tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-153983042024-03-18T19:42:16.544+00:00The Mercy BlogContemplative prayer, the Jesus Prayer, pilgrimageMike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.comBlogger1524125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-62378663589306974012024-03-15T21:13:00.005+00:002024-03-16T08:32:20.494+00:00An acuteness of love and attention...<p>In Sarah Bachelard's recent book <i><a href="https://amzn.eu/iZg9QYr" target="_blank">A Contemplative Christianity for Our Time</a>, </i>she quotes from the epilogue to Christopher Fry's play <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sleep-Prisoners-Play-Christopher-Fry/dp/0192113100" target="_blank">A Sleep of Prisoners</a></i>:</p><p></p><blockquote>Thank God our time is now when wrong<br />Comes up to face us everywhere,<br />Never to leave us till we take<br />The longest stride of soul we ever took.<br />Affairs are now soul size.<br />The enterprise<br />Is exploration into God.</blockquote><p></p><p>We do live, as did the WWII soldiers in Fry's play, in just such a time. Archimandrite Sophrony <a href="https://themercyblog.blogspot.com/2016/01/archimandrite-sophrony-sakharov.html" target="_blank">wrote</a>, some years ago now, as if he were writing yesterday:</p><p></p><blockquote>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... </blockquote><blockquote>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... </blockquote><p></p><p>As Bachelard points out, there is no sense in which prayer, let alone contemplative prayer, is to be thought of as a <i>substitute </i>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 <i><a href="https://amazon.co.uk/Peter-Abelard-Helen-Waddell-ebook/dp/B07F854KWN/" target="_blank">Peter Abelard</a></i>, 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.</p><p>Whatever technical interpretation we place on the theology of crucifixion and atonement, the direct spiritual experience of "an entire universe of horrifying anguish" (<a href="https://themercyblog.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-fathomless-ocean-of-pain.html" target="_blank">Rebecca Tope</a>) 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 <i><a href="https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Praying-Jesus-Prayer-Christian-spirituality/dp/0551015411/" target="_blank">Praying the Jesus Prayer</a></i> by Br Ramon SSF:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>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.</p><p>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]</p></blockquote><p></p>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-51184443221832461422024-03-09T21:20:00.003+00:002024-03-09T21:44:40.100+00:00Small 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 <a href="https://amzn.eu/jam7xMu">writes</a> 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."<div><br></div><div>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).</div><div><br></div><div>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 (<i>ibid.</i>) quotes John Climacus:</div><div><br></div><div><i>Do not lose heart when your thoughts are stolen away. Just remain calm, and constantly call your mind back... </i><i>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.</i></div><div><i><br></i></div><div><a href="https://wccm.org/daily-wisdom/its-about-being-faithful/">Laurence Freeman</a>:</div><div><i><br></i></div><div><i>[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.</i></div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-44066284871879988912024-03-04T21:47:00.003+00:002024-03-04T23:10:47.929+00:00Faith in Practice One of the things that has always appealed to me about the <a href="https://themercyblog.blogspot.com/p/the-jesus-prayer.html">Jesus Prayer</a> 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.<div><br></div><div>Some writers (<a href="https://amzn.eu/7UawsEY">Cynthia Bourgeault</a>, for instance) regard the Jesus Prayer as a mantra. I am not sure this is the way I look at it. The word <i>maranatha, </i>used in the practice known as <a href="https://wccm.org/">Christian Mediation</a>, 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, <i>op.cit.</i>). 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).</div><div><br></div><div>John Climacus, as quoted by <a href="https://amzn.eu/jam7xMu">John Gill</a>, 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 <a href="https://orthodoxwiki.org/Seraphim_of_Sarov">Seraphim of Sarov</a> - a surrender of the restless intellect to that which is before all things (Colossians 1:15-17).</div><div><br></div><div><br></div>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-57646401812834103402024-02-29T20:35:00.004+00:002024-02-29T23:18:14.513+00:00Faith in MercyIt 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." (<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Little-Book-Unknowing-Jennifer-Kavanagh-ebook/dp/B00TT5VXSU/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1Y66RNC1THWQ4&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.of9oMwFHtYVjBsF9dJhbHc71ygfUou3tYG3Q2IdDV4M.yDecqiRVfffpYc6YdhunwUD7lnpvqgk5x84bexsh3DM&dib_tag=se&keywords=A+little+book+of+unknowing&qid=1709235929&s=digital-text&sprefix=a+little+book+of+unknowing+%252Cdigital-text%252C101&sr=1-1">Jennifer Kavanagh</a>) 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." (<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mystical-Hope-Trusting-Mercy-Cloister-ebook/dp/B009D178W0/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3GY8LB13LN9RI&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.n8D9UjDbQgqebzeAXWs-UIzkPecSm4EnDFESoNBuPRyTtRWALlFEsH_elOw9k0golkiJdVyGQHNnzX_nb0BnIte-cjYWph9uXY1NFp1Jk7WPxD0XX79sQCulu7w5d7WV-B8ALeUNiE3Iit7ied2npqj-VoM2SyiYWfVDreojwMywL1ykWGJhPRp7J95lXxXW_bGwFtJM9U6ypejcgG7Qe5cYL3OBNyvMwIi1oUZA0Pg.v7ZmNLHCJOHgvhcUtKgROcFaUpbV0Irl-3fvsOzuOcM&dib_tag=se&keywords=Mystical+hope&qid=1709236283&s=digital-text&sprefix=mystical+hope%252Cdigital-text%252C85&sr=1-1">Cynthia Bourgeault</a>) <div><br></div><div>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." </div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>Laurence Freeman <a href="https://mailchi.mp/wccm/ywfciz5o8g-400996?e=9c4f1e614d">writes</a>, </div><div><br></div><div><i>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...</i></div><div><i><br></i></div><div><i>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.</i>..</div><div><br></div><div>Truly, as Martin Laird <a href="https://amzn.eu/d/9gwUkOC">says</a>, "... 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."</div><div><br></div><div>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. </div>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-52819697266239807322024-02-27T20:56:00.000+00:002024-02-27T20:56:59.130+00:00This waste expanse of daysLent, like <a href="https://themercyblog.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-second-sunday-of-advent.html">Advent</a>, 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 <a href="https://themercyblog.blogspot.com/2024/02/things-are-as-they-are.html">last post</a> 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.<div><br></div><div>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,</div><div><br></div><div><i>...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.</i></div><div><i><br></i></div><div><i>(Romans 8:26-27 NRSV)</i></div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div><i>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.