A small update...

I have slightly revised the static page on the Jesus Prayer (link in the menu above, or click here) in order to make it, I hope, slightly more use as a practical introduction.

21 this month

The Mercy Blog is 21 years old this month. I made my first post here on 13 August 2005, though it was not until mid-October of that year that I began publishing regularly. I suppose by now I must be one of the elders of the blogosphere...

As anyone who has followed the blog all those years will know, the posts here have traced a long and sometimes winding road; but they have always, one way or another, led back to the Jesus Prayer, and to apophatic spirituality in general. After all, it was in 1978 that I was first introduced to the Jesus Prayer, and it has clung to me ever since, no matter where I have turned.

I had thought, five years ago, to move my blogging activities entirely to An Open Ground, but things didn't work out that way. An Open Ground seems to have been a deconstruction blog, if I can use that phrase; it has not really ever done the work I have sought to do over here. To underline the fact that that work is not finished, not by any means, The Mercy Blog seems to have retained a loyal readership even over the time when this site was lying fallow. 

I don't know yet what the next months will bring - "All our steps are ordered by the LORD; how then can we understand our own ways?" (Proverbs 20:24 NRSV) - but I will try to remain faithful to the original premise of The Mercy Blog, and record here some of my own adventures and misadventures in prayer, and more importantly, some of the words I discover from those further along the pathless path (Martin Laird) than I.

The George Smileys of the spiritual life…

Hiddenness is an essential quality of the spiritual life. Solitude, silence, ordinary tasks, being with people without great agendas, sleeping, eating, working, playing ... all of that without being different from others, that is the life that Jesus lived and the life he asks us to live.  It is in hiddenness that we, like Jesus, can increase “in wisdom, in stature, and in favour with God and with people” (Luke 2.51).  It is in hiddenness that we can find a true intimacy with God and a true love for people.

Even during his active ministry, Jesus continued to return to hidden places to be alone with God.  If we don't have a hidden life with God, our public life for God cannot bear fruit.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

It’s tempting to think of hiddenness as more dramatic than it is: heroic journeys to the depths of the wilderness, hermits whose very doors have been bricked up. And yet that isn’t really hiddenness—extreme eremitism brings its own fame.

Hiddenness, especially in today’s society, is much more likely to consist in being plain and unremarkable, George Smileys of the spiritual life…

I don’t find this easy. I’m as drawn as the next person to getting up to things that may show me in a favourable light, to getting involved with visible stuff to a point where I can no longer remain hidden. A lot of these things are good and useful in themselves, and yet they don’t seem to help with the life of prayer at all. I’ve explored these things before in this blog, yet I don’t seem any closer to an answer. Meanwhile, I still long to live like ivy, constant in the shadowed places…

Poor in spirit…

May has been an odd month—in many ways scattered, through being away so much (we’ve just returned from hearing Cynthia Bourgeault speak in London)—but a glorious month too, full of beauty and discovery, and moments of extraordinary illumination that I cannot take the least credit for… but I have little time to organise any remotely coherent thoughts for this blog.

I have been typing up some notes on Cynthia Bourgeault, and trying to let her words settle into the frame of the rest of the month. As things gradually become clear, I’ll try and share some of them here over the next week or so.

Meanwhile, a couple of passages of Scripture that have haunted me this last couple of days:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death--even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Philippians 2.5-11

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 5.3

Comments?

I’m always struck by the disparity in the number of comments different blogs receive. It doesn’t seem to have much to do with readership, to judge by the numbers of subscribers on Google Reader, and—perhaps more significantly—the number of readers recorded (in Blogger stats) for each post here on The Mercy Blog (TMB).

