21 December 2018

Recess

OurWarkworth group is now in recess until Friday 1 February 2019.

Advent Canticles 4 – 21 December 2018


He has shown strength with his arm;

he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away.

(Luke 1:51-53)

Part of the Magnificat…  Mary’s song of joy when the two mothers meet, Elizabeth and Mary.  I am very much on the outskirts of all this.  You know how people often say, “I know exactly how you’re feeling”… when of course they don’t, and they can’t.  What they know is what they are feeling, or felt. We don’t know what these two women are feeling.  We are distant onlookers, rightly hesitant about approaching, and we sense mystery.  But we may listen to Mary’s song.  It is very moving poetry… and it is profoundly subversive.  God, she sings, by the birth of this child has done three things. 

The first is: He has scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts.  It is in Greek.  “The proud” is a word meaning those who deem themselves naturally superior, the arrogant, the ones who believe they are born to rule.  But there is simply no place at the cradle of this child for proud self-satisfaction or egoism...  wherever it happens, in presidencies or the highest places in church or politics, or in our homes or the secrets of our hearts.  It doesn’t belong.  It is simply inappropriate here.  Mary sees such people “scattered”, she says, with all their pretensions.

Secondly, He has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.  This is about power.  “The mighty” means those not only wielding power but enjoying knowing others are powerless – the Greek word denotes powerful dynasties.  Mary sees such power defused, cancelled – as in the end, in history, it always is.  It is the meek, the humble, said Jesus, who inherit the earth.

And thirdly, he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away.  This is more than turning on Christmas dinner for the city’s needy… it is more than foodbanks… admirable and all as they are.  It is a vision of justice, equity in which no one is hungry, children are nourished… in which there is no culture of flaunted affluent greed or the diseases of over-indulgence. 

Mary’s vision… we scarcely see it happening in fact.  There is the poetry… and there is the reality.  Human arrogance, the misuse of power, greed and inequity, continue to thrive.  Eventually the followers of this child began to realise that the kingdom, as he indeed taught, is within.  The same Spirit who inspired Mary’s vision sets about changing hearts.  Mary knew what Jeremiah had prophesied[1]: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.  Or Ezekiel[2]:  I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh… I will put my Spirit within you…  These, in ancient terms, are the changes to which we consent in the stillness and silence of our prayer. 



[1] Jeremiah 31:33
[2] Ezekiel 36:26

14 December 2018

Thankfulness – Advent 3, 14 December 2018


You will say in that day: I will give thanks to you, O Lord, for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away, and you comforted me… With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.  And you will say in that day: Give thanks to the Lord, call on his name; make known his deeds among the nations; proclaim that his name is exalted.  Sing praises to the Lord, for he has done gloriously; let this be known in all the earth.  Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.  (Isaiah 12:1-6)

The Principal of Mahurangi College, on sabbatical, spent five weeks in South Sudan, a war-torn place, schools destroyed along with much more of the infrastructure, children now having lessons under trees or in the ruins, bringing their own chairs…  But David MacLeod found students “bright-eyed and eager to learn”.  He went on to Canada, with schools better equipped and financed than here in NZ.  There he found students “disinterested, poorly motivated and contributing to a youth mental health crisis… The Canadian kids just had a dullness in their eyes by comparison”, said David MacLeod.  Of course, those are generalisations, but still, I imagine, we are not entirely surprised. 

The passage from Isaiah is the Lectionary Canticle for worship on the 3rd Sunday in Advent.  It is about joy and thankfulness.  Isaiah is filled with gratitude… this is the 8th century BC, when the Assyrian was coming down like a wolf on the fold.[1]  Gratitude is a principal marker of grown-up faith – but the gratitude we mean is decidedly not on the level of counting your blessings, naming them one by one.  That is more on the level of Aunt Daisy than Jesus or Isaiah… if your blessings outnumber your disasters, so the story goes, then you’re ahead – but that’s not faith, it’s accountancy.  A related cliché says: There’s always someone worse off than you…  Believe me, there are situations, some of them quite common, in which there is no one worse off.  Nevertheless, gratitude was not unknown in Auschwitz.

Real gratitude flows from God.  It is a gift of faith, not something we generate ourselves, like remembering to say thank you to Aunty Agatha.  Gratitude and praise is a grace we receive.  It is a sharing of God’s joy in creation and in constant re-creation.  To say “Grace” at meals, for instance, though we may do it perfunctorily, if at all, is a “kairos”, a spiritual moment.  The food before us is a gift, part of the gift of life and love.  So we pause, properly, to think however fleetingly how all is gift – and of the atrocity of famine in the world God made and gave to feed us.  Neither is this gratitude giving thanks because we are safe and privileged – that is what the pharisee did.  We give thanks that food is there at all.  We give thanks for the hope that is in us, which is often “hope against hope”.  We give thanks for life and breath, for love and goodness, and kindness, for second chances and the lessons of adversity.  We give thanks for light on the horizon, the promise of Advent. 



