Discipline and discipleship

Discipline is the other side of discipleship. Discipleship without discipline is like waiting to run in the marathon without ever practising. Discipline without discipleship is like always practising for the marathon but never participating. It is important, however, to realize that discipline in the spiritual life is not the same as discipline in sports. Discipline in sports is the concentrated effort to master the body so that it can obey the mind better. Discipline in the spiritual life is the concentrated effort to create the space and time where God can become our master and where we can respond freely to God's guidance.

Thus, discipline is the creation of boundaries that keep time and space open for God. Solitude requires discipline, worship requires discipline, caring for others requires discipline. They all ask us to set apart a time and a place where God's gracious presence can be acknowledged and responded to.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Lent is often described as a discipline. The word turns people's minds towards the externals of Lent, fasting particularly. There is so much talk about “giving up chocolate for Lent” (or something else, but usually chocolate among the Christians I know) that you’d think that was all there was to it.

Fasting is good, though I personally think it needs to be about something more than merely going without a treat that’s not especially good for one’s health, but it is only part of what Lent is about. Discipline is not a word many of us are terribly fond of. It has overtones of Victorian schools: cold showers, the cane, and hundreds of lines.

The Principles of the Third Order Society of St Francis include this sentence, “The Third Order of the Society consists of those who, while following the ordinary professions of life, feel called to dedicate their lives under a definite discipline and vows.” Without discipline, the spiritual life cannot go anywhere. Discipline is freedom, strangely enough. When we no longer open the doors of our perception to what the world offers that is not of God then our hearts are free. Jesus himself said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8.31b-32 NIV) That is the sweet heart of discipline.

Sacred Wounds?

Pain teaches a most counterintuitive thing—that we must go down before we even know what up is. Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. I would define suffering very simply as “whenever you are not in control.”

All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.

If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become negative or bitter. If there isn’t some way to find some deeper meaning to our suffering, to find that God is somehow in it, and can even use it for good, we will normally close up and close down.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 191

It’s strange that I have found, over the years, that the practice of the Jesus Prayer cuts both ways with this matter of pain.

Firstly, it most assuredly does form “a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds,” more deeply and powerfully that any other way that I have found—at least for those called to the Prayer rather than any contemplative other form. As Irma Zalesk says, in Living the Jesus Prayer (p.63), “…the essential thing is to keep that deep, central space of our being that we call the heart wide open and turned towards [Christ]. The Jesus Prayer leads us into that space, and allows us to live there unceasingly.” If that will not transform our pain, I don’t know what will.

But there is another side to living so closely in the presence of Christ, in the “deep central space” of the heart. The Christ who said, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light...” (Matthew 11.28-30) is the same Jesus who said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 16.24-25)

The practice of the Jesus Prayer leads us deep and deeper into loving our fellow-creatures (human and otherwise) and so into opening our hearts to their pain. I said the other day that I could understand the impulse of those called to contemplative sorts of prayer either to gather in enclosed communities, or to live as solitaries. This life makes one so vulnerable, so thin-skinned, that it is all but impossible sometimes to live a “normal” life among people who will often have no idea what is the matter with us. Living with a heart open to the pain of the poor, the unjustly accused, the victims of war, rape, violence; to the pain of desperately mistreated animals in fur farms, the fear of the hunted fox, the grief of the abandoned kitten—these are not things that will leave us unmarked, unruffled.

But the wounds we bear in prayer for others are sacred wounds. In their very little way they are like the wounds of Christ. (A very few contemplatives, like St. Francis, have kept it up to the point where they are physically wounded in prayer.) These wounds, sacred though they are, transformative though they are both for ourselves and for those whom we bear in our hearts in prayer, are real wounds. St. Francis bled: try as he might, he could not conceal his wounds from his brothers; those of us who have not travelled so far as our Brother Francis will still bear the marks of our prayer in tears, in vulnerabilities, in “sensitivities” that some will not understand.

