Learning to pray - 25 May 2012

I find I am teaching Christian Meditation and contemplative prayer and life, not because I do it very well, but because, as we know, the best way to learn something is to teach it. There are very few teachers who know everything already, although my daughter did have one in about Year 7. There are some brilliant contemplative teachers and writers in our day, and we can learn a lot. But still, I find myself going back to the ancient teachers, the Desert fathers and mothers, St Augustine, the Cloud of Unknowing, Julian, St Teresa and St John of the Cross… there are many of them… despite that they saw the world as teeming with demons and spirits and they rarely if ever had a bath. But having reached a great age, it dawns on me that I have learned to be very wary of counsels of perfection, anyway. What draws me to St Benedict is partly that he knew that everyone is struggling and barely getting there. Counsels of perfection don’t help much. Neither do triumphalism and stories of shining achievement. One wonderful woman remarked to me after a funeral we had both attended, that she would have to hurry up and do something notable so that they would have something to say about her at her funeral. They will actually have plenty to say about her. The reality is however, that we are teaching prayer, silence and stillness always to burdened people in the midst of life. Memories can be stressful, and so can the results of all manner of events in the past. Home and family routine and family worries, may be sometimes joyous, but often bothersome and burdensome. Ill-health, chronic pain, ageing… And to this we add the bearing of the burdens of others, which is something we do. My point is that life doesn’t normally facilitate a calm and seamless flow into contemplative life and prayer. It is important to know that we are all pilgrims, on the way. We haven’t got there yet. The most we can do is describe the place we have reached today, and the view from there. We may have gone backwards. I think not, but it may seem so. But each time we become still and silent, inwardly consenting to grace and to love, of course we are moving along the trail. We are shedding our own presumed omnipotence, which is a silly fantasy anyway, and opening to grace and love – for ourselves, and through us to others.

Telling the truth – 11 May 2012

St Benedict, about 1500 years ago, wrote what he called a Rule, which set out how Christians could and should live together. It sounds daunting, but it is actually both liberal and flexible. Benedict called it a little rule for beginners. In it he says among many other things that you can’t have Christian community without truthfulness. Sister Joan Chittister is a Benedictine nun of our day, and this is what she writes about truthfulness: Dissimulation, half answers, vindictive attitudes, a false presentation of self, are all barbs in the soul of the monastic. Holiness, this ancient rule says to a culture that has made crafty packaging high art, has something to do with being who we say we are, claiming our truths, opening our hearts, giving ourselves to the other pure and unglossed. This is not the same as the person who says, “That’s just the way I am, you have to take me as you find me, what you see is what you get…” That is really as much a façade as anything else. But it does have everything to do with the real person emerging from the shadows in the gentle processes of contemplative life and prayer. The real person, the person we glimpse in our better and humbler moments, the person God always sees and knows and loves, becomes able to be truthful and open without fear, and lovingly. It is what St Paul called learning to speak the truth in love. I have been trying to better understand one of our culture’s prime buzz-words, Lifestyle. A woman in the news told the court she needs $140,000 a year from her separated husband to maintain her lifestyle. You can have a lifestyle property. You put yourself in a beautiful setting. Your friends and family, and others too, see you there, and so you feel quite safe. Somewhere inside that beautiful perimeter, lurking as it were in a broom cupboard, is the real you, which would still exist, lifestyle or not. It is this person God begins to call forth in silence and stillness. This person may never since earliest childhood been allowed to live except behind facades of one kind or another – managing image, how others see you. What will other people think? But now what matters is the truth. St Paul’s great insight was that the truth and love go together. The true person is a loving person. It is the way God made things.

