The peacemakers – 22 March 2013

The peacemakers, says Jesus, will be called children of God.  This comes pretty well at the end of the Beatitudes, perhaps because real peacemaking has certain pre-requisites already mentioned – such as purity of heart, poverty of spirit, humility and meekness, hunger and thirst for righteousness – all part of the job description of a peacemaker.  These days we have professional mediators, reconcilers, people who conduct family group conferences, conflict resolution and such things.  It’s an art and a study in itself, and people become qualified and experienced.  To bring warring parties together, to institute constructive dialogue, to clarify the issues between people, to create a climate in which people may start listening to each other, to find hitherto hidden pathways of understanding and trust…  All of that seems to me to be our culture and society at its best.  It is a very noble ministry.

Other forces in our culture resist any suggestion of peacemaking.  Enemies are enemies.  Injuries in the past remain so, until they are acknowledged and paid for, and even long after that, and we do not forget.  The proper outcome of injury is punishment, and the proper response to pain is pain – the one biblical quote many people know is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, because of its primitive logical simplicity and its rhythmic resonance – never mind that Jesus specifically abrogated it.

Jesus sees peacemaking as a Godlike privilege and duty.  Peacemakers are children of God, because they are like God.  Jesus was a Jew, and peace in his language and culture is shalom, which is a much wider concept than simply the cessation of hostilities.  Shalom is more than the TV turned off and the shouting, punching and knifing stopped.  In Hebrew it can also mean health, well-being, a sense of prevailing justice and rightness, right relationships.  Peacemakers are shalom-makers.   To do that, they need shalom in their own hearts and relationships.  They need to have found out what to do with their own anger, hatred and resentment, and all the poison of the past.  Gandhi was one day visited by an utterly distraught Hindu man who said his wife and children had been wiped out in a Moslem attack.  There was no way he could do what Gandhi taught, to love and seek peace.  Gandhi said:  I know a way.  Find an orphaned Moslem child and raise that child under your own roof – as a Moslem. 

I would guess that each of us knows at least one family where feuds and resentments persist from year to year if not from one generation to the next.  Most of that may have become irrational and not accessible by discussion and negotiation.  But those of us who are friends with silence and stillness know at least where the springs of peace are.  Our own hearts are open to be moved and changed.  We are peacemakers in our own families and clans, simply by the fact that we do not have enemies, we do not harbor resentments or have any desire to see others suffer even what they may deserve.  It has become impossible for us to live that way, if we ever did. 

Pure in heart – 15 March 2013

Pure in heart…  Jesus said, Blessed are the pure in heart, they will see God.  “Pure in heart…”  I increasingly dislike and distrust definitions, most of all in the teachings of spirituality.  Definitions may give us an illusion of understanding, when really all we have is a neat set of words.  However, years ago, back in the days when I thought it all ought to be really pretty simple if only I could find the right book, I came across a description of purity of heart by the Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard:  Purity of heart, he said, is to will one thing.  Purity of heart is not about moral virtue.

Jesus had purity of heart.   He saw one reality, which was not his own needs, or safety, or reputation, or power – he willed his Father’s will, a love and a freedom deeper and more wonderful than these things.  Contemplative teaching says that in disciplines of stillness and silence we find we are increasingly able to lay aside the fluttering, wavering dividedness of much of our lives, our various controlling agendas, and begin to share in Jesus’s purity of heart.  And so it is that contemplative people come to be acquainted with important concepts for the journey such as attention, mindfulness, being present to others, to oneself and to God. 

All this is at the level of our hearts.   It is not some set of instructions or beliefs we have to work through.  Our prayer is already drawing each scattered or divided heart into more and more of a unity.  When you think about it, this is an amazing grace to receive, especially in our more mature years, when we might have thought we were now more fixed and settled in our attitudes.

 We start to become acquainted with what one English mystical writer called Unknowing.  Unknowing is a fascinating reality of mature years, for those who are not afraid of it.  That writer, whose name we don’t know, describes it as a cloud.  It is in no sense a menacing cloud – and through it, he or she says, we send little darts of longing love of God and our love of all that God has made and loves. 

Blessed are the pure in heart, says Jesus, they will see God.  St Paul writes about the eyes of your heart being open, that you may know… [Eph 1:18]  Perhaps this is a central truth of all Christian prayer and spirituality – it is with the eyes of the heart that the pure in heart come to see and understand. 

The merciful in our midst – 8 March 2013

Jesus said, Blessed are the merciful.  John Knox, the formidable reformer of the Scottish church, as long ago as 1564, wrote a liturgy for the reception back into the congregation of a forgiven offender.  I am not aware that any branch of the Christian Church in NZ these days has such a liturgy.  In it, Knox wrote this sentence:  No flesh can be justified before God’s presence, if judgement proceed without mercy.

