Alleluia! Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

The glory of the risen Christ broke through the darkness on this morning, long ago, and is with us now, forever...

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:5 NIV)

Holy Saturday

Divine action is not something material: it is invisible, inaudible, unexpected, unimaginable, and inexplicable by any analogy taken from this world. Its advent and its working within us are a mystery… Little by little, divine action grants to man increased attention and contrition of the heart in prayer… 

The spirit of prayer comes upon man and drives him into the depths of the heart, as if he were taken by the hand and forcibly led from one room to another. The soul is taken captive by an invading force, and is willingly kept within, as long as this overwhelming power of prayer still holds sway over it.

(Theophan the Recluse, quoted in The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology, ed. Timothy Ware & Chariton of Valamo)

This Saturday is a day taken out, like an empty hole in time, anechoic, no-thing.

Prayer is like this very often, a place without a place, emptied out, stripped and somehow inaccessible to memory.

What could have happened in the tomb, between Joseph and Nicodemus leaving, and that dawn of glory? There will never be a way to know: those hours were outside time, and what we are, creatures of days and years, cannot comprehend it.

Again prayer: the clearer our prayer, the more we come to a place forever beyond our comprehension. We meet our Lord as nearly face to face as we could bear in this life, and don't recognise him. We haven't the senses for this, and we cannot record an experience without words. All we can do is listen.

Prayer is listening, listening to the word. Like Mary Magdalene we hear many words, but at rare intervals we hear the really piercing word, the word that affirms us in our beings, the fiat that creates and re-creates us. This word is our own name. It is the secret name written on the white stone that no one knows except him who receives it, the secret truth of our own person that we do not yet fully know ourselves but only glimpse, because it is only potentially true as yet, true to God but not yet fully brought to birth.

(Maria Boulding, Marked for Life: Prayer in the Easter Christ (SPCK Classics))

Hidden even from ourselves...

So far we have been looking at making action more contemplative, finding a contemplative dimension in our actions. But there is a real sense in which prayer is itself an action, an action whose fruit and extent cannot be measured or assessed; its ways are secret, not only secret from others but also secret from ourselves. The greater part of the fruit of our prayer and contemplation remains hidden with Christ in God...

Prayer is opening oneself to the effective, invisible power of God. One can never leave the presence of God without being transformed and renewed in his being, for this is what Christ promised. The thing that can only be granted by prayer belongs to God (Lk 11:13). However such a transformation does not take the form of a sudden leap. It takes time. Whoever persists in surrendering himself to God in prayer receives more than he desires or deserves. Whoever lives by prayer gains an immense trust in God, so powerful and certain, it can almost be touched. He comes to perceive God in a most vivid way. Without ever forgetting our weakness, we become something other than we are.

(Mary David Totah, Deepening Prayer: Life Defined by Prayer)

Sr Mary David touches something here that I keep scratching after at the edge of my understanding. We cannot comprehend or record the "fruit" of our prayer, and yet we are called to pray, sometimes in an undeniably personal way. I am more sure of this call on my life than I ever have been of any calling to work or study, and obviously I am far from alone in this.

The challenge is to live a life given over to praying for others while accepting that one will seldom, if ever, see any results. No one will be able to ascertain how, or even if, their devoted prayers are efficacious for others. It is a terrible kind of poverty - to live dedicated to helping others, yet never know what good one may be doing. All that hermits can do is hope that they are doing no harm. Believers leave all results to the mercy of their God. Others rely on the interconnectedness of all humanity, trusting that what affects one, affects all. This is a form of intercession expressed less by words than by a way of life. A Camaldolese monk once wrote: "Prayer is not only speaking to God on behalf of humanity, it is also 'paying' for humanity." Suffering is part of the hermit's vocation. One of the most acute forms is to never know whether one's chosen lifestyle is worthwhile or has any value for others. Hermits enter into the darkness, the dusky cloud of unknowing, and walk without any light beyond that which is in their own hearts. Often, unbeknownst even to themselves, they have become beacons for others.

(Karen Karper Fredette and Paul A. Fredette, Consider the Ravens: On Contemporary Hermit Life)

We cannot know, and yet somehow we know, not how, or why, but that. In his Lent Reflection for today, Fr Laurence Freeman writes, of our "sense of sheer wonder that the world exists and that we exist as part of it", and our equally powerful wordless sense, in prayer, that as Mother Julian said, "all will be well and every kind of thing will be well":

I trust you will forgive me if this sounds nonsense. When we think or speak about anything on the other side of language and thought we make nonsense. To make sense of it why not call the state of wonder and radical confidence ‘faith’. Belief, with which we usually confuse it, is influenced by faith; but faith itself is independent of belief. Faith is spiritual knowledge.

