Ways of praying – 19 October 2012

Whoever wrote the Letters to Timothy listed different ways of praying.  He wrote:  First of all then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings, should be made for everyone… (I Tim 2:1).  This is generally what we do – although we should avoid the excesses of the Afro-American woman, Aibileen, in Kathryn Stockett’s amazing novel, The Help, who could make people straighten up simply by threatening to add them to her prayer list.  On the other hand, it was indeed moving to see large groups of Moslem worshippers in Pakistan, and in the UK, praying for Malala Yousufzai, age 14, shot by the Taliban and now desperately ill – all because she had been encouraging girls to go to school to break their cycle of ignorance and slavery to men. 

John Cassian was a travelling ascetic who for a while was taught by the early Desert Fathers.  He later wrote about this, and he describes how Abba Isaac taught him about prayer.   Abba Isaac said that eventually in our journey there comes what we now call contemplative prayer, in which we are still, and in which very little matters more than being still.  Even avid practitioners of words and deeds now begin to feel they might let go of words, of thoughts, of images, and of the need to be justified by results.  It is a very big prescription.  We can scarcely do it ourselves.  And so we do what we can, we sit, still, and silent, and say our word, our mantra.  That is what we mean by poverty, in prayer, because that is all we can do. 

Jesus said to go into our room and shut the door.  Well, we can do that.  It works, if other people in the house understand the message of the shut door.  If they are threatened or irritated by it, or amused, then that is something to negotiate.  Meditators I have talked with say that toddler grandchildren are the worst.  Contemplative prayer may not be possible with a demanding prepubescent in the house – or for that matter, certain teenagers, or an inhabitant with dementia or something else very needy.  All of those situations are represented in the people I know in the Benedictine Oblate community. 

But then, Jesus’ statement can be read more intelligently.  The door that is to be shut, for the time being, is the mind’s door to words, thoughts, images.  God is already there.    It is akin to the Holy of Holies in the Jewish temple, the innermost room, where there was nothing, no furnishings, no instructions, no protocol, nothing you could hide behind, or possess, control or manipulate or own.  Nothing to do but be there.  There was no liturgy for use in the Holy of Holies, words had ceased.  There was silence and stillness, and what Rowan Williams called enigmatically a ray of darkness.  And those of us who may have reached a little maturity in the Christian pilgrimage, and have seen a thing or two, may indeed find something familiar and reassuring about that.

Attending with love to the everyday – 12.10.2012

… there is no substitute for learning to be a Christian by being in the presence of significant lives made significant by being Christian. … Significance suggests importance… lives that make a difference and that demand acknowledgement.   But the lives of significance I began to notice were not significant in any of those ways.  Rather, they were lives of quiet serenity, capable of attending with love to the everyday without the need to be recognized as “making a difference”.  (Stanley Hauerwas:  Hannah’s Child)

Stanley Hauerwas is a prominent American theologian.  He grew up in a Methodist home in rural Texas, but never could manage to get converted, he says, so he became a theologian.  His previous career was bricklayer, and about that he wrote:  I write like I learned to lay brick. You do it because you have to get it done before it rains.  He is one of the most loving, insightful and irascible Christians I know of.

He thinks then that the point is to be capable of attending with love...  But he also says we don’t achieve this all the time.  Christians fall down and get up again, over and over, as the early monks discovered.  We are capable of attending with love.  A lot of people are not.  Perhaps as time goes by it becomes more and more our nature.  The word attending matters.  We know about attending, attention, paying attention, because this is at the heart of our contemplative prayer.  It is something we learn and practise, in silence and stillness.  We become less scattered and more focussed.  It becomes less threatening for us to pay attention through the rough times as well as the smooth. 

Attending with love, he writes.  The test of our prayer, the only test of whether it is “working”, whether we are “getting anything out of it”, is the question whether love is being released and facilitated in us.  If the prayer is for anything, if it has a payoff, to put it crudely, it is that we find ourselves to have become more capable of love, more lovingly insightful, lovingly patient. 

Then he says, Attending with love to the everyday...  Not necessarily the big things, although they happen too.  But pickling the beetroot, talking to some old bloke, and making a couple of sensible decisions, may well be the area and scope of attending with love today.  In the Rule of St Benedict, ordinary tasks matter just as singing the Psalms , and the garden tools of the monastery are to be cared for the same as vessels of the altar.  It is very much the opposite of the throw-away society – the everyday is where we practise our faith.  Stanley Hauerwas’s wife was bi-polar.  He knew over some 25 years of this what it meant to attend with love to the everyday. 

And then he writes, without the need  to be recognised as making a difference...  Some people seem to come with a kind of inner built-in meter, which monitors, measures and permanently records how much others were grateful – or how they were insufficiently grateful.  It is necessary in the world of careers to have an up-to-date CV –I think the trendy word is resumé, which details all our shining achievements thus far, more or less accurately.  But people of significance, Hauerwas discovered, are those of quiet serenity, capable of attending with love to the everyday without the need to be recognized as making a difference. 