[1] Byron: The Destruction of Sennacherib.

07 December 2018

Advent Canticles 2 – 7 December 2018


The Song of Zechariah, more commonly known as the Benedictus, normally gets said or sung in morning worship – but on Advent II it is given a special place.  Zechariah, a priest in the temple, so the story goes, sang this at the circumcision of his child John, whom we know as John the Baptist.  This was remarkable because Elizabeth his wife had long been labelled “barren”, which in practice meant useless.   They were elderly people – Luke stresses all this -- they may even have had their names down for Summerset Falls.  We are also told that Zechariah had been struck dumb, before John’s birth, for having expressed doubt to the Angel Gabriel that any of this was possible.  So Zechariah’s song was the first thing he had been able to speak for quite a while.  I do hope you are keeping up with me…

For some two-thirds of his song he lyrically celebrates his belief that God is about to intervene and deliver Israel from the hands of their oppressors, the Romans.  The Deliverer will be from the royal house of David.  Everything God promised to Abraham, and ever since, is about to be fulfilled.  Then suddenly he directly addresses this baby, his baby, the whole point of the observance in the temple today.  Luke renders this in Greek as an emphatic shift of focus… and you, little child…[1]  Have you ever noticed that abrupt change, as you recite the Benedictus?

It is difficult to resist, as a father, interpreting this in 21st century terms.  What is Zechariah expecting of his son?  A worthy replica of himself…? a young hero…? a dutiful prospect on which the father will spend a fortune for education and formation…? a sporting icon perhaps…? a credit to the family…? a loyal assimilator of his father’s goals and ideals and values…? Zechariah is not, he is letting go of his son.  Certainly he will do all that is expected of a father and a parent, in love, in nurture, in care and provision, in counsel…  But fatherhood does not mean ownership and control.  Fatherhood eventually means letting your child go.  Your child is another person, not under constraint to replicate anyone or anything.   Zechariah’s child will serve faith and hope and goodness in his own ways. 

The Benedictus ends in sublime poetry about God.  Zechariah sings of the tender compassion of our God – the Greek literally says “bowels of mercy”[2].  He pictures the dawn suddenly rising in the east, enlightening, shining on those sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death, guiding our feet into the way of peace.  It is a lovely prophecy that Zechariah weaves over this newborn child, utterly mysterious, profoundly hopeful and faith-filled.  Advent waits for the dawn, never more needed than in the 21st century… a dawn of mercy and truth, light in the darkness, hope for those who see nothing but the shadow of death, a discovery of ways to live in peace.



[1] Καὶ σὺ δέ, παιδίον… very focussed and emphatic.
[2] We have encountered ancient anatomy before.  τα σπλαγχνα (ta splagchna) means bowels, innards, heart and lungs.  It is seen as where our deepest feelings and reactions come from.  The word is used here, of God. 

30 November 2018

Advent Canticles – Advent I, 30 November 2018


Advent, despite the depredations of the secular world, is not Christmas.  Why not, this time around, I thought, attend to the Psalms in the Lectionary for Advent.  But as it turns out, only for the 1st Sunday in Advent do we actually have a Psalm.  For the other three Sundays it is Canticles – The Benedictus, a Canticle from Isaiah, and on Advent IV the Magnificat.  For Advent I then it is Psalm 25, the first half of it.  Unto thee, O Lord, will I lift up my soul… That’s from the Coverdale version, 1535.  It is the version used in Anglican prayer books, one way and another, down to the present day. 

My God, I have put my trust in thee; O let me not be confounded,

Neither let mine enemies triumph over me…

The Psalmist turns to prayer.  His or her prayer is heartfelt and personal from the outset.  It is not any formal saying of prayers, although that, as we know, has its important place.  Here however the Psalmist is not hiding at all from God, or from herself.  There is no one else present.  She says, or sings, I lift up my soul…  Her life, in the most hidden depths she knows, she is offering back to God.  And she is deeply aware of what she thinks are its defects.  God may not be seeing the defects she sees… but this is her prayer, and she means every word.  She wishes she had better words.

O let me not be confounded…  The Hebrew means blushing, ashamed, even disqualified.  Her deepest desire here is to be confident and honest before God.  Neither let mine enemies triumph over me…  When we read the Psalms, or hear them in church, “my enemy” is a frequent presence, but “my enemy” may not at all be some attack from elsewhere.  “The enemy” may be within, personal, obstinate, lifelong – an addiction perhaps, an intractable memory, some perceived inadequacy, some failure...  We read the Psalms as what they are, poetry, and charged with meaning we never suspected.  These prayers in all their red-bloodedness give us a voice.  So we linger over them, and love them.  The Psalmist is speaking for us and often movingly.

Shew me thy ways, O Lord; teach me thy paths.

