Faithfulness

The first thing that we begin to grasp, if we are listening to this teaching, is that meditation is a discipline, a learning process, something we must be faithful to, because in our meditation we are entering into the deepest relationship of our life. We must come to our meditation as if we are approaching the person we love most in the world, and what is needed in all relationships is fidelity. So we enter into meditation with fidelity knowing that in the discipline of it, we are becoming true disciples, true learners.

(from Aspects of Love 1 by Laurence Freeman OSB)

Meditation, any form of contemplative practice, is an odd, sometimes paradoxical kind of a thing in some ways; not least of which is the fact that despite its being so clearly a beginner's activity (see the last post here) it only reveals itself for what it is after long faithfulness. None of the contemplative disciplines is a practice for anyone looking for instant results: only after uncounted repetitions can you begin to see what is going on, and like a human relationship, only after long faithfulness can you truly touch the heart of it, and even then it's not a thing you find, but a place you find yourself in.

Hanging in there is sometimes difficult. It's so easy to think that if I only changed to some alternative practice my difficulties would be resolved, or I'd be able to step up to another level... But there it is again: this isn't about levels, it's about turning up, day after day, just quietly, not looking for any result, but letting go of the whole idea of results.

Meditation is also non-acquisitive. We are not trying to acquire anything; there is nothing to acquire. The dynamic of meditation is not trying to get anything but to lose, to let go. It is in the losing and the letting go that we will find everything that we have, everything that we are given.

(Freeman, ibid.)

Always beginning again

We are always learning; we are always in the learning mode; we are always open to experience. We are not judging our meditation; we are not comparing it. We are allowing it to be integrated into our daily life so that it becomes a normal and natural part of our life. The simplicity of that commitment, the simplicity of that discipline, opens up a path in which everything in our life can be channelled.

 (from Aspects of Love 1 by Laurence Freeman OSB)

I think this is one of the fundamental things to grasp about the contemplative life: that we are always beginning again, always beginners on a path we have trodden countless times already. It ought to be one of the first things we learn, but somehow it never is - the penny only seems to drop after years of practice, years of expecting to "get somewhere".

Of course, God being infinite, he is always infinitely beyond our understanding, however long we keep up this odd way of life; and so we can never really make progress in the practice of prayer. We can only begin again, each time we sit. 

Once again, I have to say that this is one of the things I most like about the Jesus Prayer, that it quite explicitly eschews the idea of progress, of levels of attainment and things like that. It is such a simple practice, open to anyone. You don't need to be ordained, or theologically educated, or have made a certain number of retreats, or have studied the right books: you just sit down and say, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." That's all. It takes about 12 seconds, and the rest of one's life, to pray that little prayer.

Praying in faith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hidden even from ourselves...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surrendering

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

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

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

(Laurence Freeman)

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

Small and quiet...

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

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

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

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

Laurence Freeman:

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

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

Faith in Mercy

It seems to me that faith is only possible in that emptiness of heart that comes from surrendering what we believe into pure trust. "Faith is not about certainty, but about trust. If we could prove it we would not need faith." (Jennifer Kavanagh) And mercy? "Mercy is the length and breadth and height and depth of what we know of God - and the light by which we know it. You might even think of it as the Being of God insofar as we can possibly penetrate into it in this life, so that it is impossible to encounter God apart from the dimension of mercy." (Cynthia Bourgeault) 

We can only seek God, surely, insofar as we acknowledge our own emptiness, our own unknowing. It is this existential lack that is at the heart of the Jesus Prayer, and the reason that for many years I have tended to use the longer form of the Prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." 

Psalm 119:176 (NIV) reads,  "I have strayed like a lost sheep. Seek your servant, for I have not forgotten your commands." Perhaps this is closer to the mark. Mercy is perhaps not so much about our seeking God as it is about him seeking us.

Laurence Freeman writes, 

We discover that, in a certain way of seeing, change is the only constant. In that paradox we find a portal of mystery and our search shifts into another perspective. We seek not answers or explanations but God...

From this change of seeing things we develop deeper self-knowledge. This leads to horizons where self-awareness merges with the knowledge of God, even with an at first disturbing sense that it is God’s knowledge of us is that is the starting point of every search...

Truly, as Martin Laird says, "... the sense of separation from God is itself pasted up out of a mass of thoughts and feelings. When the mind comes into its own stillness and enters the silent land, the sense of separation goes."

All this talk of seeking and journeying is, like consciousness itself, a metaphor for the ineffable, for the ground of being itself from which we cannot possibly be separate. It is all a matter of faith; of giving up thinking we know, and finding we are known. 

The desert is not a place...

In today's WCCM Lent Reflection, Laurence Freeman writes, "The desert is not a place but a state or direction of mind."

