Passing judgement – 21 September 2012

I notice that we puzzle quite a lot over this matter of judging and being judgemental.  They are two different things.  We all have to make judgements.  For judges it is their job.  For the rest of us, we expect to be able to form opinions, come to decisions, about people and events.  And sometimes our judgements do have to be, rightly we hope, negative and condemnatory.  If we have a Christian conscience we hope our judgements are accurate and charitable, even generous.  We also hope we recognize those times when it is unnecessary to judge someone, even if everyone else is doing so.  Jesus refused to pass judgement on the adulterous woman in John’s gospel. 

Judgementalism however is another matter.  This is an attitude, a habitual reaction -- even for some, including some Christian believers, a way of life and a righteous responsibility.  Emily Dickinson remarked about one preacher she heard, The subject of perdition seemed to please him, somehow.  

Judgementalism is when we pin indelible labels on people, write people off, consign them to some place somewhere else but not here.  It usually entails a willful blindness to the good in people, or to the possibility of reform.  It is a lack of care about another person.  Judgementalism generally proceeds from our own anger and fear, to say nothing of our ignorance.  I think it was because of the perils of judgementalism all around him that Jesus said, Judge not, and you won’t be judged.  The world we know is full of judgementalism.

In the still and silent world of contemplative prayer we are consenting to the long-term and gentle work of the Spirit in us, achieving changes in us which we can never engineer ourselves.  And so it is that the judgementalism in us starts to attenuate.  We begin to notice it and don’t like it.  We find ourselves doing without it.  We notice that the judgementalism in our friends begins to irritate us.  We find ourselves more inclined to patience and understanding with human error and frailty, with all its risks.

Partly this is that we are learning to live freer of fear and anger.  The world and all its dangers are unchanged.  But in silence and stillness, somehow, we find ourselves much better able to meet Jesus’s frequent question to people, “Why are you afraid…?”

Living with mystery – 14 September 2012

Kathleen Norris writes:  I sometimes think of prayer as a certain quality of attention that comes upon me when I’m busy doing something else.  It’s one of those insights these people seem to have, which can be told in simple words, briefly and clearly.  Perhaps people like me then start to obscure it.

Prayer is… a certain quality of attention that comes upon me when I’m busy doing something else.  Unfortunately, as it seems to me, she then goes on to write about the common experience most of us know, when someone or some situation springs to mind, and it becomes a quiet personal prayer.  That’s a kind of running intercession, appropriate and perfectly fine. 

But Kathleen Norris’s insight is better than that, and I felt sorry she didn’t follow it up.  There are two things in what she wrote and in the way she wrote it.  First, she called prayer a certain quality of attention.  We have visited this idea before in our group.  Prayer is paying special attention.  It is deeper and more disciplined than the scatter-gun attention we normally give to things, or the so-called attention possible in multi-tasking, which is much admired.  The attention prayer requires is the result of being fully present and fully awake.  It is the attention possible when we have set our own agendas to one side and have stepped in front of all our internal and external chatter.  It is the attention we come to know in our consent to God, in silence, in stillness and in mystery.

Secondly, she says it comes upon her when I’m busy doing something else.  She is not now referring to the time of prayer.  What meditators eventually start to report is that their mantra, with all its connotations of stillness, silence, focusing, paying attention, spills over into the rest of life.  We become aware of its resonance in stressful situations, at busy and occupied times, in tiredness or anxiety.  It is as though part of us is now living in a kind of constant presence, what the Greek of the New Testament calls an αναμνησις (anamnesis), a remembrance.  We are more and more learning to be present to God, and to other people, in ways not possible when we are living behind our defences and facades.  In company we may see what others don’t because of all the chatter.  When we are alone, we come to realize that there is no space between our thoughts of people and our prayers for them.  Boundary between life and prayer has become thin or attenuated, even invisible. 

Detachment - 7 September 2012

It quite often seems to people who don’t practice contemplative prayer and life that those of us who do are lacking a healthy sense of engagement with the world, we are aloof and we lack concern for others.  We retreat away from the real world into prayer.  And perhaps some meditators do have that motive.  It is a refuge, some kind of cocoon, a blessed peaceful haven.  Well, let’s not despise that.  Jesus knew that a lot of people are very wounded and afraid.  He said, Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden – I will give you rest… 

The Desert Fathers and Mothers had other motives.  Detachment, for them, meant that at the time of prayer no worldly concerns, including good ones, would distract them from being present to God and to each other.  That was the point of all their discipline.  One of the monks, Abba Dorotheus of Gaza, puts it in an interesting way.  Detachment, he said, is being free from wanting certain things to happen.  The burden we lay down in prayer includes a whole load of our desires, whether things we desire for ourselves or for others, for good or for ill.  You can’t be a Buddhist without learning from the outset that our desires are the root of all unhappiness and suffering.  It is one Buddhist truth which urgently needs to be translated into Christian understanding. 

