On getting weary – 2 August 2019

A long reading from Ecclesiastes is on the menu for next Sunday.  But sadly it’s listed in the Lectionary as an alternative reading and I rather think it will be avoided.  In one verse it says:  All things are wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing. (Ecclesiastes 1:8)

Now let’s do what lots might hope we’d do… that is, leap ahead suddenly to make it alright and everyone feel better and go home happy.  Indeed it is true, Jesus said: Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden…[1]  He recognised the human condition of world-weariness, tiredness of life.  He offered a “place” of both rest and hope, in him. 

Nevertheless, it seems to me, we have reason to be grateful to the Hebrew Qohelet – the word means Teacher, or more literally Assembler, someone who assembles wisdom for us – the sage of Ecclesiastes is called Qohelet. He is a wonderful weary sceptic who by some wondrous grace emerged in the canon of Hebrew and Christian scripture.  Ecclesiastes is indispensable. Shakespeare drew on it, as did Tolstoy, Hemingway, Robert Burns, G B Shaw…  Pete Seeger’s song, Turn! Turn! Turn! is straight out of chapter 11.  Edith Wharton’s novel House of Mirth references a sentence in Ecclesiastes: The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.  I recall a pious old hymn which began with the incomparable words: Art thou weary, art thou languid, art thou sore distressed…?  Don’t you love “languid”!   Qohelet says the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing… these days when it seems you have seen it all, heard it all, nothing surprises you now...  An Auckland doctor who has done a lot of emergency medicine wrote in The Listener about the road toll – he said you can’t change people’s behaviour; they/we will continue to make stupid decisions.  His letter was an almost perfect statement of the doctrine of original sin.  G K Chesterton said it memorably: I tell you naught for your comfort, yea, naught for your desire, save that the sky grows darker yet and the sea rises higher…[2]

Well, so it does.  Faith points us to where the light can be seen, sometimes brightly, other times dimly and flickering.  True faith will always be open to the sceptic, even the pessimist or the agnostic – and the Bible certainly supports that openness, and the tension of not knowing.  Similarly, what we know as contemplative prayer and life, with its awareness of silence and stillness, humility and gratitude, is open always to hesitancy and question.  We have space, that is hospitality, in our hearts for those who have lost their way in faith – not to correct them and make everything right, but to listen to world-weariness, to faith-weariness, to battle-weariness, and gently to point towards the light we can see.

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[1] Matthew 11:29

[2] G K Chesterton: Ballad of the White Horse

Asking, searching, knocking – 26 July 2019

So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. (Luke 11:9)

We enter now on quite sensitive ground.  One of my former Classics teachers, renowned for his circumlocution, called it "ground on which the footprints of angels are conspicuous by their absence".  Part of growing up in faith however is taking leave of some assumptions in faith that may have been long held, even cherished, taken for granted.  Among these is what secular thought sees as the “cargo cult”.  This is the belief that if I think I have a need, or if someone else does, I can beseech God to intervene and change the course of events… praying for a fine day for the church picnic, for instance, or for a parking space outside the dentist.  Some apparently think also that the more people praying for whatever it is, and the longer and “harder” they pray, the more likely it is that God can be persuaded.[1]  And then, if it doesn’t happen as they wish, the rationalisation is that “God did answer but the answer was No”.  Presumably this god actually lets someone die if no one prays – and even sometimes if they do.  This is superstition, it is not faith.  Neither is it what Jesus meant.

Let’s take the three verbs together – Ask… Search… Knock…  It is a literary parallelism… a stylistic form common in Semitic writing… you say the same thing twice or (here) three times, but in different words, for emphasis[2].  Taken together these three words are a strong invitation from Jesus to open the mind and heart to God and to life, to become a seeker, rather than merely a consumer or user of religion, to become a pilgrim, someone not frightened off by a change of scenery or a change of mind, or a change of events.  Ask… Search… Knock… he says.  It is a leaning forward in life. People who ask, search, knock, learn how to draw a line under whatever is past, if necessary.  They are open to the future, with its hidden perils and unanswered questions. 

