When it is dark – 27 July 2018

It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them.  (John 6:17[RM1] ; cf Matthew 14:22-33, Mark 6:45-52[RM2] [RM3] )

This is another story of the disciples in a storm on Lake Galilee.  Quite recently we touched on a former event which has Jesus asleep in the boat, they wake him and he commands the storm to cease.[1]  Now, in John’s Gospel, but also in Matthew and Mark, the disciples are again in a storm on the lake.  They are far from land, we are told.  The narrators stress, it is dark, the fourth watch of the night, says Matthew – that is the Roman measurement of time and the 4^th watch is about 3 am, just when everything seems worst, as every insomniac knows.  The wind was against them, we read, they were making headway painfully, says Mark… beaten by the waves, writes Matthew.  So we recognise the despair and fear, the sense of helplessness, being able to see no way out.  This narrative, in all its versions, is packed with allusion and metaphor, intended to make us think about our own storms and darkness, to make us use our imaginations, help us to identify with the inner realities and with Jesus’s presence.

When they see him he is walking on the water.  Remember, says John, Jesus himself had been increasingly troubled and oppressed by the crowds and their demands.  The latest was that they had wanted to make him king, presumably in the place of Herod.  They were calamitously misinterpreting his message – and so Jesus needed to get away by himself, in the hills on the other side of the lake, away from the disciples also, for a few hours – he made them go back across the lake, report Matthew and Mark.  Now, in the storm, in the dark, they see him, but think at first it is a ghost, a phantom.  Curiously, we are even told that Jesus meant to pass them by…  A man I talked with has suffered a string of pointless, cruel setbacks and tragedies, and through it all he has struggled honestly to do what he can and stay afloat.  But when the latest blow fell he told me how his friends said to him, “That’s life, mate.”  But he said, “It’s not life, is it -- it’s not a fair go.”  He is in the dark and he is in a storm.

When it is a dark and stormy night you either have a faith or you don’t.  You have either learned along the way, perhaps long ago, what Jesus means when he asks them why they are afraid, or you haven’t.  You have either learned that life is not about the self and its survival, or you missed that somehow, or you rejected it. 

Faith is what happens in the dark.  It is how we react when we can’t see.  It is what is in us, despite all that is happening.  It is where we are when we shut down the activity, relinquish the control – control that was always illusory anyway – when we become still and silent, consenting as deeply as we know in mind and heart to the way of Christ.  And then we may indeed see him, as it were walking on the waves, in the storm.

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[1] “Being afraid”, June 22, 2018

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 [RM1]

 [RM2]

 [RM3]

No longer strangers – 20 July 2018

For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.  He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.  So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father.  So then you are no longer strangers and aliens… (Ephesians 2:14-19)

If Paul wrote this, he probably did so from prison in Rome, near the end of his earthly life and ministry.  It is addressed to a church he knew well in a thriving Roman colony called Ephesus.  Paul had spent a couple of years there, at first among his fellow Jews, then with Jewish Christians, as their community widened to take in other nationalities and faiths living in this centre of trade, drawn to Christ.  We can imagine a Christian community of Jewish, Greek, Roman and other believers, meeting in homes, rich and poor, slave and free, educated and illiterate, male and female…  Normally they would be content to keep to their own kind – but now Christ creates a new community across these boundaries.  It is not that differences are suddenly unimportant, let alone cancelled out.  It is that the differences begin to be understood, appreciated and celebrated.

Paul writes:  He is our peace.  To Jews, as you know, this is shalom, the pre-eminent Hebrew word which embraces health and well-being, not only the absence of conflict.  Unity, peace and understanding are essential to shalom.  And as Paul speaks plainly, he, Jesus, is our shalom.  How is that?  Jesus, says Paul, has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility…  Not abolished the differences – Jews still live differently from Greeks or Romans.  The problem was never that we are different -- the wall was constructed of hostility, the determined memory of ancient injuries, it was teaching children to hate, it was reacting with violence to any offence, or by speech which labels and dehumanises other people and creates enemies…  To live with Jesus and his people is to live without walls of hostility.

