The Loop-Dance of the Three-in-One

Praying the Word means reading (or reciting) Scripture in a spirit of prayer and letting the meaning of the verses inspire our thoughts and become our prayer. Throughout the Old and New Testaments, we find instances of God’s people "praying the Word" by quoting Scripture in their prayers. 

Our life should be soaked in God’s Word, so it is only natural that our prayers be filled with it too. In doing so, we can experience numerous benefits to praying the Word. For example, it helps keep our prayers in scriptural proportion. "We may tend to pray about the same few issues over and over and over," says Professor of New Testament and Biblical Theology Andy Naselli. "But if we pray Scripture as we read through the Bible, that will force us to pray about a rich variety of issues in scriptural proportion." 

The NIV Bible Blog 

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 It is surely, therefore, very possible that when God began to reveal himself to men, to show them that He and nothing else is their true goal and the satisfaction of their needs, and that He has a claim on them simply by being what He is, quite apart from anything he can bestow or deny, it may have been absolutely necessary that this revelation should not begin with any hint of future Beatitude or Perdition. These are not the right point to begin at... 

CS Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms

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...taken together [the Bible is] a book which has been developed in community over thousands of years, forged in and against the white heat of empire and domination, edited and revised, pored over and criticised endlessly. And it is pure treasure – it contains the voices of those who have gone before us. It shows them working out their ideology and identity, and wrestling with ideas about and experience of what they consider to be the divine. It tells us of their lives, their longings, their weaknesses and their wisdom. It showcases their failings and their blind spots, just as it demonstrates their extraordinary compassion and courage. There is, put simply, no other book like it...

But ultimately this all means little unless we are able to let the Bible 'speak' to us – and in so doing to change the way we think and the way we live. Too many people consider it the "word of God" and then find ways to justify the way they live already, claiming that this is divinely ordained. A big thumbs up from the guy in the sky. The keys to understanding the Bible aren't hard to locate, they are there in black and white, sometimes in red and white. They are there in the Mosaic covenant, and repeated by prophets: they are demonstrated by Jesus who shows that to live this way requires dedication and humility, and a radical acceptance of 'others'. When we listen for the voice of the Bible in this way, perhaps we do indeed hear God's word, from far back in time, whispered through the lives and words of our ancestors: Love other people as you love yourself. There is no limit on whom you should love.  

Simon Cross (see also his subsequent post)

On the face of it, these may appear three disparate quotations, tied together by little more than their common subject, Scripture. But reading the Bible isn't quite like reading any other book - as Simon Cross says, doing so is of little use unless we are prepared to let ourselves be changed, in ways we cannot predict or prepare for. Change is always a risky venture, yet it is the inevitable result of prayer, and of the prayerful reading of Scripture.

Whether we follow a traditional, discursive path such as Ignatian meditation, or a more obviously apophatic one such as the Jesus Prayer (which is itself drawn from Mark 10.47 and Luke 18.13), Christian contemplation is rooted deeply in Scripture. After all, it is perhaps not stretching things too far to suggest that the inspiration of Scripture ("All Scripture is God-breathed..." (2 Timothy 3.16)) comes in the first instance from people's silence before God, their listening for his unspoken word upholding all that is (Hebrews 1.3). Contemplation returning on itself, our hearts following the loop-dance of the Three-in-One...

Holy Saturday

Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body of Jesus. Now Joseph was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly because he feared the Jewish leaders. With Pilate's permission, he came and took the body away. He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds. Taking Jesus' body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs. At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid. Because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there. 

John 19:38-42

I love these two, Joseph and Nicodemus. Faithful men, they remained where they had been called, members of the Sanhedrin; and yet they quietly acted out of their conscience and their compassion, regardless of the risks, and brought Jesus to a decent, peaceful burial. Naomi Starkey writes:

Disciples (whether secret or not) are needed in positions of power and influence in society. They can use their power and influence to do good deeds, which may run counter to the values of that society, while not casting those disciples in the role of revolutionaries. Those whose calling is to campaign on the front line against injustice, should refrain from judging those who work behind the scenes.

They remain content to be who they are, and yet their courage and their love enable them to carry God's grace and tenderness into a place of unimaginable liminality, the very hinge of the world's turning.

As Justine Allain-Chapman writes, "The darkness in the tomb was a mysterious darkness and through the night of Saturday it gave way to a new dawn... A tomb in a garden hewn out of rock was the place where Jesus' suffering was at an end and his body was laid to rest... Mary's womb and this tomb are spaces where God watched over, protected and delivered new life."

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a place of pilgrimage like few others, and it is all but impossible to visit it except in a warm and hurried crush of bodies, curious and devoted, all longing to stay longer and pray, even just to look; and yet within the tiny central Aedicule, where tradition locates the tomb itself, to this day there is a curious quiet over this packed and holy place. Visiting a few years ago, I found myself there, alone among countless fellow pilgrims, still in that circulating throng, within a cool stillness that I haven't yet been able to describe. Perhaps there are no words, just as Scripture finds no words to tell what happened between Joseph and Nicodemus leaving the closed tomb, and Mary Magdalene's arriving in the early hours of Sunday morning. And yet in that unspoken place, all time and being are rewritten, and all things made new.

