God’s two silences – 26 October 2018

Father John Main, whose vision and teaching really led to the initiation of the World Community for Christian Meditation, was a Benedictine monk.  His talks to meditation groups were gathered together and published.  One of those collections is entitled The Way of Unknowing – and one of the talks therein is entitled God’s Two Silences.  I think it is particularly important teaching for grown-up faith.

God’s first silence – if we may use these terms – is what we read at the beginning of the Gospel of John.  In the beginning was the Word… The Word, God’s Logos,[1] was before all time, primal, writes John.  The Word was with God, and the Word was God… all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being… and the Word was made flesh…  God’s Word is God’s eternal loving will and presence, eventually glimpsed in Jesus, whom Paul calls the icon of the invisible God.[2]  Here is a mystery, to be received but scarcely explained.  It is God’s first silence, not spoken, not written, but vibrant with love and purpose, creating and giving life – and light, says John.  God’s knows us from before we were ever made.  To pay attention, to pray – to listen, is the Benedictine word – to be silent and still, is to enter the silence of God, waiting, hearing, consenting to the Word of God.  That is what we do.  Very often it does not seem quite that way, it seems fractured and interrupted.  It may seem that all we do sometimes is glimpse a little light in the distance.  The mantra helps because, if we use it, it is a returning-point, to being still, silent, listening, consenting.  If God and we are both in silence – and God always is – then we are in accord.

God’s second silence, says Fr John Main, is the silence of absence and loss.  This silence is to be taken seriously, not overlaid by feverish forms of worship or sentimental spiritual advice.  John Main writes that this silence of absence and loss has a purpose.  It is the way we learn the perils of possessiveness.  It is true that we can experience times of great peace and reassurance, joy and wonder in nature… but these are all gift, not of our making but of immeasurable grace, infinitely beyond our owning or control. 

We learn in contemplative life and prayer to be content with both silences, loving God because God is love, not because God makes us happy or fixes things.  The Psalmists of Israel knew both silences – and interestingly, the Psalms we don’t get to sing in church so much are largely the ones expressive of God’s second silence.  More recently the French woman Simone Weil wrote movingly of the second silence.  In the abyss of the Second World War and occupied France, she wrote:  Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time… more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell…  The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least to go on wanting to love…  Then one day God will come to show himself to this soul…  But if the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something which is almost equivalent to hell.[3]  Perhaps so – but as John emphatically states, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never overcome it.

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[1] John 1:1-18.  “Word” in the Greek is Logos (ὁ λογοϛ)

[2] Colossians 1:15

[3] Simone Weil: The Love of God and Affliction.

Not so among you – 19 October 2018

James and John ask Jesus an infantile question about seating arrangements in the kingdom of heaven.  Yet again Jesus reminds them, it is not about precedence or greatness or mutual importance.  That is the way the gentiles think, he says.  It shall not be so among you.[1] 

There are subtleties of Greek translation here.  Jesus is not, as it were, ordering them, commanding them, about their behaviour.  He is not telling them to be humble.  James and John may have been trying to stake out for themselves high places in the order of precedence in the kingdom – we can assume that others of them had their own hopes about that – but I don’t think Jesus is responding here by requiring them not to think that way. 

He is saying what we often say in contemplative life and prayer, that time in Jesus’s company does in fact change us.  In time to come they won’t be thinking that way, he is saying.  And indeed, in a discipline of loving discipleship, prayerful silence and attention, however intermittent and erratic it may be at times, we do begin to discover values shifting, fears and anxieties lessening, steadiness increasing, love and compassion emerging where it was not so prominent before…  It seems to me that Jesus is simply observing to his disciples, who prognosticated about who would be greater, that they would change.  They would lose that need for recognition, power or control.  The greatest among them would be servant of all.  That is the way it would turn out among them, I think he is saying.

In the 21^st century there are all sorts of ways in which in fact we need power or authority – being powerless is not good in modern society.  It is not power that is wrong, but the misuse of power – whether it is in high politics and policies, or whether it is any form of bullying, or some employer sordidly demanding favours from an employee wanting promotion.  When people of wisdom and goodwill find themselves in positions of power, and where they are able to use that power for good, it is a wonderful thing – and it is a form of servanthood in Jesus’s terms. 