The desert of the heart is a real place, if not a physical one. Some of us may indeed, like the desert fathers and mothers of the 4th century, find that we need to leave everyday life and move away into actual solitude, but most of us don't. Our desert is inward and inescapable; if we fail to realise what is going on, we will probably experience it as something like depression or derealisation. But just as the Spirit "drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness" (Mark 1:12 NRSV),  so we can find ourselves driven into strange and inhospitable places of the mind for a time, often not knowing quite how we got there. For me, the recovery of prayer led to the recovery of faith (yes, that way around!) but for many it will be something different. Just as the inward desert will vary from one person to another, like some sort of Room 101 of the soul, so I am sure that the gate into the oasis will vary too. But somehow, I think, the Cross will be involved - even though it may not have that name for everyone. Rowan Williams: "The incarnate crucified life is burrowing its way through the lost depths and deserts of human experience to burst out on Easter Sunday, bringing with it the lost and the dead."

Of course such language may not resonate with everyone; this is part of the whole risky experiment of faith, that we need language as a lamp to see (Psalm 119:105); and yet its necessary failure is the silence of the very desert itself, as isaac of Nineveh saw: "Above anything, welcome silence, for it brings fruits that no tongue can speak of, neither can it be explained." But to communicate this even to ourselves we seem to have to stumble among words and images, doing our best with the tools we find to hand. 

Faith in Silence

Silence seems to be at the centre of contemplative prayer, indeed of any true prayer, whether or not it explicitly involves words. Perhaps any contemplative practice is at heart only a way to interior silence, a way into that open place of listening to the silence itself.

Every act of faith that we make and repeat encourages the process of realizing this principle of unity in our way of life. Every faith act, like every meditation and every time we repeat the mantra, helps to integrate us a little more despite our inevitable failures and infidelities. We can always decide to come home again. We come back home to the same act of faith, to where we belong, just as we come back to the mantra whenever we get distracted...

Understanding faith means seeing that every act of faith, whether successful or not, helps to make us more whole, more one. It integrates us through all the means that we have looked at so far, through waiting, through the purifying of spiritual vision, seeing things that the mind can’t see; choice, prioritizing our lives, and therefore giving our lives order, centredness, balance; and by transforming our experience of time. We become conscious of this integration through endurance, through patience and above all, through the self-transcendence by which every human person finds the space to grow.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: the Experience of Faith

The Jesus Prayer, like Freeman's mantra (in his case, maranatha), is hinge, home, healing. At the centre of the prayer is the act of faith, the surrender of what we thought in the presence of what is, that is the way to silence itself.

Paul writes, "Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God." (Romans 8:26-27 NRSV) Silence is where the Spirit is free to move in our heart, and we ourselves are free to hear the Spirit's own "sheer silence" (1 Kings 19:12).

What we are is human; all we can know or experience comes to us through our humanity - which is ours as plain gift. We do not ourselves assemble what we are, nor produce any of our experience ourselves. These things come to us through our consciousness as they are; and the silence receives them, far beneath thought and feeling. How can we know what is, except in our surrender to that sheer silence of isness, Eckhart's istigkeit?

Unexpected

Unexpectedly, I find myself compelled to reopen this blog, which seems still to have its readers after all this time. As I hinted in my last post here, the pandemic-mandated separation from church and community set me, for the last couple of years, on a path exploring first churchless Christianity and then secular spirituality. But the way of the Jesus Prayer is not so easily sidestepped! 

I came gradually to realise that, first of all, the contemplative life lived outside of a community of faith is a strange and perilous place (this moving account shows just how perilous) and second, surrender is at the heart of what contemplation has come to mean for me, at least in my own practice. Tentatively, as I thought, I returned to the practice of the Jesus Prayer...

Now, faith is an odd thing, a gift more than a decision (Ephesians 2:8) and not the same thing as belief at all. Alan Watts once wrote, 

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

(The Wisdom of Insecurity)

Laurence Freeman is almost more definite, if anything:

When belief takes the place of faith in the religious mind the possible range of spiritual experience and growth is critically limited. When religion emphasizes belief rather than faith it may find it easier to organize and define its membership and those it excludes. It is easier to pass judgement. But it will produce, at the best, half-formed followers. The road to transcendence is cut off, blocked by landfalls of beliefs as immoveable as boulders, beliefs we are told to accept and do not dare to put to the test of experience. In such a rigid and enforced belief system what I believe also easily slides into what I say I believe, or what I am told to believe or what I feel I ought to believe, because the I that believes becomes so dependent on the identity generated by the structured belief system we inhabit. 