</i></div><div><i><br></i></div><div><i>Caryll Houselander (quoted in Richard Rohr's <a href="https://amzn.to/342Ae5V">The Universal Christ</a>)</i></div><div><br></div>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-41820493698612446382024-02-20T21:37:00.004+00:002024-02-22T10:13:34.044+00:00The desert is not a place...In today's <a href="https://wccm.uk/lent-reflections-2024/">WCCM Lent Reflection</a>, Laurence Freeman writes, "The desert is not a place but a state or direction of mind."<div><br></div><div>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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derealization">derealisation</a>. 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. <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/God-Us-Meaning-Cross-Resurrection-ebook/dp/B01N33HWZX/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3JYVSFF3P1OHN&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.YVLFJzYwUE7tcWx6BLb5O-NfGixzcC5TjlgKyubURisdj5snfDS5xWQ7rbAK0HJtIx17UHaH1Lvy41VNDZeT9euPYKiVZr1XQtEfsuM9nmxpDnIVJTuhKMxjMULphfSK.pe04l_hrBjzjjAb6vudM3tXpV9OF14A6BGhGjZuKpIY&dib_tag=se&keywords=god+with+us+rowan+williams&qid=1708463536&sprefix=God+with+us%252Caps%252C112&sr=8-1">Rowan Williams</a>: "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."</div><div><i><br></i></div><div>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 <a href="https://www.catholicstoreroom.com/2017/04/11/welcome-silence/">saw</a>: "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. </div><div><br></div><div><br></div>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-72080166943407413142024-02-15T22:31:00.001+00:002024-02-17T10:42:01.031+00:00Things are as they are<p></p><blockquote><p>Because I know that time is always time<br>And place is always and only place <br>And what is actual is actual only for one time <br>And only for one place I rejoice that things are as they are...</p><p>(TS Eliot, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Poems-Plays-T-Eliot-ebook/dp/B0056HIOPK/ref=sr_1_4?crid=3M45R8AJ2HLQW&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ucXVnhuIwl2OrabEti60BfA3oPTgp8L8R7uFiPTXyQdhSyyh6DfT7kyn3HHTor6zI-LpbSuAJyWU7BjjQHN86O1xfbdfmDx6PKRqesfXmjUPuINekm5o-h5DbEsbtyCQQzdqXr5bhqr3ZYaivsktg-ljBN0salr1gUrUByGwmmSxcu5GmWo12tpvnn3b-DfF.2iq7ccMwoTDg2djag4AMbxIre3ZNBiZq7shquKPJpyQ&dib_tag=se&keywords=ash+wednesday+ts+eliot&qid=1708032025&sprefix=ash+wednesday+ts+eliot%2Caps%2C118&sr=8-4" target="_blank">Ash Wednesday</a>)</i></p></blockquote><p><i></i></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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' <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44398/no-worst-there-is-none-pitched-past-pitch-of-grief" target="_blank">terrible sonnet</a>, "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. </p><p>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.</p><p>Frederica Mathewes-Green, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jesus-Prayer-Ancient-Desert-Tunes-ebook/dp/B002VECR90/ref=sr_1_2?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.esmR-yfHTJ2_7tIrBmT1MnL5nX6oPDBFuEJ3L5Q5z9Zw0vEUotzYZLHIFcKAEc8TF2QxI8SdekoXotbtKYLo82S_NxWQ6NbM3TIztoSpYRL5Fbdw_xPPeWXdGYQlDtDztKU2KEBTCG3tyNvPnXwylTqDX6EJRI7cxeCSq6yXb3v6X0Zq1ahJADbVFMTFiicIhzNkNcrs3NzCijByXdf_ZiGAE7gVv5wejHosgcVnyDA.5LDuYNzc_dt_Vq58eLM8gr3yF7JYIT7JMRs0XKDikEI&dib_tag=se&keywords=frederica+mathewes+green&qid=1708034896&sr=8-2" target="_blank">writing</a> on the practice of the Jesus Prayer, has this to say: </p><p></p><blockquote>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 <i>nous</i>, that is) "into the heart."</blockquote><p></p><p>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.</p>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-362576358607558742024-02-13T19:08:00.001+00:002024-02-14T10:51:43.855+00:00Faith in Silence<p>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.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>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...</p><p>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.</p><p>Laurence Freeman, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/First-Sight-Experience-Laurence-Freeman/dp/1441161570/ref=sr_1_1?crid=N4NHBY9SPPKH&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.dOvEhWrsHUTtV0rydiU5NuFYinqyE1jYVEOI6npYgC4.vmGlfVcQh7cw1W3biAt8rCxlgzU71Q2mi-pjmAGPj90&dib_tag=se&keywords=first+sight+the+experience+of+faith&qid=1707848955&sprefix=first+sight+the+experience+of+faith%2Caps%2C116&sr=8-1" target="_blank">First Sight: the Experience of Faith</a></i></p></blockquote><p>The Jesus Prayer, like Freeman's mantra (in his case, <i>maranatha),</i> 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.</p><p>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).</p><p>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 <i>istigkeit</i>?</p><p></p>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-24461010651197190332024-02-10T21:15:00.008+00:002024-02-21T08:53:01.696+00:00Unexpected 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 <a href="https://themercyblog.blogspot.com/2021/01/being-quiet.html">last post</a> 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. (To read more about this journey, visit <a href="https://anopenground.wordpress.com/">An Open Ground</a>.) But the way of the Jesus Prayer is not so easily sidestepped! <div><br></div><div>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 <a href="https://psychologicalsciences.unimelb.edu.au/CSC/contemplative-resource-hub/difficulties">moving account</a> shows just how perilous) and second, <a href="https://anopenground.wordpress.com/2024/01/17/surrender/">surrender</a> 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...</div><div><br></div><div>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, </div><div><br></div><div><i>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.</i></div><div><i><br></i></div><div><i>(<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wisdom-Insecurity-Message-Age-Anxiety-ebook/dp/B008S9YTFW/ref=sr_1_1?crid=UN86F18SHLWH&keywords=The+wisdom+of+insecurity&qid=1701287732&sprefix=the+wisdom+of+insecurity%252Caps%252C430&sr=8-1">The Wisdom of Insecurity</a>)</i></div><div><i><br></i></div><div>Laurence Freeman is almost more definite, if anything:</div><div><br></div><div><i>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. </i></div><div><i><br></i></div><div><i>(<a href="https://amzn.eu/d/j2Y1PUQ">First Sight: The Experience of Faith</a>)</i></div><div><br></div><div>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 <a href="https://www.ldonline.org/ld-topics/teaching-instruction/imagery-sensory-cognitive-connection-math">imagery</a> 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. </div><div><i><br></i></div><div><i>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. </i></div><div><i><br></i></div><div><i>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. </i></div><div><i><br></i></div><div><i>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'.</i></div><div><i><br></i></div><div><i>(Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, from <a href="http://www.orthodoxa.org/GB/orthodoxy/spirituality/JesusprayerGB.htm">The Orthodox Church of Estonia</a>)</i></div><div><i><br></i></div><div><a href="https://themercyblog.blogspot.com/p/the-jesus-prayer.html">Once again</a>, these words of St Symeon's seem to be proving true! </div>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-538305455632250372021-01-28T19:20:00.001+00:002021-01-29T17:25:28.081+00:00Being Quiet<p>During this time when physically attending corporate worship of any kind is difficult, not to say inadvisable, and Zoom meetings have remained their distracting and inadequate selves, there has been plenty of time to be quiet, and to allow the assumptions and traditions by which our spiritual lives are usually conditioned to settle out, as it were, like the cloudiness in a newly-established aquarium.