Anxiety and fear – 27 March 2020

Our Warkworth Christian Meditation Group is not meeting at present, of course, because of the Lockdown.  The weekly talks are being sent to members by email, as well as being posted on this site one day ahead.

Anxiety comes from a Latin word meaning to choke.  And indeed there seem to be various morbid forms of anxiety characterised by unpleasant physical and other effects.  For most of us anxiety is an old friend – anyone who has ever sat exams knows it quite well… or sat with a sick child.  It worries us that we may not be able to cope.  And when anxiety is triggered, as it usually is, by something new, unexpected, menacing… like this virus… it is scarcely helped by the constant warning not to panic.  May I add that neither is it helped by people with a Christian label claiming that God is bringing this upon us and we deserve it.  I don’t know that God.


Anxiety is different from fear.  Fear is more specific and focussed.  The Greek phobos (φοβος) – which gives us phobia for instance, originally meant flight from someone or something… avoidance of what may frighten us… spiders, contradiction, failure, uncertainty, facing the future… Emmet’s fear of Hyacinth Bucket.  I think the distinctive feature of fear is that it is so debilitating.  It can dominate, even paralyse life.  People default then to self-protection, making walls and divisions, categorising and indulging in paranoia, suspicion or hatred.  The opposite of fear is love – Love casts out fear, writes John[1].  Why are you afraid, Jesus constantly asks[2].


If you consult the web on these topics of anxiety and fear – which, I can assure you, is something you should try only if you are self-isolating for six months – you will find multiple theories and remedies, and all manner of experts.  Now, contemplative people generally don’t like risking the impression that we are better, or have magic solutions.  We are not and we don’t.  However, it is unmistakeable, I think, that people with a discipline of stillness, who practise meditation, seem to be laying aside fear.  We can still be anxious, of course, and we are at present.  In terms of Christian Meditation, we are at least in the process of keeping the ego -- which is always frightened for itself -- where it belongs, which is not usurping the place of God.  We are coming to terms with mortality, our mortality.  We are growing up in faith, and we do not imagine that we live in some charmed circle of believers who are safe.  I was impressed by the quote from the Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, which someone posted on the web:  You can’t calm the storm, so stop trying.  What you can do is calm yourself.  The storm will pass.


We calm ourselves in stillness and silence, leaving our issues to one side for now, and being fully present to God who is fully present to us, in the Risen Christ, and in the wind of the Spirit of Christ.  It changes us.  Jesus calmed the storm on the lake, in the meaningful gospel story, and then mischievously asked the disciples, Why were you frightened?  He is the bringer of peace, shalom, to our hearts, and from there to our surroundings.

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[1] I John 4:18

[2] eg. Matthew 14:27; 17:7; 28:10…etc.

The virus of perfectionism – 13 March 2020

I know someone who is a perfectionist.  It means in practice that every task seems to take twice as long, and then at the unveiling it’s never quite right, although it looks fine to me.  A beautiful stairway, which entailed much mathematics, is nevertheless half a centimetre out.  But it’s his way and it comforts him to seek perfection.  In the realm of spirituality, on the other hand… including the practice of contemplative prayer… perfectionism is not a smart idea… not least because perfection is unattainable and we have difficulty knowing what it is anyway, it’s usually unnecessary, and expecting it is to squander spiritual energy.  So Fr Laurence Freeman writes about the virus of perfectionism… meditators for instance worrying about whether they’re doing it right.  We need only to point out the obvious, the central problem with perfectionism, that it’s the ego speaking.. “I want to do it right”.   Seeking perfection is likely to be about me, what I expect, what I hope other people see, but also (with some) what I assume God demands of us – Be perfect, Jesus is reported as saying in the Sermon on the Mount[1].  So people make a virtue out of correctness.   Of course there are many situations in which accuracy is essential, and it is proper to pursue it, improper not to.  But, as wisdom seems to find, this may be best done by people who know in advance their own flaws and fallibility.


