Seventy times seven – 29 June 2012

A brother in Scete happened to commit a fault, and the elders assembled, and sent for Abba Moses to join them. He, however, did not want to come. The priest sent him a message, saying: Come, the community of the brethren is waiting for you. So he arose and started off. And taking with him a very old basket full of holes, he filled it with sand, and carried it behind him. The elders came out to meet him and said, What is this, Father? The elder replied: My sins are running out behind me, and I do not see them, and today I come to judge the sins of another! They, hearing this, said nothing to the brother but pardoned him.

That is one of the most famous of all the desert stories. The desert brothers and sisters, in other words, did not gather outside the courthouse to scream and jeer at some convicted criminal, or to inform the media that the sentence is a joke and they have lost faith in the justice system. Abba Moses did not want to see someone suffer, whatever he may have done. Neither did he want to lose sight of the fact that the church is the company of the wounded, fallible and fragile. He knew that a sinful act did not make anyone radically different. Forgiveness is a hot issue. It evokes all manner of reactions. Everyone, I would say without exception if they think about it, has some reason to forgive and to be forgiving. Every time we go to church we pray, Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. This is incomprehensible to much of the secular world, except to those who have discovered the practical fact that nothing is gained if the road ahead is to be vengeful, full of bitterness and recrimination. To more and more people, justice has come to mean punishment. To more and more contemplatives, punishment, restriction, public humiliation, labelling, rendering someone powerless and placarded as worthless, could scarcely be more contrary to the way of Christ. But before we tackle those huge issues in social ethics, we have first to consult what is going on in our own hearts. There is a need to be still and silent, with all our own memories and anger, disappointments and failures, abandoned hopes, our fears about the past and the future – all of this – along with all that is good... Not to think about it, let alone try to puzzle it out, but simply to let it all down while we remain still. We are the ones who have to change. As Jesus put it, Abide in my love.

Paying attention – 22 June 2012

Prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.

That was written by the extraordinary young French contemplative who died of starvation during World War II, Simone Weil. Attention is an elusive concept. We know it when we experience it, or are given the grace of attention. But you won’t find contemplatives trying to define it. Perhaps it is very close to what Jesus meant when he talked about being awake. I think myself it has something also to do with what Jesus in the Beatitudes called purity of heart. Purity of heart, said Kierkegaard (I think) is to will one thing. Simone Weil makes two important points about attention. She says that attention is a gift, a grace we begin to receive once we are still and silent, and consenting to God. We don’t generate attention, she writes, by contracting the muscles, gritting the teeth, fighting to shut out all the distractions. We do what we can to be still and focused – and on some days, as we know, that isn’t much – and then we wait. That’s it. We say our word, our mantra, gently and regularly, returning to it whenever we find we have roamed off somewhere… and we wait, paying attention. You sometimes hear contemplative prayer described as “restful”, or “blissful”. It may indeed be that, or it may not. But it is important to be warned of what the ancient teachers came to call the pax perniciosa, the false peace, turning prayer into a cosy comfortable reverie. We must stay awake, says Jesus. Simone Weil also says that attention is availability. Paying attention to God is equally paying attention to our neighbour. This in practice is love. Simone Weil again: The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him/her, “What are you going through?” I would add that the love of God means saying Yes to God. So of course it requires being awake, being fully present in the present moment, gathering together our scattered wits and putting them at peace for 20 or 30 minutes while we pay attention.

