Doing justice – 17 July 2015

Some 800 years before the time of Jesus an obscure Hebrew prophet named Micah produced this luminous insight into what God is asking of us:  What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God [Micah 6:8].  Those three things.  Everything we might faithfully do to please God and to be useful in the world, in other words to be right, is summed up here.

And the first is: Do justice.   The Bible routinely links justice and truth – they are twins, and inseparable.  Lies and deceit, pretence, and also our fears, are implacable enemies of justice.  Moreover, says the prophet, we are to do justice, not merely admire it or praise it, or recommend it, let alone approximate to it. 

Our task at the moment is to see the relationship between doing justice, and contemplative life and prayer.  The best clue is truth and truthfulness.  The workings of grace within us in the disciplines of stillness and silence bring us ever more firmly into the realm of truth, rather than the cloudy land of dreams, fantasies hopes and regrets.  In John’s Gospel Jesus refers to the Spirit as the Spirit of Truth – making friends with reality and the present moment.

The first challenge, which never goes away, is to be truthful to ourselves, about ourselves – in other words, to do justice to ourselves.  The enemies of this, naturally, are all our excuses, alibis and the masks we have on hand to wear if necessary.   Other enemies are plentiful.  They include putting ourselves down as unworthy for all manner of reasons in the past, as though these things were outside love, mercy and understanding.  Truthfulness about ourselves, doing justice to ourselves, may eventually mean seeing ourselves, or glimpses, as God sees us – children of God’s, created, known and loved.

It is fundamental to grasp two things about doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly…  The first is to remind ourselves each day that we do not generate these qualities – they are gifts of God, instilled in us as we are still and accepting.  The second is that they depend on each other.  Justice requires mercy and humility.  If you are truly humble, you will be just.  If you love mercy, you will certainly have found humility and justice. 

Doing justice is a matter of the heart, before it is ever a matter of the law.  Doing justice means being a just person.  I am still in process of discovering what that might be, but I am sure it has to do with my attitudes to other people.  It is not just if I exclude anyone because they are different from me, or because they have done me harm (Jesus makes that clear enough).  I am not just if my own safety, let alone comfort, outweighs everything else.   I am not just if I cannot forgive.  Doing justice has implications also for the ways we conduct ourselves in the minefields of family life, the lacerations and resentments that can be generated – a contemplative person doing justice will be quiet, wise and thoughtful.

These are huge issues.  In the silence we are permitting our lives to be more and more conformed… in this instance to doing justice, in our actions of course, in our attitudes, in the ways we speak about others, in the causes to which we give support.   

Not thinking – 10 July 2015

If in contemplative prayer I am not seeking any conscious image of God in my mind, then what will be in my mind?  Among the first things I learned is that I do my best not to dwell on thoughts and inspirations, however worthy, not to ponder words and meanings, not to picture scenes or memories however precious or comforting or tranquillising – instead, as the teaching goes, I become aware of these things, and then I let them float quietly on down the river, while I return firmly to the gentle repetition of the mantra.  So then… am I thinking of nothing…?  No, I am not.  I am simply not thinking, not attempting to think, understand, plan or control.  I am doing my best to stay away from discursive and analytical thought, for now.  However good it is, however well-equipped I am to figure things out, however important my thoughts may be in themselves, I am setting them aside… or doing my best!

This is something my busy brain instantly dislikes, but the discipline develops over time, as I am still and accepting about it.   It is very much a shedding of control and competence.  For the time of prayer at any rate, I am not trying to keep myself safe, I am not planning or organising.  I am being who I am in this place at this moment, a child of God, capable of love. 

Of course, what we are doing is not what we normally do.  We are normally obliged to plan and organise our day, if not also other people…  Therefore, in contemplative prayer, we require a simple discipline embracing posture and attentiveness, reciting the mantra, to do something completely different.

Among the aspects of us we consciously set aside in this prayer is our captivity to how we are feeling right now, our emotions.  The teaching says that we come to this prayer irrespective of how we are feeling.  This amuses me because our entire culture is ruled, dominated by feelings – How did you feel when your house burnt down…? asks the TV interviewer.  It is incomprehensible to most that feelings either should or could be set aside.  In this discipline however we inform our emotions that their rule over us is temporarily suspended… we are now otherwise occupied.