One confessed perfectionist is Fr Richard Rohr… who is a Number One on the Enneagram.   Fr Richard writes, inter alia:  The search for perfection is the specific temptation of Ones, and it rules their lives.  Ones are always frustrated because life and people are not what they should be.  Ones are conscious of duty and responsibility… there’s always something or other that could be improved.  Above all, Ones are disappointed by their own imperfection. 


Prayer however is reborn in us when we see how we come to prayer never as experts, always frail and fallible, empty-handed, never in talent or accomplishment, or status.  Meditators know therefore that this is a time, brief enough heaven knows, in which, with great relief and our fears set aside, we can be deeply truthful and fully present.    


And so there is the gift of stillness and silence.  We have stopped talking, and stopped rushing around.  We have stopped measuring, calculating, estimating, predicting.  So far as we can, we have stopped asking, imagining, remembering, regretting, planning, visualising… so far as we can, which as we well know is often not very far… we return to the bare simplicity of the mantra, repeating, waiting, resting, listening, having no other agenda.  We have mercifully laid aside perfectionism, as inappropriate, surplus to requirements.  God sees our hearts, and the love and the yearning there.   I don’t have to be perfect, I have to be present.  I don’t have to dress up or pretend or impress God in any way, as though there’s something good about me God didn’t notice before.  I track down the Yes which is found waiting at my deepest levels, and that in its simplicity is my prayer.

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[1] Matthew 5:48.  τελειος (teleios) means fit for purpose, not totally unflawed.

Darkness and Light…4 – 6 March 2020

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in God there is no darkness at all. (I John 1:5)


This is the message we have heard from him… that is to say, from Jesus.  John is recalling his church, perhaps at Ephesus, to first principles, to the basics.  Lay aside what you may have learned in earlier impressionable times about God – these things are not sacrosanct -- or what you may have derived from the ways people talk.  In grown-up faith and practice we are humble and teachable about faith, and we are open to change, the more so as the years go by.  We are learning to discern truth, which may be very different from “what we always believed”, or “what I always thought”...  It is Jesus, the teacher within, (St Paul calls him the icon of the invisible God)[1] who says, God is light, and in God there is no darkness at all.  

It is Jesus who teaches and shows what the Jewish scriptures at their best were always straining to say, that God is the author of love and mercy, creativity and invention, today and tomorrow, oldness and newness, repentance and forgiveness, healing and restoration, truth and justice…   God is not the author or promotor of fear and hatred, suspicion and superstition, division and prejudice, power and superiority or violence against others or against the environment… God does not punish; God does not take our side against others.  So there is much popular “faith”, so called, which belongs more properly to the realm of darkness.  God is light and in God there is no darkness at all.


And here, it may be, is the resolution of our dilemma… simply that we are not living in heaven where all is light.  The seer in the Book of Revelation sings about the heavenly Jerusalem:  And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light…[2]  But we are living here.  Darkness remains a familiar friend...  or at any rate, the twilights of doubt, compromise, impasse, to say nothing of loss and sorrow.  We do need… and we continue to need… to know how to see in the dark we encounter.  This night vision is called discernment, even if sometimes in our lives it may seem slighter than lighting a candle.  The signs of discernment may well start with something as prosaic as our refusal to be drawn into the politics of strife, or power, or the familiar manifestations of confusion, prejudice, hate and fear.  We find we are preferring the light.  In Benedict’s luminous phrase, we prefer nothing whatever to Christ.[3]


So there are two imperatives for grown-up faith.  One is that we learn how to see in the dark, how to be still and listen, how (in the biblical phrase) to let our words be few, how to see what we may miss in our busyness and noise, how to discern, and perhaps even at times to be wise.  The other is always remembering, learning, loving and following the way of Jesus, whom to follow is not to walk in darkness… the Risen Jesus, “sight unseen”, whom his earliest followers understood would be with them to the end of the world.

