22 December 2017

Advent IV – Waiting – 24 December 2017


If you ever watched Fawlty Towers, you may remember Manuel the much oppressed waiter.  Manuel was from Barcelona, and he was keen to improve his English.  One day he had just learned the word eventually -- which he liked a lot and started to use frequently.  In the dining room, when an impatient couple told Manuel they wanted some water, he replied, Eventually

If only everything was eventually.  Eventually Christmas Day will come… eventually it will be 2018.  But eventually doesn’t cover it in much of the reality of people’s experience.  Waiting for a hospital appointment when you’re ill and anxious… eventually isn’t much comfort.  Waiting for son or daughter or grand children to call and to spare you a bit of their time…eventually.  What does waiting mean if you are a Rohingya refugee, waiting homeless in Bangladesh, in rain and mud and cholera… if you are effectively stateless, and governments are simply arguing about whose responsibility you are…?  Eventually…

Waiting, and knowing how to wait, is an important part of spiritual health.  I haven’t learned it yet.   I can’t wait…!  Of course, waiting can also be benign and joyous – as when you are awaiting a child to be born and all is well and as it should be.  Sometimes waiting is totally ludicrous and exasperating, as when you are waiting in a phone queue to speak to someone with intelligence and initiative, and all you are getting is hideous music and recorded assurances that your call is important.  Tedious waiting can on occasion be turned to some interesting subsidiary purpose, such as mentally writing stories about each person in the dentist’s waiting room.  Hospices, as we know, are by their nature waiting places.  Wise people have found how to fill them with peace and goodness. 

Life frequently takes the form of waiting – and so our prayer, in stillness and silence, is itself a mode of waiting in faith, not knowing the end from the beginning, not seeking to manage, control or possess.

Mary and Joseph waited for their child.  The gospel narratives depict a whole world waiting for deliverance.  At the close of 2017 we wait for deliverance from arrogance and violence, from hatred, fear and discrimination, from poverty and disease, from the egoism that turns everything ugly, and from excrescences of religion that distort and disfigure the plain teaching of Jesus.

My experience when waiting, usually, is that everything else around is busy, even frantic, and trauma is abroad.  Have you no consideration for my poor nerves, cries Mrs Bennet to Mr Bennet.  Mr Bennet always greatly preferred to wait in silence and solitude.[1]  I have utmost consideration for your nerves, my love, he replies, they have been my constant companion these twenty years.  Christian Meditation could have enhanced the Bennet family. 

If you are still, something is happening in the distance.  If you are not still, you miss it.  Oh, hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing…



[1] Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice

15 December 2017

Advent III – Seeing the glory – 15 December 2017


And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14)

God’s Logos, God’s Word.  Not a statement or a book… not a sacred scripture… not a doctrine, claiming to be truth… not a creed, or a declaration of faith, not a sermon, or a command…  God’s Word is not words at all – we provide words, in vast quantities of variable worth.  God’s Word is a person.  To a person you relate personally.

In the incomparable words of the Fourth Gospel, the Word, God’s Word, became flesh.  The Greek word “flesh” is sarx (σαρξ), useful in English words such as sarcophagus, sarcoidosis, sarcoma, sarcasm – the gospel writer chose an earthy and basic word.  It amuses me that “flesh”, which for centuries has terrified the Christian church as something dangerous and evil and to be subdued and controlled, is the very vehicle God chooses to convey God’s Word.  The Word became flesh…

…and lived among us.  Again, the Greek in which this writer tries to express the inexpressible is striking.  For “lived” he chose a form of the word skēnē (σκηνη), which means a tent.  Literally he writes, God pitched his tent among us.  A tent is not a stable permanence, like tower or temple, the Bank of England or the Warkworth Town Hall.  God’s Word is not something we can set in place, own or possess or use, or set rules for.  This living Word, as with any living person, defies definition.  God’s Word, alive in our hearts, meets us in different ways at different times and stages[1] of our lives, unpredictable. 

…and we have seen his glory, as of a father’s only son…  The glory of God’s Word is what we see, a person, loved and loving.  A mother’s only son… we could say... a father’s only daughtera mother’s only daughter  The point is that the glory is the relationship, the bond between Jesus and God whom he calls “my father”.  The same loving bond is opened between Jesus and his followers.  Of course it differs from person to person – the bond I experience and practise in prayer and service is not the same as you experience.  It also, with each of us, changes from one season of life to another.  But we recognise in each other the marks of that loving bond, if they are present. 

