O Rex Gentium

O Rex Gentium, et desideratus earum,
lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum:
veni, et salva hominem,
quem de limo formasti.

O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
Come and save the human race,
which you fashioned from clay.

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See, I am laying in Zion a foundation stone,
a tested stone,
a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation,
'One who trusts will not panic.'
And I will make justice the line,
and righteousness the plummet...

(Isaiah 28.16-17)

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

('That Nature is...' Gerard Manley Hopkins)

From the cornerstone all the measurements and angles of ancient architecture were determined; all the paths and turnings of our lives are measured from Christ our Saviour, for

All our steps are ordered by the Lord;
how then can we understand our own ways?

(Proverbs 20.24)

O Sapientia

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,
attingens a fine usque ad finem,
fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia:
veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other,
mightily and sweetly ordering all things:

Come to teach us the way of prudence.

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...but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.

1 Corinthians 1.23-25

I, wisdom, live with prudence,
and I attain knowledge and discretion..
The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth—
when he had not yet made earth and fields,
or the world’s first bits of soil.
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.

Proverbs 8.12, 22-31

The marvellous vision of the peaceable Kingdom, in which all violence has been overcome and all men, women, and children live in loving unity with nature, calls for its realisation in our day-to-day lives. Instead of being an escapist dream, it challenges us to anticipate what it promises. Every time we forgive our neighbour, every time we make a child smile, every time we show compassion to a suffering person, every time we arrange a bouquet of flowers, offer care to tame or wild animals, prevent pollution, create beauty in our homes and gardens, and work for peace and justice among peoples and nations we are making the vision come true.

We must remind one another constantly of the vision. Whenever it comes alive in us we will find new energy to live it out, right where we are. Instead of making us escape real life, this beautiful vision gets us involved.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I keep thinking of this as I long, in these troubled and uncertain days, for that day of righteousness and justice described in Isaiah 11, and yet the only way there is through this present darkness, by the way of prayer, illuminated by the little lamp of God’s word, that sheds only enough light for the next step (Psalm 119.105) and yet is (v 89) eternal. After all, "He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God…"

As Jesus said, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy." (Matthew 5.6,7)

A Contemplative Life

There is a tendency, and has been probably since the Reformation, to consider objective, measurable things, observable by means of the five human senses, or extensions of them, as reality; and anything else, whether spiritual or imaginal, as somehow less real, and of less consequence.

There is another way of looking at the universe altogether, one which regards all of creation as alive with spirit, shot through with the presence of God, whose being gave it existence, and sustains it at every instant. God is the ground of all being, and all that is is held and kept by God. "In God's hand" is one metaphorical way of putting it, if you can read that without anthropomorphism.

Fr Stephen Freeman, a priest of the Orthodox Church in America, puts it like this in a recent blog post:

The assumptions of these two worldviews could hardly be more contradictory. The naturalistic/secular model has the advantage of sharing a worldview with contemporary culture. As such, it forms part of what most people would perceive as "common sense" and "normal." Indeed, the larger portion of Christian believers within that model have no idea that any other Christian worldview exists. 

The classical/sacramental worldview was the only Christian worldview for most of the centuries prior to the Reformation. Even then, that worldview was only displaced through revolution and state sponsorship. Nonetheless, the sacramental understanding continues within the life of the Orthodox Church, as well as many segments of Catholicism. Its abiding presence in the Scriptures guarantees that at least a suspicion of "something else" will haunt some modern Christian minds. 

[If you are interested in following Ft Stephen's argument, which is fascinating and important, but which follows a slightly different path to my own post, I'd strongly suggest clicking through and reading the linked post, and the subsequent one, to understand his complete thesis.]

From the point of view of one who prays, the distinction between these two points of view is crucial. If the "objective" worldview governs out thought and our perception, then prayer does indeed become problematical. Either it is a largely solipsistic activity, designed to make us "feel better" about ourselves and those we pray for, or it is a request that God break into the shell of cause and effect he has created, and manipulate it for our own benefit or for someone else's.

But if the world is indeed sacramental, if it is as much a medium for the presence of God as for sustaining his creatures, then prayer becomes something very different indeed. The Kingdom of God is perhaps our Lord's way of describing what is going on: it is in part a life lived in the realisation of God's presence and energy - his love - as permeating and renewing all that is. St Paul puts it like this,

...these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.

(1 Corinthians 2.10-12)

Now prayer becomes something different indeed. It is much more like entering into the Kingdom with Christ, bringing our will into his unknowable purposes (Proverbs 20.24), in which he works in all things for the good of those who love him (Romans 8.28). Michael Ramsey wrote,

Contemplation is for all Christians... [It] means essentially our being with God, putting ourselves in his presence, being hungry and thirsty for him, wanting him, letting heart and mind move towards him; with the needs of the world on our heart.