Servant never means servile.  Jesus’s statement, it shall not be so among you, expresses his faith that his followers will use whatever powers they acquire, humbly and well, and to enhance God’s creation.  If you think about it, much power resides within the family unit – power to encourage or to cause despair, power to embrace or to alienate… the family can make or ruin people’s lives, children’s lives.  Horribly, I would think, too often in Christian history, “the Christian family”, elevated as an ideal, has in fact masked oppression or restriction.  This is reflected in much of our literature and biography. 

It shall not be so among you…  Our discipleship is to be prayerful and thoughtful in our basic relationships – husband, wife, parent, sibling, friend, employer, citizen, church member… and as Jesus pointed out, our relationship includes our kindness towards ourselves.

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[1] Mark  10:43; Matthew 20:26;  Luke 22:26

Silence in an evil time – 12 October 2018

It is difficult for us to visualise Israel in the 8^th century BC -- as remote from the time of Jesus as the High Middle Ages is from us.  It was the late Iron Age.  There were two kingdoms, Judah in the south and Samaria in the north.  Amos the prophet emerges in Judah, in a time of endemic violence and official corruption.  He is, he says, a sheep herder and a grower of figs.  He addresses the north, Samaria, misruled by Jereboam II, and he condemns …you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground…!  It seems eerily familiar in recent times.  And he goes on:

They hate the one who reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth. Therefore because you trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine. For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins— you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate. Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time. (Amos 5:7-13)

Keep silent comes as a surprise… but Amos thinks so.  We know that he wrote his prophecies, rather than proclaim them in public.  It is as though there is a pitch of determined evil and greed, with law and truth becoming negotiable, when speaking up for God and righteousness is simply not going to be heard except with public derision.  It is not merely that evil things are happening – it is that powerful people are determined on their own way irrespective of its effects on others.  At such a time, says Amos, the prudent will keep silent.  Persistence in prayer, passive resistance, peaceful persuasion, patience… will be the ways to bear witness.

We now know moreover that there was a major earthquake in that region at that time – it is referred to by Amos himself, it is mentioned in other writings, and it is traced in the geological and archaeological records.  The earthquake occasioned fear and disruption.  Again, how familiar is all this? 

There are two things to bring together for our discernment.  One is all that is going wrong.  Power is getting priority over justice, truth and equity, godlessness is becoming the norm among many decent people, religion is in confusion and increasingly despised, violence reigns in many places with all its terrible consequences… we seem more and more susceptible both to climate change and to seismic catastrophe.   The other is the question, how we are to be, to live, to respond.  We can take a hint from Amos… and from the wisdom of Ecclesiastes: There is a time to speak, and there is a time to keep silent^[1].  Both times matter.  In contemplative life and prayer we create a rhythm between the two – including in daily life, among friends and family.  We know that both are essential – speaking, and silence.  We are learning discernment in speaking, what Benedict calls restraint of speech.  We are learning the fruits of silence, openness to the Spirit of Wisdom and Truth, gentle resistance…  Either way, it is a matter of truth and simplicity, in life and in prayer.

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[1] Ecclesiastes 3:7

Letting go – 5 October 2018

Letting go is a major theme of contemplative life and prayer.  It is as though we have two ways we can live – one is clinging, and the other is relinquishing.  Jesus seemed to be in no doubt… freedom and truth, joy and peace, if they are there, are down the path of relinquishing.

Let’s look at clinging.  Of course we know what it means -- it means to hang on to something, to grip, stick or adhere.  A character in a novel I read referred to his ever-looming mother-in-law as Old Clingwrap.  In Old English, interestingly, cling could mean also to wither or shrivel… which is a bit of a warning.  We can easily cling to possessions, as we know.  That can be good, or not.  These things we own may be beautiful, or valuable, or carry memories – important then for such reasons.  We all have property, and we do what we can to keep it nice.  We protect it.  We give thanks for it.  It is important to have a view of how we would be if we had to relinquish it – as, at present, in Sulawesi or Syria.  Jesus visited these themes, and there are echoes in the Sermon on the Mount and in the parables.   

But possessions are only the start.  There is clinging to or letting go of aspects of the past.  Of course, we can’t “un-remember” things.  Neither, in a way, should we.  It matters, often, that we don’t forget, that we re-member, in the sense that we reassemble the past in our minds and memories, accurately and with understanding, even when it is painful.  The relinquishing of memories, then, is not pretending anything was otherwise than it was, but doing the work to ensure that events of the past are accurate and understood, and that they are not poisoning the present any more.  The stillness and silence of contemplative prayer is a gracious pathway down which the stings of the past may indeed be gently drawn, and we realise one day that we have moved on.

