Now I see – 28 March 2014, Lent IV

This Sunday the lectionary chooses another lengthy and complex story for us --  Jesus’ healing of the blind man, and all that followed.  The man was blind from birth.  The disciples ask Jesus whose fault it is.  Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents…?  Typically we have to know who to blame.  It is very convenient for some to blame God, a tyrant and an arbitrary God who declines to stop cruel things happening.  “He didn’t deserve that… an innocent child…” reactions we constantly hear when things go wrong.  Jesus says categorically, Neither this man sinned nor his parents…  Contemplative, mature understanding does include leaving behind these infantile and idolatrous concepts of God and the world.  It does entail making peace with our own frailty, vulnerability and mortality.

The story then throws up another infantilism in the church.  The man had been healed of his congenital blindness.  That, you would think, is something to be glad about.  But in the church it is seldom so simple – and this story, scholars think, in the way it is told, reflects quite serious problems in the early Christian Jewish and Gentile communities.  People were skeptical and critical of what the man was telling them, but when they demanded to know from him, How were your eyes opened…?  who did it…?  where is he…? the man tells them all, I do not know.  People want answers, explanations, perhaps a reason to show that it’s all a hoax.  The man has not become a disciple. Better people than him have not been healed.   All he knows, he says, is that he encountered the man called Jesus, and he doesn’t know where Jesus is now.  But the fact is, he can now see.

So the Pharisees take a hand in it – and believe me, that is not good news.  What interests them is not so much wonder and gratitude that a blind man can now see, as that it had been done on the Sabbath.  That is against the rules.  The rules must be reasserted and strengthened.  And what follows is a good old-fashioned religious melt-down, an inquiry, an inquisition.  The man himself is interrogated twice, his parents are interrogated, everyone gets exasperated and the Pharisees become pompous and indignant.  It is all set in contrast by the storyteller when the man once again encounters Jesus.  Jesus had heard that he was in trouble with the church, and had come looking for him.  Jesus makes this remarkable statement:  I came into the world… so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.  It was a straight confrontation between those who are sure they see but don’t – and those who may be unsure about many things, but who in their hearts actually see and know, perhaps in irregular or disapproved ways.  That sight, that knowledge – and it is contemplative knowledge – is always humble.  Those who really see are not worshipping law and observance, they are the least likely to assume the moral high ground, they are slow to condemn, and what they are most likely to dislike is judgementalism and lack of compassion.  The eyes of your heart being opened, wrote St Paul, that you may know…  That is contemplative, mature knowledge, the knowledge of the heart.

Living water – 21 March 2014, Lent III

If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink”, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. [John 4: 10]

This complex story is the Gospel lesson for next Sunday.  Jesus is in Samaria, in transit as we would say these days, on his way back to Galilee.  At midday he asks a Samaritan woman at a well if she can give him a drink of water.  The woman is amazed, first because he has spoken to a woman in public at high noon, and also because she is a Samaritan and therefore to the Jew an outcast.  When she expresses her surprise, he enigmatically suggests that she should have asked him, and he would have given her living water – υδωρ ζως – the image is flowing, clear, sparkling, cool water, in contrast to a bucketful of doubtful water fetched up from this well. 

We find the image of living water again in chapter 7.  Jesus is in Jerusalem at the temple.  It is the Feast of Tabernacles, Succot, the harvest festival.  Jesus announces to the crowd, Come to me… and drink… Out of your heart will flow rivers of living water.  The Greek actually says, out of your belly.  I suppose the translators thought heart sounded nicer.  Belly is more earthy, it is what the writer wrote, and I prefer it. 

Rivers of living water, however, does sound a little like hyperbole. It is not the experience of most people, most of the time.  Our inward and deep response to Jesus is generally more hidden and subtle.  But teachers through the centuries have pointed to an inner place, which is there whether we know it or not.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow calls it the Spirit’s secret cell.  Thomas Keating calls it the centre.  St Paul among many refers simply to the heart.  The French Benedictine, Henri le Saux, writes of the cave of the heart.  It is there and it is a place we enter.  It is not a place we build or develop, not something we improve or decorate like our lifestyle or our state-or-the-art kitchen, even with smart spiritual methods.  It is not a place we control. 

It is there.  And the point of contemplative prayer is choosing, consenting, to go to this place, or at least to turn towards it, through all the hesitations, fears and distractions.  It is a place of presence, God’s presence and ours.  And so it is a place of truth, love, simplicity, light – and like the picture given us in the Book of Revelation, far from being static, a river runs through it.  So there is change in this place, constant renewal, God making all things new.  Living water.

This is the polar opposite of the spirituality which places me at the centre, my requirements, my helpful holy thoughts, the saccharine, self-indulgent, spiritual messages which sell popular spirituality without pain to so many today.  The cave of the heart is not accessible to my public ego or to my years of devoted service.  We leave all  that stuff outside.  It is open to me, the person God already knows and invites, and loves. 