If we cannot conceal these marks that prayer leaves on us, what are we to do with them? How are we to live in the world? As Tertiaries, we are to live according to the Principles of the Third Order which state: “When Saint Francis encouraged the formation of The Third Order he recognised that many are called to serve God in the spirit of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience in everyday life (rather than in a literal acceptance of these principles as in the vows of the Brothers and Sisters of the First and Second Orders). The Rule of The Third Order is intended to enable the duties and conditions of daily living to be carried out in this spirit.”

I don’t know the answer to this. Perhaps one of the tasks of my remaining years may be, if it doesn't sound too vaulting an ambition, to try and work it out; and maybe this blog is at least the beginning of a place to share that process, if God allows.

Pray for me!

Retreating...

Off to Hilfield Friary tomorrow for our TSSF Area Team Retreat; I’ll be back on Friday sometime…

I am so fond of Hilfield – set deep in the skirts of the Dorset Downs, it really does feel like A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else, in Ursula le Guin’s words.

We’ll be staying in Bernard House,

the loveliest of the guest houses, I think.

It will be good just to be part of the rhythm of Friary life, to settle into these ancient patterns that are new every time, and to renew my acquaintance with Olive the Cat. More when I get back…

Pea-sticks…

We operate with the assumption that giving people new ideas changes people. It doesn’t. Believing ideas is, in fact, a way of not having to change in any significant way, especially if you can argue about them. Ideas become defences.

If you have the right words, you are considered an orthodox and law-abiding Christian. We burned people at the stake for not having the right words, but never to my knowledge for failing to love or forgive, or to care for the poor. Religion has had a love affair with words and correct ideas, whereas Jesus loved people, who are always imperfect.

You do not have to substantially change to think some new ideas. You always have to change to love and forgive ordinary people. We love any religion that asks us to change other people. We avoid any religion that keeps telling us to change.

Richard Rohr, adapted from How Men Change: A Thin Time (CD, DVD, MP3)

At our Third Order local group meeting last night, we were discussing, as part of our current study of the Principles, how a certain untidiness is a necessary and inevitable part of the Franciscan charism. We do not, cannot as followers of Francis following Christ, have everything cut and dried, all our words precisely right, and all our actions in line with them. To do so would be the way of the fanatic or the fundamentalist, not the Franciscan.

As Rohr says, Jesus loved people, in all their imperfection and all their untidiness. Look at the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman by the well at Sychar (John 4:1-30). Hers was a life with all kinds of loose ends—a life that didn’t conform to expectations, especially not orthodox Jewish expectations, and yet here was Jesus sharing with her the living water, and trusting her to share it with her fellow citizens.

We cannot allow ourselves to grow unless we are prepared to allow ourselves a little untidiness, What matters is love, rigorous, sacrificial love, not having all our ducks in a row.

And yet we are members of a religious order; we live by a rule. How does that square with this necessary untidiness? One of our group, a Tertiary of many years’ experience, told us of a wonderful expression of her late (Tertiary) husband’s: our rule is like a set of pea-sticks—a framework up which we can grow. But, just as in a vegetable garden, it is the peas that matter, not the pea-sticks!

Richard Rohr, why you need to hear him…

“Most of us assume that the self we’re meant to ‘die to’ is the body self, the sexual self, and the emotional self. We assume that if you just get rid of your body or emotion or sex then we’ll fly towards God. But there’s no evidence for that. In fact, quite the contrary.

“Thomas Merton gave us the language of the true self and false self, instead of the body self and spirit self. It’s not your body self that needs to die, but your false self — your persona, or in Freudian terms your ego, the person you think you need to be, the persona you need to live up to.”

The positive spin on all this talk about death-to-self is that we should, he suggests, passionately, constantly choose God, and union with God. “Prayer is a daily choice to live out of the Great Self, not the small self — the God self, not the you self.”

