Recess

Our Christian Meditation group at Warkworth will now be in recess over the summer holiday period.

We will resume on 7 February 2014.

Our usual time and place of meeting:  8.30 am, Fridays,

at

the Christ Church (Anglican) lounge in Warkworth.  All are welcome. 

Grace and peace – 20 December 2013

Here are a few words from the Epistle reading for next Sunday, right at the beginning of St Paul’s Letter to the Romans.  Paul is writing to a distant Christian community he has not yet met, and he addresses them as...

...yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, to all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ [Romans 1: 6-7].

Grace and peace...  One of my colleagues over many years, an old friend, usually addresses people in his correspondence including his emails in that way.  He wishes us grace and peace.  To say the least, it makes us pause and think – this is what mature Christian faith conveys: grace and peace.  Hospitality at its best confers grace and peace.

They are two rich words which are diminished when we try to define them.  The best way to learn them is to experience their reality in life.  Grace – the lovely Greek word χαρις -- is Nelson Mandela choosing not to walk the path of retribution at the very moment he had ample power to do so, and ample reason to do so.  Grace is the father running to greet his returning son who had squandered everything.  Grace is never reasonable and very rarely deserved.  It is Godlike. 

Peace is the Hebrew word shalom.  It means somewhat more than the absence of noise, although that in itself is not a bad start.  Shalom is a fundamental rightness, a sense that things are tending as God intends.  It includes our health and wellbeing – but the hard thing to grasp is that shalom does not wait until every problem is solved.  Someone whose body is falling to bits can know the gift of shalom. 

St Paul wishes these Roman Christians grace and peace.  Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  St Benedict said we must also have grace and peace from each other.  One reality of the birth of the baby is that you know that baby has no quarrel with anyone right now.  One of the miracles of our time is that, in a culture whose media is thriving on public blame and shame, on seeing people suffer, on sickening self-righteousness and lack of wisdom about human frailty and error, in a cruel culture of retribution – there was this one man, with no great pretensions to religion, with all his own human frailties on show, who flatly refused to condemn and punish at the moment he was in a position to do so.  It was a shaft of grace, and our media could only report it as a strange and wondrous thing.  Then came Archbishop Tutu and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  If you told the truth, the slate could be wiped clean.  Grace and truth, wrote St John, came through Jesus Christ.  Grace is the receiving of love, unmerited and unconditional.  Grace to you and peace...  Grace and truth...  These are at the heart of the strong message of Advent and Christmas.  Grace to you and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Learning patience – 13 December 2013

The epistle for next Sunday is from the little-used Letter of James.  Martin Luther famously called it an epistle of straw.  It is nothing of the kind:

Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near. Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged. See, the Judge is standing at the doors! [James 5: 7-9]

It’s all very well to talk about being patient, when advancing decrepitude means you don’t have much option.  You can’t run any more anyway, and you are retired and there’s not much reason to rush around as there once was.  Multi-tasking turns out to be not only difficult but dangerous.  It’s smart to learn the virtues of patience.  You are amazed at the people who get on the escalator at Countdown and still actually walk or even run up or down it.  They can’t simply stand still and wait.

But all this is to misunderstand what the word means.  Patience is from the Latin word, to suffer.  Being patient is a mature quality, knowing how to take the rough with the smooth, how to postpone or do without satisfaction. Patient is not passive.  A patient person not only is able to bear pain, but has learned that pain and injustice are everywhere.  It is an unjust world.  James reminds Jesus’s followers that they are not living in some safe cocoon of faith where all is well. 

That is why he also says, Beloved, do not grumble against one another.  And here I may be walking over eggshells... but James is saying that the kind of patience which marks Christian discipleship and Christian fellowship is accepting or at least understanding of human perversity and silliness.  It bears with other people – in which enterprise, I may say, a lively sense of the ridiculous helps quite a lot.  St Benedict knew that in any monastery there will be monks with smelly feet, nuns with blocked sinuses, people teetering towards lunacy accompanied by halitosis – and so, in his Rule he repeatedly warns against grumbling (sine murmuratione).  Grumbling badly damages the community.  It is a matter of discipline in a Christian fellowship that we do not grumble.  Put positively, it matters that we have learned patience, that our expectations are sensible and realistic, that we make room for human difference.  We come to gain pleasure from difference and eccentricity.

