Poor in spirit – 25 June 2021

 

The words poor and poverty, quite often used in our teaching, may be a little bothersome.  If you read Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says,  Blessed are the poor in spirit… But in Luke’s version he says Blessed are the poor.[1] Poor usually denotes people in real hardship to afford the basics of life…[2] not us, normally.  And let’s not be in too much of a hurry to say that Jesus really meant poor in spirit… in other words, humble…  He said poor… and poor is what he meant.  If you are economically poor, you probably tend also to be poor in spirit.  If we are rich, according to Jesus, it’s better if we are also poor in spirit.  This gets reflected in Christian Meditation…. as Fr Laurence Freeman expresses it:  so, when you pray, lay aside your thoughts, including your good thoughts, or good insights, or bright ideas, or pleasing ideas that you have, you lay aside your thoughts. This will give you an immediate taste of what poverty of spirit means.  And laying aside your thoughts means we're not thinking about God at the time of meditation, we're not speaking to God, we're not asking God for things.  But we are being with the Divine in that inner room.[3]  Years ago, staying at the monastery in Montreal where WCCM began, another guest at the time was a Benedictine nun from the Pecos monastery in New Mexico.  She told me it had just dawned on her how, in prayer, the mantra is actually all we have.  We are poor on arrival.  Our gifts and achievements, all our urgent needs and our guilts, our lovely words, real as they may be, are beside the point right now.  We set them aside, surplus to requirements, so as to be simply present, having come to a halt right now, and with empty hands.

I hope I am clarifying a little what we mean by poor and poverty, in prayer – and I hope that it is in accord with what Jesus taught: …when you pray, go into your room and shut the door… when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think they will be heard for their many words.  Do not be like them… your Father knows what you need…[4]  Prayer, as Jesus saw it, is clearly best when economical with words, or thoughts, or spiritual fuss.  It is a matter of choosing to be still and simple  And it is a lovely paradox of spiritual practice that sometimes we do this together, not alone – yet still in unadorned simplicity.

You cannot pray if you are clutching social status, or being better than others, or maintaining conflict with anyone.  Jesus said that’s what the hypocrites do.  Do not be like them, he emphasised.  First be reconciled, says Jesus.[5] In prayer, silence and stillness are always appropriate, waiting is necessary, attention has priority… whoever we are.  It is what Brother Lawrence called the Practice of the Presence of God, and it is never a smart idea to arrive with a personal agenda, a shopping list, or to imagine God is in the hurry we are.

But perhaps what we come to eventually, grown-up as it were, is expressed by C S Lewis:  I pray because I can't help myself.  I pray because I'm helpless.  I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping.  It doesn't change God.  It changes me.

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[1] Matthew 5:3; cf Luke 6:20.  Luke literally has blessed are the poor.  Translators who give us blessed are you who are poor are assuming that not all of Jesus’s followers were poor.

[2] eg. Mr Micawber: Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.” (Dickens, David Copperfield)

[3] Laurence Freeman OSB: Sources of Wisdom.

[4] Matthew 6:6-8

[5] Matthew 6:5. See also 6:2, 16. Matthew 5:24

Ecce, quam bonum – 18 June 2021

 

How very good and pleasant it is,
when kindred live together in unity!

It is like the precious oil on the head
running down upon the beard,

on the beard of Aaron,
running down over the collar of his robes.

It is like the dew of Hermon
which falls on the parched hills.

For there the Lord ordained his blessing:

life for evermore. (Psalm 133)

This lovely little Psalm is part of the lectionary for next Sunday.  It is one of several “Psalms of Ascents”… meaning to be sung by pilgrims as they ascended the hill of Zion, to the Jerusalem temple.  It conveys, as one Jewish scholar puts it, a sense of quiet rapture,[1] a vision of peaceful life together in a fruitful land… a basic vision, I would think, of New Zealanders. 

In the temple worship they made much use of aromatic olive oil… as also in their homes.  It fuelled the lamps, it soothed injuries; oil signified respect and honour, well-being and blessing.  The oil, says Robert Alter, was one of the palpable physical pleasures of the good life.  Now this worshipper, the Psalmist, has a sense of overwhelming rightness, as there in the temple he watches the anointing of the High Priest, Aaron.  Obviously the oil was not rationed – it flowed down over Aaron’s head, down his beard, down to his robes.  Robert Alter comments that the High Priest’s beard was evidently of proverbial amplitude.  The Psalmist sees the oil as like the dew of Mount Hermon, falling on the parched farm land, restoring fruitfulness after the dry season.  He uses the same Hebrew verb[2], meaning to flow down upon, three times in two sentences… the blessing runs down on Aaron’s head, it runs down his beard, and the dew or rain on Hermon runs down on the dry land. 

Of course this piece of poetry has inspired Jews and Christians through the centuries, because of its first lines: How very good and pleasant it is,
when kindred live together in unity!  The Hebrew actually says brethren… those Jews couldn’t imagine women or foreigners going up into the temple.  But we can.  We can read it as an ideal for the whole human family, indeed, the whole created order, in unity and peace, lifting up their hearts in gratitude.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the maelstrom of the late 1930s, wrote his Rule for students living in seminary at Finkenwalde, studying ministry and the way of Christ while under the horrors of the Nazi regime.  Their Rule is entitled Gemeinsames Leben – Life Together – and its opening lines are exactly those words from Psalm 133…  It is also what we are doing in our time and place… practising peace and unity in a world perilously choosing otherwise; we are preferring Christ, as Benedict put it[3]; responding in heart and life to his way, his Rule, and his empowerment… in peace, together.  

