The biggest shift – Easter VII, 31 May 2019

It may seem sometimes that the biggest shift asked of us in grown-up faith is to take leave of the god of rewards and punishments.  To most of the world it seems simply axiomatic that we get, or we should get, what we deserve, that we earn divine favour by doing good, and we pay for our sins.  It is a cornerstone of the concept of justice, that the punishment fits the crime.  An eye for an eye seems to tidy things up nicely.  And so it is, when people suffer things they never deserved in life, this gets pointed out as a mark against God, who is evidently not paying attention – and then we get people saying they can’t believe in God because of what he “allows to happen”.    

None of this is what Jesus taught.  Jesus, a Jew, had himself been brought up in the religion of an eye for an eye.  I may interpose here that the rabbis also taught that an eye for an eye was actually meant not so much as a recipe for equal retribution, but as a safeguard against the law which said that if your adversary steals your goat you take ten of his -- echoes of that also are to be found in darker corners of the Hebrew scriptures.  The better teachers of Israel said no, it must be proportionate, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.  It was a safeguard against the law of the jungle.

Jesus however encountered God differently.  He knew, loved and served a Father, of love, of grace, of mercy… a loving continuing Creator… a Father not obsessed with the sins committed, but with the wounded soul returned, the lost sheep found.  Life is not about expiating sin, it is about turning to the light and being enlightened by love and mercy. 

We are all wounded.  Some of this is self-inflicted.  The Gospel of Life is not about deserving, it is about receiving.  It is about the fear of punishment being replaced by the knowledge that we are known and loved.  Repentance does not mean humiliation and penance – the word in both Hebrew and Greek means turning around, coming home, to face the truth and the light.  In returning and rest will you be saved, says the prophet Isaiah – and in the Greek scriptures the unforgettable description of repentance is the Prodigal Son turning around and going back home to a welcome and restoration he knew he could never have deserved.[1]

This is the experience of grace.  As Fr Laurence Freeman puts it, we are not animals being housetrained by being given treats, rewards or punishments.  We are made in the image of God, with the dignity and ability to receive love and to give love, to be the recipients of grace, and to be gracious.  That is the whole of the law, says Jesus.  In Christian Meditation we are setting aside our various idols including any god of reward and punishment.  It is the God Jesus called Father whose presence we are in, the God who, as Jesus depicted, embraces all, and makes all things new.

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[1] Isaiah 30:15; Luke 15:11-31

The Noonday Demon – Easter VI, 24 May 2019

St Benedict was well aware that a practice of contemplative prayer in daily life can be at times a puzzling, even discouraging process.  He therefore stressed the virtue of ‘stability’, stabilitas, by which he meant among other things the quality of perseverance.  Stabilitas is the inner commitment of the best part of us, our rootedness in where we are in the present and in God’s dealings with us.  We are here, not “somewhere over the rainbow”.

What do we do, for instance, when we feel simply reluctant to meditate?  What do we do, when we feel we can’t be bothered?  What do we do, when we feel a failure in meditation, because, it seems, “nothing happens”?  The virtue of stabilitas teaches us a kind of spiritual cussedness -- we sit down as usual and say our word, our mantra.  We remind ourselves that our feelings are not the issue, and are anyway a poor guide, and an even worse master.  We persevere regardless of what happens… or doesn’t.  The beauty is that something is indeed happening, but at a level beyond our surface personality and our anxious judgemental ego.  If we let it be, and trust, meditation allows re-creation, we are further along the road.

Benedict was certainly influenced by the teaching of the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4th century.  The boredom, the aridity, the ‘what is the point?’ was well known to them. They called this paralysing emotion Acedia, or the Noonday Demon.[1]  A quote from the desert:

The demon of acedia - also called the noonday demon - is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all.  He presses his attack upon the monk [the meditator] about the fourth hour [10 a.m.] and besieges the soul until the eighth hour [2.00 p.m.].  First of all he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long.  Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out of the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour [3.00 p.m. the main meal] to look now this way and now to that to see if perhaps one of the brethren appears from his cell.  Then too he instils in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, a hatred for manual labour.  He leads him to reflect that charity has departed from among the brethren, that there is no one to give encouragement.  Should there be someone who happens to offend him in some way or other, this too the demon uses to contribute further to his hatred.  This demon drives him along to desire other sites where he can more easily procure life’s necessities, more readily find work and make a real success of himself… 

These feelings may be eerily familiar: I’m bored; other people are not pulling their weight; I loathe this place; wouldn’t it be better just to read a book about it all?  Perhaps I need a change of church. A walk in nature would be just as good.  Well, the wisdom is to persevere, stabilitas...  The answer, as is so often the case in faith, is simply to take the next step.  More is happening than we can possibly know, right now.

