Tough truths…3 – Your life is not about you

This tough truth is about letting go.  It highlights what Jesus taught:  If anyone would come after me, let them deny themselves, take up their cross daily and follow me.  Whoever would save their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will save it.  For what does it profit to gain the whole world but lose yourself?[1]


Letting go is a fundamental rhythm of Christian discipleship.  It is the opposite of clinging to the familiar, being afraid of change, opting always for safety.  One way Paul expresses this is in Philippians 3:13-14… and he links willingness to let go with maturity (v.15).  Other faiths understand this too, expressing it in their own terms.  Life itself, with or without religious faith, requires or at least invites us to let go in numerous ways…  Letting go of youth is something some people find hard, evidently.  Letting go in bereavement is specially hard.  Parents must let go of sons and daughters.  Letting go of good health, of a friendship, of power and responsibility…  Brought up in the church perhaps?  Then it may be letting go of inadequate childhood religion[2], of distorted acquired notions of God…  Letting go of resentments and the poison of the past…  Eventually we let go of life.
  

Any letting go can be difficult, even frightening.  But letting go is a major daily task of the journey of meditation, contemplative life and prayer.  On this road we are learning the value of non-possessiveness, of interior and of outer renunciation, writes Fr Laurence Freeman.  Typically however, we find it happening in us anyway… looking back we see how previously intractable things have shifted, along the road.  We have been letting go of images of self; learning to sit lighter to our desires and plans, to possessions, to fond illusions, to reliance on ownership and control.  These issues are seeming not as important as they once were.  We are learning how love is actually not love if it clings, possesses, controls.
  

It is the rhythm of a simple daily discipline of silence and stillness, faithfully and gently letting go and returning to the mantra on becoming aware that we are straying into thought and planning, remembering, imagining…  This prayer is a sustained Yes to God rather than always to me and my needs, my life, my hopes and concerns – because, essentially, it is not about me.  We have always taught about contemplative life and prayer that if you want to know what’s in it for me, you’re missing the point.  The real question is, do I find I am becoming more loving, less fearful, more available, less judgemental, more forgiving, less resentful…  These are not changes I can achieve.  They are what the Spirit of the Risen Christ will do in me as I make space and time.  It is not about me… We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves.  If we live we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. (Romans 14:7-8)


Fr Richard Rohr writes:  All the truly transformed people I have ever met are characterized by what I would call radical humility. They are deeply convinced that they are drawing from another source; they are simply an instrument.  Their genius is not their own; it is borrowed.  They end up doing generative and expansive things precisely because they do not take first or final responsibility for their gift; they don’t worry too much about their failures, nor do they need to promote themselves.  Their life is not their own, yet at some level they know that it has been given to them as a sacred trust.  Such people just live in gratitude and confidence and try to let the flow continue through them.  They know that love can be repaid by love alone.

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[1] Mark 8:34-36; Matthew 16:24-26; Luke 9:23-25; and a similar statement at John 12:25. 

[2] I Corinthians 13:11

Tough truths…2 - You are not important

Continuing our consideration of Father Richard Rohr’s Five Hard Truths…  All we write at present is against the background of the pandemic, lockdown, much anxiety… and no one knows how long it will go on…

The self that is not important is what contemplative teaching calls the ego…  It does matter that we get this clear.  Our culture, as we know, our way of life, our best teachers, counsellors, “life coaches”, generally insist that each of us is of primary importance.[1]  In the current pestilence, the Director-General of Health, giving the day’s statistics, reminds us that even one death is one too many… expressing our common humanity, that each of us is of unique value and unrepeatable (unless, evidently, like Cardinal George Pell and others, we fall into public opprobrium and humiliation).  But also the feeling of failure in life, even personal loss of self-esteem, are seen as lapses from our inherent importance and dignity.  And in more recent times, “Me First”, “Me Too”, “Me Time”, have become respectable and even admired choices.
  

So what Fr Richard Rohr is teaching here is wildly counter-cultural, and we have to repeat… the self that is not important is the persona contemplative teaching calls the ego.  This is the self I present, or hope I present, to the world.  It may be a shining and admirable self, or it may be, as we say, warts and all.  I may actually believe it myself… many do.[2]  So it may come as news to me that there can be any other self than the one I always carefully tended (or in some cases neglected).  It is alarming to learn that it may be a façade, that the emperor is in fact naked.   But the emperor is not naked.  At another level than the ego – indeed, not far away -- is the self God sees, always saw, made, knows and loves.[3]  This self is unlikely (in St Paul’s words[4]) to think more highly of itself than it ought to think.


Are these however separate selves… the ego-self, and the true self?  I am sure most Christians assume that our best self which pleases God is the old self tidied, reformed and brushed up.  We get better and better somehow – with the result that guilt piles up year after year when we suspect this is not happening as it should, and perhaps we are not sure we want it to anyway.[5]  It is not so much that they are separate selves, as that the ego is a façade, non-essential as we say these days, unreal.