To Ask… Search… Knock… then, we need to have dealt with fear, in this case fear of what we might find or hear, or what might require change somehow.  People who can Ask… Search… Knock… are people who are free to listen, who have an inner respect for truth, even when it is ugly or inconvenient or threatening.  Fear, writes John, evaporates with love[3].  Ask… Search… Knock… is the attitude of people not concerned first with self-protection, or with being always right, people who are not confusing love with possessiveness and control.  Søren Kierkgaard , the Danish 19^th century Christian philosopher, said that for many people life is like sitting in a train with your back to the engine – you look out the window and what you see is what’s now already past… so you are experiencing the journey in retrospect.  If you are aware of the present moment, it too is already moving on.  Jesus as it were invites us to turn around, to greet what’s coming, and to meet it in the openness of faith and love.  I think that is something of what he means by Ask… Search… Knock…

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[1] In some quarters this is called “Power Prayer”. The prophet Elijah memorably demolishes this superstition… see I Kings 18: 20-40

[2] Donald J Trump does it all the time.

[3] I John 4:18

Keeping it simple – 19 July 2019

If you attend to the Epistle reading next Sunday you will hear St Paul extolling the risen Christ in rapt, lyrical wonder.  And then he adds:  It is he whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. (Col 1:28)  I think in this passage he may be quoting an early church hymn of praise.  Christ, he says, is the ikon of the invisible God… the first-born of creation… before all things… in him all things hold together… head of the body, the church… first-born from the dead… reconciler of all in earth and heaven… and so on.  These categories, what theologians call High Christology, I find, are too rich a diet for me at this age and stage and trying to live meaningfully in the 21^st century.  I need simpler sustenance.  Simplicity, I find, comes easier, along with generous dollops of mystery, not to mention humility.  We had brief discussion here some weeks ago about personal difficulties in reciting some parts of the Creeds… the Nicene for instance: Only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father; through him all things were made… 

I am well aware people once went to their death defending these things.  And we might add, there are contemplative teachers of our day, including the founder of the WCCM, Fr John Main, who similarly extol the “Cosmic Christ”.  Indeed it is very ancient teaching, and is enshrined in Orthodox spirituality where a favourite depiction of Jesus is as Christos Pantocrator, Christ in Majesty and Power, ruling all.  The final Sunday of the liturgical year is called Christ the King – a Sunday on which, if I could, I got someone else to preach.

There are those of us who meet him in simplicity, more easily than in what humans deem to be majesty, complexity or power, triumph, victory or judgement.  Something in us, it may be, has shifted, feels alienated by ecstatic praise language we never normally hear except of pop stars and sporting icons… and suspicious of what I would call eschatological imperialism – Jesus sitting there ruling all, judging all at the end of time.  Jesus himself taught reticence – you go into your room and shut the door… that is, your inner room, the room of the heart.  He sought seekers, not relentless flatterers.  He was found often enough with society’s rejects, the powerless, oppressed perhaps by religion, the poor, the foreigner, women in subjection to patriarchy and power, the despairing…  He taught peacemaking, healing, reconciliation, forgiving.  He dared to teach, You have heard that it was said… but I say to you…  Above all the Father he loved is not our enemy, but rather a compassionate God whose love, in truth, bears all our frailty and error. 

It is he whom we proclaim, writes Paul.  We warn and we teach in wisdom… he writes, in order to present everyone mature in Christ.  “Mature” in Greek is teleios (τελειος) – it means complete, fit for purpose… I think of a shaped and finished kauri salad bowl fresh off the craftsman’s lathe, a lovely thing.  Paul says he warns and teaches in wisdom, seeking some such result in those who follow Christ.

No fences – 12 July 2019

"And who is my neighbour?"  Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.  Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.  So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.  But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. (Luke 10:29-33)

I like to hope that Jesus’s parable maligns priests and Levites unfairly.  Jerusalem to Jericho is to this day a dangerous road.  Yes, they should have stopped… we have all “not done what we ought to have done”.  The Samaritans on the other hand were by no means part of Israel.  They were ostracised because they were different, they had certain different beliefs, and they had their own temple on Mount Gerizim.[1]  In Jesus’s story, the Samaritan, the heretic, the Untermensch, the inferior, risks stopping to render generous help.  It meant hanging around on that lawless road.  He had to go out of his way to find a lodging for the injured man… he paid for the lodging and even said, When I come back I’ll refund whatever more you spend.  That story would have been startling indeed to Jewish ears. 

