This rib cage of failure

It is simple enough to lose sight of the liberating nature of our failings. They often seem to lead us into some parched, lonely place—a place of dry bones. The problem is not our inadequacies, much less the freight of the failures we carry, but the loss of perspective on what we resent most in ourselves. Light forever shines from within the rib cage of failure. But reactive mind is too cluttered to realize that this is the nature of divine love: flowing waters of mercy for all who are parched—each of us… Nor is reactive mind capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation, pp.95-6

Just as death is the inescapable precondition for new life, so failure and error are the necessary spring of change and growth in the spiritual life. Only when we will let ourselves know that, only in the wreckage of our plans and pretensions, only in the defeat of our new beginnings and our fresh initiatives, can we be broken open to the current of grace that will wash us out into the open sea of becoming.

Behind all these metaphors there is a very simple fact, it seems to me: that only when we cease completely from self-justification, when we are prepared without reservation to let go of whatever role we imagined for ourselves in the economy of the inner life can we discover what the flow of change that is the leading of the Spirit is tending towards.

I think this applies both in our own inner lives and in the broader life of humankind. We can see it in the unceasing pattern of evolution (species don’t remain static, however attached we may have become to one or another expression of their diversity) and in the breakdown and reformation of institutions. Sarah Bessey (Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith) sees it in the breakdown of many of the established churches, and in the tentative shoots of a radical, open faith appearing through the rubble, like fireweed springing up through the rubble of bombed buildings following WW2. (Yes, I am old enough to remember seeing it for myself from the top decks of London buses, riding with my mother looking over the makeshift hoardings that tried to conceal the broken gaps in the terraces, and the little rows of shops beginning to struggle back to some sort of normality after the end of hostilities!)

“Everything passes/everything changes/just do what you think you should do,” sang Bob Dylan (‘To Ramona‘). But what Martin Laird calls “reactive mind” is too wrapped up in what it thinks it thinks to know; it is only when we keep still enough in prayer that we are “capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.”

The Second Sunday of Advent

 It can be tempting to think of Advent as a cosy time, drawn close around the fire while we warm up the engines of Christmas. But for me at any rate this year it seems to be something far less romantic: a time of stripping back, clearing the tangled thorns around the heart - brambles of memory, the climbing briars of faithlessness. But we cannot reach, and the thorns tear the skin of our reaching hands.

Advent is a time of stillness, of waiting, they say. But for what? For what we cannot do for ourselves - Eustace the dragon, helpless within his scales.

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)

Our waiting is for God's grace alone. There is nothing we can do except wait, and pray that silence may itself bring us only to some kind of holy longing, to the psalmist's words at the end of his hymn to the Word:

I have strayed like a lost sheep. Seek your servant, for I have not forgotten your commands.

(Psalm 119:176 NIV)

Receiving Stations

Quietly, I seem to be beginning to understand something of why the penitential nature of the Jesus Prayer (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner) leads it on into acting as a prayer of intercession as well.

We are all sinners. Even those we remember as saints were themselves acutely conscious of their own sin - Francis of Assisi would be a good example - in the sense of separation from God, rather than as ones transgressing some list of "naughty things". Our innate tendency to turn from the presence of God into our own private obsessions and insecurities, sometimes called original sin, is something we all hold in common, from the most obviously "religious" to the least, from those whom the world would regard as good, to those it would regard as beneath contempt.

We live, though, in the mercy that is Christ, all of us. "For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." (Colossians 1:16-17 NIV)

In our accepting this solidarity, as it were, with the least of our fellow creatures, as well as the greatest, we are accepting for ourselves also their suffering, their alienation, their grief. Craig Barnett writes:

The religious path is often presented as a way to achieve inner peace and happiness, and to avoid suffering. Much popular spirituality claims that life is meant to be filled with peace and contentment; that pain and anguish are problems that can be overcome by the right attitude or technique. The promise of perfect contentment is seductive, but it can never be fulfilled, because it is based on the illusion that suffering is a mistake.

Suffering, ageing, sickness and loss are not regrettable failures to realise our true nature. They are inherent in the nature of embodied human life and our often-incompatible needs and desires. Any spirituality, therapy or ideology that promises an escape from these limitations neglects the truth that suffering is an essential dimension of human life. Growth in spiritual maturity does not mean escaping or transcending these experiences, but becoming more able to accept and learn from them; to receive the painful gifts that they have to offer.