The self that matters is the self that is, in life and prayer, saying Yes to God.  The ego on the other hand is not able to leave self behind, as Jesus taught – it is frightened that if the public self is removed there may be nothing left, that the emperor would be naked.  The ego cannot respond to Jesus saying, I am among you as one who serves… the greatest among you must be the servant of all.[6]  The wounded ego finds it generally impossible to forgive as Jesus taught.  And here in the unnerving experience of pandemic, the ego of course is frightened, of the unknown, of the future, of strangeness…
  

The self God knows and loves however is daily, in life and prayer, seeing these responses becoming possible by the ministry of the spirit of the risen Jesus, the ministry of love and grace.  Hardship and adversity may indeed be among the circumstances in which God destabilises the ego.


So the tough truth, You are not important, is actually a liberating wisdom.  The way of Jesus distances and frees us from the demanding ego… steadily, day by day, year by year, as we renew our Yes in the stillness and silence of our prayer.  The ego remains; it still has its rôle – Jesus had an ego – but as St Paul puts it: …that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith…[7]

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[1] See Luke 12:6-7

[2] I remember arriving at a wedding, at the door of the venue, to find the bride’s sister-in-law running past me out to her car.  She had discovered on her arrival at the venue that she had come without her earrings.  She was rushing home to get them.  She missed the wedding ceremony altogether.  Earrings were indispensable to her ego.

[3] See Luke 7:44… Simon the Pharisee sees an immoral woman, Jesus sees deeper.

[4] Romans 12:3

[5] cf. Augustine:  Lord make me pure… but not yet.

[6] Luke 22:24-27

[7] Ephesians 3:16-17

Tough truths…1 – Life is hard

There may have been times when Julian of Norwich sorely regretted ever having said, All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well… etc.  This teaching, much relied on by the church at present, sounds pretty glib to me in the circumstances.  Many people are finding life tough.  Father Richard Rohr, a well-known contemplative teacher, feet on the ground, gives us a list of five tough principles drawn, he says, from his study of initiation rites around the world.  Here they are… you will find them negative and perhaps depressing, but grown-up faith recognises them quite easily:   1. Life is hard.  2. You are not important.  3. Your life is not about you.  4. You are not in control.  5. You are going to die.   In times like this it seems vital that our contemplative thought and practice is realistic, present to pain, aware of what people are going through and are often afraid of, bearing the truth.

Baptism, conversion to Christ, initiation into the way of Jesus, contemplative life and prayer -- however we think of these things -- is a process ever seeking to separate us from who we think we are, or hope we are, and welcoming in us what St Paul called the new person, who we really are, made and loved by God, growing up in Christ.  I think the present hardships are reminding us of the futility of sentimentalism in faith, dependence on domesticated religion or religious entertainment, reliance on signs, wonders, miracles. 

Life is hard, is the first principle, and it is there in the hardship that we find the Way, the Truth and the Life[1].  For the most part the Jewish people have not needed convincing or reminder of this– the great creation myths in the Book of Genesis tell how God said to Adam: …cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you…[2]  In all the years of pastoral ministry, the only person I can remember who seemed actually in vociferous denial that life is hard was a businessman, a loud aficionado of Positive Thinking, who if you asked him how he was invariably replied, “If I was any better I would be dangerous.” So I learned never to ask him.

Fr Rohr says flatly:  All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.  He goes on:  We can obey commandments, believe doctrines, and attend church services all our lives and still daily lose our souls if we run from the necessary cycle of loss and renewal.

  

The Iona Community expresses this plainly:  Faith assumes uncertainty; the truth is hardly ever simple; the path ahead is rarely clear... 

  

Thomas Merton wrote:  Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial “doubt.” This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious ‘faith’ of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.  

Life is hard, and unfair.  Our hardships, great or small, are the place of love’s unfolding… once we have become very doubtful about trying to manage suffering through dogged endurance, willpower, denial, alcohol and other drugs, blame and retribution, choosing victim and “poor me” narratives.   Where we are, as we are, in what is happening, is the cradle of faith and love.  It is the ministry of the risen Christ in us and among us, his Spirit finding space at last in us to make all things new.  One of the foremost tragedies of Christian history is the way the church transmuted Jesus’s death into ever stranger theories and systems of atonement for our “sins”.  Our real and actual sins however, says Richard Rohr, are blindness, egocentricity, illusions, and pride.  These, in a myriad of ways, are what make life hard.  It is in stillness and silence, in our heartfelt Yes to God in Christ, that the unfolding of love works the one miracle that matters.  And then, as Jesus told his followers, my yoke is easy, my burden is light[3].

