One of the promises a Benedictine Oblate makes is the one we call the vow of Stability. I think it originally meant mainly that a monk or a nun did not go flitting around from one monastery to another in order to get a better abbot or a better bed, or a better cook. Whatever else stability meant, it certainly meant that the monk or the nun was committed to one monastery for better or for worse, and the Holy Rule was the structure within which they lived there peaceably and without grumbling. Benedict was very much against grumbling.
But we don’t live in monasteries. Stability, whether we live in a monastery or not, comes to have a very much richer meaning. We tend not to live in one place, even in our senior years, and life is a journey. Everything is mobile now. Even the elderly and the dependent may have to move. So the analogy of the pilgrim very much applies. It becomes important to life and faith that we know when and how to change -- whether it is our way of doing something, our opinions, our attitudes. We move along the road and the scenery here and the challenges and the truth we apprehend are not the same as they were last week.
So Stability is deeper. There is a part of us which, somewhere along the way, has made some choices. My Scottish grandmother, who must have been quite a girl in her day but now was old and feeble, told her son, “I didn’t leave it until now to get my roof properly thatched.”
I can’t say strongly enough that this place of stability is not any hidden form of dogmatism or bigotry. But unless there is a centre which has become still, settled, and I would say deeply loving and grateful, then no matter what our expressed opinion and actions are, out in the world and on the road, we may be what St Paul calls sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.
Stability is a function of Christian maturity -- not so much a function of age, as of the factors and experiences along the way and down the years that made us more humble and more loving, and most important of all, less afraid. In the discipline and stillness of Christian Meditation we simply come closer to that place where God’s Spirit can make these changes in us. Wisdom turns out to be not the sum of everything we know, but the stillness and simplicity that opens our hearts to wonder and goodness, enables us to bear pain including the pain of others, and always helps us to be unafraid of the truth.
16 December 2011
09 December 2011
How come Advent is turning me into a grumpy old man? - 9 December 2011
How come Advent is turning me into a grumpy old man? Advent is one of the two great so-called penitential seasons of the Christian Year. Advent is not Christmas, a point which is either not believed or widely ignored. But its proximity to Christmas, at any rate in our culture, destroys its special meaning and beauty, and its importance. And so now this time of the year gets to be all about food. We have multiple eating events. We prematurely sing Christmas carols all over the place. But never mind... I turn on the secular Radio NZ Concert Programme last Sunday morning and get the most sublime true Advent music, including the mighty Bach Advent chorale Wachet Auf... So I felt better.
Penitential does not mean we become grim and put on sackcloth and ashes. Penitential may be actually the wrong word. Archbishop Rowan Williams suggests there are two things we can do in Advent. The first is to pay attention to the enormous hunger for God, for meaning, for some word of assurance, that utterly pervades our secular culture. This hunger emerges in a thousand ways, some of them perverse, in our literature, our entertainment, our uses of leisure, our art, in our illnesses and mental health, in our social pathology... In Advent our discipline can be to recognise this hunger, in ourselves and all around us, these longings, the appalling moral anxiousness of our age -- just as the Jews long ago waited and yearned for what they called salvation, a messiah, a meaning for all their pain.
Secondly, says Rowan Williams, Advent may be when we take inventory of our idols. We will be surprised at what they actually are. One of the colourful ancient prophesies says: In that day we shall cast our idols of silver and our idols of gold, which we made each one for ourselves to worship, to the moles and to the bats (Isaiah 2:20). Advent is when contemplatives make sure that we know how easily we domesticate God to some idol reflecting ourselves and what we want. So Advent is when in a way we become Jews again, in obedience to the First and Second Commandments.
The God who comes may not be the God we expect -- and yet, in our stillness and silence we dare to hope for what one theologian calls a God of total and presuppositionless love. “Watch and pray”, signed off one pious friend in his Christmas email to me. Well, he is right. And we emerge from Advent with a clearer sense of what can be consigned to the moles and the bats.
Penitential does not mean we become grim and put on sackcloth and ashes. Penitential may be actually the wrong word. Archbishop Rowan Williams suggests there are two things we can do in Advent. The first is to pay attention to the enormous hunger for God, for meaning, for some word of assurance, that utterly pervades our secular culture. This hunger emerges in a thousand ways, some of them perverse, in our literature, our entertainment, our uses of leisure, our art, in our illnesses and mental health, in our social pathology... In Advent our discipline can be to recognise this hunger, in ourselves and all around us, these longings, the appalling moral anxiousness of our age -- just as the Jews long ago waited and yearned for what they called salvation, a messiah, a meaning for all their pain.
