The dance of the ego - 27 April 2012

Jesus talked about leaving self behind. In the modern world, that is incomprehensible. Leaving self behind is unlikely, to say the least. In contemplative understanding of spiritual truth, self means generally what psychology calls the ego. This is what springs to life as soon as we are still and silent, because stillness and silence is an environment the ego doesn’t like very much. However, it is a mistake to start thinking of the ego as any kind of enemy. Our ego is part of us, and is very much concerned with survival. So it tends to be nervous of change, anything that might upset our fragile balances of control and happiness. From our earliest days the ego has been perfecting our responses to our environment to secure our continued existence, protection, even life-style and possessions. Control and management are a large part of this. When stillness and silence threaten to set aside management and planning, the ego responds with an avalanche of thoughts. We can be literally driven to distraction. And so we have the mantra. It is what we return to, away from the distractions. But the ego doesn’t give up. “Isn’t this boring, a waste of time? Shouldn’t we be doing something right now, like saving the world or joining a committee, or stopping our grandchildren diving into drugs...?” Well yes, no doubt, we should be doing those things, along with going to church and getting dinner ready. But first we will be still, and silent, and receptive, and consenting to God, who made us, knows us much deeper than our egos, loves us unconditionally nevertheless. And as we are still, gently and interiorly choosing our mantra rather than the flow of distractions, the Holy Spirit, like a sculptor, is chipping away at the stone to reveal the true self, the person God always saw and knows and loves -- day after day, year by year. In a way it is quite fun to say no to the ego -- even more fun than keeping the driver behind me to 50 km/h in the long 50 km/h stretch through Snells Beach and Algies Bay. As a Hebrew prophet saw it long ago: In returning and rest will you be saved, In quietness and confidence will be your strength. [Isaiah 30:15]

Living Easter - 13 April 2012

I had a fascinating Easter Day last Sunday. All on my own, all day... Around our neighbourhood the blokes were out in the sunshine, happy in their black singlets and baseball caps, starting up their tractors and hauling their boats around. The Vicar of Warkworth informed us that being an Easter Christian does not mean just wearing a cross -- Madonna does that much, she said. Well me too -- I had thought that morning, in honour of Easter Day and my rare epiphany at church I should wear my Benedictine Oblate cross. So that’s two of us, Madonna and me. But then I went home, turned on the web, and found that the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Edinburgh said that all Christians should now wear a cross to make the point that there are some things we believe and stand for. Best of all for me, as always, were the words I heard in the liturgy: Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast, not with the old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth... (KJV) There is an excitement at Easter, if and when we turn our attention to it. It is a permission to say that death can be very terrible, but it can never be the worst thing or have the last word. It is a permission to live life without labels and discrimination -- free from those things -- neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female... all are one. It is a permission to say no to evil in our culture, to evil compromise -- and to become who we are in Christ. It is permission to spot, to identify, whatever is true, loving, kind and hopeful. The angel said to the women he was not there, where they were looking for him, because he was risen. We know him no longer after the manner of the flesh – and that includes the manner of the imagination. He is not what we think. He is here in all that happens, prior to us, waiting for us, life and hope and love. To meet him we require to be still, receptive, needy and consenting to change.

God to Lulu, 20 April 2012

Lulu, aged 6, came home from school and wrote a letter to God:

To God how did you get invented? From Lulu xo

Lulu’s parents considered themselves atheists. But, respecting their daughter’s serious enquiry, they eventually decided to send it to Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He ought to know. This is the letter that came:

Dear Lulu, Your dad has sent on your letter and asked if I have any answers. It's a difficult one! But I think God might reply a bit like this –

'Dear Lulu – Nobody invented me – but lots of people discovered me and were quite surprised. They discovered me when they looked round at the world and thought it was really beautiful or really mysterious and wondered where it came from. They discovered me when they were very very quiet on their own and felt a sort of peace and love they hadn't expected. Then they invented ideas about me – some of them sensible and some of them not very sensible. From time to time I sent them some hints – specially in the life of Jesus – to help them get closer to what I'm really like. But there was nothing and nobody around before me to invent me. Rather like somebody who writes a story in a book, I started making up the story of the world and eventually invented human beings like you who could ask me awkward questions!'
And then he'd send you lots of love and sign off. I know he doesn't usually write letters, so I have to do the best I can on his behalf. Lots of love from me too. +Archbishop Rowan

“They discovered me when they were very very quiet on their own…” In this loud, clamorous culture of instant communication, TV, cellphones, texting, emails, iPads, iPods and things I haven’t heard of yet, and all the peer pressures to live that way and have those things, Lulu could do with a meditative discipline to be very very quiet on her own.

