The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Again the LORD spoke to Ahaz, "Ask the LORD your God for a sign, whether in the deepest depths or in the highest heights." But Ahaz said, "I will not ask; I will not put the LORD to the test."

Then Isaiah said, "Hear now, you house of David! Is it not enough to try the patience of humans? Will you try the patience of my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel..."

Isaiah 7:10-14 NIV

In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you."

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favour with God.  You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end."

"How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?"

The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.

"I am the Lord’s servant," Mary answered. "May your word to me be fulfilled." Then the angel left her.

Luke 1:26-38 NIV

Prophecy in the Bible is a slightly difficult thing to come to terms with, however you view the historicity of the Biblical documents; the one thing, though, that comes through clearly in these passages are the attitudes of those receiving the word. Ahaz, and Zechariah too, earlier in this Gospel (Luke 1:5-25) found it hard to accept. Ahaz didn't want to "put the Lord to the test"; Zechariah couldn't believe the words of Gabriel, "How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years." (Luke 1:18)

Mary had more to lose than anyone - her husband-to-be, her good name, perhaps her life - but she received the angel's message for what it was. Intelligent girl that she obviously was, she asked the obvious question about the mechanics of this unexpected gift, but she accepted Gabriel's explanation without cavil. She knew an archangel when she heard one, obviously, and she knew that God's word would never fail. It didn't.

At the centre of faith is listening, always. To be still enough in ourselves to hear, quiet enough to receive the gift within the silence; to wait in unknowing, as long as it takes, for the Lord's mercy - to be open enough for grace - is to rest at the still point of the turning world.*

*TS Eliot, The Four Quartets: Burnt Norton (1935)

The practice of stillness...

In the daily practice of stillness we learn not to rely on ourselves, on our thoughts and on our feelings, but instead to rest in the darkness – and perhaps in the apparently complete emptiness – of the magnanimity of the Holy Spirit who gently opens us out into that greater generosity. Its fruit is simply love. It is our personal response to the mystery of God, made known to us in the person of Jesus Christ, for our maturing into full personhood… 

The practice of stillness is letting go. In relinquishing our desire to think, we are refraining from imposing meaning. This means that we can be more open to the way things actually are… A moment when we turn over in our hands a stone just picked up represents the state of preliminary receptiveness which is so important if we are to cultivate the deeper intuitive knowing of spiritual truths. Wonder is the necessary check to the tendency for reductionism which characterises both religious and secular forms of knowledge… 

…letting go means allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to realities which may shape us, and it will perhaps open us to the chaos we fear so much… Finally, this requires us to face our fear that death will be the extinction of the self. That requires the ultimate act of trust and Christian faith. However unwilling we may be to ‘go gentle into that dark night’, faith is to surrender ourselves even now into that which, then, we shall be unable to control. Faith is the letting go into an unknown which will be a birthing more awe-full and more fully life-giving than our first ejection from the womb into the light of day. 

Andrew Norman, Learn to Be at Peace: The Practice of Stillness

It seems quite hard sometimes, writing a blog such as this, to find the right tone. I never set out to write one of those confessional blogs, full of day-to-day details of my emotional life and my intimate relationships. But this isn’t a technical blog either, constrained to facts, and opinions about facts. Sometimes I can’t write about the interior life without mentioning aspects of my own life that would be simpler not mentioned at all.

Recently I suffered a minor heart attack, and while medically it was – for someone living, in the 21st century, just across the road from a major hospital – no big deal, it was a disconcerting experience, and one which raised more questions than it appeared to answer. I found, in common with many patients such as myself, that the immediate aftermath of the episode was a strange flat depression, which made it all but impossible to write, or indeed to want to write. It was made somehow more obscure by that fact that, since I am already on the waiting list for an interventional procedure to treat the underlying problem, I found myself in a kind of a medical limbo. I needed to be careful not to make matters worse, and so, while I was relatively restricted in my normal activities, I hadn’t really anything definite to do.

