29 July 2016

Playing the fool – 29 July 2016


The land of a rich man produced abundantly.  And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’  Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.  And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’  But God said to him, ‘You fool!  This very night your life is being demanded of you.  And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’  So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”  [Luke 12:16-21]

Jesus told this parable in a culture different from our own.  They were farmers and fishermen, and they and their wives and families were well acquainted with long and hard manual work, often for little reward.  If any man was rich, he had almost certainly inherited land and resources, and so it is that Luke sets this parable in the context of a dispute about inheritance – Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me…  Jesus refuses to get involved in that, and he delivers the man a warning about greed.  That has always sounded to me like a put-down.  But then, I wasn’t there…

Then Jesus tells the parable.  It is about a rich man, and we assume that most of his hearers were not rich.  So… we are not that audience.  We are property owners, more or less secure, with investments… How do we hear this parable?  We are, like most people, perfectly capable of being greedy, but greed is what we generally try to avoid.  Some of us try harder about that than others.  We do have possessions and property, and we enjoy what we have.  We believe, in the main, we use it well.  We are generally hospitable.  We never cease to be grateful that somehow we found ourselves living in this lovely place, in relative peace and security.   We give thanks to God for our food, and the measure of life, home and shelter, that we enjoy. 

Now, it is possible that all that simply describes a comfortable, complacent culture – while we know very well that we now have, not far away, people unable to acquire a home, or get a job; we do now have people sleeping on the street, and families in cars and garages.  None of this is simple.  But Jesus made it quite plain that in his kingdom the homeless are housed, the naked are clothed, the hungry are fed, and the prisoners are visited. 

In this parable, plainly, he is speaking to the rich, at any rate the comfortable and content – he is speaking to the man whose reaction to prosperity was to build bigger barns to store his goods, and to relax, eat, drink and be merry.  That seems to me a reasonably accurate description of much of our contemporary kiwi culture.  The problem is not with the possessions.  The more we own, the more we are required to be good stewards of it. 

The problem is where we are looking for happiness.  What do we think life is for?  And the contemplative question is… the more I am relying on possessions and control, and measuring it all by the levels of power and pleasure, the more I am simply feeding the ego.  And then it’s all about me.  My requirements are usurping the place that belongs to God. 

Jesus says, You fool…!  The extent of your ownership and control of all this is actually the width of the wall of a blood vessel on the brain (I am helping Jesus along here perhaps, with a little bit of imagery…).  Loving God, loving my neighbour, loving life, understanding and accepting our fragility and mortality… all of this is the opposite of being a fool.  It comes with stillness and consent, as God’s spirit rearranges our priorities.

22 July 2016

Goodbye to all that – 22 July 2016


And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.  [Luke 11:4]

The Gospel lesson for next Sunday has the disciples asking Jesus to teach them to pray.  So Jesus teaches them a prayer.  It is a prayer of considerable economy of words, and it sets out our most basic needs – daily bread, forgiveness, protection from evil.  Much of our secular culture still recites this prayer, on fraught public occasions, as a kind of mantra, without really knowing why, except that it seems right, for some it has memories, and it’s vaguely comforting. 

Well, it is the petition in the middle of the prayer that interests me this morning… forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive…  The simplicity of this masks its difficulty.  Jesus clearly believed that unforgiving people are not forgiven – indeed, they are unforgiveable, so long as they cannot, or will not, forgive others.  That in itself ought to rattle the bones of many sitting a lifetime in church pews, or any thoughtful person reciting it at a funeral or a wedding. 

Jesus’s followers, as Jesus saw it, are people who have learned forgiveness and who live that way.  In some cases it is a simple consequence of understanding that they themselves have been forgiven.    

But very often it is difficult to forgive.  Forgiving frequently seems offensive to justice.  People who have offended may be rigorously unrepentant.  In the minds of many, offences require punishment, the punishment must fit the crime, and even then, memory will make sure that the crime or injury is carried on into the future, and remembered even down the generations.  Forgiveness can seem like a far too easy way out of stern issues and consequences.

So it is never easy.  Nevertheless, the Lord’s Prayer is uncompromising.  There must be a heart willing to forgive.  Understanding helps, of course – if we even partly understood why someone did what they did, or said what they said, we might have a trail opening to forgiveness.  