“Discipline” is an interesting word.  In the protestant tradition in which I grew up it carried an almost entirely negative connotation – discipline was what ensued if you broke the rules.  But it is a Latin word from the verb “to learn”.   Jesus’s disciples were learners.  Our disciplines in prayer are so that we might learn, by the grace of the Spirit’s influence in us when we are finally still and silent… that we might learn deeper and better ways, that we might be taught what really matters and what doesn’t, that we might become more Christlike…  These are outcomes that may surprise us, subtly, later, in daily life and work and relationships. 

A way of unknowing – 3 July 2015

…a memory from long ago.  We were in some kind of retreat, and we were all sitting around in a circle, and the leader, an earnest soul, announced that each of us in turn around the circle was going to answer the question, “What is my image of God?”  I sensed, way back then, that this question is silly and wrong.  It is not for nothing that the great monotheist religions such as Judaism and Islam forbid any image of God… You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in the heaven above…  The danger is that any image of God ends up being some projection of ourselves.  Inevitably we fashion God in our image – or as some representation from our childhood, an indulgent father, or as tyrannical or unpredictable or judgemental, a God who needs to be cajoled, propitiated, even flattered.

In contemplative prayer we teach that the aim is certainly not to form any representation of God in our minds, however uplifting – just as it is not to be looking for thoughts and inspirations, oracles, visions or revelations.   I understand how stern or austere, to say nothing of surprising, this sounds to many.  In the Christian scriptures we learn from St Paul that it is Jesus who is the icon of the invisible God [Col 1:15; Rom 8:29; II Cor 4:4].  Jesus himself teaches that the central question is the one he posed:  Who do you say I am? [Luke 9:18-20]  The consequence of imagining God is either that God becomes an enemy or adversary of some kind, in any case a problem – or that we wind up trying to co-opt God to our own needs and purposes, even to our opinions and prejudices.  Either way, this God is an idol and what we are practising is idolatry. 

Thomas Merton was sure that contemplative life and prayer in the end can’t be taught.  It is learned by doing it, by experience.  Testing reactions and feelings, seeking experiences, is not contemplative prayer.  Contemplative prayer begins as we are as still and inwardly silent as is humanly possible, following simple disciplines of posture and time and mantra – and as we inwardly consent to the presence of God.  We do not awaken God, says Merton, God awakens us.  Part of the experience may well be the demolition of idols, of inherited or manufactured images of God – including any need to make use of God to accomplish things we consider important, or to drum up miracles.    Unknowing is how the wonderful anonymous English writer described it back in the late Middle Ages – The Cloud of Unknowing.  To quote:

Thought cannot comprehend God.  And so, I prefer to abandon all I can know, choosing rather to love him whom I cannot know.  Though we cannot know him we can love him.  By love he may be touched and embraced, never by thought.  Of course, we do well at times to ponder God’s majesty or kindness for the insight these meditations may bring.  But in the real contemplative work you must set all this aside and cover it over with a cloud of forgetting.  Then let your loving desire, gracious and devout, set bravely and joyfully beyond it and reach out to pierce the darkness above.  Yes, beat upon that thick cloud of unknowing with the dart of your loving desire and do not cease come what may. 

[Cloud of Unknowing, ch.6, ed. William Johnston].

Being present – 26 June 2015

Being there with all the others, showing up, having attendance marked on the roll, taking a selfie and sending it to everyone with the caption, “Guess where I am right now”…  None of this is what we mean by being present.  Arriving as a tourist at St Paul’s Cathedral or the Grand Canyon is exactly as many people say, having “done” these things – but only sometimes were we truly present.  You are not present, in contemplative terms, if you are there provisionally, merely to try it out and see if you like it, or visiting on your way somewhere else.   To be present requires commitment, trust and faith.  And therefore it can be a risky business.  You are not present in any contemplative sense if you are, as we say these days, keeping your options open.

