The Human Condition

The contemplative journey, because it involves the purification of the unconscious, is not a magic carpet to bliss. It is an exercise of letting go of the false self, a humbling process, because it is the only self we know. God approaches us from many different perspectives: illness, misfortune, bankruptcy, divorce proceedings, rejection, inner trials. God has not promised to take away our trial, but to help us to change our attitudes toward them. That is what holiness really is. In this life, happiness is rooted in our basic attitude toward reality.

Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

One of the most common objections to the story-book conception of God is the often-heard, "If evil exists, then God must be evil, or incompetent, or else non-existent." I am not going to attempt to rehash all the many and complex arguments of theodicy; they don't convince anyone, anyway. Keating's comment speaks to my own experience precisely. 

Contemplative faith is, as the Quakers say, an experiential faith (see Quaker faith  & practice 19.02) - explanations and arguments appropriate to the rational, discursive mind so often skip over the surface of our deep selves, over the waves of grief and longing, the currents of desire, like stones over the sea; it is only when they have worn themselves out with bouncing that they will sink out of sight. 

It was Karl Rahner who wrote, "The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all." I have written of this before, often enough, but it bears repeating: the human condition is contemplative (whatever name you choose for that) or it has nothing whatever to say to the "fathomless ocean of pain" we are born into. Only love, the love that bore the Cross, can plumb that ocean's depth.

Praying in faith

Practices such as the Jesus Prayer, and the WCCM's "Maranatha", seem to me truly to be prayers, despite the latter's use of the term "mantra" for their repetitive formula.

The Jesus Prayer, as I have so often mentioned in this blog, derives from the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14) and the accounts of Bartimaeus' healing (Mark 10:46-52) and the blind men on the road from Jericho (Matthew 20:29-34).

Terry Hinks, writing (on 1 Corinthians 16:19-24) in New Daylight:

Finally, [Paul] takes up the pen from the scribe to authenticate the letter in his own hand and with his own personal greeting. These are not just words – they are a blessing and not to be given glibly, far less carelessly. Without love we are nothing, as he said earlier in the letter. The gift becomes a curse if there is no love – either for the Lord or each other. The Lord of love remains the heart of the matter, hence Paul’s prayer and the prayer of the early church: ‘Our Lord, come!’ (v. 22) – in Aramaic, Maranatha.

Love is the final word – the grace of our Lord Jesus and the love Paul has for his difficult church in Corinth – not just any love, but a love for all and a love that we see in Jesus.

These are prayers, addressed in all humility to a God whose grace and mercy are present to us, and to all that is, in Christ Jesus. They are not intended to generate an experience, or even primarily to give rise to a state of mind, in the one praying. They are more like an opening of the heart to that presence as the gift of the Holy Spirit; the prayer itself is then a cleansing and a penitent thing, and its effects, if we need to look for effects, are more peace and stillness than anything else.

Increasingly I am convinced that much of the literature associated with the practice of Christian Meditation, especially those works by Laurence Freeman and Sarah Bachelard, is applicable almost equally to the Jesus Prayer; just as conversely, there is much that WCCM practitioners could learn from authors like Kallistos Ware and Frederica Matthews-Green! One hopeful contemporary sign is the openness in much of the Church to ideas from other streams of Christianity; in contemplative prayer, since the middle of the last century, we appear to be learning to pray together and to trust each other in the way that people like Thomas Merton and Thomas R Kelly seem to have dreamed of.  

It is the latter who seems to me to have summed up the source of the impulse to this kind of prayer in the fewest words:

In this humanistic age we suppose man is the initiator and God is the responder. But the living Christ within us is the initiator and we are the responders. God the Lover, the accuser, the revealer of light and darkness presses within us. ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock.’ And all our apparent initiative is already a response, a testimonial to His secret presence and working within us. The basic response of the soul to the Light is internal adoration and joy, thanksgiving and worship, self-surrender and listening.

Thomas R Kelly, 1941 (Quaker faith & practice 2.10)

The unseen condition of faith

On a... profound level we can think of faith as an existential condition that brings us closer to God in an experiential way. Faith, on this level, is not an answer to a question (such as the question, "Does God exist?"); rather, faith is the establishment of a living relationship with God that renders abstract questions meaningless in the face of living faith. However, a life of faith as an existential condition, if one begins with the question of God’s existence, needs to be nourished by an experiential connection with God. This does not mean a solitary, mystical experience. What the desert Fathers called the ascent towards God may not be found only in the life of the ascetic, but also in the life of any person who lives in faith. The sign of the cross... [for instance], has the same significance of spiritual introspection for any believer as it did for the desert monks of the fourth century.

