Lent 2, 26.2.21 – Psalm 139, 7-12

 

Where can I go from your spirit, or where can I flee from your face?

If I climb the heavens, you are there.  If I lie in the grave, you are there.

If I take the wings of the dawn and dwell at the sea’s furthest end,

even there your hand would lead me, your right hand hold me fast.

If I say, “Let the darkness hide me and the light around me be night,”

even darkness is not dark for you and the night is clear as the day.

The Psalmist is not complaining.  He feels he has grown up.  He is celebrating that there is no hiding place from God – not in atheism, not in a charmed life in which everything goes right and you have no need of God, not in Auschwitz nor in the deepest, most rigorous rejection of God because of all that’s wrong in the world, not in all the many pathways of self-indulgence…  No concealment, no hiding place, sings this Hebrew poet… If I lie in the grave, you are there… darkness is not dark for you, the night is clear as the day… nowhere he can run to.

In preparing this, I thought initially that it would be fun to be the first in living memory to comment on this passage of Psalm 139 without mentioning Francis Thompson’s poem, The Hound of Heaven.  But then it dawned on me that there are actually two English poets, contemporaries in the Victorian era, each of whom died young, and each of whom suffered most of his life with tuberculosis.  But in their poems they depict radically different attitudes to God.  The other poet is William Ernest Henley.  He had bone tuberculosis, and had a leg amputated.[1]  Henley’s choice is implacable defiance of God, and so, his poem Invictus:s

Out of the night that covers me,

      Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

      For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

      I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

      My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

      Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

      Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

      How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

      I am the captain of my soul.

Francis Thompson on the other hand, after years of living on the streets, battling TB, opium addiction, multiple suicide attempts, finally understands the need to stop running.  The Hound of Heaven, he writes, is loping in a leisurely manner, patiently, lovingly, after him.  In trying to outrun or to evade God, or ignore God, it is love he is driving away – I am he whom thou seekest:

Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

I am He Whom thou seekest! 

Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.

The Psalmist also: If I say, “Let the darkness hide me and the light around me be night,” even darkness is not dark for you and the night is clear as the day.  It might be the darkness of addiction… not necessarily to alcohol or other addictive drugs… it could be needing to be entertained all the time, fear of boredom, a chronic need of action and noise and excitement… it could be captivity to some aberrant religion or sect… or hopelessly dysfunctional family… it could be submission to despair, or captivity to depression…  Whatever it is, the Psalmist’s discovery is, I am seen… the darkness is not dark for you and the night is clear as the day.

I can stop running.  I can be still.  I can learn to wait.  I can start to listen.      

 

Miles Coverdale (1535):

Whither shal I go then from thy sprete? Or, whither shal I fle from thy presence?

Yf I clymme vp in to heauen, thou art there: yf I go downe to hell, thou art there also.

Yf I take the wynges of the mornynge, & remayne in the vttemost parte of the see:

Euen there also shal thy honde lede me, and thy right hande shal holde me.

Yf I saye: peradueture the darcknesse shal couer me, then shal my night be turned to daye.

Yee the darcknesse is no darcknesse with the, but the night is as cleare as the daye, the darcknesse & light are both alike.

 

 

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[1] That was one reason Robert Louis Stevenson saw him as a model for Long John Silver.  Henley’s daughter died at the age of five, and she was J M Barrie’s model for Wendy in Peter Pan. 

Lent 1, 19.2.21 – Psalm 139, 1-6

 

O Lord, you search me and you know me,

you know my resting and my rising,

you discern my purpose from afar.

You mark when I walk or lie down,

all my ways lie open to you.

Before ever a word is on my tongue

you know it, O Lord, through and through.

Behind and before you shaped me,

your palm ever laid upon me.

Too wonderful for me, this knowledge,

too high, beyond my reach.[1]

There may come a point in the journey of faith at which it dawns on us that we could not now live any other way – at any rate, not with any sense of completeness, or rightness.  We also find at this point, very likely, that we are reticent now to try to explain it to anyone else.  It’s hard enough to grasp it ourselves -- Too wonderful for me, this knowledge, too high, beyond my reach.