Lead me forth in thy truth, and learn me[1]

In her stillness and attention in prayer she is reminded that life and the world are not primarily about her.  God’s way is primary, not mine; God’s will, not mine; God’s word, not mine.  Hebrew loves to say the same thing twice with different words – in this case, four times:  Shew me… teach me… lead me… learn me…  The third one is a word derived from the noun meaning a goad, a prod, even a rod of correction.  It is as though we learn, often as not, if we are willing and listening, which often we are not -- by the adverse things that happen, the setbacks, the calamities.  The Psalmist in her prayer submits to leading, or prodding, so long as it is along the path of truth, love and goodness.  And so her prayer goes on… Psalm 25.  You may be able to read it yourself in the First Week of Advent.



[1] Coverdale authorises us to use “learn” transitively to mean imparting knowledge.

23 November 2018

Strangers and sojourners – 23 November 2018


Rabbi Josh Whinston serves the Beth Emeth (House of Truth) synagogue in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  A couple of weeks ago he led a team from his congregation some 2700 kilometres to Tornillo, Texas.  This is beside the Mexican border, and it is where the US government has one of its camps altogether housing now some 14,000 children of refugees, separated from their parents.  The Jews from Michigan were bearing witness to something timeless.  They bore a word from God.   All the Hebrew scriptures, the Law, the Prophets the Writings, stress repeatedly that they themselves, the Hebrews, were more than once strangers and sojourners, and may be again, that they must never forget this, that their constant obligation and privilege, in their security and prosperity, is to welcome the stranger and the sojourner, never to oppress them but to share land and opportunity. 

In Hebrew “stranger” is a little two-consonant word, ger.   Moses in Egypt named his son Gershon, “a stranger here”, to be a sign to the Hebrew exiles in Egypt.  Rabbi Whinston would have read from any of numerous passages – Solomon’s prayer, for instance, at the joyous dedication of the temple: We are aliens and transients before you, as were all our ancestors.[1]  Israel’s judges are warned to judge fairly whether it is for Hebrew citizens or for strangers, aliens.[2]  Job’s righteousness, he insists, is partly that he has never left the stranger out in the street or refused hospitality to the alien.[3]  The Torah repeatedly forbids any oppression of the stranger, the foreigner, the needy, the widow, the orphan… and the reason: …for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.  I am the Lord your God.[4]

Here in New Zealand we are bordered entirely by ocean, too wide and dangerous to be crossed by desperate people in inflatables.  Maybe Iceland is in a similar situation… remote, and safe.  But nevertheless we too were once strangers and sojourners – Maori emigrated here; White Settlers from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, the Balkans, China; war refugees, children from Poland; more recently, South Africans, and immigrants from all over the South Pacific.  That is one reality – that human habitation of New Zealand has been from the outset by strangers and sojourners… as were all our ancestors, said King Solomon.  It is as well for us to be humble and grateful.  The second reality is for mindful and contemplative believers.  It is that, in our prayer, which is where we are most real, boundaries cannot thrive, neither defensive walls nor fences nor searchlights nor guard patrols.  So the land of our prayer is not particularly safe or cosy, or likely to be.  The land of prayer is a land of change, a land of welcome, a land of risk, a land of making room and of expense, a land of understanding.  We enter that land when, in the company of Jesus, we wait in stillness and silence, and in his Spirit, and at war with no one.



[1] I Chronicles 29:15
[2] Deuteronomy 1:16
[3] Job 31:32
[4] eg. Leviticus 19:33

16 November 2018

Paroxysm of love – 16 November 2018


The lectionary, as we come within a couple of weeks of Advent, gets increasingly difficult...  for next Sunday, a ferocious apocalyptic passage in the Book of Daniel, beyond my wit, I’m afraid… the strange Letter to the Hebrews – I have always struggled with it… and the brief record in Mark where Jesus predicts the rape and pillage of Jerusalem and its temple – done indeed as we know with brutal thoroughness by the army of Titus in 70 AD.

But also in my mind have been much more recent straws in the wind.  In conversation here last Friday the erosion of our coasts, cliffs and beaches was mentioned… the whole matter of climate change and its causes, and its relentless inevitability and our seeming reluctance to face facts.  One of last Friday’s group (Eddie) talked movingly about living very much on the edge, the miracle of his day by day by faith.  It was also, in the south, a day of storms, floods and destruction… mayhem in the White House… another mindless shootout, and immense forest fires, in California… a terrorist incident in Melbourne…  Much of our responsible journalism is now daily deploring the breakdown of decency and truth, in biblical terms the removal of moral landmarks…  What do we do?  What do we think?  How do we pray?  How are our children and grandchildren going to live?  What future has a seemingly impotent, divided and compromised church?