I suspect this is why those who practice contemplative prayer refer so often to "the contemplative life", for to pray like this leads eventually to a life lived largely outside the "real world" of getting and spending, and its rewards. As Jesus himself put it, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 5.1) A life like this, though, is a life in some small way like his, and he was on earth "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." (Isaiah 53.3) The needs of the world are beyond counting, and to carry even the least of them on our heart is to have it broken, as our Lord's was; and it is only those who mourn thus who can receive, and carry, the comfort of his mercy. (Matthew 5.2)

In all directions at once?

I see… an infinite web of relationship, flung across the vastness of space like a luminous net. It is made of energy, not thread. As I look, I can see light moving through it as a pulse moves through veins. What I see “out there” is no different from what I feel inside. There is a living hum that might be coming from my neurons but might just as well be coming from the furnace of the stars…

Where am I in this picture? … How could I ever be alone? I am part of a web that is pure relationship, with energy available to me that has been around since the universe was born.

Where is God in this picture? God is all over the place. God is up there, down here, inside my skin and out. God is the web, the energy, the space, the light – not captured in any of them, as if any of those concepts were more real than what unites them – but revealed in that singular, vast web of relationship that animates everything that is.

…it is not enough for me to proclaim that God is responsible for all this unity. Instead, I want to proclaim that God is the unity – the very energy, the very intelligence, the very elegance and passion that make it all go. This is the God who is not somewhere but everywhere, the God who may be prayed to in all directions at once. This is also the God beyond all directions, who will still be here (whatever “here” means) when the universe either dissipates into dust or swallows itself up again. Paul Tillich’s name for this divine reality was “the ground of all being.” The only thing I can think of that is better than that is the name God revealed to Moses: “I Am Who I Am.”

Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web

This is, as Taylor points out a little later, not pantheism at all. She is not saying that God is everything, still less that everything is God, but that God is “above all and through all and in all” as Paul the apostle saw (Ephesians 4.6b). God is not a distant being, who occasionally deigns to interfere in the thing that he has made, but “the only One who ever was, is, or shall be, in whom everything else abides.” (Taylor, ibid.)

The question arises, of course, how one might pray to such a God. “In all directions at once”, says Barbara Brown Taylor. But what does that mean? We are so prone to think of prayer as messages between separate parts of a mechanism – us here, God there, the ones we are praying for somewhere else. But if we are not separated like that? If we, and those we pray for, and who pray for us, are in God, and God in us, then our connection is God, and what affects each of us affects each other, because it affects God.

If we really believed this, really saw it to be true, how could we go on living our selfish, antagonistic lives? How could we feel that our loss is another’s gain, or vice versa? This morning’s ministry was all about community, and the communion of community – that by living in love, in a community of love, we are witnesses, and more than witnesses: we are signs of the Kingdom, loci of Kingdom infection in the world. But perhaps we do not so much build community as realise community, and in realising it, make it real to ourselves and among each other.

To pray, in such circumstances, is then a very different thing from any conception of posting letters across time and space.

Simon Barrington-Ward writes of Silouan the Athonite:

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

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

Prayer, as Daniel O Snyder writes in Friends Journal, “is itself a field of engagement.” As St Silouan discovered, contemplative prayer, the practice of stillness and silence, is anything but disengagement, anything but a way out of dealing with the pain and the grief of the world, but is a way of welcoming them into one’s heart without defence, and being made in oneself a channel of God’s grace, Christ’s mercy.

Ascension Day

...the prayer of baptized people is going to be a prayer that is always moving in the depths, sometimes invisibly – a prayer that comes from places deeper than we can really understand. St. Paul says just this in his letter to the Romans: ‘The Spirit helps us in our weakness… that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words’ (Romans 8.26). The prayer of baptized people comes from a place deeper than we can penetrate with our minds or even our feelings… and therefore it is a prayer that may often be difficult and mysterious… Prayer, in other words, is more like sneezing – there comes a point where you can’t not do it. The Spirit wells and surges up towards God the Father. But because of this there will be moments when, precisely because you can’t help yourself, it feels dark and unrewarding, deeply puzzling, hard to speak about.

Rowan Williams, Being Christian

So, as we come to this fortieth day of Easter, when we remember that mysterious scene at the opening of the Acts of the Apostles, it seems right somehow to look again at this odd calling we find ourselves in. The disciples of Jesus were just like us: they wanted to know when their Lord would finally sort things out, put an end to Roman tyranny and all that went with it, and the messy, broken state of human life itself. “Lord,” they said, “is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Jesus’ reply, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set…” reminds me of his sharp rejoinder to Peter when the latter queried John’s role in the kingdom, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!”

There is a lot not to know about being a Christian, it seems to me. We are often accused of thinking we know all the answers – and maybe some fundamentalists do think so – but really the way of Christ, while we follow it on earth, is a way of mystery and darkness more than anything else. “Faith”, said Jennifer Kavanagh, “is not about certainty, but about trust.”