…full of grace and truth, writes John.  God’s Word is grace and truth.  If what we hear is not, it is not God’s Word.  In mature faith we have learned to distinguish grace and truth from the myriad distortions wrought upon it, it seems inevitably, by human ego and the need for control.  My sheep know my voice, we read in this same gospel[2].  We intuitively discern, or suspect, what is not gracious and what is not true… and we are seeing a lot of it lately, masquerading as Christian truth and righteousness.  The silence and stillness, then, so far as we are able without words or images, is the space in which we may become encountered and taught by God’s Word.



[1] “Moments” - kairoi
[2] John 10:4-5, 27

08 December 2017

Advent II – At peace – 8 December 2017


Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish… (II Peter 3:14)

On Advent II it’s all about John the Baptist, locusts and wild honey, and much repenting.  I retreated to the Epistle for the day, which is a fire-breathing passage in II Peter, not often visited.  I have discovered it’s more fruitful to study these impossible passionate writings after some 60 years, than it ever was in student days.  We may note that whoever wrote II Peter it could scarcely have been the Apostle Peter, and it certainly wasn’t whoever wrote I Peter… we actually don’t have any idea who wrote this.  That’s exciting for a start -- it was someone from epic and lively days in the church, and it was someone who didn’t mince words.  Consider, about believers who revert to pagan ways:  It would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than, after knowing it, to turn back… The dog has turned back to its own vomit… the sow is washed only to wallow again in the mud.  Speak as uncompromisingly as that in the modern church… insist that there are standards and changes required in personal life and values…

While you are waiting for these things.., he writes.  Here is the theme of waiting again.  We meet it regularly.  The infant church was waiting for the final deliverance, the return of Jesus in power and glory and judgement.  They thought that’s what they had to do.   But you can think of Christian life in any age as, in one way or another, a process of waiting.  Jews know how to wait, wrote someone I read recently – the Book of Psalms is full of waiting and longing.  But our current culture keeps crying, I can’t wait…!  The Now of prayer is also the Now of waiting, knowing how to be still in a frenetic age, knowing what to do with anger and fear and endless unresolved issues, knowing how to live deeper than materialism, entertainment, possession and control. While you are waiting, he writes…

…strive to be found by him at peace.  Note the phrase… found by him  It is not a matter of how we appear in the eyes of others, or hope we appear, nor even what we think of ourselves.  and be found in him, writes Paul in another place[1].  Prayer is where we are found… once we have set aside the busyness and the role-playing, the dreaming and dressing up.  Jesus finds us, at peace.  So far as it lies with us, we are refusing to be at odds, to have enemies.  We do not carry aggressive weapons.  We study living without fear.  We seek to make peace.  We instinctively recoil from hate-speech and the vitriol that seems to sustain so many, and maintain divisions, these days.  We do our best to be at peace with the environment.  We no longer have patience for any Christian church in which egos are dictating discord and disorder, since it simply ceases to be credibly Christian.  That is prayer – being found, at peace.  It does not mean untroubled, of course.  Troubles may abound.  But as St Paul put it, Grace does much more abound.[2]



[1] Philippians 3:9.
[2] Romans 5:20.

01 December 2017

Advent I – Heaven and earth – 1 December 2017


Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.  Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.  [Mark 13:30-31]

Well, there seem to be three issues here.  The first is the strange statement Jesus makes, that this generation will not pass away until these things – he refers to the return of the Son of Man in glory and judgement – have taken place.  As we know, we are necessarily in the business of restating Christian truth for our generation and our age and the culture of human arrogance and alternative facts.  Those earliest Christians expected the Lord’s return any day.  It would be most dramatic, nothing like his first Advent at Bethlehem, and all wrongs would be righted. Here Jesus seems to be saying it will be during their generation… but clearly it wasn’t.  Contemplatives know a way to see this more meaningfully.  The end time is always now.  Now is the only time we have.  And an essential feature of contemplative life and prayer is that we are motivated and equipped to live fully in the now – rather than, for instance, what our culture calls living my dream… or retreating from reality into memories, be they triumphs or regrets… Jesus meets us in real time and in truth.  St Paul wrote: Behold, now is the acceptable moment[1], now is the day of salvation!  Contemplative prayer, our prayer of silence and stillness, is always the courage and honesty to mark and name and respect the present moment, to stand in it and realise we are not alone here. 