Letting go - 4 May 2012

One of the primary rhythms of all contemplative life and prayer is that we are, perhaps imperceptively, relinquishing our hold on possessions and on other people. We are losing the need to personally control life and events and the future, a control which was in any case mainly illusory. Every time we choose the stillness and the silence, in preference to everything else we could be doing and thinking and planning, we are creating a space, what Greek scripture calls a kairos (καιρος), a special time, in which the processes of letting go are gently applied. Buddhists understand this quite well. Ideally you arrive at the end of life with nothing. Well, we are not in that tradition, but we gather truth where we find it. Jesus taught clearly that possessions can be a problem. He showed clearly that it is fear, not sin, that is the underlying problem. Fear that we might lose what we own and control… Fear of the future… Fear of mortality and death… He showed that it is love that is the antidote of fear – abide in my love, he says. But the relinquishment is more radical and more subtle than we expect. Over the years, and over the days and weeks of meditation, we find that it is not so much that we are relinquishing anything – more that things are being taken away from us, gently and almost imperceptively. Typically we see it happening in retrospect. It is the work of the Holy Spirit, and it is always like the wind, unpredictable and strange, and surprising. I came upon a moving example just recently. Leonard Cohen, the now elderly singer and poet, and his poem about letting go: “Going home”: Going home without my sorrow Going home some time tomorrow Going home to where it’s better than before. Going home without my burden, Going home behind the curtain, Going home without the costume that I wore… We are letting go of attitudes, of poisonous memories, of remembered guilts… steadily, and day by day. We are conforming to Christ, by being still.

The dance of the ego - 27 April 2012

Jesus talked about leaving self behind. In the modern world, that is incomprehensible. Leaving self behind is unlikely, to say the least. In contemplative understanding of spiritual truth, self means generally what psychology calls the ego. This is what springs to life as soon as we are still and silent, because stillness and silence is an environment the ego doesn’t like very much. However, it is a mistake to start thinking of the ego as any kind of enemy. Our ego is part of us, and is very much concerned with survival. So it tends to be nervous of change, anything that might upset our fragile balances of control and happiness. From our earliest days the ego has been perfecting our responses to our environment to secure our continued existence, protection, even life-style and possessions. Control and management are a large part of this. When stillness and silence threaten to set aside management and planning, the ego responds with an avalanche of thoughts. We can be literally driven to distraction. And so we have the mantra. It is what we return to, away from the distractions. But the ego doesn’t give up. “Isn’t this boring, a waste of time? Shouldn’t we be doing something right now, like saving the world or joining a committee, or stopping our grandchildren diving into drugs...?” Well yes, no doubt, we should be doing those things, along with going to church and getting dinner ready. But first we will be still, and silent, and receptive, and consenting to God, who made us, knows us much deeper than our egos, loves us unconditionally nevertheless. And as we are still, gently and interiorly choosing our mantra rather than the flow of distractions, the Holy Spirit, like a sculptor, is chipping away at the stone to reveal the true self, the person God always saw and knows and loves -- day after day, year by year. In a way it is quite fun to say no to the ego -- even more fun than keeping the driver behind me to 50 km/h in the long 50 km/h stretch through Snells Beach and Algies Bay. As a Hebrew prophet saw it long ago: In returning and rest will you be saved, In quietness and confidence will be your strength. [Isaiah 30:15]

Living Easter - 13 April 2012

I had a fascinating Easter Day last Sunday. All on my own, all day... Around our neighbourhood the blokes were out in the sunshine, happy in their black singlets and baseball caps, starting up their tractors and hauling their boats around. The Vicar of Warkworth informed us that being an Easter Christian does not mean just wearing a cross -- Madonna does that much, she said. Well me too -- I had thought that morning, in honour of Easter Day and my rare epiphany at church I should wear my Benedictine Oblate cross. So that’s two of us, Madonna and me. But then I went home, turned on the web, and found that the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Edinburgh said that all Christians should now wear a cross to make the point that there are some things we believe and stand for. Best of all for me, as always, were the words I heard in the liturgy: Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast, not with the old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth... (KJV) There is an excitement at Easter, if and when we turn our attention to it. It is a permission to say that death can be very terrible, but it can never be the worst thing or have the last word. It is a permission to live life without labels and discrimination -- free from those things -- neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female... all are one. It is a permission to say no to evil in our culture, to evil compromise -- and to become who we are in Christ. It is permission to spot, to identify, whatever is true, loving, kind and hopeful. The angel said to the women he was not there, where they were looking for him, because he was risen. We know him no longer after the manner of the flesh – and that includes the manner of the imagination. He is not what we think. He is here in all that happens, prior to us, waiting for us, life and hope and love. To meet him we require to be still, receptive, needy and consenting to change.