</p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a> defines religion as "a social-cultural system of designated behaviours and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements."</p><p>Contemplation, however differently it may be defined in different traditions, is at root a kind of inner seeing, an experiential encounter with the ground of being that gives rise to, and sustains, all that is. The many techniques of contemplative practice may in the end give rise to contemplation, but their intention is much more modest: to train attention and consciousness sufficiently to still the field of awareness. Of course the outer forms of mediation or contemplative practice are very different, and conditioned by the religious tradition within which they arise, but very broadly something like this seems to be intended by them all.</p><p>In this period of quiet settling, separated from the religious atmosphere and bustle of corporate worship, I have begun to sense that the "social-cultural system" of religion is something quite separate from the "experimental faith" (cf. <a href="https://qfp.quaker.org.uk/passage/19-02/" target="_blank"><i>Quaker faith & practice</i> 19.02</a>) of contemplative practice, and crucially, the one does not depend upon the other.</p><p>Where this is leading I am not at present certain, but there is a clarity developing that I had not expected, nor intentionally "worked towards". The inward solitude of these unusual times is proving strangely fruitful. This is what Martin Laird once called a "pathless path": as Dave Tomlinson <a href="https://amzn.to/2NLiGpS" target="_blank">wrote</a>, "Human language is unable to describe the external realities of God with any precision. As we have seen, this does not make language useless; it simply means that we have to accept its limitations... Religious language or talk about God and the spiritual realm is therefore inherently provisional and approximate in nature."</p><p>Perhaps it is time that silence and practice are allowed to stand without language: the field still, and open. It seems to be so for me.</p>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-49215986637885727942020-12-31T12:56:00.003+00:002020-12-31T19:00:45.775+00:00Ground and Network; Life and Death<p>Nearly two years ago now, Rhiannon Grant published a <a href="https://brigidfoxandbuddha.wordpress.com/2019/01/14/liberal-quakers-and-life-after-death/" target="_blank">post</a> on her blog <a href="https://brigidfoxandbuddha.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Brigid, Fox and Buddha</a> considering the question of what, if anything, Liberal Quakers think about life after death. Now, Rhiannon is far better qualified than I to say what they may or may not think, and an interesting discussion ensued in her comments section. But the question, when I revisited her blog, set me thinking.</p><p>Merlin Sheldrake, in his fascinating book <i><a href="https://amzn.to/3hI4ysx" target="_blank">Entangled Life</a>,</i> discusses the all way life, on this planet at least, is underpinned by fungal networks, mycorrhizal webs connecting tree to tree, plant to animal, bacterium to lichen. He remarks, of his research on fungal networks, facilitated as it is by international academic and commercial scientific networks, "It is a recurring theme: look at the network, and it starts to look back at you." (Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life (p. 240). Random House. Kindle Edition.)</p><p>Much of our unthinking outlook on things, even in the twenty-first century, is conditioned by a Cartesian, atomistic outlook inherited from the seventeenth century. This has crept into our religious and spiritual thinking too, so that we tend to understand God as a "thing" over against other things, and we ourselves as separate individual selves who continue, or don't continue, after death. Perhaps this is as wrong a way of looking at life as was the early Darwinian view of evolution as divergence, separation, of organisms (Sheldrake, <i>op cit.</i>, pp. 80-82) rather than as interconnection, often cooperative interconnection, within ecosystems.</p><p>For a long time now, Paul Tillich's understanding of God as "Ground of Being", beyond being, not to be understood as object vis à vis any subject but preceding the subject-object disjunction (<i><a href="https://amzn.to/3rJnHhZ" target="_blank">Theology of Culture</a>, </i>p.15) has made perfect sense to me. Tillich somewhere in <i><a href="https://amzn.to/380wXXb" target="_blank">Systematic Theology</a> </i>refers to God as Ground of Being as "Being-itself" - a concept which has always appeared to me to be pretty much equivalent to Meister Eckhart's <i>Istigkeit</i>, "<a href="https://amzn.to/3hup6o9" target="_blank">isness</a>"!</p><p>If God is indeed the Ground of Being, that which underlies as well as overarches all things, the ground in which, as Christ, "He is before all things, and in [whom] all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17 NIV) then his relation to "things" in creation, human and other beings included, is, at least metaphorically, much more like the relation of a network to its nodes than anything else I can think of. Our own lives, then, are "hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3.3) - as Paul says, we have already died; how then can we die? (see Colossians 3.1-4!) But is this an atomistic, separate continuation, a life lived "in Heaven" rather than in Dorchester, merely? That neither seems likely nor accords with my own experience at all. Our true life is lived in God, in the Ground of Being, the isness of God. That goes on - death is consumed in life, darkness by light.</p><p><br /></p>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-31570586798424943372020-12-25T09:28:00.004+00:002020-12-25T09:28:40.566+00:00Christmas 2020<p></p><blockquote><p>For to us a child is born, to us a son is given,<br /> and the government will be on his shoulders.<br />And he will be called Wonderful Counsellor,<br /> Mighty God, Everlasting Father,<br /> Prince of Peace.</p><p>Of the greatness of his government and peace<br /> there will be no end.<br />He will reign on David’s throne<br /> and over his kingdom,<br />establishing and upholding it<br /> with justice and righteousness<br /> from that time on and forever.<br />The zeal of the LORD Almighty will accomplish this.</p><p>(Isaiah 9:6-7 NIV)</p><p></p></blockquote><p>A morning of glorious stillness and light, with hardly a leaf stirring, and a winter sun gilding the trees and making translucent the leaves of the quiet ivy.</p><p>Happy Christmas!</p>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-12221768638272375602020-12-20T18:45:00.005+00:002020-12-20T19:57:38.761+00:00The Fourth Sunday of Advent<p></p><blockquote><p>Again the LORD spoke to Ahaz, "Ask the LORD your God for a sign, whether in the deepest depths or in the highest heights." But Ahaz said, "I will not ask; I will not put the LORD to the test."</p><p>Then Isaiah said, "Hear now, you house of David! Is it not enough to try the patience of humans? Will you try the patience of my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel..."