The act of contemplation helps us to observe the “unobserved” or false self, and by so doing, to gradually detach ourselves from it. But it is not something that comes naturally in our culture. “We are a capitalist society, into accumulation, not detachment,” Fr Rohr says. “That’s why people are attracted to Buddhism. Buddhists have kept their vocabulary and their honesty about the need for detachment up to date, whereas we’re just people who have invested heavily in our own opinions and rightness, with disastrous results.”

The secret to detachment, he suggests, is to learn how to live more fully in “the now, not the past or the future”.

Some people do discover “presence”, he explains, “in love-making, in nature, in the presence of great music. As a spiritual teacher, that would be my whole desire, to say: ‘Don’t just look to the churchy moments.’ If you’re contemplative, you’re going to find these moments everywhere. And once that begins, life is no longer divided into the sacred and the secular: it’s one world.”

Perhaps the main threat to the rise in interest in authentic contemplation is that it becomes just another individualistic pop-spirituality technique, or a therapeutic tool alone.

This is something Fr Rohr is painfully aware of. “In some circles, contemplation is the new trendy thing; but when you draw close to some of these people, you find they have no love for the poor or the outsider. It’s just a new way to feel pious.”

From a 2008 Church Times interview with Fr. Richard Rohr OFM

This interview neatly sums up why I am always so excited about Fr. Richard’s teaching, and why I quote him so often on this blog. If you can, I would urge you to go and hear him at the Third Order sponsored conference this September in London. Oh, I know sometimes there are things in Rohr’s writings that come over, especially out of context, as if he is just another trendy guru of the latest Christian craze, or worse, as if he is just a Christian face for some generalised New Age spirituality. But it really isn’t so. Rohr is a Franciscan through and through, the genuine article, and if you listen to his homilies you will get a sense of how far he is from being a product of his age. As far as the Emerging Church is concerned, it’s much more nearly the case that his age is a product of him!

Of and with the poor…

We can no longer be satisfied by simply being the Church for the poor from our position of establishment.  We must realize that sometimes that very generosity, that very attempt to be good to other people, has kept us in a position of power and superiority.  Somehow we must be of and with the poor, and then be ready for some mistrust and even criticism.
Dom Helder Camara (1909-1999), the holy Archbishop of Recife, Brazil, said it so truthfully, “As long as I fed the poor, they called me a saint.  When I asked, ‘Why are there so many poor people?’ they called me a communist.”

Richard Rohr, April 2010

As Franciscans, I think it is crucial that we face this question. The First and Second Orders, by virtue of their vocation to the Evangelical Counsels, live it out in common with their sisters and brothers in other religious communities—but we as Tertiaries need to examine ourselves rather rigorously on this point, I feel. Though, as our Principles state, “we possess property and earn money to support ourselves and our families,” we must consider how Rohr’s words here question our own vocation.

I don’t have an answer, of course, to these questions. The path God has somehow laid out for me has brought me closer to the way of poverty than some of my sisters and brothers, but this is through what might be called (if you leave God out of it!) force of circumstance: I can claim no holiness, or acuity of discernment, for myself. All that life since the farm accident that stopped me working some years ago has done is to give me a different perspective, a way of seeing that I didn’t have before; a cure, maybe, for a blindness common to so many educated people of my generation, who have not had to live frugally amid abundance. But it has not shown me any specific advice for anyone else… Maybe each of us has to plot our own course through this land of inequalities—it would be so hard to offer advice without appearing to manipulate, or to offer criticism.
One thing I do know. As Franciscans we must look clearly, with wide open eyes, at the poor who live among us, quite as much as at the glamorously poor of what used to be called the Third World. (I am using deliberately provocative language here!) We must set aside the dark glasses of prejudice, the tinted lenses of class, and look, really look, into the eyes of the Big Issue sellers, into the bundles of rags under the city bridges, into the doors of the temporary accommodation dotted even among the prosperous and leafy villages of Dorset, and allow them to ask their own questions of us, of our own vocation to the Third Order of St. Francis…

More Francistide fun…

I'm just off to our Francistide Area Day at Hilfield Friary in a few minutes, so, damp chilly autumn though it is, my heart's singing with anticipation! I do love my sisters and brothers in the Third Order more than I can say—more, somehow, than I can properly explain to myself…

[picture courtesy of Ship of Fools]

Poverty and simplicity…

In an excellent post at St. Edward's Parish Blog today, Fran asks, "How do you define poverty?"