Grace in Stillness

Wakeful long after midnight, I looked out in the early hours to see frost forming in the air between the trees, over the grassy bank above the reservoir: little clouds and tendrils of mist sparkling where the last few lights still burning caught them aslant, like some gift of stillness…

I picked up my phone, and quickly noted down these few words, somehow trying to remember what I’d seen. It was quite warm in the room, and yet the still cold touched me with a kind of grace. Things are not the same in an air frost, without becoming. Silence is not the absence of noise, merely, but the place where change is, before things change, or else remain. It is only necessary, and the hardest thing, to keep very still.

Dionysius, known as the Areopagite, wrote

...the mysteries of God's Word

lie simple, absolute and unchangeable

in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.

Amid the deepest shadow

they pour overwhelming light

on what is most manifest.

Amid the wholly unsensed and unseen

they completely fill our sightless minds

with treasures beyond all beauty.

We don’t often think of scripture in terms like this. Our minds (mine is, at least) are so often full of critical preconceptions, scraps of imperfectly digested doctrine, the wrack and spindrift of credal formulae, that we can’t listen in stillness. It is written in Psalm 119, “Your word, Lord, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens. Your faithfulness continues through all generations…” (Ps 119.89-90 NIV) It is only when we keep still enough that we can make any sense of passages like this, or indeed Psalm 46.10, “Be still and know that I am God…”

Only when something like this happens, and we are awake in the night and we stumble, half-sleeping, across the grace of stillness can we open our hearts to these “treasures of darkness” (Isaiah 45.3 NRSV). Or else we take up the quiet yoke of some discipline like lectio divina or Gospel contemplation. Otherwise, the rattling of our minds’ junkyards will always keep us from hearing, and we’ll miss the place from which John’s opening words make sense, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him…” (John 1.1-3 NRSV)

[Also published on Silent Assemblies]

Bible Sunday

Today is Bible Sunday, and the collect for today reads:

Blessed Lord
who caused all holy scriptures
    to be written for our learning
help us so to hear them,
to read, mark learn and inwardly digest them
that, through patience, and the comfort of your holy word,
we may embrace and forever hold fast
    the hope of everlasting life,
which you have given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and forever.

Amen

Sometimes our hearts feel closed and dry—and yet, if we will just listen, or read, quite passively and without examining how we may be taking in what we read or hear, the living water of God’s Word (who is, after all, our Saviour Jesus Christ) will secretly soften and heal us. Its working may be unknown and unrealised, and yet it is true and sure beyond our fallible senses.

Our only hope…

“Come, Lord Jesus,” the Advent mantra, means that all of Christian history has to live out of a kind of deliberate emptiness, a kind of chosen non-fulfilment.  Perfect fullness is always to come, and we do not need to demand it now.  This keeps the field of life wide open and especially open to grace and to a future created by God rather than us.  This is what it means to be “awake,” as the gospel urges us (Matthew 24:42)!

We can also use other a words for Advent: aware, alive, attentive, alert, awake are all appropriate!  Advent is above all else, a call to full consciousness and a forewarning about the high price of consciousness…

“Come, Lord Jesus” is a leap into the kind of freedom and surrender that is rightly called the virtue of hope.  The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves.

We are able to trust that the Lord will come again, just as Jesus has come into our past, into our private dilemmas and into our suffering world.  Our Christian past then becomes our Christian prologue, and “Come, Lord Jesus” is not a cry of desperation but an assured shout of cosmic hope!

Richard Rohr, adapted from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr, pp. 4-5

This kind of Advent life is the only thing that makes any sense of my own Christian living. My heart is so continually torn by all that is broken in this world, by the death of friends—including my little cat Ruby—and the death of strangers, by the suffering of strangers, by all those to whom Advent means nothing, holds no promise, that I can never truly be content, full, at rest, until the Lord Jesus comes. And yet, somehow, somewhere, even that is all right. He is coming—he has promised. Our calling is simply to pray…

I will praise you, O LORD, with all my heart;
   before the “gods” I will sing your praise.
I will bow down toward your holy temple
   and will praise your name
   for your love and your faithfulness,
for you have exalted above all things
   your name and your word.
When I called, you answered me;
   you made me bold and stout-hearted.

May all the kings of the earth praise you, O LORD,
   when they hear the words of your mouth.
May they sing of the ways of the LORD,
   for the glory of the LORD is great.

Though the LORD is on high, he looks upon the lowly,
   but the proud he knows from afar.
Though I walk in the midst of trouble,
   you preserve my life;
you stretch out your hand against the anger of my foes,
   with your right hand you save me.
The LORD will fulfil his purpose for me;
   your love, O LORD, endures forever—
   do not abandon the works of your hands.

(Psalm 138)

Our hope is only in him…

The persistence of what we must still call faith…

The best metaphor for our world of today is astronauts speeding through the cosmos, but with their life-supporting capsule pierced by a meteorite fragment. But the Church resembles Mary and Joseph travelling from Egypt to Nazareth on a donkey, holding in their arms the weakness and poverty of the Child Jesus: God incarnate.