The story was Jesus’s answer to the question, Who is my neighbour?  My neighbour, says Jesus, is the one who needs me, or who responds to my need.  My neighbour may be the one I never expected, the one religion has perhaps ignored or failed or abused or discarded.  I don’t cease to be a neighbour, moreover, because there is nothing practical I can do – neighbourliness begins in coming near, as the Samaritan shows, that is, a willingness to understand, listen, risk, share pain and anxiety – it begins in the heart and moves into practical help.  The Samaritan, says Jesus, was moved with pity.  His first instinct was not self-protection – although he may have been well aware of that need.  The others went by on the other side.

So neighbourliness, Jesus recognises, doesn’t have sides.  In that way it is God-like.  It ignores social walls and boundaries.  My protestant tribe in my youth was un-neighbourly to the Catholics, for instance, for all our diligent church devotion and attendance to the Gospel.  Some even thought that was righteousness.  Jesus demolishes those fences.  In his own life he simply ignored them.  There are no fences, consequently, in our silent and still presence to God.  If they emerge -- memories or damage or whatever between us and anyone else – it’s better not to fight these things, or try to pull down the walls.  That would probably be a losing battle.  We go back yet again to the faithful, gentle repetition of the mantra.  We restore its priority in our prayer.  It is God who, in God’s time and way, will bring down the barriers and make peace.  Paul wrote it this way:  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… that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace. (Ephesians 2:14-15)

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[1] A remnant community of Samaritans exists there to this day.  See also John 4:9.

By the Spirit – 5 July 2019

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23)

One of my wife’s relatives said she had better hurry up and do something notable so that they will have something to say about her at her funeral.  Similarly, we might feel on hearing Paul’s list of the fruits of the Spirit that we had better hurry up in acquiring one or two of those virtues, in whatever time we have left.  This is not entirely facetious – no matter what we say, good church people assume two things about these virtues.  One is that they are, hopefully, provisional, or perhaps negotiable; it may not suit me on occasion to be gentle or generous or patient… or more likely these days, I simply don’t feel like being kind or peaceable.  We might assume we’re doing well enough if we achieve just one or two of them, some days.[1]  And the other assumption is that these virtues are up to us to achieve anyway – if I am self-controlled, or patient, it is because I decided and did it.

All of this is to miss the point.  Paul is writing about what he calls living by the Spirit.  These virtues are, he says, fruits of the Spirit.  We don’t generate them ourselves.  We make space for them.  The Spirit Jesus promised grows them in us.  Our task is to make sure that ego/Self is not in the way, compromising the growth.  Once again it’s timely to stress… ego (or simply Self) is not “bad”.  Indeed, it is essential.  Jesus had an ego.  If he had not, then for instance the temptations in the desert are meaningless.  Our ego is a basic part of our identity, it includes essential survival mechanisms and much else.  The ego however is typically demanding, insistent, often dominant.  So it can be very much in the way.  It can take over -- and we get what Paul called works of the flesh… the life determined by Self.  Again, it is not necessarily “bad”.  The point is whether Self is in control (or thinks it is), or whether Self can stand aside so that the Spirit may bring those fruits, and much else, to fruition in us, gently, over time. 

Paul sheds another light on this, in this passage in Galatians – he calls it Freedom.  For freedom Christ has set us free, he writes – don’t submit again to the yoke of slavery.  Living in submission to Self is slavery.  Christ has set us free.  Trying to be good is something the ego does[2]…measuring our goodness, justifying our lapses, trying helpful disciplines that might work, feeling guilty, seeking some church or religion that better accomodates our ego… all of this is ego work, and very draining of spiritual energy.  Then it may be, we discover the discipline of silence and stillness, sitting light to Self, gently using a mantra, realising it can be done, for a little while at a time anyway… we are not asking for anything, not even for virtue, let alone miracles…  We are being present, and so far as it lies with us, opening the doors of Self to the Spirit who restores what God created in us and always intended.

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[1] Rather like the church noticeboard which read: Special this week – obey any eight of the Ten Commandments.

[2] And about as problematic as trying to lose weight and keep it off.

