Back to Basics…3 - 13 February 2015

The prayer we practise here, Christian Meditation, belongs to grown-up faith.  But this is a difficult point to talk about, because we are instinctively uncomfortable with making distinctions, let alone value judgements, between the ways different people express their faith, and we don’t sit happily with any kind of elitism or superiority.   Everyone knows some good Christian who loves animals but whose attitudes to people who are different range from fearful to ferocious.  Everyone knows some devoted Christian who prays to some strange god who miraculously finds her a parking space.  Everyone knows the moment when we asked the god of miraculous interventions to make some special rescue, to heal or to keep safe, while knowing that human peril and human mortality remained the same for everyone else on the planet. 

Grown-up faith has begun when we have grasped what both Jesus and the New Testament writers have said about fear.  Why are you afraid?...asked Jesus.  Love casts out fear, writes St John.  Fear of the future, fear of risk, fear of pain, of ageing, of dependence, of mortality…  This fear seems all very human, realistic and necessary.  A lot of it was instilled into us in our earliest years, parent recordings we call them, by those who naturally wanted to keep us from harm.  But you can’t protect people from life and death.  Life is dangerous to health.  We observe that money and lifestyle are little if any protection.  There may not be some sublime celestial plan for my life.  It may actually be up to me.  God made it and I live it.

And so, in the stillness and silence we are not building up protective walls – on the contrary, if anything, we are opening the doors.  We are not accumulating knowledge and knowhow – on the contrary, we are opening ourselves to wisdom, which is another matter, to an ever new relationship with God, to a fresh – and oddly, even a childlike, as Jesus said -- perception of Jesus and his teaching.  We are not strengthening our defences against evil or finding ways to feel better – on the contrary, we begin to recognise the joy that lies at the heart of pain, and our essential oneness with people in pain for any reason.

Contemplative prayer is a very basic Yes to God.  It is a Yes at the deepest levels we know.  It is not any kind of conditional Yes…If… or Yes…But... or Yes…And…   It is the Yes of love and finality.  Prudent legal documents have lovely Latin phrases indicating all manner of provisos and precautions.  None of that is in our prayer.  Our prayer is unconditional, because along the way we have laid aside our fears of what might happen.  Perhaps more likely, we have discovered that these fears were removed from us anyway.  It has become grown-up prayer, a prayer of freedom.