Each other – 29 March 2019

A former colleague of mine found himself at a Moslem event.  He was there to speak for the Christians, he was at the end of the queue of speakers, he was told that the Prime Minister had to leave shortly and so he had only 20 seconds. This is what he said…

In the Lord of the Rings, Sam says to an exhausted and despairing Frodo, 'I can't carry the ring, but I can carry you.'  Our beliefs differ and maybe we can't carry each other’s 'rings of truth', although there are times and places when we can and will discuss those with mutual respect.  Nevertheless, we can and must carry together each other's hopes and dreams for a city and country where all our children can be safe and happy and play together.

“Each other” – that common phrase suddenly struck me… a curious English idiom… Each… other…?  Think about it word by word.   “Each” means people one by one, or family by family, or tribe by tribe, religion by religion.  Not leaving people out.  “Each” implies all, inclusion.  But “each” also means particularity – each person in the family is different, but nevertheless there and belonging.  If someone expects them all to conform, they are out of luck.  So that word “each” embraces the tattooed and the untattooed, the wise and the simple, the good and the bad.

“Other” simply recognises that there is stuff in the world that is not me, that I can’t and needn’t try to control.  Other people, for instance.  Their histories are not the same as mine, nor are the experiences that are still forming them.  “Other” means then that I share my space, my country – and in the Christian community it means that I am accompanied at the Lord’s Table, where there can be no fences and no disqualifications.[1]

Our contemplative practice, day by day, is a matter of opening the door, or perhaps a matter of holding the gate ever more open.  We are not threatened by difference.  As the Dalai Lama put it, if you are a Christian be a good one – you don’t have to become a Buddhist.  We are instinctively suspicious of walls and barriers, protocols and parameters.  The Truth is not adherence to any doctrine – it is humble openness to reality and to my brother and sister. 

In silence and stillness the defensive layers are peeled off, gently and relentlessly over time, and we become true, as Jesus was… knowing love, offering love, bearing pain, sensing injustice, being present, being fully human.  The Prophet Micah said it long ago:  What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly.[2]

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[1] I am so grateful to my old colleague, Stuart Vogel – I guess we are both pretty old these days – for sparking these thoughts in me at this time. Last time I saw Stuart, maybe 25 years ago, he was surviving an eye-wateringly tedious meeting of the Presbytery of Auckland by sitting at the back, reading Tolstoy… in Russian. 

[2] Micah 6:8

Hate and fear – 22 March 2019

On the early afternoon of 15 March, not long after our meditation group last met, a gunman entered two mosques in Christchurch and murdered 50 people.  Many others were injured.  Some are still in critical care. 

I am sure you remember the Greek word kairos… a special time, God’s time, a time when change can happen.  This past week has been a kairos for checking out hate and fear.  The well-known passage in Ecclesiastes tells us there is a time for love and there is a time for hate.[1]  Hate surfaces surprisingly often in the Hebrew scriptures.  Esau hated his younger brother Jacob… But then, God also is depicted as hating various things, and hating even the doers of evil.  The Psalmist is anxious to reassure God that he hates all those who hate God.  Much of scripture sees hating as endemic, part of our personal weaponry, seen by some even as a noble part of religion.  But hating is perilous.  It can consume us.  It can become obsessive, poisoning life for ourselves and others.

In the Christian scriptures things change.  Jesus is hated by the religious establishment – and he responds, sometimes with anger, but with sorrow rather than hate.  You have heard it was said, “Love your brother, hate your enemy”, but I say to you, love your enemy…[2]  Later the early christian church became repeatedly menaced by persecution and hatred.  There are people now in 2019 who nurse a virulent hatred of religion.  As we know, hatred has many levels, degrees of intensity.  Someone hates brussels sprouts… irritating and silly, but fairly innocuous.  To hate Moslems is another matter.  Or to hate gays.  Hate is considered a virtue among the growing ranks of white supremacists and their ilk… and others.  I find it difficult to imagine hatred as a way of life.

I have linked together hate and fear because it seems to me they go together almost inevitably.  People hate what frightens them – it may be fear of difference, or fear of change, or fear of a repetition of some past event.  Helpless anger can transmute into hate.  There are fundamentalist versions of Christianity that encourage hatred of liberal attitudes, or of deviating opinions.