Faith, as we repeatedly say, is moving toward the light we can see, one foot in front of the other.  The Letter to the Hebrews, scholars think may have been written quite early to the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem.  Persecution was increasing, and some Christians were returning to their Jewish faith in the hope that they might protect their families.  Next Sunday’s passage is from chapter 10, and one sentence reads:  Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and goodness…  Provoke...?  Provoke to love…?  This is an instance where the translators seem frightened someone will be upset if they say what the Greek says.  It says:  Let us learn together paroxysms of love and good actions…  In Greek paroxysmos (παροξυσμοϛ) the word used here, means an incitement, provocation.  Paroxysms of love, however...?  In medicine, I find, a paroxysm is “a sudden return or intensification of symptoms”.    The advice to the beleaguered Christians in Jerusalem seems to be simply to pick each other up, day by day, and get on with what you know best – caring for each other and doing good… being present and being true.  That is our task in faith when, as G K Chesterton expressed it with the First World War looming, the sky grows darker yet, and the sea rises higher. 

We don’t have special formulae to explain events.  We don’t have secret recipes for peace in the world or peace of mind.  We have the way of Christ and the fathomless symbols of the cross and the empty tomb.  We have each other.  We have a pathway of prayer, stillness and steadiness.  We have, if we know good teachers, a treasury of wisdom from history and literature.  Always ahead is the light which, as John writes, the darkness has never quenched.  In that setting, says this writer, we learn paroxysms of love and goodness.  Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue, the scene of one of the more recent gun atrocities in the USA, in his sermon on Shabbat to his traumatised congregation a week later, said simply:  Follow the path of good.  It is the only way to heal…

09 November 2018

All she had to live on – 9 November 2018


The Gospel lesson for next Sunday you may know by the title, The Widow’s Mite.  Jesus is in the temple precincts, and just about everything he sees is making him sad and angry.  This is reflected in what he says, particularly in Matthew’s account – Jesus is in furious grief.  He laments over Jerusalem, the temple, and the apocalyptic events he sees are coming.  He turns ferociously on the rulers and religious leaders… hypocrites, white-washed tombs, blind guides, snakes, brood of vipers, locking people out of the kingdom, full of greed and self-indulgence, loading burdens on people but not helping to lift them with so much as a finger…  

He watches worshippers arriving.  They drop their offerings of money into the temple treasury, thoughtfully situated at the entrance.  Some people drop in substantial sums.  A widow arrives and places there two coins – two lepta in Greek equalled one Roman quadrans, something like our old penny.   Jesus said it was all she had to live on.  Now the normal take on this is… how wonderful!  She gave all she had.  She gave from the heart – the others gave from their abundance.  They could spare it, she could not.  And so, we should all take note of the depths of her love and devotion. 

Well, count me out…  She need never have given all she had to live on.  Neither should the church have accepted it.  The standard interpretation surely misses the point.  She gave all she had to live on because she thought she should.  She had been taught that God expects this and it’s called sacrifice.  People are taught, in some places even today to “give till it hurts”, and that God’s favour will be bestowed in return.  With humble respect to St Paul… I have real problems with his counsel to the Corinthian church, where he certainly claims that the degree of blessing you receive is in proportion to the money you have given (see II Corinthians 9:6-15) -- or more accurately, the magnitude of your sacrifice… Paul writes: The one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.  And so we have, at the seriously shallow end of the Christian swimming pool, what is now called the Prosperity Gospel, that your receiving in life is directly linked to your giving, and perhaps to your righteousness.

God loves a cheerful giver does not mean God loves reckless superstition.  So much that passes for Christian these days is actually a chronic refusal to grow up, as Paul put it, into Christ[1].  What Jesus teaches begins within – treasure in heaven, he calls it[2].  The God whom I expect to reward me for my generosity and my upright years of service – but might withhold reward otherwise – is not the God Jesus called Father, but idolatry.  In contemplative life and prayer we are led by the Spirit through this preoccupation with self.  Our duty, as always, will be to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly… as Jesus knew from the Prophet Micah long before.  The temple’s duty to this woman was to care for her dignity and give her a future… not to relieve her of all she had to live on.  Another of Jesus’s accusations against the pharisees was that they devour widows’ houses – which is, in a way, what is happening here.  Jesus also says don’t bring your gift at all if you are not at peace with your brother or sister.  Always the real issue is within, a quietened and obedient heart – which the Dalai Lama calls, with typical simplicity, a good heart.



[1] Ephesians 4:14-15
[2] Matthew 6:19-21

02 November 2018

Knowing the truth – 2 November 2018


It is good to be clear what we mean, and emphatically do not mean, about the truth.  You will know the truth, said Jesus… the truth will make you free[1].  We do not mean that somehow we possess a body of truth – the bible or our beliefs, or anything else.  We mean that we are finding under grace how to become free of illusion, delusion, fantasy, and from the pernicious untruths of prejudice and violence, hate and fear.  We come to sense an alert when we ourselves are less than true... in Leonard Cohen’s remarkable words:  Going home without my burden / Going home behind the curtain / Going home without the costume that I wore.  Perhaps we became untrue because pride got in the way, or fear of loss of face, or of someone’s negative opinion.  It may even be a generous desire not to hurt someone else – often excused as “white” lies.  It may be that a need to be included makes us in some way untrue to ourselves… or the need to have some power or possession.  With some, often enough, it has become a habit of preferring fantasy-land, living my dream, imagining great deeds, rôle-playing a life that isn’t happening or never happened.