Moreover, this is Advent teaching.  James writes about waiting in patience.  He says the Judge is standing at the doors.  He wrote in the early Jerusalem church where they were always threatened by real oppression and persecution.  Patience and endurance is necessary equipment, and a sense of what matters and what doesn’t.  Our contemplative stillness and silence can equip us with a large and generous spirit.  Sometimes, even at my great age I confess, I am considerably tested in this regard.  But we get there.  At any rate, all our impatience and grumbling gets folded into the stillness of prayer, where Christ’s Spirit is making us into better disciples. 

To the moles and the bats – 6 December 2013

Here is part of a real flesh and blood Advent reading – the kind of reading ministers may be tempted to avoid if they can, but if it does get read, people’s eyes start to glaze over:

The haughtiness of people shall be humbled,

 

            and the pride of everyone brought low;

the Lord alone will be exalted on that day.

The idols shall utterly pass away.

Enter the caves of the rocks and the holes of the ground,

from the terror of the Lord,

and from the glory of his majesty…

On that day people will throw away to the moles and the bats

their idols of silver and their idols of gold

which they made for themselves to worship…  [Isaiah 2:17-20]

Rowan Williams identifies two very personal issues in Advent.  The first is to realize yet again that there are things we cannot do for ourselves.  Alone, as we know, we can’t learn language and communication.  Alone, we can’t learn to love and to be loved.  Alone, we can’t know whether we are worth anything or not, or actually visible to anyone or anything.  It is trendy now to have taken leave of God and religion and to be self-sufficient.  And our generation is left with what Rowan Williams calls paralyzing unhappiness and anxiety.  We would love to hear a voice of recognition and reassurance, but it must be on our terms and say the things we want to hear. 

So – and this is the second thing -- we make idols.  We project on to the empty space before us the voices and images we want – typically in western culture they include wealth and power, sex and so-called freedom, sport and entertainment, family first and last, happiness, the illusion of safety, personal appearance…  For Jews the covenant was always about the forsaking of idols.  We cannot make God, least of all in our own image.  We cannot domesticate God to our own life and preferences and what we imagine are our needs.  In the Christian Advent we become, as it were, Jews again.  We are reminded how, surrounded by all our goods and fortified by all our knowledge, we still need to be touched into life by a word from God – a word which brings all our idolatry to judgement. 

The wondrous thing is that, after our weeks of Advent waiting, this word turns out to be spoken in the birth of a baby, in a story which the secular world and much of the church have turned into a charming nursery tale.  In our contemplative life and prayer, our thoughtfulness and attention, but also in our silence and stillness, we are not strangers to mystery and awe, to the truth that may lie in the shadows, and the love which never lets us go.  And we are very ready, when we see our idols, to cast them to the moles and the bats.

What to do about Advent – 29 November 2013

Advent starts in two days.  Here is something, pretty simple, which I wrote for my fellow Benedictine Oblates about the approach of Advent.  I have altered the bits that are addressed specifically to Oblates...

Advent is a strange time.  The church insists it is a penitential season, like Lent.  But it rarely feels that way.  As we know all too well, Christmas gets prematurely “celebrated” in the shops and in the expectations of children.  Schools and supermarkets have mindless carols and nativity clutter, to say nothing of Santa and reindeers, in the middle of Advent. Known widely as I am for my calm and even temperament, I can be reduced to helpless grinding of teeth when the sheer spiritual richness of words such as “God of God, Light of Light / Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb...” is made mindless wallpaper music for the supermarket – and it’s not yet Christmas anyway.   We are citizens of 2013 in all its secular sentimental banality.  Not only is Advent not Christmas, but it is not capable of being secularised and commercialised without being distorted and destroyed.

No one who has listened to the Mozart or the Verdi requiems, the huge minor chords of the Dies Irae, and understood what is being conveyed there – and who pays attention to our world – is ready before Christmas Eve to celebrate Christmas.  Of course all that kind of thing is dreadfully inconvenient when you have to plan food and arrange presents and cater for the clamant expectations of modern grandchildren. 

We (Oblates) can do a little bit better, however.                                            

• During Advent we can find someone upon whom the Day of Wrath has descended in one form or another, and do what we can. 
• We can pay attention to the (sometimes very) difficult, even unpleasant, biblical readings of Advent, bearing in mind that the dire events set forth seem similar to what many are indeed experiencing around the world. 
• We can assess to what extent, in our life of contemplative stillness and silence, we are shedding the need to defend ourselves, to justify ourselves, to make ourselves safe at any rate, and are shedding the fear of mortality. 
• We can read, in our Lectio, what Benedict says about Humility [RB7], and be readier to greet the news of the helpless incarnate Christ in humble, awed delight. 