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[1] See Kathleen Norris: Acedia & Me (Penguin 2008)

Simplicity – Easter V, 17 May 2019

Contemplative life and prayer encourages us to prefer simplicity.  Part of simplicity is indeed what is popularly called downsizing – what you have to do to go and live in Summerset Falls – getting rid of stuff, stuff we once needed,  stuff we may never have needed.  It’s making space.  Simplicity however is also doing this task inwardly – seeing the ego downsized, its many demands and expectations, discovering how to live fulfillingly, simply – as some writers put it, learning to find happiness in the right places.  St Paul said: I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.[1]

We learn about letting go as an alternative to possessing and controlling.  Of course we still need to be comfortable and fed, and in pleasant surroundings, sheltered, reasonably secure – none of that is in question here, although we know even those basic requirements millions today can only dream about.  We are challenged to be discerning – seeing more clearly what matters and what doesn’t, or never did.  There is a principle in classical philosophy called Occam’s Razor.  The medieval Franciscan, William of Ockham, taught that simpler solutions are more likely to be correct than complex ones.  God, say some of the great theologians, is infinite simplicity… which leads to the next point:  Simplicity surely means also simplicity of belief.  Jesus advocated being like little children.  He did not mean naïve, infantile or deliberately ignorant.  I think he did mean that requirements in our beliefs about God, Christ and the Bible, which divide and confuse and condemn, are actually surplus requirements.  William of Ockham was right – simplicity waits in the wings.  The Apostle John writes: God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God.[2]  That is simplicity.  It is the being of it and the doing of it that is the ground of faith.  Abiding in love.

Downsizing however, as we well know, is probably very difficult.  I have lots of stuff I scarcely need, but do not want to be without right now all the same.  If circumstances were to decree immediate downsizing – if for instance I went to prison – it would be a big task for someone.  Interior downsizing is really not much easier.  I remain confused by complexity and unanswered questions that don’t simply go away.  Life is often noisy and busy, of necessity.  But we are practising Christian Meditation.  It is a plug of simplicity in our lives, like a plug of healthy grass you might put in your lawn in the hope that it will seed and spread… a kind of transplant, a complexity bypass, if that’s not too fanciful. 

I am sure that contemplative life and prayer, which is an exercise in simplicity, and is without boundaries or prior conditions, is a vital pathway onward for Jesus’s followers.  As Thomas Merton put it, faith is not the determination to cling to any form of words, biblical or liturgical or theological, but is the opening of the inward eye, the eye of the heart, to life and to God.  On this path we can indeed address the very personal challenges of simplicity in a complex and increasingly threatening world.

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[1] Philippians 4:11.  “Content” is autarkēs (αὐταρκης), a word which in ordinary speech means “enough”. 

[2] I John 4:16

Cheap and Costly Grace – Easter IV, 10.5.19

As Hitler took over power in Germany, and fascist military regimes were spreading arrogance and cruelty far and wide, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others recognised a huge and urgent kairos, a wake-up call for the Christian Church.  In 1937 Bonhoeffer wrote about cheap grace (Billige Gnade).  Cheap Grace, he said, is grace without discipleship.  Fr Laurence Freeman describes cheap grace as the kind we bestow on ourselves… in our religious frame of mind.  It's the kind we get when we use the church to satisfy ourselves.  It's grace without really following, without being a disciple.  It's the cheap grace of the Christian who says I prefer to stay as I am.  I'm okay, leave me alone, don't ask me to grow or change. That's not the way of a disciple.  Costly grace, on the other hand, wrote Bonhoeffer, confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart.  It is costly because it compels us to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: "My yoke is easy and my burden is light."