I’m not complaining, by the way, about being neglected by my non-commenting readers—I am always slightly astonished to see how many of you there are out there! It just bewilders me a little that there is such a range of responses. Some blogs hardly ever receive a comment, while some seem to attract many comments, which develop into long conversations—heated, sometimes!—with both casual visitors and those who are evidently regulars. Of course, some bloggers are more punctilious about replying to comments than I am, but still it doesn’t seem to matter that much. For example: there’s a minimalist blogger I read sometimes, who has less Google Reader subscribers than TMB, but her posts rarely seem to have less than 25 comments—sometimes 125—and yet there’s a Franciscan friar and author I read regularly who has far more subscribers on Google Reader, and who receives about the same, or maybe slightly less, comments as TMB.

Some bloggers have closed comments altogether, some have open commenting (and often trouble with trolls and spam as a result) while others, like me, have enabled comment moderation and CAPCHA, It makes (apart from the closed blogs of course) little difference to the amount of comments they receive, seemingly.

Perhaps here is a field for research into the sociology of blogging…

The Place Where We Are Right

 

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plough.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

by Yehuda Amichai, with thanks to Maggi Dawn

Shirt of Flame, a recommendation

Whether or not you think you are going to agree with it, I do hope you will read this post to the end, for it is some of the most beautiful and truthful writing I have come across recently:

Shirt of Flame: Ecstatic Truth

I’m delighted to have discovered, through a link on Franciscan Quote of the Day, Heather King’s writings. She is one of the most passionate and courageous spiritual writers I have read in recent months, and her blog feed is definitely worth a (prayerful) subscription...

A caveat…

 

With thanks to http://www.jimnolansblog.com/isabella-bannerman-cartoons/

Truth, freedom and gratitude…

Re-reading yesterday’s post, I was struck by a sentence from Victoria Boyson’s article: “Our thankful heart will produce an honest and accurate view of God.”

We I wonder how many others, like me, carry within us a curious little seed of doubt, that would have us sometimes wonder if all we know of God is not wishful thinking, so kind of illusion of the heart? Yet Jesus 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 8:31-32)

This morning I attended, for the first time, the regular Saturday prayer meeting at my new church. Someone quoted these words of Jesus’ there, and they’ve been on the edge of my mind ever since.

It is God’s longing for us that we should know him, and that we should know his blessings as his, as in some way a glimpse of who he actually is. When Jesus healed ten lepers (Luke 17:11-19) on the border between Samaria and Galilee, only one turned back to give thanks to God, and Jesus said to him, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?… Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”

Paul wrote to the church at Thessalonica, “Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18) and to the Colossians he wrote, “So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.” (Colossians 2:6-7)

It seems to be that as we live in Christ, as we try to follow him, and depend on him for healing and forgiveness when we fail, that we know who he really is. Every time I hear that remark of Jesus’ from John 8, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free”, I can’t get over the fact that Jesus didn’t say, “Learn the truth, and the truth will set you free” or even, “Confess the truth, and the truth will set you free.” He said, “If you hold to my teachings… you will know the truth…”

“Our thankful heart will produce an honest and accurate view of God.” It does seem that way.

CS Lewis wrote somewhere, that “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

While we’re on the subject of Lewis, that great scholar and apologist of the last century whose life is commemorated in the Episcopal Church calendar on Monday (though curiously not in our Church of England Calendar, when we remember St. Cecilia only) I can’t help but remember his book about the death of his wife, Joy Davidman Gresham, and of the process of his grieving. If I am tempted to be what a dear friend of mine calls “precious” about the potentially confessional side of this blog, I should remember that deeply personal, agonisingly raw piece of confessional literature from a man I admire, even love, as much as any writer I have read! Perhaps others may even be helped by what I may write here, in some small reflection, perhaps, of the way I have been helped by A Grief Observed.