Jesus says truth and freedom go together… freedom from falsity and illusion.  When Thomas Merton finally entered the monastery to become a novice in the Cistercian Order, he wrote his famous sentence:  So Brother Matthew locked the gate behind me and I was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom.[2]  Merton was finally being true to himself.   Fr Laurence Freeman writes: Impatience and illusion meet their match in meditation.  It is extremely difficult to sit for any extended time, silent and still, attending and consenting, while still hanging on grimly to untruth, covering-up for ourselves, keeping unfair judgements of others.  Love and grace enable us to greet reality and the present moment… gently, as we are able, and with freedom and gratitude.  The truth will make you free.

So “truth” does not mean that we are on one side of a line, a boundary, a trumpian wall, as the “Enlightened”, let alone “Saved”, while others on the other side are “in the wrong”, “unsaved”, or consigned to perdition.  The contemplative does not enjoy the luxury of knowing they are right and others wrong, writes Fr Laurence.  God does not take our side against others, some will be surprised to hear.  If there is any dividing line (Jesus does talk about the sheep and the goats, the wheat and the tares, etc), it is between those who persistently divide in the world, ignore human need, create division -- and those who live to unite and reconcile and build up understanding.  That kind of truth is free of the fear of difference. 

I appreciate that we may nevertheless have genuine fears of insecurity and violence… understandably so.  But in our prayer we are welcoming truth and reality, and therefore at times, it may be, pain and risk also.  The Spirit makes us free for this, more and more, day by day.



[1] John 8:32
[2] Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, ch. “The Sweet Savour of Liberty”.

26 October 2018

God’s two silences – 26 October 2018


Father John Main, whose vision and teaching really led to the initiation of the World Community for Christian Meditation, was a Benedictine monk.  His talks to meditation groups were gathered together and published.  One of those collections is entitled The Way of Unknowing – and one of the talks therein is entitled God’s Two Silences.  I think it is particularly important teaching for grown-up faith.

God’s first silence – if we may use these terms – is what we read at the beginning of the Gospel of John.  In the beginning was the Word… The Word, God’s Logos,[1] was before all time, primal, writes John.  The Word was with God, and the Word was God… all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being… and the Word was made flesh…  God’s Word is God’s eternal loving will and presence, eventually glimpsed in Jesus, whom Paul calls the icon of the invisible God.[2]  Here is a mystery, to be received but scarcely explained.  It is God’s first silence, not spoken, not written, but vibrant with love and purpose, creating and giving life – and light, says John.  God’s knows us from before we were ever made.  To pay attention, to pray – to listen, is the Benedictine word – to be silent and still, is to enter the silence of God, waiting, hearing, consenting to the Word of God.  That is what we do.  Very often it does not seem quite that way, it seems fractured and interrupted.  It may seem that all we do sometimes is glimpse a little light in the distance.  The mantra helps because, if we use it, it is a returning-point, to being still, silent, listening, consenting.  If God and we are both in silence – and God always is – then we are in accord.

God’s second silence, says Fr John Main, is the silence of absence and loss.  This silence is to be taken seriously, not overlaid by feverish forms of worship or sentimental spiritual advice.  John Main writes that this silence of absence and loss has a purpose.  It is the way we learn the perils of possessiveness.  It is true that we can experience times of great peace and reassurance, joy and wonder in nature… but these are all gift, not of our making but of immeasurable grace, infinitely beyond our owning or control. 

We learn in contemplative life and prayer to be content with both silences, loving God because God is love, not because God makes us happy or fixes things.  The Psalmists of Israel knew both silences – and interestingly, the Psalms we don’t get to sing in church so much are largely the ones expressive of God’s second silence.  More recently the French woman Simone Weil wrote movingly of the second silence.  In the abyss of the Second World War and occupied France, she wrote:  Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time… more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell…  The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least to go on wanting to love…  Then one day God will come to show himself to this soul…  But if the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something which is almost equivalent to hell.[3]  Perhaps so – but as John emphatically states, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never overcome it.



[1] John 1:1-18.  “Word” in the Greek is Logos (ὁ λογοϛ)
[2] Colossians 1:15
[3] Simone Weil: The Love of God and Affliction.

19 October 2018

Not so among you – 19 October 2018


James and John ask Jesus an infantile question about seating arrangements in the kingdom of heaven.  Yet again Jesus reminds them, it is not about precedence or greatness or mutual importance.  That is the way the gentiles think, he says.  It shall not be so among you.[1] 

There are subtleties of Greek translation here.  Jesus is not, as it were, ordering them, commanding them, about their behaviour.  He is not telling them to be humble.  James and John may have been trying to stake out for themselves high places in the order of precedence in the kingdom – we can assume that others of them had their own hopes about that – but I don’t think Jesus is responding here by requiring them not to think that way. 