Hearkening – 28 June 2019

Hearkening is an old-fashioned English word that doesn’t get much use these days.  Those of us old enough to remember the King James Version or the Coverdale Psalms being used in churches will know the word well enough.  Adam, it tells us, hearkened to the voice of his wife…  Hearken means listen, but it is a richer word than merely listen.  I am reminded of this on reading further in the diary of Etty Hillesum.  She is in Auschwitz.  She says her body aches, but that her spirit can continue – it can still love, she realises, and (what she calls in German) hineinhorchen… she says there is no equivalent word in Dutch… neither is there, so far as I know, in English.  Hineinhorchen is to listen deeply, exclusively, to shut down other voices, to attend totally and seek to understand.  Etty Hillesum writes in Auschwitz:  My life is one long hearkening to myself, to others, to God.  Indeed, she writes, If I say that I hearken, it is really God who hearkens inside me.[1]

The first word in the Rule of St Benedict is Listen!  Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.  St Paul writes about the eyes of your heart being open, that you may know…[2]  Hearkening is attending, we might say, with the eyes and ears of the heart.  So it will mean being open to discovering pain and despair.  It means welcoming truth however inconvenient… and it means accepting mystery or confusion or unresolved issues, even muddle, if they appear.  Some people seem to have developed mechanisms which filter out anything they don’t want to hear or think they won’t like, an efficient inner censor – they simply don’t hear, let alone attend to whatever is being said or shown, in case it might apply to them[3].  Hearkening on the other hand opens the gateway to sometimes costly understanding and perhaps changing our minds.

If we read Etty Hillesum we meet a person who, in Auschwitz, removed now from civilised behaviour, among people who have nothing left of possessions, of dignity, of freedom, of health or hope… finds herself listening.  It is all she can do -- hearkening, as she puts it, hineinhorchen… to myself, to others, to God.  It is what Benedict calls the ear of the heart.  The ear is opened as the self-protective shields of the ego get laid aside, and our fears of the world, of the future, of mortality, begin to be quietened. 

Some people, who don’t know, assume that contemplative prayer is self-indulgence.  They can find plenty to do in daily life without all that “introspection, navel-gazing”.  But contemplative life and prayer, far from self-indulgent, is setting self aside, attending, hearkening to God, to the world, as well as self.  It is a process that the gentle Spirit, the Paraclete Jesus promised, can initiate and develop as we are still and silent, attentive and consenting, relinquishing control of life and people, opening the ear of the heart... and being deeply glad.

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[1] Etty: A Diary (Jonathan Cape 1983), p.173.

[2] Ephesians 1:18

[3] I first became aware of this phenomenon long ago, with church announcements.

That piece of You – 21 June 2019

In this group, as we know, we have much reason to celebrate meaning and happiness in life.  We know also, however, people who feel generally insecure and menaced, afraid of the future.  Ageing, for one thing, has its nasty surprises… but long before senior years, for many, there are bleak fears of what could happen, or of managing what has happened.  We seem also to have now a generation centred on self, not so much intending to be selfish, but simply that they don’t see meaning except as things affect them.  There are other places where meaning boils down to the bliss of having a home in peace, and the means to feed and raise the children. 

There is something to learn from Etty Hillesum.  She was a young somewhat unconventional Dutch woman who voluntarily ministered to Jews and others in Nazi-occupied Holland.  Eventually she died, in Auschwitz.  She wrote in her diary[1] (it was her prayer, she talks directly to God): …one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You ourselves.  And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that piece of You, God, in ourselves…  You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last. 

Now, the point about that quote is not whether we agree with it.  We were not there.  Etty Hillesum was reflecting an utterly desperate situation which she was sharing with many others.  The point is to listen to what she writes, to catch its wisdom and truth.  She is far away from the religion that wants solutions, looks for miracles, for signs and wonders, for interventions to make things right again.  She says that the Light is within, and that we are guardians of the Light.  That Light is our meaning, and we shouldn’t lose it.  The light shines in the darkness, wrote John, and the darkness has not overcome it.[2]  Etty Hillesum wrote this again later in her diary: Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place in us to the last.

I think Etty Hillesum points us in the right direction.  Our important task in grown-up faith is to have learned how to be still, to sit light to the religious chatter and superstitions, to revise those things we “always thought”, and locate the Light that is already within, what Etty Hillesum called that piece of You, God, in ourselves.  John’s Gospel calls it the light that enlightens everyone.[3]  Jesus describes it as a mutual abiding, I in them and you in me… they in us.[4]  It is very moving to realise that all this young woman had, now in Auschwitz, was that -- the stillness and attention in which she steadied, and knew herself reconnected with herself, with her friends, and with God.

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[1] Etty, A Diary 1941-43 (Jonathan Cape 1983)

[2] John 1:5

[3] John 1:9

[4] John 17:21-23