My grace is sufficient for you…

My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Prayer clarifies our hope and intentions. It helps us discover our true aspirations, the pangs we ignore, the longings we forget. It is an act of self-purification... It teaches us what to aspire to, implants in us the ideals we ought to cherish. Prayer is an invitation to God to intervene in our lives, to let God’s will prevail in our affairs; it is the opening of a window to God in our will, an effort to make God the Lord of our soul. We submit our interests to God's concern, and seek to be allied with what is ultimately right.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Prayer simplifies things. When all around us, within and without, is desperately complicated, ambiguous and contradictory, prayer is one thing. Contemplative prayer, in whichever way, is very close to Jesus’ “one thing needed” (Luke 10:42). What is surprising, always, is how hard it is to remember this—to turn to prayer first, rather than as a last resort. We are so deeply marked by that original sin of wanting to “be like God” (Genesis 3:5) that we turn first to our own strength, cunning, experience, and to God last of all. Perhaps that’s why Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…” (Matthew 5:3) Only those whose internal resources are spent and drained—or who through long discipline have learned their own emptiness—are open enough to receive from God his limitless blessing, his endless strength. As the Lord said to Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

It’s quite remarkable, looking back over the past few years’ extraordinary difficulties, just how close God has been to me at those times when I have had nothing left. I have actually seen for myself what Paul meant when he wrote, “That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:10)

We are called to “imitate Christ” as Thomas à Kempis put it. It is surely at the Cross that we see most clearly where this is likely to lead. Jesus did warn us (Matthew 16:24, among other references) and it is here that we come closest to him, as he drew close to us in that appalling act of redemption.

In all this God has blessed me in ways I couldn’t possibly have imagined, and often these days I just don’t know what to do with all the blessings! That, as much as anything, has been the reason I’ve been so quiet here. Maybe I shall have to share some more of this, loath though I am to go in for “confessional blogging…” Because it really is strangest thing. Why is it so hard to learn that God is good, to learn to trust that, to learn that there is such a thing as plain, honest joy, at the end of it all?

Sorry!

I’m sorry there have been so few posts on the Mercy Blog recently. Moving has meant lots to do, most of it good, some of it very good! I’ve been settling into my new church, exploring the town, getting the new flat to rights, and helping the cats settle into a new neighbourhood, not to mention seeing friends, and going places, and generally finding my feet in a new place and new circumstances.

I’ve had the chance, too, to think about The Mercy Blog, and what it’s for. It never was intended to be a chatty, slightly confessional account of day-to-day events (“Bought a new phone today – way cool! And I had the just best supper ever. I cooked beans, and rice, and…”). Not that I’ve anything against blogs like that, but it just isn’t me, somehow…

I think maybe The Mercy Blog should stop trying to be quite so regular in posting, and wait till it really has something to say. I’ve been thinking of a series of longer articles, looking seriously at this whole issue of contemplative and intercessory prayer, and why they are occasionally seen as mutually exclusive, or at least one is seen as somehow “better” than the other. This bothers me, since as I’ve said before, I see them as inextricably linked through the love, and mercy, and presence, of Christ… So watch this space. I’ll try not to keep you waiting unreasonably long!

Blog Action Day 2010 – a call to prayer, again…

Today is Blog Action Day once again. This year the theme is water, something we all too easily take for granted in the developed countries. We turn a tap, even the poorest of us, and out it comes, clean, sparkling and life-giving, good to drink and lovely to look at. You can even wash in it.

And yet it isn’t so for so many of us. African women walk over 40 billion hours each year carrying cisterns weighing up to 18 kilograms to gather water, which is usually still not safe to drink. Every week, nearly 38,000 children under the age of 5 die from unsafe drinking water and unhygienic living conditions. Many scholars attribute the conflict in Darfur at least in part to lack of access to water. A report commissioned by the UN found that in the 21st century, water scarcity will become one of the leading causes of conflict in Africa.

Some of us live in water, use it to breathe, to bring us all our food. Our sisters and brothers, the fish and the whales, are like this. Yet their homes, the world’s oceans and rivers, are terribly polluted. There is an excellent educational website I discovered here, too.

There are many ways to help. One of the best ways to start is by clicking on the widget you’ll see just to the right of this post, in the blog sidebar.

There are people working on solutions and new tools that help us to do our part to address the water crisis: Organisations like Water.org and charity: water are leading the charge in bringing fresh water to communities in the developing world. We can all take small steps to help keep pollution out of our rivers and streams, like correctly disposing of household wastes.