Let’s look again at what we mean by grace.  In the Greek scriptures, charis… in Hebrew, chesed… two profoundly important words in understanding our faith.  Grace is the goodness we receive which we didn’t expect and neither earned nor deserved.  Grace is “love… nevertheless”.  Love despite, perhaps.  But grace comes with a corollary – if you are the recipient of grace, your life turns towards it, you change.   Of his fullness have we all received, writes John, grace upon grace. He goes on:  The Law was given through Moses… That is the law which defines what you deserve or do not deserve.  …grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.[1]  That is the “law” which says that love prevails because God is love and no one is lost.

Costly grace, then, is God’s grace received and known in humble gratitude and wonder.  This grace displaces the ego, the self, because we are less and less captivated by the self, charmed by it, or protective of ourselves.  The church at its best is a channel of the costly grace which changes us into disciples – it means learners, listeners.  Bonhoeffer’s concern was that the church of his day, by and large, was existing for its own sake, compromising with fascism and its horrors, occupied mainly with survival, and therefore purveying cheap grace.

We are in another kairos – and one of the signs of this is our loss of confidence.  What were familiar landmarks in faith seem to disappear.  The church seems scarcely to know what to say.  But then, more and more people no longer wonder or care what the church has to say.  Secularism prevails, some of it sensible, much of it pernicious.  This is a kairos which calls us to be still, steady, and be formed and re-formed by God in Christ.  Believers are now able to rediscover inwardness and its strength, along with discerning again what to let go of – which is quite a lot -- and what to embrace.  This teaching, grown-up faith, I would say, is always going to surprise us.  We are being ministered to in a time of need by costly grace and wisdom.

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[1] John 1:16-17

After daybreak – Easter III, 3 May 2019

Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. (John 21:4)

I don’t know how that could be, that they didn’t recognise him, but we hear it repeatedly in the gospel accounts of Jesus’s resurrection.  He appears, unexpectedly, and they don’t know who he is.  The gospel writers, dealing now more than ever with mystery and wonder, are very soon making copious use of symbolism – here for instance, it’s just after daybreak, symbolising the dawning of their new life, Easter life.  Jesus is on the beach -- in all literature the beach is potent as a symbol of life on the border, transition between past and future, known and unknown, safety and peril.  Jesus, we find, is also very human here… he is wounded, and in Luke’s Gospel he actually asks, Is there anything to eat? 

So it’s strange.  And strangest of all is that, whether it was Mary at the tomb, or the disciples on the lake, or on the road to Emmaus, they didn’t know at first who he was.  Albert Schweitzer understood this, I think.  Schweitzer was a French/German (Alsace) medical missionary in Africa, in what is now Gabon.  A devout Lutheran Christian of independent mind, Schweitzer was theologian, organist (he was an authority on J S Bach), writer, philosopher, physician, Nobel Peace Prize winner of 1952.[1]  This is what he wrote about Jesus:  He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he came to those who did not know him.  He speaks to us the same words: "Follow me!" and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfil for our time.  He commands.  And to those who obey him, whether they be wise or simple, he will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in his fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who he is.

I find this totally encouraging.  The risen Lord is encountered in life’s depths and predicaments, trials, doubts and disasters.  It is a matter of being still and waiting.  We find him in our confusion and setbacks.  We learn discernment, preferring silence and stillness.  Eventually we know, or suspect, who he is.

It is far removed from the embarrassment intelligent and sensitive Christian faith has suffered lately, with Destiny Church zealots gathered in Hagley Park, directly over the road from the Al Noor mosque, to broadcast their testimonies and, as they put it, “reclaim Christchurch for Jesus”.  This dogmatism and arrogance has little to do with the way of Jesus.  Neither the gospel of Christ nor the city of Christchurch depend on any of this for faith and truth.  The risen Lord, hidden and mysterious, and totally humble, has been ministering in the hearts of Christian, Jew, Moslem, long before we came along.  The point is not to bring him back – he never left -- the point is to meet him where he is, and always was, with his humility and simplicity and love.

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[1] While completing his doctorate in theology, Schweitzer somehow studied medicine in Strasbourg, and was an organ pupil of Charles-Marie Widor.  Later he recorded much of Bach’s organ opus.