Carlo Caretto, The God Who Comes, with thanks to inward/outward

Our waiting is always shaped by alertness to the Word. It is waiting in the knowledge that someone wants to address us. The question is, are we home? Are we at our address, ready to respond to the doorbell? We need to wait together, to keep each other at home spiritually, so that when the Word comes it can become flesh in us. That is why the Book of God is always in the midst of those who gather. We read the Word so that the Word can become flesh and have a whole new life in us.

Henri J.M. Nouwen, Finding My Way Home, p.107, The Crossroad Publishing Company

Our waiting is what the world calls weakness. The world wants action, decisiveness, assertiveness, alacrity—these are the strengths it admires and nurtures, demands.

Our Lord was hidden in his mother’s womb for 9 long months, and then hidden, as Caretto tells us, in her arms all that long and vulnerable journey into exile in Egypt. His early life, back in Nazareth, was hidden among sawdust and stacked planks, down some dusty unrecorded narrow street.

Our life in Advent is hidden in the darkness of unknowing, our eyes turned to the pain in which we are, by our plain createdness, hopelessly implicated. Or it would be hopeless, were it not for the rumour of prophecy, the persistence of what we must still call faith…

The Word of God…

Jesus is the Word of God, who came down from heaven, was born of the Virgin Mary through the power of the Holy Spirit, and became a human person. This happened in a specific place at a specific time. But each day when we celebrate the Eucharist, Jesus comes down from heaven, takes bread and wine, and by the power of the Holy Spirit becomes our food and drink. Indeed, through the Eucharist, God’s incarnation continues to happen at any time and at any place.

Sometimes we might think: “I wish I had been there with Jesus and his apostles long ago!” But Jesus is closer to us now than he was to his own friends. Today he is our daily bread! …

When we gather around the Eucharistic table and eat from the same bread and drink from the same cup, saying, “This is the Body and Blood of Christ,” we become the living Christ, here and now.

Our faith in Jesus is not our belief that Jesus, the Son of God, lived long ago, performed great miracles, presented wise teachings, died for us on the cross, and rose from the grave. It first of all means that we fully accept the truth that Jesus lives within us and fulfils his divine ministry in and through us. This spiritual knowledge of the Christ living in us is what allows us to affirm fully the mystery of the incarnation, death, and resurrection as historic events. It is the Christ in us who reveals to us the Christ in history.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I think perhaps we might want to add that since Jesus is indeed the Word of God, he is with us too in that Word, by his Holy Spirit. I sometimes think that we Christians, both the ones who take the Eucharist very seriously, and even the ones who take the Word very seriously, miss out on this sacramental aspect of God’s word. It is “living and active” in all truth, just as the writer to the Hebrews describes it (4:12), “sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” When we take up the Bible in faith, prayerfully asking for the presence and help of the Spirit, we are taking Jesus by the hand. More than that, we are taking him, through his word, into our heart—at least as much as in the Eucharist we take him as our daily bread. No wonder St. Francis was prone to picking up stray scraps of paper from the Scriptures that he found discarded, and carrying them reverently to a place of safety!

Paul’s paradoxes…

If God is “crucified flesh” for Paul, and that is what he has fallen in love with, then everything is a disguise: weakness is really strength, wisdom is really foolishness, death is really life, matter is really spirit, religion is often slavery, and sin itself is actually the trapdoor into salvation.  People must recognize what a revolutionary thinker Paul was with such teachings as these; and we made him into a mere moralistic churchman.

So the truth lies neither in the total affirmation nor in the total denial of either side of things, but precisely in the tug of war between the two.  Hold on to that, and you will become wise and even holy.  But be prepared to displease those on either entrenched side.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Great Themes of Paul (CD)

It’s wonderful to read these words of Rohr! I so often find myself—as many Franciscans do—caught between entrenched positions. My heart is so impossibly Christ’s that I’m helpless to do otherwise. If I’m honest, I have to give my absolute allegiance, and obedience, to God’s word—which is, if we read and understand the opening of John’s Gospel, Jesus himself. Yet if I do that, I am brought up against his words at the institution of the Eucharist, “take, eat, this is my body given for you… this cup is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:19-20). Evangelical and Catholic—the classic paradox that Francis himself lived out, with a style of personal worship in the Holy Spirit that anyone in our time would identify as Charismatic!

It wasn’t meant to be like this…

Natural things can’t be appreciated with a dualistic mind.  Nature almost naturally teaches you non-duality.  If you look long enough at anything in nature it is always non-dual.  It is both this and that.  It’s living and it’s going to die.  It’s gentle and it’s violent.  It’s useful and totally unnecessary.  It’s beautiful yet wild and uncontrollable.  It’s always a mixture of what seems like “good” and what seems like “bad.”

No wonder Jesus told us to learn by observing “the lilies of the field” (Luke 12:27), “the seeds falling to the earth” (Matthew 13:4), “the birds in the sky” (Matthew 6:26),” the red sky in the morning” (Matthew 16:2), and “the very stones crying out” (Luke 19:40).  Was Jesus a New Age tree hugger?  No, he was a Deep Seer of all things, who saw the souls of things.

