25 November 2016

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 1st 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 21st 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.

18 November 2016

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.

11 November 2016

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.

04 November 2016

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. 



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