For myself, I have found cannot find God by looking, or thinking, much as my whole life may seem to have been spent in a search for – or being distracted from a search for – what is true and is the source of all that is. What God is in himself is unknowable. Anything I might say or think about God is partial, incomplete and misleading. God is not to be contained in human understanding, nor to be constrained by time, space or any other dimension. The only way I can know God is by not knowing, and by not knowing allowing myself to be known. Jennifer Kavanagh, a few pages on from the passage above, goes on to say that,

Not knowing is not the same as doubt (though they may co-exist). We may not know what, how or why, but our not knowing may co-exist with a firm knowledge that! And where does that knowledge come from? It comes from a different kind of knowing. A knowing that comes from experience.

Indeed that seems to be the crux of the matter for me. It is only by unknowing, by knowing one’s own unknowing with a passionate thoroughness, that the gift of experience, of direct knowing, can be received. And it is gift. All I have done or ever will do amounts to getting myself out of the way of that channel of loving gift that is Jesus himself. To pray “in the name of Jesus” is nothing more nor less than this; and it is with some such thought that the Jesus Prayer is so often referred to as “the prayer of the Name”.

We are caught up, by our baptism – and by that term I mean our entry into the life of the spirit, whether or not physical water is involved – into a life more than our own. All we are is, as Paul said, “hidden with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3.3) Rowan Williams continues (ibid.):

...we receive life from others’ prayer and love, and we give the prayer and love that others need. We are caught up in a great economy of giving and exchange. The solidarity that baptism brings us into, the solidarity with suffering, is a solidarity with one another as well… We are ‘implicated’ in one another, our lives are interwoven…

And so our prayer, whether we are aware of it or not, covers life itself, the broken, weeping, glorious becoming that is being made. We are not separated, and our breath is breathed with the breath of God.

[Also published on Silent Assemblies]

The Coming of the King–the ‘O’ Antiphons

O Wisdom,
O holy Word of God,
you govern all creation with your strong yet tender care:
Come.

O Sacred Lord of ancient Israel,
you showed yourself to Moses in the burning bush
and you gave the holy law on Mount Sinai:
Come.

O Flower of Jesse’s stem,
you have been raised up as a sign for all people;
kings stand silent in your presence;
the nations bow down in worship before you:
Come.

O Key of David, O royal Power of Israel,
you [not the systems of this world] control

at your will the gate of heaven:
Come break down the prison walls of death.

O Radiant Dawn,
splendour of eternal light, sun of justice:
Come shine on those who dwell in darkness

and the shadow of death.

O, King of all the nations,
the only joy of every human heart;
O Keystone of the mighty arch of humankind:
Come and save these creatures you fashioned from the dust.

O, Emmanuel,
God-With-Us, king and lawgiver,
desire of the nations, Saviour of all people:
Come and set us free.
The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.”

Amen.

Richard Rohr, from Daily Meditations

The Peaceable Kingdom…

When we think of oceans and mountains, forests and deserts, trees, plants and animals, the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the galaxies, as God's creation, waiting eagerly to be “brought into the same glorious freedom as the children of God” (Roman 8:21), we can only stand in awe of God's majesty and God's all- embracing plan of salvation. It is not just we, human beings, who wait for salvation in the midst of our suffering; all of creation groans and moans with us longing to reach its full freedom.

In this way we are indeed brothers and sisters not only of all other men and women in the world but also of all that surrounds us. Yes, we have to love the fields full of wheat, the snow-capped mountains, the roaring seas, the wild and tame animals, the huge redwoods, and the little daisies. Everything in creation belongs, with us, to the large family of God…

All of creation belongs together in the arms of its Creator. The final vision is that not only will all men and women recognise that they are brothers and sisters called to live in unity but all members of God's creation will come together in complete harmony. Jesus the Christ came to realise that vision. Long before he was born, the prophet Isaiah saw it:

The wolf will live with the lamb,
the panther lie down with the kid,
calf, lion and fat-stock beast together,
with a little boy to lead them.
The cow and the bear will graze,
their young will lie down together.
The lion will eat hay like the ox.
The infant will play over the den of the adder;
the baby will put his hand into the viper's lair.
No hurt, no harm will be done
on all my holy mountain,
for the country will be full of knowledge of Yahweh
as the waters cover the sea.

(Isaiah 11:6-9)

We must keep this vision alive…

Long before Jesus was born the prophet Isaiah had a vision of Christ’s great unifying work of salvation. Many years after Jesus died, John, the beloved disciple, had another but similar vision: He saw a new heaven and a new earth. All of creation had been transformed, dressed with immortality to be the perfect bride of Christ. In John’s vision the risen Christ speaks from his throne, saying: “Look, I am making the whole of creation new. …. Look, here God lives among human beings. He will make his home among them; they will be his people, and he will be their God, God-with-them. He will wipe away all tears from their eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness or pain. The world of the past has gone” (Revelation 21:5; 21:3-4).

Both Isaiah and John open our eyes to the all-inclusive nature of Christ’s saving work…

The marvellous vision of the peaceable Kingdom, in which all violence has been overcome and all men, women, and children live in loving unity with nature, calls for its realisation in our day-to-day lives. Instead of being an escapist dream, it challenges us to anticipate what it promises. Every time we forgive our neighbour, every time we make a child smile, every time we show compassion to a suffering person, every time we arrange a bouquet of flowers, offer care to tame or wild animals, prevent pollution, create beauty in our homes and gardens, and work for peace and justice among peoples and nations we are making the vision come true.

