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.

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[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.

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 21^st 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.

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

Silence in an evil time – 12 October 2018

It is difficult for us to visualise Israel in the 8^th 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.

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[1] Ecclesiastes 3:7

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.