Secondly he says, heaven and earth will pass away.  Indeed they will, in two respects.  In 1st century terms, heaven and earth was the whole cosmos, the earth and the sky, the known universe.  Now we know that, although it always had a limited life, we are now helping the process along, accelerating it, by our plundering and misuse of the environment.  The second sense in which heaven and earth will pass away is that we are part of it and plainly mortal.  Our bodies stop working.  We too pass away – in the lovely poetry of the Psalmist:  The wind passeth over it and it is gone, and the place thereof knoweth it no more.[2]

And thirdly he says, my words will not pass away.  What endures is the life and truth to which Jesus witnesses.  It is the truth, the words, the teaching, the presence, the gift of new life, that compels us to silence and stillness, to respond with our innermost Yes, our deepest consent.  It is the preference of love over fear, mercy over judgement, the relinquishing of arrogance and the delusion of control, the subduing of the ego.  Jesus brings us into the realm of truth in which death itself forfeits any right to the final word.  Jesus’s words are eternal because they are words of freedom… freedom to celebrate mystery unafraid… freedom to be still and receptive in the kairos, the present moment.



[1] II Corinthians 6:2.  It’s that word kairos which we have met already a few times.
[2] Psalm 103:16.

24 November 2017

The sheep and the goats – 24 November 2017


This Sunday is the last of the old liturgical year, and the following Sunday is the First in Advent, a new Christian year.  In 1925, Pope Pius XI decreed that this Sunday would be called Christ the King, and the lectionary takes us to Matthew 25 and the stern account of the Sheep and the Goats.  Christ the King in glory sits in judgement and separates the sheep from the goats, on the basis of how they have given food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, welcomed strangers, clothed the naked, cared for the sick and visited those in prison – or how they have not done these things.

Rather more ancient is an Anglican designation for this Sunday, which comes from the Collect for the day in the 1534 Book of Common Prayer: Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded… So it has been popularly known as Stir-Up Sunday -- and a timely signal therefore to make the Christmas pudding. 

But all this is putting off the moment when we respond intelligently to this strange picture of Christ the King, sitting in glory and in final judgement, separating people, labelling them indelibly sheep or goat, saved or lost, on the basis of their service record (…unto me) – and consigning the failed, the goats to perdition.  It is uncomfortably reminiscent of horrifying separations at Auschwitz or Ravensbrück, and such other hideous things that are happening still to people in 2017.  The narrative in Matthew takes no account of who had seriously tried but failed in life, or of people who never had a chance, or people who laboured under crippling handicaps not of their doing or deserving, or people who did everything right but for self-serving motives.  Robert Burns put it better:  What’s done we partly may compute, but know not what’s resisted.[1]

There are numerous Christians who accept this story with its uncompromising message… and are presumably unworried about its implications… or simply hope they’re among the sheep.  But there are others of us who encounter Jesus very differently.  In his kingdom, as he said, we do not have a binary society of winners and losers, us and them, the right and the wrong, black and white, rich and poor, male and female, Christian and Moslem, Protestant and Catholic, Jew and Gentile, whole and broken.  Neither did St Paul, we should note.  Far from separating the sheep from the goats, wrote Paul, Jesus demolishes walls, heals divisions.[2]  In John 17 Jesus prays: …that they may be one, as we are one.

The walls and divisions come down first in our hearts, the primary battleground, and the process continues to happen there in a practice of silence and stillness, dissolving prejudices, calming fears of difference or of being vulnerable, replacing blame and guilt with mercy and love.  And a different person means, to that extent at any rate, a different world.



[1] Robert Burns: Address to the Unco Guid or the Rigidly Righteous.  It’s worth reading… based on Ecclesiastes 7:16.
[2] See Ephesians 2:13-22.

17 November 2017

Thief in the night – 17 November 2017


For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.  When they say, “There is peace and security… [I Thess 5:2-3]

The two letters from Paul to the church at Thessalonica are among the earliest writings to have made it into the Christian scriptures, and they are generally dated at only 20-25 years after the crucifixion of Jesus.   Those 1st-generation Christians lived in expectation of the Lord’s return, the Day of the Lord.  But already there is a note of caution.  Jesus doesn’t return in the way they expect, and so here Paul is writing also about the discipline of waiting.  How do we cope with delay, uncertainty, unpredictability? 

Last week we were reinterpreting[1]… now in the writings of Paul we have to reinterpret some more, find what we might mean in 2017, by the Day of the Lord.  This Day of the Lord is what the Greek language, including in this very passage, calls a kairos (καιρος), a moment, an event in life, when something crucial happens.  So it is a time of change, a time for decisions, a discovery that things are not going to be the same again…  For the Thessalonians, the Day of the Lord if it happened would certainly be a kairos.  Being bereaved is a kairos, obviously… so is having a baby.  Conversion, Baptism…  Falling in love… but also in human experience, parting, separating…  A bad diagnosis… A loss of trust in someone…

In Paul we find two teachings about this, and they go oddly together.  The first is that, as he says, the Day of the Lord, whatever it may be, may be sudden and unexpected.  This is the Thief in the Night.  Mature faith has learned to live therefore in an unfair and unpredictable world, to expect the unexpected and undeserved.  Moreover, for mature faith the Day of the Lord, whatever event it is, is not seen as something God does to us.  The God Jesus called Father does not unaccountably afflict anyone with disease or punish or strike anyone down, or take our side against others.  Paul writes: You are not in darkness, for that Day to surprise you like a thief… we are children of light, he writes, we are awake and sober.  I would add, if Paul permits… and we do not live in fear and superstition. 