Our prayer for mercy is answered always by love (Luke 18:9ff), and it is in this love that we, somehow, become as it were aerials for the Spirit, receiving stations for a grace that we may not even ourselves understand.

Rest for the weary and unclear

Contemplative prayer is always an odd occupation, and it has effects on our wider spiritual life that extend far beyond our formal times of prayer.

Robert Llewelyn, writing in With Pity, Not With Blame, quotes Edward Bouverie Pusey on distracting and unwelcome thoughts during prayer: "Do not examine yourself about these thoughts whether you consented to them or not. Do not try not to have them. Be not impatient to get rid of them; only desire that you should love God more." He (Llewelyn) goes on to say, "To suffer such thoughts patiently accepting yourself as you are, and looking in trustful surrender to God, is necessarily a humbling experience. For that very reason it is cleansing and healing."

This is a stunning realisation. All those feelings of envy or fear, those sexual fantasies, those thoughts of shopping lists or of our own tedious failings; these are not just not distractions to be fought against with gritted teeth, nor to be pushed down with a determined will, but they are capable of being used by God for our "cleansing and healing". Once again the psalmist had it spot on: "It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees." (Psalm 119.71)

Julian of Norwich, that wisest of women of prayer, took this a whole, almost shocking, stage further. (We sometimes forget that this revered English anchoress, counsellor of Margery Kempe and quoted by TS Eliot and Thomas Merton, was one of the most radical and daring theologians and spiritual directors of any time, not just of her own.) Robert Llewelyn (ibid.), quoting her (Revelations of Divine Love, tr. Clifton Wolters, and Julian of Norwich: Showings, tr. Edmund Colledge OSA and James Walsh SJ):

'He lays on each one he loves some particular thing, which while it carries no blame in his sight causes them to be blamed by the world, despised, scorned, mocked, and rejected.' This, she goes on to explain, is that our pride may be overcome, and that united to Christ we may be made 'humble and mild, clean and holy'. In this our suffering 'our Lord rejoices with pity and compassion', a line which must be linked with the following later in the chapter: 'For he wants us to know that it will all be turned to our honour and profit by the power of his Passion, and to know that we suffered in no way alone, but together with him, and to see in him our foundation.' Being united to Christ in his suffering is central to the whole work of redemption, and our chastisement itself 'becomes gentle and bearable when we are really content with him and with what he does...' 'What penance a man should impose upon himself was not revealed to me... but this was shown, with particular and loving emphasis, that we are to accept and endure humbly whatever penance God himself gives us with his blessed passion ever in mind.' Julian adds that while we are to recognize and accept our chastening the remedy is 'that our Lord is with us, protecting and leading us into the fullness of joy'. And so we are taken to the climax of the chapter: 

'Flee to our Lord and we shall be comforted. Touch him and we shall be made clean. Cling to him and we shall be safe and sound from every kind of danger. For our courteous Lord wills that we should be as at home with him as heart may think or soul may desire.'

If I look back over my own life, with its at times catastrophic (at least from the world's perspective) stumblings and missteps, its meanderings and its outright sins, I can see the precision of Julians insights here. These words, which I first read many years ago, but which I have only gradually come to understand in part, transform everything.

Julian's words put flesh on the bones of Paul's famously disturbing observation "that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who are called according to his purpose." (Romans 8.28) More than that, she is anointing our memories and regrets with hope, and with an unspeakable comfort. Of course we did not understand what was going on at the time; of course we were lost in mire and confusion... Was it not Paul too who said, a few verses earlier, "For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience"? (Romans 8.24-25)

Prayer is the means we have been given, all of us, to bring to God these long memories of pain, and glimpses of sudden and frightening hope; and it is, in the long run, the means we have been given to receive his comfort. It is the great gift of contemplative prayer that we need not understand, need not find the right words - or any words - to explain to God or to ourselves what it is that weighs so heavily on our hearts, to hear Jesus' own invitation to

Come to me, all you that are weary and burdened, 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)

The Peace of God

In his Confessions Augustine describes movingly how God had made him whole after many years of brokenness. 'I find no safe place for myself save in you in whom all my scattered pieces are gathered together,' he writes.