Now that I have a date, next month, for the procedure, I seem to be able to look back over events, trying perhaps to make some kind of sense of the experience itself. As I’ve written elsewhere, I’ve encountered my own mortality before, and I have found that frailty is only one side of the coin. Reality is not what it seems. That in each of us which is love itself is beyond all the dimensions of time and matter, beyond the reach of thought. Bur it is precisely in this being beyond the reach of thought, even of conscious experience, that hope lies hidden. Unknowing extends beyond a few minutes of sitting quietly. It, itself no thing, underlies all things. It is the unseen source of all that is, and the surest refuge.

Here in Advent all we can do comes down to waiting. Darkness is heavy over the land, and tonight the fog is coming down. Through the bare trees beyond this lighted window the little distances are closing in. What we cannot see, what we have not heard, waits under the dark as it has always done. The dark has not overcome it. In the love that is its light is the seed of Christ, who comes in the shadow of the womb’s pulse long days before birth. Isaac Penington knew this:

Give over thine own willing, give over thy own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything and sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart, and let that grow in thee and be in thee and breathe in thee and act in thee; and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of Life, which is its portion. 

Quaker faith & practice 26.70

[First published on my other blog, Silent Assemblies]

Rejoice! Rejoice! (Advent 3 & 4)

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4.4-7)

O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel…

Latin, traditional (tr. John Mason Neale)

What is this that comes at this time of year? Whose coming, and to whom?

Nothing is the same any longer; and yet each Christmas we pray the same prayers, celebrate the same rites, religious and secular, and the world goes on as before, corrupt, cruel and broken. The weak grow weaker; the masters thrive as they have always done.

And yet, for all we “mourn in lonely exile here”, the call is to “rejoice… [and] do not worry about anything, but [live] by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving…”

Somehow we know this. Even those most caught up in the commercial side of Christmas know, somewhere in their hearts, that there really is something going on. There is a gladness that rises even in the two sizes too small heart of the grinchiest among us…

As Mary prophesied herself (Luke 1 46-55),

[God’s] mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty…

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1.5). Steadily the light shines: love constant in pain, mercy relentless before cruelty. A tiny child brought it with him, long long ago. Defenceless, in occupied territory, the light shines still, and always will.

“Rejoice, rejoice, again, I say, rejoice!”

Cold and empty…

After all the church activity, Good Friday evening is cold and empty, empty as the stripped altars, the shocking, open tabernacle, without even its curtain…

If I feel like this, wondering how long it will be till Sunday morning, how must it have been for his Mother, and the scattered, frightened disciples?

To whom can we turn, when silence lies hollow as the night wind, and the light fails at last?

Peter said it: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6.68)

Stella Maris…

Our minds are always active. We analyse, reflect, daydream, or dream. There is not a moment during the day or night when we are not thinking. You might say our thinking is “unceasing.” Sometimes we wish that we could stop thinking for a while; that would save us from many worries, guilt feelings, and fears. Our ability to think is our greatest gift, but it is also the source of our greatest pain. Do we have to become victims of our unceasing thoughts? No, we can convert our unceasing thinking into unceasing prayer by making our inner monologue into a continuing dialogue with our God, who is the source of all love.

Let’s break out of our isolation and realize that Someone who dwells in the centre of our beings wants to listen with love to all that occupies and preoccupies our minds.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

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Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

1 Thessalonians 5.16-18

There is so much we cannot know by thinking, including some of the most fundamental questions regarding “life, the universe and everything…” – how then can we know how or what to pray for everyone of whose pain or need we come to hear. How can we possibly “pray without ceasing” as Paul recommends?

I so often find myself adrift in strange seas these days, my hair and beard crusted with the salt of old tears, that my heart fills up with the longing for God, for his mercy and his judgement, before I am even aware of what is going on. As I do gradually become aware, all I really know are the words of the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…” Was I praying the Prayer all along? Was it praying me? I don’t know. But the shadow of the Cross lies over it all, and the figure of our Blessed Lady seems to draw alongside me in the twilight air. She is, after all, Stella Maris, the Sea Star…

Epiphany!