Paul’s second point is that in mature faith we learn how to wait, patiently if necessary, when necessary – not grinding our teeth or raising our blood pressure, but acquiring the strange gift of being still and letting the river run of its own accord.  For some of us this is a rather hard lesson, and sometimes, I agree, it may be necessary to be impatient.   The Psalmist however knows how to wait.[2]  Contemplative prayer is very much a matter of waiting in silence and stillness.  And for the true contemplative, in whom fear is being dispelled and the need to control is being tamed, waiting in silence holds many good secrets.



[1] Bridegrooms arriving, and foolishness…
[2] eg. Psalm 62:1, 5; 33:20; 69:3; 27:14; 37:7 etc… Also eg. Isaiah 8:17; Romans 8:25; Galatians 5:5…  cf T S Eliot: East Coker III – I said to my soul, be still, and wait…etc

10 November 2017

Five out of ten were morons – 10 November 2017


The kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom.  Five of them were foolish, and five were wise.  [Matthew 25:1-2]

So… in Jesus’s parable of the bridesmaids the ratio of foolish to wise in the Kingdom of God is about 50%.  (I don’t know how many weddings I have conducted in years gone by, but when it comes to bridesmaids 50% wise may seem a little on the hopeful side.)  The Greek adjective used here for foolish is mōron (μωρος).  It may sound familiar.  Their foolishness however was not that they were asleep when the bridegroom finally showed up – both wise and foolish, it says, were asleep.  It was rather that they had insufficient oil for their lamps when the moment came.  They were not ready.  The wise ones (and this is how it has always seemed to me since I first heard this story as a child brought up to share happily with my younger brother and sister, whether I wanted to or not) the wise ones may have been wise, but were nevertheless rude and uncaring: …there wouldn’t then be enough for all of us… go and buy some for yourselves.  And while the foolish were away doing that…the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut.  Later the (foolish) bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’  But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’  

It ends up with a slap in the face.  The door is shut.  He doesn’t know them.  This is in conflict with the prevailing sentimental religious hopefulness, that everyone gets there in the end… God shuts no one out… or as we learn in American movies: Everything’s gonna be just fine.  So we have a task as intelligent grown-up Christian believers in the 21st century, to find the wisdom (σωφια) here if we can. 

The foolish bridesmaids had neglected to have enough oil.  In both Hebrew and Christian scriptures, oil is a potent symbol… olive oil of course, supplying light; essential for food; olive oil was a useful skin emollient…  The great seven-branched menorah in the temple was fuelled by oil (not candles).  There was a prevailing myth that its oil never ran out.  Olive oil was pretty well essential for life in the ancient world.  In ancient Greece it was a capital offence to cut down an olive tree. 

So we in the 21st century might ask, what is essential, in that kind of way, in the life of faith – and living as we do in a maelstrom of competing faiths and increasingly no faith at all?  What makes the difference between a formal religion of generally good behaviour, sneered at by much of the world -- and a life of faith supplied, empowered, enlightened daily by love, grace and mercy…?  It is not a question of who gets to heaven and who doesn’t.  Rather, it is a question, as Jesus said, of setting self aside.  The enemy of faith is (grammar alert!) the first person possessive pronoun – my needs, my rights, my faith, my God, my church, my opinions, my tribe, our culture, our way of life…  In contemplative silence and stillness, nothing is less appropriate… words have ceased and hands are empty.  With the help of God we are gently consenting to the setting of self aside. 