The only way dualistic thinking is possible long term is if you stay inside of words, concepts, and ideas, as if they were reality itself.  Once you meet factual reality, it’s always non-dual or both-and, and it takes a merciful, compassionate, and often forgiving mind to receive it exactly as it is—and let it teach you whatever it has to teach you.

Richard Rohr, adapted from The Soul, The Natural World, and What Is

I know what Rohr is getting at, here, and yet somehow something gives me pause. I can’t help remembering Isaiah 65:25:

The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent—its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain…

and Revelation 21:3-4:

I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

For all that Rohr says here, sounding disconcertingly like the hip Americanised Taoism of Alan Watts, it wasn’t meant to be like this. It won’t always be like this. The story of the Fall in Genesis may not be the police report that young Earth creationists like to imagine, but it is true nonetheless. Something happened. We screwed up in some unimaginably profound way, and opened the door to evil across the earth. Creation is broken. It is beautiful, and glorious, and it speaks of God in every molecule, but here on Earth at least it is broken. Pain and grief and death and injustice stride the world like ghastly spectres, feeding where they will. We cannot celebrate this! Our desperate prayer must be for mercy, and justice, and healing, and one day our prayers will be answered, as glorious as God has promised. It is only through the Cross that this healing can flow; perhaps it wouldn’t be too presumptuous to suggest that this is the reason for the Cross, that this is what lies behind the Incarnation itself (Philippians 2:5-11; Colossians 2:14-15; Romans 8:18-25)

St. Isaac of Nineveh, writing back in the 7th century, had it right:

An elder was once asked, “What is a merciful heart?” He replied:

“It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, and for all that exists. By the recollection of them the eyes of a merciful person pour forth tears in abundance. By the strong and vehement mercy that grips such a person’s heart, and by such great compassion, the heart is humbled and one cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in any in creation.

For this reason, such a person offers up tearful prayer continually even for irrational beasts, for the enemies of the truth, and for those who harm her or him, that they be protected and receive mercy. And in like manner such a person prays for the family of reptiles because of the great compassion that burns with without measure in a heart that is in the likeness of God.”

Bible Sunday

The rich young man in Mark 10:17-22 isn't personally a bad guy; he's simply a normal part of the system in which he's stuck. Thus Jesus calls him to distance himself, or even separate himself from it for his own liberation. Most people are not personally bad or evil, but they are often a part of structures that make it impossible for them to see correctly or wisely. Personal blindness and structural blindness are two different things, although they often overlap.

"Jesus said, 'You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor.' At that saying, the man's countenance fell, and he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions." We can tell that he is personally a good man from Jesus’ response to him: the text says, "He looked intently at him and loved him."

When Jesus challenges people, he usually does not call them personally evil or malevolent. Instead he points to the fact that they’re structurally blind, that they can’t see from their present vantage point. Thus he tells them they have to change positions (tax collectors, rich people, people trapped in victimhood, etc.) because otherwise they will never learn to see. Up to now, we have largely addressed evil on a personal level with rather poor results. Jesus addresses evil by also critiquing the invisible loyalty systems which demand most of our allegiance.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Simplicity, p. 139

I sometimes think this is what we are up against in our churches. We believe, we worship, but like the rich young man in the Gospel account, we don't accept the consequences of Jesus' challenge to the systems that undergird our lives.

Today is Bible Sunday. As the writer to the Hebrews says (4:12 NIV), "the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart." If we are to be able to receive the gift of eternal life, of freedom now, from Jesus, we have to approach and accept the Bible as more than just a collection of interesting old stories and poems, as more than a liturgical ornament that fits between the collect and the sermon: it is the Word of God, with all the beauty and all the terror that that should convey.

Manifest in the ordinary…

I would love to make you love Scripture, and go there for yourself, to find both your own inner experience named, and some outer validation of the same.

Only when the two come together, inner and outer authority, do we have true spiritual wisdom. We have for too long insisted on outer authority alone, without any teaching of prayer, inner journey and maturing consciousness. The results for the world and for religion have been disastrous.

I am increasingly convinced that the word prayer, which has become a functional and pious thing for believers to do, is, in fact a descriptor for inner experience. That is why all spiritual teachers mandate prayer so much. They are saying, “Go inside and know for yourself!”

I offer these reflections to again unite what should never have been separated: Sacred Scripture and Christian spirituality…

This marvellous anthology of books and letters called the Bible is all for the sake of astonishment! It’s for divine transformation, theosis, not intellectual or “small self” cosiness.

The genius of the biblical revelation is that we will come to God through what I’m going to call the “actual,” the here and now, or quite simply what is…

God is always given, incarnate in every moment and present to those who know how to be present themselves.

Let’s state it clearly: One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life. That’s opposed to God holding out for the pure, the spiritual, the right idea or the ideal anything. This is why Jesus stands religion on its head!

That is why I say it is our experiences that transform us if we are willing to experience our experiences all the way through.