He is saying what we often say in contemplative life and prayer, that time in Jesus’s company does in fact change us.  In time to come they won’t be thinking that way, he is saying.  And indeed, in a discipline of loving discipleship, prayerful silence and attention, however intermittent and erratic it may be at times, we do begin to discover values shifting, fears and anxieties lessening, steadiness increasing, love and compassion emerging where it was not so prominent before…  It seems to me that Jesus is simply observing to his disciples, who prognosticated about who would be greater, that they would change.  They would lose that need for recognition, power or control.  The greatest among them would be servant of all.  That is the way it would turn out among them, I think he is saying.

In the 21st century there are all sorts of ways in which in fact we need power or authority – being powerless is not good in modern society.  It is not power that is wrong, but the misuse of power – whether it is in high politics and policies, or whether it is any form of bullying, or some employer sordidly demanding favours from an employee wanting promotion.  When people of wisdom and goodwill find themselves in positions of power, and where they are able to use that power for good, it is a wonderful thing – and it is a form of servanthood in Jesus’s terms. 

Servant never means servile.  Jesus’s statement, it shall not be so among you, expresses his faith that his followers will use whatever powers they acquire, humbly and well, and to enhance God’s creation.  If you think about it, much power resides within the family unit – power to encourage or to cause despair, power to embrace or to alienate… the family can make or ruin people’s lives, children’s lives.  Horribly, I would think, too often in Christian history, “the Christian family”, elevated as an ideal, has in fact masked oppression or restriction.  This is reflected in much of our literature and biography. 

It shall not be so among you…  Our discipleship is to be prayerful and thoughtful in our basic relationships – husband, wife, parent, sibling, friend, employer, citizen, church member… and as Jesus pointed out, our relationship includes our kindness towards ourselves.



[1] Mark  10:43; Matthew 20:26;  Luke 22:26

12 October 2018

Silence in an evil time – 12 October 2018


It is difficult for us to visualise Israel in the 8th century BC -- as remote from the time of Jesus as the High Middle Ages is from us.  It was the late Iron Age.  There were two kingdoms, Judah in the south and Samaria in the north.  Amos the prophet emerges in Judah, in a time of endemic violence and official corruption.  He is, he says, a sheep herder and a grower of figs.  He addresses the north, Samaria, misruled by Jereboam II, and he condemns …you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground…!  It seems eerily familiar in recent times.  And he goes on:

They hate the one who reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth. Therefore because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins— you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate. Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time. (Amos 5:7-13)

Keep silent comes as a surprise… but Amos thinks so.  We know that he wrote his prophecies, rather than proclaim them in public.  It is as though there is a pitch of determined evil and greed, with law and truth becoming negotiable, when speaking up for God and righteousness is simply not going to be heard except with public derision.  It is not merely that evil things are happening – it is that powerful people are determined on their own way irrespective of its effects on others.  At such a time, says Amos, the prudent will keep silent.  Persistence in prayer, passive resistance, peaceful persuasion, patience… will be the ways to bear witness.

We now know moreover that there was a major earthquake in that region at that time – it is referred to by Amos himself, it is mentioned in other writings, and it is traced in the geological and archaeological records.  The earthquake occasioned fear and disruption.  Again, how familiar is all this? 

There are two things to bring together for our discernment.  One is all that is going wrong.  Power is getting priority over justice, truth and equity, godlessness is becoming the norm among many decent people, religion is in confusion and increasingly despised, violence reigns in many places with all its terrible consequences… we seem more and more susceptible both to climate change and to seismic catastrophe.   The other is the question, how we are to be, to live, to respond.  We can take a hint from Amos… and from the wisdom of Ecclesiastes: There is a time to speak, and there is a time to keep silent[1].  Both times matter.  In contemplative life and prayer we create a rhythm between the two – including in daily life, among friends and family.  We know that both are essential – speaking, and silence.  We are learning discernment in speaking, what Benedict calls restraint of speech.  We are learning the fruits of silence, openness to the Spirit of Wisdom and Truth, gentle resistance…  Either way, it is a matter of truth and simplicity, in life and in prayer.



[1] Ecclesiastes 3:7

05 October 2018

Letting go – 5 October 2018


Letting go is a major theme of contemplative life and prayer.  It is as though we have two ways we can live – one is clinging, and the other is relinquishing.  Jesus seemed to be in no doubt… freedom and truth, joy and peace, if they are there, are down the path of relinquishing.

Let’s look at clinging.  Of course we know what it means -- it means to hang on to something, to grip, stick or adhere.  A character in a novel I read referred to his ever-looming mother-in-law as Old Clingwrap.  In Old English, interestingly, cling could mean also to wither or shrivel… which is a bit of a warning.  We can easily cling to possessions, as we know.  That can be good, or not.  These things we own may be beautiful, or valuable, or carry memories – important then for such reasons.  We all have property, and we do what we can to keep it nice.  We protect it.  We give thanks for it.  It is important to have a view of how we would be if we had to relinquish it – as, at present, in Sulawesi or Syria.  Jesus visited these themes, and there are echoes in the Sermon on the Mount and in the parables.   