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[1] John 14:6

[2] Genesis 3:17-18

[3] Matthew 11:28-30

New every morning – Good Friday and Easter 2020

Lamentations 3:1-9, 19-24

I am one who has seen affliction under the rod of God's wrath;

he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light;

against me alone he turns his hand, again and again, all day long.

He has made my flesh and my skin waste away, and broken my bones;

he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation;

he has made me sit in darkness like the dead of long ago.

He has walled me about so that I cannot escape;
he has put heavy chains on me;

though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer;

he has blocked my ways with hewn stones, he has made my paths crooked.

The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall!

My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;

they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

"The Lord is my portion," says my soul, "therefore I will hope in him." 



Whatever the triumph and fanfare of Easter, we will be still in lockdown and in exile from our normal lives.  Our normal lives may remain always now a memory.  The menace of pandemic reigns.  It is as though Good Friday and Easter have merged. 


The messages and images of Good Friday draw together all the cruelty, injustice and suffering people know.  The drama invites us to see God bearing it also, ineffably in Christ, even through death.  Saturday is the continuing experience of sorrow and loss which so many of us know.  Easter Day dawns… and quietly, gently, mysteriously, it may be over many days, in different ways for different people, we enter a newness, a freshness… for Mary in the garden at the tomb, and for the disciples it was indeed new every morning.


I chose the passage from Lamentations because it seems to mirror this merging.  The Book of Lamentations, usually considered far too gloomy for the kind of worship people expect, is a series of Hebrew poems dating from after the rape, pillage and demolition of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC.  He marched most of its surviving citizens to some 50 years of exile in Babylon.  Somehow, precisely in the desolation, these writers come to know themselves addressed by God, through the pain and loss, and they can lift up their hearts.  Jesus’s followers too, men and women plunged into grief, horror and loss, found joy in the depths.  Like the Babylonian exiles, we are now confronting uncertainty, unable to imagine the future, each day receiving glimpses of fragility and menace.


The experience of resurrection, however it comes, is at the edge of what words can express.  That doesn’t stop teachers trying, however – and these are Fr Richard Rohr’s words:   At some point, such people were led to the edge of their private resources, and that breakdown, which surely felt like dying, led them into a larger life.  They broke through in what felt like breaking down.  Instead of avoiding a personal death or raging at it, they went through a death of their old, small self and came out the other side knowing that death could no longer hurt them.  This process of transformation is known in many cultures as initiation.  For many Christians, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the preeminent example of this pattern.  Following Jesus, we need to trust the down, and God will take care of the up.  Although even there, we still must offer our yes.


Resurrection takes root in us quietly and deeply, it may be over months or years, once we know how to be still and silent, with empty hands, asking for nothing.  Meister Eckhart, a teacher from the Middle Ages, wrote: Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.  Resurrection comes in the silence and stillness, as Jesus met Mary in her grief, in the garden, in the morning.

De Profundis – 3 April 2020

The Covid-19 lockdown means of course that our Warkworth Friday morning Christian Meditation group isn’t meeting.  The coming Sunday is Palm Sunday, which initiates the Passion - Death - Resurrection drama, and this “talk” reflects that.  It is longer than usual, mainly because of additional notes… the penalty, I suppose, of having me in indefinite lockdown with books and computer. (R.M.)

Psalm 130, De Profundis, and you will recognise it, perhaps.  Out of the depths…  Oscar Wilde used its imagery after his release from Reading Gaol where he was Prisoner C33.   This is a translation of the Psalm by Robert Alter, a Jewish Hebrew scholar.  It’s not at all an elegant translation, but it’s insightful:

From the depths I called you, Lord.  Master, hear my voice.

May your ears listen close to the voice of my plea.

Were you, God, to keep track of wrongs, Master, who could endure?

But forgiveness is yours, so that you may be feared.

I hoped for the Lord, my being hoped, and for his word I waited.

My being for the Master – more than dawn-watchers watch for the dawn.

Wait, O Israel, for the Lord, for with the Lord is steadfast kindness,

      and great redemption is with him.

And he will redeem Israel from all its wrongs.


Now, what do we say…?  It is de profundis… from the depths…  Many are feeling out of their depth.  Some will never before have had to plumb inner resources of strength, perseverance, wisdom, for weeks or months… indefinitely.  Some don’t know how to try.  Life has always been, for them, simply reactive.  Nothing they can’t handle, as we might say.  Everyone knows that calamity can suddenly and undeservedly fall upon any of us – accident or disease, grief or loss – and we generally hope that will always be elsewhere, not here.  Otherwise, normal life is a matter of finding fulfilment, or excitement, entertainment or achievement, or perhaps just being not bothered.  