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[1] Colossians 1:15… “Image” in Greek is eikōn (εוκων)

[2] Revelation 22:5

[3] Rule of St Benedict, 72:11 – Christo omnino nihil praeponant

Darkness and Light…3 – 28 February 2020

If the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness! (Matthew 6:23)


How can the light that is in me be darkness?  I think this is difficult to talk about because we are so defensive.  Our choices in life are what they are.  Sometimes we made decisions, took choices which are now at least problematic… but mostly it just happened, we played the cards we were dealt… we grew up in a family or tribal environment which was imperfect, violent or simply ignorant… or the circumstances of adult life forced choices on us which we couldn’t help…  But at any rate it is not helpful to me if you point out that things should be otherwise, or if you criticise what I do.  I don’t know that it’s darkness, the way I’m living – I hope not -- but it is often very gloomy, and I do the best I can.  Anyway, you’re not so perfect…!  Have you had that conversation?


Well Jesus felt free to be stridently critical of some people’s choices.  The scribes and the pharisees lived for the sacred law, irrespective of its effects on ordinary folk… whited sepulchres, Jesus called them.  The priest and the levite who walked past the injured man on the road to Jericho evidently lived for moral and ritual purity, and also considered a Samaritan, a foreigner, not worth their bother.  Jesus immortalised their choices in a memorable story.  The man who built bigger barns to store his wealth was living for that because, as he said, he could now take his ease, eat drink and be merry.  That was his dream… you’ve got to have a dream.  The men who thought it proper to stone an alleged adulteress to death inhabited some essential male cult of power and control… numerous men still do.  In our day it has become trendy in some circles to live “Me-Time”, so the self, the ego, comes to have dominance and priority.  For many, hedonism in all its forms seems the obvious way of life – what else is there?  Looking for happiness… but in the wrong places, says Thomas Keating.  Religion too, it must be said, no less in our day can be pretty dark… darker to the extent that it misrepresents the way of Jesus, and relies on ignorance, superstition, credulity and greed.
  

St Paul taught the way of Christ as a bringing of light in our dark places:  It is the God who said “Let light shine out of darkness” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (II Cor 4:6).  The light shines in the darkness, writes John, and the darkness has not overcome it (Jn 1:5).   John Henry Newman wrote of the kindly light by which he now lives – I was not ever thus, he added… I loved the garish day… pride ruled my will…   I woke, the dungeon flamed with light, sang Charles Wesley.  Once you were in darkness, writes Paul to the Ephesians, but now in the Lord you are light.  Live as children of light… the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true…  Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them…  Therefore it is said (and here he quotes from some early Christian hymn): “Sleeper, awake!  Rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light”.
  

The contemplative experience is that, in the disciplines of silence and stillness, in our readiness to set self aside, and in our hospitality to the Spirit of the Risen Lord, we begin to see things in the light of Christ, we come to know at the level of our deepest and best self, and we find the freedom to respond in love.

Darkness and Light…2 – 21 February 2020

And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light…  Those who do what is true come to the light…  (John 3:19-21)


God is light and in him there is no darkness at all…  Whoever says “I am in the light”, while hating a brother or sister, is still in the darkness… walks in the dark, and does not know the way to go, because the darkness has brought on blindness.  (I John 1:5; 2:9-10)


So, somewhat in contrast to what we were saying last week, as far as biblical John is concerned, darkness does not have a lot going for it, in fact it is to be avoided, it is to be departed from.  He says you will get lost, the dark will make you blind.  For the moment let’s just accept that in both Jewish and Christian scriptures, each speaks with two voices on the theme of light and darkness.  Here, darkness is not what we want at all.  God is light.  Jesus is the light of the world – whoever follows him will not walk in darkness.  He says his followers are a light set on a hill, presumably in the surrounding dark.


