In the TV drama Downton Abbey, the execrable aunt who has caused a lot of damage by her plain speaking says to the wonderful Dowager Countess of Grantham, “My dear, I always say what I think...” “Why,” asks the countess, “no one else does.” There are people who have never experienced what it is like to think it perhaps, but choose not to say it.
One of the most famous of the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 3rd and 4th centuries was Abba Moses the Black. He was probably an Ethiopian, and tradition says he had been a robber, a highwayman. One of the many stories tells how a council was being held in Scetis, and some of the fathers there treated Moses with contempt, saying “Why does this black man come among us?” But Moses kept silence. Later, some asked him, “Abba, did that not grieve you at all?” He said to them, “I was grieved, but I kept silence.” On another occasion, when one of the brothers had committed a fault, Abba Moses was asked to come and help with the judgement. He took a leaking jug, filled it with water and carried it with him. The others said, “What is this, Father?” Moses replied, “My sins run out behind me, and today I am coming to judge the errors of another.” When they heard that, they said no more to the brother but forgave him.
One of the consequences of a contemplative discipline in which, so far as we can, we are paying attention to the real world rather than day dreaming or fantasising, and to human brokenness including our own rather than blaming, judging, labelling, is that we seem to have less and less to say. If God teaches us in the silence to make peace with ourselves, as Jesus taught, then it becomes less difficult to understand what C S Lewis called this bent world. At any rate we pause now on any threshold of passing judgement, and often as not we say nothing at all.
It doesn’t mean at all that we lose our sense of justice and our indignation when people and our precious environment are maltreated by the misuse of power. But it is not possible to come from the silence and resume the old strategies of label and divide, name, blame and shame. The silence extends out far beyond the time of meditation, the mantra follows us off down the road, and there is something in our hearts put there by God which tells us that speaking up judgmentally and hurtfully will not improve anything. And if we are compelled to speak up, it is likely to become a rare event, and it will always somehow reflect what we have come from in the silence and stillness.
Isidore of Pelusium, one of the later Desert Fathers, put it this way: Living without speaking is better than speaking without living. For a person who lives rightly helps us by silence, while one who talks too much annoys us. If, however, words and life go hand in hand, it is the perfection of all philosophy.
28 October 2011
21 October 2011
Inner peace - 21 October 2011
Why are we meditating? Of course there is a variety of reasons, motivations. What we frequently hear when we ask is a desire for inner peace. People are meditating because it is so different from the other aspects of their lives, which may be busy, noisy, demanding -- and for some, full of anxiety or fear, or regret. For a while they can be still and rest, with permission as it were to set down the load. And that’s fine. If that’s what it is, “not a problem” as everyone seems to say these days.
Christian Meditation however invites us to rather more than that. If our motive is personal inner peace, there are perhaps two things to say. The first is that there are many offers of peace of mind around, such as Transcendental Meditation, TM, and much of it is simply part of the consumer culture. Secondly, it may not work. In half an hour’s time we are back where we came from, amid all that is not peaceful. What we have had is a rest. In the classical Christian teaching, that “rest” was known very well. They called it the pax perniciosa, day-dreaming, a kind of alpha consciousness, an escape from reality.
In Christian Meditation it is important that we are awake and alert, and not hiding from reality. I think the word rest is not appropriate because there is in fact a lot going on. We are the ones who are still and silent, but we are consenting to the work of the spirit over the days, weeks and years, eroding the false self and calling the true self, which was always there, and which God always saw. The much-used hospital cliché has some relevance here -- informed consent. We are consenting, and sometimes that is quite hard work, because it means facing our reality and the present moment.
One frequent question is about results -- what do I get out of this, if not an amazing and instant inner tranquillity...? You see the consumerism again... there has to be some reward, some benefit. If we must look for a result, we should look for it in the area of our relationships. Are we more loving... of ourselves in the first place? Less judgemental and inclined to labels which are exclusive of some and inclusive of others. Are we acquiring more understanding or sympathy with human difference, including our own human frailty and fallibility?
It is a long process of being brought closer to the Way of Christ, to some of those sublime requirements such as the Beatitudes which may have always seemed far above us. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard said that most Christians typically treat the Sermon on the Mount rather as they set their watches deliberately ahead of time, so that they will at least possibly approximate. The work that is going on in our stillness is something we learn to trust, and it becomes apparent in our hearts and in our relationships.