(First Sight: The Experience of Faith)

I am not a theologian. Perhaps the relationship between faith and surrender is well known, and has been thoroughly explored; I don't know,  but I am coming to see that for me at least the two things are inextricably entwined. The heart has its own logic, and it is wiser, often, than the head. I am speaking metaphorically, of course, but that is part of the mystery of the contemplative path. To allow the mystery, to allow the inner reality to accrue metaphor as a fallen branch accrues moss, is an essential part of any healthy contemplative practice, it seems to me. Metaphysical reality is not a thing we can make sense of in itself, and to make the attempt is the very danger that I mentioned above. Even the mathematics of relativity and quantum mechanics seem to amount to imagery in the end, and it is only by using such imagery that physicists can begin to understand or to work with the underlying structure of the world we inhabit. 

More than any other prayer, the Jesus Prayer aims at bringing us to stand in God's presence with no other thought but the miracle of our standing there and God with us, because in the use of the Jesus Prayer there is nothing and no one except God and us. 

The use of the prayer is dual, it is an act of worship as is every prayer, and on the ascetical level, it is a focus that allows us to keep our attention still in the presence of God. 

It is a very companionable prayer, a friendly one, always at hand and very individual in spite of its monotonous repetitions. Whether in joy or in sorrow, it is, when it has become habitual, a quickening of the soul, a response to any call of God. The words of St Symeon, the New Theologian, apply to all its possible effects on us: 'Do not worry about what will come next, you will discover it when it comes'.

(Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, from The Orthodox Church of Estonia)

Once again, these words of St Symeon's seem to be proving true! 

Hidden Things

In The Big Book of Christian Mysticism (I love that title!) Carl McColman tells the story of a friend of his who had been a spiritual explorer, checking out Eastern spirituality and "other practices from around the world" before settling down as an Anglican, in the Episcopal Church. While happily at home in his new faith community, he missed the practice, the open teaching on the mystical life, that he'd become used to in Eastern meditation.

Finally, he took his question to his priest. "It's hidden in plain sight," was the minister's response. "The Christian tradition has just as much depth as any other wisdom tradition, but no one's going to hand it to you on a silver platter. You have to go looking for it." The priest went on to recommend a few books - The Philokalia, The Cloud of Unknowing - challenging my friend to get the right equipment and start working if he wanted to climb the mountain.

But McColman goes on, later in the chapter, to remind his readers that, despite the metaphor, mysticism is not an extreme sport, a grand hobby, but simply "trusting in the singular beauty of your own path, no matter how unexceptional (or unfulfilling) it may seem at times to be." Often, I think, the more unexceptional, even unpromising, the better. Jesus once said (Matthew 11.25 NIV) "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children."

Laurence Freeman once wrote that "sinners make the best contemplatives." The sense of being separated, marginalised, is in itself a grace, strangely. Jesus himself said that he came (Luke 5.32) not to call the righteous, but sinners. Perhaps it is in accepting this that we open ourselves to the grace and mercy of God in Christ, regardless of our external circumstances. It is no coincidence that the classical form of the Jesus Prayer ends with the words, "a sinner." To me it seems that knowing oneself as imperfect, fallible, poor in spirit (Matthew 5.3) is essential to living in that mercy.

McColman again:

Some forms of spirituality can subtly reinforce experiences, not of God, but of the ego. Mysticism, on the other hand, concerns the more daunting task of surrendering the ego before the cross of Christ. It's about immersing your self-identity into the cloud of unknowing and the dark night of the soul. It is the hidden or "negative" path where, ultimately, all is stripped away before the awesome presence of God.

The Jesus Prayer, and, I imagine, every other classical or modern discipline of contemplative prayer, is at root a very simple practice, for simple people, the poor in spirit in fact. The points of light across the reservoir, hardly visible between the leaves of springtime, are almost hidden from sight; yet their light is as bright as ever, illuminating the place of their own presence. Only in the darkest time can we see their pinpoints reaching through the trees...

Hermits in disguise?

There have probably always been hermits-in-disguise: the old woman living alone at the edge of the village, the family man who, as the years went by, gradually retreated into a place inside himself where his wife and children couldn’t follow. Maybe these people were quietly living a life of inner solitude, a wordless faith that remained unexpressed even to themselves. Perhaps they were the unsung spiritual heroes and heroines on the way to the life of being rather than doing that so many religious traditions consider the peak of spiritual development. Or perhaps they weren’t. Maybe they were just grumpy misanthropes or dysfunctional types who couldn’t cope with the demands of relating to others. God only knows. 

It’s often forgotten that monastic communities began as groups of hermits who gathered to support each other in what was a fundamentally solitary enterprise. (‘Monastic’ comes from the Greek monos, alone.)… the experiences reported from [solitude’s] frontline seem to confirm Thams Merton’s claim that hermits are the real McCoy, more serious about getting close to God than their community-minded counterparts. It’s a view that transforms them from anti-social creatures to explorers of a realm beyond the frontiers of known religious experience, prepared to take greater risks and endure more hardship than the average person. 

