Darkness and Light…1 – 14 February 2020

Darkness is as light to you. (Psalm 139:12)


In the Christian scriptures we find two distinct ways of looking at darkness and light.  One of them is what we might expect… that darkness is the realm of menace, perhaps even evil.  So, this strand says it is important to come out of the dark into the light.  The other strand teaches that darkness is not our enemy.  In grown-up spiritual understanding we learn to be ready to live with darkness, with setbacks, tragedies, contradictions, dilemmas, hypocrisies… and this requires from us both humility and patience, perspective and wisdom.  You will find some of that teaching in the Book of Job for instance, and in the Psalms and Wisdom writings.  Today I want to look at that second strand… darkness is not an adversary, it is not in itself evil.  Dangerous perhaps…. and there are dangers also in the daylight.  Darkness, sang Simon and Garfunkel, is an old friend.  We are familiar with dark places and dark times in our lives, as with old acquaintances, along with blocked sinuses or the troublesome neighbour.  Or the family’s or the church’s perennial pain in the neck.
  

We emerged moreover from darkness.  It had been our habitat.  We preferred it, initially -- it was the sudden light that was the problem, and breathing air.  We had to learn smartly to cope with light and noise and people.  (Some of us still have problems with that…)   So that seems to be the first point, that we have an earlier and deeper affinity with the dark and, by a slight leap of sense, with the dark times in life.  There is no immediate need to avoid the dark, to run away.  Our modern culture has many ways you can try to evade the dark, but it may be a bad decision.  The darkness and the light in God’s creation are mutually dependent.  Both are present in life and are meant to be.  In the Hebrew creation mythology, the darkness is there and God is there:  Darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.  Eventually God says, Let there be light.[1]  And what God saw was good was the interplay of light and darkness.


And so the Psalmist can say, Darkness is as light to you.  God did not create the black evil of Auschwitz – humans did that in defiance of God, some of them worshipping Christians.  In the amazing Psalm 88, not a popular one, the psalmist is sunk in darkness.  By day I cried out – by night, in your presence…  His pain and sorrow are real, but so, whether in darkness or in light, is God’s presence real.  Robert Alter is a Jewish scholar steeped in the rabbinic traditions, and I have his wonderful translation of the Psalms.  If you read this Psalm in most English translations, it ends: You have caused friend and neighbour to shun me; my companions are in darkness.  Not so, says Robert Alter – and as a minor Hebraist I agree -- that final Hebrew verse says: You distanced lover and neighbour from me.  My friend (now) is darkness.  Darkness, where God waits, is the friend remaining.  Later writers have called this friend the cloud of unknowing.  St John of the Crosss called it the Dark Night.  Paul, Augustine, Luther and countless others call it living by faith rather than by sight and certainty.  It is the darkness of the inner room in our prayer when the door is shut, and we are silent and imageless, yet in wonder, love and expectation.  To live by faith as Jesus taught is to find your way in the dark. Learning how to wait.  Finding fear starting to melt away.  Learning to love God amid questions, contrary voices, mystery, and in our times, relentless secularism, materialism, consumerism, hedonism. (Next week, the other biblical metaphor of darkness…)

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[1] Genesis 1:2-3

Finding silence – 7 February 2020

Preach the Gospel at all times, and – when necessary – use words. (St Francis)


The gospel records make it clear that there were times when Jesus had to be away on his own.  He drew strength from solitude and silence.  And one of our major challenges in this 21^st century, in the secular culture in which God has placed us, and in what’s left of a bothered, noisy chattering church, is not only to find better ways of being a disciple, of loving God and the world – but of finding words to describe this, at any rate to ourselves.  The church scarcely has vocabulary, or ordered mind, for expressing what we have to teach now – or else, the words it has are large and technical.  In this task one of the helpers is Richard Rohr, American Franciscan friar.  He reminds us that the silence is already within.  We don’t so much learn to be still and silent, as that we find it there already, in stillness and silence, at levels beyond all our worthy noise and activism.  We locate the quiet space, the inner room, where now we can learn to hear and see.  It is another way of knowing… it can be communicated with economy of words.