In contemplative life and prayer we are attacking the roots of fear in ourselves, and therefore any hint of hate.  Of course there are and remain things necessarily to be afraid of – we are taught this from childhood – it is simple prudence and good sense.  The fear in question is not that.  In the grace of our silence and stillness we are learning to sit ever lighter to the ego and its need to survive and to control.  We are opening more to change, and to difference, becoming more hospitable in our hearts, less frightened and judgemental.  It is a good way to be… one of the rewards of senior years perhaps.  One of Jesus’s more frequent questions was, one way or another: Why are you afraid…? 

Last Wednesday the Jewish communities met for the feast of Purim.  The NZ police had authorised the opening of synagogues again.  Purim is a joyous feast – it celebrates how the exiled Jews in Babylon, condemned to genocide by Haman the Persian Grand Vizier, were rescued by Mordecai and his brave adopted Jewish daughter Esther.  Jews commemorate this annually with much food and noise.  It is an ancient sign of faith and love overcoming division and violence, hate and fear, exile, separation and sorrow.   For our Jewish community it came at a good time this year.  Happy Purim…!

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[1] Ecclesiastes 3:8. 

[2] Matthew 5:43

Parable of the elephant – 15 March 2019

Fr Laurence Freeman tells the Parable of the Elephant:  Elephants are not as peaceful, wise and well behaved as often portrayed.  If uncontrolled they will walk anywhere at all, knocking over things on their path.  When passing by roadside stalls their mischievous trunk will pick up whenever possible whatever it can – bananas, mangoes, anything tempting.  Those who train elephants, the mahouts, are very aware of this fact and when they have to take an elephant through the crowded streets in a religious or marriage procession, they have two ways of controlling the elephant’s behaviour. First they dress him in a special way with decorations and a seat on his back, making him feel important.  This encourages the elephant to walk in a careful and measured way.  Secondly they give his mischievous trunk a stick to hold on to and the elephant proudly holds on to this and is not tempted to pick up tasty morsels.


So then, fellow elephants, the mantra you use in meditation is the stick you are holding in your trunk.  It is an important stick, not because it is beautiful or meaningful, but because it keeps you on track, out of mischief as we say, it brings you back if you chance to see a tasty morsel.  The elephant, moreover, feels special, being dressed up – we are special because we have set aside this time, and we know how to be still in a helpful posture, and we surround our immediate vicinity as much as we can with silence. 

Inner silence however is another matter and the work of a lifetime.  Here is part of the liturgy for Ash Wednesday, from Iona Abbey:

  … This is not the past.
Do not live there.
Let the voices go.
Do not cling to what is gone.

This is not the future.
You are not there yet.
Let the worries be.
Do not live where you are not.

This is here and now.
This is all you have.
Do not miss where you are …

The wisdom is in the words, let the voices go… let the worries be… do not miss where you are…  The voices and the worries will all be there, still clamouring, at the end of our meditation.  But for now, what is needed is the courage, the trust, the singleness of purpose, to be present in the present moment, not looking to control it, or tidy it up, but rather in simple consent and attention.  That’s all.  The elephant, feeling special, and deploying the stick in his trunk, is free then to do what he is supposed to do – simply putting one foot in front of the other.

Rescuing love…6 – 8 March 2019

Faith, hope and love, these three, says Paul in the final verse of chapter 13 – the verse everyone remembers.  Then he adds… the greatest of these is love… and people vaguely wonder why.  Perhaps he is saying, you can lose your faith -- some people do, or wonder if they have; and you can lose hope…  But if agapē/love goes, you are in the abyss.  As Simone Weil put it, while she was starving and with tuberculosis, and writing about affliction during the Nazi-occupation of France, If the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something which is almost equivalent to hell.[1]