But now, as one writer in The Guardian put it, “we crossed over this week” -- all of a sudden, we are either required to stay at home, or needed at essential work and therefore in danger.  It is strange territory (or as you have to say these days, surreal).  It frightens people.  Issues loom, such as income, paying the mortgage or rent, separation from loved ones, fragile mental states, fear of disease, proneness to anxiety or depression, loneliness, getting stuck in a “bubble” with violence… a list I keep adding to*.  This is de profundis territory, and we are not helped in it by people bearing a Christian label who tell us that God keeps the upright and prayerful safe and happy**.


The testimony of Jewish and Christian scriptures tells us, not that God makes everything alright again – that is a very selective reading of scripture -- but that we are never alone in life or in death.  God, in love and mercy shares the pain.  Digging deep, then, in times like this, is not only finding reserves of courage or wisdom we didn’t know were there, but learning to be still, how to set the frightened demanding ego aside, learning new trust and faith, day by day.
  

When I am weak, then I am strong, wrote St Paul (II Corinthians 12:9-10).  Of course it’s counter-intuitive and counter-cultural.  It’s Christian.  It’s Jesus’s way.  It is precisely in the maelstrom that we find faith, love, hope… God.  Not in evasion.  Not in using religion as an escape or anaesthetic or party pill.  Not in expecting we will be alright while others will not.  We share the load, the anxiety and the dangers.  We do what is right.  Our Worst-Case Scenario is not that we might get ill and die.  It will happen one day anyway.  It is that we might have let ego take over, retreating under a carapace of self, shutting out God and others, saving ourselves, as Jesus put it, at the cost of our souls.


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NOTES:

*With hundreds of thousands of people at home "on the sofa" because they lost their jobs, we're asking people to spend their days stressing (even more than usual) about how they'll feed their children.

·         We're asking people to potentially die alone, rather than spending their final moments surrounded by loved ones.

·         We're asking people not to hold funerals for their mum or their dad.

·         We're asking parents in complex custody situations to not see their child for a long time.

·         We're asking grandparents to miss out on their grandchild's first birthday.

·         We're asking immune-compromised people such as cancer sufferers to worry even more about their health.

·         We're asking people to sit at home, away from people they love, who might not have long on Earth and we're asking them to come to terms with the fact that there's no date they can put in their diary for when they'll see that person again.

·         We're asking them to live with that knot in their stomach every hour of their days for an undetermined period of time. "At least" four weeks.

·         We're asking some mums to give birth without their partners, especially if they have other children who cannot be left with anyone else outside their bubble.

·         We're asking dads to miss seeing the birth of their child.

·         We're asking grandparents to miss out on meeting their grandchildren.

·         We're asking grandchildren to risk never seeing their elderly grandparents again.

·         We're asking people to cancel weddings.

The list of individual circumstances is endless but the bottom line is this: hardly any of us is settling in for a month of Netflix marathons on the sofa completely care and worry-free.

A lot will happen in the next few weeks, to our families, to our friends, to ourselves. (NZ Herald 29.3.20)

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**An evangelical pastor who holds regular Bible studies on Capitol Hill for members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet is suggesting that the crisis America is now experiencing is proof of God’s disapproval of LGBTQ Americans.  In a Bible study he published last weekend, Ralph Drollinger pointed to several signs he believes are evidence of God’s displeasure ― including “a proclivity toward lesbianism and homosexuality” and the “religion of environmentalism.” Ultimately, he says, these groups are “largely responsible” for God’s wrath on America today. “Whenever an individual or corporate group of individuals violate the inviolate precepts of God’s Word, he, she, they or the institution will suffer the respective consequences,” Drollinger wrote last Saturday. “Most assuredly America is facing this form of God’s judgment.” (Huffington Post 27.3.20)


Drollinger is a conservative evangelical Christian who describes his belief that there should indeed be an "institutional" separation of Church and State, but that the Church should still "influence" the State.  He has also asked President Trump to use his presidency to turn the American government into a "benevolent dictatorship." Drollinger is also on record as being anti-LGBTQ, anti-women's rights, anti-immigration (he supports family separation at the border), a climate change denier, and declaring Catholicism as "one of the primary false religions of the world." In March 2020, Drollinger generated controversy when he linked corona virus with God's wrath and homosexuality.  (Google)

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I usually avoid making partisan comment, but this came from the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand (1 April 2020): 


“God Our Protector
Psalm 91:3 - “He will keep you safe from all hidden dangers and from all deadly diseases”.  This Psalm reminds and challenges us to trust and to remain firm in our God. The gracious Lord will keep you safe. You are protected and in His loving care. Call on the Lord and believe that the Most High is your defender and protector.”


…a perfect example of looting the Bible for isolated texts saying what we want to hear.  Psalm 91 is indeed inspiring, but it does say that God punishes the wicked and protects the righteous (see vv. 8, 14).  Can Jesus’s followers believe that as it is?  How is that different from the Kaiser’s Gott Mit Uns…?  Is God the author of this pandemic?  The PCANZ seems to think so.


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