Then secondly, Paul writes about one new humanity[1].  Well, it is a distant vision.  At a time of history such as ours, when frightened people are withdrawing back behind frontiers, going to war pointlessly, refusing care to desperate refugees, following demagogues and tyrants, taking leave of God and faith… it seems wistful at least to talk about one new humanity, making peace, he writes, reconciling differences.  Nevertheless it is a vision we keep.  It is there in our hearts and in our prayer.  It influences and guides the ways we live, and certainly how we pray.  As Paul writes: For through him (Jesus) we both (Jew and Gentile) have access in one Spirit to the Father. 

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[1] Paul actually writes one new man (ἑν καινος ανθρωπος… hen kainos anthropos).  Modern translators needed to make it generic and include women.

God is not what we think – 13 July 2018

Fr Laurence Freeman, among others, likes to say that God is not what we think.  He means two things, mainly.  First, that all attempts to define or describe God by thinking, logically, rationally, wind up less than a howling success.  In the sub-tribe of the Christian tradition I come from, the chapter in the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647 entitled “Of God and of the Holy Trinity” is a triumph of rich, ornate language over simple clear truth.  God is not what we think. 

Secondly, Fr Laurence means, if we insist on finding God down the road of reason and debate, we are looking in the wrong place anyway.  The Persian mathematician, astronomer and poet of the Middle Ages, Omar Khayyam, famously wrote:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door as in I went…[1]

Of course, it’s not a criticism of reason and logic.  The homely writer of the Cloud of Unknowing tells it in another way, in plain language:  But now you will ask me, “How am I to think of God himself, and what is he?” and I cannot answer you except to say, “I don’t know!” …Therefore I will leave on one side everything I can think, and choose for my love that thing which I cannot think!  Why?  Because he may well be loved, but not thought.  By love he can be caught and held, but by thinking never.[2] 

It does not mean that we leave our brains at home.  But it does mean that our world and our understanding are widened.  “Knowing”, it turns out, may be not necessarily understanding, but a matter of becoming still and open to change, learning to receive what we call grace.  For Jews, any attempt to describe or depict God simply ends in distortion or idolatry.  For followers of Jesus, we learn from St Paul for instance, that it is Christ who is the image, the icon, of the invisible God.[3]  For St John, God is understood only by love.[4]  Indeed, love is the test.  Hate speech, for instance, or attitudes, however disguised, cannot be in the name of God.

So -- continues the writer of the Cloud of Unknowing -- although it may be good at times to consider the kindness and worthiness of God, and though it may be enlightening and part of contemplation, nevertheless, in this work, it should be cast aside and covered with a cloud of forgetting.  Step on it resolutely and enthusiastically with a devout and kindling love, and try to penetrate that darkness above you.  Strike hard at that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love.  And whatever happens, don’t give up.

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[1] Rubaiyat, Quatrain 27

[2] Cloud of Unknowing, ch.6.  Also 2^nd quote, final paragraph.

[3] Colossians 1:15.  “Image” in Greek is eikōn (εικων)

[4] eg. I John 4:7-21

Travelling light – 6 July 2018

He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics.  He said to them, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place.  If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” (Mark 6: 8-11)

Travelling light is an admirable concept, a noble goal which, speaking for myself, is yet to be attained.  Neither am I likely to reduce my lifestyle to a staff, a pair of sandals and one shirt – carrying, says Jesus, no food, no bag, no money.  I am fond of being warm and well fed, surrounded by books, and having some mobility.  But in no way can this passage be read as a general instruction for all Jesus’s followers.  He called to him “the twelve”, it says, and sent them out to share his ministry, and gave them those instructions.  Our task, in our time and where we are, as always, is to discern what is here to help and edify us. 

First comes the phrase, nothing for their journey except…  For their journey, in the Greek, is simply “on the road”[1].  Nothing on the road except…  One of the general differences between much of human culture, and the life Jesus invites us to, is indeed that Christian discipleship is seen as a journey.  It contrasts with the surrounding culture which prioritises safety and security, home and family, walls and fences, defences, borders, right ways and wrong ways.  The culture of Jesus invites and enables us to move on, or at least be open to moving on, to change, to ask questions.  Symbols of this include sitting light to possessions, travelling light.  Jesus pointed to the contrast when he said that foxes have lairs, birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head[2].  Indeed, the whole concept of “following” Jesus implies journeying, travelling on in life – inwardly moving and listening, responding and changing, learning better, becoming more like him.  He is not challenging so much the inventory of our possessions – although that may still be something to think about – rather our need to own, possess, control, use and consume.  The planet and its resources are reeling because we have forgotten how to travel light.