Christian Meditation however invites us to rather more than that. If our motive is personal inner peace, there are perhaps two things to say. The first is that there are many offers of peace of mind around, such as Transcendental Meditation, TM, and much of it is simply part of the consumer culture. Secondly, it may not work. In half an hour’s time we are back where we came from, amid all that is not peaceful. What we have had is a rest. In the classical Christian teaching, that “rest” was known very well. They called it the pax perniciosa, day-dreaming, a kind of alpha consciousness, an escape from reality.
In Christian Meditation it is important that we are awake and alert, and not hiding from reality. I think the word rest is not appropriate because there is in fact a lot going on. We are the ones who are still and silent, but we are consenting to the work of the spirit over the days, weeks and years, eroding the false self and calling the true self, which was always there, and which God always saw. The much-used hospital cliché has some relevance here -- informed consent. We are consenting, and sometimes that is quite hard work, because it means facing our reality and the present moment.
One frequent question is about results -- what do I get out of this, if not an amazing and instant inner tranquillity...? You see the consumerism again... there has to be some reward, some benefit. If we must look for a result, we should look for it in the area of our relationships. Are we more loving... of ourselves in the first place? Less judgemental and inclined to labels which are exclusive of some and inclusive of others. Are we acquiring more understanding or sympathy with human difference, including our own human frailty and fallibility?
It is a long process of being brought closer to the Way of Christ, to some of those sublime requirements such as the Beatitudes which may have always seemed far above us. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard said that most Christians typically treat the Sermon on the Mount rather as they set their watches deliberately ahead of time, so that they will at least possibly approximate. The work that is going on in our stillness is something we learn to trust, and it becomes apparent in our hearts and in our relationships.
14 October 2011
Paying attention - 14 October 2011
Sitting still and paying attention, according to our experts, is a very complex human problem. While tens of thousands of our compatriots have no difficulty paying close, focussed attention (if not sitting still) for over an hour to a rugby game they want to watch, and can recall every detail of it later, I for one am bored rigid in the first five minutes. I think that is because, wildly exciting as it may be, it seems to me not to matter.
And indeed, those who compile our TV programs are assuming at present, I think, that our attention is successfully captured for serious lengths of time only by relentless sport, or by the preparation of food to the accompaniment of much drama and tears, or by TV and pop icons locked in battle with their hormones. One bloke on a food program cooks what he himself has hunted and killed, so that combines two criteria, as it were, if indeed hunting and killing is a sport.
Paying attention is a large subject, I do realise. Our attention span depends on many things. When the New Zealand Anglican Prayer Book was published in 1989 it was such an excellent thing it seemed to me, except for what they did with the Psalms. The old 1662 Prayer Book had instructed in the Preface: The Psalter shall be read through once every month... Obviously not everyone paid attention when it was, but some did, and expected it, and it tended to result in a red-blooded church in which, as one Benedictine Abbot pointed out, God was not expected to behave in ways prescribed in the manuals of doctrine. But now in 1989 the Psalms got selected for our tender sensibilities, and abbreviated for our attention span, the language was cleaned up, and they have become in our worship like little approved sound bites as it were. Some Psalms we never hear now because they might upset someone.
Well, when we come to pray as contemplatives, we are taking whatever attention span we might have -- and of course it will differ from day to day, depending on a lot of things -- and we are making it completely available in the present moment, whether it encounters difficulties or not, as it will. I had a lovely teacher in Standard 3, Mrs Stephens -- I think her husband was killed in the war, in that year, because suddenly we felt very sad for her without knowing why -- nobody told us. One day Mrs Stephens said, I would really like it if Ross Miller would pay attention and stop staring dreamily out the window. Well, Mrs Stephens, I have got better at it now. I have learned to sit still for 20 to 30 minutes and pay attention as completely as I know how to the present moment. I hear everything that happens in that time within my auditory range -- but I now know to decide not to start thinking about all that. I am content to be where I am at this moment, and to be still, and to be aware that I am in the presence of God, as is always the case, except that now I am paying attention. I am not expecting emotions or revelations or any such thing, and I would be very surprised to start levitating -- that would wreck my attention.
And that is all. My loving presence here is my very best response to God’s loving presence here, since God is always paying attention to me. And that in the end is the whole of prayer.
