Mutual non-understanding – 26 August 2016

A biography I have just read, called Remember Me, is about a Polish Jew, Martin Small – he had actually an unpronounceable Polish name.  Martin Small first writes about his early life, with the most moving and evocative description of Jewish village life in Poland I have ever read… Fiddler On The Roof becomes entirely credible… the customs, the superstitions, the incomparable humour, the rituals and celebrations.  But as a young man Martin Small was caught up in the Nazi invasion of Poland and Russia, which swept away all that priceless culture.  All of his family were wiped out, cruelly and remorselessly.  Martin then fought with the partisans, but eventually wound up in the hell of Mauthausen, in Austria.  On the day Mauthausen was liberated by the Americans, Martin Small was scarcely alive.  He was actually unconscious.  A soldier carried him to the medics – and Martin spent the rest of his long life in love and gratitude.  He fought in Israel’s 1948 war of independence against Egypt and the other Arab states…

Now in his 90s, looking back on all this as an elderly practising Jew he writes, My theology is simple. I don’t understand God, and God doesn’t understand me.  It is so Jewish, so Yiddish… This man who has seen everything, suffered unspeakably, lived a long lifetime, raised a family, loyally attends the synagogue, teaches there, says Kaddish for all who died… this man says, I don’t understand God, and God doesn’t understand me.  And yet in another breath he would recite from memory in Hebrew:

(…read Psalm 139: 1-18…)

Experience, he says, has taught him that God is known and loved best with a decent reticence and humility, and a certain black humour.  The Psalmist was not in Mauthausen – God was.  I have just spent a week in Samoa, where by contrast they understand God very well and quite loudly.  Churches are everywhere and are large and multi-coloured.  The biggest and flashest house in the village is probably the pastor’s.  Every public bus informs you in gaudy lettering that Samoa is founded and ruled by God.  Well, plenty of nations have lived by that assumption, with very mixed results…  On Sundays the food is terrible because the kitchen staff are all at church.  It is a confident, safe, simplistic and superstitious religion, being practised by big, loud, good people. 

It was a new thought for me, however, that I may be as much a mystery to God, as God is to me.  That seems quite exciting in some ways.  God is puzzled, just as I am.  If it is so, it means that only an ongoing relationship of listening and loving, and discarding idols and idolatry is going to get anywhere.  Doctrines and creeds won’t do it.  Years of loyal and costly service, although useful of course, won’t do it.  If we can talk about God wanting things, then perhaps God wants simply my loving “yes”, my heartfelt unequivocal consent.  Perhaps faith has very little to do with making the world safe for me, or keeping me and my loved ones away from trouble or pain.  Perhaps it is rather all about gratitude and love, and doing what I can, if and when I can, to set things the right way up for other people. 

In our practice of silence and stillness we learn serious reserve in God’s presence.  We learn to hold our tongues and open our hearts.  We are led to relinquish idols, while we remember that it is Jesus who is the icon of the invisible God, as St Paul puts it.  We learn to love and accept mystery, as our worldly fears start to become less fearsome.

Division – 12 August 2016

Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!  From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”  [Luke 12:51-53]

Jesus depicts, and predicts, the most painful and unthinkable kind of family strife, resulting from following him in time to come.  He says this on his way to Jerusalem, knowing very well what is likely to happen there.  What we have in this passage is some sayings from that time, collected by someone into what scholars now call the Q document.  The Q document itself is long lost, but it was evidently known to the writers of both Matthew and Luke, and we have these glimpses of it in their writings.  Sometimes these sayings are not where you would look for peaceful, strengthening reassurance.

Jesus shockingly predicts that allegiance to him will divide people.  Even the sacred family relationship, he says, will come under threat.  But when you are facing the sterner realities – be it a serious downturn in health, or the death of a loved one, or the end of cherished hopes, or despair about a world going mad… and here Jesus himself is walking to Jerusalem – any sort of feel-good spirituality, all about me, is not going to suffice any more.  It’s growing-up time.  Jesus says there are things to be decided.

