What the body knows - 31 July 2020

An old friend of ours, if you asked him how he was, might quote, “As well as can be expected for the state I’m in”.  He was joking, but a lot of people are not.  How they are feeling dominates everything... the prison of the body, but also the prison or tyranny of the mood.  The Greek philosophers had a saying, sōma sēma,[1] the body is a tomb.  So their point was, by philosophy or however, to escape the prison of the body, or at any rate to control it, bring it into submission.  St Paul too had his doubts about the body, perhaps in his case with good reason.  Paul starkly contrasts flesh and spirit[2]… Flesh and spirit are opposed to each other, he says.  And indeed, in meditation we start by making the body, so far as we can, to be still and silent and less in the way… as though the body were actually a nuisance. But this is where it gets confusing.  Paul after all still thought the body was the right metaphor to use for the church, the Body of Christ.[3]  I wish he had spelled it out more – the church resembles the body, not only in the function and interdependence of its many parts, but equally in its problems, failures, fallibility, and falling down.   

These days we are frequently told that we must listen to our bodies; they are telling us stuff we need to know.  We had better listen.  Dr Rowan Williams, last year, as guest speaker for the UK National Christian Meditation Conference, chose as his theme, “What the Body Knows”.  And in Lecture 1 he plunged right in… in Christian Meditation, he said, the first Basic Principle is the body, where it is and how it is.  Far from telling the body to sit there and shut up, Dr Williams advocates taking detailed stock… awareness, it is part of paying attention: the sounds of ourselves, pulse, breathing, digestion... pressures where we are sitting, tension areas... and then the ambient sounds, other people’s shifting, breathing, the creaks and noises.  His point is not only that this is where we are, but that this is where we should be.  We inhabit the body – we don’t have a lot of choice about that, it is where God has put us – it is our locus, where we are.  Indeed, the basic human state is just that: inhabiting and receiving.  In prayer, inhabiting and receiving is reality... anything else we are setting aside for now.  The point of being still and silent and introducing the mantra, gently and interiorly and rhythmically repeated, is to help maintain us in this simplest place, present and attentive, listening rather than speaking… present to God.

In Jewish faith and understanding it is incomprehensible that we should somehow try to suppress or minimise the body.  We are very much corporeal, and although the body has its problems, increasingly as the years go by… it is a welcome presence in prayer.  We are not present in prayer without it.  It is heroic, and even in decrepitude it honours God.  Paul could write[4] (although it is certainly past the narrow borders of my understanding): He will transform our humiliated body so that it may be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him to make all things subject to himself.

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[1] σωμα σημα

[2] Romans 7:14-8:11

[3] I Corinthians 12:12-30

[4] Philippians 3:21

Weeping and gnashing of teeth - 24 July 2020

If you are paying attention to the Gospel next Sunday[1] you may hear the phrase weeping and gnashing of teeth.  In fact you may hear it twice.  The angels of God, says Jesus, at the end of the age, come and sort out the righteous from the evildoers – the latter are consigned to the furnace of fire where, understandably, there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.[2] Interestingly, the other two synoptic gospels (Mark and Luke) omit mention of the furnace of fire and the weeping and gnashing of teeth.  Perhaps they thought, as many of us have privately thought, that it has always seemed out of kilter with the spirit and clear intention of Jesus’ message.

 

Now, we could go on for the rest of the time available, about the textual and other problems raised by this passage… but there are other things to be seen here.  Firstly, if the whole concept of inevitable ghastly and eternal torture for the wicked strikes you as abhorrent, and you find it difficult to believe that Jesus taught such things, then you are in excellent company.  But it is wise to remember that there are to this day earnest Christians believing that it is not only true but essential; it is even imagined that this punishment of the wicked is just and that it glorifies God.

Why is this?  Why has the church, including good and wise people, through the centuries, thought it necessary to teach that the God Jesus called Father is retributive and punitive?  Is it not yet another instance of idolatry, making God in our image… in this case needing to rain punishment on sinners not like us?  In the Catechism of the protestant tradition in which I was brought up, Question 152 asks:  What doth every sin deserve at the hands of God?  And the answer is:  Every sin, even the least, being against the sovereignty, goodness and holiness of God, and against his righteous law, deserveth his wrath and curse, both in this life, and that which is to come, and cannot be expiated but by the blood of Christ.

Well, mercifully, our contemplative spirit causes us to pause…  In this 21^st century, that intransigent judgmentalism is still everywhere to be found.  Secularism has embraced it with enthusiasm.  It takes its root in fear… fear of difference, of colour, of different belief, of sexual choice, even fear of different nationality, or of gender…  along with much wilful blindness to causes, such as social disadvantage, personal demons, family failures...  Fear even of peace, of unity and understanding across walls and boundaries.  Fear of being wrong.... all engender a need to punish, often more politely expressed as being held accountable.  So the most secular society comes to reflect the conflict in both church and bible between the God Jesus loved as the Loving Father, and the God who consigns the wicked to eternal punishment.  