The Epiphany is an ancient Christian feast day and is significant in a number of ways. In the East, where it originated, the Epiphany celebrates the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist in the River Jordan. It also celebrates Jesus' birth.

The Western Church began celebrating the Epiphany in the 4th century where it was, and still is, associated with the visit of the magi (wise men) to the infant Jesus when God revealed himself to the world through the incarnation of Jesus. According to Matthew 2:11 they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

BBC – Religions

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A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter…

TS Eliot, ‘The Journey of the Magi’

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Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy is Lord of all creation?
Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy would one day rule the nations?
Did you know
that your Baby Boy is heaven's perfect Lamb?
The sleeping Child you're holding is the Great, I Am…

Mark Lowry & Buddy Greene, ‘Mary Did You Know?’

In Epiphany we begin to glimpse who this Baby is; we start to realise that the Angel of the Annunciation was speaking no less than the sober truth when he said, “And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” (Luke 1.31-33)

Lord God, open our eyes to see your Son as he truly is, Lord of all, Saviour of the world and all creation (Romans 8.21), your Name and your Word who is exalted above all things (Psalm 138.2)…

Christmas night…

Sometimes people assume that ‘good’ Christians have no doubts, never ask questions, never experience a sense of bewilderment in the face of cruelty or disaster. That is demonstrably untrue. To be a Christian is surely to live with uncertainty, relying on the gift of faith to bridge the gap between our understanding and our questioning…the God we seek is not a God afar off, but God-with-us, one who has shared our humanity and calls us to share in his divinity…

There in a nutshell is what Christmas is about. In his compassion and love, God wills to take our human flesh and blood and redeem us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. Our salvation is very near. It began with Mary’s generous-hearted consent to be the Mother of God. It will take physical shape with the birth of Jesus on Christmas night. It will be completed only when all are one with Him in the Kingdom. Truly, this is ‘a mystery hidden from long ages, a secret into which even angels long to look!

from Digitalnun’s iBenedictines blog

Each Christmas might be our last on earth. There is such a glorious fragility about this season, when we celebrate the birth of a tiny, vulnerable baby—who just happened to be the Son of God—to a young Jewish girl far from home in the middle of occupied territory, Her faith, the loyalty of her husband Joseph, the kindness of strangers, opened the door to eternity in the person of that little new-born lad.

Christmas night is holy. Of all nights of the year there truly is an uncanny glory about this one. This is no myth, no fairy-tale to hold back the dark. This is God, touching all that he has made with the most tender love, the most glorious power of mercy—with his saving grace made Mary’s Son…

Hail, space for the uncontained God!

(from the Akathistos Hymn, Greece, VIc)
We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always
the tall lily.
Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.
But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.
The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.
God waited.
She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.
____________________________
Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.
More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.
______________________________
She had been a child who played, ate, slept
like any other child – but unlike others,
wept only for pity, laughed
in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence
fused in her, indivisible.
Called to a destiny more momentous
than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,
only asked
a simple, 'How can this be?'
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
perceiving instantly
the astounding ministry she was offered:
to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power –
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.
Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love –
but who was God.
This was the minute no one speaks of,
when she could still refuse.
A breath unbreathed,
Spirit,
suspended,
waiting.
____________________________
She did not cry, "I cannot, I am not worthy,"
nor "I have not the strength."
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light,
the lily glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings.
Consent,
courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.

Denise Levertov, with grateful thanks to Catholic Ireland

One perfect vessel…

The Annunciation story (Luke 1.26-38) is the crescendo point to scripture’s theme of total grace and gift. Did you ever notice that Mary does not say she’s “not worthy”? She only asks for clarification: “How can this happen? I am a virgin” (Luke 1.34). She never asks if, whether, or why!

That is quite extraordinary and reveals her egolessness. Mary becomes the archetype of perfect receptivity. It takes the entire Bible to work up to one perfect vessel that knows how to say an unquestioning yes to an utterly free gift.

Richard Rohr, from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, pp. 31-32

Rohr here puts his finger on what I have felt about our Lady ever since I’ve been a Christian. In one sense she appears to be an ordinary, humble Jewish girl, engaged to a village craftsman; yet she is as Rohr says, “one perfect vessel that knows how to say an unquestioning yes to an utterly free gift.”

