The two tasks – 20 July 2012

There is nothing difficult in the contemplative life. It is difficult to understand the Higgs Boson, and how it somehow gives mass to everything else, such as us. I didn’t know I had the Higgs Boson to blame. It is difficult to understand logarithms, and how Auckland City water rates are calculated. But nothing in contemplative life or prayer is essentially difficult. For centuries the church perpetuated a myth that contemplative life and prayer was mainly for the spiritual giants, the elite, most of them in monasteries – people prepared to deny themselves and practice all manner of ascetic disciplines. One of my fellow Benedictine Oblates was told years ago by her parish priest, “Oh you don’t want to worry about that stuff. That’s for the real professionals.” She said that choice bit of advice actually set her back years before she began to learn better. Fr Laurence Freeman writes that there are two tasks we do in meditation, and each one is a kind of risk. The first task and risk is to be ourselves. He writes:

Meditation allows no self-deception. We see ourselves as we are. It is impossible to avoid seeing the ways in which we are phony or hypocritical; our illusions, self-deceptions, fearful insecurities, and compulsions stand out clearly; and the way we judge and dismiss others so arrogantly will strike a dagger in our conscience when we see it. But by facing this dark side of ourselves, we enlighten it. We see it with a light that shines from somewhere deeper in ourselves. And this light of our spirit burns away our self-hatred with the ultimately unavoidable and revolutionary truth that we are good and lovable.

The second task is to take the risk of letting others be themselves. He writes:

Perceiving their reality as distinct from our own is the way to do this. And to see them as real is to love them. Iris Murdoch once wrote that “love is the perception of the individual. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than ourselves is real.”

This is all risky because we can’t say what the outcome will be. We learn to live contemplatively in all that we do.

Activism rules – 13 July 2012

Most people who have learned to meditate, and practice it regularly, are also active people in their own churches. Some are very active indeed. Some are more active than they really intended to be. Also typically, meditators often have considerable commitments in the wider community and in their own homes. There is no danger that a practice of Christian Meditation is going to lead them down the perilous path of idleness and uselessness and wasting time. It is also not the case that most meditators are elderly and really looking for some comfortable place of reassurance and peace. Around the world Christian Meditation is being taken up, learned and practiced by people of all ages – children in schools and at home, students at university, professional people, in prisons and places for rehabilitation. It is very difficult to see what the church of the future will be like, except that it will rapidly become very different from the church of today. In many cases our own sons and daughters, brought up in Christian homes, now have little interest in the local church in its present formats. Of course there are exceptions. There are still insightful and charismatic people doing traditional things. There are still some inspirational leaders, prophets and priests, and amazing things can happen. Into the midst of all this maelstrom of change, God inspired a rebirth, a rediscovery of contemplative life and prayer. It is the mode of being in which we make ourselves available to be fully present to God, without words, without noise, without fuss and humbug, without images, without pretences or dressing up, but rather as we are, trusting entirely in grace and love. We are not bringing our skills or our knowledge or the work we have done. We are simply responding to love by being present and still. And whatever the church of the future is like, it will have rediscovered contemplative life and prayer. Whatever the world of the future is like, the Christians within it will need to be contemplative. Activism on its own won’t do. We will need to know where love and wisdom, mercy and grace, are to be found. As Benedict found in the 5th century, we will need a proper balance of activism with a discipline of stillness and silence in prayer.

The hall of mirrors – 6 July 2012

One of the first things to happen, typically, when we choose Christian Meditation, is that we find ourselves wondering how did I get on with that. Was that a good time of meditation, or did it seem like a waste of time because I was so distracted? Perhaps the worst – or at any rate experienced meditators would think it the worst – is when we think, Wow! That was really something. Now I think I’m getting somewhere. I am often reluctant to recommend books for meditators to read, although there are a lot of good ones. It is, I think, because some teachers seem to think they are writing a recipe book. Do this, don’t do that… when the fact is, each of us is different. I have been around long enough to know not to trust rules and prescriptions overmuch. God deals with each of us in a unique way, and not only do I not have to try to follow some recommended pathway, it may be actually better that I don’t. Good abbots in a monastery are those who can make a balance between the rules and human individuality. St Benedict knew that his Rule, for his monks, would need to recognize special needs, not as some school these days has to recognize and cater for a few special needs students, but rather as a normal thing. We are all special needs meditators. So perhaps an early hurdle in the contemplative life is understanding that the Spirit of God will help me, as I consent to that help, to get out of the circle of self. “How am I doing…? Am I doing this right…? Should I change my mantra…? Will I ever be free of distractions…?” This is the circle of self. It is like a hall of mirrors. Whichever way we turn, what we see is some aspect of ourselves – and in a proper hall of mirrors, as you may know, these images are typically distorted anyway. The best teaching says, simply be still, be silent, and when you realize you are distracted, return to the mantra, gently and without self-recrimination. And to that gentle extent, we are setting self aside, stepping outside the hall of mirrors, going back into a space where it is not all about me, but about God and me. And as we seem to keep pointing out, this choice, setting aside self, is clean contrary to our contemporary culture. It is not considered the way to get on in the world. We will never turn out to be role models or idols of the media. How sad is that…!

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.