Secondly, says Rowan Williams, Advent may be when we take inventory of our idols. We will be surprised at what they actually are. One of the colourful ancient prophesies says: In that day we shall cast our idols of silver and our idols of gold, which we made each one for ourselves to worship, to the moles and to the bats (Isaiah 2:20). Advent is when contemplatives make sure that we know how easily we domesticate God to some idol reflecting ourselves and what we want. So Advent is when in a way we become Jews again, in obedience to the First and Second Commandments.
The God who comes may not be the God we expect -- and yet, in our stillness and silence we dare to hope for what one theologian calls a God of total and presuppositionless love. “Watch and pray”, signed off one pious friend in his Christmas email to me. Well, he is right. And we emerge from Advent with a clearer sense of what can be consigned to the moles and the bats.
02 December 2011
It’s not about me - 2 December 2011
St Paul has these tantalising sayings about life and death -- sayings we probably know about from hearing them in church, but have never quite come to terms with: ...as dying, and see, we are alive! It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And I can certainly remember as a youth being puzzled about some of these things -- Paul actually says in one letter that he would prefer to die, but for the present he seems expected to continue living.
The journey a contemplative person is on is very much a matter of confronting the personal issues which may make us afraid of death, afraid of any signals of losing personal control of things or events. In meditation, to relinquish our illusion of ordering of our universe, even just for 20 or 25 minutes, is immediately to confront some of our fears. Mercifully, the hidden secret which we eventually discover is that what we can scarcely do ourselves starts to get done in us anyway, as we find the grace to be still and consent. This is why stillness matters -- our only tasks right now are to be still, physically and mentally, and say our word.
It makes the time of silence both easy (because all we have to do is say our mantra), and hard (because the door now opens a chink to the distant protest of our inner demons). And the best teaching I know remains the same -- just say your word. Be still, be silent, consent to the presence of God.
We have 25 minutes without our defences actually up there in front of us. In a group this is good because we are all doing much the same. Each time of meditation is an announcement to ourselves that one day, and we really don’t know when, this is going to happen anyway.
You may remember Jesus’s story about the man who had too many possessions, and so he went away sorrowful. We are not going away sorrowful because we are refusing in this time to be defined by our image, or our lifestyle, or our possessions, our achievements, our reputation. These things are not bad. But we are preferring to be named and defined by God and by the truth. The truth requires humility and consent, and the best we can do about that is to be still and silent.
The journey a contemplative person is on is very much a matter of confronting the personal issues which may make us afraid of death, afraid of any signals of losing personal control of things or events. In meditation, to relinquish our illusion of ordering of our universe, even just for 20 or 25 minutes, is immediately to confront some of our fears. Mercifully, the hidden secret which we eventually discover is that what we can scarcely do ourselves starts to get done in us anyway, as we find the grace to be still and consent. This is why stillness matters -- our only tasks right now are to be still, physically and mentally, and say our word.
It makes the time of silence both easy (because all we have to do is say our mantra), and hard (because the door now opens a chink to the distant protest of our inner demons). And the best teaching I know remains the same -- just say your word. Be still, be silent, consent to the presence of God.
We have 25 minutes without our defences actually up there in front of us. In a group this is good because we are all doing much the same. Each time of meditation is an announcement to ourselves that one day, and we really don’t know when, this is going to happen anyway.
You may remember Jesus’s story about the man who had too many possessions, and so he went away sorrowful. We are not going away sorrowful because we are refusing in this time to be defined by our image, or our lifestyle, or our possessions, our achievements, our reputation. These things are not bad. But we are preferring to be named and defined by God and by the truth. The truth requires humility and consent, and the best we can do about that is to be still and silent.
25 November 2011
Attention, the essence of contemplation - 25.11.2011
Attention is the essence of contemplation. Paying attention. Attention, says one dictionary definition, is the cognitive process of paying attention to one aspect of the environment while ignoring others. So it is deliberately selective -- we are choosing to pay attention somewhere and not elsewhere, during the time of prayer. The mantra is intended to assist us in this, because left to ourselves our monkey minds are all over the place.
Of course in other parts of our life, being able to attend to fifteen things at once is widely admired. This is now called multi-tasking. People add it to their CVs. Others of us, usually male I understand, are more or less unable to multi-task. And that I imagine explains why I am not CEO of Air New Zealand or Archbishop of Canterbury. I am generally unable to do more than one thing at a time. Well, while it may indeed be admirable to multi-task, in contemplative prayer and life what matters is that we learn how to focus attention to the present moment and to God’s presence. God is paying attention to us. This is a discipline that needs to be practised and developed.
