Joy, pain and the fruits of the Spirit

Carl (Skye) McColman writes, in a fine (and very long) article on his Substack:

So what exactly is joy? Let’s turn to John Bradshaw again: John Bradshaw: “Joy is the exhilarating energy that emerges when all our needs are being met. We want to sing, run and jump with joy. The energy of joy signals that all is well.”

So joy is an emotion, but it is also an energy. Bradshaw believes it emerges in us spontaneously, when all our needs are being met. From the place of faith, I would frame that slightly differently: joy is a fruit of the Spirit in our hearts. When we are aligned to love, joy occurs naturally within us. So I’m not opposed to the idea that joy emerges when our needs are being met, but I would suggest it’s not just about needs, but it’s about love. Maybe no contradiction there, for the greatest need in the human heart is the need to love and be loved. And fortunately, God is love, and through the Holy Spirit, God’s love is poured into our hearts (that’s in the Bible: Romans 5:5, in case you don’t believe me).

John Bradshaw also suggests that when the energy of joy emerges in our lives, this is a signal that “all is well.” And this reminds me of the wisdom of one of greatest mystics of the Christian tradition: a 14th century woman named Julian of Norwich. Julian was a visionary who experienced sixteen life-changing visionary encounters with God and Christ and Mary. She is most famous for saying “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” But she also said “The fullness of joy is to behold God in all.”

That bears repeating: The fullness of joy is to behold God in all.

McColman goes on to recall that after being seriously injured in a major car accident in his early thirties, the nursing staff in the hospital were surprised that he was so positive and cheerful. He had retained joy, in other words, despite his trauma. 

Joy, I have discovered, is not at all tied to happiness, to "having one's needs met". There have been times in my own life when I have had to accept pain, both physical and emotional (I survived a serious farm accident a few weeks short of my 50th birthday, and lived only to deal with the almost instantaneous loss of home and livelihood that ensued) and yet I can recall few times in my life when I have been so conscious of the presence of God. Like McColman, I had not been deserted by joy.

"By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things." (Galatians 5:22-23 NRSV) 

The Greek word μακροθυμία is translated here as patience; in the NIV it is rendered forbearance; but I would suggest that for our present purposes it could as easily be read as acceptance. For the fruits of the Spirit are not, it seems to me, individual gifts given one by one, but are all of a piece. Joy is in our acceptance - in our patience - just as peace is found only in love. And it is in the nearness of God (however we explain to ourselves that inexplicable presence) that we find that the fruits of the Spirit enfold all that we experience: that we come to "behold God in all".

The mercy of the cross

Paul declares that "sin reigned in death." [Romans 5:21] Sin is the human failure of vocation, with all that this entails. When we sin, we abuse our calling, our privileges, and our possibilities. Our thoughts, words, and actions have consequences. They were meant to. That is what being image-bearers is all about. Sin risks replacing good consequences with damaging ones. Turning away from the source of life, we invite death to fill the vacuum. Both these elements, sin and death, need to be dealt with on the cross. The whole New Testament and Paul in particular declare that this is what was achieved. That is why the cross launches the revolution.

Tom Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Rethinking the Meaning of Jesus' Crucifixion, p.84

Sometimes people who are introduced to the Jesus Prayer in its usual form - Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner - are dismayed by the phrase "a sinner", associating the word with the placing of ticks against a long list of dreary transgressions, rather than an embracing of our own reality in the light of God's mercy.

When we pray for mercy in this way, we are in effect aligning ourselves with the cross. We pray to Jesus, the crucified saviour, for the mercy he has already given on the cross. As Brian Zahnd explains (The Wood Between the Worlds: A Poetic Theology of the Cross, pp.16-17)

But if the point is not appeasement, how do we associate Good Friday with forgiveness? Allow me to suggest that we think about it like this: On Good Friday the sin of the world coalesced into a hideous singularity that upon the cross it might be forgiven en masse...

Jesus was killed, not by God, but by the hands of wicked men. With great violence the principalities and powers sinned the sin of the world into the sinless body of Jesus. When the sins of the world became the sinful singularity of Good Friday, the one who knew no sin was made to be sin (2 Cor 5:21). The body of Jesus hanging upon the cross was made to be the repository for the sin of the world. What does sin look like? ... It looks like the innocent one nailed to a tree bearing in his hands and feet and side the entrance wounds of sin.