To be free of desire may be something we can’t even begin to imagine.   But then Abba Dorotheus gives as it were the other side of the coin.  He says that we can find peace in what is happening.  It is important to be clear about this.  He does not mean we agree with or like what is happening around us.  What is happening may be very hurtful or unjust.  But in the presence of God another door opens which we hadn’t noticed.  Where does it lead?  It leads to a deeper level where we are at peace with what we can’t change.  It is a level of trust.  Once we have seen this, and perhaps seen it in others, we begin to see it also for instance in the Psalms.  It is the resolution of the Book of Job. 

Kathleen Norris tells a lovely story from the USA.  A woman middle-aged school bus driver suddenly had her bus, which was full of mentally handicapped children, taken over by a deranged man with a gun.  When reporters later asked her how she had managed to talk the man out of using the gun, her reply was, “I pray a lot.” That’s the kind of response I love – it seems absurd to most people, and it really gets up the noses of the atheists.  Notice, the woman did not say, “I prayed a lot.”  What she indicated was that she was generally not far from prayer.  In that sense at least, she was a contemplative person.  And the encounter between her and the man with the gun was not quite what he expected, evidently.    

Not running away – 31 August 2012

Father John Main, seized by a sudden simplicity, wrote as follows:

Meditation is a discipline of presence. By stillness of body and spirit we learn to be wholly present to ourselves, to our situation, to our place. It is not running away.  

Not running away.  Sometimes we shed light on something by saying what it is not.  It is not running away, finding who or what is to blame as though that were a solution, finding excuses.  It is not living in denial.  It is not living behind some façade.  It is simple acknowledgement of our fears.  It is sitting for a while outside our dreams and fantasies.  When we sit down in stillness and silence we are doing so in full awareness of the many things whose solution, if there is one at all, which there may be not, certainly doesn’t lie with us. 

In meditation we are doing the best and truest thing we can.  We are paying attention, devoting our attention to what is real and now – I am here, and this is how I am and what I am -- and away from what is unreal, illusory, past regrets or future hopes.  Contemplatives sometimes call this mindfulness, and it is best done in silence and stillness, without words and without images. 

We have stepped outside the web of our own self-reflective weaving, says John Main.  I find that very interesting.  Sitting there and trying to puzzle things out, for instance, is self-reflective weaving.  We are trying to frame our solutions or our explanations.  All well and good, no doubt, but the issue now, in meditation is not that, but to be still, in the humility of only the mantra, and the presence of God.  Moreover, sitting there and trying to image God… that too is self-reflective weaving, because the image will be, like all idols, some reflection of ourselves, inevitably. 

John Main calls meditation a “discipline of presence” -- wholly present to ourselves, to our situation, to our place… not running away.  God is wholly present to us. 

Perhaps then, as some would say, the whole thing is just self-indulgence.  Well no, it is not.  Just the reverse.  Meditators find the disciplines of contemplative prayer are quite life changing.  They begin to see ways forward invisible before.  They learn the deeper meanings of faith.  They start to live without the facades and pretences.  Problems which seemed insoluble now appear to have some light shining through them.  The silence and stillness, the attention and mindfulness, simply do honour to God in love and in truth.

Compassion – 24 August 2012

One of the most striking features of the Desert Fathers and Mothers was their considerable reluctance to sit in judgment on others.  Squarely in front of any need for judgment they saw a prior need for understanding and compassion.  Numerous stories of these people illustrate this.  They said judging is perilous to the one doing the judging.  They saw that when we do judge others, it is inclined to be an expression of our own woundedness.--- -

So what are we going to think about a person who is, so far as I know, beyond moral redemption – reaching for words we find, for instance, recalcitrant, or the old ecclesiastical word, contumacious -- someone who is indeed refusing moral help, who does not acknowledge guilt, who is placing himself beyond normal civilised moral codes?  Another old-fashioned word for that is reprobate.  The word means not approved, rejected entirely from favour.  In Christian theology there have always been some who thought that God reprobates certain people anyway.  They are then beyond redemption, outside the pale, cast into the abyss.  This may be because of what they have done, or not done – or it may be, as Calvin thought, entirely the sovereign and inscrutable choice of God.  Robert Burns pillories all this in his poem, Holy Willie’s Prayer.  I think any Christian believer would need to work hard to believe that stuff today.  But  now, it’s at least interesting to me that whole chunks of secular society seem eager to believe it.  You may be reprobate and we don’t want you anywhere near our town.  You should be cast out, as the lepers were driven outside the city walls in ancient times.  It was not only the fear of contagion from them, but also the assumption that God had shown his rejection of them by their visible disease.  So we don’t now care about you or what happens to you.  You are outcast.