Being present is precisely what we are doing in Christian Meditation, and in all contemplative prayer and life.  It is a discipline.  It is learned and practised.  We are paying attention in silence and stillness, and those who use a mantra find that helps.  This quality of sustained attention, this kind of stillness, is really a matter of complete simplicity, because for the present, at the time of prayer, we are setting aside all our usual games…  We are in a space where they are now unnecessary and inappropriate.

God is completely present to us.  Perhaps God finds that easier than we do – it sounds flippant, but it is important to point out.   In us he is completely at home, said (I think) Mother Julian of Norwich.  I am with you always, said Jesus.  The Psalmist asks rhetorically, Where can I go from your spirit, or where can I flee from your presence?   A shallow or infantile spirituality typically asks, Where was God?  when things went wrong – as though God is there simply to make everything go right for us and make us happy.  Contemplative spirituality has learned that there are times of darkness and pain in which God is seeking us in other ways and bearing our sorrows.  Abide in me, and I in you, says Jesus in John’s Gospel.

Everything we do in prayer – which isn’t much – is intended to help us be fully present.  Moreover this discipline helps us along the way to be fully present to others when that is asked of us.  As we know only too well, our presence is normally less than perfect.  We are always going to be distracted.  Our minds fly around.  As soon as we are still and silent it is heartily disliked by our busy egos, which sense danger and change, and our consciousness starts to fill up with both big matters and trivialities.  The mantra is always there to bring us back.  I am sure, also, that God’s presence sees our best intentions, our need to be still, and the love which has brought us to this point.  As we keep saying, it is always gentle.  God reads our hearts, not our brave accomplishments or our abject failures. 

Being present matters because I am the one God sees, and knows, and loves – here, where I am, in the world in which God has placed me, capable of being loving.  Nothing matters more than that.  That presence is deeply healing and strengthening.  And to that extent I am made a reconciler in God’s broken world. 

Unity – 19 June 2015

How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity! It is like the precious oil on the head, running down upon the beard, on the beard of Aaron, running down over the collar of his robes. It is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion. For there the Lord ordained his blessing, life forevermore. [Psalm 133]

This is one of the Psalms in the lectionary for next Sunday – and it’s very brief, just three verses.  The Psalmist loves the thought of brothers – the Hebrew, as you might expect, says brothers, and in this English version it is changed to kindred which presumably includes sisters – living together peaceably, in unity.  He has rapturous visions about it.  Unity is like the precious anointing oil running down the beard of the High Priest.  It is like the gentle morning dew on the hillsides of Israel.  In my experience, it’s a little difficult to be so lyrical or poetic about unity after an hour or two in some church meetings.

In St John’s Gospel chapter 17 we find Jesus’s great prayer before he is arrested – and this prayer is about unity…

I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know…

But the unity Jesus sees is not about everyone agreeing with each other and all living happily together.  On the other hand, the minute we start to talk about the inner life of the Holy Trinity people’s eyes start to glaze over.  Nevertheless, what Jesus is seeing here is the unity which is the essence of the life of God, a unity of love.  It is the bond between Jesus and God whom he called Father.  This bond of unity and love he wishes his followers, his friends, to share.  And that ultimately is the nature of prayer.  In the silence and the stillness we are joining Jesus in his prayer of unity and love.  We have nothing to say because he says it all.  We are there with him as he prays for all creation to come together in beauty and love.  We enter that vision. 

It is really not possible then for Christian contemplatives to have enemies, as Jesus pointed out.  Any fracture in human relationships is felt as a wound, needing to be healed.  Jesus’s vision of unity absolutely entails our willingness and our ability to celebrate human difference.  It requires humility about what we know and what we think.  Omniscience goes out the door along with omnipotence and omnicompetence.   Unity is a state of mind and a state of heart, gifted, gentled and instructed by the risen Christ. 

While we sleep – 12 June 2015

He also said, The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. [Mark 4:26…]

There is a hymn we used to sing, once upon a time.  I haven’t heard it lately.  Perhaps its awfulness is now more widely apparent.  One stanza says:

                Rise up, O men of God!

                His kingdom tarries long.

Bring in the day of brotherhood

                and end the night of wrong.