Not only does seeing the cross in this light explain the final words of the Jesus Prayer, it gives us a glimmer of insight into the mystery of the intercessory aspect of the Prayer: that it is not merely a prayer for mercy for the one praying, but for all creation in its agony of becoming (Romans 8:22).

The weight of light

As long as I can remember I have struggled to put words to what I have seen - what I have come to know - inwardly.

Before I turned five, I contracted meningitis, and spent what would have been my first year of school slowly recovering. I spent some of the most peaceful and untroubled hours of my life lying on a rug by the old apple trees in the orchard at the back of our house, under the endless vault of the open sky, listening to distant aircraft passing high overhead, or on a flaking stone bench on the patio, watching the little velvety red mites scampering in the sunlight. Time was unlike anything I'd known before, an open ground of appearing, empty of thought, mostly, but fertile with becoming.

But there was no way to speak of this time, no way to ask anyone what it was I had come to know. It was many years before I read anything I could connect with those days, and with the moments of often unsought stillness and illumination that recurred throughout my early years. And despite reading TS Eliot and CS Lewis and RS Thomas, it wasn't until I learned the Jesus Prayer from Fr Francis Horner SSM at Willen Priory at the age of nearly 30 that I came to realise that it was God I had found in the silence. 

Now, it is always hard to write, even to think, of these experiences. Prose is not built to carry such things: it buckles under the weight of light. Truth cannot be set out in static, logical propositions: definitions and categories are parched and rotted through by the actinic light of what merely is.

All we can do, it seems to me, is point out what it is not. Not structured, not hierarchical, normative, dogmatic. It is not the object of sentences. Thought fails. 

It is only in Christ that the light becomes human enough to touch; and even then, on the Mount of Transfiguration the light undid the three disciples (Luke 9:28ff). It will undo us if we stay still long enough, unknowing. These times outside time are perhaps our little models of the Cross; our "white martyrdom" of prayer that draws us inexorably back, even when we try to turn away. Christ is faithful, even when we are not. 

Paul wrote, "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." (Galatians 2:20 NIV)

The mercy of littleness

James Finlay writes, in the Centre for Action and Contemplation article 'The Mercy of Littleness':

At the beginning of Thérèse of Lisieux’s autobiography Story of a Soul, she admits that she wondered for a long time why God raises some people to the level of sainthood “who had offended Him” and seemed to have God’s graces forced upon them, having “no obstacle in their way when coming to Him.” Her wrestling is relatable in a world where success, fame, and comparison place us on a scale of worthiness and often lead to self-judgment. But then, Thérèse says, Jesus set before her the book of nature — a vast field of flowers in which “the splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the Lily do not take away the perfume of the little violet or the delightful simplicity of the daisy.”

Hence known to us as the “Little Flower,” Thérèse continues: “And so it is in the world of souls, Jesus’ garden. He willed to create great souls comparable to Lilies and roses, but He has created smaller ones and these must be content to be daisies or violets destined to give joy to God’s glances when He looks down at his feet. Perfection consists in doing His will, in being what He wills us to be.” Thérèse’s insights are reflective of Thomas Merton’s words a half-century later: “For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.”

This remarkable awareness by a young French Carmelite nun, who was steeped in the writings of fellow Carmelite forebears St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila, reminds us that life should not be oriented around climbing to a place of importance. Instead, we discover who we are in Christ through the ordinariness of our lives. As Fr. Richard Rohr learned from Paula D’Arcy, “God comes to us disguised as our life.” Thérèse looked at her life and spiritual path and found them to be little, ordinary, and unremarkable. St. John of the Cross experienced his dark night of the soul amid imprisonment, Teresa of Ávila explore her interior castle amid sickness and ecstatic visions, and Thérèse discovered her Little Way as a daisy in a field of lilies and roses.

