A waste – Passion Sunday, 27 March 2015

While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, “Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her. [Mark 14:3-5]

A denarius was roughly one day’s wage for a common labourer.  This ointment, pure extract of spikenard, was worth more than 300 denarii.  And now it was running on the floor.  The alabaster jar also was broken.  We have no idea who this woman was, but it was not the first time a woman had intruded while the men were having dinner with Jesus, and had done something unexpected and socially embarrassing.  They scolded her…  They would have made much better use of 300 denarii.  But Jesus comes to her rescue with what must have sounded like a black joke:  She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. 

It is finally a matter of what is in the heart.  We can only speculate on what was in the hearts of Jesus’s companions at Simon’s house at Bethany.  Certainly anger – Mark tells us that some reacted in anger when this woman did what she did.  But also, it is close to the time when Jesus is arrested and put on trial.  They must have had fear and confusion in their hearts.  We know that – for all their criticism of this woman’s actions – they were not themselves busy raising money for the poor. 

In the heart of the woman, however, at that moment, was single-minded love.  She loved him, and she was already grieving for his loss.  Jesus knew what was in their hearts, he knew what was in the woman’s heart.  This is something that flows from quietness and spiritual depth – the freedom to perceive, to discern, what is happening in someone’s heart.  It is an aspect of mindfulness, and it entails the inner freedom, in contemplative life, to set one’s own feelings and reactions to one side. 

Most of us have known for years that both the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures teach that God “looketh on the heart”.  In a world obsessed with appearance, superficiality and triviality, our faith always reminds us that what God sees is very different, flowing from love and understanding, forgiveness and compassion.  A few years ago the guest speaker at the annual John Main Seminar, that year in Dublin, was the Dalai Lama.  He spoke about his Buddhist sense of the teaching of Jesus.  Much of this later appeared in a small book which he entitled, “The Good Heart”.  Buddhist teaching is just that – it is the heart always that needs to be healed, the broken heart. 

Jesus had healed the heart of the woman at Bethany.  She responds with a reckless extravagance of love, and Jesus says:  Leave her alone, she has done a beautiful thing.  When we extract some silence and stillness from our busy, committed lives, this itself is an extravagance of love.  We are content for our hearts to be open to God and to healing.

Some Greeks – Lent V, 20 March 2015

Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.  [John 12:20-22] 

But what follows in this gospel reading for next Sunday is not a fascinating account of the meeting between Jesus and these Greeks.  We are not even told whether they actually got to meet him.  We are given instead a very complex series of statements from Jesus in which he voices his personal torment and his sense of imminent crisis – the seed falling into the ground and dying, then bearing fruit.  He talks about losing your life and saving it.  He says his soul is troubled.  There is a voice from heaven. There is something about darkness and light, and about the ruler of this world being driven out…

So let’s go back to the simpler beginning.  A party of Greeks is asking to be introduced to Jesus.  We are not told why, or who they were.  I did wonder whether they were Greek Jews – it says they had come to Jerusalem for the Passover – but most commentators assume they were Gentiles, perhaps Greek traders who knew there would be lots of business in Jerusalem at that time.  It certainly sounds as though it was a pretty inconvenient time for an interview anyway.  I am sure it has already occurred to you that the Epiphany story of the wise men who followed a star from the east to visit the infant Jesus, is another instance in which non-Jews are mysteriously attracted, sensing something significant.

Some Greeks…  Jesus was a Jew – something needing to be remembered by many lifelong Christians who assume he was an Anglican, a Catholic or an Honorary Presbyterian.  Jesus had never heard of Christianity.  In Jerusalem, Jesus was in the heartland of his own community and his faith, and confronting its issues.  The problem was that it was his fellow Jews who were out to get him, with the support of the Roman occupation government.  Jesus did not have what we would call a world view.  “Some Greeks” would have been alien, interesting but irrelevant and inconvenient right now.  John includes this in his gospel because he thinks it is a sign, of the eventual explosion of this faith far beyond Judaism to all the world. 

