Two sorts of religion - 25 September 2020

 

The Gospel next Sunday presents us with this curious little parable: A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’  He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went.  The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go.  Which of the two did the will of his father?”  (Matthew 21:28-31)

Perhaps in today’s climate there‘s nothing very strange in that story.  Each son changed his mind later.  You’re allowed to do that… indeed, you hear it stated as a kind of sovereign freedom: “Well, I changed my mind!”  On the other hand, in politics for instance, changing your mind gets labelled immediately as doing a U-turn, or flip-flopping, a sign of weakness and prevarication.  “Never back down” is seen as a sign of strength, even when you were plainly wrong. 

This is the passage where Jesus goes on to inform the chief priests and the elders that the tax collectors and the prostitutes get into the kingdom of heaven before they do – scarcely, one would think, a career enhancing statement.  But there are indeed these two types of religion.  The religion of the temple priests and the elders, the scribes and pharisees, as Jesus saw it, is giving lip service to all the fine precepts of faith, but not actually doing it.[1]  Jesus’s truth is not allowed anywhere near the part of them where vital decisions are made and actioned. They see religion as something to be professed, but living it is a private and personal matter and no one else’s business.  The other sort is what Jesus can see in the tax-collectors and the prostitutes.  They may have no time or inclination at all for religion and its lofty principles – but in some important ways, they do what God requires.  Of course it is not always so – you can’t generalise like that.  There are however these two approaches to religion.  The appearance of faith and the generally reassuring practice of its rites and rituals, along with a general public decency and charitable works, suits some people fine.  ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go.

The other approach flows out of repentance and faith.  The tax collectors at that time were men who contracted with the Roman government to collect all taxes.  By extortion they were able to make a good living out of it.  And we know how the prostitutes lived.  These are the ones who may have no use for the church, but Jesus could see in them much that is coming from God, however disguised, distorted, defaced at times… their neediness, their suffering, their hidden strivings and wishes… like the tax gatherer who stood at the back of the temple and prayed, Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.[2] 

As Jesus told it: He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went.  No doubt I have over-simplified, but the Apostle James picks up this same theme when he writes: …those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.[3]  Our Christian Meditation, indeed our Christian discipleship, is not about religion.  It is not about the way we feel.  It is about loving God, our neighbour and ourselves... about doing justice, loving mercy, walking humbly.[4]

---

[1] See Matthew 23:2-7

[2] Luke 18:9-14

[3] James 1:25

[4] Luke 10:27; Micah 6:8

A radiance of his presence - 18 September 2020

 

Thomas Keating was a Trappist monk, a Cistercian of the Strict Observance.  He died two years ago aged 94.  I met him when he was the speaker at the John Main Seminar in San Francisco in 1998.  So much for the name-dropping…  Somewhere in Keating’s many writings I came across his comments on a passage in the First Letter to Timothy, and in particular on this sentence:  God… alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.[1]

The church would do better to be more reticent about God.  Much that we hear, whether it is from statements of belief or from the loopier wings of fundamentalism, simply makes sensitive followers of Christ cringe.  As we keep saying, we need to identify idolatry for what it is… making God, one way or another, inevitably some replica of ourselves.  Our idea of God, wrote Thomas Merton, tells us more about ourselves than about God.  That is why the Hebrews in ancient times recorded what we know as the Second Commandment, which forbids any image of God because, however holy and exalted, it cannot be other than a distortion. 

Timothy is reminded that God dwells in inaccessible light.  Faith proceeds by unknowing… by sight unseen.  Keating writes:  Anything that we perceive of God can only be a radiance of (God’s) presence and not God as (God is).[2]  It is, he says, something like the effect of a prism… as though the divine light is separated into the varied colours of a spectrum, and what we may “see”, one way or another, is one radiance, one aspect, of the Ultimate Mystery.  In the cute imagery of the ancient writings, Moses on Mount Sinai saw only the “back parts” of the divine presence.[3]

St Paul writes that Jesus is the image of the invisible God.[4]  “Image” in the Greek is icon (εἰκων).  Icons are not central in western Christian spirituality and worship, but they are certainly central and crucial are in eastern Orthodox Christianity.  An icon is not intended as an oil painting or any other kind of graphic art.  The point about any icon is to see through it, as it were, glimpses, radiances, of the divine light and truth.[5] 

The Apostle John makes it clear:  No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.[6]  Love, with its attendant truth and understanding, freedom, unity and peace, is the infallibly recognisable radiance of God.  In our kind of world it may indeed be fleeting and fragile.  But we “see” with the eye of the heart.  We see others also opening to truth and grace, in love, and becoming able like true pilgrims to share the light they have found along the road.

---

[1] I Timothy 6:16

[2] Thomas Keating: The Daily Reader for Contemplative Living

[3] Exodus 33:20-23.  It is best in the KJV.

