The present moment – 28 October 2016

To the most experienced meditators it is still commonplace that, as one person put it, the moment our bodies are stilled, our thoughts start to do the walking… We wander about in daydreams, down memory lane, planning, hoping, worrying; internally we are still filled with perpetual noise and movement, the mad whirl of disconnected thoughts.  I know we keep returning to this subject of distractions, but it can be a worry for meditators and sometimes lead to a sense of defeat.

I think there are two basic things to say.  The first is that our noisy minds, our distractions, are normal, utterly predictable, inevitable, and they are not our enemy.  Neither will the distractions ever completely disappear in meditation, so that one day we can guarantee to be floating around in blissful uninterrupted serenity.  When one woman asked Fr John Main how long it would be before she was undistracted, he replied, Oh, the first 30 years are the worst.  We introduce the mantra into our silence to be a stable, neutral focal point, the free alternative to any and all distraction, something to return to – usually over and over again.

What matters then is that we greet these thoughts, memories, anxieties, images, whatever they are, gently and simply as they appear, honour them by noting them -- and turn back to the mantra.  (Another classic saying about this is that while you can’t stop the birds flying overhead, you can stop them making nests in your hair.)  So this is what we do for the whole time of our prayer.  It is always gentle, no irritation or impatience, no recrimination… indeed, the thought, “I’m just not getting it right… I’ll never be any good at this”, is itself a distraction which we receive, note gently -- and return to the mantra.

The second basic issue is about time.  This is the harder one for me.  The distractions, if we permit them, always seduce us away from the present moment.  After all, that is how our minds have been trained and formed.  We live in linear time, that is to say, we think about what happened – that is memory; or we think about what might happen, quite often with anxiety – that is planning, or fearing the future…  Or we may dwell (abide is the biblical word) in the present moment – and that is attention.  Prayer, and particularly contemplative prayer, is a matter of attention.  It lives and breathes where God’s Spirit is present, attending to us in the present moment.  I am with you always… said Jesus. Abide in me, and I in you…  

Now it will always be difficult, as a matter of personal discipline, to learn to live, to attend, to abide in the present.  Of course we do have to remember the past and learn from it.  We are silly, even dangerous if we don’t.  And of course we must arrange prudently for the future, as we can.  In a way, those are disciplines also.  In Greek, all of that is chronos (χρονος), the linear passage of time and events that never ends.  The river of time.  But not in prayer.  Prayer is being present, now, the heart, timid perhaps, saying Yes to God and Yes to the way things are… because, for one thing, there is no help for us, no saving help for our world, in the denying or concealing of reality.  That meeting, then, in Greek, is kairos (καιρος), the special moment, the time when deep speaks to deep, as the Psalmist put it, when with the help of our discipline and our mantra we are for the moment blessedly still and silent, chronos steps back and kairos takes over -- and the Spirit can bring new things to birth in us and in our world.

Not like other people – 21 October 2016

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other.  [Luke 18:9-14]

It seems to me worth noting however that each man was correct, in a way.  There’s no need to see the pharisee as a hypocrite.  He may well have been just as upright as he claimed, observing the law, and genuinely grateful not to be part of the degeneracy around him.  It is a feeling we might sometimes be reasonably familiar with.  The tax collector by contrast may well have become ashamed, even disgusted, with his life – these tax collectors were men who bought contracts from the Roman government to collect taxes; they lived on what they could extort above and beyond the money the government required.  It was a squalid system, made for corruption and for leaving misery and penury in its trail. 

So what is the point in this story…?  Jesus says that it was the tax collector who went home “justified”, and not the pharisee.  “Justified”, in this context, means something like restored to favour, let out of the dog box… Yes, you can get off the naughty chair, now run outside and behave…!  In the religious thinking of that time – and, I’m sad to say, in many places in our time – you are either right with God or you are not.  God is pleased with you, accepting you, or not.  Some forms of faith actually encourage people to think this way, even warn that we may be offside with God without realising it, accidentally so to speak.  So then faith and worship and service become a matter of doing whatever you have to do to be right with God.   