Now there is something to notice here.  I am sure you remember the Greek menein (μενειν), to abide.  It has prominence in the writings of John, for instance:  Abide in me, and I in you…  Earlier last year we had a series of talks about abiding, and how it describes the special bond between God and us, between Jesus and the disciple.  I mention it now because Paul chooses that word here:  And now abide faith, hope, love, these three…  These three central gifts abide in us.  They are gifts – we did not put them there.  In the Letter to the Romans Paul writes that hope does not disappoint us, because God’s agapē/love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.[2]   Faith is given, and faith abides in us; hope is given, and hope abides in us.  They are bound together, illumined, made meaningful, by love, agapē, God abiding in us.  God is love, writes John[3].  In contemplative life and prayer, consent to God’s Spirit, these are the changes – gradual, subtle as they may be – that we become aware of.  Ego recedes, loosens control.  But the greatest is love, says Paul.  Love abiding in us is simply the image of God in us, our journey towards Christlikeness and to being fully human.

It may be that the primacy of agapē/love will become clearer to Christ’s followers, with all that is happening in our day.  The church is deeply and irremediably compromised in the eyes of the world, widely rejected and despised.  Meanwhile, human society is increasingly besieged by climate change and natural disaster, fire and flood, by nationalism and violence, even the clash of religions…  We are scarcely keeping pandemic disease at bay.  Truth itself has become negotiable.  More and more people are being governed by despotism, cruelty and ignorance.  The light Jesus gives us is, as Paul wrote, faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is agapē/love.

God lit its spark in us, as John puts it, in the beginning – we are made in the image of God, and God is agapē/love.  In the Hebrew scriptures we are commanded to love God, ourselves and our neighbour.  Jesus showed us the way, and abides in us, in agapē/love .

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[1] Simone Weil: The Love of God and Affliction, in Waiting On God (Fontana, 1959)

[2] Romans 5:5

[3] I John 4:8

Rescuing love…5 – 1 March 2019

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.  For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.  Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

If you have a sense of humour, you might be curious to wonder what Paul was like as a child.  Precocious…?  It’s speculation.  Paul’s point is that it is necessary eventually to grow up.  A lot of people never complete that task.  Some are too timid to attempt it.  A middle-aged woman walks out on her husband and family, goes to live with a boyfriend from schooldays – and her justification…?  I decided it was now ME-Time.  Very trendy… a reversion to childhood.  The ego reassuming control.  There are types of church that encourage inhibited growth, although they would be most put out to hear that accusation.  But members confuse faith with fear and superstition… hectic activism, black-and-white moralism…

An important task of growing up is discovering that it is not all about me, and discovering also the liberation that entails.  Another task is what Paul identifies here in his lovely statement about knowing things, a sentence which has bothered centuries of translators because it says the opposite of what they think Paul ought to say… While they are writing creeds and catechisms, and policing error in the church, building walls and boundaries, Paul is way out there making peace with mystery and wonder.  …now we see in a mirror, dimly, he writes.  “Dimly”… well, the Greek word is enigma.[1]  Maturity, growing up, means developing humility and then wonder about the many unanswered questions, about life, death, God and the universe.  Growing up means getting wise about unfairness, injustice, unresolved issues… imperfections, hypocrisies… as my very Kiwi brother-in-law recently put it succinctly:  It’s just not a fair go.  Life, he meant.  Perhaps it should be, but it’s not – and that has been, after all, a major theme of the Hebrew Psalms of the Jews, and of the Book of Job, and of much else down to the writings in our day of Elie Wiesel and Etty Hillesum, Simone Weil and a host of others. 

But, Paul is saying, there is a pathway through all this.  It is the pathway of agapē/love.  That is the light we are given.  Then we will know, writes Paul, even as we are known… his sublime vision.  Fr Laurence Freeman wrote recently, of the death of one of his friends: He leapt into the light… we will know, even as we are known.  Agapē (he writes elsewhere) is not the love that we are trying to gain (by trying to improve ourselves), but the love that is constantly with us.  Growing up in faith, our eyes are opened, through meditation it may be, to see how much this power of love is present in the midst of all our imbalance, all our own waywardness, all our own distractedness.  Even in the distractedness of our meditation, we learn to love ourselves, to love others and to love God.  It is the one agapē/love from God who is love.

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[1] ἐν αἰνίγματι – it is the English word enigma