Forgiveness is a decision that whatever it was, it is not now or ever going to poison life or love.  I decide that I can and will bear injury… yes, it may hurt, but I will bear that too, quietly and peaceably, without recrimination.  Forgiveness sets free both the offender and the victim to move onwards with life.  It restores relationships.  It sets judgement aside, and opens the door to the future again. 

It would be very difficult, I would think, if not impossible, for a contemplative person to remain unforgiving.  In our prayer, a prayer of silence and presence, there may be pain to bear, and the knowledge of unresolved issues, but there can be no respect in which we are consenting to cause pain, to keep wounds open, or to shut the door to peace and forgiveness.  More than that… we are consenting to the gentle processes of grace and love, to change us in the ways we need to be changed, and to heal the damage we have done.  And so that prayer, forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive, becomes a simple description of the way we are living. 

15 July 2016

Martha – 15 July 2016


Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home.  She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying.  But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.”  But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” [Luke 10:38-42]

Nevertheless, what I want to say is, Let’s hear it for Martha!  Martha did not deserve to go down in history henceforth as the kitchen-bound generator of food, and clearer-up after men, whose favourite saying is a woman’ work is never done.  The Christian Church from Rome to Warkworth owes Martha a somewhat posthumous apology for having portrayed her down the centuries as attending to all the wrong things.  Jesus didn’t see her that way.  What Jesus saw, he says, was a worrier.  Martha, you are anxious and fretful about many things…  He is inviting her to come and sit down.  That’s all.

The difficulty with this story, it seems to me, is that Jesus is reported as saying that Mary had chosen the better part. I do not know why it gets translated that way.  The Revised English Bible (RKJV) translates, Mary has chosen what is best.  That’s difficult too.  Martha was being critical of Mary, and I think Jesus quietly defended Mary -- Mary has made a good choice too.  He is not saying Martha’s choice is not good.  Presumably he will be glad to eat the food she brings. 

People do not develop all the same way.  I would imagine that Martha, by temperament, was always going to be happier when busy and doing things for others, seeing tangible results of her energy, and seeing happy faces.  If it was left to Mary, they mightn’t get food much before midnight – and that would be on a good day.  Martha makes things happen.  She instinctively prioritises and she has shopping lists.  For Martha this is all a kind of offering, not too far at all from prayer.  A large part of the genius of Benedict is that he showed a way in which work and prayer could be two sides of the same coin, melding into each other so that in the monastery Laborare est Orare, to work is to pray, and the prayer they do in the chapel is the Opus Dei, the work of God.

Martha got anxious and flustered, and angry with her sister.  It is this anxiety that registers with Jesus -- Martha, Martha, you are anxious and fretful about many things…  Her anxiety, he sees, might shut her out of what Mary is gaining because Mary has chosen to sit and listen.  Perhaps some of that anxiety is precisely because Martha always finds it difficult to sit and listen.  Jesus loves and honours them both.  He is not elevating Mary at the expense of Martha.  He is saying that whoever we are it is important to know how to listen and learn, how to open the eyes of the heart, as St Paul puts it, how to be still and receptive. 

Contemplative people, people who know how to be silent and still, paying attention at deeper levels than the needs of self, actually do know also how to get meals ready and do practical things.  Our priorities may have been adjusted somewhat, rebalanced a little…  But always it is the way of Jesus that matters.

08 July 2016

The language of God – 8 July 2016


Meister Eckhart, one of our greatest, most daring and adventurous teachers, from the High Middle Ages, wrote, There is nothing so much like God as silence.  It is one of those enigmatic remarks we often find in spiritual teaching.  The ancient prophet Elijah, in despair at the major crisis in his life, stands before the Lord, as the Hebrew puts it, on Mount Horeb.  There was a mighty wind which threw even the rocks around, then an earthquake, then a fire – but, we are told, the Lord was not in any of this excitement.  Then, after the fire, a sound of silence…  And Elijah, says the story, “heard” the silence.   The Hebrew sentence uses two words to express the silence, and one of them actually means stillness.  It depicts the most dramatic contrast to all the noise and strife and terror that had gone before.  A sudden complete calm.  The tumult and the shouting dies.  It is not the only place in the Bible where such a transition happens.

Silence, writes Rowan Williams, is letting what there is be what it is, and in that sense it is profoundly to do with God.  So it is hands-off.  Silence signifies that for the moment we have stopped trying to manage and control, or to achieve anything.  It is not so much that we create a time and a space of silence and stillness for a while – it is much more our knowledge that anything we now say or do will simply intrude and be unnecessary, unhelpful.   We have already done all we can, which was to bring ourselves to sit still, and be silent within, as much as we can, which, as we know, often isn’t much.  (Thank God for commas.)