As we enter into the meaning of Holy Week and allow its central story to read us and show us our place in it, faith is the path we are following. We test and reset our beliefs against the experience of faith. Hiding behind faith is hope and secreted in hope is love. Like the eternal engine of God, these three are one.

Palm Sunday

I seem always to find in Palm Sunday a call to stillness, to wordless prayer. Partly I think it comes from the agonisingly slow movement of the long Passion reading, from Bethany to the tomb, the steadily gathering weight of the cross, the closing in of the "obscurity and torments of [Christ's] Passion" (Thomas Keating), the appalling separation of the Son from God under the iron overcast of our own alienation. The enormity of that stills our every thought or feeling, stills our hearts almost as it stilled his.

Sister Mary David Totah writes:

The point here is that like our Christian life, Christian prayer is going to involve participating in the paschal mystery of Christ. We have to accept death sometimes in order to rise to newness of life. Trying to avoid such death is likely to lead to prayerlessness: just as in life, such avoidance leads to escapism, a lack of depth or commitment. "The less one prays the worse it goes" (Dom John Chapman). Like Christian life, prayer needs the dimension of faith, the conviction that God is acting in and through all the circumstances of our life.

The key here, I think, is to remember that it is "all the circumstances of our life"; even - especially - the worst, the most terrible times of alienation and betrayal, the most meaningless and demeaning times, all the pointless wasteful little occasions of anxiety and remorse as well as the unforeseen catastrophes. It's only by allowing it all into our prayer, surrendering the lot, without excuse or disguise, that our own dereliction, taken up in his, can become against all imagining, our Eastering.

Surrendering

Surrendering is a curious thing. The verb "to surrender" is somehow both transitive and intransitive, an action and a state of being. In a sense, the mere act of contemplative practice is an act of surrender to unknowing, a relinquishing of the controls of discursive thought; allowing the wind of the Spirit (John 3:8) to take our vessel out into the deep seaways, far from the sight and scent of land. The compass spins loosely. The helm is untenanted.

So much trust is asked of us. We are unprotected, out on the long swells, the deep reaches. We are like Peter, perhaps. If we take our eyes off the one who calls us (Matthew 14:22-33) we may begin to sink; and the abyss lies open beneath, unguarded. If we cry out, it must be to him; or else perhaps he hears anyway. Perhaps all cries for mercy are really the same, and touch the same place.

You can’t argue with the ground of being. You can never undermine it. You can only try to accept your degree of self-knowledge in humility. However uncomfortably to our independent spirit, it reveals that we are accepted, chosen, known, before we emerge into the world of space and time. Our meaning in this emergence is to learn to enjoy the goodness of life by realising we are a creation, not self-made and therefore not self-sustaining, but a spontaneous emanation of divine beauty...

(Laurence Freeman)

Home, they say, is where the heart is. When we give our heart, truly surrender our heart, then our home is out there on the endless rollers, in the grey wind, where the Spirit leaves no track on the dimpled water. Only we must give up, take our hand from the wheel; gazing only at the far horizon, our heart's armour lost at sea, we may come home at last.

An acuteness of love and attention...

In Sarah Bachelard's recent book A Contemplative Christianity for Our Time, she quotes from the epilogue to Christopher Fry's play A Sleep of Prisoners:

Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul we ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.

We do live, as did the WWII soldiers in Fry's play, in just such a time. Archimandrite Sophrony wrote, some years ago now, as if he were writing yesterday:

It has fallen to our lot to be born into the world in an appallingly disturbed period. We are not only passive spectators but to a certain extent participants in the mighty conflict between belief and unbelief, between hope and despair, between the dream of developing mankind into a single universal whole and the blind tendency towards dissolution into thousands of irreconcilable national, racial, class or political ideologies. Christ manifested to us the divine majesty of man, son of God, and we withal are stifled by the spectacle of the dignity of man being sadistically mocked and trampled underfoot. Our most effective contribution to the victory of good is to pray for our enemies, for the whole world. We do not only believe in - we know the power of true prayer... 

The Jesus Prayer will incline us to find each human being unique, the one for whom Christ was crucified. Where there is great love the heart necessarily suffers and feels pity for every creature, in particular for man; but our inner peace remains secure, even when all is in confusion in the world outside... 

As Bachelard points out, there is no sense in which prayer, let alone contemplative prayer, is to be thought of as a substitute for human endeavour, scientific, political, or whatever. But it is not less than those things. So far from a retreat from or a defence against pain, our calling may be to an acuteness of love and attention so keen and detailed as to constitute prayer itself; an entering, in effect, into the pain of the cross of Jesus that, as Helen Waddell shows in her novel Peter Abelard, goes on and on throughout all history, like a ring in the trunk of a tree; Calvary being only the visible bit, the saw-cut that reveals the ring. The cross, in all of its pain and desolation, continues through all time, the pain itself by which Christ's mercy is present always as redemption and grace.