Now, I confess, I don’t know that God… the God served this way seems like an idol to me… and here Jesus seems to be saying:  If you want to think in those terms, OK… but realise that it doesn’t turn out how you expect.  It was the one who had no illusions about himself whom God saw and accepted.  It was the one who never dreamed of claiming, “I am not like others, I am better than others…”   That was the crucial difference – not one man’s moral achievement and the other man’s moral failure, but the fact that the tax collector saw himself as one with all fallen and fallible humanity.  The pharisee saw himself safe on the moral and religious high ground, unsullied… and separate.

I am corresponding with a man in prison, sentenced for sexual crimes.  There is no way this man can occupy the moral high ground.  His professional life, his social life, his family life, are at an end, along with his self-respect, his dignity and his reputation.  For the rest of his days, in prison or out, he will have people passing judgement on him, restricting his life, rejecting him.  He is a Christian believer, although the faith in which he was instructed is desperately infantile and moralistic.   My task is gently to introduce him to the God Jesus called Father, who upsets religion and justifies, restores the ungodly who call in their need.

Introversion it is not – 14 October 2016

One of the trendy ways to make sense of human society is to label people as extroverts or introverts.  It seems obvious.  Those labelled extroverts not only enjoy the company of others, but look for it and actually need it.  They languish and shrivel if they are all alone.  They are energised by other people.  They tell you: You should get out more.  These are the extroverts.  Others in category introvert tend more to be drained in society.  Hell is a cocktail party, as someone put it.  Far from languishing all on our own, we are restored and reanimated in solitude. 

We all know that life and people are actually much more complicated than that, and that most people find ways to live happily in both camps…  The assumption however is that when it comes to contemplative life and prayer, introverts will tend to take to it better than extroverts.  It is the introverts, we think, who will be more at home with silence and stillness and solitude… and inwardness… so the argument goes. 

Well, it is not so.  Fr Laurence Freeman says that in what he calls our self-conscious and narcissistic society, we confuse introversion with true interiority.  In contemplative spirituality, introversion is not what we are looking for.  Conversion is what we are looking for.  Our concern is no longer to be looking at ourselves and all our feelings, reactions, desires, ideas, dreams or daydreams… interiorly or exteriorly.  That is what we are turning away from, in our disciplines of silence, stillness and, with most of us, our mantra. 

True contemplative life, experience and prayer cordially includes both extroverts and introverts.  This is because it is at another level than all this management of self and fascination with self.  It is where we are consciously in the presence of the unseen God – or we may say, the Spirit of the Risen Jesus.  We are admitting a presence and a grace other than our own.  Whether the meditator is an extrovert or an introvert, either or some of each, the issue now is to be still and receptive, to be silent and undemanding… indeed, in what I think to be wonderfully moving Hebrew terms, to welcome with hospitality the love that encompasses us all. 

So personality type is interesting…  I have always found it so.  If nothing else, it warns me when to become invisible in company…  But in prayer the question does not arise.  Whoever I am and whatever I am like, indeed, however I may be feeling right now, I do what I can to be fully present – in the presence of God in Christ. 

Exiles – 7 October 2016

The lectionary Old Testament reading for next Sunday takes us back to about 580 BCE, to Jerusalem, and to the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah.  Jerusalem has been conquered by the army of Nebuchadnezzar.  He has creamed off all the priests and intellectuals, the artisans and professionals, and has carted them away into exile in Babylon.  Jerusalem is a city largely destroyed, a way of life all but wiped out, families shattered, survivors wandering – we have exile, refugees, all the calamitous consequences of mindless violence. How familiar does that sound at present?  Jeremiah writes to the exiles in Babylon…

These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon…  Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.  [Jeremiah 29:1, 5-7]

So they were to live through this catastrophe, and not by becoming perennial victims.  Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives…  Jeremiah sets out for them what real faith is like.  It requires first that we have a sober awareness of reality.  The reality now was Babylon, being far from home and in a foreign culture; the reality entailed loss and sorrow.  To the victim it is not that.  The victim’s first reality is myself, what has happened to me, how much I am disabled by the events of my life.  I start to see everything through the sentimentalism of what could have been but wasn’t…. for me, or for my family or tribe.  It may be eminently understandable – and perhaps it’s all very well for me, since I am not a refugee or experiencing such things in my life – but victimhood shields us from God and from faith.  We have placed self in the place that belongs to God.