03 November 2017

Loving my neighbour…3 November 2017


The discussion last Friday brought us once again to the practicalities of a consistent Christian life... questions asked by people who live in the real world.  Living with neighbours, for instance, as we know, can turn into a bracing test of Christian behaviour.  We can become bewildered and confused by anger, it may be, or frustration or defeat.  A neighbour who won’t cut down a tree… a neighbour who does cut down a tree… a neighbour who defaults to abuse… a neighbour who has drunken parties… 

One of our really effective teachers, Esther de Waal, has written about what she calls pausing at the threshold.[1]  Esther de Waal is an Anglican, a Benedictine Oblate and a writer also on Celtic spirituality.  She lives in the Welsh borders.  She says there are different kinds of lines in the sand, as it were.  You can have, for instance, a boundary.  A boundary is probably there for a reason and it is to be respected.  The American poet, Robert Frost, wrote about boundaries, Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down…  but then he quotes his neighbour who simply says, Good fences make good neighbours.   Or you can have a frontier.  That is another matter.  A frontier says, Stay out!  It says, if you want to come in you must seek permission.  The President of the United States is making a frontier, 10 metres high, between the USA and Mexico.  Huge prefabricated sections are already being tested.   Or thirdly, you can have a borderland.   A borderland is a meeting place where different people, cultures and histories, ways of life, languages, races, encounter and learn from each other.  So a borderland will be where people might change their minds or alter their opinions.  At any rate, you can’t be sure of the outcome of your hospitality.

Moreover, in a borderland, what happens on the border happens also personally and interiorly.  We have borders, lines in the sand, not only between our properties, or between countries, but in our minds and hearts.  If the border within, as it were, is a borderland, then you know to practise hospitality, as the scriptures understand that word.  You are not afraid of the meeting of ideas and opinions, or different creeds or races.  As Esther de Waal points out, you still have your own boundaries within – you know who you are, you know what is unresolved within you and you are giving hospitality also to your doubts, fears and frailties.  An inner borderland is an open mind.  But if it is a frontier it is not open, it will be threatened by change, perhaps even by truth.

In practical terms then, if our inner boundaries are a borderland, then we are always available for listening.  Perhaps we want to understand what lies behind abuse or intransigence.  We discern when to leave well alone.  We do what we can always for peace and understanding.  We come to any encounter in the borderland as people of prayer, of the meeting of silence and stillness.  It is not a magic formula, it doesn’t solve everything – but it is the way we live.



[1] Esther de Waal: To Pause At The Threshold – Reflections on Living on the Border (Morehouse, 2001).

27 October 2017

Brought to silence – 27 October 2017


When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:34-40)

Next Sunday the devout churchgoer is likely to hear about All Saints Day (November 1), or All Souls Day (November 2), or Reformation Sunday – and in that respect 2017 is the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door of All Saints Church at Wittenberg.  It makes a good story… but he did trigger the vast protestant reformation which took Germany and much of Europe at the time by storm.  Luther said a lot of things, but his basic message was that God’s favour is not earned by good deeds or any other way, but is received as the free gift of God's grace and love to all, through the believer's faith in Jesus Christ.

In this narrative from Matthew we learn how Jesus brought the religious practitioners, the pharisees and the sadducees, to silence.  The sadducces wanted to debate with him about aspects of religious practice, while the pharisees decided to test him more cunnngly by asking which was the greatest, the most important religious law.  There comes a time, I think, when there is little energy for this sort of debate.  And indeed, the way many Christians talk and argue about God tempts me towards atheism.  Jesus goes to the heart of life and belief with two statements, both of them from the Hebrew scriptures – and they are not about the mind but about the heart:  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind… you shall love your neighbour as yourself.[1]  In the first of those, about loving God, Jesus inserts “with all your mind” – but what he was quoting from says not “mind” but “might”.  Jesus amends that, he says that mind – that is to say, intelligence, intellect, our opinions -- all that also is brought into captivity to love of God, God’s love and ours.  One outcome of that is humility about belief.

The point of contemplative life and prayer is that it leads us and helps us to put first things first in our heads and hearts.  On our dying day, if we still have our wits, we will be saying yes to God in love – despite all that we still don’t understand.  The point is love, and always was.  That is the willingness to set self aside.   And the climate in which love is born, grows and thrives, is silence and simplicity.





[1]  He is quoting Deuteronomy 6:5, the central Jewish cry of faith, “Shema’ Yisrael…!” where we are to love God with heart, soul and might (Heb: me’od).  But Jesus says: …heart, soul and mind (Greek: dianoia).

20 October 2017

Fear of God – 20 October 2017


Father Laurence Freeman, in a recent article entitled Muddling Through, writes about what our grandparents and their grandparents, to say nothing of earlier translations of the Bible, called the fear of God.  The fear of God, says the Bible, is the beginning of wisdom[1].  But “fear”, often as not, connoted being afraid of God.  They saw the world and human events as under the control of God.  What happened was what God ineffably willed – disease, wars, pregnancy or childlessness, a nice sunny day for the church picnic, or for your granddaughter’s wedding...  You have heard this sort of talk.  Prayer then becomes a matter of conveying our hopes to this all-powerful God.  Death is understood as God “taking” you.  So God gets both feared and blamed.  This kind of religion, the only kind millions of people know, owes more to superstition than to anything Jesus lived or taught. 