</p><p>Isaiah 7:10-14 NIV</p></blockquote><div><div></div></div><blockquote><div><div>In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you."</div><div><br /></div><div>Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favour with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end."</div><div><br /></div><div>"How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?"</div><div><br /></div><div>The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.</div><div><br /></div><div>"I am the Lord’s servant," Mary answered. "May your word to me be fulfilled." Then the angel left her.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>Luke 1:26-38 NIV</div></blockquote><div></div><div><br /></div><div>Prophecy in the Bible is a slightly difficult thing to come to terms with, however you view the historicity of the Biblical documents; the one thing, though, that comes through clearly in these passages are the attitudes of those receiving the word. Ahaz, and Zechariah too, earlier in this Gospel (Luke 1:5-25) found it hard to accept. Ahaz didn't want to "put the Lord to the test"; Zechariah couldn't believe the words of Gabriel, "How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years." (Luke 1:18)</div><div><br /></div><div>Mary had more to lose than anyone - her husband-to-be, her good name, perhaps her life - but she received the angel's message for what it was. Intelligent girl that she obviously was, she asked the obvious question about the mechanics of this unexpected gift, but she accepted Gabriel's explanation without cavil. She knew an archangel when she heard one, obviously, and she knew that God's word would never fail. It didn't.</div><div><br /></div><div>At the centre of faith is listening, always. To be still enough in ourselves to hear, quiet enough to receive the gift within the silence; to wait in unknowing, as long as it takes, for the Lord's mercy - to be open enough for grace - is to rest at the still point of the turning world.*</div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;">*TS Eliot, The Four Quartets: Burnt Norton (1935)</span></div><div><br /></div>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-29864418218595845772020-12-13T19:37:00.000+00:002020-12-13T19:37:15.388+00:00The Third Sunday of Advent<p></p><blockquote><p>“And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Highest; For you will go before the face of the Lord to prepare His ways, To give knowledge of salvation to His people By the remission of their sins, Through the tender mercy of our God, With which the Dayspring from on high has visited us; To give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, To guide our feet into the way of peace.”</p><p>(Luke 1:76-79 NKJV)</p></blockquote><p></p><div>The universe is filled with light, threads and vast floods of light, streaming through apparent emptiness, illuminating all that is made, bringing life to all that is alive. And the darkness has not overcome it.</div>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-13066698930352714632020-12-12T13:15:00.003+00:002020-12-14T18:07:15.790+00:00Another Kind of Desert<p>I have written <a href="https://themercyblog.blogspot.com/2020/08/church-is-what.html" target="_blank">before here</a> about my growing sense not only of a increasing personal call to some kind of hiddenness, but also of the way in which the (at least in the UK) repeated lockdowns and "tiered" partial easings of lockdowns have contributed to the growth of what Steve Aisthorpe calls <i><a href="https://amzn.to/3kLMj6A" target="_blank">The Invisible Church</a></i>:</p><p></p><blockquote>There is a growing realisation that church is what occurs when people are touched by the living Christ and share the journey of faith with others. Whether that occurs in an historic building or online or . . . wherever, is unimportant.</blockquote><p></p><p>The history of religion is littered with examples of the way that the luminous insights of prophets and poets and contemplatives (in my usage, Jesus would be all three) become clouded and encoded by institutions, and by their uneasy relationships with power and wealth. Obvious examples would be the Roman church in the years following the Emperor Constantine's conversion, and the chaos of the English Reformation and the ensuing Civil Wars, but within other religions there are many parallels such as the troubled history of the Islamic Caliphates and the role of Buddhism during the politically volatile late Heian to early Kamakura period in Japan.</p><p>Time and again contemplatives have broken away from the apparent corruption of state churches on the one hand and religion-inspired revolutionaries on the other, sometimes forming loose communities, and retreated from formal organisation almost altogether. Examples are as diverse as the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt and Syria around the 4th century AD, the Pure Land (Shin) schools of Buddhism founded by Honen and Shinran in 12th and 13th century Japan, and the Quakers in 17th century England.</p><p>These contemplative movements, often based around simplicity of practice and openness to the Spirit, seem to arise when not only are the religious establishments in a compromised and sometimes corrupt condition, but the state is in flux, sometimes violent flux. Trump's America and Brexit Britain, scoured by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, would seem to provide fertile ground for contemplative change in this way.</p><p>Needless to say I have no answers, but the question underlies, it seems to me, much of the interest in "<a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/churchless-faith-british-christian-community-may-be-far-larger-due-changing-forms-practising-belief-a6948591.html" target="_blank">Churchless Christianity</a>" that has flared up even more strongly during the present crisis. There will be voices raised, of course, both on the side of secular humanism and on the side of organised religion, accusing "hermits" of retreating from their responsibilities to the world, just as parallel voices have been raised at the hinges of faith and practice throughout history. To them I would offer these words from Caryll Houselander (quoted in Richard Rohr's <i><a href="https://amzn.to/342Ae5V" target="_blank">The Universal Christ</a>)</i></p><p><i></i></p><p></p><blockquote>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.</blockquote><p></p>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-15136759394026777942020-12-06T22:49:00.000+00:002020-12-06T22:49:34.781+00:00The Second Sunday of Advent<p> It can be tempting to think of Advent as a cosy time, drawn close around the fire while we warm up the engines of Christmas. But for me at any rate this year it seems to be something far less romantic: a time of stripping back, clearing the tangled thorns around the heart - brambles of memory, the climbing briars of faithlessness. But we cannot reach, and the thorns tear the skin of our reaching hands.</p><p>Advent is a time of stillness, of waiting, they say. But for what? For what we cannot do for ourselves - Eustace the dragon, helpless within his scales.</p><p></p><blockquote>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. </blockquote><blockquote>(Romans 8:26-27 NRSV)</blockquote><p></p><p>Our waiting is for God's grace alone. There is nothing we can do except wait, and pray that silence may itself bring us only to some kind of holy longing, to the psalmist's words at the end of his hymn to the Word:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>I have strayed like a lost sheep. Seek your servant, for I have not forgotten your commands.