Another thing we hear a lot about is attention span. Commercial advertisers seem to be of the opinion that we have very limited attention spans, and so they have to speak to us in rapid sound bites and suchlike. A lot of people have an extremely low boredom threshold. Suddenly, very soon, they need to be entertained in some way. In contemplative prayer and life we work on our attention span. We set aside times for prayer in silence and stillness, and sometimes these can be quite demanding. During these times we are awake and alert and paying attention.
The ability to pay attention starts to spill over into the rest of life. We begin to find that it is possible and important to be able to give someone else our undivided attention -- this is a gift, often a healing gift, which we can both receive and give. Total attention... I remember seeing one teaching monk, who was in great demand at a crowded meeting, and getting pecked to death by devotees -- but he was giving his undivided attention to one person who had asked, and he would not be diverted. It was an object lesson for me, lest I be one of those ministers with shallow automatic responses to people, their eyes always flickering around elsewhere in the room in case there is something they are missing. The development of the gift of attention spills over in all sorts of ways -- it may also produce a growing impatience with shallowness and triviality.
Of course in other parts of our life, being able to attend to fifteen things at once is widely admired. This is now called multi-tasking. People add it to their CVs. Others of us, usually male I understand, are more or less unable to multi-task. And that I imagine explains why I am not CEO of Air New Zealand or Archbishop of Canterbury. I am generally unable to do more than one thing at a time. Well, while it may indeed be admirable to multi-task, in contemplative prayer and life what matters is that we learn how to focus attention to the present moment and to God’s presence. God is paying attention to us. This is a discipline that needs to be practised and developed.
Another thing we hear a lot about is attention span. Commercial advertisers seem to be of the opinion that we have very limited attention spans, and so they have to speak to us in rapid sound bites and suchlike. A lot of people have an extremely low boredom threshold. Suddenly, very soon, they need to be entertained in some way. In contemplative prayer and life we work on our attention span. We set aside times for prayer in silence and stillness, and sometimes these can be quite demanding. During these times we are awake and alert and paying attention.
The ability to pay attention starts to spill over into the rest of life. We begin to find that it is possible and important to be able to give someone else our undivided attention -- this is a gift, often a healing gift, which we can both receive and give. Total attention... I remember seeing one teaching monk, who was in great demand at a crowded meeting, and getting pecked to death by devotees -- but he was giving his undivided attention to one person who had asked, and he would not be diverted. It was an object lesson for me, lest I be one of those ministers with shallow automatic responses to people, their eyes always flickering around elsewhere in the room in case there is something they are missing. The development of the gift of attention spills over in all sorts of ways -- it may also produce a growing impatience with shallowness and triviality.
18 November 2011
Blessed are the poor - 18 November 2011
In an article in the Tablet, Fr Laurence Freeman introduces us to Dr Pierre. Dr Pierre is co-ordinator of all the meditation groups in the Caribbean nation of Haiti. He is also a very bright doctor who is medical director of the one major hospital not demolished in the recent devastating earthquake. Although it was not that kind of hospital, Dr Pierre was obliged to take in a lot of patients with spinal cord injuries, and then set about getting the proper staff and equipment for them.
Eventually, also, he started a Christian Meditation group with these patients. In his spare time -- in his case a concept hard to understand -- he provides assistance and encouragement for Christian Meditation groups all over that ravaged land. Most of these are poverty-stricken people in a land of tragedy, endemic corruption, and exploitation. And yet, interestingly, suicide in Haiti is virtually unknown -- almost as though it is more a disease of affluence.
I don’t know how you teach Christian Meditation to desperately poor people. Perhaps you would need to be one yourself, as Jesus was. And yet, there is a sense in which contemplative life and prayer makes us all poor. Blessed are you poor, taught Jesus. Meditation introduces us to the poverty which is a gift for us to receive at levels deeper than all the knowledge and achievement, and of course all the outward show. This poverty is not anything bad or reprehensible. It is not a problem. When I am poor, wrote St Paul, then I am rich. Empty hands and a receptive heart are the necessary ground for love and grace.
Fr Laurence reminds us that prayer is more than consolation or relief from misery or anxiety. You can teach Christian Meditation to the poor precisely because it is a political act. It introduces people to a new personal dignity, it clears the mind, purifies the heart and releases wisdom and compassion. And so Dr Pierre adds to his medical skills the wisdom to teach not only the poor, but also men, women and children in long, probably partial recovery from spinal injury, to be still and silent. Who knows what healing this facilitates -- in the brain and spinal cord, or in the psyche, in the memories, the relationships, the courage to hope… and most certainly in the fears we have.