Secularism deals with this uncertainty of events by strategies of planning and control.  If there is no one to blame, then it was an Act of God.  You plan your wedding day so that nothing will go wrong.  You may plan your family for the right balance of male and female, at the right intervals, and plan your lifestyle accordingly – may it all go as you hope.  I suppose most of us have had annual ‘flu shots, as a sensible defence against the virus… I presume it wasn’t any fear that God might zap us with influenza.

But “fear”, Father Laurence points out, is a bad translation.  Fear evokes punishment or guilt, or the fear of getting hurt.  If something bad happens it must be because we did something wrong.  A hefty chunk of American religion – but there are echoes of it in NZ too – adds the corollary:  If you prosper and have a “successful” life, you must have done something right.  God is rewarding you… the so-called prosperity gospel, hopelessly unlike Jesus.  When some tragedy occurs, often as not you will hear the lament, “He didn’t deserve that…” -- as though it would have been understandable if he had.

In Hebrew thought, fear of God is not about being frightened.  It is about wonder and curiosity, awe and excitement at seeing how our familiar world can be changed.  It is what you experience when a child is born.  You are now encountering new ways of being.  God makes all things new[2].  English language finds it hard to express this.  In the prayer of silence and stillness, letting go not only of words and images, but also being ready to let go of fear and any need to control, we may find life becoming suffused with confidence.  This is how Fr Laurence puts it:

In saying the mantra, we recognize and accept the muddle of our minds and lives.  We find ourselves becoming less fearful.  We walk through the minefield of life with a lighter step.  In that acceptance we begin to see potential and pattern in chaos.  We remember that the Spirit of God can do what management consultants cannot.  It brings cosmos out of chaos…   



[1] Proverbs 9:10
[2] Isaiah 43:19; II Corinthians 5:17… etc.

13 October 2017

Silence is golden - 13 October 2017


(Adapted from Sister Joan Chittister OSB: Radical Spirit, 12 Ways to Live a Free and Authentic Life)
The silence of the heart, that deep-down awareness of where we are right now, is our monk’s cell.  It is the place Jesus referred to when he said we should go into our room and shut the door.[1]  It is in that place of honesty that we refresh our acquaintance, over the months and years, with ourselves and who we really are.  We may learn there what we are afraid of and what we are resisting.  We hear there the voices we normally block out with seductive noise or busy activity.  It is in silence that we hear the sounds of our better angels calling us to rise above our lesser selves.  It is in silence, beyond words, that it becomes possible to be truthful, forgiving and compassionate.

Hence, in much of our contemporary culture, silence is very much the enemy.  We don’t know what to do with it.  Also, many live in fear of being bored or perhaps helpless.  Restaurants and shopping malls and supermarkets are filled with mindless music, while parties and nightclubs drown any useful thoughts or communication under a tidal wave of decibels. 

A gentle discipline of silence throws us back upon ourselves, unveils our wounds, and perhaps our untruthfulness.  Silence is a healing process – because it is not possible to pretend all the time.  Silence distances us from our public selves so that we may have more to give to the rest of our world in the future.

It is not uncommon to hear people who are nervous about silence, when they consider the kind of prayer we do here, call it selfish, or self-indulgent, or label it as unhealthy “introversion”.  Well, silence can of course become something else.  It can become our private game of escapism.  We can come to like and enjoy silence, and try to use it – for instance, to reduce anxiety or lower our blood pressure.  We can begin to substitute feeling better for being right.  We can withdraw from the real world and call withdrawal a spiritual life.  We can use silence to avoid the world, its menaces, and our responsibilities.  We can simply dissociate from the people around us and tell ourselves that we have done a holy thing.  But if we do, we are misusing silence, debasing its spiritual value, and making ourselves our own god, whom we go inside to worship.
 

Silence is not for its own sake.  It is the silence in which God, who will not shout at us, offers the love and mercy of which Jesus spoke.  It is a silence meant to help us -- healed of our anger and fear – to do what we can to see that the world around us becomes more a graceful and peaceful place.