The journey to wholeness, he says, started when he withdrew to the quiet place of sweet solitude within his own heart. There he invited God to speak to him, 'Whisper words of truth in my heart,' he pleaded, 'for you alone speak truth... I shall not turn aside until you gather all that I am into that holy place of peace, rescuing me from the world where I am broken and deformed and giving me new form and new strength.'

Augustine describes that holy place of peace in his commentary on John's Gospel. It is 'that innermost shrine of your deepest self,' he tells us, 'that place of sweet solitude, where there is no weariness, where no bitter thoughts enter, where there is no lurking temptation or heavy sorrow...'

So Augustine bids us: 'Surrender to him now all your futile searching. What is withered in you will flower again. your sickness will be healed. What is faded will be fresh again, and what is warped made whole and strong and sound. And all that is weak in you will not drag you to the grace. But your wholeness will remain with you before God, who remains strong and abides forever.'

Benignus O'Rourke, Finding Your Hidden Treasure: The Way of Silent Prayer

The way of the Jesus Prayer is a way of immense simplicity, a way into silence almost more complete than any other. There are words, yes, but saying the Jesus Prayer, there is nothing we need to do at all; no need to dig for concealed shadow material, no need to prepare the healing of memories. All that is in Jesus' hands. All that is what is meant by mercy. We simply repeat the words of the Prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner in the silence of our own hearts; the words tending always to stillness, to wholeness of mind and spirit, to the peace of God, beyond our understanding...

Unforgettable and shining…

Conservatives look for absolute truth; liberals look for something “real” and authentic. Spouses look for a marriage that will last “’till death do us part.” Believers look for a God who never fails them; scientists look for a universal theory. They are all on the same quest. We are all looking for an immortal diamond: something utterly reliable, something loyal and true, something we can always depend on, something unforgettable and shining.

There is an invitation and an offer for all of these groups from John’s very short Second Letter, when he writes: “There is a truth that lives within us that will be with us forever” (2 John 2). But most of us know very little about this, so we end up as St. Augustine admits in his Confessions: “Late have I loved you, Beauty so very ancient and so ever new. Late have I loved you! You were within, but I was without.”

Richard Rohr, excerpted from Immortal Diamond: the Search for Our True Self (due for publication February 2013)

We are all in the same boat, to begin with. I can remember this quest for “something unforgettable and shining” almost as far back as I can remember anything. Like everyone, I assumed it was outside myself, but I did see even from my early childhood that somehow it was what “made everything work” as I described it to myself.

Thinking it to be outside myself, as I grew up I looked for it in science, art, chemicals, philosophy, sex – everywhere but within. To be honest, I was afraid of what I might find, despite the increasingly reckless experiments I tried.

Gradually, though, I began to find it: not through an increasingly desperate and extreme search for something beyond myself, but truly within, gently, quietly, through prayer and contemplation—not looking for “It” but looking for mercy, for grace; then “the truth that abides in us and will be with us for ever” found me.

It seems to me that only in simultaneously realising that the hollowness, the brokenness, the pain of the world are reflected in me, and that the only response to them is love, however apparently helpless and wounded such loving renders my own heart, that the “unforgettable and shining” opens at the heart’s own core, and reaches out to all creatures, every one.

Swimming in mercy...

…When we think of mercy, we should be thinking first and foremost of a bond, an infallible link of love that holds the created and uncreated realms together. The mercy of God does not come and go, granted to some and refused to others. Why? Because it is unconditional - always there, underlying everything. It is literally the force that holds everything in existence, the gravitational field in which we live and move and have our being. Just like [the] little fish swimnming desperately in search of water, we, too - in the words of Psalm 103 - "swim in mercy as in an endless sea." Mercy is God's innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope

"God's innermost being turned outward..."?

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being... And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth." (John 1.1,2,14)

The mercy of God, in which we swim as in an endless sea, is Christ himself, who says, "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them." and, "I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me." (John 6.56; 17.20,21)

We are not beyond mercy, outside mercy, or bereft of it; nor can we be. When we cry out to Christ for his mercy, we are crying out as those who seek to realise what they already have, like the man who cried out "I believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9.24)

Faithful at any cost?

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 - with thanks to the Henri Nouwen Society

Faithfulness; trust; mercy. It seems to me that these three are inextricably linked. God's mercy, Christ himself, is faithful beyond our imagining, and it is only in him that our own little faithfulness can subsist at all. We trust so little.