Paradox. God’s dealings with his creation seem to be wrapped in paradox; he through whom all things were made came to be born of a virgin, a helpless baby at the very hinge of history…

Amen. Even so, come., Lord Jesus

Breaking Bread…

The two disciples whom Jesus joined on the road to Emmaus recognised him in the breaking of the bread. What is a more common, ordinary gesture than breaking bread? It may be the most human of all human gestures: a gesture of hospitality, friendship, care, and the desire to be together. Taking a loaf of bread, blessing it, breaking it, and giving it to those seated around the table signifies unity, community, and peace. When Jesus does this he does the most ordinary as well as the most extraordinary. It is the most human as well as the most divine gesture.

The great mystery is that this daily and most human gesture is the way we recognise the presence of Christ among us. God becomes most present when we are most human…

When we gather around the table and eat from the same loaf and drink from the same cup, we are most vulnerable to one another. We cannot have a meal together in peace with guns hanging over our shoulders and pistols attached to our belts. When we break bread together we leave our arms - whether they are physical or mental - at the door  and enter into a place of mutual vulnerability and trust.

The beauty of the Eucharist is precisely that it is the place where a vulnerable God invites vulnerable people to come together in a peaceful meal. When we break bread and give it to each other, fear vanishes and God becomes very close.

Henri Nouwen

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Something like this strikes me at every celebration of the Eucharist. “Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread…”

We who share in this most blessed sacrament are truly one, one community, one body of Christ, through the Body by which he is made present to us, this Blood he shed for us. This is real, not some man-made symbol; this uniting is something far deeper than anything that could ever separate us, and far deeper than anything we could ever do ourselves to bring us together. The very act of God is here among us each time we celebrate this most glorious event; how could we ever have thought otherwise? Jesus himself told us, “This is my body… This cup… is the new covenant in my blood…” The verb is clean, present, real. In this moment, so are we – for an instant, at least, we can glimpse the shores of heaven; for a moment, we can be who we were made to be. This “amen” is for each of us, just for a shining second, our own surrender, our “let it be to me according to your word.”

Christ in each of us, the hope of glory…

Medjugorje and after…

It’s the first of October already, and I’ve been putting off posting here simply because, after a full week back home, I’m still fairly speechless about the Medjugorje pilgrimage.

Google will very quickly introduce you to many pages (probably the Wikipedia article already linked here, and its internal links, provide the best place to start, especially for the unfamiliar or sceptical (!) enquirer) dealing with the village, and with the history of Marian pilgrimage to the area. You will easily be able to trace the various controversies surrounding the site, from the early disagreements with the Communist authorities of Yugoslavia, through the Bosnian War of the early 1990s, to the current inquiry by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

But none of these – and as you may imagine I had read plenty before we travelled – had prepared me even slightly for the impact that most Franciscan of places would have on me. It is hard to explain how this came about, and it is this difficulty that has made me strangely reluctant to begin this post.

Certainly I experienced nothing “supernatural” in the external way. The widely reported and well-attested miracles of healing still go on, but I did not experience these directly during our stay. The experiences I did have were entirely spiritual and internal, and too private to write of here or anywhere.

What has remained, apart from a greatly deepened love of our Lady herself, is an odd kind of spiritual certainty – a sureness of heart, if I can use such a phrase. This life that I have lived, its twists and turns, the many things I would have wished otherwise, is a gift from God’s own hand. It is thoroughly permeated by the Holy Spirit, and so lived-in by Christ. I cannot choose the best bits. All that I have lived through works in the end together for my own good (Romans 8.28!); somehow for the healing of my tangled heart.

Yet again the call is to prayer, to the simplification of life. I seem to be incapable of living without getting caught up in stuff. Increasingly I’m coming to understand why men and women are called to live in community, where “stuff”, physical and social, is owned by the community, and they themselves are not caught up in it in such a personal way as we are who live in the world.