But all this information is gleaned from other sources. I’m no expert in water pollution, though I did need to know the basics in order to run a profitable, environmentally responsible dairy herd, as I did for years. But I wrote a piece for 2008’s Blog Action Day (which was all about poverty) in which I said some things I don’t think I could better today:

I'm not an ingenious person, economically, and I've never been any use to any fundraising initiative, beyond holding the odd collecting tin. Kiva Loans and the economics of poverty in marginalised communities make my head spin. But I can pray.

Prayer is so often seen as a last resort: "We've tried everything, and nothing works. All we can do is pray!" But if we are Christians, if we really believe Jesus' words in Matthew 7, "Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened…" prayer should be our first resort.

I've said so often in this blog that most of my readers will know what is coming next before I type it, but it isn't even necessary to know what to pray for, in order to pray. Yes, of course we can, and should, inform ourselves in every way possible, about poverty, and the many global initiatives to combat it; but we don't need to frame in thoughts and words what we feel God should do about it. We need only to hold the needs of the world on our hearts before God, remembering that "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)

God will use our tears, our bafflement, our frustration, in ways we cannot imagine, and may never know.

Please pray. Please don't think, as I am tempted to think sometimes, "It's no use, I can't do anything about this." But be prepared, always, to be part of God's answer to your own prayers. He may have uses for you, for me, that we've never even begun to think of…

Whoever eats this 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.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

What Jesus, the Bread of Life, is telling us is who we are underneath our clothes, who we are before we did anything right or anything wrong, who we are from the first moment of our existence.  And that self is the true life, the life that cannot be destroyed.  It cannot be given to us and it cannot be taken away.  Do you know why?  Because we have it, and it’s largely a matter of awakening to it! 

And when we do, when we know as Paul knew one wonderful day:  “I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20), then we will kneel and kiss the ground and be in touch with the Really Real.

As St. Therese of Lisieux said, “It’s all about confidence and it’s all about gratitude.”  May we be drawn into that confidence and gratitude that come from knowing I’m God’s son, I’m God’s daughter!  And God is in me and I am in God.  It doesn’t get any better than that!

Richard Rohr, adapted from Eucharist as Touchstone (CD)

All we are is fed and healed and shaped in the Eucharist, in the real encounter with the risen Christ. All we have been is forgiven, all we could be is nourished and made real. Whoever eats this bread will live forever (John 6:51).

I’m back online. The move has gone better than I could have hoped, and BT have excelled themselves getting the phone enabled, and the broadband active, within 24 hours. It’s good to be home—and tomorrow is Sunday…

The loving of blogs, and other things…

Dear Sue, she of Discombobula, has seen fit to bestow on me the “I Love Your Blog” award. I am really touched that she’d do that—her own blog is unfailingly beautiful, shamingly honest, full of deep and searching faith: truly one of my own favourites.

Sue says, wisely and typically, of the supposed rules that attach to accepting this decoration, “I hate rules.  The last rule of this award is to pass this on 10 bloggers .  Never forget, however, that rules are made to be broken and so if you don't want to play, feel free not to.” Right on, Sue. I won’t. I have a blogroll, and I link to blogs I love. I can’t imagine selecting 10.

Another stipulation of this blog-loving award thingy is that one should list 10 things one loves. Ah, now that’s more like it… but only 10? Well, the best amplifiers go to 11, they say…

In no particular order (you are not to assume one, either, see?):

Christ’s mercy. Why do you think this blog is called what it it? More necessary than the air we breathe, more beautiful than any made thing. Can’t stop thinking about it, ever, really.

My sisters and brothers in Christ. Honestly. More and more. How could I live without you lot? Lovely, impossible, irresistible—we are family, in the deepest possible way.

The Third Order Society of St. Francis. See above, with bells on.