But possessions are only the start.  There is clinging to or letting go of aspects of the past.  Of course, we can’t “un-remember” things.  Neither, in a way, should we.  It matters, often, that we don’t forget, that we re-member, in the sense that we reassemble the past in our minds and memories, accurately and with understanding, even when it is painful.  The relinquishing of memories, then, is not pretending anything was otherwise than it was, but doing the work to ensure that events of the past are accurate and understood, and that they are not poisoning the present any more.  The stillness and silence of contemplative prayer is a gracious pathway down which the stings of the past may indeed be gently drawn, and we realise one day that we have moved on.

Or it may be that the challenge is to let go of people.  Sons or daughters grow up, we hope, have their own lives, aspects of which we don’t share… we lose loved ones, who aren’t there any more… old friends unaccountably change…  I am well aware that this is a minefield of many emotions.  But love is scarcely love if it clings, or tries to control or possess.  Love entails the willingness to let go, to accord freedom to the loved one.  It is the way we are loved, by God, who as we know creates and gifts us with freedom and choice.  Our love of God too is very much a matter of letting-go.  We do not own or control faith or truth.  We humbly receive these things, learning as we go, and confirming it day by day, that all is gift and grace. 

If you think about it, letting-go may come with a sense of release.  If I can, as I can, I relinquish control and the need to control.  Faith says it is for the sake of something better, which I may not yet fully see or understand.  Ageing, often problematic, may indeed be seen in another light. Other people can do the tasks I used to do.  I may have to take leave of religious assumptions that sustained me once upon a time, but not now.  I now require space, for mindfulness, for thought, for managing physical issues, for remembering and reassessing and enjoying, for being still and silent, and perhaps alone.  And there will come a time, a kairos, when I must let go even of all that.  And in Lady Julian’s words, all will be well.

28 September 2018

Because the bell rings – 28 September 2018


One of the best-known quotes from the Benedictine writer Sister Joan Chittister originated when she was addressing her fellow nuns in a seminar, and she asked them, “Why do we pray?”  They supplied all sorts of worthy and lofty answers.  But Sr Joan said, “No – we pray because the bell rings.”   And indeed the Rule of St Benedict provides[1]: On hearing the signal… monastics will immediately set aside what they have in hand and go with utmost speed, yet with gravity…  But then comes a typical Benedictine touch – the first Psalm, Benedict orders, is to be said quite deliberately and slowly, to give time for latecomers.

Now what is the point here?  Sr Joan provides it, in a way, in one sentence:  Prayer is not just one more thing in the day….  She adds: We are meant to go to it consciously, seriously, with concentration, so that every day we may become more and more immersed in the presence of God.  Well, to modern devotees of the secular culture, this sounds simply incomprehensible...  more and more immersed in the presence of God.  It is what they always feared about religion and religious people, that you retreat into some dreamland based on hopes and myths, and lose your grip on truth and reality.  But also, to many sincere church-going people, it sounds over the top.  Prayer, they would say, is a Good Thing, no doubt, in its place… and so on.  It suits some church folk very well (not all of course) to have their prayer said for them in an orderly and objective manner, by priest or vicar or pastor, in familiar language, at set times.

A contemplative person is one who, we might say, after weeks or months of perhaps shaky attention to a discipline of silence and stillness, woke up one morning and realised that familiar attitudes and actions were shifting, altering.  Making a space in which we are simply present, having a mantra as something to return to repeatedly from the drip-feed of distractions and preoccupations… all of this is effecting change.  The changes are subtle, but at times unmistakable.  There are various ways in which prayer-silence, attention, insight, we might say, are now quietly and gently spilling over into all of life.  The heart and the mind inwardly know… oddly enough, often enough, by unknowing.  We may be aware of a new steadiness.  Fears, anxieties, seem no longer to loom the same ways.  We are disinclined to talk about it much – or at any rate, if we do, we might later wish we hadn’t. 

It is what the 17th century French Carmelite monk, Brother Lawrence, called The Practice of the Presence of God.[2]  It is absolutely not that we have become starry-eyed and always on the edge of some rapture... “heavenly-minded but no earthly use”, as some have put it.  Just the opposite – we are now freer than we were to attend to truth and to reality, and to bear pain. 

In the monastery the bell rings at set times.  In lay contemplative life it rings frequently, usually faintly in the background, as a reminder and a call.  We are those for whom the bell tolls… we hear, and we respond with love.



[1] Rule of St Benedict, ch 43
[2] My copy is a translation by New Zealander, E M Blaiklock (Hodder & Stoughton 1981.  Published also by Thomas Nelson, 1982). 