Many aspects of Christianity and the church reflect that explosion.  Among them is our Christian Meditation movement and practice.  The Greeks who were interested to see Jesus, if they were not Jews, were pagan idolaters in the terms of the day.  But they felt drawn.  In Christian Meditation we believe we reflect the mind of Christ in removing the fences, maintaining open doors.  The issue is not whether you qualify in some way, it is whether your heart needs to live and beat behind safe fences, or out in the wind of the Spirit, as John has Jesus saying to Nicodemus.  Christian Meditation around the world is being practised by – to borrow St Paul’s words – both Jews and Greeks, slave and free, rich and poor, male and female.  I would add, we include meditators who are not at all sure what precisely they believe, but who have found that this pathway brings them closer to truth and light.  When you think about it, we are “some Greeks” who have come to find Jesus.

Loving darkness – Lent IV, 13 March 2015

This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light.  [John 3:19]

Light and darkness is a very grand theme, but this morning let’s keep it close to our humbler experience.  Life has acquainted us with both light and darkness, and still does.  We have also learned, in mindfulness along the way, that light and darkness are very closely related.  John’s Gospel tends to depict them rather as opposites.  But you can’t have the shadows without the light.  Our lives are stories of both light and darkness, shadows and hiding places. 

It is also our experience that the glare of sunlight, the full light of a summer day, can be blinding as much as revealing.  We all sometimes prefer the solace of darkness, some shadows and coolness, some differentiation of the light.  Perhaps I can insert here a commercial on behalf of serious introverts -- as my son-in-law once put it, in a world of chattering, of loudly motivated extroverts and activists, the introvert’s happiest place may be alone in a darkened room. 

So we ponder what Jesus was seeking to convey when he said, the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light.  He explains… because their deeds were evil.  But we need the shadows.  One of our media culture’s gross distortions happens when the full glare of publicity is turned on someone with something to hide, something private or profoundly embarrassing.  This rarely if ever discloses the truth.  The truth assumes not only that you get a sight of someone naked and humiliated before the world, but also that this is being seen and told with understanding and compassion.  The light distorts as much as the darkness conceals.  Any experienced photographer knows what too much light does to the image and to perception. 

If we have deeds that are evil, as Jesus put it, unredeemed aspects of our egos, or things in our past, or addictions, nothing whatever is gained by turning the glare of interrogation on them.  Wanting answers, is one favourite public cliché and illusion.  Rather, in a contemplative life, God’s Spirit is able to bring into the light of understanding and compassion what was formerly hidden, or kept in gloom, or in some back room.  I think this is a slow process, and gentle in the main.  The movement is always towards the light, and on the way there are many shadows and spectres and times of waiting. 

O God our Light, to thee we bow,

Within all shadows standest thou…

Or Paul Simon’s words from 40 years ago:  Hullo darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again…  I am unsure what Paul Simon meant, and I suspect he wasn’t sure either.  But Jesus saw how many people prefer the darkness.  And he delivers us from fear of the darkness in life.  St Benedict instructs his followers to prefer nothing whatever to Christ.  That is the choice by which we learn to make friends with both light and darkness.  It is the way by which we learn Christian maturity, how to discern subtlety in the truth, to distinguish truth from cant and dogmatism.  It is the way by which we learn how compassion and kindness are indispensable, how you cannot divide people into labelled categories, and how we heap up guilt if we do not protect the weak.  It teaches us to understand brokenness, and to love forgiveness. 

Jesus with a whip – Lent III, 6 March 2015

In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out…  [John 2:14-15]

A besetting sin of the church and of most of us in it at some time is what we can call the domestication of God, which is simply the making of idols.  And so in its extremes God may come to bear an uncanny resemblance to a British Tory, or a United States Republican, or to dear old Uncle Algernon, kind and gentle and mercifully remote.  Jesus turns out as portrayed in those Victorian coloured posters which once papered the walls of Sunday schools, walking through flowery fields in the sunshine, blessing children and little lambs, sitting on a rock teaching with uplifting words.  Even pictures of the crucifixion, which could only have been a hideous, filthy and bloody event, seem somehow sanitised.   And so we end up with a sort of benign idolatry, worshipping a God we create, to whom we make requests.  Of course that is in some respects a caricature... but it is not for nothing that Jewish faith insisted that you cannot see or image God, and the Second Commandment forbade idolatry utterly.  Jesus, writes St Paul, is the icon of God.  But I do not recall Jesus portrayed on the Sunday school wall, flailing a whip, tipping up the tables of the money-changers and scattering it all across the ground, chasing the animals out of the sacred precincts and opening the cages of doves.