[1] Matthew 6:6.   In Scetis, a brother went to see Abba Moses and begged him for a word. The old man said, "Go and sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything." ( Saying From the Desert Fathers)

06 October 2017

Looking forward – 6 October 2017


Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:12-14)

Paul makes several statements here which are indicative of what we might call, perhaps a little provocatively, grown-up faith.  The first is his acknowledgement that he remains a work in progress – he has not obtained certainty, he says, he has not reached the goal.  I don’t know how old Paul was, but it could seem a little striking around here when someone in their senior years says, I am still finding out, maturing, exploring.  Paul does not say, I know what I believe[1]… that’s the way I am, I’m too old to change… that’s what I think and that’s what I’ll always think…  It is still for Paul a journey, a trail awinding.   Indeed, he may feel that there is less he can be sure about. Mystery increases and questions abound. 

Then he says, Christ Jesus has made me his own.   Paul has come to see that it’s really not so much my faith, my belief, my discipleship…  You have not chosen me, Jesus told his disciples[2], I have chosen you.  With mature faith has come a sense of being called, and held -- a sense that wherever the truth lies, it is certainly with Jesus, and it is down the path of surrendering, relinquishing, simplifying. 

Next he says he forgets what lies behind  Well of course he doesn’t.  We may forget some of the past, or distort it, but mostly it remains in our memory.  There are cogent reasons not to forget the past.  Good and careful historians should always have an honoured place in human society wherever people are willing to listen and learn.  But also, every family in every generation can do with someone who knows the story as accurately and honestly as possible, and can tell it with understanding and compassion.  The church’s story too… including its darker aspects in our lifetimes. 

What Paul seeks to leave behind, I think, is any legacy of bitterness, blame, or the need for revenge, or lying awake with unfinished business.  He emerges from the past certainly wounded, as many do one way or another, but not as any career victim.  Father Laurence Freeman puts this better than I can, when he writes that mature faith is about looking back and discerning patterns and resonances in life, which we could not see at the time.  We learn never to settle for just one level of meaning.  We know now that there are and always will be new ways of being, and we are not afraid of newness or change.  These are concomitants of grown-up faith, and they include prayer, especially the prayer of stillness and silence, our mature and grateful yes to God.



[1] Paul, or whoever wrote II Timothy 1:12 does say, I know WHOM I have believed… that is a different matter.
[2] John 13:18;  15:16, 19.

29 September 2017

Order of precedence – 29 September 2017


What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’  He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went.  The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go.  Which of the two did the will of his father?  They said: The first.  Jesus said to them: Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. (Matthew 21:28-31)

I find that at least slightly enigmatic?  Do you?  Jesus seems to be saying that everyone winds up in the kingdom of God eventually.  It’s just that the tax collectors and the prostitutes get there earlier and easier than the overly righteous, those whom Robert Burns called the unco’ guid,[1] who are delayed because they don’t do what they claim to do, or perhaps because their egos are in the way.  The tax collectors and the prostitutes make only modest claims about righteousness, but they fulfil the law in deeper ways.  Is that right, and is that what it means?  Or does he mean that vain self-righteousness is actually worse than anything the tax collectors and prostitutes are up to…?

At any rate it does have echoes of last week’s parable, in which the owner of the vineyard pays the same to those who had worked only one hour, as to those who had worked all day.  When they complained, the proprietor asks, Are you envious because I am generous?[2] 

“Generous” is the key to it…  The usual biblical word is Grace – in Greek the lovely word χαρις – in the Hebrew scriptures it is chesed, grace – along with love, the closest language gets to the nature of God.  Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in a sermon in California, put it inimitably:

This family (God’s kingdom) has no outsiders. Everyone is an insider. When Jesus said, "I, if I am lifted up, will draw..." Did he say, "I will draw some"? "I will draw some, and tough luck for the others"? He said, "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all." All! All! All! – Black, white, yellow; rich, poor; clever, not so clever; beautiful, not so beautiful. All! All! It is radical. All are to be held in this incredible embrace. Gay, lesbian, so-called "straight;" all! All! All are to be held in the incredible embrace of the love that won’t let us go.

In our prayer we are present in that generosity, that grace.  It is altogether too much, too impossible, too inequitable, for the church at times to stomach, let alone we ourselves in our times of guilt and failure, or our times of anger with others.  But our place in the queue as it were, in the order of precedence of God’s kingdom, depends upon none of that.  It depends on grace, generosity and love.



[1] Robert Burns: Address to the Unco Guid or the Rigidly Righteous.
[2] Matthew 20:15.  The Greek for generous is agathos (αγαθος) which usually means simply “good”.  This generous, gracious goodness, overturning human assumptions about worth and deserving, is simply what God is like.