The wind blows on Nicodemus – 14.03.2014, Lent II

Nicodemus.  This story is one of the Gospel options for this Sunday, Lent II.  It is in John’s Gospel, so we need, more than ever, wonder and imagination.  We must make a humble space in which the story can begin to speak to us anew, however well we may think we know it from the past. 

Nicodemus was a teacher of Israel.  That is what Jesus called him.  It was respectful.  Nicodemus was moreover a Pharisee.  And yet he came to Jesus by night, after dark, and called him Rabbi, which means teacher.  Two teachers, offering each other total attention.  Nicodemus brings serious questions, and it’s important to note that these questions are not traps or anything clever.  He is asking the most basic things.  Jesus teaches him two things. 

First, that we must expect and be available to be born anew – the Greek ανωθεν can mean either born anew, or born from above.  Of course Nicodemus struggles to understand.  For him it is an entirely new concept.  Born anew of water and Spirit, says Jesus.  So Jesus explains.  There is life in the flesh and there is life in the Spirit.  They are not the same.  Baptism, water, signifies the entrance into a new life of the Spirit, and the Spirit, God, continually forms and energises this new life. 

One of the commitments of Benedictine life is what we call conversatio morum – it is receiving this new life each day, each morning, each time of prayer, each encounter with God’s world.  Being born anew does not happen just once, but constantly, steadily, gradually, gently for the most part, like a metamorphosis, an emergence, perhaps through many trials along the way, but getting there, as we say.

Secondly, says Jesus to Nicodemus, there is the wind.  In Greek, πνευμα means both wind and Spirit.  As Jesus says, and as we well know, the wind blows where and when it chooses, as hard or as gently as it likes, it can blow hot or cold – neither do we know where it is going.  That’s what it is like, teaches Jesus.  Life in the Spirit is not for those who require safety or predictability or security first.  So life in the Spirit entails having come to terms with our own frailty, vulnerability, fallibility and mortality.  It flows directly from love for God and for all God has made.  It is intimately linked to freedom.  To be born of God is to rise free from convention and addiction. 

We can say that to sit, as we do, here, in silence and stillness, with only our mantra, is to sit out in the wind.  It may be a gale at times.  Or it may be a gentle zephyr or nothing much at all.  Our task is to be present.  To consent to what the Spirit does.  And still, whatever, as they say, to be still…

Temptation – 7 March 2014, Lent 1

Oscar Wilde famously said he could resist anything except temptation.  It tends to be true for a lot of people, and for most of us some of the time.  The Season of Lent usually begins with the classic story of Jesus’s temptations in the desert – this year in Matthew’s account -- and whatever we make of that event, we must be careful not to trivialize it with silliness about trite Lenten disciplines.  Lent is not about being tempted to go shopping or to eat chocolate. 

Jesus is tempted by the Devil – and we will never get this story if we leave our imaginations at home – first to turn stones into bread because he is hungry.  And Jesus replies:  We do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.  “Bread” here suggests not only food, but all material dependency and satisfaction.  It is looking for happiness by spending and consumption, deriving worth from owning, possessing, controlling, as though these things are all self-evidently good.  And Jesus says, we don’t live that way.

The second temptation invites Jesus to become a wonder, a celebrity, by jumping from the pinnacle of the temple – the angels will bear you up.  He replies with another quotation:  Do not put the Lord your God to the test.  The power which would allegedly keep him safe in such a stunt, even if it did, would be actually an abuse of power, a distortion of our proper relationship to the world.  Magic is not part of our faith, nor does it need to be.  The creation is not there to be manipulated and used for our own entertainment -- and God does not exist to keep us somehow especially safe.  That is the last thing some Christians will ever realize.

Thirdly, Jesus refuses the Devil’s invitation to fall down and worship him:  You will worship the Lord your God; you will serve only him.  Jesus refuses the temptation to illusion and falsehood, to dreamworld, fantasy land, leading inevitably to limitation, bondage and addiction.  It is too easy to consent to lies, to illusion – in the words of G K Chesterton, all that terror teaches, lies of tongue and pen, all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men.  If it is not true and free, and breathing clean air, it is not of God.  (I wrote that paragraph after watching ten minutes of the Academy Oscar movie awards.)

We come to our contemplative prayer always in the context of our world in which we live.  And that world is possessed – I use the word deliberately – by all the factors which assailed Jesus in the desert.  There is the desperate need to find happiness in owning and consuming.  There is the reluctance to see ourselves for what we are, frail and mortal, in T S Eliot’s words, susceptible to nervous shock.  Our culture turns readily to illusion, to diversions, to drugs, mindless pursuits, to feel better or safe.  We come from a world seething with lies and half-truths, deceit and violence. 

My point is that we are not exempt from any of this, because these are things we hear and read, and which we brush against over the years in the lives of our families and friends.  The seeds of some of it may linger within our own selves.  All of this, or its possibility, drapes around us when we come to be still and silent.  And it is into that confusion, along with all the good and positive factors, that we introduce the gentle rhythm of the mantra, the word or phrase we have chosen, which draws our attention to the centre, to God, who is always paying attention.