The Latin contemplatio doesn’t mean thinking, working it out, it means seeing what is there.  Our prayer, what Jesus called the inner room, is where we begin to see… as we are setting to one side, for now, as we can, all our usual stuff, thought and imaging and imagining, remembering, re-living, planning.  Richard Rohr says this is a form of knowing beyond reacting – emotion is set to one side.  For most of us that is quite a change – in our 21^st century culture emotion, “how do you feel…?” is paramount information… TVNZ regards feelings as news.  But we set aside, for now, our thinking, working things out.  In Richard Rohr’s own words: 


The soul does not use words. It surrounds words with space, and that is what I mean by silence. Silence is a kind of wholeness. It can absorb contraries, paradoxes, and contradictions. Maybe that is why we do not like silence. There is nothing to argue about in true inner silence, and the mind likes to argue. It gives us something to do. The ego loves something it can take sides on. Yet true interior silence does not allow you to take sides. That is one reason contemplation is so liberating and calming. There are no sides to take and only a wholeness to rest in—which frees us to act on behalf of love.[1]


I know very well how strange that can sound.  We are programmed to do things, to react with how we feel or what we think, or what happened to us.  We do it incessantly.  Our reaction to dire things happening in the world is to feel helpless, or at any rate, if we can, we do something.  And God bless all those who do achieve things, and all who try.  Jesus invites us first to listen and to see… to be wise.  Wisdom (σοφια) in Jesus’s understanding came from stillness, silence, solitude, attention to God.  So Mary of Bethany had chosen the better way, he said.  In the house of Simon the Pharisee, when the distraught woman came in embarrassing them all, Jesus’s words were, Do you see this woman…?[2]  Of course they didn’t; what they saw was an interruption, a nuisance and an intrusion… and an unauthorised female.  It was Jesus who saw, from the silence of his inner room, the woman God knew and loved. 

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[1] Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation (Franciscan Media: 2014), 4-7.

[2] Luke 7:44

Advent IV – Isaiah 9:2, 6 - 20 December 2019

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;

those who lived in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined…

For a child has been born for us, a son given to us;

authority rests upon his shoulders, and he is named

Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace…   (Isaiah 9:2, 6)

(It’s not the reading in the Lectionary – it’s the one I would have prescribed had they asked me.)  One of my earlier Advent lessons came from my mother, who was inclined to call a spade a spade, and was generally underwhelmed by ministers in pulpits all dressed up.  We were walking home from some carol service, and my mother gave a snort of derision at one of the best-known carols of all, one line of which says: But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.  Did you ever hear such silliness, she asked.  If you wanted religion demythologised, it did help to go to church with my mother.  And indeed, in our days as young students demythologising was all the rage.  We thought our faith had to be made intelligible for “the rational mind”.  The years and maturer wisdom say that the truth, the divine Logos, is not something we can ever grasp, possess, own, understand and use.  What we do is bear witness humbly to the Light we see… love, grace, mercy, incarnated, made flesh, in a baby, this child…  


Never a Christmas goes by for me these days without Thomas Hardy’s lovely poem of wistful longing (The Oxen, 1915, after Ypres and Gallipoli…):  

… I feel, if someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come, see the oxen kneel

In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

The humility necessary at Christmas begins back in Advent, as we have seen in all those poetic words of Isaiah, not with answers but with quiet longing – sharing God’s longing it may be -- the lovely German word Sehnsucht… longing, yearning, waiting, for ourselves, for our world.  On Christmas morning what we find is the veil drawn back a little, a glimpse of God... a word from God.  God was in Christ, says Paul.  In another place he says this child is the icon of the invisible God[1].  It is a glimpse of love – before we see anything that might be called powerful or majestic, before we think we have answers now to life’s questions, we have this scene of love and humility and vulnerability.  The point about the Nativity scene is that it needs nothing from us.  There is nothing we can contribute… what did he want with gold, frankincense or myrrh?  Our knowledge, our knowhow, our achievements, our plans, are all set aside.  What we bring is quiet, awed wonder and our longing, loving hearts.

(OUR FRIDAY MORNING CHRISTIAN MEDITATION GROUP IS NOW IN ABEYANCE UNTIL 7 FEBRUARY 2020.)

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[1] II Corinthians 5:19; Colossians 1:15 – “image” in the Greek is icon (ἐικων)

Advent III – Isaiah 35:1-10 - 13 December 2019

The wilderness and the dry land will be glad,

the desert will rejoice and blossom;

like the crocus it will blossom abundantly

and rejoice with joy and singing….

Strengthen the weak hands, make firm the feeble knees.

Say to those of a fearful heart,

“Be strong, do not fear!  Here is your God…”

The eyes of the blind will be opened,

and the ears of the deaf unstopped;

then the lame will leap like a deer,

and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.