You would have to be very angry to do that.  I hate to think what the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce had to say about it – they would have been angry too.  The actual traders, dealers in currency, sellers of sacrificial animals, would scarcely have been amused.  The temple officials, the junior priests charged to see that it all happened as it should and that the temple got its share of the proceeds, would have had to face their superiors who would have been incandescent.  Whose anger was right?

Jesus did it moreover with a whip in his hand.  I remember back in student days long ago, one of my colleagues who later became distinguished saying, “Perhaps it was just a very little whip…”  He was already instinctively domesticating and sanitising and constructing idols. 

Jesus was in high indignation.  My Father’s house…  He had just come to Jerusalem.  This was the scene he saw in the temple.  Ordinary folk were being shut out by religious rules and by queues and protocols that favoured privilege, shut out by clamour, by commercial exploitation and rip-off, by a religious system more geared to its own survival than to caring for widows and orphans…  It was the incessant din of idolatry, shutting out true devotion and truth.

The silence and stillness we practise are the obverse of all that.  We are laying our idols aside, so far as we can.  And so far as we can’t, we are helped by the Spirit of Jesus.  Anger too…  I sometimes think that anger might be the last to go.  I want to retain anger, so long as I see people beheaded by religious fanatics, maimed and starved in the desert by warfare, kidnapped, raped and blown up…  Jesus had times when searing anger was appropriate, with a whip.   I carry that too into the silence.  It turns out to be something that doesn’t necessarily need healing at this time.

Saving and losing - Lent II, 27 February 2015

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. [Mark 8:34-35]

In fact, it seems to me, both things are always happening, all through our lives.  I rather wish someone had pointed that out to me about 60 years ago.  Sometimes we are able to set ego aside – at other times we seem to defend it, protect it, feed it, pamper it, proclaim it, advertise it, study ways to enhance and develop it. 

It may seem confusing, however.  Seriously denying myself can be, if you think about it, a very handsome exercise in ego.  “From now on I will devote myself to selfless service… look how humble I am becoming…!”  And as for what Jesus called saving your life, and the modern world calls taking care of Number One – well, God in his goodness has equipped us with necessary aggressive and competitive instincts, self-protection mechanisms, flight reflexes, the capacity for justified ambition and pride, abilities for high achievement and hard work… These are gifts we perhaps should not suppress. 

The contemplative disciple however sees a river of grace running through it all. A vital aspect of prayer is simply our consenting to this process.  It is a process in which the ego, which itself is a gift of God, is losing its priority as time goes by.  The saddest thing about ageing in much of our culture is the way it comes for so many to be seen as an enemy.  Ageing is not for wimps, is one of our current clever clichés – no, ageing is for the wise, for those becoming free to lose their fears.  It is sad when this time gets to be used instead to fight off ageing, to recapture some lost youth or retain control of people and events, to be in despair about wrinkles, to hang on desperately to the form of faith that captured our imaginations 50 years ago, or to join the serried ranks of elderly grizzlers.   The contemplative path is a journey of learning to live by grace… 'Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far and Grace will lead me home. 

The phrases Jesus used, denying oneself / losing one’s life, are not pointing to some mighty decision we make one day, that from now on I will be different.  It is, as our experience teaches us, the process of grace, initiated and energised by God as we learn to be still and silent and welcoming to God’s Spirit.  The ego, which may have served us well in many ways, but not in other ways, becomes steadily more attenuated, perhaps even a source of wry amusement to us, or amazement…  It is being supplanted from within by what St Paul calls simply Spirit, what Jesus in John’s Gospel calls the Spirit of Truth.  St Paul wrote about this to the Corinthians [II Cor. 3:17-18] --

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.  And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being changed into the same image, from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

Wild animals and angels – Lent I, 20 February 2015

He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. (Mark 1:13)

Wild beasts and ministering angels sounds like the way lots of people experience life – perhaps many of us at some time.  Jesus had been baptised by John, and that had been clearly a profound and vivid experience for him.  The narrative in Mark can only be a memory from Jesus himself, told by Jesus, and Mark recorded it years later in these very colourful images.  The Spirit, it says, straight away drove him into the desert – the Greek literally means “threw him out” into the desert.  It is a kind of compulsion some may recognise, when there was something we knew we had to do, and it was as though we had no choice.  Perhaps if that happens it is a moment of grace when we are not for once being driven by our habitual busyness, or by social agenda or tribal convention, or by the need to feed our egos.    