Love to the loveless shown,

That they might lovely be...

The Noonday Demon (3) – 22 November 2013

The previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has this luminous passage in his book, Silence and Honeycakes: 

God does not stop working in the church when we Christians are wicked, stupid and lazy.  The church is not magic, much as we should love it to be – a realm where problems are solved instantly and special revelations answer all our questions and provide a short-cut through all our conflicts.  It is rather – pre-eminently and crucially – a community of persons…, a place where holiness takes time, and where the prose of daily faithfulness and yes, sometimes, daily boredom, has to be faced and blessed, not shunned or concealed.

Perhaps in many ways the church has always been a community whose people are, in the phrase from the desert fathers we used last week, pledged to the walls.  The “local church”, we call it.  This is even more visible in places like Manila or Johannesburg, Buenos Aires or the slums of Rio – most recently of all perhaps in those Philippine cities and towns flattened by the typhoon.  People living and believing their faith in the best ways they know how.  Naturally we welcome any miracles that come along, but we know better than to expect them or rely on them.  Among us are always some who do want to live by miracles and excitement and instant solutions, but most of us know that reality is otherwise – and it is right there, in reality, in the present, that we are to love God and our neighbour.  The church is stodgy and boring only if we expect it to be separate from stodgy and boring life and reality. 

The trick, the spark of wisdom, the leap of faith, is to see God right there.  It is the secret of the Eucharist.  Jesus is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh – like us, pledged to the walls. 

The desert fathers and mothers teach us what the Benedictines came to call stability.  It means not running away.  It means that acedia may be temporarily relieved by a new kitchen, or a cruise around Iceland, but we will return to what we wanted to escape.  One of the ancient Greeks said, you will have a change of air but not a change of heart. 

The hardest lesson…  I am the one who has to change, here where I am, among these people I didn’t choose, in these circumstances, with all these memories and unresolved issues.  It is my ego I bring into the silence and the stillness, simply by being still and repeating the mantra I have chosen.  It is not that my ego is bad – in fact it is necessary – but it may not occupy the place that belongs to God. 

The noonday demon (2) - 15 November 2013

One of the desert fathers said: If a trial comes upon you in the place where you live, do not leave that place...  Wherever you go, you will find that what you are running from is there ahead of you.  So stay until the trial is over...

It is reinforced by another desert story:  There was a brother who had a rather turbulent temperament.  He often became angry.  So he said to himself, "I will go and live on my own.  I shall live in peace and my passions will be soothed."  He lived in a cave.  One day when he had filled his jug with water, he put it on the ground and it tipped over.  So he picked it up and filled it again -- and it tipped over.  He filled it a third time, put it down, and over it went.  He grabbed the jug and smashed it.  Then he realised that he had been tricked by the devil.  He said, "Since I have been defeated, even in solitude, I'd better go back to the monastery.  Conflict is to be met everywhere, but so is patience and so is the help of God."  So he got up and went back. 

One of the greatest spiritual secrets is as prosaic as it could possibly be.  If we keep wanting to try something else, in order to get rid of acedia, the noonday demon, we are probably out of luck.  My life is boring, or unhappy, or troublesome, or worrying – so I will go and live in Australia, or I will move to another house, or I will get out more, or I will change my partner, or I will have a course of Botox or a tummy tuck or some tattoos...  I will spend some money.  I will try another church, take multi-vitamins, hire a life coach...  Any or all of these things may be good to do. 

But the ego is remaining supreme and unchallenged, in control.  I cringe these days when yet another person tells us about their dream, this shining light on their horizon.  You must have a dream and be somehow realising your dream.  When Martin Luther King had a dream, it was about reality and the way things were.  It was about others, not himself.  Our first task is to be present in the present moment, not living in a dream.  The reality, the present, for better or for worse, is where God is.  Contemplative spirituality is a process of being present, being attentive, being true and being real, bearing pain as well as pleasure, hearing more than the noise of my own ego and all its feelings and demands.  Our prayer is just that, a matter of being present and real, to God, and to all the reality of the present. 

One desert brother was told by an elder, Go, sit in your cell, and give your body in pledge to the walls.  It is almost a ferocious metaphor of refusing to live in fantasy and dreamland, or anywhere else but the present and how it is.  Then see what happens.  Breathe deeply, be still, shut down your own noise, pay attention as God is paying attention...  Life then begins to open, attitudes start to shift and change, a way forward opens up, one step in front of the other.