"We are very quick to equate poverty with money. Perhaps we need to reflect more deeply", she says, and goes on to ask, "Ultimately how can we examine the poverty in our own lives and use that to both transform and be transformed?"

Thinking about this, I was reminded of Rowan Clare Williams' words in A Condition of Complete Simplicity, where she writes,

To be poor, sadly, is still to be without a voice and without power… Arguably, 'the poor', wherever they are, are still less than people. The very phrase, 'the poor', lumps together and depersonalizes billions of individuals with different unique stories and voices which are seldom heard, because the rich and powerful shout more loudly.

It can be tempting for those attracted by Franciscan simplicity to rhapsodize about the ennobling properties of poverty. This is dangerously patronizing. It is important to understand that there is an essential difference between poverty as a chosen, life-giving option and the poverty which denies and dehumanizes. Living in un-chosen poverty does not ennoble. Instead of freeing the mind from 'distractions' about food and clothes and other material concerns, they become an obsession. Far from being set free to live abundantly, this kind of poverty concentrates the mind on the mechanics of blind survival. A poor people are not necessarily any freer from materialism than the rich; they merely have less opportunity to indulge their desires. For the sake of clarity, then, it is necessary to draw a distinction between involuntary poverty, and a choice (or vocation) to live in simplicity in defiance of a world which defines us by what we have.

Over at Inward/Outward, there is a quote from Bill Moyers' foreword to Jim Willis' Faith Works: Lessons From the Life of an Activist Preacher:

Charity is commendable; everyone should be charitable. But justice aims to create a social order in which if individuals choose not to be charitable, people will not go hungry, unschooled or sick without care. Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance. Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table.

Where does this take us?

Poverty, unsought, crushes the heart and dulls the mind; simplicity, chosen, whether the absolute poverty of St. Francis and his contemporary followers, or the simplicity enjoined on members of the Third Order, to "live simply and to share with others… accept[ing] that we avoid luxury and waste, and regard our possessions as being held in trust for God" (The Principles, 11), sets the heart free and clears the mind.

We who choose simplicity, whether the circumstances of our natural lives have provided us with much, as St. Francis' had, or little, as with many of the early Tertiaries, must put ourselves either personally at the service of of those whose poverty in un-chosen, or at the service of finding for them justice, and a place, by right of simply being human, at the table. As The Principles state (7), "Our Order sets out, in the name of Christ, to break down barriers between people and to seek equality for all. We accept as our second aim the spreading of a spirit of love and harmony among all people. We are pledged to fight against the ignorance, pride, and prejudice that breed injustice or partiality of any kind."

It seems to me that these thoughts may have relevance beyond the Third Order Society of St. Francis in these days of economic insecurity and environmental concern. You don't need to be a Franciscan to choose a life of simplicity and justice - but St. Francis may still have things you can learn from, and his beautiful and Christ-like heart may strengthen and comfort you as you try to work out your calling.

What a day…

…we all had at Hilfield Friary! It was our Francistide Area Chapter - four of us were professed together at the midday Eucharist, and then two were noviced at the afternoon Third Order Office. We had a wonderful time: tears and laughter and love and God's incredible blessings shared between Tertiaries from all across the Blackmore Vale, and with the Brothers - and to put the icing on the cake Bishop Tim was there too. He gave us a talk on our Diocese's link with the Sudan in the morning, managing to be profound and funny, heartbreaking and encouraging all at the same time, and then he filled us in on events at Lambeth after lunch.

Thank you, dear friends of the blogosphere, for your prayers for me today. They were most certainly answered, and with interest…

Thanks and blessings and love to you all!