I know too how easily trying to live with less stuff can in itself become a hobby, can become “stuff” in its own right. Try entering “minimalist blog” into your favourite search engine, and you will find a legion of (mostly) young (mostly) American women and men whose waking hours seem to be devoted to working out how to live with increasingly less stuff – not all of it physical stuff, by any means. That isn’t what I’m getting at.

There is a passage in the Principles of the Third Order Society of St. Francis which reads, “Those of us who have much time at our disposal give prayer a large part in our daily lives. Those of us with less time must not fail to see the importance of prayer and to guard the time we have allotted to it from interruption.” I have made a fairly poor showing on either count, on the whole, and it is mostly to do with my attachment to stuff: social, intellectual, even spiritual stuff quite as much as physical stuff.

I am rambling. Medjugorje has been for me about far more than un-stuffing. It is, though, about living one-pointedly. The mistake some Protestants make is to imagine that Catholics worship Mary. They love her, honour her, turn to her; but she herself is continually pointing them to her Son. Medjugorje has been for me an experience of being called to leave everything and follow him, being called far deeper into the place Paul describes in the opening verses of Colossians 3:

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

In the end, it’s simply about trust – trusting Jesus enough actually to believe the Beatitudes, I suppose…

Holy Cross Day

It is not possible to look at the present condition of our land and people and find support for optimism. We must not fool ourselves.

It is altogether conceivable that we may go right along with this business of "business," with our curious religious faith in technological progress, with our glorification of our own greed and violence always rationalized by our indignation at the greed and violence of others, until our land, our world, and ourselves are utterly destroyed. We know from history that massive human failure is possible....

On the other hand, we want to be hopeful, and hope is one of our duties. A part of our obligation to our own being and to our descendants is to study our life and our condition, searching always for the authentic underpinnings of hope. And if we look, these underpinnings can still be found.

Wendell Berry, Economy, Freedom and Community, and Sex
with thanks to inward/outward

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Many people live with the unconscious or conscious expectation that eventually things will get better; wars, hunger, poverty, oppression, and exploitation will vanish; and all people will live in harmony. Their lives and work are motivated by that expectation. When this does not happen in their lifetimes, they are often disillusioned and experience themselves as failures.

But Jesus doesn't support such an optimistic outlook. He foresees not only the destruction of his beloved city Jerusalem but also a world full of cruelty, violence, and conflict. For Jesus there is no happy ending in this world. The challenge of Jesus is not to solve all the world's problems before the end of time but to remain faithful at any cost.

Henri Nouwen

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I wrote about this last month, but these passages, arriving in email newsletters, reminded me again just how vital, and hard, it is to keep these things in mind always.

Today is Holy Cross Day. Today we remember Jesus’ victory over sin and death, and the fact that his cry from the Cross – τετέλεσται (tetelestai), it is finished – means something much more like, “It is completed. I’ve done it!” than “I’m done for!” (There’s a good article in Open Source Theology on this which is well worth reading.)

Paradoxically, perhaps, I find Nouwen’s conclusion, in the passage I’ve quoted, very heartening. If Jesus had preached a happy ending in this world, then where is it? Instead we see a world riven with “cruelty, violence and conflict.” Our own hearts are broken, divided, and unfaithful. Well, mine is, anyway. Pain is the rule rather than the exception in our lives. Even at our happiest, the shadow of loss and death lies across our sunlit hours like a stain.

Jesus knows this: it is why he came to be born as man, born from that frail and unthinkably courageous girl whom we call, down all generations, blessed, and to die so horribly as she stood vigil at the foot of that Cross. It is why that death was not the final victory of death, but the final victory of life, and why Mary’s grief was swallowed up in glory. Death is not the end: it is transformed. It is now the door to eternal life, and to a new Heaven and a new earth, in which

[God] will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.

Revelation 21.4

The Cross is indeed Holy. From an instrument of torture and death, Jesus’ blood has made it into our refuge, the fountain and source of grace, mercy and peace to all who believe. Holy, and glorious!