We must remind one another constantly of the vision. Whenever it comes alive in us we will find new energy to live it out, right where we are. Instead of making us escape real life, this beautiful vision gets us involved.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

We are all together in this now, we followers of Christ. This is the judgement we await at Advent, a judgement of mercy, of endless grace.

We feel so helpless when we look at the suffering in the world, the misunderstandings, the betrayals, the tragic confusions behind each suicide, the cruelty and rejection faced by those who love and trust, the small, the weak, the dependent—children, animals, the poor.

Nouwen’s words here remind us that there is always something we can do, small as it may seem to us. It is love that matters. “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” (1 John 4.16) However poor, however baffled, we can love. This very emptiness, this helplessness we feel may be our greatest asset in the economy of Christ, who said himself that, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…”

Fearful and wonderful…

How long shall I be in the world of the voice and not of the world of the word? For everything that is seen is voice and is spoken with the voice, but in the invisible world there is no voice, for not even voice can utter its mystery. How long shall I be voice and not silence, when shall I become word in an awareness of hidden things; when shall I be raised up to silence, to something which neither voice nor word can bring?

John the Solitary 5th c., from Sebastian Brock, 'John the Solitary, On Prayer', Journal of Theological Studies, New Series, 30 (1979), 84-101, p. 87, with thanks to Voice in the Wilderness

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Word without voice? Word as silence?

Sometimes I think music subsists as much in its silences as in its sounds: beyond the attack and decay of a note is the time before it was sounded, and the time after. Beyond its pitch is an infinity of vibrations that are not sound; beyond its scale degree are uncountable microtones.

We are this kind of thing ourselves – there was a time when each of us was not, and there will be a time after us, and yet our limited lives are shot through with eternity. A bit of the Spirit – who, being spirit, cannot be divided – is in each who lives, human or otherwise (Psalm 104.30), and so the perishable will somehow put on imperishability (1 Corinthians 15.42ff), and we shall “become word in an awareness of hidden things” – not in these glimpses, reflections in broken water, but in steady truth and certain rest, and

“God himself will be with [us];
he will wipe every tear from [our] eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”

(Revelation 20.3-4).

Just as the Kingdom is here, and yet to come, within us, yet about to break upon us, so we live in eternal life even now: our little, sleep-rounded lives lie in the palm of that piercèd hand that made the vaults of Orion, the unimaginable distances and lambent deeps of interstellar space. Truly, we are fearfully and wonderfully made…

Collaboration or competition?

When you truly know, the giveaway is that you know that you do not know! Truly holy people are always humble. If you are not humble, you have not experienced the Holy One. If you don’t see humility in religion, you know it’s not on the right course.

The prophets are always calling Israel to such humility. They represent the self-critical and honest part of religion. Without the prophetic element, religion is always self-serving and idolatrous. True prophets please nobody, neither left nor right, which are mere ideologies. According to Jesus, the whole world will hate you if you follow him (Matthew 10:22). When you are truly prophetic, both the left and the right will mistrust and attack you.

Richard Rohr, adapted from CAC Foundation Set: Gospel Call to Compassionate Action (Bias from the Bottom) and Contemplative Prayer (CD, DVD, MP3)

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I know I keep on saying this in one way or another, but I do feel that what Rohr says here has a bearing on how we view prayer. Too often prayer assumes that if we do not know, then we ought to, and oceans of ink and forests of trees are expended by good and honest Christian charities producing and distributing prayer bulletins, prayer newsletters, prayer diaries and other aides de prière, so that supporters may pray in a more informed manner.

Perhaps those who put so much effort and so many resources into producing these publications intend us merely to be better informed, and so come to prayer with their needs closer to our hearts; but I worry that some of us will simply founder beneath the burden of detail, and fail to pray at all since we cannot pray for everything. In any case, God’s purposes may be greater and stranger than anyone may imagine who is caught up in the day-to-day minutiae of running an aid agency or a homeless shelter.

We need prophets, as Rohr so rightly says. We need, too, those who come before God in reckless prayer, crying out for mercy and justice, not for specific instances of charity. Of course we are right to pray for charities, Christian and otherwise, and for their work. Some of us may be called, by reason of personal involvement, perhaps, to pray extensively of one or another. But prayer activism is not the same as prophetic prayer.

Nor, come to that, does prophetic prayer consist in recasting Jeremiads in terms of contemporary events, like so many “words” coming out of certain Christian camps in recent years, proclaiming God’s wrath and judgement on corrupt and disobedient nations as if the Incarnation and all that follows from it had never happened.

We live in the Kingdom; but the Kingdom is not yet. We are redeemed; but the world is not, nor will it be. Someday there will be a new heaven and a new earth. Meanwhile, we work and pray to build the Kingdom one kindness at a time, knowing that it will never be more than an outpost of love in a broken and dying world. Jesus knew that, which is why he rebuked Peter for trying to keep him from the Cross (Matthew 16.23).