Eventually, also, he started a Christian Meditation group with these patients. In his spare time -- in his case a concept hard to understand -- he provides assistance and encouragement for Christian Meditation groups all over that ravaged land. Most of these are poverty-stricken people in a land of tragedy, endemic corruption, and exploitation. And yet, interestingly, suicide in Haiti is virtually unknown -- almost as though it is more a disease of affluence.
I don’t know how you teach Christian Meditation to desperately poor people. Perhaps you would need to be one yourself, as Jesus was. And yet, there is a sense in which contemplative life and prayer makes us all poor. Blessed are you poor, taught Jesus. Meditation introduces us to the poverty which is a gift for us to receive at levels deeper than all the knowledge and achievement, and of course all the outward show. This poverty is not anything bad or reprehensible. It is not a problem. When I am poor, wrote St Paul, then I am rich. Empty hands and a receptive heart are the necessary ground for love and grace.
Fr Laurence reminds us that prayer is more than consolation or relief from misery or anxiety. You can teach Christian Meditation to the poor precisely because it is a political act. It introduces people to a new personal dignity, it clears the mind, purifies the heart and releases wisdom and compassion. And so Dr Pierre adds to his medical skills the wisdom to teach not only the poor, but also men, women and children in long, probably partial recovery from spinal injury, to be still and silent. Who knows what healing this facilitates -- in the brain and spinal cord, or in the psyche, in the memories, the relationships, the courage to hope… and most certainly in the fears we have.
11 November 2011
The opposite of love - 11 November 2011
One of the major steps on our journey is the discovery that the opposite of love is not hate, but fear. There is no fear in love, we read in the First Letter of John, but perfect love casts out fear. In a way, this is not what we expect. Love and hate seem to be opposites. But in fact, psychologically and one might think perversely, love and hate can be quite closely related.
It is the miracle of love, the sudden, surprising security of love, that gets rid of our fear of God. You can’t read great literature -- Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dickens -- without becoming aware of the primal fear of God that much religion seems always to have engendered, fear of what God might do. It infects so much of the human story. Music such as sections of the Mozart Requiem depicts terror of a just and implacable God - Dies Irae, Day of Wrath... So many people assume that adversity must be some kind of punishment, deserved or undeserved. If it is undeserved, then God is a tyrant indeed to be feared. To counter such superstition St Augustine wrote: Fear is a suffering that oppresses us. But look at the immensity of love. We actually don’t have to be afraid.
All tyranny thrives on fear. Religious tyranny is no exception. Of course we do have a built-in fear mechanism, reflexes that are necessary to our survival -- I am not talking about that. It is our sometimes subconscious recognition of danger, leading to fear and flight. That much is simply the provision of a good Creator. The fear I am referring to, which is the opposite of love, is something altogether corroding and debilitating. It stops love, because love is always by its nature vulnerable. This fear causes you to be forever trying futilely to eliminate risk, to protect people from the perilous world and from nasty realities. In Coronation Street the children are immediately, by reflex, told lies and sent upstairs, by adults themselves afraid of the truth. Fear becomes the default position, and then love becomes impossible -- only relationships that masquerade as love are possible.
Silence and stillness are necessary while we discover how to be open to God who is unconditionally loving. Each time of prayer for a contemplative is an act of faith, because we are setting aside our normal defences and risk-limitation strategies, in order to sit still and receptive where God is, in our hearts. And as we keep on saying, if we need to assess or review our meditation -- what are we getting out of it? -- we need to ask ourselves, are we becoming more loving -- that is, less afraid?
It is the miracle of love, the sudden, surprising security of love, that gets rid of our fear of God. You can’t read great literature -- Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dickens -- without becoming aware of the primal fear of God that much religion seems always to have engendered, fear of what God might do. It infects so much of the human story. Music such as sections of the Mozart Requiem depicts terror of a just and implacable God - Dies Irae, Day of Wrath... So many people assume that adversity must be some kind of punishment, deserved or undeserved. If it is undeserved, then God is a tyrant indeed to be feared. To counter such superstition St Augustine wrote: Fear is a suffering that oppresses us. But look at the immensity of love. We actually don’t have to be afraid.
