Resuming is a rhythm we find ourselves quite
regularly practising in the contemplative life.
And this reminder itself bears repetition. In the classic story, when some tourist asks a
monk, But what do you do there all
day? The monk replies, Well, we fall down and get up again, and
fall down and get up again… Just
like life. Another year happens, so we
resume, after a bit of a breather. The
prodigal son gets home again after all his disasters, and he resumes , older
and wiser, one would think, humbler and better.
I am certainly older in 2014… humbler and better or wiser is as maybe. But we resume.
Another important repetitive teaching we have
is what Rowan Williams and many others have stressed – that for the most part real
faith is not heroic or dramatic or exciting.
Prosaic was the word Rowan Williams chose. Ordinariness.
Faith is usually, in practice, a matter of simply deciding to take the
next step, to put one foot in front of the other, when often the outcome and
the risks are unclear. That is where the pentecostalists and suchlike
get it all wrong. It is what you decide
within yourself. Doing something
dramatic but mindless is not faith, any more than the opposite, being paralysed
in indecision because we don’t know for sure what’s right. Receiving direct spiritual inspiration and
waving arms around is not faith, however impressive it may seem and therapeutic
it may feel.
Faith is being present in the present moment. Faith is knowing how to live with the unanswered
questions and great mysteries. Faith is
being able to distance oneself from the insatiable demands of the ego. Faith is what I discover within me, day by
day, quietly but surely, put there by God.
And so each day we resume faith. That is what we do at any new beginning, such
as getting up in the morning. We resume.
Jesus meets us at this point. After an interim, after a sorrow, after a
lapse, after a rebellion, after a false love, a failed hope, a disappointment, even
simply a distraction in our meditation, he is there, waiting on the beach,
cooking fish [1]–
was there ever, in all of spiritual literature, such an image? Then we resume, one step in front of the
other. He sent them on their way.
But what will we do if there is no more
excitement in the faith than that? What
we will do is continue our discipline of silence and stillness. It has
the same rhythm as life. We are
distracted, and we resume. You could
even say that meditation is a way of practising resuming. It has the same prosaic features. We are not looking for excitement or to be
entertained, or for dramatic outcomes – we can find plenty of all that
elsewhere. The church has committees
planning such things. In Christian
Meditation it is one step in front of the other, in simplicity, in stillness,
in silence – and often as not, in solitude.
In the distance, it may seem, Jesus is on the beach.
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