Minds being remade – 15 June 2012

Adapt yourselves no longer to the pattern of this present world, but let your minds be remade and your whole nature thus transformed. St Paul writes that to the Christians at Rome. We tend to be a little cynical about our minds being remade – ambivalently, perhaps, because we may feel reasonably comfortable the way we are after all these years; perhaps because we doubt whether much change is possible anyway; and perhaps because we assume our opinions and reactions are kind of set, like jellied beetroot, and that’s just us. Well it’s not just us. It’s the ego, and the ego is only part of us. It is an important part of us, and it is not our enemy. But it is never the truth about us. But the ego unfortunately tends to think it is the whole of us. It is the self that has been formed over the years through all our experiences of acceptance and rejection, joy and pain, the need to survive, the need to appear well to others. St Paul writes about your whole nature being transformed. It starts with the willingness, the consent. And this is the essence of contemplative prayer and life, the constant assent to God, from a deeper place than the ego, to whatever the Spirit seeks to make of us. The remarkable fact about silence and stillness is that we come to see it as the space in which our consent is possible and welcome. It is, within us, what Jesus called the Kingdom of God. And it is without words, a kingdom of love given and received. It is permissible to be perfectly still. Part of a poem of Mary Oliver: Lord, what shall I do that I can’t quiet myself? Here is the bread, and here is the cup, and I can’t quiet myself… I will learn also to kneel down into the world of the invisible, the inscrutable and the everlasting. I will move no more than the leaves of a tree on a day of no wind, bathed in light, like the wanderer who has come home at last and kneels in peace, done with all unnecessary things; every motion; even words.

Sounds of silence – 8 June 2012

In contemplative prayer, silence is always a relative thing. Pure silence never happens. Thomas Merton, shut away in his hermitage in the woods, away from all the distractions of the monastery, including all its religious noises, learned to laugh at himself. In the woods he still had the sounds of the wind and the trees. He got irritated at the faint and distant sound of some farmer with his tractor, and a far-off aircraft conveying gamblers to Las Vegas. And all that was before all the noise of mental distractions kicked in. We shouldn’t expect silence if we mean the absence of noise. That occurs nowhere. In a sound-proof room there is still the noise our body makes, breathing and churning along. But none of that matters. The silence that matters is at another level, where we have started to still our monkey minds, which are habitually all over the place. There is that in us which is frightened of a vacuum, immediately wants to fill up a space, gets nervous or guilty if we are not “doing something”. Meditation is in one sense simply where we are learning, over weeks and years, to shut up, close down the agendas, and be internally still. Simple perhaps, but not easy. Neither, however, are we listening for God. To a lot of earnest Christian people this may come as a bit of a surprise. We are not expecting messages or visions, inspirations or revelations, ecstasies or raptures. The older teachers say that levitation is rigorously discouraged. Indeed, in a sense, we let go of these things and these needs… the need to have results, encouragement, something for me. Our only task is to consent to what God is doing in our hearts when once we are still. It is this consent that matters, our deep inner Yes to God. It is also where we encounter God’s unconditional Yes to us. And so it is the end of fear. In the silence we are able, as time goes by, to let go of childhood images of God, primitive fears and superstitions. Simply to be present, as God is fully and lovingly and unconditionally present to us, means these things start to evaporate, replaced by an enhanced capacity to love and to be loved. Abide in me, says Jesus – abide in my love.

Learning to pray - 25 May 2012

I find I am teaching Christian Meditation and contemplative prayer and life, not because I do it very well, but because, as we know, the best way to learn something is to teach it. There are very few teachers who know everything already, although my daughter did have one in about Year 7. There are some brilliant contemplative teachers and writers in our day, and we can learn a lot. But still, I find myself going back to the ancient teachers, the Desert fathers and mothers, St Augustine, the Cloud of Unknowing, Julian, St Teresa and St John of the Cross… there are many of them… despite that they saw the world as teeming with demons and spirits and they rarely if ever had a bath. But having reached a great age, it dawns on me that I have learned to be very wary of counsels of perfection, anyway. What draws me to St Benedict is partly that he knew that everyone is struggling and barely getting there. Counsels of perfection don’t help much. Neither do triumphalism and stories of shining achievement. One wonderful woman remarked to me after a funeral we had both attended, that she would have to hurry up and do something notable so that they would have something to say about her at her funeral. They will actually have plenty to say about her. The reality is however, that we are teaching prayer, silence and stillness always to burdened people in the midst of life. Memories can be stressful, and so can the results of all manner of events in the past. Home and family routine and family worries, may be sometimes joyous, but often bothersome and burdensome. Ill-health, chronic pain, ageing… And to this we add the bearing of the burdens of others, which is something we do. My point is that life doesn’t normally facilitate a calm and seamless flow into contemplative life and prayer. It is important to know that we are all pilgrims, on the way. We haven’t got there yet. The most we can do is describe the place we have reached today, and the view from there. We may have gone backwards. I think not, but it may seem so. But each time we become still and silent, inwardly consenting to grace and to love, of course we are moving along the trail. We are shedding our own presumed omnipotence, which is a silly fantasy anyway, and opening to grace and love – for ourselves, and through us to others.