Well, John was writing after one, more likely two generations of experience of church life.  Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and Romans and numerous other cultures and nationalities, with their differing customs and folkways and assumptions, had been responding to the message of Christ, becoming followers… and then trying, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s 20^th century words, Gemeinsames Leben… Life Together, in community, in communion.   This was not only a matter of living in peace together in the Christian community – it was also relating in peace and love to people, good and bad, beyond the Christian community, often hostile to it… as Jesus taught.   

John makes some startling statements.  He says people love darkness rather than light.  Darkness is more comfortable because it can hide things, it offers denial, deceit and evasion… concealment of the truth.  John almost equates light and truth – those who do what is true come to the light.  Because they seek what is true they have no fear of the light.  Notice also that he says simply what is true… not what may be prescribed in religion, not what we think the Bible says.  If it is true, then it is true whether it’s in the Bible or not, whether I feel it or agree with it, or not.  To reject what is true, to ignore it, to distort it, is indeed in John’s view to be in the dark…  Well, how do I know what is true?  That is the point of faith… I am seeking to live truly in the light I can see, so far as it lies with me, seeking the light I can’t see yet or perhaps only glimpse.  I am at any rate on the side of truth... and that at times is costly.  


John gives us one important practical hint:  Whoever says “I am in the light”, while hating a brother or sister, is still in the dark… walks in the dark, and does not know the way to go, because the dark has brought on blindness.  Two things here…  Hatred, which as we know is generally the child of fear, is a major sign of darkness.  And the second is that blindness is its fruit.  There are people for whom hatred has become a way of life – or it may be their chronic woundedness, victimhood, reliving memories and injustices -- and they become blinded by the dark they have chosen… and by their fear and anxiety.  John says that we learn love, and therefore living in the light, from the indwelling Christ, the Teacher within.  He invites us to the way of Jesus… and to the gentle disciplines of letting-go, of living in the present, and of having a heart of love and gratitude. 

Darkness and Light…1 – 14 February 2020

Darkness is as light to you. (Psalm 139:12)


In the Christian scriptures we find two distinct ways of looking at darkness and light.  One of them is what we might expect… that darkness is the realm of menace, perhaps even evil.  So, this strand says it is important to come out of the dark into the light.  The other strand teaches that darkness is not our enemy.  In grown-up spiritual understanding we learn to be ready to live with darkness, with setbacks, tragedies, contradictions, dilemmas, hypocrisies… and this requires from us both humility and patience, perspective and wisdom.  You will find some of that teaching in the Book of Job for instance, and in the Psalms and Wisdom writings.  Today I want to look at that second strand… darkness is not an adversary, it is not in itself evil.  Dangerous perhaps…. and there are dangers also in the daylight.  Darkness, sang Simon and Garfunkel, is an old friend.  We are familiar with dark places and dark times in our lives, as with old acquaintances, along with blocked sinuses or the troublesome neighbour.  Or the family’s or the church’s perennial pain in the neck.
  

We emerged moreover from darkness.  It had been our habitat.  We preferred it, initially -- it was the sudden light that was the problem, and breathing air.  We had to learn smartly to cope with light and noise and people.  (Some of us still have problems with that…)   So that seems to be the first point, that we have an earlier and deeper affinity with the dark and, by a slight leap of sense, with the dark times in life.  There is no immediate need to avoid the dark, to run away.  Our modern culture has many ways you can try to evade the dark, but it may be a bad decision.  The darkness and the light in God’s creation are mutually dependent.  Both are present in life and are meant to be.  In the Hebrew creation mythology, the darkness is there and God is there:  Darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.  Eventually God says, Let there be light.[1]  And what God saw was good was the interplay of light and darkness.