The spiritual realm is not experienced in the solitude of the desert only. Ordinary people experience it in community. Although Scripture and the history of the church have shown several saints and prophets in direct personal encounters with God (as direct as an encounter between God and humans could be), the way God meets with most people is often subtle: A life in Christ is a sacramental life. This life radiates to the people with which it is shared. This sharing makes evident the presence of Jesus in the church and makes evident the image of God in all of us.

Andreas Andreopoulos, The Sign of the Cross

One of the essential functions of contemplative Prayer of whatever kind, it seems to me, is to maintain that stream of nourishment flowing from "an experiential connection with God". Now, it's important to make what might seem a rather subtle distinction here: an experiential connection is not the same thing as a succession of experiences. A contemplative practice is not a means to peak experiences or exalted states of mind - or it shouldn't be - so much as an often unconscious connectivity. From the practitioner's point of view, it may look as though nothing is going on, and our long-repeated and regular times of prayer are achieving little - but under the surface the Spirit may imperceptibly be bringing about profound changes, and one's prayer may be achieving, out of sight, things undreamed-of in terms of everyday causality. A long and gentle rain will heal and renew the land as a torrential downpour never could, and beneath the all too obvious helplessness and sorrow of the world strange and holy things may be taking shape.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

More things are wrought by prayer

Than this world dreams of…

For so the whole round earth is every way

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God… 

(Morte d’Arthur)

Homewards

Most of us in the West have not grown up with the Jesus Prayer as part of our spiritual landscape, as so many seem to in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Consequently we have difficulty in finding examplars, let alone teachers (staretsy) of the way of the Prayer. And yet we are often advised to "always seek to find an experienced spiritual guide for our practice of the Jesus Prayer. Such a person is important in providing support, encouragement, insight and help on the spiritual path and in managing difficulties that arise in our prayer practice."

Many of the readers of the blog, I imagine, will find themselves in this predicament. Somewhere along the path we have encountered the Jesus Prayer, and something in our hearts has resonated to its simple words. We pick up a book, or visit a website, to find out more - only to meet with this impossible requirement. 

Or is it a requirement? Frederica Matthews Green:

Look for a spiritual mother or father. Many Orthodox Christians turn to their parish priest for this, while others seek one at a men’s or women’s monastery. If you can’t find one, embark on the Jesus Prayer with whatever resources you can gather, but retain an extra measure of caution about your own capacity for spiritual pride. You’re still bound to make some mistakes, but at least you won’t be surprised when you do. Attend worship; be part of a worshiping community. Receive the sacraments (in Orthodoxy, called “Holy Mysteries”). Go to confession, if that is part of your spiritual heritage.

Kallistos Ware went further: 

Yet today, in this present epoch of restless curiosity and ecclesiastical disintegration, there are in fact many who use the Jesus Prayer without belonging to any Church, possibly without having a clear faith either in the Lord Jesus or in anything else. Are we to condemn them? Are we to forbid them the use of the Prayer? Surely not, so long as they are sincerely searching for the Fountain of Life. Jesus condemned no one except hypocrites...

I've found, over the years since I was first introduced to the Jesus Prayer at the end of the 1970s, that there is that in the Prayer which is profoundly healing and, for want of a better phrase, inwardly stabilising. Even when I have been thoroughly lost and without bearings the Prayer has found me and brought me back; not only to its practice, but to the fellowship of the Church, and to the Eucharistic community itself. For me it has been the safest of havens, and a beacon in the shadows where I have found no other light.

Not everyone of course, will share this call - there are many paths up the Mountain, and none is better of itself. But I don't think, if you are one who finds the Prayer tugs at something in you far deeper than words or ideas, an inexplicable yearning when you read Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me... that you need fear slipping out on the running tide of those words. There is there, to repurpose Hopkins' words, "the dearest freshness deep down things", like the scent of the sea wind that will lead you home.

A calling

Not for the first time it has been borne in upon me that the life of prayer is not a choice but a calling. Time and again I have tried, over the course of my life, to sidestep this; and time and again I have been brought back by an infinite patience and grace to a path that seems to have been traced for me.

In Quaker faith & practice we read:

Those of you who are kept by age or sickness from more active work, who are living retired lives, may in your very separation have the opportunity of liberating power for others. Your prayers and thoughts go out further than you think, and as you wait in patience and in communion with God, you may be made ministers of peace and healing and be kept young in soul. 

(London Yearly Meeting, 1923)

I would want to add the word “calling” to the first sentence here: “kept by age, sickness or calling…” Throughout history, even in times of great social need or unrest, the calling to a retired life of prayer and contemplation has been recognised by those to whom it has come.

