any good at this”, is itself a distraction which we receive, note gently -- and return to the mantra.

The second basic issue is about time.  This is the harder one for me.  The distractions, if we permit them, always seduce us away from the present moment.  After all, that is how our minds have been trained and formed.  We live in linear time, that is to say, we think about what happened – that is memory; or we think about what might happen, quite often with anxiety – that is planning, or fearing the future…  Or we may dwell (abide is the biblical word) in the present moment – and that is attention.  Prayer, and particularly contemplative prayer, is a matter of attention.  It lives and breathes where God’s Spirit is present, attending to us in the present moment.  I am with you always… said Jesus. Abide in me, and I in you…  

Now it will always be difficult, as a matter of personal discipline, to learn to live, to attend, to abide in the present.  Of course we do have to remember the past and learn from it.  We are silly, even dangerous if we don’t.  And of course we must arrange prudently for the future, as we can.  In a way, those are disciplines also.  In Greek, all of that is chronos (χρονος), the linear passage of time and events that never ends.  The river of time.  But not in prayer.  Prayer is being present, now, the heart, timid perhaps, saying Yes to God and Yes to the way things are… because, for one thing, there is no help for us, no saving help for our world, in the denying or concealing of reality.  That meeting, then, in Greek, is kairos (καιρος), the special moment, the time when deep speaks to deep, as the Psalmist put it, when with the help of our discipline and our mantra we are for the moment blessedly still and silent, chronos steps back and kairos takes over -- and the Spirit can bring new things to birth in us and in our world.

Not like other people – 21 October 2016

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other.  [Luke 18:9-14]

It seems to me worth noting however that each man was correct, in a way.  There’s no need to see the pharisee as a hypocrite.  He may well have been just as upright as he claimed, observing the law, and genuinely grateful not to be part of the degeneracy around him.  It is a feeling we might sometimes be reasonably familiar with.  The tax collector by contrast may well have become ashamed, even disgusted, with his life – these tax collectors were men who bought contracts from the Roman government to collect taxes; they lived on what they could extort above and beyond the money the government required.  It was a squalid system, made for corruption and for leaving misery and penury in its trail. 

So what is the point in this story…?  Jesus says that it was the tax collector who went home “justified”, and not the pharisee.  “Justified”, in this context, means something like restored to favour, let out of the dog box… Yes, you can get off the naughty chair, now run outside and behave…!  In the religious thinking of that time – and, I’m sad to say, in many places in our time – you are either right with God or you are not.  God is pleased with you, accepting you, or not.  Some forms of faith actually encourage people to think this way, even warn that we may be offside with God without realising it, accidentally so to speak.  So then faith and worship and service become a matter of doing whatever you have to do to be right with God.   

Now, I confess, I don’t know that God… the God served this way seems like an idol to me… and here Jesus seems to be saying:  If you want to think in those terms, OK… but realise that it doesn’t turn out how you expect.  It was the one who had no illusions about himself whom God saw and accepted.  It was the one who never dreamed of claiming, “I am not like others, I am better than others…”   That was the crucial difference – not one man’s moral achievement and the other man’s moral failure, but the fact that the tax collector saw himself as one with all fallen and fallible humanity.  The pharisee saw himself safe on the moral and religious high ground, unsullied… and separate.

I am corresponding with a man in prison, sentenced for sexual crimes.  There is no way this man can occupy the moral high ground.  His professional life, his social life, his family life, are at an end, along with his self-respect, his dignity and his reputation.  For the rest of his days, in prison or out, he will have people passing judgement on him, restricting his life, rejecting him.  He is a Christian believer, although the faith in which he was instructed is desperately infantile and moralistic.   My task is gently to introduce him to the God Jesus called Father, who upsets religion and justifies, restores the ungodly who call in their need.