Waters will break forth in the wilderness, streams in the desert…

A highway will be there, it shall be called the Holy Way…

it shall be for God’s people;

no traveller, not even fools, shall go astray…

The ransomed of the Lord shall return

and come to Zion with singing…

they shall obtain joy and gladness,

sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

It’s tempting in Advent to become facetious… and like Oscar Wilde I can resist most things except temptation.  Here we have, for instance, the desert rejoicing with joy and singing… as when my wife comes in from watering the garden to inform me: “The silver beet’s saying thank you.”  Then we get the bit about firming up the feeble knees, which has relevance for some of us.  Then the highway… I don’t know what highways were like in the 8^th century BC, but this one is the highway to Zion, and it will be such a wonderful highway that, says Isaiah, not even fools will go astray… not even tourists in campervans.  Everyone arrives at the temple singing… sorrow and sighing flee away.

There is discovery in faith which may come as a lovely surprise.  It is what one hymn writer calls the joy that seekest me through pain.[1]  There are levels deeper than the pain, and joy is hidden there – although words like “joy” and “rejoicing” may be spoilt I think, through having become religious words.  C S Lewis wrote about being surprised by joy.  Etty Hillesum, on the cattle wagon leaving for Auschwitz, threw a card from the train which read, We left the camp singing.  Though I make my bed in Sheol, wrote the Psalmist, you are there.[2]  For Thomas Merton at a low and restless time it was the liberating discovery of his major handicap: taking himself seriously, the delusion that it was all about Thomas Merton.  And for Karl Barth it was finding Mozart, the divine child in all of us.  Martin Luther was overcome by joy when it dawned on him what St Paul is saying, that we live by faith, by unknowing.  Jesus died, says the writer to the Hebrews, for the joy that was set before him.[3]  What Isaiah sees, his vision, is that all this journeying, all this struggle and setback, ends wondrously:  they shall obtain joy and gladness, sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

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[1] George Matheson: O Love, that wilt not let me go

[2] Psalm 139:8.  Jewish prisoners did celebrate Sabbath Eve, Passover, in Auschwitz.

[3] Hebrews 12:2

Advent II – Isaiah 11:1-9 - 6 December 2019

The readings for Advent II take us to another of the visions, or inspirations, of the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem.  He sees a deliverer coming, but not the kind of deliverer one might expect:

The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,

the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the spirit of counsel and might,

the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord…

With righteousness he shall judge the poor,

and decide with equity for the meek of the earth…

The wolf shall live with the lamb,

the leopard shall lie down with the kid,

the calf and the lion and the fatling together,

and a little child shall lead them.

The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,

and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.

They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain;

for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord

as the waters cover the sea.

It is a strange picture, like the endearing quaintness of the early medieval pictures of saints and kings – the wolf and the lamb playing together, the calf and the lion… What it depicts is a life without fear.  Children are safe. This theme has been picked up by many, including Franklin D Roosevelt who listed four basic freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.  (It is ironic, then, that the USA is the only country not to have ratified the 1989 Convention of the Rights of the Child.)  Roosevelt’s list was enshrined in 1948 by the United Nations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  The American artist Norman Rockwell movingly depicted children going off to bed free from fear.  These days it is more the case that we have to teach children danger-savvy, what to be afraid of and how to deal with it. Numerous United States children are taught to feel safe if there are guns in the house (and membership of the local gun club). How do children feel safe in Syria, or in any Kiwi home housing drugs and violence? 


The Christian scriptures convey the insight that it is fear, not hate, which is the opposite of love.  Hate is derivative from fear.  In contemplative life and prayer we tackle fear on deeper levels. What are you afraid of, asks Jesus – why are you afraid?  Love casts out fear, writes John[1]  Love and fear are mutually incompatible.  As fear takes over, love and peace, understanding, retreat.  We are learning, slowly it may be, to lay down the burden of fear so that fear is not ruling our lives, or determining our decisions.  Obviously there are times and situations in which fear is appropriate – we would be silly not to be afraid.  But that is different from a chronic fear of life, being afraid of tomorrow, afraid of difference, afraid of change, needing always first to feel safe…  Once again such a vision seems far out of reach – but it is the way Jesus invites his people to live, and in Advent at any rate we remind ourselves not to lose the vision, and to turn our steps in that direction.

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[1] eg. Matthew 14:27; 17:7; Mark 5:36; John 6:20; I John 4:18; Matthew 6:25-34

Advent I – Isaiah 2:2-4 - 29 November 2019

Rowan Williams says that in Advent we all become Jews once more.[1]  If all we do during Advent, then, in life and in worship, is sentimentally anticipate Christmas, we are missing a wonderful season… the sounds and songs of Advent.  So I thought it was time for some sublime Hebrew poetry – indeed, the four passages from Isaiah the Prophet set down for Advent readings this year.  Here is the first:

In days to come

the mountain of the Lord’s house will be established…

and will be raised above the hills;

all the nations will stream to it.