Elaine Aron, in her book The Highly Sensitive Person, argues persuasively for society's need for sensitive, reflective people just as much as for extraverted, dynamic types. She categorises them as (p.18 et passim) “priestly advisors”, informing and balancing the “warrior kings” whom both the media and the man in the street tend to value above all. It seems to me that Christian society has just as deep a need as any other for those who are called to the contemplative rather than the active to take their vocation seriously. As Aron points out, introverts are not failed extraverts: they are a different, and equally valuable, kind of human being. Being human is a collaboration, not a competition, or at least it should be.

Perhaps those of us who are called not to “know how to pray as we ought”, but to pray, as Paul said in Romans 8.26-27, within the Spirit’s own intercession, need to stop feeling like second-class citizens of the Kingdom, but to realise that we are a vital part of its growth, as important as – though not more important than – those who are called to give their lives in active service. We need to talk, to inform each other, to understand each other. But it is easier, maybe, for activists to publish prayer bulletins than it is for contemplatives to communicate their calling to live out their intercession. Hence, perhaps, blogs like this?

O Adonai…

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,

qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,

et ei in Sina legem dedisti:

veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.

O Lord and ruler of the House of Israel,

who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush

and gave him the law on Sinai:

Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

Jesus said it to us quite clearly: “Why do you worry like the pagans do?  What shall I eat? What shall I drink?  What shall I wear?”  (Matthew 6:31).  But for some reason, the human mind feels most useful when it reprocesses the past and worries about the future.  

For some reason, the mind cannot just be present to the moment, where it could find delight in the “birds in the sky” and the “lilies of the field” that Jesus has just described as the simple antidote to all of our “worrying.” He says “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will take care of itself” (6:34).

Jesus clearly lived in the now or he could not have talked so foolishly.  When we live in the present we tend to notice the natural world, when we live in our heads, we compare, worry, and judge.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr, p. 35

It is only in knowing Jesus’ Lordship, in knowing his great love for us, the endlessness of his mercy and his grace, that we can possibly find the faith to live within these words of his. Now, in the last days of Advent, he is all our hope, and all our longing…

O Sapientia…

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,

attingens a fine usque ad finem,

fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia:

veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,

reaching from one end to the other mightily,

and sweetly ordering all things:

Come and teach us the way of prudence.

The marvellous vision of the peaceable Kingdom, in which all violence has been overcome and all men, women, and children live in loving unity with nature, calls for its realisation in our day-to-day lives. Instead of being an escapist dream, it challenges us to anticipate what it promises. Every time we forgive our neighbour, every time we make a child smile, every time we show compassion to a suffering person, every time we arrange a bouquet of flowers, offer care to tame or wild animals, prevent pollution, create beauty in our homes and gardens, and work for peace and justice among peoples and nations we are making the vision come true.

We must remind one another constantly of the vision. Whenever it comes alive in us we will find new energy to live it out, right where we are. Instead of making us escape real life, this beautiful vision gets us involved.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Sitting here this snowy evening with the two cats, I keep thinking of this. I so long for that day described in Isaiah 11, and yet the only way there is through this present darkness, by the way of prayer, illuminated by the little lamp of God’s word, that sheds only enough light for the next step (Psalm 119:105) and yet is (v 89) eternal. After all, “He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God…”

As Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” (Matthew 5:6,7)

In the way of tears we become prayer…

In the way of tears we become prayer; we no longer labour under the illusion of prayer as technology. As Clément says, we are “offering the world on the altar of (our hearts)”:

“The condition of space-time which gives rise to the beating of the heart, is no longer an endless prison, but a temple walled with light. The man “feels” (taking the apophatic meaning of the “feeling of God”) the risen Christ, who is the face of the Father, in the light of the Spirit.”

We do not pray, we are prayed. And only when the last element of creation has become transfigured through the tears of Christ living in humankind will tears cease.

But there is more. We must remember that these are not tears of sorrow only, but of both sorrow and joy. As Isaac says, “here is sweet and flaming compunction”; or, mixed sorrow and joy like honey and the comb, to use an image of John Climacus. Mixed because in this singularity we somehow come to know more and more (in the most intimate biblical sense) that we gaze upon the face of God (Matthew 18). The promises made for us in baptism are fulfilled in us by this new and unceasing pouring out of fiery tears through our life within the blessed Trinity, whose love has become the polarity in this unending exchange of kenosis. This is the baptism of tears. The dark glass though which we see is washed by tears that magnify the face of God as we gaze upon it. And the only sin of which we need repent is the turning away from this gaze.