But we may still ask, what is this knowledge?  In the part of the Psalm I read, a verb “to know” is used five times… and then the Psalmist says,  Too wonderful for me, this knowledge, too high, beyond my reach.  So the Psalmist is making the vital point… what matters is not so much what, if anything, I know… what matters is the fact that God knows.  I am known.  The writer gives no hint of being self-righteous or sanctimonious or other-worldly.  Neither is it in any sense a reward for goodness or piety.  He is singing because he has known turbulence and pain, stops and starts and inconsistencies.  It is more like humbled awe and gratitude. If you can personally echo this, then the old arguments about whether God exists, about what’s wrong with church and religion, about imagined conflicts between science and faith, about believing the bible… these seem now to be beside the point.

If you are living in legalistic formal religion, one thing you can be sure of is that you are never going to be quite good enough.[2]  But this is something else, another knowledge.  I don’t have to measure up.  I am measured up -- I am known:  Lord, you search me and you know me, you know my resting and my rising, you discern my purpose from afar.  You mark when I walk or lie down, all my ways lie open to you.  Before ever a word is on my tongue you know it, O Lord, through and through. 

The Psalmist is glad because God sees him/her; God sees not only what happened but what was intended, longed-for, the innermost hopes.  Robert Burns wrote: What’s done we partly may compute / but know not what’s resisted.  Well, what was resisted is seen by God, says the Psalmist... through and through, he writes.  Behind and before you shaped me, your palm ever laid upon me.[3] 

It is a good Lenten thought, I believe, to dwell on what this ancient Hebrew poet is saying.  If the faith that is in us is real faith, then it is spacious, generously roomy, inside-outside flow.  It is not restrictive, or selective, let alone exclusive.  It is inclusive.  Its first product is gratitude and wonder – its lasting product is love.  It chops away the roots of fear.  It breathes the air of freedom.  It celebrates the God of the Psalmist, the God Jesus called Father, who made us, knows us, loves us.  Let’s hear it again, this time as Myles Coverdale brought it to us back in 1535:

O Lorde, thou searchest me out, and knowest me.

Thou knowest my downe syttinge & my vprisynge, thou vnderstodest my thoughtes a farre of.

Thou art aboute my path & aboute my bedd, & spyest out all my wayes.

For lo, there is not a worde i my toge, but thou (o LORDE) knowest it alltogether.

Thou hast fashioned me behinde & before, & layed thine hode vpon me.

Soch knowlege is to wonderfull & excellet for me, I can not atteyne vnto it.

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] The translation of Psalm 139 used in this series is The Grail Psalter, the inclusive language version of 2004 (HarperCollins).  It was originally made for the Jerusalem Bible of 1955.

[2] Fr Laurence Freeman writes (Aspects of Love): And most of us come to meditation with strong forces of self-hatred, self-distrust, self-rejection. Most of us, particularly in our religious upbringing, had been told that we must be very suspicious of ourselves when we were taught to examine our conscience, even as young children. When we were taught to go to confession, our first prejudice, the prejudice with which we were trained, was that we must first look for our faults because those are the aspects of ourselves that God is most aware of, and those are the aspects of ourselves which we must be frightened of because we will be punished for them.  (I think he may slightly overstate “most of us”.)

 [3] The Psalmist comes back to this thought later, when we hear about being formed in the womb.

Coming and going – 12 February 2021

 

The Lord will watch your going out and your coming in… (Psalm 121:8)

Do you sometimes have guests who don’t know how to leave?  They say, “Well, we really should be on our way…”  They say, “Good heavens, look at the time!”  They may even stand up.  But they don’t go.  They linger.  They talk.  In the worst case scenario they sit down again…  When you do get them outside, they hang around the car and chatter.  In the days of Jane Austen there was the aunt or cousin who came for a week and stayed for a month.  My point is that knowing when and how to leave, simply and without fuss, is a virtue.

Arriving also is something to consider.  I am thinking of the person who comes in the door and yells up the stairs, “It’s me…!”  Rather like Bertie Wooster who would not marry Madeline Bassett (or was it Honoria Glossop?) because she would come up behind him at the breakfast table, put her hands over his eyes and say, “Guess who…?”  I imagine we can all think of the person who invariably enters a room talking loudly, making an entrance, coming at you like a blitzkrieg.   Whatever is already happening in the room, it may all be summarily interrupted.