One stream of spiritual teaching says that we are all, in various ways, in exile.  Some of our protestant hymns reflect that teaching.  Another important stream remembers that we are all children or great-great-grandchildren of exiles, of people who for one reason or another left home and made a life in a new place.  The faith of Abraham, Jeremiah, Jesus or Francis the Pope, of countless exiles through the centuries, consists in taking the next step, trusting God, putting one foot in front of the other, being still, saying yes to life in both joy and pain.  What cannot be helpful is retreating into fantasies and regrets, blame and retribution, sentimental dreams of a former life where all was well.

Our prayer is the discipline in which we practise presence and reality.  This discipline is our growing familiarity with the space in which it becomes possible even to forgive our enemies – something Jesus taught, as we know, but nearly six centuries before that Jeremiah said: seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf…  That city was Babylon.

Sursum corda – 30 September 2016

The poplars lining Sandspit Road are now well on the way into leaf.  Last week was the Spring Equinox in the southern hemisphere, so that’s a kind of milestone each year.  At the South Pole the sun rose above the horizon, where it will stay for six months, day and night so to speak.  So Mother Nature is looking up.  In last Friday’s talk, centred on the lectionary gospel for last Sunday, I touched on gloomy issues about faith and the world, and we went home chastened and puzzled.  Then during this week I looked at the gospel for this next Sunday, and… oh dear.  It’s all about duty and not getting above ourselves.  The Old Testament reading is from the Book of Lamentations, and the Psalm is 137, the one about weeping by the waters of Babylon and hanging up our harps. 

I decided it was time to remind myself where the light is shining, to rejoin the world of spiritual fun.  A useful ploy in this spiritual circumstance is to consult Rowan Williams, one of the luminous Christian teachers of our day.  Dr Williams did not let me down.  I found a sermon of his commemorating John Wesley.  Rowan Williams describes John Wesley as a hugely passionate but deeply fallible man, with his muddle and silliness, false starts, disastrous misjudgements, wrong turnings… and that’s just the start of what we may celebrate about John Wesley: 

Wesley’s gospel is that our first task is to trust God…  Our identity before God will come from God, insofar as we simply go on with him, patiently opening ourselves to his patience with us, and patiently staying with each other in our risky and muddled lives.  This is not a Christianity without struggle, without discipline, and without judgement.  It is hard to keep that openness, that habit of trust – we need disciplines for that, silent listening for God, standing before the Christ of the gospels, joining in the church’s act of praise.  We need to learn real repentance and honesty, to accept our mistakes as real, and never to be so paralysed by or ashamed of them that we are afraid of ourselves and our own perceptions and choices…  Beyond this stumbling and confusion… God still holds a future for us in his hands.

Thank God for a saint who had to live his life so embarrassingly beyond the conventions…  Thank God even for the 18^th century Church of England, so clueless about how to handle a man so irresponsibly devoted to God that it forced him into wandering and exploration, folly and blundering – and unshakeable witness to free and full grace.

There is much more in that sermon…  There is no safe place, there is no safe life, there is no safe and sure religious belief and practice.  What there is, is faith, hope and love, as St Paul put it.  If we are concerned to change this desperately cruel and sad world, the only pathway is the change in ourselves brought by God, in our attention to God.  We become women and men of peace and love and justice.  We become unafraid of change because we know change in our own hearts and lives.  We do not have enemies and we do not resolve disputes with violence of any kind.

That is gospel, good news.  We are free… to weep with those who weep -- in Syria we see a fraction of their pain and bear it with them -- and we rejoice with those who rejoice.  We set aside the need to appear otherwise than we are, and we have set aside also the fear of mortality.  Death is the final mystery, and we will be invited into it by God in love and trust. 

A Jewish tale – 23 September 2016

There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table…  [Luke 16:19ff]

…and what follows is the tale of the rich man and Lazarus the very poor man.  They both die.  The rich man is tormented in Hades because of his life of self, while the poor man, it says, lies in Abraham’s bosom.  This is what Jews call a midrash, a graphic commentary on the law, and to me it reads like a cautionary synagogue tale.  The rich man says well, if you can’t send Lazarus with some water for me, at least send him to warn my brothers about the perils of wealth.  And Abraham replies: They have Moses and the prophets… if they don’t heed Moses and the prophets, they’re not going change whatever happens.