Many peoples will come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

to the house of the God of Jacob;

that he may teach us his ways, and that we may walk in his paths.”

…They will beat their swords into ploughshares,

and their spears into pruning-hooks;

nation will not lift up sword against nation,

neither will they learn war any more.[2]

This is some seven centuries before the time of Jesus.  Even back then the Jews are waiting, seeing in their hearts a better day, a reign of peace, an abandonment of cruelty and violence – and it must have seemed then, as it does now, a hopeless dream.  What they knew was, as Rowan Williams expresses it, a hunger to be spoken to, to be touched, to be judged and loved and absolved.

But, says the prophet, the first Advent requirement is that we take leave of our idols.  Idolatry is worshipping, giving ultimate value to what is not God.  Jesus called it, where your treasure is.  Isaiah in this same chapter says: On that day people will cast their idols of silver and of gold, which they made for themselves to worship, to the moles and to the bats.[3]  And so in contemplative prayer and life, in what may be a long and demanding process, our idolatries are being removed from usurping the place that belongs to God.
  

Notice too that, in Isaiah’s vision, the Lord’s House is open to all.  The Jerusalem temple wasn’t.  It is an end to Jewish exclusivism: all the nations will stream to it… many peoples will come… And what will happen at the Lord’s House…?  …They will beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither will they learn war any more.  Advent then is when we listen to Isaiah – we call our idolatries again into question; we question whatever in our faith excludes rather than includes; and we question the violence that may lurk in our actions or speech or our attitudes.  To borrow a modern trendy phrase, in Advent we are invited to live the dream.  It changes us, which is always what has to happen first.

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[1] Rowan Williams: A Ray Of Darkness (Cowley Publications 1995, p.5)

[2] Isaiah 2:2-4

[3] Isaiah 2:20

Christ the King – 22 November 2019

And so we arrive at the final Sunday of the liturgical year, Christ the King.  Yet again I had a look at the texts and imagery surrounding this day, mostly about victory, majesty and power... and yet again came back to, for instance, the dispute among the disciples as to who would be the greatest.[1]  Jesus tells them:  The kings of the gentiles lord it over them… But not so with you.  The greatest among you will become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves…  I am among you as one who serves.  


The Feast of Christ the King is actually a recent invention.  Pope Pius XI inaugurated it in 1922, not 100 years ago, in the wake of the First World War.  Europe was falling again into class and race divisions and militant nationalism, and the Pope sought to teach that it is Jesus who reigns as Prince of Peace, reconciling all to himself.  But Christ the King remains an image that resonates power and (some would insist) dominance and masculinity.  That may not be at all what Pope Pius intended, but a doctrinal formulation perhaps appropriate in 1922 may be seen now as simply replacing the power of politicians and demagogues and armies with the power of some christian imperialism...  Christ the King… based allegedly on love… except that, tragically, love is not what many now associate with the christian church.  And there are those of us who find it difficult to offer heart worship to a Christ in Glory, Christos Pantokrator, Christ Ruler of All, “exercising dominion over all creatures” (Cyril of Alexandria).
  

I am way out of my depth in all this.  That may already be evident.  Richard Rohr wheels in a theory in physics called Quantum Entanglement.  Sub-atomic particles seem to know and are able to react to each other while far apart, even though there is no imaginable means of communication between them.  So, it is thought, we can posit a mysterious force field of love and goodness, in which my loving thoughts or actions actually affect others far away – some people like to explain prayer this way.  Equally, evil or negative attitudes or actions produce corresponding negative reactions.  And these mysteries, some think, are a way of seeing the triumph and reign of Christ in power.  He rules by some such hidden, transcendental network.


For others of us, it is a more subtle thing, not enhanced by being explained or defined.  He reigns by love.   His reign is completely unlike that of any earthly ruler we have seen.  He knows our griefs and bears our sorrows.  He suffers our rejection of him.  He seeks the lost.  He fills judgement with mercy.  His power is never power of coercion.  His judgement is never condemnation.  His kingdom is not some “spiritual” version or replication of earthly kingdoms.  It is, Jesus told Pilate, not of this world.[2]  To be quietly at prayer, alone or with others, is to come to the threshold of this kingdom where Jesus reigns, and to start to hear its songs and to share its hopes and longings.  It is a matter of being present to him, as he is present, always, to us, to the end of the world.

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[1] Luke 22:24ff

[2] John 18:36