Whatever technical interpretation we place on the theology of crucifixion and atonement, the direct spiritual experience of "an entire universe of horrifying anguish" (Rebecca Tope) is, to me at least, the most fundamental call to prayer, and the reason why for me only a contemplative practice can come anywhere near answering that call. Not for the first time I am reminded of this passage from Praying the Jesus Prayer by Br Ramon SSF:

We have seen that the Jesus Prayer involves body, mind and spirit... The cosmic nature of the Prayer means that the believer lives as a human being in solidarity with all other human beings, and with the animal creation, together with the whole created order (the cosmos). All this is drawn into and affected by the Prayer. One person's prayers send out vibrations and reverberations that increase the power of the divine Love in the cosmos.

The Christian is well aware of the fact that the world is also evil. There is a falseness and alienation which has distracted and infected the world, and men and women of prayer, by the power of the Name of Jesus, stand against the cosmic darkness, and enter into conflict with dark powers... The power of the Jesus Prayer is the armour against the wiles of the devil, taking heed of the apostle's word, 'Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayers and supplications...' [Ephesians 6.18]

Small and quiet...

The longer I keep on with the way of prayer, and especially since returning to it as I have, the more convinced I am of the necessity of remaining small and quiet. John Gill writes of Sophrony Sakharov that, "[h]e taught that humility and repentance are paramount and through experiencing the ebb and flow of God’s grace we learn the need to be poor in spirit."

The only way to approach the Jesus Prayer - and this is all the more urgent if, like most of us in the West, we lack the help of an experienced guide in person - is as a beginner. Oddly, this seems to have little to do with experience. Many years of practice don't make one an expert; rather they just make one more aware of one's littleness and emptiness (Psalm 131; Luke 18:13-14).

It is as impossible to turn off the mind as it is to still the heartbeat and remain alive, and so the practitioner of a lifetime is in just the same position as the practitioner of a few weeks, subject to distractions and fantasies with every breath. Gill (ibid.) quotes John Climacus:

Do not lose heart when your thoughts are stolen away. Just remain calm, and constantly call your mind back... Let the remembrance of Jesus be present with your every breath. Then indeed you will appreciate the value of stillness... Make the effort to raise up, or rather, to enclose your mind within the words of your prayer; and if like a child, it gets tired and falters, raise it up again.

Laurence Freeman:

[O]f course we get distracted many, many, many times. That doesn't matter. We're not perfect. We don't have to be perfect meditators because we're not perfect disciples yet, so we don't expect to be perfect meditators. That doesn't matter. You don’t have to be perfect. The best meditators will say, 'I meditate. It's very, very important to me. I miss it so much if I don't do it, but I'm a very bad meditator.' That's OK. What matters is not being successful, it's about being faithful.

These distractions, whether mental, physical, emotional or whatever, shouldn't discourage us. Looked at in the right way, they can be a great help, like Paul's thorn (2 Corinthians 12:7), to keep us from thinking we are becoming good at this prayer business. But in order to see this, we shall have to remember the smallness and quietness; like the child in John Climacus' example, it doesn't take much to tire us out.

Faith in Practice

One of the things that has always appealed to me about the Jesus Prayer is its simplicity, and, for want of a better word, its modesty. It is not in any way a practice reserved for religious professionals, nor one that requires training or qualifications; it doesn't even need much remembering, being only twelve words long. All it requires is perseverance, and a place to sit.

Some writers (Cynthia Bourgeault, for instance) regard the Jesus Prayer as a mantra. I am not sure this is the way I look at it. The word maranatha, used in the practice known as Christian Mediation, is avowedly a mantra, "a word or short phrase of sacred origin and intent, used to collect the mind and invoke the divine presence" (Bourgeault, op.cit.). But the Jesus Prayer has content; it is a prayer, addressed to Jesus by name, and bringing with it its own peculiar attitude - a kind of surrender, or repentant trust, like that of the tax collector in Luke 18:9-14, "For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted" (Luke 18:14 NIV).

John Climacus, as quoted by John Gill, advised: "Make the effort to raise up, or rather, to enclose your mind within the words of your prayer..." That is more like my own experience. Paradoxically, so enclosed, the mind is freed from its incessant stream of thinking, and sinks into a living silence open to the bright ground of God. This, I think, is perhaps something similar to the immersion of the "mind in the heart" described by Seraphim of Sarov - a surrender of the restless intellect to that which is before all things (Colossians 1:15-17).