</p><p>(Psalm 119:176 NIV)</p><div></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-90022504877175231762020-11-29T18:48:00.000+00:002020-11-29T18:48:26.932+00:00The First Sunday of Advent<p> <a href="https://www.ibenedictines.org/2020/11/29/the-first-sunday-of-advent-2020/" target="_blank">Digitalnun writes</a>,</p><p></p><blockquote>Advent begins quietly, almost stealthily, with a call to stay awake and alert and prepare for the coming of the Lord. We are simply clay, to be fashioned anew by the Potter into the shape most pleasing to him. The emphasis is not on our doing but on his. That gives to the Advent season a wonderful freedom and joy. So, out with those prideful programmes of self-improvement, those ambitious schemes of prayer and fasting! Instead, welcome the silence, the mystery, the quiet pondering of scripture. Become, in the best sense, a child again, filled with wonder and awe at what is unfolding before your eyes. With the humility of Mary, the fidelity of Joseph and the joy of John the Baptist, let us prepare in our hearts a place for the Lord.</blockquote><p>There is such comfort and hope in the simplicity of this. For me, it brings the same sense of compassionate, merciful grace that the <a href="https://themercyblog.blogspot.com/p/the-jesus-prayer.html" target="_blank">Jesus Prayer</a> carries, or the Pureland Buddhist <i><a href="http://www.amidashu.org/pureland-buddhism/" target="_blank">Nembutsu</a></i>. Simple prayers for imperfect people. Just practice.</p><p></p>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-30592352517675749822020-11-25T18:41:00.001+00:002020-11-25T21:36:51.207+00:00What Is Normal Now?<p>As we approach the end of this period of national lockdown and prepare to move back into a three-tiered existence, many churches (including Quaker Meetings) will be wondering how much public worship they will be able to get away with now.</p><!--wp:paragraph-->
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<p>I have used deliberately uncomfortable language. So many of us, in all walks of life, are longing to "get back to normal", and are wondering how much normal behaviour will be tolerated by others, or permitted by the COVID-19 restrictions over the Christmas period and afterwards. It has been a long year, and we are weary of what feels to some like the imposition of a sudden totalitarian state for which no one voted.</p>
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<p><a href="https://www.ibenedictines.org/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">Digitalnun</a>, whose Benedictine blog I have followed for years, writes:</p>
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<blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Many priests and pastors are doing their imaginative best to support those who feel bereft, but some talk only of ‘when things return to normal’ and, to be honest, I question whether that will ever come about. It is not just that, however successful vaccines prove to be in controlling the spread and severity of the virus, there are many other changes that will take much longer to work through. The shift in work patterns, the economic consequences of actions taken by government, the effects of delayed healthcare interventions, the disruption to education, to say nothing of climate change and political re-alignments, they are all going to have an effect on our future lives...</p><p>Worshiping together is only one aspect of what church-going means. Fellowship and service of others are also important. However, I’d like to stay with worship a little longer because I think it is there that we can identify a lack we need to address. Here in the West we are not accustomed to being unable to receive the sacraments... </p><p>I’ve said often enough that I think the territorial parish is no longer central or necessary to most people’s experience of church, and I think that trend will continue. But if the traditional parish goes, and with it the economic and financial basis of much church organization and activity, there will be a knock-on effect on how we understand priesthood, both of the ordained presbyterate and the priesthood of all the baptized. If the buildings are closed, we go on being the Church but we can no longer make the same assumptions about what that means or how it is expressed. Are we ready for that? Can lockdown restrictions help us?</p></blockquote>
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<p>Digitalnun is of course writing as a Catholic religious sister, and Friends do have some different perspectives, but I think we can find enough parallels to relate to what she is saying. We find ourselves on the outside of our tradition, all of us, looking in at what used to be.</p>
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<p>Change is part of who we are. Each of us changes, day by day, year by year, merely by living. We grow older, and we sometimes look askance at those of our contemporaries who will insist on being as much like they were in their teens or twenties as they think they can get away with in their retirement. The band Wire have an album called <em>Change Becomes Us</em> - and it does, if only we will accept it.</p>
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<p>What will worship look like next week? Or next year? The thing is, we don't know. We will have to wait and see. And that's all right. Our faith is now: it isn't located in the seventeenth, or the seventh, century of this uncommon era, and it doesn't depend upon how it will be in the next year, or decade. Our encounter with God is always in the present. There is no other time for it, since time does not apply to such encounters anyway. Worship is waiting, waiting for the encounter with that which is beyond us, and from which we have our being. We can do waiting. Alexander Parker, back in 1660, <a data-id="https://qfp.quaker.org.uk/passage/2-41/" data-type="URL" href="https://qfp.quaker.org.uk/passage/2-41/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">wrote</a>, "Those who are brought to a pure still waiting upon God in the spirit, are come nearer to the Lord than words are; for God is a spirit, and in the spirit is he worshipped…"</p>
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<!--/wp:paragraph-->Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-53845233727078215502020-11-14T12:24:00.002+00:002020-11-14T13:47:53.294+00:00The Nub of Hope<p> "What if the nub of hope is that we cannot know where it is leading?" (Dana Littlepage Smith, writing in <em><a data-id="https://thefriend.org/article/waiting-may-well-be-the-compost-in-a-life-of-prayer#addcomment" data-type="URL" href="https://thefriend.org/article/waiting-may-well-be-the-compost-in-a-life-of-prayer#addcomment" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">The Friend</a> </em>21 May 2020)</p><!--wp:paragraph-->
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<p>This morning the rain is grey and unceasing. Drops trickle down the windows, beyond the reflections of the room lights, on since we woke up, late. A chill seeps in, despite the good tight glazing, and the room's warmth. Out along the hazels, damp little blue tits flit from shelter to shelter, looking for spiders under the leaves. </p>