Maggie Ross, from her blog Voice in the Wilderness

The truth of this is summed up in some words Maggie Ross quotes in her recent post on Walter Bruggemann’s An Unsettling God:

At the centre of reality is a deep, radical, painful, costly fissure that will, soon or later, break every self-arranged pattern of well-being… It cannot be helped, and it cannot be avoided…

This insistence on the reality of brokenness flies in the face of the Enlightenment practice of denial. Enlightenment rationality, in its popular, uncriticized form, teaches that with enough reason and resources brokenness can be avoided. And so Enlightenment rationality, in its frenzied commercial advertising, hucksters the good of denial and avoidance: denial of headaches and perspiration and loneliness, impotence and poverty and shame, embarrassment and, finally, death. In such ideology there are no genuinely broken people. When brokenness intrudes into such an assembly of denial, as surely it must, it comes as failure, stupidity, incompetence, and guilt. The church, so wrapped in the narrative of denial, tends to collude in this. When denial is transposed into guilt—into personal failure—the system of denial remains intact and uncriticized, in the way Job’s friends defended the system.

It is the brokenness that Bruggemann refers to that is the source of the tears; its mending is the promise from Isaiah 61 that Jesus quotes at the beginning of his ministry (Luke 4:18-19) that he has been sent to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners…

The Kingdom is here, in the fellowship of believers and in the presence of Christ himself among them (Matthew 18:20, and the High Priestly prayer from John 17); yet it is still to come (Matthew 24:14; Luke 19:11, etc., and the entire book of Revelation). Until that day, when the last wounds is healed, and the last tear dried, we must be content to weep—be content, too, with our “failure, stupidity, incompetence, and guilt.” Our victory in Christ is our willingness to be crucified with him (Galatians 2:20), and our forgivenness is our willingness to assume the guilt inherent in our humanity (Daniel 9:5ff; Romans 3:21-28).

It is here that our identification enables us to intercede for the brokenness that is ours as well as the world’s (Romans 8:26-27), and here that our cry “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” calls down his mercy on all of his broken creation (Romans 8:22) and here that our own tears wash the pierced feet of Christ himself (Matthew 25:40).

All Creation Cries to You…

When we think of oceans and mountains, forests and deserts, trees, plants and animals, the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the galaxies, as God's creation, waiting eagerly to be “liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.” (Roman 8:21), we can only stand in awe of God's majesty and God’s all-embracing plan of salvation. It is not just we, human beings, who wait for salvation in the midst of our suffering; all of creation groans and moans with us longing to reach its full freedom (ibid. v.26).

In this way we are indeed brothers and sisters not only of all other men and women in the world but also of all that surrounds us. Yes, we have to love the fields full of wheat, the snow-capped mountains, the roaring seas, the wild and tame animals, the huge redwoods, and the little daisies. Everything in creation belongs, with us, to the large family of God.

All of creation belongs together in the arms of its Creator. The final vision is that not only will all men and women recognise that they are brothers and sisters called to live in unity but all members of God's creation will come together in complete harmony. Jesus the Christ came to realise that vision. Long before he was born, the prophet Isaiah saw it:

The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.

The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox.

The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest.

They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

(Isaiah 11:6-9)

We must keep this vision alive.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey
[NB I have taken the liberty of replacing the Bible passages with the NIV translation rather than the unidentified one used my Nouwen.]

Advent is not just about waiting for Christmas: it is about justice and liberty, about the coming of the Kingdom, the triumph of the mercy of Christ . As Francis of Assisi saw so very clearly, God’s mercy in Christ extends to all creation, and so our prayer and our longing for mercy and justice must encompass all creation too.

[Title of this post courtesy of Marty Sampson]

An aside on the nature of prayer…

And when I mention that I needed to pray, I am referring to prayer in what I understand to be its most essential, simple and rudimentary reality, as a relationship in which the authentic (or, one could say, original) identity of a person is affirmed by the Word of God. Prayer, as I mean it, has its integrity in recall of the event of one’s own creation in the Word of God.  Prayer, in this significance, is distinguished from the vulgar or profane connotations that have, unhappily, accrued to the term. Prayer, for instance, has nothing, as such, to do with utterance, language, posture, ceremony or pharisaical style and tradition. Prayer is not ‘talking’ with God, to God, or about God. It is not asking God for anything whatsoever. It is not bargaining with God. It has no similarity to conjuring, fantasizing, sentimental indulgence, or superstitious practice. It is not motivational therapy…

More definitely, prayer is not personal in the sense of a private transaction occurring in a void, disconnected with everyone and everything else, but it is so personal that it reveals (I have chosen this verb conscientiously) every connection with everyone and everything else in the whole of Creation throughout time. A person in the estate of prayer is identified in relation to Alpha and Omega to the inception of everything and to the fulfilment of everything (cf. Romans 1:20, 1 Corinthians 12:12-13, Revelation 22:12). In prayer, the initiative belongs to the Word of God, acting to identify, or to reiterate the identity of, the one who prays.

…Prayer, in quintessence, therefore, is a political action—an audacious one, at that—bridging the gap between immediate realities and ultimate hope, between ethics and eschatology, between the world as it is and the Kingdom which is vouchsafed.

A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning by William Stringfellow, 1982, pp. 67,68. (With thanks to Hugh Valentine)

Loving the little things…

If we dishonour the so-called inferior or unworthy members of creation, we finally destroy ourselves, too.  We cannot dismiss, pollute, or misuse animals, the earth, the trees, and the waters and pretend to love the Creator of all these things, or even to love ourselves in the midst of them.