One of our most potent and time-honoured tribal gods is called Family.  Family comes first, and is not negotiable… certainly in Pacific Island culture.  In a book I’m reading, about Jewish life in Poland during the rise of the Nazis, a young Jewish man who could read the signs, tried to persuade his father to leave, while they could, for a new life in Palestine:  As soon as I started talking, Papa made it clear that he would have no part in this.  He told me that… he couldn’t think about leaving his mother, father, cousins, brothers, aunts, and uncles… Family was more important than anything; without family, life had no purpose.  So that was that.  They all fell into the abyss.

I have observed families along the way, including my own (the family of my parents and grandparents), but also as a parish minister… the tribal reactions, the defences and the walls that get built, the memories that become distorted and then enshrined in tribal folklore, the sanitising, rewriting of history to cope with the uncomfortable or the unbearable.  We are a very close family, I hear people saying, while others may be getting a picture of suffocation in that closeness, and emotional control.  It is when, in a Christian family, the clear claims and requirements of Christ get subordinated to tribal needs, right or wrong, that I find myself off on the road to Jerusalem, somewhere in sight of Jesus, if I possibly can.  Love is not love if it is possessing and controlling… even less if it is requiring recognition and gratitude and compliance and conformity.  The way of Christ, which may well be the way to Jerusalem, may indeed invade sacred family ties.   

In our contemplative prayer the Spirit of Christ helps us sort out what comes first, and what we must now let go of – as we are silent, and still.

Jesus bids us shine – 5 August 2016

An email last week expressed concern that most of us, living in New Zealand, in adequate surroundings, may really be simply protecting our own degree of comfort and security – doing religious things instead of really making a difference.  Then in another email, one of my fellow Oblates, Janet, reported that on an impulse she went to a seminar in Sydney organised by the Australian Christian Meditation community, and she writes:

(The seminar was entitled) ECOLOGY. ENVIRONMENT, and MEDITATION.  I questioned how they could all weave together…  (It) was held over a weekend, and all the speakers were Australians except for Father Laurence Freeman…  His question was: How can a contemplative spirituality make a difference in responding to the environmental challenges we face?  All the speakers spoke with energy, with urgency about the crisis in our world today…, social justice… and the need for a new consciousness… how a contemplative consciousness might heal our growing disconnectedness with the earth, and our increasing identification as consumers.  What I came away with was the knowledge that in all the turmoil of the world, the pain, the frustration, the often helplessness, what is needed is a joyful heart, a warm heart, a supple heart sustained by daily meditation which is the work of transformation and can indeed bring about a new consciousness and heal the world.

Well, the feeling of helplessness in the face of the world’s pain is an old friend.  Whatever service we render, whatever money we give, we know is the proverbial drop in the bucket.  Our fragile environment continues to degrade, mindless greed and violence abound, and children suffer and die.  G K Chesterton wrote, in 1911, as the skies were indeed darkening (Ballad of the White Horse):

    …you and all the kind of Christ
               Are ignorant and brave,
               And you have wars you hardly win
               And souls you hardly save.

               I tell you naught for your comfort,
              Yea, naught for your desire,
              Save that the sky grows darker yet
              And the sea rises higher.

The contemplative wisdom is that it is precisely there, where we are helpless and hopeless, that Jesus is present, knowing that territory well and saying Peace be with you.  The only faith any good any more is faith that sees light in these circumstances, and can testify to the light that we see.  Our contemplative prayer, our quiet consent to God, our love of silence and stillness… all of them, as Janet said, are facilitating a healing heart, what the Dalai Lama calls a Good Heart.  We can bear the burdens of others, as St Paul put it, and he added: and so fulfil the law of Christ.

It is true that there is very little we can do.  Occasionally, there may be something we can do that is important and makes a difference.  Meanwhile, each day, we are present, not running away from the world’s pain, and not obsessed with protecting our own safe hiding places.  Reality, not dreamtime, always accompanies us in the silence and stillness.