Alex Klaushofer, The Secret Life of God: a journey through Britain

Living a life of interior solitude, as a Quaker or in any other religious tradition familiar in the West, is a strange and sometimes chancy business. It is easily misunderstood, as Klaushofer hints in the passage above, and it is vulnerable to the human impulse to dramatic gestures, spectacular renunciations, and other wasteful mistakes. Eve Baker wrote, on this very subject, “Dramatic gestures are easy, simple faithfulness requires more effort.”

I have been strangely blessed by a relationship in which “[a] due proportion of solitude” (Caroline E Stephen, 1908, Quaker faith & practice 22.30) is all but taken for granted. In a marriage, or any other committed relationship, each party surely owes it to the other ensure that they do have “[a] due proportion of solitude”. This is one of the greatest gifts those who live together can give each other, not only to allow each other reasonable solitude, and each gently to safeguard their own, but actively to work for a way of life that allows reasonable, loving access to times alone with “the unseen and eternal things”. It seems to me that such a journey is one to which I have not only been called, but astonishingly equipped, through no virtue of my own.

I have quoted elsewhere in full Fr Laurence Freeman’s Advent Address last year, but in this context part of it may help express what I am getting at:

The word ‘wilderness’ in Greek is eremos, an uninhabited place. This gives us the word hermit, one who lives in solitude. In meditation we are all solitaries. 

Meditation leads us into the wilderness, into a place uninhabited by thoughts, opinions, the conflicts of images and desires. It is place we long for because of the peace and purity it offers. Here we find truth. But it also terrifies us because of what we fear we will lose and of what we will find. 

The more we penetrate into the wilderness, the solitude of the heart, the more we slow down. As mental activity decreases, so time slows until the point where there is only stillness – a living and loving stillness. Here, for the first time, we can listen to silence without fear. The word emerges from this silence. It touches and becomes incarnate in us. It incarnates us making us fully embodied and real in the present. 

Only here, where we cut all communication with the noisy, jeering, fickle crowds inhabiting our minds do we see what ‘fleeing from the world’ means. What it does not mean is escapism or avoidance of responsibilities. It means to enter into solitude where we realise how fully, inescapably we are embodied and embedded in the universal web of relationships.

I am coming gradually to realise that for me, the danger of “escapism or avoidance of responsibilities” is not so much to be found in turning away from the news of politics, the agitation and conflict of social media, but in allowing myself to become caught up in them. “You will hear of wars and rumours of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.” (Matthew 24.6)

I am not separate from God, ever. I could have no existence outside what is, for I am. I am intricately part of what is, and all that is is held in the ground of being, which is God. I’m more interested, as RS Thomas once said (The David Jones Journal R. S. Thomas Special Issue (Summer/Autumn 2001)) in the extraordinary nature of God. But that implies – how can it not? – the realisation that I am inextricably involved with all else, human, animal or otherwise, that is. How else could prayer work?

"Sinners make the best contemplatives"

It seems strange to me sometimes how in the midst of a contented life, at last, I can find myself almost nostalgic for times when I had little, and with that little or no security. Of course in fact I am not nostalgic for the anxiety, or for the lack of so many things that are commonly thought of as necessities; what I am nostalgic for is the extraordinarily conscious closeness of God.

It's interesting to note that Jesus didn't say, "Blessed are the poor," but "Blessed are the poor in spirit." (Matthew 5.3) I don't think for a minute that there is anything ennobling or even spiritually helpful about poverty or insecurity in themselves, even if freely chosen as in a monastic setting - still less when enforced by circumstances, or by social injustice; what is significant here is the inner poverty that accompanies the acceptance of poverty (or sickness, or injustice) as from the hand of God, rather than greeting adversity with anger or self pity. The mercy and blessing of God seem to fall especially on those who depend upon nothing but God, who have nothing in themselves to depend upon, or to rely upon as a source of pride or self-esteem. It was the tax collector at the temple in Luke 18, who, standing at a distance and praying "God, have mercy on me, a sinner" who went home at peace with God, not the self-righteous Pharisee.

Laurence Freeman once wrote that "sinners make the best contemplatives." The sense of being separated, marginalised, is in itself a grace, strangely. Jesus himself said that he came (Luke 5.32) not to call the righteous, but sinners. Perhaps it is in accepting this that we open ourselves to the grace and mercy of God in Christ, regardless of our external circumstances. It is no coincidence that the classical form of the Jesus Prayer ends with the words, "a sinner." To me it seems that knowing oneself as imperfect, fallible, poor in spirit is essential to living in that mercy.

Now that it is Lent, perhaps it is only our sense of self-reliance that we need to give up. Anything else is just a reflection of that need, or a means to it.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.