Music. Oh, we agree on this one, Sue! Playing music, listening to music, mucking around with the endlessly fascinating technicalities of music, learning stuff and finding out there’s just so much more to learn. Oh, what a glorious gift, what an incredible way to have fun…

Beer. Good beer, mind. I am entirely unashamed in my contempt for the brewing conglomerates. Beer should be local, idiosyncratic, individual, delicious.

Living simply. I truly do really really enjoy doing without stuff I don’t need. This isn’t a virtue, it’s a delight.

Created things, particularly animals. (Special mention for cats here…) I can’t get over the fact that God has made this creation of his so various, so endlessly marvellous (I’m seriously beginning to run out of adjectives…). See what Gerard Manley Hopkins had to say about it. Which brings me to…

Poetry. As necessary as mathematics, and as exacting. David knew what he was about when he set out to write those Psalms. And that reminds me…

The Bible. I really do love the Bible. All of it. Read Psalm 119 if you want to know why.

The sea. I am always most myself by, on, occasionally in, the sea, somehow.

Someone who knows who she is. Never would have imagined…

So there we are. Not according to the rules, but it’s the best I can do. My heart is very full, an unexpected side-effect of a silly blogospherical game. Or more than that?

Blogging as an ancient literary form...

You know, it occurs to me that blogging is actually a very ancient literary form. Since printed books became affordable, we have grown used to longer and longer means of expression, longer and longer arguments: a Ph.D. thesis approach to even devotional writings, covering all the bases, supported by critical evidence and exhaustive textual references. But is wasn't always so. The Desert Fathers and Mothers often did not even write down their thoughts, but spoke them in short, rounded little sayings that could stand on their own, and whose truth was self-evident, self-contained, rather like the Biblical Proverbs, or perhaps more accurately, like the stories and parables Jesus told.

Very like blog-posts, in fact...

A word in season?

Reading often means gathering information, acquiring new insight and knowledge, and mastering a new field. It can lead us to degrees, diplomas, and certificates. Spiritual reading, however, is different. It means not simply reading about spiritual things but also reading about spiritual things in a spiritual way. That requires a willingness not just to read but to be read, not just to master but to be mastered by words. As long as we read the Bible or a spiritual book simply to acquire knowledge, our reading does not help us in our spiritual lives. We can become very knowledgeable about spiritual matters without becoming truly spiritual people.

As we read spiritually about spiritual things, we open our hearts to God’s voice. Sometimes we must be willing to put down the book we are reading and just listen to what God is saying to us through its words.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Perhaps this is something we bloggers, tweeters and Facebook posters need to consider very carefully. Certainly, for myself, I’ve been finding that I need to be liberated from the self-imposed tyranny these things can inflict (with all the paradox inherent in that sentence). I find it’s far too easy to become conditioned to a way of reading that involves filleting and gathering in a very similar way to how Nouwen describes academic reading. Being prepared to lay this down involves a sort of humility, a poverty of results, that we may find as difficult as would the scholars Nouwen is writing about…

Odd metrics…

Well, that’s sort of comforting, I suppose…

(Hat-tip to Sue, who scored 33.3%…)

Tag Cloud

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, the Blogger platform has given us a neat way of incorporating a tag cloud in our blog pages. If you look below the “About me” section on this page, under the “Blog Archive” or list of recent posts, you’ll see mine. (By default, the gadget is called “labels” when you first add it. I thought that was a bit underwhelming, so I’ve called mine what it is…)

Wordle alert…

Everyone seems to be coming out in Wordles, so I thought I’d have to join in:

(Click on the Wordle to see it full size…)

Something Trinitarian going on there, or am I just too full of today’s readings?

One of the dangers of blogging…

Wonderful post on Tim Chester’s blog:

We [bloggers] commend one another for echoing back the same thoughts. All the time, we feel we are part of the cognoscenti, the cabal of people who know what is right. But ‘on the last day we stand or fall on the approval of one Person, one Master, the Lord Jesus.’

Scary. Read it. Go on, read the whole thing…