Irma Zaleski says, "It is our failure of trust, our turning away from God and focusing on ourselves - our self-centredness - our need to protect ourselves at all cost, which the Fathers considered the root of all sin. Because we are unable to anybody or anything, and, above all else, because we are unable to trust God, we are compelled to reply on our own resources, to attempt to find our own happiness, and to fulfil our own desires and needs. We are imprisoned, stranded on the island of our self. We are all exiles from Paradise."

The only way out is repentance: trusting God in Christ enough to give up struggling, give up our self-reliance, and to cry out unceasingly, like some 21st-century Bartimaeus, for mercy, in whatever words, or wordlessness, we are given...

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…

The very earth of Heaven...

All great spirituality teaches about letting go of what you don’t need and who you are not. Then, when you can get little enough and naked enough and poor enough, you’ll find that the little place where you really are is ironically more than enough and is all that you need. At that place, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect.

That place is called freedom. It’s the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don’t feel the need to eliminate anybody because they’ve come to the place where, as I like to say, everything belongs. To live from this place cuts the roots of violence at their very foundation, for there is not even any basis for fear or anger or protection or hatred. Negativity must be nipped in the bud—that is to say, in the mind.

Richard Rohr

I often think of this strange freedom - as regular readers will remember, there have been times over the seven years I've been blogging here when things have been very much stripped away - and of how often I have found these words of Rohr's to be quite concretely true. (This post details the beginning of these things, and this one the continuation.)

CS Lewis, in The Great Divorce, puts these words into the mouth of one of the saints in Heaven, "There is no meantime... All that is over. We are not playing now..."

Indeed. This is the kind of place Fr Richard's "little place" is, and as he points out, "At that place, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect."

This is not "a" freedom. It is not one of several we may choose amongst. It is freedom, and eventually, it will be all we have. It is, as Lewis saw so clearly, the very earth of Heaven...

The 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.

The choice of term may seem a bit odd. Today “mercy”—along with so many other classic words in our spiritual tradition—has developed a negative connotation. It seems to suggest power and condescension, a transaction between two vastly unequal parties. A friend of mine, in fact, was told by her spiritual director that she should not pray the Jesus Prayer—“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy one me,” the mainstay of Eastern Orthodox contemplative spirituality—because “it reinforces medieval stereotypes of paternalism and powerlessness.” Modern people, this spiritual director felt, need to be told that they are worthy, “that they can stand on their own two feet before God.”

But the word “mercy” comes profoundly attested to in our Judeo-Christian spiritual heritage. Aside from the fact that the Jesus Prayer, hallowed by two millennia of Christian practice, has been consistently singled out... as the most powerful prayer a Christian can pray, we simply cannot get away from the Mercy without getting away from the Bible as well. The word confronts us at every turn, as a living reality of our faith...

Cynthia Bourgeault Mystical Hope: Trusting in the Mercy of God (Cloister Books) pp.20-22

I have to confess, without wishing to be unpleasant to Bourgeault's friend's SD, to finding the idea of standing on my own two feet before God so utterly silly as to be almost funny. This has far less to do with my own ingrained stereotypes of paternalism and powerlessness than with the odd few fleeting little glimpses of God's own Being that have been granted me over the years. The legend of King Canute on the seashore comes to mind.

Cynthia Bourgeault comes closer, in this wonderful little book, than almost anyone else I've read to describing what this way of prayer actually feels like.

Living in the Mercy, since that is what having the Jesus Prayer at the centre of one's spiritual life over al long period actually seems to be, As Bourgeault describes so well in the last few pages of Mystical Hope, we become changed, gradually, at a level which the everyday parts of our minds may come to observe, but which they can never directly access nor control. At this level, all is God's. The part of ourselves that St Paul calls σάρξ, sarx, translated variously as “flesh” (NRSV, KJV etc.) “human nature” (ISV), “sinful nature” (NIV) chunters on, doing what it does, and yet we are no longer under any obligation to take that much notice of its panics and enticements (Romans 8.12). As Bourgeault says, “Hope is not imaginary or illusory. It is that sonar by which the body of Christ holds together and finds its way. If we, as living members of the body of Christ, can surrender our hearts, re-enter the righteousness, and listen for that sonar with all we are worth it will again guide us... to the future for which we are intended. And the body of Christ will live, and thrive, and hold us tenderly in belonging.” (ibid. pp.98-99)