Or it may be that the challenge is to let go of people.  Sons or daughters grow up, we hope, have their own lives, aspects of which we don’t share… we lose loved ones, who aren’t there any more… old friends unaccountably change…  I am well aware that this is a minefield of many emotions.  But love is scarcely love if it clings, or tries to control or possess.  Love entails the willingness to let go, to accord freedom to the loved one.  It is the way we are loved, by God, who as we know creates and gifts us with freedom and choice.  Our love of God too is very much a matter of letting-go.  We do not own or control faith or truth.  We humbly receive these things, learning as we go, and confirming it day by day, that all is gift and grace. 

If you think about it, letting-go may come with a sense of release.  If I can, as I can, I relinquish control and the need to control.  Faith says it is for the sake of something better, which I may not yet fully see or understand.  Ageing, often problematic, may indeed be seen in another light. Other people can do the tasks I used to do.  I may have to take leave of religious assumptions that sustained me once upon a time, but not now.  I now require space, for mindfulness, for thought, for managing physical issues, for remembering and reassessing and enjoying, for being still and silent, and perhaps alone.  And there will come a time, a kairos, when I must let go even of all that.  And in Lady Julian’s words, all will be well.

Because the bell rings – 28 September 2018

One of the best-known quotes from the Benedictine writer Sister Joan Chittister originated when she was addressing her fellow nuns in a seminar, and she asked them, “Why do we pray?”  They supplied all sorts of worthy and lofty answers.  But Sr Joan said, “No – we pray because the bell rings.”   And indeed the Rule of St Benedict provides[1]: On hearing the signal… monastics will immediately set aside what they have in hand and go with utmost speed, yet with gravity…  But then comes a typical Benedictine touch – the first Psalm, Benedict orders, is to be said quite deliberately and slowly, to give time for latecomers.

Now what is the point here?  Sr Joan provides it, in a way, in one sentence:  Prayer is not just one more thing in the day….  She adds: We are meant to go to it consciously, seriously, with concentration, so that every day we may become more and more immersed in the presence of God.  Well, to modern devotees of the secular culture, this sounds simply incomprehensible...  more and more immersed in the presence of God.  It is what they always feared about religion and religious people, that you retreat into some dreamland based on hopes and myths, and lose your grip on truth and reality.  But also, to many sincere church-going people, it sounds over the top.  Prayer, they would say, is a Good Thing, no doubt, in its place… and so on.  It suits some church folk very well (not all of course) to have their prayer said for them in an orderly and objective manner, by priest or vicar or pastor, in familiar language, at set times.

A contemplative person is one who, we might say, after weeks or months of perhaps shaky attention to a discipline of silence and stillness, woke up one morning and realised that familiar attitudes and actions were shifting, altering.  Making a space in which we are simply present, having a mantra as something to return to repeatedly from the drip-feed of distractions and preoccupations… all of this is effecting change.  The changes are subtle, but at times unmistakable.  There are various ways in which prayer-silence, attention, insight, we might say, are now quietly and gently spilling over into all of life.  The heart and the mind inwardly know… oddly enough, often enough, by unknowing.  We may be aware of a new steadiness.  Fears, anxieties, seem no longer to loom the same ways.  We are disinclined to talk about it much – or at any rate, if we do, we might later wish we hadn’t. 

It is what the 17^th century French Carmelite monk, Brother Lawrence, called The Practice of the Presence of God.^[2]  It is absolutely not that we have become starry-eyed and always on the edge of some rapture... “heavenly-minded but no earthly use”, as some have put it.  Just the opposite – we are now freer than we were to attend to truth and to reality, and to bear pain. 

In the monastery the bell rings at set times.  In lay contemplative life it rings frequently, usually faintly in the background, as a reminder and a call.  We are those for whom the bell tolls… we hear, and we respond with love.

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[1] Rule of St Benedict, ch 43

[2] My copy is a translation by New Zealander, E M Blaiklock (Hodder & Stoughton 1981.  Published also by Thomas Nelson, 1982). 