And indeed, those who compile our TV programs are assuming at present, I think, that our attention is successfully captured for serious lengths of time only by relentless sport, or by the preparation of food to the accompaniment of much drama and tears, or by TV and pop icons locked in battle with their hormones. One bloke on a food program cooks what he himself has hunted and killed, so that combines two criteria, as it were, if indeed hunting and killing is a sport.
Paying attention is a large subject, I do realise. Our attention span depends on many things. When the New Zealand Anglican Prayer Book was published in 1989 it was such an excellent thing it seemed to me, except for what they did with the Psalms. The old 1662 Prayer Book had instructed in the Preface: The Psalter shall be read through once every month... Obviously not everyone paid attention when it was, but some did, and expected it, and it tended to result in a red-blooded church in which, as one Benedictine Abbot pointed out, God was not expected to behave in ways prescribed in the manuals of doctrine. But now in 1989 the Psalms got selected for our tender sensibilities, and abbreviated for our attention span, the language was cleaned up, and they have become in our worship like little approved sound bites as it were. Some Psalms we never hear now because they might upset someone.
Well, when we come to pray as contemplatives, we are taking whatever attention span we might have -- and of course it will differ from day to day, depending on a lot of things -- and we are making it completely available in the present moment, whether it encounters difficulties or not, as it will. I had a lovely teacher in Standard 3, Mrs Stephens -- I think her husband was killed in the war, in that year, because suddenly we felt very sad for her without knowing why -- nobody told us. One day Mrs Stephens said, I would really like it if Ross Miller would pay attention and stop staring dreamily out the window. Well, Mrs Stephens, I have got better at it now. I have learned to sit still for 20 to 30 minutes and pay attention as completely as I know how to the present moment. I hear everything that happens in that time within my auditory range -- but I now know to decide not to start thinking about all that. I am content to be where I am at this moment, and to be still, and to be aware that I am in the presence of God, as is always the case, except that now I am paying attention. I am not expecting emotions or revelations or any such thing, and I would be very surprised to start levitating -- that would wreck my attention.
And that is all. My loving presence here is my very best response to God’s loving presence here, since God is always paying attention to me. And that in the end is the whole of prayer.
09 October 2011
Spiritual or religious - 7 October 2011
It seems trendy these days to claim to be spiritual but not religious. Religious apparently means going to church and doing religious things, so that’s a no-no. But spiritual is such a handy word in the contemporary climate because it can mean anything, like whatever I want it to mean. And also spiritual, whatever it is, can be done without messing up all the other things we might want to do.
Well, it might be quite important to be neither of these things. Labelling, in any case, usually isn’t helpful or specially informative, and in a mature faith we require less and less of labelling of ourselves or others, because it always obscures the truth.
Jesus didn’t invite his followers to become spiritual or religious. He invited his followers to leave self behind, and that is another pathway altogether. When he did employ any labelling it was in a negative sense -- don’t be like the pharisees. And what was the matter with the pharisees...? They were deeply aware of self, ego, image, reputation. They had official selves. They were role-models, visible, important. The pharisee Jesus pictured in the temple actually thanked God that he was not like other people. He was very spiritual and religious, and quite exemplary. I am sure he was also sincere. Jesus invites us to say goodbye to whatever vestiges of the pharisee are in us, large or small.
So, what we experience in contemplative life and prayer, as time goes by and the life of stillness builds, is the steady enfeebling of the ego. Our official self, what we hope is our visible self, even if it is widely admired, is not the same as the self God made and sees, knows and loves. Love, in the disciplines of stillness and silence, but actually wherever we find it, somehow attenuates the ego in ourselves and even in others, as we begin to see the truth more clearly.
Love and truth are always intimately related, and it is the true self which God made and which Jesus brings to birth, always, as we are still and consenting. This is never something we strive for. The best we can do is be still. God’s breath of creation does it in us.
Well, it might be quite important to be neither of these things. Labelling, in any case, usually isn’t helpful or specially informative, and in a mature faith we require less and less of labelling of ourselves or others, because it always obscures the truth.
Jesus didn’t invite his followers to become spiritual or religious. He invited his followers to leave self behind, and that is another pathway altogether. When he did employ any labelling it was in a negative sense -- don’t be like the pharisees. And what was the matter with the pharisees...? They were deeply aware of self, ego, image, reputation. They had official selves. They were role-models, visible, important. The pharisee Jesus pictured in the temple actually thanked God that he was not like other people. He was very spiritual and religious, and quite exemplary. I am sure he was also sincere. Jesus invites us to say goodbye to whatever vestiges of the pharisee are in us, large or small.