St. Paul says “if one part is hurt, all parts are hurt with it. If one part is given special honour, all parts enjoy it … and it is precisely the parts of the body that seem to be the weakest which are the indispensable ones, and it is the least honourable parts of the body that we must clothe with the greatest care.” (I Corinthians 12:26, 22-23).

For some sad reason we humans thought that we were the only creatures that mattered, as if all of the rest of creation was just an arbitrary and throwaway part of God’s plan.  We took our narcissism to a cosmic level, it seems, and did not love and protect the weakest parts of the “Body of God,” nor did we “clothe them with the greatest care.”  Now we all “hurt” together, just as Paul predicted.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Hope Against Darkness, p.138

On this we must base the rest of our lives on this planet, we humans, if we are to survive. Perhaps we are just beginning to glimpse where we might have gone wrong?

I do encourage you to visit the Hilfield Project website. As the community states in their introduction:

Francis of Assisi, in his living the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the full, gives us an example of three ecologies:

• an environmental ecology, living in harmony with creation
• a social ecology, knowing all people as brothers and sisters
• a spiritual ecology, in praise of God as Father and Creator of all things

The Hilfield Peace and Environment Project seeks to express and share this ‘integrated ecology’ for the sake of and out of love for the world.

Broken and emptied out...

I am the vine, you are the branches. You have blossomed forth from me. Are you then surprised if a drop of my Heart’s blood trickles into your every thought and deed? Are you surprised if the thoughts of my Heart quietly infiltrate your worldly heart? If a whispering takes wing in you and day and night you perceive a low, beckoning call? To a love that wants to suffer, to a love that, together with mine, redeems? Are you surprised if the desire comes upon you to risk your life and all your strength and put them in jeopardy for your brothers? And to complete in your own body what is still lacking to my sufferings, what must still lack as long as I have not suffered my Passion in all my branches and members? For, to be sure, none of you is redeemed by anyone save myself; but I am the total Redeemer only united with each of you. Do you want to accomplish the great change with me and build up the Father’s Kingdom? Do you want to live my mind, the resolve of one who did not hold on to his form of God convulsively and clutchingly, but who broke it and emptied it out so that it began to flow as the courage to serve and as lowliness, became obedient even unto death on the Cross? Are you willing? For my work must be perfected in you and it will be brought to term only when my Heart beats in yours, only when all hearts, now submissive and docile, beat for the Father together in my Heart. Are you willing?

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World, pp. 80-81 with thanks to Gabrielle

Coincidences happen…

The word must become flesh, but the flesh also must become word… It is not enough for us, as human beings, just to live. We also must give words to what we are living. If we do not speak what we are living, our lives lose their vitality and creativity. When we see a beautiful view, we search for words to express what we are seeing. When we meet a caring person, we want to speak about that meeting. When we are sorrowful or in great pain, we need to talk about it. When we are surprised by joy, we want to announce it.

Through the word, we appropriate and internalize what we are living. The word makes our experience truly human.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Time and again over the course of my life I have found myself stumbling across this connection between what is said, and thought, and what is. Words have real power, power beyond mere emotion. Words change things, not just the way we look at things.

When prayers are answered, prophecies fulfilled, there will always be sceptics standing on the touchline waiting for the chance to claim that it was all coincidence. But coincidence is a slippery term, that can as easily turn and bite the hand of the one who uses it dismissively. For instance, the Wikipedia definition of coincidence opens, “Coincidence is the noteworthy alignment of two or more events or circumstances without obvious causal connection… A coincidence does not prove a relationship, but related events may be expected to have a higher index of coincidence.”

William Temple once said, “When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don’t, they don’t.”

We are deep into the territory of the Eucharist here. In many ways the Eucharistic Prayer seems to me to be the heart and source of all prayer in the Kingdom. And here the words do things. When we repeat, as he commanded us, Jesus’ words, “Take, eat, this is my body…” we are saying something that is true beyond symbol and description. Jesus said, “…this is my body,” and, “this cup… is the new covenant in my blood.” His words changed things. He meant them to. (Matthew 26.26; Luke 22.14-20) There is a co-incidence, a being-together-in-the-one-place, of bread, and word, and flesh, that we ignore at our peril. As Paul said: “…all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgement against themselves.” (1 Corinthians 11.29)

When I pray in Jesus’ name, whatever I pray is prayed within the co-incidence of the Kingdom, the co-incidence of our eternal life in Christ and our temporal life in the world (John 17.14.16) and it has literally real significance. As Jesus said, “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” (John 14.13) No wonder things happen when we pray. (It’s worth noting that Jesus says he will do what we ask. This is not a blank cheque for worldly goods or selfish ambitions. Jesus cannot act against his own character. As he says a couple of verses earlier, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves.” (John 14.10-11))