And so the Psalmist can say, Darkness is as light to you.  God did not create the black evil of Auschwitz – humans did that in defiance of God, some of them worshipping Christians.  In the amazing Psalm 88, not a popular one, the psalmist is sunk in darkness.  By day I cried out – by night, in your presence…  His pain and sorrow are real, but so, whether in darkness or in light, is God’s presence real.  Robert Alter is a Jewish scholar steeped in the rabbinic traditions, and I have his wonderful translation of the Psalms.  If you read this Psalm in most English translations, it ends: You have caused friend and neighbour to shun me; my companions are in darkness.  Not so, says Robert Alter – and as a minor Hebraist I agree -- that final Hebrew verse says: You distanced lover and neighbour from me.  My friend (now) is darkness.  Darkness, where God waits, is the friend remaining.  Later writers have called this friend the cloud of unknowing.  St John of the Crosss called it the Dark Night.  Paul, Augustine, Luther and countless others call it living by faith rather than by sight and certainty.  It is the darkness of the inner room in our prayer when the door is shut, and we are silent and imageless, yet in wonder, love and expectation.  To live by faith as Jesus taught is to find your way in the dark. Learning how to wait.  Finding fear starting to melt away.  Learning to love God amid questions, contrary voices, mystery, and in our times, relentless secularism, materialism, consumerism, hedonism. (Next week, the other biblical metaphor of darkness…)

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[1] Genesis 1:2-3

Finding silence – 7 February 2020

Preach the Gospel at all times, and – when necessary – use words. (St Francis)


The gospel records make it clear that there were times when Jesus had to be away on his own.  He drew strength from solitude and silence.  And one of our major challenges in this 21^st century, in the secular culture in which God has placed us, and in what’s left of a bothered, noisy chattering church, is not only to find better ways of being a disciple, of loving God and the world – but of finding words to describe this, at any rate to ourselves.  The church scarcely has vocabulary, or ordered mind, for expressing what we have to teach now – or else, the words it has are large and technical.  In this task one of the helpers is Richard Rohr, American Franciscan friar.  He reminds us that the silence is already within.  We don’t so much learn to be still and silent, as that we find it there already, in stillness and silence, at levels beyond all our worthy noise and activism.  We locate the quiet space, the inner room, where now we can learn to hear and see.  It is another way of knowing… it can be communicated with economy of words.


The Latin contemplatio doesn’t mean thinking, working it out, it means seeing what is there.  Our prayer, what Jesus called the inner room, is where we begin to see… as we are setting to one side, for now, as we can, all our usual stuff, thought and imaging and imagining, remembering, re-living, planning.  Richard Rohr says this is a form of knowing beyond reacting – emotion is set to one side.  For most of us that is quite a change – in our 21^st century culture emotion, “how do you feel…?” is paramount information… TVNZ regards feelings as news.  But we set aside, for now, our thinking, working things out.  In Richard Rohr’s own words: 


The soul does not use words. It surrounds words with space, and that is what I mean by silence. Silence is a kind of wholeness. It can absorb contraries, paradoxes, and contradictions. Maybe that is why we do not like silence. There is nothing to argue about in true inner silence, and the mind likes to argue. It gives us something to do. The ego loves something it can take sides on. Yet true interior silence does not allow you to take sides. That is one reason contemplation is so liberating and calming. There are no sides to take and only a wholeness to rest in—which frees us to act on behalf of love.[1]


I know very well how strange that can sound.  We are programmed to do things, to react with how we feel or what we think, or what happened to us.  We do it incessantly.  Our reaction to dire things happening in the world is to feel helpless, or at any rate, if we can, we do something.  And God bless all those who do achieve things, and all who try.  Jesus invites us first to listen and to see… to be wise.  Wisdom (σοφια) in Jesus’s understanding came from stillness, silence, solitude, attention to God.  So Mary of Bethany had chosen the better way, he said.  In the house of Simon the Pharisee, when the distraught woman came in embarrassing them all, Jesus’s words were, Do you see this woman…?[2]  Of course they didn’t; what they saw was an interruption, a nuisance and an intrusion… and an unauthorised female.  It was Jesus who saw, from the silence of his inner room, the woman God knew and loved. 

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[1] Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation (Franciscan Media: 2014), 4-7.

[2] Luke 7:44