We meditators often need to be reminded also of some realities of the external silence.  The world, and what Dapper Dan the Weather Man calls Mother Nature, choose not to be silent, and are unlikely to do otherwise.  The traffic still drives past, sometimes kicking up gravel.  Doors creak.  Birds patter around on the roof.  Distant horns and sirens sound sometimes…  All of that, I have to say, is perfectly proper.  No one gets complete silence anywhere.  In a monastery there are noises, I have to tell you, including the monks’ gastro-intestinal chorus.  Thomas Merton in his hermitage deep in the woods still complained in his journal of some farmer driving his tractor perhaps 2 km away.   Serious studies of silence have shown that it actually never happens. 

And rightly so.  The silence that matters for us is within.  It comes when we are content to be still, and to shut down our deliberate thinking about people and issues, including ourselves – not because the thoughts are wrong, but because for the moment they are surplus to requirements – and then to say our mantra simply and humbly and gently, and to return to it whenever we realise we have strayed off. 

Sometimes this is put a little differently, as though the silence is there anyway, whether we are or not, and we divest ourselves of noise and busyness in order to enter it for a while.  That’s just another way of describing the same thing.

What we have made space for is presence and attention, God’s and ours.  In our noisy fractious clamouring world this is the road less travelled.  In this space, every repetition of the mantra is our consent to God, to the Spirit’s steady depletion of the ego which otherwise stands in front of God -- and to the growth of love and all Christikeness in us, day by day. 

01 July 2016

The Abana and Pharpar Syndrome – 1 July 2016


We take an excursion into the Jewish scriptures in the lectionary for next Sunday.  It’s the memorable story of Naaman, powerful and proud captain of the army of Syria.  Naaman developed leprosy.  No one in Syria could help him, but his wife’s maid, an Israelite slave girl, said there was a prophet down in Israel who could heal these things.  You have to be a bit sorry for Naaman… on top of the humiliation of his leprosy, he is now commanded by the king to go to Israel, a captive and subject land, to consult this pestilential village prophet, all on the advice of a servant girl.  If you know the story, you know that Naaman’s humiliations are not over yet.

Elisha the prophet neglects even to come outside to greet Naaman, who has just rolled up with his chariots and horses.  Elisha sends a message:  Tell him to go and bathe in the Jordan seven times.  Naaman erupts.  The Jordan is a much inferior river to Syria’s clear mountain streams:  Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean? [II Kings 5:12]  Naaman has a noble tantrum.

Apparently there is (or was once) a syndrome recognised by physicians, called the Abana and Pharpar Syndrome.  It is when a patient rejects good medical advice because it conflicts with the patient’s own opinions or prejudices, or because the patient thinks it had been delivered in an inappropriate way – as when the doctor finally became fed up. 

The Abana and Pharpar Syndrome (APS) flourishes often enough in the Christian community.   I know it well.  Fundamentalism is many things, but typically it includes a state of mind in which a person rejects the message if it was not expressed in familiar terms, or if whoever is delivering the message is not approved of.  Familiar clichés such as, But I always thought that… or, My Bible says that…, may be symptoms of APS.  

Naaman was being offered a way forward, but in an inferior foreign land, by a disrespectful Hebrew prophet, in a humiliating process.  To be healed, therefore, he had to set ego aside and open himself to new possibilities.  Naaman was at a turning point in his life.  It is the point of realising that not everything we had assumed, is true; not everything we were told, was right; not everything we hoped, is going to happen; not all the walls and fences we built and admired, to protect ourselves, were actually necessary, or even helpful; not all the attitudes we inherited, were appropriate or accurate…  If this moment comes, it is what in Greek is called a καιρος (kairos), a time when something new from God is possible and imminent.  History bristles with examples – as when the President of South Africa, the Dutch Reformed Christian F W de Klerk, realised after generations of apartheid, that the suffrage must now be extended to all South Africans, and that Nelson Mandela could no longer be held in prison.  That is kairos on a grand scale…  On the level of our personal faith and life, there are certainly these moments, if we are open to embracing the new, and feeling the wind of the Spirit.  It may be as simple as choosing another path.  As Robert Frost expressed it:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.