Simon Barrington-Ward writes of St. Silouan:

…he began to recognise that [his sense of darkness and isolation] was in part the oppression of the absence of the sense of God and the alienation from his love over the whole face of the globe. He had been called to undergo this travail himself not on account of his own sin any more, but that he might enter into the darkness of separated humanity and tormented nature and, through his ceaseless prayer, be made by God’s grace alone into a means of bringing that grace to bear on the tragic circumstances of his time. He was praying and living through the time of World War I and the rise of Hitler and the beginnings of all that led to the Holocaust [not to mention the Russian Revolution, and at the very end of his life, Stalin’s Great Purge]. And with all this awareness of pain and sorrow, he was also given a great serenity and peacefulness and goodness about his, which profoundly impressed those who know him. 

For all of us in our lesser ways, the Jesus Prayer, as well as bringing us into something of this kind of alternation which St. Silouan so strikingly experienced, also leads us on with him into an ever-deepening peace. You can understand how those who first taught and practised this kind of prayer were first called “hesychasts”: people of hesychia or stillness.

Of course all this is by grace, entirely by grace; God’s life and presence given to us freely in Christ. We are called into this. I honestly don’t think we could choose these things for ourselves. Even if we could, they would fall into disuse by our own inertia. We would become bored with the Prayer, terrified by the darkness and the identification with the pain and alienation of the world, as I have all too often been myself. This "travail" of prayer, as much as its consolation, has for me often led to attempts to find another way - but to no avail!

Why would anyone choose such a path, hidden as it is too, mute and inglorious? My only answer must be that I didn't choose it. I have tried, so often, to choose anything but this way; but I have found myself driven back by a kind of interior necessity not of my own making.

Barrington-Ward again:

After all, the whole prayer becomes an intercession. Soon I find that I am on longer praying just for myself, but when I say “on me, a sinner” all the situations of grief and terror, of pain and suffering begin to be drawn into me and I into them. I begin to pray as a fragment of this wounded creation longing for its release into fulfilment… I am in those for whom I would pray and they are in me, as is the whole universe. Every petition of the prayer becomes a bringing of all into the presence and love of God…

What seems to be required here has to be a life marked largely by prayer and silence.  In my own case, calling and sickness, or at least weakness from old injuries, seem to work together in a kind of synergism to reinforce this calling to a retired life. Why is it that I find it so difficult to settle down to accepting it?

Of course, how this will work out in the life of each of us called to such a life is a kind of small mystery of our own. It will have to be worked out, sometimes literally with fear and trembling, in the mercy of the Prayer itself.

I think we have, when we find ourselves called to the Jesus Prayer - or indeed any other contemplative practice - and the life that is lived within that practice, to be prepared to walk into the dark, as it were, unknowing, and see how things turn out. The path may be quite straightforward; or it may be quite scandalously tangled and broken. That doesn't seem to be for us to choose - what we are given is that unknowing, and a scrap of faith, like a dusty pilgrim's shell, to hold on to. Or perhaps it holds onto us. In my own case, it seems to be the latter.

[Parts of this post are, inevitably, revisions of things written here earlier. They seem to need repeating from time to time.]

The promise of presence

The call, the promise of blessings, and our willing response inevitably lead to a journey—a journey away from all that is safe and familiar, toward the unknown and very often, towards danger. There is great mental and emotional cost in such a journey, whether it be a physical journey to a strange land, a foreign culture, and an unknown people; or a journey inward, deep into the turbulent, uncharted territory of the mind and heart... The divine call is not always easy to discern and the mysterious promise often takes a long time to make itself manifest. God never promises us success. What God does promise is presence...

(Veronica Mary Rolf, Suddenly There is God: The Story of Our Lives in Sacred Scripture)

I think a statement like this must apply especially to the calling to a life of prayer. Anything we could imagine as "success" is very far from the experience of one praying: what could it mean, even? And yet this call is entirely real, concrete, almost. My own experience of the Jesus Prayer is precisely this, "a journey inward" and yet a journey into inescapable presence. Like many others, in Scripture and elsewhere, I'm not sure that my response could be characterised as "willing"; the best I can come up with is listening. Obedience is another matter...

And yet that presence is infinitely patient; and the call, once given, only grows stronger, despite the lengthening shadows. John Gill:

[The Jesus Prayer] is a direct invocation to the person of Jesus, expressing faith in his divinity and a plea for his mercy. It does not just rely upon mechanical technique and is not in the nature of a magical incantation. Its efficacy is the result of God’s grace, freely given. It is not an impersonal instrument but a prayer replete with meaning, expressing sentiments of humility, repentance, compunction and love.

Perhaps I might be forgiven for adding to Gill's four sentiments that of attention. Not so much the attention of will that any repeated prayer or formula involves, but attention to the presence of God in Jesus, like the beloved apostle's off the shore of Galilee: "It is the Lord!" (John 21:7)

Love and attention - maybe the only response possible or necessary to that inescapable presence - are all in the end we have to offer; and yet they are nothing more than faith expressed; and faith is given (Ephesians 2:8), just as the call is, and its promise.