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!