All tyranny thrives on fear. Religious tyranny is no exception. Of course we do have a built-in fear mechanism, reflexes that are necessary to our survival -- I am not talking about that. It is our sometimes subconscious recognition of danger, leading to fear and flight. That much is simply the provision of a good Creator. The fear I am referring to, which is the opposite of love, is something altogether corroding and debilitating. It stops love, because love is always by its nature vulnerable. This fear causes you to be forever trying futilely to eliminate risk, to protect people from the perilous world and from nasty realities. In Coronation Street the children are immediately, by reflex, told lies and sent upstairs, by adults themselves afraid of the truth. Fear becomes the default position, and then love becomes impossible -- only relationships that masquerade as love are possible.
Silence and stillness are necessary while we discover how to be open to God who is unconditionally loving. Each time of prayer for a contemplative is an act of faith, because we are setting aside our normal defences and risk-limitation strategies, in order to sit still and receptive where God is, in our hearts. And as we keep on saying, if we need to assess or review our meditation -- what are we getting out of it? -- we need to ask ourselves, are we becoming more loving -- that is, less afraid?
04 November 2011
Being in the world differently - 4 November 2011
One of the important contemplative teachers of our day is the American Benedictine nun, Sister Joan Chittister. A lot of the art of teaching, it seems to me, is being able to say the simplest truths in a fresh and simple way. So it is that Sr Joan Chittister writes: The contemplative life is about becoming more contemplative all the time. It is about being in the world differently.
And so, if what we want or expect from faith in God, from loyal and busy attendance at church -- and I have to say, for many people, from simply being good -- is stability, a reduction of change in our lives, protection from adversity and pain, then as contemplatives we are seriously out of luck.
Paying attention to God does mean change. It is a life of being in the world differently. It becomes increasingly difficult to live superficially. We start seeing things we may not have seen before. We find we can pay attention more to aspects of things we hitherto didn’t want to know about. But basically, we ourselves are changing, even at our great age. Sr Joan puts it this way: What needs to be changed in us? Anything that deludes us into thinking that we are not simply a work in progress, all of whose degrees, status, achievements, and power are no substitute for the wisdom that a world full of God everywhere, in everyone, has to teach us.
This is a kind of freedom, you see. Personal change, whether it is merely in the ways we do things or react, or whether it is much deeper, in the thoughts and fears we may reveal to no one, is always the result of discovering we are free to change. We may have thought we weren't. We are not locked into any determination of our background, or upbringing, or past sorrows, or beliefs we were taught. God’s spirit is working in us at the level of our fears, including our fears of mortality and not being here any more.
And so, to be contemplative is to be a work in progress, as Sr Joan puts it. As our fears about that reduce, our surprise quotient reduces also -- there may be things we intensely dislike, but we are no longer so surprised, horrified, aghast, threatened, because we are free to be still and because we are understanding better. It is a kind of wisdom, as Sr Joan says. I tend to be amused when people quote St Teresa’s most famous statement, that all will be well and every manner of thing will be well. It demands the Tui Beer response: Yeah, right. But St Teresa was speaking from her personal inner freedom. She wasn’t afraid any more.
And so, if what we want or expect from faith in God, from loyal and busy attendance at church -- and I have to say, for many people, from simply being good -- is stability, a reduction of change in our lives, protection from adversity and pain, then as contemplatives we are seriously out of luck.
Paying attention to God does mean change. It is a life of being in the world differently. It becomes increasingly difficult to live superficially. We start seeing things we may not have seen before. We find we can pay attention more to aspects of things we hitherto didn’t want to know about. But basically, we ourselves are changing, even at our great age. Sr Joan puts it this way: What needs to be changed in us? Anything that deludes us into thinking that we are not simply a work in progress, all of whose degrees, status, achievements, and power are no substitute for the wisdom that a world full of God everywhere, in everyone, has to teach us.
This is a kind of freedom, you see. Personal change, whether it is merely in the ways we do things or react, or whether it is much deeper, in the thoughts and fears we may reveal to no one, is always the result of discovering we are free to change. We may have thought we weren't. We are not locked into any determination of our background, or upbringing, or past sorrows, or beliefs we were taught. God’s spirit is working in us at the level of our fears, including our fears of mortality and not being here any more.
And so, to be contemplative is to be a work in progress, as Sr Joan puts it. As our fears about that reduce, our surprise quotient reduces also -- there may be things we intensely dislike, but we are no longer so surprised, horrified, aghast, threatened, because we are free to be still and because we are understanding better. It is a kind of wisdom, as Sr Joan says. I tend to be amused when people quote St Teresa’s most famous statement, that all will be well and every manner of thing will be well. It demands the Tui Beer response: Yeah, right. But St Teresa was speaking from her personal inner freedom. She wasn’t afraid any more.
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