Now we see in a mirror, in a riddle, but then we will see face to
face. Now I know in part; then I will
know fully, even as I am fully known [I Cor. 13: 12].
The Greek word Paul uses is “enigma” (εν αινιγματι). Faith in God, Christian allegiance, does not
draw the veil aside to explain much at all.
If you are looking for your questions to be answered, your doubts
resolved… if you want assurance about belief and about what’s right and what’s
wrong… if you want to live in some safety zone where things don’t go wrong,
where no one ever lets you down… then you’re seriously out of luck. Yet people come to the church with those
expectations, and in some ways the church has encouraged them. St Paul says that life and faith remain
cloaked in mystery. What John’s Gospel
calls abiding, what St Paul calls being “in Christ”, deepens our capacity to
live fully in that place of unknowing, to live with uncertainty and
unresolvedness – along with, as we well know, the continuing realities of pain
and loss, unfairness, inequity… all the issues the Psalmist complained about –
the income gap, the wicked thriving, the children suffering.
Now abiding, as we have been hearing, is a mutual abiding. I abide in him, he abides in me. It finds expression most clearly in our form
of prayer based on stillness and silence, in which we make space, we do what we
can (which often isn’t much) to set self aside.
In this discipline, then, as weeks and years go by, we find our
self-concern attenuating, weakening, assuming less prominence. This is not something we could decide and do
ourselves. We are consenting to this
change brought by the Spirit of the Risen Christ abiding in us. This gentle process begins to modify our
reactions and feelings widely, far beyond our actual prayer.
One of the fruits of this, we have seen, is the process of
discernment. To the extent that self is
no longer determining everything, we are (says Sarah Bachelard) deepening
our capacity to dwell in the place of unknowing, we are more able to suspend
premature judgement or solutions. One
surprise may be that we are not as afraid as we used to be of what could happen. We have less need of fences, walls,
battlements – rather, we are finding a better sense of spaciousness and
possibility and the future. We lose our
fear of being wrong. To the extent moreover that the church
learns contemplative prayer and discernment, it becomes better able to be
sensible and wise in Christian action in the secular world.
Sarah Bachelard described the culture in which we find ourselves living
the faith we have. In her words… We live in highly opinionated and reactive
times, in a culture that often exhibits arrogant certainty, impatience with
waiting and with the vulnerability of real listening… (A culture of) winning
and losing, listening for weakness and exploiting it… demand for instant
results, readily measurable outcomes, manageable key performance indicators… The committed practice of discernment is
profoundly counter-cultural, she says. Yet… if we are to act in our families,
communities, businesses and nations truly responsive to the truth of things, to
the will of God, then it’s this capacity for discernment above all that we need
to strengthen and practise. And this is
a gift that contemplative persons and communities must model and make
available.[1]
[1]
Quotations are from Sarah Bachelard: For
Love of the World: Contemplation, Faith and the Active Life – Talks to the
NZCCM retreat, Hamilton NZ, January 2017… Talk 3.
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