Christian Meditation people are these days introducing meditation to young children, who turn out to be sometimes better at it than their teachers. In a culture in which so many people get so very restless and nervous about silence and stillness, terrified of boredom and being left not knowing what to do, it is scarcely amazing that they lose any concept of God also. So we make friends again with silence and stillness, and learn to welcome mystery and wonder, and be quite surprised.

Numbered with the transgressors - 6 April 2012

...the old King James Version words of Isaiah 53:

He poured out his soul unto death;
and he was numbered with the transgressors;
and he bore the sin of many...

It is very ancient and very beautiful and very moving poetry. It comes from centuries before the time of Jesus. It starkly depicts what happens to people. Never mind whether they are good people or bad. The fact is, as the poet realised, it is a cruel and unjust world.

We go on and on these days about deserving. Deserving has nothing to do with it. Good people suffer. In the towns of Syria... Or Nature takes over and devastates our lives. We get leukaemia, or alzheimers. Babies get born with some lethal disorder. Or in another way, after a lifetime of devoted public service you may stand in the dock accused of some neglect as a company director, and suffer utter and prolonged humiliation. People are accused unjustly, or justly. What is the difference...? as Robert Burns said,

Who made the heart, ‘tis he alone decidedly can try us...
Then at the balance let’s be mute, we never can adjust it.
What’s done, we partly may compute,
But know not what’s resisted.

The Jews under Jewish law were in no doubt that Jesus was guilty as charged -- guilty they thought of blasphemy. The Romans under their law were not so sure -- he may have been guilty of sedition -- but Roman rule was in any case corrupt, and they needed peace in Palestine.

And so, in a morass of conflicting motives and ideals, of corrupt people, frightened people, ignorant people, Jesus chooses to stand there silent. Where would you start, anyway? His contemplative love of the Father, his complete confidence of the Father’s love for him, at this moment is the sustenance he needs. He is content to be numbered with the transgressors. Beaten, tortured, humiliated, condemned. We too have to fall into silence, if even for just this short time...

He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows...
He poured out his soul unto death;
and he was numbered with the transgressors;
and he bore the sin of many...

Keep it simple - 30 March 2012

There is now a large and ever growing volume of writings about contemplative life and prayer, certainly more than I can keep up with. Much of it is from America. We used to be more or less in the desert, as it were -- you really had to hunt around to find anything new being taught. And in a way that was good because the best prayer is what we do ourselves, and the best experience is what we discover ourselves. But now there is no end to what we can find in print and on the web. Some of it is junk. The word contemplative is in danger of being hijacked. Some writers can’t help trying to “add value”, as we say, to what actually needs nothing of the kind. Some can’t help lapsing into sentimentalism, and we get nice photos of roses and sunsets. Others can’t resist trying to formulate rules, recipes and spiritual flow charts -- you must do this or that. Yet others, of the psychology persuasion, seek to describe what is happening in our psyches in the stillness and silence, and tell us about it. I do however have a more kindly feeling towards the historians, who need to show us how contemplative teachings have always been there, down the centuries. A lot of this is admittedly interesting, and any of us could spend the rest of our days getting more and more informed. The trouble is, it’s not the way to learn to pray.

We say again, we learn to pray by doing it. And mostly, by following the advice of Jesus -- behind closed doors, in secret, in silence. As we rapidly find out, there are all manner of practical issues about that. Our own programme and busyness. Grandparent duties. Most family homes are set up for just about everything but prayer. And of course, external interruptions and internal distractions. I recall one meditator who was very keen, but she said, there was no way she could disable the phone. The idea was anathema. Someone might be trying to get her. And I can see, for her that fact would be an overwhelming distraction -- someone needing her and she wasn’t there. She could not conceive her finger off the response and control button for 25 minutes. I am happy to report that it dawned on her that she was not indispensable after all, and that the world could struggle on for that brief time.