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<p>"Silence is paradoxically a listening, and solitude is truly finding the whole world in God." George Maloney, <em><a data-id="https://amzn.to/2IGKbhy" data-type="URL" href="https://amzn.to/2IGKbhy" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">Prayer of the Heart: The Contemplative Tradition of the Christian East</a>.</em></p>
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<p>"All our steps are ordered by the LORD; how then can we understand our own ways?...<br />The human spirit is the lamp of the LORD, searching every inmost part."<br />(Proverbs 20:24,27 NRSV)</p>
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<p>It is only in the darkness of unknowing that the structures of our understanding fall away from our naked awareness, and we find that nothing separates us from the wholly unknowable ground of all that is, Eckhart's <i>Istigkeit</i>, love alone in which all things come to be, and are held. But it is only when we are at the very end of ourselves that this gift can be received, into open hands that can hold onto nothing anyway, that have lost all they ever had.</p>
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<p>"...for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God." (Colossians 3:3 NRSV)</p>
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<p>"For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?" (Romans 8:24 NRSV)</p>
<!--/wp:paragraph-->Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-64593903049863016402020-11-04T18:07:00.005+00:002020-11-04T21:42:20.443+00:00What Is Worship?<p>Our churches are closing again for public worship, and the baffled hunger for absent Sacraments, for music and fellowship, has returned.</p><p>Our local Quaker meeting house had just moved to what is termed “blended worship” – part Zoom, part distanced worship, in our case limited to eight Friends due to the size of the room – when the announcement came of a second lockdown throughout November at least.</p><p>I personally have found the Zoom technology intrusive, and in itself somehow attention-seeking, and so I have become part of the small group of Friends who have joined the silence, alone in our respective homes. For me, as perhaps for some of the others, this has felt far closer and more like “real” worship than a screenful of animated postage stamps. But this raises the question, what is worship?</p><p>For millennia men and women have met together to worship, and though what we know of their practices and liturgies have widely differed from religion to religion, and nation to nation, they have met together, whether it has been to dance, sing, chant the <i>Nembutsu </i>or walk sacred paths. Many, perhaps most, faiths have solitary practices of prayer, in many cases silent practices. Quakers are unusual, in that their meetings for worship are silent, but they are corporate, and their members not only call them “worship” but understand them that way too, on the whole.</p><p>I have, as I have described elsewhere, a discipline of private, silent prayer. It is a vital part of who I am, of my own understanding of what I am here for, but it does not feel like what Friends do together on a Sunday morning. Yet, when I am sitting alone in silence on a First Day morning, conscious of other Friends across our town, across our Area and our Yearly Meeting, across the world, sitting likewise, I know that I am joining with them in an act of worship. It is not at all the same as my own regular times of contemplative prayer. On one or two occasions I have even found myself visited by what I can only term “ministry”, that I have shared by email afterwards.</p><p>What is going on here? And, more to the point perhaps, what might it suggest for the future of worship during, and even after, a pandemic? Maybe worship isn’t only meeting together in rows, a breath and a handshake apart. Maybe worship, which is after all a joining in spirit more than anything else, perhaps, is less dependent on physical togetherness than we had thought. Always there have been Friends who, for reasons of great age, illness, remoteness, even occasionally imprisonment, could not come to the meeting house on Sunday morning. We have remembered them, and we have hoped that they could remember us, sitting together in worship, but we have, most of us I imagine, tended to feel sorry for them, that they had to “miss out” on “our” meeting. Perhaps we knew less than we thought. Perhaps indeed there were some of us who did understand, who knew that despite outer appearances and the presumptions of our own attempted compassion, these Friends were as much part of our worship as the warm and breathing presence next to us.</p><p>Perhaps the future of worship is stranger and more luminous than we had thought. Perhaps we are moving into new territory, making our own maps as we tread forward on virgin ground, into a place odder and more beautiful than we have known. I hope so.</p><p>[First published on my other blog, <i><a href="https://silentassemblies.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Silent Assemblies</a></i>]</p>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-20645866723850744692020-09-14T22:16:00.004+01:002020-09-15T08:50:38.093+01:00Kept hidden in God<p><span face=""Open Sans", sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333a42; font-size: 15px;">For much of my Christian life I have found myself caught between longings: a longing to identify myself by belonging, so that I might call myself “a Franciscan” or “a Quaker” or whatever it might be, and a longing to be kept hidden in God, obscure, unremarkable. Even before I had admitted my Christian faith to myself, I read Alan Watts’</span><span face=""Open Sans", sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333a42; font-size: 15px;"> </span><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #333a42; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://amzn.to/32vdnzD" rel="noreferrer noopener" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #aa5626; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s linear 0s; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown</a>,</em><span face=""Open Sans", sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333a42; font-size: 15px;"> </span><span face=""Open Sans", sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333a42; font-size: 15px;">and it was the title, more than the essays themselves, that called to me with a yearning I couldn’t name.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #333a42; font-family: "open sans", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.8em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Perhaps my longing to be identified by something greater than myself, by the mantle or habit of someone or some way that I admired, was nothing more, really, than an unwise insecurity. It hadn’t occurred to me, I think, that God’s love for me, which is the only index of value anyone can have in the end, takes less than no account of such things.</p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #333a42; font-family: "open sans", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.8em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">All too often, I think, we fail to hear God’s voice in the yearnings of our hearts, probably because we were expecting to hear from someone, or something, outside of ourselves. But if there is, indeed, that of God within each life, where else would we hear God’s voice except in the interior silence? The wind across empty dunes, the movement of cloud-shadows on the wrinkled sea, the night-bird’s cry, awaken longings we cannot name, and yet our hearts know the imprint of the divine that our busy minds cannot frame – perhaps not in the sound heard or in that seen, but in the very movement of the heart that rises in response.