The Parable of the Child – 21 September 2018

Then he took a little child and put (the child) among them; and taking (the child) in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” (Mark 9:36-37)

There are levels of meaning here.  The disciples had been having a private chat about precedence… who is great in the coming kingdom, and who will be not so great.  Jesus inconveniently intervenes… what were they arguing about?  He reminds them, whoever wants to be first must be servant of all… which sits uneasily with our culture of being a winner, getting ahead…

I think however it is what we might call the “Parable of the Child” that brings this event to life.  All three gospel writers report, a little child,[1] a toddler, an infant.  The point of the diminutive noun is that this child is helpless without us, is entirely dependent on adult care for growth and health, maybe even for survival.   Jesus took the child in his arms, it says.  It is the child who is first, has precedence, in Jesus’s kingdom.  There it is for all to see.  There is no higher priority in the kingdom.  Jesus could scarcely say it more clearly – but he nails it with his words: Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.  God is watching that child, and what we do… or neglect.  On one level it is about our duty of care for our children, of course – but it is also about what matters most in Jesus’s kingdom, which is decidedly not power, wealth or achievement. 

Al Jazeera ran a reportage on what is in fact happening to children, at present, in various places as a result of war, violence, ignorance and neglect.  We saw children in their thousands, many of them skeletal, already too ill to respond to medical help and recover – in Yemen, in Syria, in the Congo, in South Sudan…  I think there is a special place in hell for people who make war on children.   

Then there is the searing truth of generations of gross abuse of children within the church and elsewhere.  And after we have expended a million words on cause and blame and retribution, the fact is, the only satisfactory response is for the violence and the abuse to utterly cease, and for children to be cared for as our first duty, as Jesus clearly taught.

…then, in my anger, perhaps providentially, Fr Laurence Freeman intervened in a general post.  He reminded us: The contemplative response to violence should affirm the goodness and potential of humanity.  Further along he wrote: Meditation doesn’t solve problems. It transforms how we see and approach them – including the most ancient and intractable problem of humanity, the inhumanity of violence.  We are to do what we can, of course, which is to renounce violence, so far as it lies with us, at any rate absolutely against children – and again absolutely, as we can, teach and initiate and practise love and recognition of children, and care, shelter, food and education, security, hope and faith, for the children we know.  If we neglect that, I suspect, any of our other achievements might strike the heavenly courts as unimpressive.

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[1] Greek paidion, παιδιον, diminutive of pais, παις, a child.

Response – 14 September 2018

…on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”  And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”  He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:27-29)

On the way… is a popular motif in the gospels.  They typically talked as they walked, on the road.  It’s a picture to trigger our imaginations – they learned as they went along, as we do, day by day, if learning and growing are what we want.  Not everyone welcomes learning new things or changing.  If what we hope for is things to stay the same, with certainty, safety and security, then learning and growing are scarcely going to happen.  But in Jesus’s company, evidently, the changing scenery facilitated developing hearts and minds. 

He asked them first, what are people saying about me… who do they say I am?  The answers show how we feel better if we can categorise, simply pin a label, good or bad, on someone[1] – that way, we have pigeon-holed things in an orderly manner, we know what we think, and best of all, we may have established that we are not threatened, life can continue…  So, reply the disciples, some say you are John the Baptist back to life again, some say Elijah, others say some other of the prophets.   It is a warning about labelling Jesus – if I want to know who Jesus is, really, it’s pretty pointless to ask around, conduct a poll, do a street survey, even around the church. 

So Jesus asks: But you… who do you say I am?  Peter knows the answer.  You are the Christ, ὁ Χριστος, the Anointed One – Messiah, in Hebrew.  It is a catechism answer, and the implication is that, since it is the “right” answer, it is the answer for everyone.  In some Christian circles defining Jesus correctly (or Mary, or the Trinity…) is used as a test of orthodoxy… as every parish minister discovers before long. 

But Jesus asks a crucial question.  Who do you say I am…?  It is an invitation to discover, in our own personal experience, over the years and through the mysteries and setbacks and sadnesses, as well as the triumphs of life, who he is.  What matters is not the catechism answer, but my answer.  Moreover, my answer today might differ significantly from my answer 30 years ago, or even last year – because I am further along the road, learning as I go.  The issue is not whether I am “correct” in my answer, but whether my answer is what I am living by, enlightened by, whether my answer is coming from doing justly, loving mercy, walking humbly.  What matters is not the labels I put on Jesus, even labels prescribed by church or bible, although they may be helpful… so much as what he is making of me as I take step after step, as I remember the great gospel themes and teachings, as I review what has happened in my life and among the people I know and love, and as I value the times I am able to spend in silence and stillness, simply present to God as God in Christ is, and always was, present to me.

(In our group's discussion later, one member said Jesus might have been clearer if he had asked, "But who am I to you...?"  I agree.)

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[1] Eg. I was labelled, on Facebook this week, “a racist low-life”.  The person feels better now, having categorised me.