Walsingham 950

On the Diocese of Exeter website you’ll find a superb sermon by Bishop Michael Langrish on Walsingham 950. Do read it all the way through, even if you think you may not be going to agree with him!

Simple obedience...

Tertiaries recognise the power of intercessory prayer for furthering the purposes of God’s kingdom, and therefore seek a deepening fellowship with God in personal devotion, and constantly intercede for the needs of his church and his world. Those of us who have much time at our disposal give prayer a large part in our daily lives. Those of us with less time must not fail to see the importance of prayer and to guard the time we have allotted to it from interruption. Lastly, we are encouraged to avail ourselves of the sacrament of Reconciliation, through which the burden of past sin and failure is lifted and peace and hope restored.

The Principles of the Third Order - The Third Way of Service, Prayer

It's strange how much more clearly this has been coming to speak to me over recent months, and how strongly I've been convicted of my own failure to live by it. Remarkable, too, how easy it is to find excuses for filling that "much time" that I have at my disposal with other things than prayer.

Temptation always sells us so short. God has more to give us than we can possibly ask imagine, and yet we allow ourselves to be led away by the least alternative. Well, I do. And yet I find that even what little obedience I manage to give to God's call to prayer as my chief calling is rewarded so generously that I haven't the tears to acknowledge it.

On this day after St. Clare's Day, I keep remembering these word's from Clare's Testament: "I bless you during my life and after my death, as I am able, out of all the blessings, with which the Father of mercies has blessed and will bless His sons and daughters in heaven and on earth and a spiritual father and mother have blessed and will bless their spiritual sons and daughters. Amen."

God has so blessed me over these last months, with blessings I couldn't have imagined, or dreamt up for myself. He is faithful beyond our understanding, and we know so little of gratitude. And so we have Christ's mercy beneath us as a cupped hand, and our Lady's simple obedience as our light, our Stella Maris: "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word..." How hard that is for us, sinners that we are, and yet how necessary. It's strange, but I sometimes actually find myself these days longing for that simple obedience, as Francis and Clare did...

The Rose…

Dat Rosa Mel Apibus The Bee Gets its Honey from the Rose (Mary)
Jan Oliver

On this most glorious day, when the sea sparkles like moving glass, and the Gospel reading was of Thomas, dear wondering Thomas, making his glorious affirmation of the risen Lord, and a new baby was baptised into the Church at the Eucharist at St Mark’s, it’s good to remember our Lady, the faithful Rose from whom such sweetness sprang!

Life after Walsingham…

The Chapel of St Augustine, Walsingham

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It isn’t easy to begin to describe the TSSF Pilgrimage to Walsingham. The external facts are easy enough to read about on the website, but the experience itself is far less accessible to words or pictures. The lovely buildings, set in beautiful gardens, are well enough known to need no introduction from me. What you don’t see is the sheer sense of holiness that pervades the place. I kept catching myself walking around a corner and feeling like Jacob, who “was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’” (Genesis 28.17)

God speaks with a strange clarity in places like this, and yet it is hard to share in such a public way as this the things one hears. Certainly we left Walsingham both knowing very clearly the intensity of God’s call to prayer, and the urgent necessity of our response, which has been strangely echoed in the recent experience of other Christians in Swanage. The true extent of that call on our lives, though, is only gradually becoming clear.

Somehow the Holy Spirit soaks into one with the water of that place, and as Paul says, “God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit…” (Romans 8.27) It’s very uncomfortable. Increasingly it’s impossible to get away with hiding one’s mind from one’s heart. But God is very gentle, even if he is God…

Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.
Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity,
and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

While I kept silence, my body wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.

Then I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not hide my iniquity;
I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’,
and you forgave the guilt of my sin.

Therefore let all who are faithful
offer prayer to you;
at a time of distress, the rush of mighty waters
shall not reach them.
You are a hiding-place for me;
you preserve me from trouble;
you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.

I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go;
I will counsel you with my eye upon you.
Do not be like a horse or a mule, without understanding,
whose temper must be curbed with bit and bridle,
else it will not stay near you.

Many are the torments of the wicked,
but steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the Lord.
Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous,
and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.