God to Lulu, 20 April 2012

Lulu, aged 6, came home from school and wrote a letter to God:

To God how did you get invented? From Lulu xo

Lulu’s parents considered themselves atheists. But, respecting their daughter’s serious enquiry, they eventually decided to send it to Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He ought to know. This is the letter that came:

Dear Lulu, Your dad has sent on your letter and asked if I have any answers. It's a difficult one! But I think God might reply a bit like this –

'Dear Lulu – Nobody invented me – but lots of people discovered me and were quite surprised. They discovered me when they looked round at the world and thought it was really beautiful or really mysterious and wondered where it came from. They discovered me when they were very very quiet on their own and felt a sort of peace and love they hadn't expected. Then they invented ideas about me – some of them sensible and some of them not very sensible. From time to time I sent them some hints – specially in the life of Jesus – to help them get closer to what I'm really like. But there was nothing and nobody around before me to invent me. Rather like somebody who writes a story in a book, I started making up the story of the world and eventually invented human beings like you who could ask me awkward questions!'
And then he'd send you lots of love and sign off. I know he doesn't usually write letters, so I have to do the best I can on his behalf. Lots of love from me too. +Archbishop Rowan

“They discovered me when they were very very quiet on their own…” In this loud, clamorous culture of instant communication, TV, cellphones, texting, emails, iPads, iPods and things I haven’t heard of yet, and all the peer pressures to live that way and have those things, Lulu could do with a meditative discipline to be very very quiet on her own.

Christian Meditation people are these days introducing meditation to young children, who turn out to be sometimes better at it than their teachers. In a culture in which so many people get so very restless and nervous about silence and stillness, terrified of boredom and being left not knowing what to do, it is scarcely amazing that they lose any concept of God also. So we make friends again with silence and stillness, and learn to welcome mystery and wonder, and be quite surprised.

Numbered with the transgressors - 6 April 2012

...the old King James Version words of Isaiah 53:

He poured out his soul unto death;
and he was numbered with the transgressors;
and he bore the sin of many...

It is very ancient and very beautiful and very moving poetry. It comes from centuries before the time of Jesus. It starkly depicts what happens to people. Never mind whether they are good people or bad. The fact is, as the poet realised, it is a cruel and unjust world.

We go on and on these days about deserving. Deserving has nothing to do with it. Good people suffer. In the towns of Syria... Or Nature takes over and devastates our lives. We get leukaemia, or alzheimers. Babies get born with some lethal disorder. Or in another way, after a lifetime of devoted public service you may stand in the dock accused of some neglect as a company director, and suffer utter and prolonged humiliation. People are accused unjustly, or justly. What is the difference...? as Robert Burns said,

Who made the heart, ‘tis he alone decidedly can try us...
Then at the balance let’s be mute, we never can adjust it.
What’s done, we partly may compute,
But know not what’s resisted.

The Jews under Jewish law were in no doubt that Jesus was guilty as charged -- guilty they thought of blasphemy. The Romans under their law were not so sure -- he may have been guilty of sedition -- but Roman rule was in any case corrupt, and they needed peace in Palestine.

And so, in a morass of conflicting motives and ideals, of corrupt people, frightened people, ignorant people, Jesus chooses to stand there silent. Where would you start, anyway? His contemplative love of the Father, his complete confidence of the Father’s love for him, at this moment is the sustenance he needs. He is content to be numbered with the transgressors. Beaten, tortured, humiliated, condemned. We too have to fall into silence, if even for just this short time...

He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows...
He poured out his soul unto death;
and he was numbered with the transgressors;
and he bore the sin of many...