15 September 2017

God’s welcome – 17 September 2017


Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables.  Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgement on those who eat; for God has welcomed them. (Romans 14:2-3)

Paul is writing to the church at Rome.  He has not yet visited Rome, he hasn’t met these people, but he has heard that divisions have developed among them – between conservatives who want rules to prevail, and others for whom the rules may be unnecessary or even a hindrance to real faith.  Of course the problem may be between Jewish and Gentile Christian believers, but in Rome I would think it was rather more complex than that.  Some in the Roman church feel free to eat anything they like, while others want to prohibit meat.[1]  Interestingly, Paul refers to the abstainers as “weak in faith”[2].  Undue reliance on rules and prohibitions, he thinks, is actually a weakness, something we can grow out of.  He had a furious argument with the Galatian church about the same issue – in Galatia it concerned circumcision or uncircumcision.[3]  Back in Rome it was also about the keeping of holy days… whether that was compulsory or not. 

Paul’s passion about this issue is that the divisions and disputes simply miss the point.  God has welcomed them, he writes – that is the point.  God has welcomed the ones you think are out of order.  Would they be, more likely, in the 21st century, the couple living in a same-sex relationship?  God has welcomed them.  The divorced person…?  The person with a criminal record…?  The psychiatric survivor…?  God has welcomed them.  In some places… the woman minister or bishop…?  God welcomed her.  In hearts of mature faith these disputes are settled.  Informed both by the Bible and by the Spirit of Christ, we don’t have time or energy for them anymore.

In contemplative life and the prayer of inner silence and stillness there are no discriminations between people because our own status and importance and ego have ceased to be the agenda.  Moreover, creating space for God inevitably means space also for our writhing, hurting world.  The Spirit of Jesus, as we are consenting to God, opens us gently into the widest hospitality to difference and need.  Most of all, we are surrendering our fears.  This has suddenly become more pointed in apocalyptic times.  We may fear for others and what may happen to them, but love casts out fear for our own possessions and survival.  We acquire an inner freedom, and an instinctive regard for truth.  Jesus was notorious among the respectable classes precisely because his inner freedom and truth, the grace he received in prayer, took him as a practising Jew across the boundaries of Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, good and bad, black and white.  And that is what hospitality means in faith – welcoming whom God welcomes.



[1] They refused possibly because the meat supply came mainly from animals sacrificed in Roman pagan rituals.
[2] Even if they are not weak in haemoglobin.  Also see Acts 11:1-18.
[3] Galatians 5:1-7… but indeed the whole epistle.

08 September 2017

First do no wrong – 8 September 2017


Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. (Romans 13:8-10)

That is the Epistle for next Sunday.  I turned to it in hope, having been defeated by the Gospel lesson in Matthew 18 – which I cannot think is authentic words of Jesus.  The many commentaries available online similarly struggle with that passage.  Once upon a time I would have sweated over it until I had wrung something more or less intelligible from it… but not any more.  Part of grown-up faith is a keener sense of what seems right… and what does not.  So St Paul came as a relief.  Our only debt to each other, he says, is the debt of love – love is the fulfilling of the law, the commandments.  Love does no wrong to a neighbour.  

I have just read what is called a graphic novel trilogy… three volumes, all under the title “March”[1].  They tell the story of the United States civil rights movement from the 1950s, through towards the Obama presidency.  It is done brilliantly in graphic comic book format, but very much for adult understanding.  These books tell of the early lunch counter sit-ins, the Freedom Riders, the reactions of many white people who turned to violence to preserve their segregated way of life.  The principal author is John Lewis, a black leader now a US congressman, who was in the movement from the beginning.  He tells of the interminable and brutal struggle simply to get black people registered to vote, the terrible retaliations and injustices, corrupt courts, and hatred.  From the beginning – and this is the point this morning -- most of the civil rights movements adopted a strict discipline of non-violence.  So… they went to hospital, they went to gaol, but they did not retaliate.  Love does no wrong to a neighbour.  Non-violence was personally very costly, and some of them died, or were permanently injured.  Their determination to be non-violent was often severely tested. 

We work out our discipleship, our personal response to Jesus, in individually different ways.  No two Christians are the same, or necessarily agree with each other, or experience the same things.  But our differences are not the problem – it is simply the way God has ordered creation.  In mature discipleship we learn always to be suspicious of uniformity and conformity.  But what we have in common through all the differences, in company with Jesus, is the priority of love – rescuing that word, if we can, from the repellent sentimentality the secular culture reduces it to.  Love requires truth and it requires courage.  It does no wrong to another.  Part of love therefore is that we have made peace with ourselves, and this we seek in the prayer of silence, stillness, simplicity – as Jesus said, Go into your room and shut the door… 



[1] MARCH Books 1, 2 and 3 – John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell (Top Shelf Productions, 2013, 2015, 2016)