Faith in Mercy

It seems to me that faith is only possible in that emptiness of heart that comes from surrendering what we believe into pure trust. "Faith is not about certainty, but about trust. If we could prove it we would not need faith." (Jennifer Kavanagh) And mercy? "Mercy is the length and breadth and height and depth of what we know of God - and the light by which we know it. You might even think of it as the Being of God insofar as we can possibly penetrate into it in this life, so that it is impossible to encounter God apart from the dimension of mercy." (Cynthia Bourgeault) 

We can only seek God, surely, insofar as we acknowledge our own emptiness, our own unknowing. It is this existential lack that is at the heart of the Jesus Prayer, and the reason that for many years I have tended to use the longer form of the Prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." 

Psalm 119:176 (NIV) reads,  "I have strayed like a lost sheep. Seek your servant, for I have not forgotten your commands." Perhaps this is closer to the mark. Mercy is perhaps not so much about our seeking God as it is about him seeking us.

Laurence Freeman writes, 

We discover that, in a certain way of seeing, change is the only constant. In that paradox we find a portal of mystery and our search shifts into another perspective. We seek not answers or explanations but God...

From this change of seeing things we develop deeper self-knowledge. This leads to horizons where self-awareness merges with the knowledge of God, even with an at first disturbing sense that it is God’s knowledge of us is that is the starting point of every search...

Truly, as Martin Laird says, "... the sense of separation from God is itself pasted up out of a mass of thoughts and feelings. When the mind comes into its own stillness and enters the silent land, the sense of separation goes."

All this talk of seeking and journeying is, like consciousness itself, a metaphor for the ineffable, for the ground of being itself from which we cannot possibly be separate. It is all a matter of faith; of giving up thinking we know, and finding we are known. 

This waste expanse of days

Lent, like Advent, seems in many ways to be a time between times, with the shadow of Good Friday cast back on these forty days by the brilliant light of Easter morning. As I wrote in my last post here, the strangeness of Lent lies largely in its associations with the wilderness, the empty place of dust and restless wind where we are thrown back not on what we might have hoped for, but on the bare substrate of God's ground.

Prayer during Lent is strange too. If ever there was a time of not knowing, of finding our hearts emptied of words in the waste expanse of days, it must be now. And yet,

...the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

(Romans 8:26-27 NRSV)

This hermit time, far away from celebration and comfortable things, leaves room for little other than prayer, thin though the heart seems in the dry air. But maybe that is all that is needed.

Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life. It is not the foolish sinner like myself, running about the world with reprobates and feeling magnanimous, who comes closest to them and brings them healing; it is the contemplative in her cell who has never set eyes on them, but in whom Christ fasts and prays for them—or it may be a charwoman in whom Christ makes Himself a servant again, or a king whose crown of gold hides a crown of thorns. Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.

Caryll Houselander (quoted in Richard Rohr's The Universal Christ)

The desert is not a place...

In today's WCCM Lent Reflection, Laurence Freeman writes, "The desert is not a place but a state or direction of mind."

The desert of the heart is a real place, if not a physical one. Some of us may indeed, like the desert fathers and mothers of the 4th century, find that we need to leave everyday life and move away into actual solitude, but most of us don't. Our desert is inward and inescapable; if we fail to realise what is going on, we will probably experience it as something like depression or derealisation. But just as the Spirit "drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness" (Mark 1:12 NRSV),  so we can find ourselves driven into strange and inhospitable places of the mind for a time, often not knowing quite how we got there. For me, the recovery of prayer led to the recovery of faith (yes, that way around!) but for many it will be something different. Just as the inward desert will vary from one person to another, like some sort of Room 101 of the soul, so I am sure that the gate into the oasis will vary too. But somehow, I think, the Cross will be involved - even though it may not have that name for everyone. Rowan Williams: "The incarnate crucified life is burrowing its way through the lost depths and deserts of human experience to burst out on Easter Sunday, bringing with it the lost and the dead."

Of course such language may not resonate with everyone; this is part of the whole risky experiment of faith, that we need language as a lamp to see (Psalm 119:105); and yet its necessary failure is the silence of the very desert itself, as isaac of Nineveh saw: "Above anything, welcome silence, for it brings fruits that no tongue can speak of, neither can it be explained." But to communicate this even to ourselves we seem to have to stumble among words and images, doing our best with the tools we find to hand. 

Things are as they are

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place I rejoice that things are as they are...

(TS Eliot, Ash Wednesday)

Lent is a strange period in many ways. We are very used to the idea of Lent, and in or out of a church context we rather superficially associate it with the giving up of all those treats we enjoyed on Shrove Tuesday; but if we miss the sense of its strangeness I think we may have missed the point.

I like Mark's stark account of Jesus' time in the desert: "[T]he Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him." (Mark 1:12-13 NRSV) That's all. No stories of conversations with the tempter, no Scriptural rapiers from our Lord, just the plain facts.

The wilderness is an odd place in itself. There is that very physical wilderness, of course, and no one who has travelled across the Judean Desert will forget its strangeness; at dusk and dawn one could imagine anything, and one's perceptions are stretched thin across the terraced escarpments and the pale dust. Only the ravens seem truly at home there. But the wilderness of the heart is as real a place, and stranger. Hopkins' terrible sonnet, "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed" gives the sense of it. The years of the pandemic gave many of us to spend time there. 

But God's angels patrol the wilderness of the mind as they patrolled the Judean wilderness following Jesus' baptism. We may not see them, but they are there in the pain itself. The words of Psalm 119, "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word... It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees" (Psalm 119:67;71 NIV) are not pious platitudes but unvarnished truth.