So, what we experience in contemplative life and prayer, as time goes by and the life of stillness builds, is the steady enfeebling of the ego. Our official self, what we hope is our visible self, even if it is widely admired, is not the same as the self God made and sees, knows and loves. Love, in the disciplines of stillness and silence, but actually wherever we find it, somehow attenuates the ego in ourselves and even in others, as we begin to see the truth more clearly.
Love and truth are always intimately related, and it is the true self which God made and which Jesus brings to birth, always, as we are still and consenting. This is never something we strive for. The best we can do is be still. God’s breath of creation does it in us.
30 September 2011
Being and doing - 30 September 2011
A person emailed me with the perceptive comment that a lot of this contemplative business and Christian Meditation seems like unknowing, unlearning.
Back in the 14th century an anonymous English mystic wrote an all-time classic of spirituality entitled The Cloud of Unknowing. When we pray, he or she taught, we are sitting between two clouds. That in itself is interesting news for anyone who is expecting clarity, solutions or certainty, reassurance, revelations or miracles. All we see is cloud, opaque. The cloud above us is the Cloud of Unknowing. This cloud tells only of mystery. It is not full of meaningful symbols or instructions or commandments, thoughts for today or helpful hints. Below us, says the writer, is the Cloud of Forgetting, which lies there between us and all our normal worldly business and concerns and all the noise of our lives, including our church lives. In prayer, in stillness and silence, we drop our distractions into the Cloud of Forgetting, and through the Cloud of Unknowing, says the author, we send “little darts of longing love”.
John Main, one of the great teachers, wrote that we are unlearning much that was conditioned by our education and training, and that is now inadequate for mature spiritual life. What we are learning, however … is something too direct and simple for us to understand, except in and through experience. That is to say, by doing it rather than considering and assessing it. We ourselves may be too complex and self-conscious for the experience when we begin. So some teaching, not only by example (the best teaching) but also by words and ideas, is needed to keep us on the way that we are now travelling…
Over the years we attend study groups and seminars, some of them very good. I have taught a lot of these myself, and even some of those ones were passable. I once ran a church seminar for some weeks on issues emerging from Coronation Street for the edification of the faithful. People came to these things eager to understand basic issues better, even solve some of their philosophical or biblical questions. I am a little cynical now, perhaps -- if we felt intellectually stimulated we felt better. I have been speaker at Sea of Faith and other such meetings where furrowed brows were the order of the day, and the inner message of Christmas or Easter seemed far too simplistic.
But it is as though wiser years are simpler, and what matters is not so much to understand God as to encounter and be in the mystery and love where God is. The eyes of your heart, wrote Paul, being open, that you may know…
Back in the 14th century an anonymous English mystic wrote an all-time classic of spirituality entitled The Cloud of Unknowing. When we pray, he or she taught, we are sitting between two clouds. That in itself is interesting news for anyone who is expecting clarity, solutions or certainty, reassurance, revelations or miracles. All we see is cloud, opaque. The cloud above us is the Cloud of Unknowing. This cloud tells only of mystery. It is not full of meaningful symbols or instructions or commandments, thoughts for today or helpful hints. Below us, says the writer, is the Cloud of Forgetting, which lies there between us and all our normal worldly business and concerns and all the noise of our lives, including our church lives. In prayer, in stillness and silence, we drop our distractions into the Cloud of Forgetting, and through the Cloud of Unknowing, says the author, we send “little darts of longing love”.
John Main, one of the great teachers, wrote that we are unlearning much that was conditioned by our education and training, and that is now inadequate for mature spiritual life. What we are learning, however … is something too direct and simple for us to understand, except in and through experience. That is to say, by doing it rather than considering and assessing it. We ourselves may be too complex and self-conscious for the experience when we begin. So some teaching, not only by example (the best teaching) but also by words and ideas, is needed to keep us on the way that we are now travelling…
Over the years we attend study groups and seminars, some of them very good. I have taught a lot of these myself, and even some of those ones were passable. I once ran a church seminar for some weeks on issues emerging from Coronation Street for the edification of the faithful. People came to these things eager to understand basic issues better, even solve some of their philosophical or biblical questions. I am a little cynical now, perhaps -- if we felt intellectually stimulated we felt better. I have been speaker at Sea of Faith and other such meetings where furrowed brows were the order of the day, and the inner message of Christmas or Easter seemed far too simplistic.