I cannot think that the love that created all things and declared it good, is finally defeated in wailing and gnashing of teeth… for goodness sake, that is superstition, not faith.  Maturing in Christ and in contemplative life and prayer means choosing whom we will serve, simply because the God who is present to us in our silence and stillness is the God Jesus knew in his silence and stillness, whose presence is signalled by love and mercy… and that love and mercy, as Paul told us, bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things, never ends.[3] 

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[1] Matthew 13:31-52

[2] Κλαυθμὸς και βρυγμὸς τῶν ὀδὀντων

[3] I Corinthians 13:7-8

Both growing together - 17 July 2020

In the Gospel for next Sunday Matthew gives us three parables – the Good Seed and the Weeds, the Mustard Seed, and the Yeast in the Dough.  They are all about growing.  In the first of these we have a farmer sowing good wheat in his field, but then, it says, while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds as well.  The workers want to know, what shall we do?  shall we go out now and pull up the weeds?  The master says no, Let both of them grow together until the harvest. 

Now, weeds and good grain growing together surely makes for an untidy crop... just like the church.  The weeds surely take some of the nourishment that otherwise the good grain would enjoy.  The weeds also propagate and sow more weeds everywhere.  And even I know that it would be easier to pull up the weeds while they are small, rather than when they are mature and seeding and deeply rooted.  The master points out the difficulty of pulling them up, anyway, without pulling up the good grain also. And he says, let them grow together until the harvest.  Well, I rather fear a lot of nonsense has been preached about this parable, over the centuries.  We immediately make a sharp distinction:  Wheat is Good, Weeds are Bad.  That may indeed be so in horticulture, although I sense weeds have been getting a better reputation in recent times, with roadside wildflowers, herbal remedies...  

But we cannot apply such judgements to people.  Saints are not all good, and infidels, heretics and reprobates are not all bad, not even capitalists, communists, tories or socialists.  The point about this parable, it seems to me, are the words together until the harvest.  God is the harvester, we are not, and that should come as a considerable relief.  Meanwhile, we belong together.  Benedict warned his monks not to think of themselves as holy before they really are – Benedict’s quiet humour -- he knew that if any of them were indeed holy, they would be the last to think of themselves that way.

So, if we pay attention to Jesus, we become more reluctant to define good and bad, black and white... and we certainly start to smile, or wince inwardly, about distinguishing ourselves from lesser breeds, or assuming the moral or spiritual high ground.  Yes, society has some bad people – the church has some too.  Jesus was not blind to that.  John intriguingly comments how Jesus, in Jerusalem at the Passover, experienced a flood of popularity... and John writes:  But Jesus... knew all people... he himself knew what was in people.[1]  

A few years ago, for various reasons, the churches were seized with a need to be seen as safe, to cleanse themselves from embarrassment in the sight of a judgmental and often hypocritical wider society.  Notices went up in the church porches, clergy attended seminars, systems were set up for people wanting to report alleged offences, memos were sent out about “Building Healthy Churches”...  Pharisaism, in some respects, got a new life.  But then it was discovered, or remembered, that we are not as righteous as we might like to think.  I recall one of my colleagues, in high indignation about all these righteous (he used a noun I won’t repeat here) forgetting what Jesus said about cleaning the house only to leave it open to the entry of demons worse than the former ones.  The wheat and the weeds, truth be known, are not that easily distinguished, we are all broken and fallible, and growing together as it should be, until God sorts it out in God’s own way and time.  

I have no doubt that in contemplative prayer and life we find after a while that we are taking our time about rushing to judgement, we become more reluctant to make sharp distinctions between people... because, perhaps, we are seeing ourselves and others more clearly and accurately, kindly and lovingly.

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[1] John 2:24-25

Your cell will teach you everything – 10 July 2020

The experience of lockdown was the sort of thing one of my teachers long ago liked to call very pedagogical.  We had confinement, stability and relative simplicity... and for those who wanted it, we had a sustained look at ourselves.  It confronted us with our capacity, or lack thereof, to be content with what we had.  Having said that, perhaps we should add that many of us still enjoyed considerable warmth, food and safety, while on the other hand, many had and still have real anxieties about employment and income and the future.  The capacity of many for lockdown was shaky.  It was strange, it could be scary, and for some claustrophobic…  People invented all manner of games and ploys to structure time and energy, to stave off boredom, and they videoed themselves at it -- and when lockdown and distancing were lifted some 40,000 poured into Eden Park for a rugby game, and into pubs, night clubs and restaurants for rapturous relief and celebration.