Is it all about me? – 5 October 2012

Am I the only one who has to try not to wince when some shining-faced young athlete or other achiever, entirely admirable, tells us about realizing their dreams…?  Dreams are what you’ve got to have.  People without dreams don’t get anywhere.  A young couple dream of their dream-home – or else watch their dream receding as financial realities take over, or some other disaster intervenes.  A few dreams have evaporated in Christchurch.  People are now conditioned by consumerism from their earliest years.   And the consumer world is all about me.  Father Laurence Freeman observes that the bookshops, for those who still read, are full of the latest advice on self-help. The bestsellers are about handling self-criticism, expressing your feelings, developing balance, asserting yourself, eating well and doing exercise – most of it, I would think, very worthy.  Of course there are extremes, and there are many exceptions.  But only a total egoist could take seriously the recent complaint of some Christchurch women that the rough state of the city’s footpaths and roads since the earthquakes had made it impossible for them to wear their expensive and very high heels. 

So it’s all about me, when the great open secret is that life and death are not all about me – certainly not in the sense that my comfort and happiness and success are what it’s all for.  Contemplative prayer is not only about setting our various burdens aside and being peaceful and receptive.  It is also about the process of setting ourselves aside – that is to say, our public selves, the self we know much of the time isn’t completely true.  The gentle but persistent ministries of the Spirit of God help us, day by day and year by year, to resign what is false and unreal, and to greet the emergence of the self God created and always knew and recognised and loved. 

The earliest mystics began to understand that this process begins once we are still and silent and consenting.  They also knew very well, from their own painful experience, that it is not a process we can do ourselves.  He must increase, I must decrease, said John the Baptist – and he added, for this reason my joy is fulfilled.  Perhaps the turning point for some of us is when we realise that we are looking for happiness in the wrong places, that our deepest joy lies deeper than the ego, the facade – when we also realise that we have no need to be afraid.  We can trust, and as Lady Julian of Norwich memorably put it, All will be well, and every manner of thing will be well. 

Anger – 28 September 2012

The Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4^th century thought that anger is the most dangerous of all the human passions.  They ranked anger as more destructive than greed or lust.  Anger, they said, is our biggest obstacle, not only in prayer, but in all of life.  Abba Ammonas said that he had spent fourteen years in the desert asking God day and night to grant him the victory over anger. 

These people knew that anger plays tricks on us.  If we absolutely have to correct another person in a spirit of anger, they said, we should do it quickly and simply, and then let it go.  Don’t get entangled in any expectation of results.  Evagrius, one of the later desert monks, says we easily sin with anger when we misapply it and use it to punish someone.  He said that prayer is the seed of gentleness and the absence of anger.  But prayer is also a warfare, these people knew, because it was when the monk sat down to pray that he was most likely to be distracted by unresolved anger – old grudges, the memory of old wrongs, even schemes of retaliation and revenge.  They could even get into trouble when their anger tricked them into feeling righteous.  There are numerous desert stories about monks trying to resolve their anger by seeing others as less holy than themselves.  Evagrius wrote:  Better a gentle, worldly man than an irascible and wrathful monk.  St Benedict in his Rule cautions:  Don’t think of yourselves as holy before you really are.  The trick there, if you think about it, is that by the time you really are holy, the last thing you will think is that you are.  And in any case, if you are aware of anger against someone, you are not very righteous at all. 

But anger remains utterly basic and imperative in all our contemporary life and culture.  In many quarters it is considered very trendy.  Much of our journalism is expressing anger about this or that, and some writers work hard to express it eloquently or even elegantly.  Vicious anger and violence are important forms of entertainment for people. 

Contemplatives learn another way.  It begins with the steady healing of our own internal anger, the drawing of the sting of memories and the poison in our reactions to people and events.    And this process happens as we are still and silent, and as we find the grace to let go of anger. 

Passing judgement – 21 September 2012

I notice that we puzzle quite a lot over this matter of judging and being judgemental.  They are two different things.  We all have to make judgements.  For judges it is their job.  For the rest of us, we expect to be able to form opinions, come to decisions, about people and events.  And sometimes our judgements do have to be, rightly we hope, negative and condemnatory.  If we have a Christian conscience we hope our judgements are accurate and charitable, even generous.  We also hope we recognize those times when it is unnecessary to judge someone, even if everyone else is doing so.  Jesus refused to pass judgement on the adulterous woman in John’s gospel. 

Judgementalism however is another matter.  This is an attitude, a habitual reaction -- even for some, including some Christian believers, a way of life and a righteous responsibility.  Emily Dickinson remarked about one preacher she heard, The subject of perdition seemed to please him, somehow.  

Judgementalism is when we pin indelible labels on people, write people off, consign them to some place somewhere else but not here.  It usually entails a willful blindness to the good in people, or to the possibility of reform.  It is a lack of care about another person.  Judgementalism generally proceeds from our own anger and fear, to say nothing of our ignorance.  I think it was because of the perils of judgementalism all around him that Jesus said, Judge not, and you won’t be judged.  The world we know is full of judgementalism.