So society becomes very ugly.  People come to be motivated by their fear.  No one has any actual solutions, simply because the problem is intractable.   It is without any satisfactory and safe solution.  People then start to say silly things.  They threaten vigilante action.  They demonise their fears by media-labels such as Beast.  Mob psychology and hysteria start to emerge. 

Contemplative prayer and life teach me that nothing whatever is gained by fear and anger.  It also teaches me to be very wary of self-righteousness.  These things are what the ego grasps at.  That the other person may be intractably wicked does not mean that I am in any position to climb on to the moral high ground and give interviews to the media.  Jesus reminds me that I am unable conscientiously to throw the first stone.  The only one who could – Jesus himself presumably – quietly refuses to.  And indeed, in Jesus’s company I can’t remotely imagine myself ever doing so.  Contemplatives know there are always various circumstances in life which are without solution, and that danger in a human and social sense is always present somewhere.  If we want to be safe in human terms we are out of luck.  But in the company of Jesus and in the silence and stillness, we are learning another way.

Sit down and shut up – 17 August 2012

James Bishop spent 10 years in prison. During that time he began to practice Christian Meditation in a group taught and led by Sr Benita Lankford, a Benedictine nun. Later, still in prison he became a novice Benedictine Oblate, and eventually took his final vows. Fr Laurence Freeman describes how that happened one day when the prison was in lockdown because of some incident, but the officers allowed the meditation group to meet and James Bishop to take his vows. Now he is out of prison, and he has written a book called A Way In The Wilderness. He calls it “a commentary on the Rule of St Benedict for physically and spiritually imprisoned people.” I have just begun to read this commentary. Already it is remarkable. James Bishop writes simply, directly, succinctly, lucidly. I am starting to wonder if he is putting to shame those of us who, as Disraeli said about Gladstone, are intoxicated with the exuberance of our own verbosity. The first word in the Rule of St Benedict, as is often pointed out, is “Listen…”

Listen, my son, to the precepts of your master, and incline the ear of your heart…

One of the three Benedictine vows is the vow of Obedience -- and obey comes from the Latin verb meaning to listen. Listening is more important than speaking and having opinions. It is also humbler. To listen is to remember our obligation to be teachable, so to listen is to be a disciple. In James Bishop’s words:

It is to sit down and shut up... Sitting down stills the body. Don’t move around and wriggle. Just sit quietly and calmly. Shutting up means more than not speaking; it means quieting the mind…

I watch Coronation Street in horror and fascination because it depicts, it seems to me, the precise opposite of a listening faith and life. On Coronation Street they respond to every person and every event verbally and often as not abusively. The words are frequently a preliminary to much yelling and accusation and punch-ups. No one tells the truth – it is a diet of silly, futile lies. Egoism reigns supreme. Although admittedly extreme, it is reflected quite chillingly in various aspects of NZ culture. James Bishop found a way to be still and silent in the horror of a prison. He used earphones to signify that he was unavailable for interruption. Of some 7 months in solitary confinement, officially called Administrative Segregation and which the prisoners called The Hole, with no TV or radio, never allowed outside, he wrote: The advantage of being there was that I could meditate very well.

Why meditate? – 10 August 2012

For the last couple of weeks we have been groaning under the weight of achievement and success. Gold, silver and bronze. It dawns on me that we now have something called High Performance coaches, who presumably differ from the kind of coach I might be allocated, that is to say, remedial. The pinnacle of all our culture and striving, to stand on that podium having overcome all odds and one’s opponents, and now to be a national icon, a role model, a hero. Children with shining eyes are being motivated to great and wonderful things. Per ardua ad astra, was the motto of my old school, which we translated as through tights to heights – not that it had any noticeable effect on me. This result-and achievement-oriented culture often has echoes even in Meditation. And indeed, as one teacher, Kim Nataraja, wrote very recently: It is wonderful to stop the endlessly chattering mind and release stress and tension. It feels great to have ‘time out’ from the concerns, anxieties, hopes and fears that generally beset us, to stop the drain of energy of a mind going round and round in circles. I do see the point she is making, although she may have forgotten for the moment that our teaching says that meditation is independent of feelings. “Whether we feel like it or not,” is what we teach. Emotions, including the drive to exceed and excel, are a big part of what is brought into obedience and conformed to reality. Meditation is about transformation at another level than how fit we are. It has a lot to do with what St Paul wrote to the Romans:

I appeal to you therefore... to present your bodies as a living sacrifice... Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

We emerge, as the months and years go by, with another, better, more Christlike way of thinking and reacting to events and to people, less fearful, less threatened, less defensive, more understanding and compassionate, more mindful and insightful. And it is not from having attended night classes with high performance teachers, but from having been still and silent and paying attention. Fr John Main always said, if you have to look for results, then look for them in a deeper capacity for love, understanding and compassion.