(Read the Psalm again…)

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[1] Robert Alter: The Book of Psalms, Translation and Commentary (Norton 2007)

[2] yarad (יָרַד), to pour down upon.

[3] Rule of St Benedict 72:11.  See also RB 4:21.

Paying attention - 11 June 2021

 

Father Laurence Freeman in Sources of Wisdom quotes William James, psychologist and philosopher, who said, ‘Reality is where you place your attention.’  Attention matters, writes Fr Laurence.   The loss of our capacity to pay attention  (our distracted culture, the fact that we spend an average of three or four hours on our mobile devices every day, young people are spending at a very vulnerable age, hours, hours and hours on their social media) this is a fragmentation of our fundamental capacity which is attention: to be able to listen, to be able to observe, to be able to engage, to feel empathy, to see the wonder of the world in which we live and the relationships in which we are connected.  Attention is the essence of prayer.

I think it is what Jesus called being awake.  Not being asleep, as it were.  I am particularly struck by William James’ statement, Reality is where you place your attention.  It reminds me of the old conundrum in Stage 1 Philosophy… Is there any sound on a desert island if there is nothing there to hear it?  There is no one paying attention.  Is there any sermon if no one’s actually listening?  If I am sitting there but my thoughts are on what I’m doing this afternoon, or what I said to someone, or in Jesus’ words, what will I eat, what will I drink, what will I wear?... then that, according to William James, is my reality.  Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also, said Jesus[1].  If my life is devoted mainly to myself, or to my whanau or tribe or sport… perhaps to my panicky fear that I might be bored, needing always to be entertained… then that is my reality.  I am attending to myself, to what I need or enjoy.  At a funeral I attended, a friend of the deceased got up and said in effect and at length… we did all these dubious things, but we had a ball.  Their reality was themselves… a sad, fragile, pointless reality.  “Me time”, it’s come to be called.

Attention, says Fr Laurence, is the essence of prayer... and reality is where we place our attention.  It is the point of the mantra.  We constantly slide off into thoughts about all manner of things… of course we do, we have fertile minds, well-stocked brains, and plenty of thoughts…  The best teaching I know says that it’s the return that matters, the unflustered, inner decision, without guilt or exasperation or rancour, simply to go back to the mantra.  This return says two things:  Firstly, as St Paul put it, we don’t know how to pray as we ought… and whatever is the “right” way, we are finding out that it is not via our agenda or our thoughts or our interests or our fears or our emotions; and secondly, that prayer is the Spirit praying in us, as we are still and silent, waiting, and gently but definitely paying attention.  As Paul puts it in the astonishing chapter 8 of Romans:  The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words[2].  And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit…[3]

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[1] Matthew 6:31; 21

[2] στεναγμοῖς ἀλαλήτοις – “with sighs not able to be spoken”. 

[3] Romans 8:26-27

Slight momentary affliction – 4 June 2021

 

So we do not lose heart.  Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.  For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. (II Corinthians 4:16-18)

Years ago the Presbyterian church engaged an insurance company to manage its ministers’ superannuation fund – and we started to get an annual notice asking each of us to affirm again that we were still alive… it was called a Certificate of Existence, and it had to be attested by someone presumably able to distinguish being alive from being dead[1].  One year I replied in the words of St Paul, in the King James Version: …though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.  They were not amused, but I was.

Now, I have to say to St Paul that there are some conditions of ageing that he is better not to describe as “this slight momentary affliction”.  Perhaps in Paul’s day you had simply to grin and bear it, whatever it was – minimise it if you could.  That may have provided more incentive than we have now, to attend instead to what pious Presbyterians call the things of God… what Paul calls the inner man/woman.  We have it easier now in some ways, not all -- you can be blissfully asleep while they remove your leg; and if you don’t like what the normal usage of the years is doing to your skin, the situation may perhaps be relieved, these days…   I believe it is possible, if you wish and can afford it, for your remains to be carbonised and processed into a diamond… about which it is better that we are silent.  As Paul reminds us here, what can be seen is temporary, whether it is tidied up or not.  And I do understand that Paul could regard his trials in life, which were considerable, as slight compared with the coming world in which there will be no more pain.[2]

Paul says our outer nature is wasting away… as it will and should.  If our inner nature, as he calls it, is being renewed day by day, that is really good news.  Our inner nature… the faculty by which we give and receive love, our sense of God and wonder and purpose, our will to forgive and to be forgiven, our loss of fear… our sense of being at home in this place and at this time, held in love, known, named, loved unconditionally… or to know it deeply if we’re not.  Our inner nature is reached in silence and stillness, in waiting… and waiting some more… learning how to wait… and there it is renewed, day by day[3]… frequently beyond our knowing and often despite how we are feeling. 

In John’s Gospel the analogy of this is Living Water[4], picturing an inner spring, fresh and bubbling, cooling and sustaining.   Whatever the picture, the process of loss and frailty in us is balanced by the inner process of renewal.  And yes, we have to say that with some it is tragically, unaccountably overwhelmed by forms of dementia, by neurones packing up… and that remains a challenge both to science and to spiritual wisdom.  So we thank God for our wits, we practise silence and stillness, waiting and attention, and we are renewed, day by day.

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[1] Admittedly, with some ministers, that could be tricky.

[2] Romans 8:18-27; Revelation 21:4

[3] II Cor. 4:16 - ἡμέρᾳ καὶ ἡμέρᾳ.

[4] Living Water -ὕδωρ ζῶν - eg. John 4:7-15