</p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #333a42; font-family: "open sans", sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0px 0px 1.8em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">These unsought frequencies from some resonance out beyond our understanding simply cannot be followed in our busy, patterned lives of belonging and being needed, of roles and responsibilities. The more nearly unnamed we can become, it seems, the more likely it is that we shall be able to sit still by the edge of the sea, and wait for the God who is with us always, even to the end of the age.</p>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-72412486274617543732020-08-14T22:16:00.004+01:002020-08-17T18:41:02.712+01:00Church is what?<p>The period of "doing church" during lockdown was an interesting time. The Dorchester churches were closed of course, as was the Quaker meeting, and while there were various efforts at worship via Zoom, livestreamed sermons and meditations, and other initiatives, by and large - for me at least - the peace of silence, and the practice of the Jesus Prayer, filled the space left with a closeness to God that I hadn't experienced for a long time.</p><p>Our experience of church during this current period of uncertain easing of regulations, and imposition of others such as the wearing of face coverings in public gatherings, has been very mixed. As with some shops, there is constant tension and uncertainty around the often ambiguous - if necessary - rules, and continual vigilance, about following one-way routes to and from communion stations, for instance. It has been good to see those we've missed again, and to hear their voices without the interposition of electronics, but in many ways it seems to me that our local Quaker meeting has made the better choice in remaining closed until we are sure that the pandemic is more nearly under control.</p><p>What can we learn from these experiences, which come, for me, as a kind of culmination of a quite long process, involving an increasing sense of being drawn to a hiddenness of life and worship, to silence and to stillness? Back in June this year, I <a href="https://themercyblog.blogspot.com/2020/06/between-times.html" target="_blank">wrote</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>This seems to be for me more than ever before a time between times. I haven't written much here the last few weeks, not because there's been nothing to say, really, but more because it has come to me without words, this stillness; the waiting so deep that I haven't even been able to find even a cognitive toehold, so to speak, to explain it to myself... this liminal place is for me about more than the result of the current suspension of normal life while we wait for the pandemic to pass. It is a place God has brought me to, in that hidden way he has. </p><p>These anything but ordinary weeks of near-isolation, bereft of so many of the distractions of ordinary life, have brought me here, against all expectations.</p><p>It seems that to remain hidden (Colossians 3:3) with Christ in God, unknowing, is at least for me the narrow path to, and the gift of, God's own presence, where even our own steps are unknown to us: our God who is entirely beyond our own comprehension, whose name can only be a pointer, as Jennifer Kavanagh <a href="http://amzn.eu/hH07XRi" target="_blank">says</a>, to something beyond our description. In silence itself is our hiddenness, our unknowing, where God waits within our own waiting (Isaiah 30:18).</p></blockquote><p></p>Where does this leave us? What is to be learned - or to put it another way, what might the Spirit be showing me - of the path ahead? The final sentences of Steve Aisthorpe's <i><a href="https://amzn.to/3kLMj6A" target="_blank">The Invisible Church</a></i> read:<blockquote>There is a growing realisation that church is what occurs when people are touched by the living Christ and share the journey of faith with others. Whether that occurs in an historic building or online or . . . wherever, is unimportant.</blockquote>Looking back over past posts here - try a search within this blog (the search box is top left, by the orange Blogger logo) for the word "hiddenness" - I have the uncomfortable sense of being crept up on, in the way that God so often has. In the past, those who sought to follow Christ sometimes came to a time in their lives when they felt drawn, like St Aidan or St Cuthbert, to climb into a coracle and paddle away to some offshore island; or like the Desert Fathers and Mothers, to move out into the all but trackless desert. Perhaps I am at some analogous stage in my life. I don't know. But the kind of qualified solitude that I found during the period of complete lockdown was a healing thing, an unsought wholeness and peace with God, a sense of being in the right place, against all expectations.<p>I seem to find myself quoting the author of Proverbs here, again and again, when he writes:</p><blockquote>All our steps are ordered by the LORD; how then can we understand our own ways?</blockquote><blockquote>(Proverbs 20:24 NRSV)</blockquote>But it's true; and in accepting that, and in waiting quietly for whatever God may yet reveal, there is a peace and a contentment that I had not anticipated.<p></p>Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-39134809288723593592020-07-19T20:31:00.000+01:002020-07-19T20:31:54.914+01:00TruthPontius Pilate infamously asked Jesus, "What is truth?" (John 18:38) and philosophers from Socrates through Kant to Erich Fromm have attempted to give their own answers. But I am coming to believe that the incessant exercise of the human power of reason actually takes us further from truth itself, as much as it may seek to know <i>about</i> it.<br />
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John Starke, in <i><a href="https://amzn.to/3eIraWG" target="_blank">The Possibility of Prayer</a>,</i> writes:<br />
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Throughout the Gospels we find Jesus resisting the powerful and pompous and going to the outcast and the humble... If we want to experience what God does in us and around us, which is quiet and subtle, we must make ourselves low. Prayer is the regular practice of lowering ourselves to better views of his work... It's a strange irony that prayer is the strengthening of an inner muscle that does nothing more than boast in weakness [2 Corinthians 12:9]</blockquote>
Unless we can be still in prayer, and cease from our anxious reasoning, and surrender to God's presence in the space between one breath and another, one morsel of bread and the next crumb, the experience will slip past us, and the memory fail.<br />
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John Bellows <a href="https://qfp.quaker.org.uk/passage/2-15/" target="_blank">wrote</a>:<br />
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I know of no other way, in these deeper depths, of trusting in the name of the Lord, and staying upon God, than sinking into silence and nothingness before Him… So long as the enemy can keep us reasoning he can buffet us to and fro; but into the true solemn silence of the soul before God he cannot follow us.</blockquote>