Telling the truth – 11 May 2012

St Benedict, about 1500 years ago, wrote what he called a Rule, which set out how Christians could and should live together. It sounds daunting, but it is actually both liberal and flexible. Benedict called it a little rule for beginners. In it he says among many other things that you can’t have Christian community without truthfulness. Sister Joan Chittister is a Benedictine nun of our day, and this is what she writes about truthfulness: Dissimulation, half answers, vindictive attitudes, a false presentation of self, are all barbs in the soul of the monastic. Holiness, this ancient rule says to a culture that has made crafty packaging high art, has something to do with being who we say we are, claiming our truths, opening our hearts, giving ourselves to the other pure and unglossed. This is not the same as the person who says, “That’s just the way I am, you have to take me as you find me, what you see is what you get…” That is really as much a façade as anything else. But it does have everything to do with the real person emerging from the shadows in the gentle processes of contemplative life and prayer. The real person, the person we glimpse in our better and humbler moments, the person God always sees and knows and loves, becomes able to be truthful and open without fear, and lovingly. It is what St Paul called learning to speak the truth in love. I have been trying to better understand one of our culture’s prime buzz-words, Lifestyle. A woman in the news told the court she needs $140,000 a year from her separated husband to maintain her lifestyle. You can have a lifestyle property. You put yourself in a beautiful setting. Your friends and family, and others too, see you there, and so you feel quite safe. Somewhere inside that beautiful perimeter, lurking as it were in a broom cupboard, is the real you, which would still exist, lifestyle or not. It is this person God begins to call forth in silence and stillness. This person may never since earliest childhood been allowed to live except behind facades of one kind or another – managing image, how others see you. What will other people think? But now what matters is the truth. St Paul’s great insight was that the truth and love go together. The true person is a loving person. It is the way God made things.

Letting go - 4 May 2012

One of the primary rhythms of all contemplative life and prayer is that we are, perhaps imperceptively, relinquishing our hold on possessions and on other people. We are losing the need to personally control life and events and the future, a control which was in any case mainly illusory. Every time we choose the stillness and the silence, in preference to everything else we could be doing and thinking and planning, we are creating a space, what Greek scripture calls a kairos (καιρος), a special time, in which the processes of letting go are gently applied. Buddhists understand this quite well. Ideally you arrive at the end of life with nothing. Well, we are not in that tradition, but we gather truth where we find it. Jesus taught clearly that possessions can be a problem. He showed clearly that it is fear, not sin, that is the underlying problem. Fear that we might lose what we own and control… Fear of the future… Fear of mortality and death… He showed that it is love that is the antidote of fear – abide in my love, he says. But the relinquishment is more radical and more subtle than we expect. Over the years, and over the days and weeks of meditation, we find that it is not so much that we are relinquishing anything – more that things are being taken away from us, gently and almost imperceptively. Typically we see it happening in retrospect. It is the work of the Holy Spirit, and it is always like the wind, unpredictable and strange, and surprising. I came upon a moving example just recently. Leonard Cohen, the now elderly singer and poet, and his poem about letting go: “Going home”: Going home without my sorrow Going home some time tomorrow Going home to where it’s better than before. Going home without my burden, Going home behind the curtain, Going home without the costume that I wore… We are letting go of attitudes, of poisonous memories, of remembered guilts… steadily, and day by day. We are conforming to Christ, by being still.