The Jesus Prayer, it seems to me, exists precisely in that space of littleness and mercy. As Jesus himself once said "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children." (Luke 10:21 NIV). The Prayer is simple, no more than 12 words, and to pray it asks no more of us than merely to silently repeat the words Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

We cannot know the results of our prayer. We are not praying for anything tangible, so we can't tell if we've received it or not. There is no special technique involved, so that we might know if we've mastered it or not. We are not aiming for an altered state of consciousness, so that we might be able to discern whether we've achieved our goal. We are simply sitting quietly and saying the Prayer in the silence, expecting nothing.  It is the plainest and smallest of disciplines, and all it asks is mercy.

The last resort of the helpless

Prayer is something deeper than words. It is present in the soul before it has been formulated in words. And it abides in the soul after the last words of prayer have passed over our lips. 

Prayer is an attitude of our hearts, an attitude of mind. Prayer is a definite attitude of our hearts toward God, an attitude which He in heaven immediately recognizes as prayer, as an appeal to His heart. Whether it takes the form of words or not, does not mean anything to God, only to ourselves. 

What is this spiritual condition? What is that attitude of heart which God recognizes as prayer? ... 

In the first place, helplessness. This is unquestionably the first and the surest indication of a praying heart. As far as I can see, prayer has been ordained only for the helpless. It is the last resort of the helpless. Indeed, the very last way out. We try everything before we finally resort to prayer. 

This is not only true of us before our conversion. Prayer is our last resort also throughout our whole Christian life. I know very well that we offer many and beautiful prayers, both privately and publicly, without helplessness as the impelling power. But I am not at all positive that this is prayer. 

Prayer and helplessness are inseparable. Only he who is helpless can truly pray.

Ole Hallesby, Prayer (1931) pp.10-11 

We grow up learning to admit to almost anything but helplessness. "God helps those who help themselves!" we are taught, even though there is no such verse in all of Scripture. But helping ourselves is really no more than grasping - John Keats' "irritable reaching after fact and reason" - instead of simply waiting in the stillness of longed-for grace. Oliver Murray writes, 

We live in a world in which we are very good at grasping... 

Today, perhaps more than ever, it is about learning to receive the world — reality itself — as gift. Creation points beyond itself, not because we force it to, but because it comes from the hand of a Creator. Christ tells us, "Seek, and you will find." But Christian seeking is not the same thing as grasping. Sometimes we have to become quiet enough to notice what has been there all along. 

"We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us...  And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit..." (Romans 8:26-27 NIV). To remain still, in the open acknowledgement of our own helplessness, is the very heart of prayer. And it's for this reason that contemplative prayer, and especially hesychasm, the prayer of helpless stillness, is so often the shortest way in Christ to God - to the ground of all that is given, of all that is. 

The paradox of discipline

The classical Disciplines of the spiritual life call us to move beyond surface living into the depths. They invite us to explore the inner caverns of the spiritual realm. They urge us to be the answer to a hollow world. John Woolman counsels, ‘It is good for thee to dwell deep, that thou mayest feel and understand the spirits of people.’

We must not be led to believe that the Disciplines are only for spiritual giants and hence beyond our reach, or only for contemplatives who devote all their time to prayer and meditation. Far from it. God intends the Disciplines of the spiritual life to be for ordinary human beings: people who have jobs, who care for children, who wash dishes and mow lawns. In fact, the Disciplines are best exercised in the midst of our relationships with our husband or wife, our brothers and sisters, our friends and neighbours.

Neither should we think of the Spiritual Disciplines as some dull drudgery aimed at exterminating laughter from the face of the earth. Joy is the keynote of all the Disciplines. The purpose of the Disciplines is liberation from the stifling slavery to self-interest and fear. When the inner spirit is liberated from all that weighs it down, it can hardly be described as dull drudgery.

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, p.1

The regular discipline of some contemplative practice is as necessary a thing to the spiritual life as breathing. (It is no coincidence that so many practices do involve some level of attention to the breath.) 

Many of us may not immediately recognise our favourite practice as either contemplative or classical, but it seems that the patterns of the spiritual life continually recur whether we immediately recognise them or not. The method of prayer and Bible study known as Lectio Divina dates back to the 3rd century BC; yet it is in essence what countless evangelical (and other) Christians practice daily, and refer to as their "Quiet Time". Bare attention to the breath is a contemplative practice that likewise dates back in the Christian tradition at least to the Desert Fathers and Mothers - and in the Buddhist East many centuries further back - but it is in essence the practice used by thousands of followers of various secular programmes of mindfulness, not to mention Centering Prayer and its variations among contemporary Christians.