In the true littleness of our silence truth for a moment lifts to us the mirror of God. "Faith", <a href="https://amzn.to/3eE6HSI" target="_blank">said</a> Jennifer Kavanagh, "is not about certainty, but about trust." In our stillness, our unknowing, our very lowliness, is the very place Jacob found: "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven." (Genesis 28:17 NIV)Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-58488591908585109252020-07-11T12:56:00.000+01:002020-07-11T18:56:03.301+01:00The deep-water swell...Over the years I've many times found myself speaking about the Jesus Prayer, usually in the wider context of contemplative prayer, and quite often in church contexts someone will come up with the objection, "If all you're doing is saying <i>Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner</i> over and over again, surely that's the 'vain repetition' Jesus warned us against!" (Matthew 6:7, in the King James Version).<br />
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Of course, it's an easy objection to answer: if you ask them, most of the objectors don't use the KJV in their regular Bible reading. It's much more likely to be the NIV or the NRSV, where the phrase Jesus used is translated "do not keep on babbling like pagans" or "do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do" - and patently the Jesus Prayer isn't anything like that.</div>
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But for all the ease with which one can refute such proof-texting, our objectors do have a point. Occasionally you will find Christian writers, whether in approval or disapproval, referring to the Jesus Prayer (as well as prayers like the Hail Mary, and perhaps even the <i>Kyrie) </i>as a "mantra", by which they seem to mean a phrase that is repeated over and over again, more or less regardless of meaning, in order to bring about some psychological effect, such as reducing stress or "emptying the mind." And of course the Jesus Prayer is not that. Unlike many of the mantras sometimes used by practitioners of transcendental mediation and similar paths, that are also often given in languages unfamiliar to the user, the Jesus Prayer is a <i>prayer.</i></div>
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Almost all the teachers of the Jesus Prayer whom I have encountered make the point somewhere, though they may have different ways of putting it, that the key to this way of praying is intentionality. We <i>mean</i> what we say, and our using it repetitively is much more like the prayer of Bartimaeus the blind man, who "was sitting by the roadside begging. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, 'Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!' Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, 'Son of David, have mercy on me!'" (Mark 10:46 NIV)</div>
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In its simplicity and its self-abandonment, the Prayer comes to resemble, too, the prayer of the tax collector at the temple, who "stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'" (Luke 18:13 NIV) (The prayers of Isaiah 6, and Revelation 4:2 and 5:11-14 are prayers of repetition also, but of praise rather than of supplication or intercession.)</div>
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It is best to approach saying the Jesus Prayer with as few preconceptions as possible. Although I have read widely, and I hope deeply, on the Prayer over the years, I began saying it when I knew very little of the tradition, or the traditional methods, of praying the Prayer. It took hold, as God had obviously intended it should, and became simply part of who I am before God. In fact, although when I was first introduced to the Prayer by Fr. Francis Horner SSM back in 1978, he gave me Per-Olof Sjogren's <a href="https://amzn.to/328EqRO" target="_blank">wonderful book</a> to read, a good deal of what happened in the years following were things for which I had no frame of reference. I only discovered much later that they were commonplace in the experience of those who pray the Prayer.</div>
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So we don't need to be afraid, if God calls us on this way of knowing him, to strike out into the deep. After all, even the best maps can do no more than hint at destinations, and maybe warn of shoals; they can convey nothing of the sea-wind, the endless cry of the gulls, the wonderful scent of the waves as they break, or the peace there is in the lift and rock of the deep-water swell...</div>
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Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15398304.post-88496861993968771262020-07-05T19:17:00.000+01:002020-07-19T21:28:45.503+01:00Receiving StationsQuietly, I seem to be beginning to understand something of why the penitential nature of the Jesus Prayer <i>(Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner)</i> leads it on into acting as a prayer of intercession as well.<br />
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We are all sinners. Even those we remember as saints were themselves acutely conscious of their own sin - Francis of Assisi would be a good example - in the sense of separation from God, rather than as ones transgressing some list of "naughty things". Our innate tendency to turn from the presence of God into our own private obsessions and insecurities, sometimes called original sin, is something we all hold in common, from the most obviously "religious" to the least, from those whom the world would regard as good, to those it would regard as beneath contempt.</div>
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We live, though, in the mercy that is Christ, all of us. "For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." (Colossians 1:16-17 NIV)</div>
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In our accepting this solidarity, as it were, with the least of our fellow creatures, as well as the greatest, we are accepting for ourselves also their suffering, their alienation, their grief. Craig Barnett <a href="https://transitionquaker.blogspot.com/2019/09/suffering-is-not-mistake.html" target="_blank">writes</a>:</div>
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The religious path is often presented as a way to achieve inner peace and happiness, and to avoid suffering. Much popular spirituality claims that life is meant to be filled with peace and contentment; that pain and anguish are problems that can be overcome by the right attitude or technique. The promise of perfect contentment is seductive, but it can never be fulfilled, because it is based on the illusion that suffering is a mistake.</div>
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Suffering, ageing, sickness and loss are not regrettable failures to realise our true nature. They are inherent in the nature of embodied human life and our often-incompatible needs and desires. Any spirituality, therapy or ideology that promises an escape from these limitations neglects the truth that suffering is an essential dimension of human life. Growth in spiritual maturity does not mean escaping or transcending these experiences, but becoming more able to accept and learn from them; to receive the painful gifts that they have to offer.</div>
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Our prayer for mercy is answered always by love (Luke 18:9ff), and it is in this love that we, somehow, become as it were aerials for the Spirit, receiving stations for a grace that we may not even ourselves understand.</div>
Mike Farleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06732248182662167951noreply@blogger.com0