Frederica Mathewes-Green, writing on the practice of the Jesus Prayer, has this to say: 

At first the Prayer is just a string of words repeated, perhaps mechanically, in your mind. But with time it may "descend into the heart," and those who experience this will be attentive to maintain it, continually "bringing the mind" (the nous, that is) "into the heart."

There is no place within us, however desolate, that the Prayer will not touch, and its patient reach will hold us firm, even when we think we have lost it altogether. Things are as they are only in the endless ground of God's isness. There is nothing else. The mind descending into the heart encounters not the cold of the interstellar wastes but God's own light, love and endless healing mercy. At the end of Lent there is Easter Day.

Faith in Silence

Silence seems to be at the centre of contemplative prayer, indeed of any true prayer, whether or not it explicitly involves words. Perhaps any contemplative practice is at heart only a way to interior silence, a way into that open place of listening to the silence itself.

Every act of faith that we make and repeat encourages the process of realizing this principle of unity in our way of life. Every faith act, like every meditation and every time we repeat the mantra, helps to integrate us a little more despite our inevitable failures and infidelities. We can always decide to come home again. We come back home to the same act of faith, to where we belong, just as we come back to the mantra whenever we get distracted...

Understanding faith means seeing that every act of faith, whether successful or not, helps to make us more whole, more one. It integrates us through all the means that we have looked at so far, through waiting, through the purifying of spiritual vision, seeing things that the mind can’t see; choice, prioritizing our lives, and therefore giving our lives order, centredness, balance; and by transforming our experience of time. We become conscious of this integration through endurance, through patience and above all, through the self-transcendence by which every human person finds the space to grow.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: the Experience of Faith

The Jesus Prayer, like Freeman's mantra (in his case, maranatha), is hinge, home, healing. At the centre of the prayer is the act of faith, the surrender of what we thought in the presence of what is, that is the way to silence itself.

Paul writes, "Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God." (Romans 8:26-27 NRSV) Silence is where the Spirit is free to move in our heart, and we ourselves are free to hear the Spirit's own "sheer silence" (1 Kings 19:12).

What we are is human; all we can know or experience comes to us through our humanity - which is ours as plain gift. We do not ourselves assemble what we are, nor produce any of our experience ourselves. These things come to us through our consciousness as they are; and the silence receives them, far beneath thought and feeling. How can we know what is, except in our surrender to that sheer silence of isness, Eckhart's istigkeit?

Unexpected

Unexpectedly, I find myself compelled to reopen this blog, which seems still to have its readers after all this time. As I hinted in my last post here, the pandemic-mandated separation from church and community set me, for the last couple of years, on a path exploring first churchless Christianity and then secular spirituality. But the way of the Jesus Prayer is not so easily sidestepped! 

I came gradually to realise that, first of all, the contemplative life lived outside of a community of faith is a strange and perilous place (this moving account shows just how perilous) and second, surrender is at the heart of what contemplation has come to mean for me, at least in my own practice. Tentatively, as I thought, I returned to the practice of the Jesus Prayer...

Now, faith is an odd thing, a gift more than a decision (Ephesians 2:8) and not the same thing as belief at all. Alan Watts once wrote, 

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

(The Wisdom of Insecurity)

Laurence Freeman is almost more definite, if anything:

When belief takes the place of faith in the religious mind the possible range of spiritual experience and growth is critically limited. When religion emphasizes belief rather than faith it may find it easier to organize and define its membership and those it excludes. It is easier to pass judgement. But it will produce, at the best, half-formed followers. The road to transcendence is cut off, blocked by landfalls of beliefs as immoveable as boulders, beliefs we are told to accept and do not dare to put to the test of experience. In such a rigid and enforced belief system what I believe also easily slides into what I say I believe, or what I am told to believe or what I feel I ought to believe, because the I that believes becomes so dependent on the identity generated by the structured belief system we inhabit. 

(First Sight: The Experience of Faith)

I am not a theologian. Perhaps the relationship between faith and surrender is well known, and has been thoroughly explored; I don't know,  but I am coming to see that for me at least the two things are inextricably entwined. The heart has its own logic, and it is wiser, often, than the head. I am speaking metaphorically, of course, but that is part of the mystery of the contemplative path. To allow the mystery, to allow the inner reality to accrue metaphor as a fallen branch accrues moss, is an essential part of any healthy contemplative practice, it seems to me. Metaphysical reality is not a thing we can make sense of in itself, and to make the attempt is the very danger that I mentioned above. Even the mathematics of relativity and quantum mechanics seem to amount to imagery in the end, and it is only by using such imagery that physicists can begin to understand or to work with the underlying structure of the world we inhabit. 

More than any other prayer, the Jesus Prayer aims at bringing us to stand in God's presence with no other thought but the miracle of our standing there and God with us, because in the use of the Jesus Prayer there is nothing and no one except God and us. 

The use of the prayer is dual, it is an act of worship as is every prayer, and on the ascetical level, it is a focus that allows us to keep our attention still in the presence of God. 

It is a very companionable prayer, a friendly one, always at hand and very individual in spite of its monotonous repetitions. Whether in joy or in sorrow, it is, when it has become habitual, a quickening of the soul, a response to any call of God. The words of St Symeon, the New Theologian, apply to all its possible effects on us: 'Do not worry about what will come next, you will discover it when it comes'.

(Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, from The Orthodox Church of Estonia)

Once again, these words of St Symeon's seem to be proving true!