But the spiritual disciplines are channels of grace and freedom beyond anything that might be expected of things with so unpromising a name. They set us free from the dreary confines of our own impulses and inclinations, from the exigencies of our digestion or sleep patterns. They are habits of prayer and contemplation that will grow, the more we practice them, to be as natural as breathing itself. We can rest in the quiet necessity of habit as in a well-made chair, knowing that it can be relied on to support us however unpromising our feelings at the time. We can trust the the steady pattern of our chosen discipline - actually it is usually more like a calling, a movement of grace, than an choice; but that is a matter for another day, perhaps - when we can't trust our own inclinations. To return to our practice, no matter whether we are tired, or anxious, or distracted, is its own freedom, quite apart from the familiar benefits of the practice itself.

Words for the ineffable

For all its inspiration, for all the lives it has changed, the Bible is undeniably problematic. Put in the hands of egocentric, unloving, or power-hungry people or those who have never learned how to read spiritually inspired literature, it is almost always a disaster. History has demonstrated this, century after century, so this is not an unwarranted, disrespectful, or biased conclusion. The burning of heretics, the Crusades, slavery, apartheid, homophobia, and the genocide and oppression of native peoples were all justified through the selective use of Scripture quotes...

The Christian’s goal is to be transformed by the renewing of our mind into the mind of Christ (see Romans 12:2; 1 Corinthians 2:16; and Philippians 2:5). That is why I try to read the Bible the way Jesus did, following Jesus’ hermeneutic (a method of interpreting sacred texts)... Jesus was a master of winnowing the chaff from the grain (see Matthew 3:12 and Luke 3:17) and “bringing out of the storeroom new treasures as well as old” (Matthew 13:52).

The Bible is an anthology of many books. It is a record of people’s experience of God’s self-revelation. It is an account of our very human experience of the divine intrusion into history. The book did not fall from heaven in a pretty package. It was written by people trying to listen to God. I believe that the Spirit was guiding the listening and writing process. We must also know that humans always see "through a glass darkly . . . and all knowledge is imperfect" (1 Corinthians 13:12). Prayer and patience surrounding such human words will keep us humble and searching for the true Living Word, the person of Jesus, which is how the Spirit best teaches (1 Corinthians 2:10,13)—through living exemplars. This is surely what it means to know "contemplatively."

Richard Rohr, What do we do with the Bible?

We tend these days to adopt polarised positions on Scripture - as on so much else. Either the Bible is the literal word of God, inerrant in every verse, or it was made up out of whole cloth by church and civic authorities seeking to bamboozle believers into unquestioning obedience. Rohr here expresses perfectly my own long-held - if instinctive - belief that the biblical authors were honest people doing the best they could, with the often severely limited cultural and literary tools at their disposal, to eff the ineffable.

Spiritual experience is, at least so far as I have found, impossible to discuss or even to recount without the use of images and concepts derived from religion, literature, society; words common to my readers, words that resonate, that convey something felt by both reader and writer. All writers build on, or else contradict, those who have gone before: as Harold Bloom saw, we can do nothing else. It was no different for the people whose words form the canon of Scripture.

So what are we to do with Scripture? I think there is little useful we can do unaided: we cannot resist becoming drawn off into critical theorising, political mining operations, or the excision of slabs of text to abuse each other with. But by reading prayerfully we can allow ourselves to be questioned by the text; we are both questioned and changed by what we read; ultimately, by God. We open ourselves to the same process - the same Spirit - that formed the text in the first place, in the minds of those who wrote it down.

As Rohr goes on (ibid.):

When history finally gets to the Risen Jesus, there is nothing to be afraid of in God. Jesus’ very breath is identified with forgiveness and the divine Shalom (see John 20:20-23). If the Risen Jesus is the full and trustworthy unveiling of the nature of God, then we live in a safe and love-filled universe. It is not that God has changed, or that the Hebrew God is a different God than the God of Jesus; it is that we are growing up as we move through the text and deepen our experience. Stay with the Bible and with your inner life with God and your capacity for God will increase.