It means also an end to shopping around.  I think that is the point of the strange instruction that they enter a town, stay in one home until they leave the town.  If the town is not interested or hostile, then leave.  Don’t argue the point with anyone.  Jesus leaves people completely free to decide for themselves.  Move on, he says… shake off the dust.  We might ask, what are the implications for us, living now amid people, most of whom report no interest in God or religion, and find life manageable, indeed preferable, without all that.   It is, as it always was, much more a matter of how we live, inwardly and outwardly, than of what we say or preach. 

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[1] Εις ὁδον (eis hodon), on the road, en route.

[2] Matthew 8:20; Luke 9:58

And there was a woman – 29 June 2018

In the gospel lesson for next Sunday[1], Mark tells us about a woman in the crowd around Jesus.  But Jesus is in a hurry to get on his way elsewhere.  The woman is not named.  Mark says she had been haemorrhaging for 12 years: She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.”  Her condition had made her ritually and socially unclean – not to mention anaemic and exhausted.  She had run out of money and she had run out of options.  I think it is important to note that she was not acting from what we might call intelligent faith – she was not seeking to encounter Jesus -- she came up behind him, it says, in the despairing hope that his clothes might somehow transmit his healing power.

In all three synoptic gospels we learn that she immediately felt healed.  It is not explained how she would know that – it was intuitive.  Moreover, Jesus sensed that he had been touched.  The woman then told him what she was doing, and in all three gospels Jesus responds: Your faith has made you well, go in peace.  It is not claimed that Jesus healed her.  Jesus didn’t assume that, and neither should we… unless we want to believe that he could heal without knowing or intending to, or that even his clothes carried healing properties.

Your faith has made you well… “Your faith…?”  What she had was desperation over her long-term condition, a need however not to bother or be a nuisance to Jesus, but simply to touch his clothes secretly and anonymously.  While we might be critical, Jesus sees this at another level.  He knows immediately that something subliminal has happened, and he is quite ready to pause on his rush to the home of Jairus’s dying daughter, and to give this woman time and attention.  This is the healing situation – Jesus gives us his attention, and we respond… it may well be that we are at the end of our tether otherwise.  We don’t know, of course, precisely the extent of this woman’s “healing”, but we do know that she is now on a new path.  She is not now merely a helpless victim of disease and circumstance.  She has a way forward.  That is why Jesus says, your faith has made you well, go in peace.

Faith, as we repeatedly say, is never something we are graciously offering to God, but rather a gift that we receive, the prosaic ability, it may be, simply to take the next step, put one foot in front of the other… rather than remaining stuck in memories, living in permanent victimhood, insisting that God and the universe understand how poorly they have treated you.  Jesus enables that step.  It is not about everything coming right, so much as seeing a path to walk, a door opening, a trail to follow in company with him.  Yes, the woman’s understanding was elemental, if that… more like superstition.  But she took the step, Jesus knew she had, he turned to her and told her she could go on in peace.

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[1] Mark 5:21-43

Being afraid – 22 June 2018

On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him.  A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped.  But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.  He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”  And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:35-41)

Let’s agree firstly that there are plenty of situations in life, in which it is proper to be afraid – it is appropriate, necessary, and not at all to be condemned.  Fear is not in itself wrong.  It is reasonable to be afraid of sudden danger, or of serious pain, or of being disastrously misunderstood, or of great calamity…and so on.  The disciples in a boat on the lake in a violent storm, with the boat getting swamped, were understandably afraid… perhaps of drowning, certainly of feeling helpless in the situation.  We are equipped with the capacity for fear, partly because it may help us escape or take some necessary action.

Yet Jesus says to them: Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?  Something of a put-down…  Well, the worst thing we can do with this story is to iron it out into a literal record of events.  It is not that, it never was.  It bristles with image and symbolism intended to help us at another level than facts.  The story invites us to understand that crossing to the other side with Jesus, as it were, (Let’s go across to the other side, he said), is unlikely to resemble a quiet scenic romantic drift down the Mahurangi River from Warkworth.  If you think life with Jesus should be blissful, peaceful, joyous, and you will be shielded from harm, you are in for a surprise.  The other side, pictured in this story, is where the crowd is not – they left the crowd behind, it says.  They have left their comfort zone, but Jesus is there with them.  Life with Jesus differs radically from life with the crowd, and the transition from here to there may be rocky as we learn change, new ways with a new heart… as we learn grown-up faith.