Esther de Waal, years ago, moved into the ancient mansion at Canterbury Cathedral where her husband had been appointed Dean.  The Deanery was where the Benedictine monks had once lived.  Esther began to cope with this place by finding out all she could about local Benedictine history and what it taught.  She became a wonderful teacher of both Benedictine and Celtic spirituality.  In later years she moved to live on the Welsh Borders, and it is there that she wrote a little book called “To Pause At the Threshold”.[1]  It is lovely study of Benedictine sensitivity, how to enter a new situation, in her case going to live on the border… to pause at the threshold, with an open heart and an open mind, a quiet heart and mind.

A threshold is a special place, a transition space from one place to another.  Any threshold is a place to pause… at any rate interiorly.  Jewish homes have a small device on their doorpost, called a mezuzah – a little cylinder usually containing some words from the Torah, the Law.  You pause and touch the mezuzah as you enter.   Another threshold is surely the transition from life to death, or from unmarried to married (these days, perhaps the reverse), child to adult…. Or the doorway of baptism.  The transition for instance to caring for a loved one disappearing into senility… someone called it the long goodbye… is a threshold to be reckoned with.  Many transitions may seem trivial, and yet… it’s as well to pause.  The hour before dawn is a threshold.  Any threshold is a place of ambiguity – there is a lot we don’t know at that moment, that kairos.  It is a place to watch and listen.  Every time of meditation, of contemplative prayer, is a threshold – we are at the edge of what we know and understand, we are waiting (one of the Psalmist’s favourite words) for whatever is to come in life, and therefore we are being still in faith and love.  As the Psalmist says:  The Lord will guard you from evil, will guard your soul.  The Lord will watch your going out and your coming in, now and for ever.

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[1] An expanded version of this theme by Esther de Waal is published as Living On The Border (2014).

I lost a lot – 5 February 2021

 

The Buddha was asked at the end of his life, ‘What did you get out of meditation?’  He said, ‘Nothing… but I lost a lot.’  In Christian understanding this is called kenosis, a biblical Greek word which means emptying.  Fr Richard Rohr says that all great spirituality is about letting go.  That is for most of us, in one way or another, perhaps in many ways, the hump to get over.  I lost a lot…  I lost my safe comfort zone, my bolt hole, my need for certainty…  It meant learning to love without possessiveness.  I found I was losing my fear of life, and of death…  I lost my need to label and categorise, to have black and white, good and bad, small and great, biblical and unbiblical, christian and unchristian…

These are major shifts in life.  They may be quite subtly done, but sometimes painfully, sometimes abruptly.  One real grace is looking back and finding that the change happened, or started, before I realised.  These are the changes from having, keeping, possessing, controlling, accumulating… to letting go, what Jesus called leaving self behind, becoming sensitive to falsity and show, including my own, reliance on appearance… shedding the need for all that.  Discovering instead what Thomas Merton called my new freedom.  It is the fruit of contemplative life and prayer.  The ego retreats, back towards where it belongs, where God intends it usefully to be.  In common idiom, we stop taking ourselves so seriously.   It is not that the ego is bad, simply that it is demoted, it is no longer determining life and decisions.

I lost a lot, said the Buddha… He means he lost the imperial “I”, the first person singular pronoun, the “I” which means me.  I lost my need always to be right, to be well thought of (although of course that is nice, and to be badly thought of is not nice), I lost my need for my opinion to prevail, my need to see anyone punished, get what I think they deserve.  I lost any vestiges in me of narcissism (a word scarcely known before the Trump era), needing to be the centre of my universe, or of the charmed circle of family or tribe, right or wrong.  I shed any lingering need to be one of the right-thinking people, because the things I really needed to know were found elsewhere, among people who had made mistakes and endured suffering and setback… among people who have found how to listen.

When the Buddha said, I lost a lot, I wonder, did he sometimes wistfully want any of that stuff back?  I hardly think so.  In our western, Kiwi way of life we may find it comes as a deep draught of free air to find and enjoy the meaningful simplicity that Jesus prescribes, to know it becoming possible in practice, and to be applying it gently and sensitively to the lives we lead and the decisions we make, and the opinions we hold, day by day.  It is, as we repeatedly say, the fruit of a gentle, sensible discipline of stillness and silence, contemplative life and prayer, and our innermost Yes to God.