But it is as though wiser years are simpler, and what matters is not so much to understand God as to encounter and be in the mystery and love where God is. The eyes of your heart, wrote Paul, being open, that you may know…
23 September 2011
Who qualifies? - 23 September 2011
If you enjoy reading biographies, a couple of basic facts may have become clear early on. The first is the difference between good biography and what we call hagiography. Hagiography is what happens often at funerals, a dressed-up and somewhat selective account of a person’s life, while knowing that some people present could tell alternative versions. Perhaps understandably at funerals, we usually draw a veil over anything discreditable or puzzling.
The other fact is what we find in good biography -- that most persons’ lives are replete with contradictions and shadows, and that includes the life of every sainted Christian leader I have read. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, Martin Luther King, Hensley Henson the saintly Bishop of Durham, George Augustus Selwyn, John Betjeman, William Wilberforce, St Augustine, Desmond Tutu... the list is endless, and they are just a few of the males...! Episodes in their lives reflect St Paul’s as he reports in the Letter to the Romans: I do not understand my behaviour; I know what is right but I can’t do it... Or they fell into the abyss of depression, and the guilt of assuming they should be better than that. Or they allowed themselves to be led off somehow against their vows and promises.
Occasionally you do hear of someone who arrives on the western slopes of life, as it were, saying: I regret nothing, I would do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing... No regrets...? Yeah, right.
St Benedict warns his brothers: Do not think yourself as holy before you really are. The subtext there is that if you ever become truly holy, then thinking it is the last thing you will think. Benedict knew that we are all flawed, “mutilated” as Archbishop Rowan Williams dares to express it. The best way to find that out, actually, might be stay for a while in a monastery. Anyway, we shrink to think of ourselves as holy precisely because we know it cannot be so. It is Christ who is holy, and the truth is that our wholeness is in owning and acknowledging our whole past and present. This is our poverty, and it is what we bring to our prayer. It is also what unites us with the whole of humanity. We are not better than others, we are the same stuff. We may have done slightly better at times, but we know where the shadows are.
And so we come to prayer, not because we are good at it, and not because we have goods to offer or even things to ask... We qualify here, not because we have done well, and despite the fact that we did badly. None of that is relevant here. We are here because unconditional love and grace draw us. We have dignity because God in Christ bestows dignity on us as beloved daughters and sons.
The other fact is what we find in good biography -- that most persons’ lives are replete with contradictions and shadows, and that includes the life of every sainted Christian leader I have read. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, Martin Luther King, Hensley Henson the saintly Bishop of Durham, George Augustus Selwyn, John Betjeman, William Wilberforce, St Augustine, Desmond Tutu... the list is endless, and they are just a few of the males...! Episodes in their lives reflect St Paul’s as he reports in the Letter to the Romans: I do not understand my behaviour; I know what is right but I can’t do it... Or they fell into the abyss of depression, and the guilt of assuming they should be better than that. Or they allowed themselves to be led off somehow against their vows and promises.
Occasionally you do hear of someone who arrives on the western slopes of life, as it were, saying: I regret nothing, I would do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing... No regrets...? Yeah, right.
St Benedict warns his brothers: Do not think yourself as holy before you really are. The subtext there is that if you ever become truly holy, then thinking it is the last thing you will think. Benedict knew that we are all flawed, “mutilated” as Archbishop Rowan Williams dares to express it. The best way to find that out, actually, might be stay for a while in a monastery. Anyway, we shrink to think of ourselves as holy precisely because we know it cannot be so. It is Christ who is holy, and the truth is that our wholeness is in owning and acknowledging our whole past and present. This is our poverty, and it is what we bring to our prayer. It is also what unites us with the whole of humanity. We are not better than others, we are the same stuff. We may have done slightly better at times, but we know where the shadows are.
And so we come to prayer, not because we are good at it, and not because we have goods to offer or even things to ask... We qualify here, not because we have done well, and despite the fact that we did badly. None of that is relevant here. We are here because unconditional love and grace draw us. We have dignity because God in Christ bestows dignity on us as beloved daughters and sons.