“God comes disguised as our Life” (a wonderful line I learned from my dear friend and colleague, Paula D’Arcy).

Richard Rohr, from Things Hidden pp. 5, 7, 15-17

Looking underneath every phrase…

For me, to preach is first of all to immerse myself in the word of God, to look inside every sentence and underneath every phrase for the layers of meaning that have accumulated there over the centuries. It is to examine my own life and the life of the congregation with the same care, hunting the connections between the word on the page and the word at work in the world. It is to find my own words for bringing those connections to life, so that others can experience them for themselves. When that happens—when the act of preaching becomes a source of revelation for me as well as for those who listen to me—then the good news every sermon proclaims is that the God who acted is the God who acts, and that the Holy Spirit is alive and well in the world.

Understood in this way, preaching becomes something the whole community participates in, not only through their response to a particular sermon but also through identifying with the preacher. As they listen week after week, they are invited to see the world the way the preacher does—as the realm of God’s activity—and to make connections between their Christian faith and their lives the same way they hear them made from the pulpit. Preaching is not something an ordained minister does for fifteen minutes on Sundays, but what the whole congregation does all week long; it is a way of approaching the world, and of gleaning God’s presence there.

From The Preaching Life by Barbara Brown Taylor (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1993), p. 32. [with thanks to Vicki K Black]

About the Holy Spirit and the Bible - some old thoughts revisited...

I know I've been a bit quiet here recently, and I thought a word of explanation was due. Somehow God has been opening up to me things that I had neglected. The Spirit has been I guess rather "like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old." (Matthew 13.52)

So, in the spirit of all this, I revisited some of my old writings on The Mercy Site, and I thought I'd share with you some bits I found that seemed to explain something of what's been going on:

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The Bible is far more than an old book about the way things were: "Your word, O LORD, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens." Psalm 119:89; "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away." Jesus, in Matthew 24:35.

Then, it literally feeds us: "… man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD." Deuteronomy 8:3; "Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation." 1 Peter 2:2.

It guides us in all we do: "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path." Psalm 119:105; "The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple." Psalm 119:130.

But it has even more power than that: "I am not ashamed of the Gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes." Romans 1:16; "Is not my word like fire," declares the LORD, "and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?" Jeremiah 23.29; "… the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." Ephesians 6:17; "For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart." Hebrews 4:12.

But if the Bible is to be so much to us, if it is to be our guide and our protection and our weapon and our food, then how can we manage this? Even pocket Bibles are somewhat awkward to have with us every minute of every day, and how can we stop and look up Scripture every time we have a choice to make, every time we are tempted or annoyed or challenged or endangered? The Bible tells us: "These commandments I give you today are to be upon your hearts." Deuteronomy 6:6; "No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and your heart so you may obey it." Deuteronomy 30:14; "I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you." Psalm 119:11; "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly..." Colossians 3:16.

How can the Bible dwell in us like that? How can we learn the whole Bible to use like that?

There is an old tradition in some churches known as learning Memory Verses: certain verses, useful for various situations and circumstances and states of mind we may find ourselves in are committed to memory, using a variety of mnemonic tools well tested over time. That works - until you find yourself in a situation you've never learnt a verse for. Then you get to panic. Or go your own way…

The human mind is a wonderful thing, with capacities far beyond what we mostly expect of it, and abilities the greatest of us hardly begin to tap into. But the Holy Spirit knows all about them, all about the unused 3/4 of the human brain. He also knows all about Scripture. If only we will soak ourselves in the Bible, if only we will read and read, and think about, and pray about, all we have read, if only we will take the time to let the Holy Spirit burn the Word into our minds like the little laser that burns data onto an optical disc, then we will slowly begin to realise for ourselves the truth that the Word of God is in our heart, that suddenly, strangely, we find just the right word for just the situation we find ourselves in, that when we find ourselves tempted to sin, that we can answer, as Jesus did in the desert, "It is written..."

And once this starts to happen, then perhaps the strangest thing begins to happen to us. We start to fall in love, in the oddest way, with the Word of God. We actually start to find we can say, with the author of Psalm 119, "Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long." (v 97) Or with Jeremiah, "...your words… were my joy and my heart's delight, for I bear your name, oh LORD God Almighty." (15:16)

"Listen," said the apostle Paul, "I will tell you a mystery..." I am going to tell you a mystery now. I feel really strange saying this, because it is so great a mystery that it scares me even to think about it. But it is very simple really, it is very logical. The Bible, Holy Scripture, is the Word of God, agreed? Its human authors were so closely inspired by the Holy Spirit that what the wrote down are the very words of God, and the whole canon of Scripture together is the Word of God. And who, or what, is the Word of God? "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God… The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us." (John 1:1, 14). And what did Jesus say? "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you." (John 14:18) He was speaking of the Holy Spirit in this famous passage, but he said. "I will come to you." You see, we can't make artificial distinctions among the persons of the Holy Trinity. God is one: "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one." (Deuteronomy 6:4) He is God in Three Persons, but he is still One. Take one bit, you've got the lot, if you will forgive my speaking of God like that.