The life of faith starts and nourishes a process, in which fear, what we are afraid of, comes to be under review.  Typically we discover these shifts in watching the ways we react.  The fear of what others might think of us, for instance, which can cripple some people, is one day not an issue – or perhaps has changed into a reasonable concern for how we are affecting other people.  But more importantly, it’s the shedding of the fear of God – that is to say, the God who is out to get us if we don’t shape up, the God who zaps people.  We learn to embrace the God Jesus called Father, with reverence, reticence and love.  The fear of death undergoes change… in Paul’s words, its sting is drawn.   It is that the universe is no longer revolving around Me, the Ego, the demanding paramount Self.  I am learning in stillness and silence to yield place to God.  Perhaps you would like an apt quotation from the Gospel of Thomas:  Jesus said, “The seeker should not stop until he finds.  When he does find, he will be disturbed.  After having been disturbed, he will be astonished.”

Say your mantra – 15 June 2018

Let me quote from Stillpoint, the newsletter of the NZ Community for Christian Meditation:  You sit to meditate and begin saying the mantra... Then immediately you remember you should have taken the car to the garage. And is my next appointment at three or four? Should I do the washing today or tomorrow? Wasn’t that dinner guest’s dress a beautiful colour last night? Hang on. I should be saying the mantra. Am I saying it properly? Is this really getting me anywhere? I wonder if you know when enlightenment happens. What is enlightenment? Where is God? Is God really in this? Am I wasting time? Is there a better way of doing it? Where’s the mantra gone now? Come on, back to it. How much longer is this going to last? Did I set the alarm properly? I’ll take a quick look. A cup of coffee would be nice, if I’ve got time. This will be better when I go to a proper retreat. It will be lovely to be just quiet and away. Then I’ll be able to meditate well. Should I go for the full week I have off or keep a few days free for a holiday as well?  Say your mantra. You’re wasting precious time. Why does my side hurt after meals? My father died of cancer. I am going to start a low fat diet tomorrow. There are special products now at the supermarket for that. Did I get the new supermarket credit card? There are so many things to remember. Jesus said one thing is necessary. I wonder what it is. The alarm will go off any second now. Let’s say the mantra from now till then. Oh I forgot to call so-and-so…

For most of us the whole idea of a mantra seems strange, even alien.  I think there are two things to say about that.  First, the repeating of a word or phrase in Christian prayer is a tradition that can be traced back to the very early centuries of Christian spirituality – and indeed is pivotal in Orthodox Christianity to this day.  Secondly, if a spiritual practice in Buddhism, for instance, is found to be helpful, why would we shun it because it’s “Buddhist”?  Thomas Merton, Bede Griffiths were teachers who made a point of learning from Buddhism or Hinduism or Islam, in order to better practise the faith of Christ.  Indeed, John Main first learned what came to be Christian Meditation from a Hindu swami in Malaysia.  For most of us, I imagine, I hope, this kind of issue ceased to be a problem years ago.

In fact we honour the distractions.  They are not our enemy.  They echo our normal busy, often noisy lives.  But during the time of prayer, having recognised them, we let them go, see them float on past.  We are choosing for this time not to live in memory, or in what may happen later – we are choosing the present moment - and in it, as best we can, we keep this little space clear.  The mantra gently summons us back to that place.  For many, as time goes by, it becomes a resonance and a reminder in all of life, not only at the times of prayer. 

Something I read quite recently -- I have forgotten what – led me to pay some attention to the Hebrew word shekinah.  It’s from a verb which really means simply to settle, to sit down and be still – not too different from the abide of John’s Gospel.  In Judaism shekinah had also a special meaning – it referred to the divine presence in the innermost part of the Temple, the Holy of Holies.  It’s a feminine noun, moreover.  In a more homely way, Jews thought the shekinah settled under the canopy to bless the couple at a Jewish wedding.  And if you have ever been to dinner in a Jewish home on Sabbath Eve, and watched the mother of the family light the Sabbath candles… well there too, they say, is the skekinah… what T S Eliot called Light Invisible.  It’s a lovely image, and it is a way to think about the space we have in prayer and the repetition of the mantra.