Advent I – Waiting – 26 November 2021

 

In these cliché-ridden times, one of the most frequently heard is, I can’t wait…  I can’t wait to go on holiday… I can't wait to get a haircut...  but you may have no alternative.  Waiting, I think of as the first theme of Advent, and it matters that we know how to wait.  Remember the Stanford marshmallow test…  Put a marshmallow in front of a child, tell the child he/she can have a second one if he/she can go 15 minutes without eating the first one, and then leave the room for 15 minutes.  Contemplative people can learn waiting quite well without marshmallows because we see the point.  The point is, while waiting may inconvenience me, and probably will, and may not improve me as a person to know, it is also probably not about me.  It is about other needier patients; or it’s about people doing their best in trying conditions...  or inadequate management…  or simply too much needing to be done.  In recent times we have had dramatic displays of people unable to wait for restrictions to end, becoming angry, risking mental health, defying the law, listening to lies…

But why is waiting such an Advent theme? …simply that waiting is salutary, it is not yet having, it is decidedly not instant gratification, it is the state of not possessing or controlling… waiting is always “not yet”… it may be “if ever”.  So, waiting puts our ego in check.  It is the appropriate attitude to God.  I waited patiently for the Lord, sings the Psalmist; he inclined to me and heard my cry.  I wait for the Lord, my soul waits / and in his word I hope; / my soul waits for the Lord / more than those who watch for the morning…  I am weary with my crying / my throat is parched. / My eyes grow dim / with waiting for my God… Be still before the Lord / wait patiently for him…[1]  The Psalms are full of waiting.  If you can’t wait, you can’t pray much because you are busy fretting, or grizzling or being upset about time passing uselessly by.  So it is that the first thing contemplatives want to do is set time aside.  We appropriate time from our busy schedule.  We designate it for waiting, specifically not for getting something done.  We choose to be present, as untrammelled as possible; we choose to pay attention; we choose the present moment… each successive present moment, as we are still and as time moves on by. 

Paul informs the believers in Rome, If we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.[2]  “What we do not see…”  Now faith, says the writer to the Hebrews, is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.[3]  We wait because, mercifully, at the end of the day (cliché-time again), we are not going to bring in the reign of God.[4]    For all our good works – and they are many and admirable… and indeed we had better achieve the necessary climate changes – we do not bring in the kingdom.  God’s Advent arrives quietly, despite us, and God’s rule comes into waiting and watching hearts and minds.

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[1] Psalm 40:1; 130:5; 69:3; 37:7

[2] Romans 8:25

[3] Hebrews 11:1

[4] I recall, from back in the days when we had grand church parades, a parade of some earnest men’s organisation; they insisted on singing what they called their official hymn: Rise up, O men of God! / Have done with lesser things. / Give heart and soul and mind and strength / to serve the King of Kings.  We could have (but didn’t) substitute a verse on their hymn-sheet:  Sit down, O men of God! / His kingdom he will bring / whenever it may please his will / you cannot do a thing.

Birthpangs – 19 November 2021

 

When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?”  Then Jesus began to say to them, “Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.  For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines.  This is but the beginning of the birthpangs.” (Mark 13:3-8)

… part of the Gospel for  last Sunday… I didn’t want to pass it by.  We hear about the beginning of the birthpangs… the onset of labour.[1]  Jesus mentions wars, earthquakes, famines… we of course can add pandemics, climate crises, corruption in high places…  Then we could ask, if these are birthpangs, what is being born?  W B Yeats, in 1919, his pregnant wife critically ill from the influenza pandemic, the world groping back to its feet after the First World War, his beloved Ireland falling into rebellion and civil war… and Yeats famously wrote:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

the ceremony of innocence is drowned;

the best lack all conviction, while the worst

are full of passionate intensity…

The darkness drops again; but now I know

that twenty centuries of stony sleep

were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

and what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

What rough beast…?  I think Yeats rejected faith and Irish Christianity because he found it too often not much like Jesus.  In our day, faith in God is widely dismissed as incomprehensible.  Human encounter lies wide open to some rough beast.  And indeed… so much of what occupies or entertains people now, seems to be about monsters, catastrophes, super-beings, aliens… as though reality, the gift of creation, simply discovering the day and its essence, spending time seeing beauty or meaning, making connections, doing some task well… as though all of that is simply unconscionable, too tedious altogether.

Grown-up faith, approaching Advent, sees the familiar roads start to peter out.  We move into vision and apocalypse.  Ahead, it becomes a contemplative trail.  Now we need the poets and the prophets... and the language of silence and waiting... and steadiness.  It is here that we pause… we start to watch hopefully for the dawn.  To pause at the threshold is always a sensitive and respectful thing to do.  And we can see, there is no rough beast slouching to Bethlehem, unless it’s us.  We learn clearly here, from Jesus, that earthquakes and viruses are not apocalypse.  God’s newness is seen to the eye of the heart… a baby is born, someone unforgivable is forgiven, love and mercy prevail over judgement and pharisaism, someone discovers how to change their mind, people find peace and meaning, and a way of faith.  Isaiah is the prophet who speaks for Advent:  In returning and rest you will be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.[2]

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[1] Mark’s Greek word is ōdin (ὠδίν), severe labour pain. In the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures it is used graphically in Psalm 18:4… the torrents of perdition assailed me.

[2] Isaiah 30:15

Tower and temple – 12 November 2021

 

As Jesus came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” (Mark 13:1-2)[1]

Herod the Great[2] had hugely expanded the Jerusalem Temple to create, it is thought, some 35 acres of sacred space.  Jesus’s disciples are amazed at its magnificence.  Jesus comments: Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.  The army of Titus demolished it all in 70 AD.  To this day it has never been restored. 