[4] Colossians 1:15

[5] See for instance, Rowan Williams: The Dwelling of the Light (Canterbury Press, 2003)

[6] I John 4:12

Adsum – 11 September 2020

 

Third-form Latin at Auckland Grammar, back in the late 1940s, was a bracing experience.  As I recall, Latin was usually the first period of the day, and so the teacher had to call the roll.  It being Latin, each boy had to respond, Adsum – present – and then sit down.  Never mind that the teacher could see perfectly well that the boy was present, or not… the teacher pretended not to know until the boy audibly certified his presence in a respectful manner.  A curious ritual…

Adsum matters however.  A lot of the time we are not actually present, despite being visibly there.  There may be good reason.  It happens a lot in church – people are there but actually somewhere else.[1]  I find it a useful skill at family/tribal reunions.  But also, I am reminded, there are circumstances in which it may be necessary to cultivate what sensitive Germans during the Nazi era called inner retreat.[2]

It is not so in contemplative prayer.  Adsum.  I am here.  I have come in, I have shut the door, other people know I am not available, I have turned off the cellphone, I have become silent and still, I am present.  I have left my baggage outside the door – my agenda for the day, my agenda for the week, my accomplishments, my failures, my anxieties… my memories too are lodged at the door… not because any of these are bad things, but because for the moment (kairos) they are surplus to requirements.  Any of these may want entrance at any time, but I am choosing to ignore that for now.

Adsum… I am here, fully me.  It is the present moment, it is not yesterday, or tomorrow.  If I have aches and pains they are present too, part of me, not the whole.  I am awake.  I am paying attention, so far as I can, to the gentle repetition of the mantra.  It is comforting to know that my true self, the self God made, knows, sees and loves, is here.  I am here, in Leonard Cohen’s words, without the costume that I wore.  There is no one I have to impress, or convince, let alone hide from or fear.  God is present, and God sees only the truth about me, in love and joy.  The only word I have – is Yes. 

But there may be a problem…  Father Laurence Freeman, one of our important teachers, says that true silence happens when the “I” is absent.  He writes:  Silence is… much more of course than the absence of noise and even more than the absence of thoughts...  Silence is deeper than that, because the thought ‘I had no thoughts’ is a thought; it is still self-consciousness.  So silence… is when the ‘“I” thought does not arise…  And this I think is what Jesus is pointing to when he tells us to leave self behind and all our possessions, and to enter into that poverty of spirit which we enter into through the mantra, and by living out the consequences of saying the mantra at the centre of our being. ‘The sparkling of truth devoid of “I” is the greatest austerity.’

Maybe so, but it is beyond my experience (and I puzzle about that interpretation of Luke 9:23 and related passages).  It seems to me the kind of comment that leads on to the strange ancient wisdom that if you know you’re praying then you’re not praying – I wonder if St Anthony ever regretted having said that.  For the present, so to speak, adsum is what matters.  I am here, warts and all, glad to be here, somewhat timid, paying attention, quiet and still, deploying only my consent. 

---

[1] In Scotland, one bitter Sunday morning, the big stone church was full of dense fog.  I climbed into the pulpit, and could see no one beyond the front pew… rather like standing on the bridge of a battleship off the coast of Labrador, eerie, even more fun if I’d had a fog horn… Needless to say, the clarity of my sermon steadily dispelled the fog.

[2] Selbst sich zurückziehen.

Telling the time - 4 September 2020

Here is part of the Epistle next Sunday:  …you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. …the night is far gone, the day is near.  Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; let us live honourably as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy.  Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ… (Romans 13:11-14)

Paul is making use here of the familiar process of waking up, jumping out of bed, and getting dressed.  …you know what time it is…  Well-informed meditators know about kairos and chronos, two Greek words meaning time.  Chronos means time on the clock, in this case time to get up – 6 o’clock it may be – some people even sleep in until 7 o’clock.  But Paul does not write chronos here, he writes kairos, the special time, the time of change, of challenge, the time God sends, the meaningful moment when we are paying attention.  It is waking up time, he says, the night is far gone, the day is near… now is the moment for you to wake from sleep.  Wake, here, in Greek, is the verb used for resurrection.  Paul is writing about waking to a new life.[1]

So we… lay aside the works of darkness.  Sorry about all the linguistics, but Paul did write in Greek, and here he is deliberately choosing words with special meanings for people of faith.  Lay aside is the verb for taking clothes off, throwing off pyjamas, or whatever they wore in bed in those days… and then, as you might expect, put on the armour of light, where put on is the verb meaning getting dressed.  This is one of Paul’s favourite analogies.[2] 

But it is the kairos that is the real issue here.  Something is changing.  The new day is not the same as yesterday.  The post-pandemic world will not be some return to “normal”.  We need to wake up and be aware of it, greet it, understand it, “dress”, as it were, for the climate and the circumstances.  Paul’s 1^st century advice is: Let us live honourably as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy.  Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ… the same verb again… putting on Christ as an  enveloping garment. 

Well, it may be a lovely thought, but we are awaking to a world of pandemic, environmental crisis, chronic warfare including cyber warfare, refugees and homelessness, political ineptitude and corruption, racism, populism, hatred and fear.  True discernment, then, might suggest that we embrace our powerlessness to do or change anything much.  We “put on” Christ and his pathway of humility, hospitality, helpfulness, in love and openness. 

I thought at this point I had finished this talk, but then, from darkest USA arrived the Text for Today, sent out by Sojourners magazine on the first day of spring:  For now the winter is past… the flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land… (Song of Songs 2:11-12)  With all that’s wrong, life is reasserting itself.  While adversity is bringing out the worst in some, it is generating the best and even better in others.  Science, arts and religion are all being tested and challenged… we are needing more than ever to discern truth from falsehood… ill will is being seen for what it is, along with greed and resort to violence, power is more and more being held accountable… The time of singing has come, and the voice of the kereru is heard in our land.

---

[1] Paul may be referencing here a very early Christian hymn about waking up and rising from the dead – he quotes from it in Ephesians 5:14.

[2] See I Corinthians 15:53; Ephesians 4:24; Colossians 3:10, 12; Galatians 3:27.