Fr John Main’s most famous teaching is, “Just say your mantra.” It comes down to utter simplicity. Be still. Be quiet. Be attentive. Be fully present, here and now. Stop trying to control the universe.

The truth in love - 23 March 2012

One of the memorable events of this past week, it seems to me, is the resignation of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He is to go back to academia, to be Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge. This gentle and brilliant scholar will distance himself from the bruising maelstrom of church politics, crises and schisms.

My personal memory of Rowan Williams was listening to him each day for a week, in Sydney in 2001. He was leading a seminar for meditators, on the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4th and 5th centuries, and I have never forgotten the impression of a truly wise and spiritual man, a natural and humble scholar.

It was interesting to me that Dr Williams, Primate of Wales but about to become Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke feelingly about the role of contemplative people in the church. Of course we are not any kind of elite, and I doubt that anyone here is remotely tempted to imagine we are. But some people in the church wonder what on earth we are for, anyway. Extended periods of silence... and then we go home...! That’s not a proper meeting! We don’t even have food.

In our discipline of silence and stillness, Rowan Williams thought, people of contemplative life and prayer are helping to purify the language of the tribe (those are T S Eliot’s poetic words). Our attention to God and to what is real and now, without asking for anything, somehow witnesses to the tribe a language as free as it can be from the games of control, fantasy and evasion that take up so much room in the church and the world. Another English poet, G K Chesterton, saw it too, and wrote of all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men. The spirit in our hearts in the stillness starts to teach us another speech that is loving rather than aggressive or competitive. Let your yes be yes and your no be no, teaches Jesus -- simple and truthful speech. St Paul writes about speaking the truth in love. St Benedict taught his monks what he called Restraint of Speech. We begin to learn it in a discipline of contemplative life and prayer.

I think I am at a point -- one might say a cultural crisis -- where I will find Coronation Street simply unbearable after some 48 years, simply because of the vile ways they speak to each other, confrontational, in-your-face as we say, violent words. And yet so many think this is normal communication or appropriate reaction to events. It is much the same in wide areas of NZ society, including much of our press and TV.

Well we are living and learning another language for the tribe.

God’s kingdom - 16 March 2012

In Jesus’s teaching about prayer his fourth basic point is about its God-centredness. This sounds like stating the obvious, until we look again at what is much more common in practice. So much prayer is “beseeching”, in the old terminology -- seeking to make use of God, one way or another, or to make ourselves feel better. Last week an intelligent, active and highly involved woman wanted me to know how she had given up on the church because of the ways she felt she had been let down by the church. She had been brought up in a very conservative Christian family of Plymouth Brethren, I believe, and she loudly assured me, “I still believe it all” -- she meant the doctrine. I wanted to say to her, “But it’s not about you. It’s not about what you believe. It’s about God.” Jesus said:

Set your mind on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well.

In contemplative prayer that is our task. So far as it lies with us, we become still, silent, available to God, consenting to God. We are asking for nothing, imaging or imagining or fantasising nothing, simply fully present as God is fully present to us. In the much warmer words of John’s Gospel, where Jesus is explaining the contemplative life to his disciples, he says: Abide in me, and I in you... It is a mutual abiding. In our prayer he abides in us, we abide in him, he abides in the Father. And thus, somehow, ineffably, we become involved in the very life of the Trinity. That is God’s kingdom, and God’s justice, where things are the right way up, where right and truth prevail. It is the place of unity and love.

I don’t understand these things, and I probably can’t explain them to you any better than that. And it is a truism that we learn prayer by doing it, in all our ignorance and neediness. The woman I mentioned earlier is struggling. She believes she first needs questions answered, wrongs righted, the church reformed, and all the damage of the past somehow transformed. It won’t happen. And in any case it is not about her, or me, or you. It is about God before all else, and where we place the attention of our heart.

Cynthia Bourgeault, a contemplative writer says, We've made such a mistake and done such disservice right from the start of our interior life of equating prayer with saying prayers and contemplation now with silence. Silence is not the absence of noise, it's the absence of selfishness.