Now… to avoid overstatement… it was not the first time Jerusalem had been raped and pillaged, and not the last, and it is always hideous.  Such things are happening today… whether by violence or by what the hymn Abide With Me calls change and decay… much that was familiar and valued collapses and isn’t there any more… the church life we knew and the practices of faith, what we feel is ordered society, politics and morality, decency, we have the perils and panic of pandemic and mounting levels of anxiety and risk, cruelty to children, dreadful distortions of religion.  What with care and toil he buildeth / tower and temple, fall to dust.^[3]

But neither is it apocalyptic.  We do these things – God doesn’t.  God is not punishing the world.  Not the God in such loving bond with Jesus that Paul can say Jesus is the icon of the invisible God.  Paranoia about God and human events derives directly from fear and ignorance... on which so many people seem wilfully to thrive.  Our need is for a fresh understanding and practice of faith in Christ, which is not a bolt-hole but appropriate to the kairos, to the times we are actually in, the changes and the threats.

That faith, many of us have come to see, has to be contemplative… a word which already is having to be rescued from people wanting to distort and exploit it.  If there is one thing contemplative life and prayer utterly depend on, it is seeing the ego, the Me, assume the place where ego belongs, which is not in the illusion of control.  For Jesus’s disciple it is what he called leaving self behind, seeing the true self emerge, by grace, the self God always saw and knew and loved.   Contemplative faith rediscovers freedom, which is service to Christ.  It attacks the roots of fear, fear of life and of death. 

Mature faith cannot be in denial about change, or be always trying to restore what has served its purpose and is gone.  Faith always makes room for newness… as in the ringing words of Isaiah: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.  I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?  I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert…[4]  “I will make a way”… and soon, in Advent, we will hear just that:  In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.[5]

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[1] “What large…!” ποταπός (potapos) in the Greek.  The English translation is anaemic – the disciple is amazed – it’s not their size only but their magnificence.

[2] Herod the Great, ruled Judaea 37-4 BC.  He was succeeded by his son Herod Antipas, who ruled at the time of Jesus, 4 BC – 39 AD.

[3] Hymn: All My Hope On God Is Founded (originally German by Joachim Neander).

[4] Isaiah 43:18-20

[5] Isaiah 40:3

Rumpole Pillars – 5 November 2021

 

A couple of years ago I copied a quotation from John Mortimer’s Horace Rumpole stories, thinking I might look at it again some time… Rumpole is addressing the judge in the Old Bailey and informs him: When my country is no more, and even the Old Bailey will have sunk back into the mud of the Thames, we will be remembered for three things – the English breakfast, the Oxford Book of English Verse, and the presumption of innocence.

Now, I wouldn’t normally go to Horace Rumpole for informed spiritual wisdom, but here he hits (inadvertently, it may be) upon three features among numerous other features of a healthy, grown-up spirituality.  What will remain in memory, says Rumpole, is first, the English breakfast.  (Bear with me here… I think it comes out alright in the end…) You may have had a true English breakfast.  It is the full version of what Jack Duckworth called a fry-up, somewhat frowned on in my home.  You would have had a pork sausage, maybe two, fried eggs, slices of bacon, baked beans, black pudding, hash browns, mushrooms, grilled tomatoes and toast... even, I would personally hope, devilled kidneys.  It is excessive, of course… once a year is probably enough.  But it serves to remind me that a lively spirituality does includes a grateful, if not always sensible exuberance about food.  We give thanks for our food.  Every meal that sustains us would be a gift rare for many in this world.   Food is quite basic, and Jesus made it sacramental.  Rowan Williams tells a lovely story from the Desert, in which a brother sees a vision of two boats on the river.  In one of them sits Abba Arsenius and the Holy Spirit of God… in complete silence.  In the other boat is Abba Moses, with the angels of God – and they are all eating honey cakes, with merriment.^[1]  In one of his poems Thomas Merton says to a Severe Nun: I know, Sister… you have chosen / a path too steep for others to follow. / I take it you prefer to go without them…^[2]  I am not much of an ascetic, I’m afraid.

Then, said Rumpole, the British people will be remembered for The Oxford Book of English Verse…  He often quotes from this, as a dreamy response to She Who Must Be Obeyed.  It is good to have a copy at home – it is a lovely antidote to our dreadful misuse, abuse of words and atrocious plundering of language.  God’s Word speaks simplicity and love… He spake and it was done, says Psalm 33.  Truth, Beauty and economy of words go together – Benedict devotes a chapter of the Rule of St Benedict to Restraint of Speech.  God is in heaven, you upon earth – therefore let your words be few, says Ecclesiastes.^[3]

And thirdly, says Rumpole, the presumption of innocence.  No one may be convicted of any crime so long as there remains reasonable doubt as to his/her guilt… otherwise we are presumed innocent… something our media need constantly to be reminded of.  It is, says Rumpole, the Golden Thread in our common law.  But it reflects the insistence that pushes its way through all biblical truth since earliest times, that God will always veer towards mercy, pardon, restoration… towards the poor, the disadvantaged, the widow, the orphan and the stranger.  I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God – turn, then, and live!^[4]

Thank you, Rumpole… crusty old reprobate.  I think you have the Dalai Lama’s accolade, a Good Heart.

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[1] Rowan Williams: Silence and Honeycakes (Lion Publishing 2003), p.42.

[2] Thomas Merton: Selected Poems (New Directions 1967), p.95.

[3] Ecclesiastes 5:2

[4] Ezekiel 18:32.  See also Jonah, ch.4.