Our culture, which includes our churches, has become very good at judgement.  The Sensible Sentencing Trust lights the way for many these days.  It is considered best when people have been publicly humiliated, named and shamed.  Some have indeed committed hideous crimes and are a danger to us all, some have cynically betrayed trust.  There is often no question about whether punishment is deserved – it usually is – but we still get much debate about whether the punishment will be sufficient, whether the culprit has been made to suffer enough…  I do know that penology is a deeply complex matter.  Society’s need to see an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is usually considered superior to the plain teachings of Jesus.

But John Knox, himself in the midst of a singularly brutal age, 450 years ago, reminds his church that Jesus requires mercy.  Mercy is that we cannot pass judgement if we don’t deeply understand what happened and why.  Mercy is that the one judgement we cannot pass anyway is to write someone off.  Mercy is that we bear in mind at all times, as Knox put it in his liturgy: what nature we bear, what corruption lurketh in it, how prone and ready every one of us is to such and greater impiety.   In John’s Gospel Jesus, it is told, confronted with a publicly humiliated woman caught in adultery (note the absence of any guilty bloke at this point), said that any of her accusers without sin might throw the first stone.

Mercy is what God requires.  It is God’s nature, and true prayer will always direct our journey more towards what God is and what God creates in us.  The silence and stillness of our prayer bring us into that space where, as we inwardly consent, mercy begins to take precedence over the poison that may remain in our memories, and the need to see someone suffer...  That someone, sometimes, may be ourselves.  This is why the Psalms of imprecation are so important, in all their unpleasantness.  They are real.  They are prayers of the hearts of many.  They come from real events.  And they may be dissolved in mercy, so that we do not live the rest of our lives in anger or resentment. 

Jesus said:  Blessed are the merciful, they will receive mercy.  Perhaps it means that God recognises them as kindred souls.  I have quoted John Knox.  Another famous Presbyterian, Robert Burns, wrote:

What’s done, we partly may compute,

But know not what’s resisted.

Being Righteous – 1 March 2013

Righteous is a word which may tend to set our teeth on edge, perhaps because we associate it with self-righteous – and righteousness with self-righteousness.  But Jesus says in the Beatitudes, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…

Well, the first thing to say is that it is nothing to do with the aberration common among both religious and non-religious people, which we label self-righteousness.  Self-righteousness is simply an unfortunate and unpleasant mistake.  No doubt any of us can be guilty of it at times.  Jesus could get very angry with the self-righteous of Israel, some of the scribes and pharisees and saducees.  They were, he said, in not exactly career-enhancing words, whited sepulchers and a brood of vipers.

In Hebrew and in the Aramaic which Jesus spoke, the word is tsaddiq, and it is not so much a word as a concept.  Justice and right relationships, just dealing and just decisions, are all part of it, but so are the obligations to care for the widow, the orphan and the stranger.  The word expresses the nature of God, and it expresses what God requires.  It also goes with a healthy appreciation of our own history and frailty – You were slaves in the land of Egypt…  But it is not some lofty ideal.  It is an obligation and a discipline.  And Jesus teaches his disciples:  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…  One modern translation puts it:  Happy are those who hunger and thirst to see right prevail.

In the silence and stillness of contemplative prayer, what is being dealt with and changed is our hearts, and our stillness is our consent to this.  The hunger and thirst of our hearts comes to be more about righteousness.  This does not mean our own moral performance, however much that might need to be spruced up.  It means our sharing of God’s righteousness, God’s indignation at injustice, God’s care for the widow, the orphan and the stranger.  Jesus proclaims beatitudes, and the meaning emerges if we look at the scriptures Jesus knew well, for instance in Deuteronomy -- Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice.  All the people shall say, ‘Amen!’

We all hunger and thirst for something – indeed, what we actually hunger and thirst for defines us as persons.  Some people hunger and thirst for lifestyle, or for wealth, or for personal happiness – some for sport, or for fame – some people hunger and thirst for vengeance, retribution…  Other people hunger and thirst simply for sobriety – but not yet.  There are millions who hunger and thirst merely to be able to make a living and live with dignity.  All this is what Jesus meant when he said, Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.  What if, as Meister Eckhart taught, what we long for is actually what God longs for in us?  Think about it.  Eckhart actually said, The eye with which you see God is the eye with which God sees you.  God reciprocates our yearning, we reciprocate God’s yearning.  This is the process of righteousness, and of our hunger and thirsting.