16 September 2011
Suffering and affliction - 16 September 2011
Simone Weil was a remarkable young woman who lived in France during the Nazi occupation, and died in 1943 from “malnutrition”, aged 34. She was a Catholic but refused baptism. Much that we know about her is from her correspondence with Father Perrin, a Dominican priest in Marseilles. In one of these letters she writes about the difference between affliction and suffering.
Suffering is universal. We all know suffering, whether it is toothache or the ache and pain of bereavement, the limitations of ageing, the grief of a broken relationship, tragedy and hardship... a multitude of causes of pain. That is suffering. There are usually things we can do about suffering, its causes or its effects. We are not entirely powerless. The Buddhist teachers tell us that accepting it may be the way forward, since it is a basic fact of all life. But we also know that how we react to suffering is profoundly important. We see many examples of people making bad choices in their suffering, hanging on to anger, resentment and hurt, unable or unwilling to forgive or to understand anything or anyone beyond their own pain.
Now, Simone Weil sees another human condition which she labels affliction. She wrote in French, and the French word is malheur, and I’m unsure whether affliction translates it adequately. Affliction, she says, is something apart, specific and irreducible. She gives one example -- slavery, being owned, having no freedom. Under the Nazis, the Jews were experiencing affliction. She calls affliction a more or less attenuated equivalent of death. There is pain in life which cannot be resolved or relieved, or understood. Our mortality is just that, the ultimate loss of both possession and control. Simone Weil notices that often as not a lot of people simply try not to think about it.
Jesus, she says, experienced affliction, he believed he was forsaken by God. One of the greatest mystics, St John of the Cross, has given his classic description of affliction which he calls the Dark Night. There are passages in the Book of Psalms which clearly come out of affliction, such as the extraordinary Psalm 88. Now listen to what I think is Simone Weil’s most insightful passage about this: Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time... more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell... The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least go on wanting to love, though it may be only with an infinitesimal part of itself. Then, one day, God will come to show himself to this soul and to reveal the beauty of the world, as in the case of Job. But if the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something almost equivalent to hell.
In stillness and silence, no longer trying to possess or control, we consent to the way things are. It absolutely does not mean that we withdraw from the fight for justice and peace and change in the world. But for ourselves, we are asking primarily the grace to say yes to life and to death, and to opt deeply and inwardly for love.
Suffering is universal. We all know suffering, whether it is toothache or the ache and pain of bereavement, the limitations of ageing, the grief of a broken relationship, tragedy and hardship... a multitude of causes of pain. That is suffering. There are usually things we can do about suffering, its causes or its effects. We are not entirely powerless. The Buddhist teachers tell us that accepting it may be the way forward, since it is a basic fact of all life. But we also know that how we react to suffering is profoundly important. We see many examples of people making bad choices in their suffering, hanging on to anger, resentment and hurt, unable or unwilling to forgive or to understand anything or anyone beyond their own pain.
Now, Simone Weil sees another human condition which she labels affliction. She wrote in French, and the French word is malheur, and I’m unsure whether affliction translates it adequately. Affliction, she says, is something apart, specific and irreducible. She gives one example -- slavery, being owned, having no freedom. Under the Nazis, the Jews were experiencing affliction. She calls affliction a more or less attenuated equivalent of death. There is pain in life which cannot be resolved or relieved, or understood. Our mortality is just that, the ultimate loss of both possession and control. Simone Weil notices that often as not a lot of people simply try not to think about it.
Jesus, she says, experienced affliction, he believed he was forsaken by God. One of the greatest mystics, St John of the Cross, has given his classic description of affliction which he calls the Dark Night. There are passages in the Book of Psalms which clearly come out of affliction, such as the extraordinary Psalm 88. Now listen to what I think is Simone Weil’s most insightful passage about this: Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time... more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell... The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least go on wanting to love, though it may be only with an infinitesimal part of itself. Then, one day, God will come to show himself to this soul and to reveal the beauty of the world, as in the case of Job. But if the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something almost equivalent to hell.
In stillness and silence, no longer trying to possess or control, we consent to the way things are. It absolutely does not mean that we withdraw from the fight for justice and peace and change in the world. But for ourselves, we are asking primarily the grace to say yes to life and to death, and to opt deeply and inwardly for love.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)