Now, in order to have informed and credible faith we need space to ask questions.  The day is surely gone when faith was taken to mean virtuous subservience to biblical or any other authority.  And some questions certainly do arise about this Jewish tale.  Did Jesus actually tell this story?  It seems to be uncomfortably out of step with the general spirit of his teaching.  This tale is found only in Luke.  There’s not a hint of it elsewhere.  But it does make sense in the Jewish context… Abraham’s bosom… fortunes being reversed… Moses and the prophets…  If Jesus told this tale, then perhaps he was wryly recounting a story they all knew anyway as Jews. 

In the Jewish sense, Moses and the prophets, the Law and the Prophets, in Hebrew the Torah and the Nevi’im… are the two pillars of Jewish love and response to God.  The Law of Moses and the teachings of the prophets regularly warn that wealth carries obligations.  You care for the widow, the orphan and the stranger.  In the Law this is not negotiable.  You are not to be scrupulous to harvest the grain from the corners or right to the edges of your fields – you leave grain for the poor.  Every seven years you remit all debts.  Moses and the prophets were quite enough to alert this rich bloke to the peril he was always in, and they will suffice to warn his rich brothers.  That is the Jewish teaching in this tale.

Jesus says rather more, however, although you don’t find it echoed in this story.  He himself identified himself with the flawed and the failed, the sinners and the needy.  He bridged what the story calls the great gulf fixed.  He directly challenged the religious élite and the power of wealth.  He taught it is a matter, not of social status, privilege and power, but of the heart… Where your heart is, there your treasure will be also… to invert his equation.  Our life and prayer are a bridging of what that story calls the great chasm fixed, between us and them, between privileged and needy, between power and poverty, between appearance and reality, between safety and love – to say nothing of black and white, male and female, deserving and undeserving...  We can’t live, as it were, on the other side of a great gulf from other people.  So far as it lies with us, which normally isn’t very far because we are not among the great and good, in our silence and stillness we consent to the changes in us brought by the Spirit of Jesus.  And our hearts are changed, and to that extent our world is changed. 

Balm in Gilead – 16 September 2016

The readings for next Sunday include this passage from Jeremiah.  The prophet is sunk in inconsolable grief at the state of religion and the people.  I was tempted, as I’m sure others were, to consign this to the Too Hard basket… but then my attention was caught by its raw reality and poetry…

My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land: “Is the Lord not in Zion? Is her King not there? The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored? O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people! [Jeremiah 8:18ff]

You might say that there are two broad ways of living a faith, in our case Christian faith.  They differ from each other, and yet in some ways you can have bits of each.  The most popular attitude, at any rate in western Christianity, is that it is mainly about me.  Although I know I am to love God and my neighbour, and quite often do, my faith, my satisfaction and my happiness are not negotiable and are the test, my security and assurance, my church and its fellowship, my growth and development…  This overall prior assumption with all its variations is scarcely questioned, and it can be formed to merge peaceably at least with the now dominant secular culture and people who probably want nothing to do with religion.  Faith is for me, obviously, and so plenty of people now say, “I have no need of it.  I can take better care of myself, myself.”

The other way is the road less travelled… in which…  I am not the centre of life and faith.  That self is finding itself displaced (replaced…?).  In prayer and quiet discipline I am attending to what Jesus taught and presides over even now – a life which is challenging my securities and boundaries.  Jesus asked, Why do you call me Lord, yet don’t do the things that I say?  The balm in Gilead, we discover, is not a soothing balm, it is a healing, re-creating balm.  It is not about how I am feeling, but about who I am becoming, in Christ.  This way of faith is by its nature open and vulnerable, it sees no need of fences or walls.  It has been called in history the Via Negativa, because God whom we love and worship is best described by what God is not – God is not what we think.  What we have is mystery, holiness, justice and love, with the veil somewhat lifted for us by Jesus.  So we are not loud, and we do not imagine we are saving the world.  We live by the Spirit, as one of the great biblical images puts it – the wind of God.  The Spirit, taught Fr John Main, is Jesus living in us, and among us, and joining in our prayer.