21 September 2018

The Parable of the Child – 21 September 2018


Then he took a little child and put (the child) among them; and taking (the child) in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” (Mark 9:36-37)

There are levels of meaning here.  The disciples had been having a private chat about precedence… who is great in the coming kingdom, and who will be not so great.  Jesus inconveniently intervenes… what were they arguing about?  He reminds them, whoever wants to be first must be servant of all… which sits uneasily with our culture of being a winner, getting ahead…

I think however it is what we might call the “Parable of the Child” that brings this event to life.  All three gospel writers report, a little child,[1] a toddler, an infant.  The point of the diminutive noun is that this child is helpless without us, is entirely dependent on adult care for growth and health, maybe even for survival.   Jesus took the child in his arms, it says.  It is the child who is first, has precedence, in Jesus’s kingdom.  There it is for all to see.  There is no higher priority in the kingdom.  Jesus could scarcely say it more clearly – but he nails it with his words: Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.  God is watching that child, and what we do… or neglect.  On one level it is about our duty of care for our children, of course – but it is also about what matters most in Jesus’s kingdom, which is decidedly not power, wealth or achievement. 

Al Jazeera ran a reportage on what is in fact happening to children, at present, in various places as a result of war, violence, ignorance and neglect.  We saw children in their thousands, many of them skeletal, already too ill to respond to medical help and recover – in Yemen, in Syria, in the Congo, in South Sudan…  I think there is a special place in hell for people who make war on children.   

Then there is the searing truth of generations of gross abuse of children within the church and elsewhere.  And after we have expended a million words on cause and blame and retribution, the fact is, the only satisfactory response is for the violence and the abuse to utterly cease, and for children to be cared for as our first duty, as Jesus clearly taught.

…then, in my anger, perhaps providentially, Fr Laurence Freeman intervened in a general post.  He reminded us: The contemplative response to violence should affirm the goodness and potential of humanity.  Further along he wrote: Meditation doesn’t solve problems. It transforms how we see and approach them – including the most ancient and intractable problem of humanity, the inhumanity of violence.  We are to do what we can, of course, which is to renounce violence, so far as it lies with us, at any rate absolutely against children – and again absolutely, as we can, teach and initiate and practise love and recognition of children, and care, shelter, food and education, security, hope and faith, for the children we know.  If we neglect that, I suspect, any of our other achievements might strike the heavenly courts as unimpressive.



[1] Greek paidion, παιδιον, diminutive of pais, παις, a child.

14 September 2018

Response – 14 September 2018


…on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”  And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”  He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:27-29)

On the way… is a popular motif in the gospels.  They typically talked as they walked, on the road.  It’s a picture to trigger our imaginations – they learned as they went along, as we do, day by day, if learning and growing are what we want.  Not everyone welcomes learning new things or changing.  If what we hope for is things to stay the same, with certainty, safety and security, then learning and growing are scarcely going to happen.  But in Jesus’s company, evidently, the changing scenery facilitated developing hearts and minds. 

He asked them first, what are people saying about me… who do they say I am?  The answers show how we feel better if we can categorise, simply pin a label, good or bad, on someone[1] – that way, we have pigeon-holed things in an orderly manner, we know what we think, and best of all, we may have established that we are not threatened, life can continue…  So, reply the disciples, some say you are John the Baptist back to life again, some say Elijah, others say some other of the prophets.   It is a warning about labelling Jesus – if I want to know who Jesus is, really, it’s pretty pointless to ask around, conduct a poll, do a street survey, even around the church. 

So Jesus asks: But youwho do you say I am?  Peter knows the answer.  You are the Christ, ὁ Χριστος, the Anointed One – Messiah, in Hebrew.  It is a catechism answer, and the implication is that, since it is the “right” answer, it is the answer for everyone.  In some Christian circles defining Jesus correctly (or Mary, or the Trinity…) is used as a test of orthodoxy… as every parish minister discovers before long. 

But Jesus asks a crucial question.  Who do you say I am…?  It is an invitation to discover, in our own personal experience, over the years and through the mysteries and setbacks and sadnesses, as well as the triumphs of life, who he is.  What matters is not the catechism answer, but my answer.  Moreover, my answer today might differ significantly from my answer 30 years ago, or even last year – because I am further along the road, learning as I go.  The issue is not whether I am “correct” in my answer, but whether my answer is what I am living by, enlightened by, whether my answer is coming from doing justly, loving mercy, walking humbly.  What matters is not the labels I put on Jesus, even labels prescribed by church or bible, although they may be helpful… so much as what he is making of me as I take step after step, as I remember the great gospel themes and teachings, as I review what has happened in my life and among the people I know and love, and as I value the times I am able to spend in silence and stillness, simply present to God as God in Christ is, and always was, present to me.

(In our group's discussion later, one member said Jesus might have been clearer if he had asked, "But who am I to you...?"  I agree.)



[1] Eg. I was labelled, on Facebook this week, “a racist low-life”.  The person feels better now, having categorised me.