So, if we have the Bible, we have Jesus. He is with us. If we have the Word of God in our hearts, we have Jesus in our hearts. If we obey the commands of Jesus - the commands of God, which the psalmist of Psalm 119 so loved - "[we] will know the truth, and the truth will set [us] free." (John 8:32) - and as Jesus (14:6) is "the way and the truth and the life" we will know him. And the Holy Spirit (16:13) "will guide [us] into all truth."

In one profound sense, Scripture is a perfect circular argument. It is inescapable. Try as we may, we cannot evade or avoid its demands on our life, its profound transformation of our very selves. The Christian life is like a quicksand: one real stride into and you're gone, no way back. Accept one thing, and you've suddenly accepted the whole thing, all its profound and outrageous claims on us, on every second of our time, on every aspect of our lives. We suddenly find we have given it all away, we are not our own any more, and even the very life in us has changed, has been taken over. Nothing will ever be the same again. We've fallen in love, we've taken the step, and there's no way back. And all we can do is press on, with our brother Paul: (Philippians 3:12-14) "Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." ...

The Jesus Prayer developed in the years directly after the times described in the Acts of the Apostles, when people - both men and women - went out into the desert to pray, sometimes for many years. They ran into the same problem Paul identifies in Romans 8:26 ("We do not know what we ought to pray for..."), and they searched the Scriptures - including the (at that time, very!) New Testament - for an answer. They found it in the prayers people addressed to Jesus: Peter's "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16); the Canaanite woman's "Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me!" (Matthew 15:22); the tax collector's "God, have mercy on me, a sinner!" (Luke 18:13). They found themselves praying, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!" and somehow in its repetition it was complete, somehow it both answered and spoke out their hearts' cry, not only for themselves, but for all the aching world and its people...

This intercessory dimension of what is in effect a contemplative style of prayer was a revelation to me, though I had known of the Jesus Prayer for many years. It was not until the Holy Spirit brought it out for me, as it were, and illuminated the scriptures from which it is built, that I began to realise the incredible completeness of the Bible's teaching on prayer. Truly it is inexhaustible - and it is never superseded, never out-of-date. "Your word, O LORD, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens. Your faithfulness continues through all generations." (Psalm 119:89-90)

The whole of prayer, just like The Jesus Prayer, is to be founded in the Bible - in the Word of God.

(Slightly edited and adapted from The Mercy Site)

The shadowed lands of the heart...

The basic and most fundamental problem of the spiritual life is this acceptance of our hidden and dark self, with which we tend to identify all the evil that is in us. We must learn by discernment to separate the evil growth of our actions from the good ground of the soul. And we must prepare that ground so that a new life can grow up from it within us, beyond our knowledge and beyond our conscious control. The sacred attitude is, then, one of reverence, awe and silence before the mystery that begins to take place within us when we become aware of our innermost self. In silence, hope, expectation, and unknowing, the man of faith abandons himself to the divine will: not as an arbitrary and magic power whose decrees must be spelled out from cryptic ciphers, but as to the stream of reality and life itself. The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself.

Thomas Merton. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. William H. Shannon, editor (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003): p. 55

I mentioned earlier today "the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God" (Ephesians 6.17) and it is the work of this sword the Merton seems to me to be describing here. Merton's language may seem unfamiliar to some who are more used to studying the Bible than psychology, but I am reminded strongly of the words of the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews:

Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews 4.12)

To learn to exercise that discernment of which Merton writes is one of the most difficult things we can face as Christians. We so easily identify the hidden part of ourselves as the source of "all the evil that is in us" - and yet there is a part of ourselves which is forever unknowable, because it is the place where God touches us. To identify this with the evil that is part of the fallen human condition is so grave an error that it reminds me of the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (Luke 12.10). (If you think my words are extreme, consider for a moment the fact that some conservatives consider speaking in tongues to be demonic.)

It is only in silence that we can allow God to reach out to the shadowed lands of the heart; and yet it must be a silence lit by a profound acquaintance with Scripture (1 John 4.1-3). By itself, Bible study will never more than a dry and legalistic accumulation of knowledge; by itself, silence can be a perilous, haunted desert. Only when the word and Spirit are one (e.g. 1 Thessalonians 1.5-6) is silence truly prayer - which is why a prayer like the Jesus Prayer, or the Holy Rosary, deeply rooted in Scripture, yet prayed as a doorway to silence, is such a powerful means of grace.

The full armour of God...

I believe that all would-be ministers must face the same three temptations as Jesus before they really can minister. The first temptation of Christ, to turn stones into bread (Matthew 4:3), is the need to be effective, successful, relevant, to make things happen. You've done something and people say, "Wow! Good job! You did it right. You're OK." When the crowds approve, its hard not to believe that we have done a good thing, and probably God’s will.

Usually when you buy into that too quickly, you're feeding the false self and the system, which tells you what it immediately wants and seldom knows what it really needs. You can be a very popular and successful minister operating at that level. That is why Jesus has to face that temptation first, to move us beyond what we want to what we really need. In refusing to be relevant, in refusing to respond to people’s immediate requests, Jesus says, Go deeper. What's the real question? What are you really after? What does the heart really hunger for? What do you really desire? "It's not by bread alone that we live" (Matthew 4:4).

Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p.294

When Rohr speaks of feeding the false self and the system, I'm reminded of what Paul says about rulers and authorities (Ephesians 6.12) - there is a real sense in which the "system" is the enemy's stronghold in human society, just as the "false self" is its stronghold in the heart of an individual.

We need, as even Jesus did in the desert, to put on the full armour of God, and particularly "the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." (Ephesians 6.17)

A light for my path…

Often we want to be able to see into the future. We say, "How will next year be for me? Where will I be five or ten years from now?" There are no answers to these questions. Mostly we have just enough light to see the next step: what we have to do in the coming hour or the following day. The art of living is to enjoy what we can see and not complain about what remains in the dark. When we are able to take the next step with the trust that we will have enough light for the step that follows, we can walk through life with joy and be surprised at how far we go. Let's rejoice in the little light we carry and not ask for the great beam that would take all shadows away.

(Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey)

Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light for my path.

(Psalm 119.105)

I need to read things like this. I always want to know exactly where things are going, precisely what God has planned for me after I do this next thing, and he always says, "Just do the next thing. Leave the consequences, and their consequences, to me." I never listen… the next time I'm just as bad.

Ruby is doing well – she has been playing with her sister all day, as best she can with her silly collar. She refuses to go back in her cage at any price. I have to say she seems just fine not in it!

St. John's Day

It is God who calls; human beings answer. The vocation of John and his brother James is stated very simply in the Gospels, along with that of Peter and his brother Andrew: Jesus called them; they followed. The absoluteness of their response is indicated by the account. James and John "were in a boat, with their father Zebedee, mending their nets. He called them, and immediately they left their boat and their father and followed him" (Matthew 4:21b-22).

For the three former fishermen - Peter, James and John - that faith was to be rewarded by a special friendship with Jesus. They alone were privileged to be present at the Transfiguration, the raising of the daughter of Jairus and the agony in Gethsemane…

John's own Gospel refers to him as "the disciple whom Jesus loved" (see John 13:23; 19:26; 20:2), the one who reclined next to Jesus at the Last Supper, and the one to whom he gave the exquisite honour, as he stood beneath the cross, of caring for his mother. "Woman, behold your son… Behold, your mother" (John 19:26b, 27b).

Because of the depth of his Gospel, John is usually thought of as the eagle of theology, soaring in high regions that other writers did not enter. But the ever-frank Gospels reveal some very human traits. Jesus gave James and John the nickname, "sons of thunder." While it is difficult to know exactly what this meant, a clue is given in two incidents.

In the first, as Matthew tells it, their mother asked that they might sit in the places of honour in Jesus' kingdom - one on his right hand, one on his left. When Jesus asked them if they could drink the cup he would drink and be baptized with his baptism of pain, they blithely answered, "We can!" Jesus said that they would indeed share his cup, but that sitting at his right hand was not his to give. It was for those to whom it had been reserved by the Father. The other apostles were indignant at the mistaken ambition of the brothers, and Jesus took the occasion to teach them the true nature of authority: "…whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave. Just so, the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:27-28).

On another occasion the "sons of thunder" asked Jesus if they should not call down fire from heaven upon the inhospitable Samaritans, who would not welcome Jesus because he was on his way to Jerusalem. But Jesus "turned and rebuked them" (see Luke 9:51-55).

On the first Easter, Mary Magdalene "ran and went to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them, 'They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don't know where they put him'" (John 20:2). John recalls, perhaps with a smile, that he and Peter ran side by side, but then "the other disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first" (John 20:4b). He did not enter, but waited for Peter and let him go in first. "Then the other disciple also went in, the one who had arrived at the tomb first, and he saw and believed" (John 20:8).

John was with Peter when the first great miracle after the Resurrection took place - the cure of the man crippled from birth - which led to their spending the night in jail together. The mysterious experience of the Resurrection is perhaps best contained in the words of Acts: "Observing the boldness of Peter and John and perceiving them to be uneducated, ordinary men, they [the questioners] were amazed, and they recognized them as the companions of Jesus" (Acts 4:13).

The evangelist wrote the great Gospel, the letters and the Book of Revelation. His Gospel is a very personal account. He sees the glorious and divine Jesus already in the incidents of his mortal life. At the Last Supper, John’s Jesus speaks as if he were already in heaven. It is the Gospel of Jesus’ glory.

A persistent story has it that John's "parishioners" grew tired of his one sermon, which relentlessly emphasized: "Love one another." Whether the story is true or not, it has basis in John's writing. He wrote what may be called a summary of the Bible: "We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us. God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him" (1 John 4:16).

(Slightly edited from the entry for 27th December at Saint of the Day.)