There in the desert he remained for forty days.  “Tempted by Satan” indicates to me a critical inner conflict about what kind of person he was to be from now on.  He was seriously tempted during this time to settle for the wrong choices about being powerful or spectacular, popular, a star, an icon.

He was with the wild beasts, says Mark.  The picture is not that they were threatening or attacking him.  Wild beasts are what is untamed in any of us, what may emerge when we are not safely behind our respectable public persona and firewall mechanisms – our shadow side, normally shut down with the lid on, might appear.  It is something that happens in silence and stillness, when we are listening and attentive.  That is why we sometimes say that meditation is not always comfortable, that sometimes it is hard work.  The Spirit is confronting Jesus with his inner truth.  Our inner truth may not always be the truth we like to hear.  But if it is the truth, it is as well to recognise and acknowledge it.

And the angels waited on him…  In the Greek, the word is ministered, served.  It is a lovely picture of God with one hand instigating pain by the piercing light of personal truth, and with the other hand ministering peace and healing, strength and hope.

It is the whole process of our contemplative prayer and life.  Truth… and healing.  We realise the angels have been ministering when, perhaps at other times altogether than the times of prayer, we discover that our attitudes have shifted, that we reacted untypically in some difficulty, that we are aware of a joy or a hope we hadn’t noticed before, or an acceptance of some limitation or adversity, some fact we can’t change.  The silence – some people run away from it, instinctively, because they sense that there are wild beasts, as it were.  Well there are, and there are angels.

Back to Basics…3 - 13 February 2015

The prayer we practise here, Christian Meditation, belongs to grown-up faith.  But this is a difficult point to talk about, because we are instinctively uncomfortable with making distinctions, let alone value judgements, between the ways different people express their faith, and we don’t sit happily with any kind of elitism or superiority.   Everyone knows some good Christian who loves animals but whose attitudes to people who are different range from fearful to ferocious.  Everyone knows some devoted Christian who prays to some strange god who miraculously finds her a parking space.  Everyone knows the moment when we asked the god of miraculous interventions to make some special rescue, to heal or to keep safe, while knowing that human peril and human mortality remained the same for everyone else on the planet. 

Grown-up faith has begun when we have grasped what both Jesus and the New Testament writers have said about fear.  Why are you afraid?...asked Jesus.  Love casts out fear, writes St John.  Fear of the future, fear of risk, fear of pain, of ageing, of dependence, of mortality…  This fear seems all very human, realistic and necessary.  A lot of it was instilled into us in our earliest years, parent recordings we call them, by those who naturally wanted to keep us from harm.  But you can’t protect people from life and death.  Life is dangerous to health.  We observe that money and lifestyle are little if any protection.  There may not be some sublime celestial plan for my life.  It may actually be up to me.  God made it and I live it.

And so, in the stillness and silence we are not building up protective walls – on the contrary, if anything, we are opening the doors.  We are not accumulating knowledge and knowhow – on the contrary, we are opening ourselves to wisdom, which is another matter, to an ever new relationship with God, to a fresh – and oddly, even a childlike, as Jesus said -- perception of Jesus and his teaching.  We are not strengthening our defences against evil or finding ways to feel better – on the contrary, we begin to recognise the joy that lies at the heart of pain, and our essential oneness with people in pain for any reason.

Contemplative prayer is a very basic Yes to God.  It is a Yes at the deepest levels we know.  It is not any kind of conditional Yes…If… or Yes…But... or Yes…And…   It is the Yes of love and finality.  Prudent legal documents have lovely Latin phrases indicating all manner of provisos and precautions.  None of that is in our prayer.  Our prayer is unconditional, because along the way we have laid aside our fears of what might happen.  Perhaps more likely, we have discovered that these fears were removed from us anyway.  It has become grown-up prayer, a prayer of freedom.