Coincidences? I should say so…

On this morning’s mustard seed (Mark 4.26-34)…

Yes, it is true: a mustard seed is indeed an image of the kingdom of God. Christ is the kingdom of heaven. Sown like a mustard seed in the garden of the virgin’s womb, he grew up into the tree of the cross whose branches stretch across the world. Crushed in the mortar of the passion, its fruit has produced seasoning enough for the flavouring and preservation of every living creature with which it comes in contact. As long as a mustard seed remains intact, its properties lie dormant; but when it is crushed they are exceedingly evident. So it was with Christ; he chose to have his body crushed, because he would not have his power concealed…

Christ became all things in order to restore all of us in himself. The man Christ received the mustard seed which represents the kingdom of God; as a man he received it, though as God he had always possessed it. He sowed it in his garden, that is in his bride, the Church… In the Church it became a great tree putting forth innumerable branches laden with gifts. And now you too must take the wings of the psalmist’s dove, gleaming gold in the rays of divine sunlight, and fly to rest for ever among those sturdy, fruitful branches. No snares are set to trap you there; fly off, then, with confidence and dwell securely in its shelter.

From a sermon of Peter Chrysologus, quoted in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament II, Mark, edited by Thomas C. Oden and Christopher A. Hall (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998), with thanks to Vicki K Black.

Hidden…

The resurrection of Jesus was a hidden event. Jesus didn't rise from the grave to baffle his opponents, to make a victory statement, or to prove to those who crucified him that he was right after all. Jesus rose as a sign to those who had loved him and followed him that God's divine love is stronger than death. To the women and men who had committed themselves to him, he revealed that his mission had been fulfilled. To those who shared in his ministry, he gave the sacred task to call all people into the new life with him.

The world didn't take notice. Only those whom he called by name, with whom he broke bread, and to whom he spoke words of peace were aware of what happened. Still, it was this hidden event that freed humanity from the shackles of death.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Sometimes it's we Christians who are baffled. Baffled that the world goes on as always, broken and compromised; that it didn't listen, didn't change forever, at the resurrection. We are hurt and confused that our prayers, and the prayers of all those who went before us, haven't already produced a glorious vindication of Christ, and the confounding of all those who spoke against him, who have spoken against us.

But we are in the Kingdom, and the Kingdom is among us, invisible from outside, and yet gloriously alive within the communion of those who have been saved by that resurrection(Luke 17.20-21), lifted up with Jesus from the darkness of the grave (Romans 8.11).

I love this hiddenness, actually. I know it somehow fits with the way I am, so you might say I was bound to like it, and yet there is more to it than that. No-one can enter the Kingdom by being impressed, by taking the side of the playground bully, as might be the case if the Kingdom were to come in power as we wish it would, like the Jews hoping to see the Romans' backsides well and truly kicked. We only enter the Kingdom, which is "a Kingdom of truth and life, a Kingdom of holiness and grace, a Kingdom of justice, love, and peace" (Preface for the Feast of Christ the King) through love, through loving the Christ who was raised in glory, yes, but in hiddenness and gentleness, whose first contact with humanity was with a frightened girl in the early morning mist, in a quiet garden, calling her name softly into her panic and her tears (John 20.14-18). That is the King of this strange Kingdom, that is the nature of the event whose power changed everything, forever. That is what the gate looks like (John 10.9) that leads into the Kingdom. That is the Christ I love.

In my deepest wound…

Give me your failure; he says I will make life out of it. Give me your broken, disfigured, rejected, betrayed body, like the body you see hanging on the cross, and I will make life out of it. It is the divine pattern of transformation, and it never seems to change.

We'll still be handicapped and terribly aware of our wound, but as St. Augustine says, "In my deepest wound I see your glory and it dazzles me." Our wound is our way through. Or as Julian (of Norwich) also put it, at the risk of shocking us, "God sees the wounds, and sees them not as scars but as honours… For he holds sin as a sorrow and pain to his lovers. He does not blame us for them." (Chapter 39, Showing 13, Revelations of Divine Love) We might eventually thank God for our wounds, but usually not until the second half of life.

Richard Rohr, from Everything Belongs

Somehow for me this meditation of Rohr's does fit in with today, with the celebration of Christ the King. As Rhona pointed out in her sermon today, Christ enthroned in glory still bears on his hands and feet, and in his side, the wounds of crucifixion. When we are welcomed ourselves into his Kingdom, we will be glorified, for sure, and our entire beings will be remade imperishable; but we will still bear the wounds of our sins, and the sins done to us. But glorified! If we were to catch a glimpse of those wounds now, with out mortal eyes, they would indeed dazzle us.

Rhona recounted this morning, too, an old story of two monks, one young, a novice maybe, and the other perhaps his Prior, or certainly a monk with years of prayer and thought behind him.

The younger says, one summer morning, "When I think of Christ's wonderful mercy, I cannot imagine that he would willingly consign anyone to an eternity outside his glorious Kingdom."

The elder replies, "Why do you keep turning your head aside from the sunlight, and screwing up your eyes?"

"The light is too bright - it hurts my eyes."

"And so it is with Christ, brother. Christ does not turn anyone away; but unless we repent, and receive his forgiveness, we sinners cannot bear his light."