May the Force be with you…

The word healing comes from a word meaning "entire" or "complete," and signifies a restoration to wholeness. For that reason it is a more "holistic" word than therapy. While many people are helped by psychotherapy, I suspect that there are also many like me who have benefited from occasional counselling but have received more help from spiritual practices such as prayer and lectio divina, or holy reading. Perhaps the most radical aspect of the psychology of the desert monastics is the extent to which they believed that Scripture itself had the power to heal. In The Word in the Desert, his study of how thoroughly the early monks integrated Scripture into their lives, Douglas Burton-Christie notes that they regarded these "sacred texts [as] inherently powerful, a source of holiness, with a capacity to transform their lives."

Appreciating this monastic perspective on the Bible means abandoning the modern tendency to regard it as primarily an object of intellectual study, or as a handy adjunct to our ideology, be it conservative or liberal. The desert father who expounds on the inherent value of meditating on Scripture by observing, "Even if we do not understand the meaning of the words we are saying, when the demons hear them, they take fright and go away," insults our intelligence. What is left to us, if we relinquish our intellectual comprehension? Isn't it necessary to retain more control than that? Maybe not, if we want to experience the Word of God as these monks did, as "a living force within them."

From Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books, 2008), with thanks to Vicki K Black

I just love this. I love it. I love it. I love it. I have for so long felt that there was a force, which I couldn't exactly name, in Scripture as you read it in the Daily Office, unvarnished, free from commentary or sermon, short of devotional notes. Just the Word of God, standing there before us, rather as Jesus stood before Pilate. We are changed merely by being in its presence. Healed. Made whole. And we do not need to know the mechanism behind our healing. There words of Norris' are such liberation: to read someone else describing just what I've been feeling is - for me at any rate, full of self-doubt as I am - healing in itself!

The beloved physician…

Luke, which is a familiar form of Lucius, was a Gentile, a physician, and a close friend of Paul (Col. 4:10ff.), a fellow worker with Paul (Philemon. 24), and a companion of Paul’s in prison, probably in Rome (2 Tim. 4:11). Greek was obviously his native tongue, as his language is flawless Koine, the common Greek of the time (which was much less sophisticated than the language of Homer and the great philosophers). He was a Gentile, and thus probably a Greek, although Lucius was a common Roman name and all upper-class Romans were fluent in Greek. It is most likely that he was Greek, however, and there is much circumstantial evidence that he was from Philippi.

No one knows how he came to be in Judea… It is possible that as a physician Luke was attached to the Roman army. Most good physicians spent at least some time in their training as army doctors or as surgeons to the gladiators. This exposed them to a wide variety of critical wounds through which they could learn anatomy and surgery on a living patient…

There is no evidence that Luke ever met Jesus, and he was thus never considered an apostle. He was highly regarded by Paul as an evangelist, however. Also, his knowledge of many details of Jesus’ birth and childhood support the ancient tradition that he was a close friend of Mary, who shared these stories with him. His account of the crucifixion also indicates that, while he probably did not witness it, he was particularly interested in the physiological aspects of it. One would expect this of a physician. If he were a Roman or associated with the Roman army, he would have seen many crucifixions…

He apparently worked alongside Paul for years, remaining with him right to the end. He was obviously loved and admired by Paul. After Paul’s death in about 64 CE, Luke apparently continued to evangelize in his home region, and sometime in the early 80s CE he wrote his Gospel and the book of Acts, the first history of Christianity.

From “Luke” in All the People in the Bible: An A-Z Guide to the Saints, Scoundrels, and Other Characters in Scripture by Richard R. Losch (Eerdmans, 2008) with thanks to Vicki K Black

Jesus, the woman and the dogs...

I have read and heard a number of people's thoughts (here, for instance, and here) recently on Matthew's story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman. To save you looking it up, here it is:

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, 'Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.' But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, 'Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.' He answered, 'I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.' But she came and knelt before him, saying, 'Lord, help me.' He answered, 'It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.' She said, 'Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.' Then Jesus answered her, 'Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.' And her daughter was healed instantly. (Matthew 15.21-28)

Many of the recent comments I've read focus on the possibility that what we read here is an account of Jesus' growing self-awareness, his understanding of himself and his mission only gradually expanding to encompass the universal scope of the work his Father had sent him to do, and of himself as Saviour of the world, not just of Israel. Now, I'm not doubting that Jesus did come, at least in some respects, gradually to a full understanding of who and why he was, and of the divine dimension of his identity. It seems unlikely that he was born with the whole package, as it were, clear in his mind from day one. However, I'd always read this passage rather differently, and I was amused to discover this morning that the great Quaker theologian and philosopher D. Elton Trueblood read it much the same way.

What if Jesus were actually teasing the Canaanite woman? What if there was an obvious twinkle in his eye when he spoke those words, and an eyebrow raised in the direction of his disciples, who were after all rather prone to trying to maintain the exclusivity of his ministry (sending away the little children, for instance, and ignoring Bartimaeus)? Her witty reply would then make sense, and would be be far more believable humanly that way, than as a response to a cold-eyed denial. Come to think of it, can you really, honestly, imagine a cold-eyed denial from Jesus to anyone, let alone a woman distraught about her daughter's suffering?

If you'd like to read more on this, I can recommend Glenn Miller's fascinating article; and his eye-opening remarks about Greek words for dogs!