In the still and silent world of contemplative prayer we are consenting to the long-term and gentle work of the Spirit in us, achieving changes in us which we can never engineer ourselves.  And so it is that the judgementalism in us starts to attenuate.  We begin to notice it and don’t like it.  We find ourselves doing without it.  We notice that the judgementalism in our friends begins to irritate us.  We find ourselves more inclined to patience and understanding with human error and frailty, with all its risks.

Partly this is that we are learning to live freer of fear and anger.  The world and all its dangers are unchanged.  But in silence and stillness, somehow, we find ourselves much better able to meet Jesus’s frequent question to people, “Why are you afraid…?”

Living with mystery – 14 September 2012

Kathleen Norris writes:  I sometimes think of prayer as a certain quality of attention that comes upon me when I’m busy doing something else.  It’s one of those insights these people seem to have, which can be told in simple words, briefly and clearly.  Perhaps people like me then start to obscure it.

Prayer is… a certain quality of attention that comes upon me when I’m busy doing something else.  Unfortunately, as it seems to me, she then goes on to write about the common experience most of us know, when someone or some situation springs to mind, and it becomes a quiet personal prayer.  That’s a kind of running intercession, appropriate and perfectly fine. 

But Kathleen Norris’s insight is better than that, and I felt sorry she didn’t follow it up.  There are two things in what she wrote and in the way she wrote it.  First, she called prayer a certain quality of attention.  We have visited this idea before in our group.  Prayer is paying special attention.  It is deeper and more disciplined than the scatter-gun attention we normally give to things, or the so-called attention possible in multi-tasking, which is much admired.  The attention prayer requires is the result of being fully present and fully awake.  It is the attention possible when we have set our own agendas to one side and have stepped in front of all our internal and external chatter.  It is the attention we come to know in our consent to God, in silence, in stillness and in mystery.

Secondly, she says it comes upon her when I’m busy doing something else.  She is not now referring to the time of prayer.  What meditators eventually start to report is that their mantra, with all its connotations of stillness, silence, focusing, paying attention, spills over into the rest of life.  We become aware of its resonance in stressful situations, at busy and occupied times, in tiredness or anxiety.  It is as though part of us is now living in a kind of constant presence, what the Greek of the New Testament calls an αναμνησις (anamnesis), a remembrance.  We are more and more learning to be present to God, and to other people, in ways not possible when we are living behind our defences and facades.  In company we may see what others don’t because of all the chatter.  When we are alone, we come to realize that there is no space between our thoughts of people and our prayers for them.  Boundary between life and prayer has become thin or attenuated, even invisible. 

Detachment - 7 September 2012

It quite often seems to people who don’t practice contemplative prayer and life that those of us who do are lacking a healthy sense of engagement with the world, we are aloof and we lack concern for others.  We retreat away from the real world into prayer.  And perhaps some meditators do have that motive.  It is a refuge, some kind of cocoon, a blessed peaceful haven.  Well, let’s not despise that.  Jesus knew that a lot of people are very wounded and afraid.  He said, Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden – I will give you rest… 

The Desert Fathers and Mothers had other motives.  Detachment, for them, meant that at the time of prayer no worldly concerns, including good ones, would distract them from being present to God and to each other.  That was the point of all their discipline.  One of the monks, Abba Dorotheus of Gaza, puts it in an interesting way.  Detachment, he said, is being free from wanting certain things to happen.  The burden we lay down in prayer includes a whole load of our desires, whether things we desire for ourselves or for others, for good or for ill.  You can’t be a Buddhist without learning from the outset that our desires are the root of all unhappiness and suffering.  It is one Buddhist truth which urgently needs to be translated into Christian understanding. 

To be free of desire may be something we can’t even begin to imagine.   But then Abba Dorotheus gives as it were the other side of the coin.  He says that we can find peace in what is happening.  It is important to be clear about this.  He does not mean we agree with or like what is happening around us.  What is happening may be very hurtful or unjust.  But in the presence of God another door opens which we hadn’t noticed.  Where does it lead?  It leads to a deeper level where we are at peace with what we can’t change.  It is a level of trust.  Once we have seen this, and perhaps seen it in others, we begin to see it also for instance in the Psalms.  It is the resolution of the Book of Job. 

Kathleen Norris tells a lovely story from the USA.  A woman middle-aged school bus driver suddenly had her bus, which was full of mentally handicapped children, taken over by a deranged man with a gun.  When reporters later asked her how she had managed to talk the man out of using the gun, her reply was, “I pray a lot.” That’s the kind of response I love – it seems absurd to most people, and it really gets up the noses of the atheists.  Notice, the woman did not say, “I prayed a lot.”  What she indicated was that she was generally not far from prayer.  In that sense at least, she was a contemplative person.  And the encounter between her and the man with the gun was not quite what he expected, evidently.