 

Possibly the most famous story from the Desert Fathers and Mothers of many centuries ago is this one:  A brother came to Scetis to visit Abba Moses and asked him “Father, give me a word.” The old man said to him “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”  Now we need our imaginations...  Your cell or mine for a while may have been the strange circumstances of the lockdown.  For Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, and for many others, it was their actual enforced detention, in which they had to learn to obey what is, rather than what they might prefer.  In the pandemic lockdown some have been consigned to a 4- or 5-star hotel room for 14 days... comfortable, maybe a nice view, equipped with TV and internet and cell phone, nice food brought to you... all so far paid by the taxpayer... and yet this can be a nightmare.  Your cell, for some, is a happy home and family – for others it is not quite like that, but it is where they are.  The day’s extended duties may be your cell, or serious commitments at work.  Arriving to live in a retirement village, with reduced space, different community, burnt bridges… it may be that.  Or your private and hidden set of burdens and tensions is where you are.  Or it may be the grief and loss that is there when you wake up and never goes far away. 

Go into your cell and sit down, says Abba Moses.  Go into your room and shut the door, says Jesus[1]. Pledge yourself to the walls, advises someone else.  What is so magic about that?  The magic is that your cell is the opposite of escape and denial.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer was confined to a Gestapo prison cell, condemned to death.  There he read[2] how Moses, about to die, was taken to Mount Nebo from where the Lord showed him all the land.  Bonhoeffer came to know the grace by which he could see what Jews call ha’aretz, the Land, the scope of God’s love and providence and purpose... and God’s presence.  Martin Luther King famously said, I have been to the mountain top, I have seen the promised land... and he went on to say how they would get there, he would not.  Your cell will teach you everything, gently, once you know how to be still and silent… once you have learned, as Jesus said, the leaving of self behind… once you have begun to say yes to faith rather than fear…

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[1] Matthew 6:6

[2] Deuteronomy 34:1

Woundedness – 3 July 2020

The Oxford English Dictionary reluctantly admits that woundedness is a valid word, but says it is rare.  What is not rare is the fact of human woundedness.  We bear the legacies of wounding events or words – physical, mental, psychic, or simply fantasy, they can be open wounds or troublesome scars.    So, life for many entails finding ways, often heroically, to compensate for the limitations woundedness imposes.  

There is, just as real, a woundedness of spirit, a sense of defeat it may be, or of inferiority, or deprivation.  Any or all of this can manifest in anger, or in defensiveness, unwillingness to take risks… it may show up in euphoria, partying, misuse of alcohol and other drugs.  And there is the woundedness of ageing – it’s not only bits of us packing up like an old washing machine, but also, in far more cases than we think proper, the distressing facts of senility.

One reality of woundedness is that the more we try to hide it, the more it may be apparent to the discerning eye.  Denial is another ploy… “Everything’s going to be just fine”, you hear routinely in American movies... somewhere over the rainbow, I presume.  Send the children upstairs… lest they hear something that might suggest the world can be a nasty place… which they may be suspecting already.  The powerfully rich cosmetic industry is dedicated to denial, driving (botoxing) back the visible effects of ageing... with what we might call mixed results.

 

Jesus was wounded.  It is in the nature of love to share woundedness.  The ancient Hebrew prophecy said the Servant would bear our griefs and carry our sorrows[1].  Even the resurrected Lord invites his disciples to see his wounds[2] – rich wounds, says the hymn writer, yet visible above[3].  He bore the wounds that go with simply living among people, in his case, an oppressed people brutally ruled by an occupying power… but also, his immediate company of disciples and friends had its tensions and defections, misunderstandings, needless alienations.  Kawau Bay some mornings is beautifully calm and unruffled... but an elderly Maori woman I met one day in a waiting room in Warkworth, when I said the bay looked nice, told me the taniwha – she actually called it Tangaroa – was getting restless and therefore dangerous.  Church meetings at times could be among the worst for wounding people.

 

When we come to the silence and stillness of contemplative prayer, we have come to a “place” where there can be no guilt or embarrassment about our woundedness.  There is no talk of blame here – no one says, “Well she brought it on herself” ... as though that contributes to the sum of understanding and compassion, or truth.  Any brokenness we may set to one side, because here at any rate we are living from wholeness and newness.  The grace that operates here, in love, is reconfiguring our relationships with the past.  What is asked from us is the willingness of the heart to be still, to cease the chatter and self-justification, and to say Yes to God who is always saying Yes to us, in love.

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[1] Isaiah 53:3-6`

[2] Luke 24:39-40; John 20:20, 25-28

[3] Crown Him with Many Crowns, a hymn by Matthew Bridges and Godfrey Thring.