Someone wiser and a little less stressed wrote an alternative:

                Sit down, O men of God!

                His kingdom he will bring

                Whenever it may please his will –

                You cannot do a thing.

In this saying of Jesus he teaches that the kingdom grows while we are asleep.  That is to say, it grows despite us, even without us.  It is almost as though it may happen better once we have relinquished power and control.  And that is precisely the experience of the contemplative believer.  The kingdom grows within us as we are still and silent, day by day, as wordless and imageless as we can manage, not making plans, forming goals, brainstorming, filing and compiling, setting targets, making lists, flowcharts and agendas, joining committees and calling for reports.  The seed sprouts and grows anyway.  It is a very deep affront to our personal competence, management skills and control of our lives.

We don’t build the kingdom.  The seed is already sown within us.  If you read the gospels you discover that Jesus was actually fond of this analogy of the seed and the soil.  Sometimes the ground we provide for this miracle of germination and growth actually actively inhibits it.  It is stony or full of weeds.  Our contemplative teachers say that the mantra we may use in prayer clears and prepares the ground.  It makes the space in which the seed will grow. 

And the corollary in this I am sure is that the only way the kingdom grows is within us.  It doesn’t grow anywhere else but in human hearts, and then between those who are being changed.  If we are not changed, the world is not changed.  The necessary features of a peaceable and just world have to germinate and grow in people’s hearts.  Sometimes, I think, one of the ways in which religious people get conditioned is that they can hear this kind of teaching and immediately think of others they know who could do with a bit of conversion.  Certainly in contemplative life and prayer it is always first a matter of the occupation of our noisy, restless, demanding egos by the peaceable and life-changing Spirit of Christ.  Karl Barth wrote: To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.  Even to that extent the kingdom is present and growing, and the world is changing.

Belonging and priorities – 7 June 2015

Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.” And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” [Mark 3:31-35]

Well, to many in the church and far beyond, that’s puzzling to say the least.  In most cultures on the planet, I would think, family will take much higher precedence than that.  I vividly remember talking with an Italian man whose attitude was, you may criticise my wife, who is from another and therefore inferior family, but you say anything against my mother or my sisters or brothers who are beyond reproach, watch out.  Family ties trump other commitments and obligations.  “Blood is thicker than water” -- a cliché often trotted out as though it meant something real.  And yet, oddly, many adults know well that it was not always family they came to rely on, when in need of confidence and secrecy, comfort, wisdom or solace. 

Jesus, so far as we can see, loved his parents and his family home.  But he left it.  He found eventually a wider family and a home much more varied.   For all that, I think it was a little harsh of the gospeller, in this case Mark, to picture Jesus’s mother and brothers left standing forlornly outside (“outside” is stressed) humbly begging to see their own son and brother – and Jesus responding with what to them would have been a dismissive and hurtful remark.   I certainly wonder if this faithfully represents the situation.

However, in our lives we do have competing commitments.  We do not live in monasteries where our duties would be unitive and clear.  We have on the one hand our spiritual choices, our vows, our obligations to God, our deepest desires and callings, our bonds within the Christian community – and on the other hand we have the ties of love to those we knew first, to parents and family, who may be far removed from all that.  These competing commitments only multiply…  The classic example which lives in my memory is from my last parish; I had just announced a very special service to take place on the next Sunday, and one officebearer, the father of a young family, said he wouldn’t be there – it would be the day of the Santa parade, and the children’s grandparents (also church members, I may say) insisted on duteous attendance at that every year.

What I am trying to avoid saying, in so many words, is that I think the gospeller behind Mark’s Gospel got it wrong.  Mature faith requires that we interpret the letter of the gospel by the Spirit of Christ.  If Jesus was rude and dismissive to his mother and brothers, we know from the narrative that he had had a difficult, distressing and abusive encounter, just then.  That is clear from the preceding dialogue in the Gospel.  The Christian contemplative resolves these apparently clashing commitments by having them all present in the silence and stillness.  Given time, we begin to see aspects which we were missing before.  The changes needed may be in us – but it is the Spirit of Christ who will sort that out, once we are still and silent and consenting.