Introversion it is not – 14 October 2016

One of the trendy ways to make sense of human society is to label people as extroverts or introverts.  It seems obvious.  Those labelled extroverts not only enjoy the company of others, but look for it and actually need it.  They languish and shrivel if they are all alone.  They are energised by other people.  They tell you: You should get out more.  These are the extroverts.  Others in category introvert tend more to be drained in society.  Hell is a cocktail party, as someone put it.  Far from languishing all on our own, we are restored and reanimated in solitude. 

We all know that life and people are actually much more complicated than that, and that most people find ways to live happily in both camps…  The assumption however is that when it comes to contemplative life and prayer, introverts will tend to take to it better than extroverts.  It is the introverts, we think, who will be more at home with silence and stillness and solitude… and inwardness… so the argument goes. 

Well, it is not so.  Fr Laurence Freeman says that in what he calls our self-conscious and narcissistic society, we confuse introversion with true interiority.  In contemplative spirituality, introversion is not what we are looking for.  Conversion is what we are looking for.  Our concern is no longer to be looking at ourselves and all our feelings, reactions, desires, ideas, dreams or daydreams… interiorly or exteriorly.  That is what we are turning away from, in our disciplines of silence, stillness and, with most of us, our mantra. 

True contemplative life, experience and prayer cordially includes both extroverts and introverts.  This is because it is at another level than all this management of self and fascination with self.  It is where we are consciously in the presence of the unseen God – or we may say, the Spirit of the Risen Jesus.  We are admitting a presence and a grace other than our own.  Whether the meditator is an extrovert or an introvert, either or some of each, the issue now is to be still and receptive, to be silent and undemanding… indeed, in what I think to be wonderfully moving Hebrew terms, to welcome with hospitality the love that encompasses us all. 

So personality type is interesting…  I have always found it so.  If nothing else, it warns me when to become invisible in company…  But in prayer the question does not arise.  Whoever I am and whatever I am like, indeed, however I may be feeling right now, I do what I can to be fully present – in the presence of God in Christ. 

Exiles – 7 October 2016

The lectionary Old Testament reading for next Sunday takes us back to about 580 BCE, to Jerusalem, and to the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah.  Jerusalem has been conquered by the army of Nebuchadnezzar.  He has creamed off all the priests and intellectuals, the artisans and professionals, and has carted them away into exile in Babylon.  Jerusalem is a city largely destroyed, a way of life all but wiped out, families shattered, survivors wandering – we have exile, refugees, all the calamitous consequences of mindless violence. How familiar does that sound at present?  Jeremiah writes to the exiles in Babylon…

These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon…  Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.  [Jeremiah 29:1, 5-7]

So they were to live through this catastrophe, and not by becoming perennial victims.  Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives…  Jeremiah sets out for them what real faith is like.  It requires first that we have a sober awareness of reality.  The reality now was Babylon, being far from home and in a foreign culture; the reality entailed loss and sorrow.  To the victim it is not that.  The victim’s first reality is myself, what has happened to me, how much I am disabled by the events of my life.  I start to see everything through the sentimentalism of what could have been but wasn’t…. for me, or for my family or tribe.  It may be eminently understandable – and perhaps it’s all very well for me, since I am not a refugee or experiencing such things in my life – but victimhood shields us from God and from faith.  We have placed self in the place that belongs to God.

One stream of spiritual teaching says that we are all, in various ways, in exile.  Some of our protestant hymns reflect that teaching.  Another important stream remembers that we are all children or great-great-grandchildren of exiles, of people who for one reason or another left home and made a life in a new place.  The faith of Abraham, Jeremiah, Jesus or Francis the Pope, of countless exiles through the centuries, consists in taking the next step, trusting God, putting one foot in front of the other, being still, saying yes to life in both joy and pain.  What cannot be helpful is retreating into fantasies and regrets, blame and retribution, sentimental dreams of a former life where all was well.

Our prayer is the discipline in which we practise presence and reality.  This discipline is our growing familiarity with the space in which it becomes possible even to forgive our enemies – something Jesus taught, as we know, but nearly six centuries before that Jeremiah said: seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf…  That city was Babylon.