(Psalm 32)

Walsingham

Here we are at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. I’ve found Wi-Fi access, free, thanks to the Shine people.

God is very good – this most beautiful place is so full of grace and peace, and it’s a joy to be among our fellow pilgrims. My heart is too full to write much more now, but I’ll try to post here during the Pilgrimage…

Thank you all for your prayers…

The wrecks of comprehension…

Mary’s understanding of her nothingness is also saying something about you. Your worthiness is given. It is not attained. It is God in you searching for God. It is God in you that believes and hopes and cares and loves. There is nothing that you can take credit for. It is something you just thank God for!

Eventually you will not be inclined to say, “I prayed today.” Rather, you will want to say, “Prayer happened today—and I was there!” Whatever you do in communion is prayer. When your mind, your heart and your body are all present; that kind of full presence is automatically prayer. At that moment God is able to use you and speak to you.

I believe Mary is the model for being used by God. And we, like her, are just standing here saying, “Let it be done unto me” (Luke 1.38). All we can do is let it happen.

Richard Rohr, from an unpublished talk

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The longer I go on in this life that is about prayer, the less I realise I know about it. As Rohr says here, prayer happens. Sometimes, I’m not even sure I am there. Prayer is all wrapped up in dreams, these days, too. Some nights are so filled with dreaming that is prayer, or prayer that is dreaming, that I’m not always sure what is sleep and what is not. But these are not dreams of the prophetic, “God gave me a dream – better sit up and write it down!” variety. They rise out of sleep like the wrecks of crippled warships rising out of sand and silt, full of pain and the memory of pain, and sink again in the half-waking susurration of the Jesus Prayer. They are nothing I do; their content has generally nothing to do with my life or even my experience.

My day-life goes on, filled with light and truth as never before. My Susan and I are engaged now, and our parallel Third Order vocations are calling us into a “community of two” – we are so excited to see where God might take us in this path together. The more obscure and baffling these sleeping prayers become, somehow, the more blessed are these long days of early summer.

But this mystery of prayer continues darker than ever. It’s as though my mind has no reference for what is going on, rather as something illuminated by radiation outside the human visual spectrum appears dark to us, and yet may be bathed in a light we cannot see. I feel like Abram asleep after meeting Melchizedek, blanketed by “a deep and terrifying darkness” that I don’t understand. And yet I know that it is God’s darkness; that it means nothing but good, and peace, and healing for things that are not in my experience.

All I can do is be here, try to be present to what God is doing, as best I can, and leave the outcome up to him. Our Blessed Lady is my guide and mentor; she went this way before, to an extent no-one else has ever been called to go. From the Annunciation, to the Cross, and on to Pentecost, she was present in silence to God’s highest doing. From the beginning, her life was a surrender more active than we can comprehend, more passionate in its stillness than our hearts can embrace. No wonder all generations call her Blesséd…

Happy Christmas!

Every blessing for Christmas and the New Year to everyone!

Out of the ordinary…

One does not always have to wait for something out of the ordinary. The all-important thing is to keep your eyes on what comes from God and to make way for it to come into being here on the earth. If you always try to be heavenly and spiritually minded, you won't understand the everyday work God has for you to do. But if you embrace what is to come from God, if you live for Christ's coming in practical life, you will learn that divine things can be experienced here and now, things quite different from what our human brains can ever imagine.

Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, Action in Waiting, with thanks to inward/outward

And wasn’t the birth of a son to a young Jewish girl, miles from home on a trip to register for the occupying power’s census, just the most ordinary event, devoid of dignity or ceremony, even of the distinction of marriage? Wasn’t the place all part of it, a cramped and smelly stable attached to an overcrowded inn? What could be less spiritual, less exalted or rarefied? And yet here, now, the Son of God was born on earth, Emmanuel, God with us, the promised Saviour…

The ancient prophecies were fulfilled, the great day come at last.

But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah,
   who are one of the little clans of Judah,
from you shall come forth for me
   one who is to rule in Israel,
whose origin is from of old,
   from ancient days.

(Micah 5:2)