Still thinking about Simone Weil…

God is not an object. How can we expect to test for his presence, expose him to investigation? He holds in the palm of his hand—or so we understand it—all that he has made. How could he be within it, susceptible to perception? Only the Incarnation makes possible the touch on the shoulder, the pierced hand against the tunic, bread and wine—that and the frail aerials of the prophets, picking up, through the hiss and stutter of culture and common knowledge the unmistakable signals of the Spirit…

All else, in our time, is as Eliot saw

…hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

(Four Quartets: The Dry Salvages)

Lord God, give us grace to persevere, discipline to keep on…

I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek out your servant, for I do not forget your commandments. (Psalm 119.176)

Temptations...

If you struggle in temptation and fight against sin because you are in love with an idea you have of yourself as a holy soul or a religious person, you might succeed for a little while, but sooner than later you will fail and fall into sin. And this, in fact, is God's mercy, for you are only flattering the flesh.

If you struggle in temptation and fight against sin because you believe in goodness or morality or the sovereignty of God or because of your duty to observe the state of life you have chosen for yourself, you might succeed for a time, but eventually you will also fail.

But if you don't fight temptation at all, but instead rejoice to find yourself in temptations because you realize that in them God has found you worthy of embracing Christ crucified and sharing in his sufferings, and that this suffering is the resetting of the dingy sack of broken bones that is your mortal nature deformed and miserable in the effects of original sin--a procedure for which there is no anaesthesia—then you have found the remedy for sin and the path from death to life.

Brother Charles

I think this is one of the clearest and most striking explanations of the nature of our struggle with temptation I've ever seen. I don't know why, this Lent, I keep finding myself thinking so much about the redemptive aspects of suffering, but that's just what the Spirit seems to be doing with me...

It seems to me that we often don’t realise that temptation, too, is a way of sharing in Christ's sufferings, since he was tempted (Hebrews 4.15) exactly as we are ourselves. Perhaps this is a way in which we can draw very close to our Lord, as Paul said, “For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ.” (2 Corinthians 1.5)

We usually think of physical suffering when we read Peter’s famous exhortation, “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed.” (1 Peter 4.12-13) Indeed the next few verses seems to imply that that is what Peter had in mind, but the principle applies to moral and emotional suffering just as much...

Once again, I’m amazed at how the Jesus Prayer adapts itself (or we adapt to it?) in these circumstances. I can’t imagine a prayer better suited to being prayed in the grip of this kind of temptation. And if we pray it imagining that we are “a holy soul or a religious person” as Br Charles says, then we will fall, in the mercy of Christ. I know. I’ve been there, more than once!

The Prayer for me is the clearest refuge, the best comfort I know. It is always there because Christ is always there by the power of his Spirit. His steadfast love never fails.

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

Transmission lines...

To listen is very hard, because it asks of us so much interior stability that we no longer need to prove ourselves by speeches, arguments, statements, or declarations.  True listeners no longer have an inner need to make their presence known.   They are free to receive, to welcome, to accept.

Listening is much more than allowing another to talk while waiting for a chance to respond.  Listening is paying full attention to others and welcoming them into our very beings.  The beauty of listening is that, those who are listened to start feeling accepted, start taking their words more seriously and discovering their own true selves.  Listening is a form of spiritual hospitality by which you invite strangers to become friends, to get to know their inner selves more fully, and even to dare to be silent with you...

Listening in the spiritual life is much more than a psychological strategy to help others discover themselves. In the spiritual life the listener is not the ego, which  would like to speak but is trained to restrain itself, but the Spirit of God within us. When we are baptised in the Spirit - that is, when we have received the Spirit of Jesus as the breath of God breathing within us - that Spirit creates in us a sacred space where the other can be received and listened to. The Spirit of Jesus prays in us and listens in us to all who come to us with their sufferings and pains.

When we dare to fully trust in the power of God's Spirit listening in us, we will see true healing occur.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

This seems to be more true than we often realise. Like prayer, there is far more to listening than the conscious mind can comprehend. When we set ourselves truly to listen, we cannot know the power that is released in what seems to us like a passive, vulnerable occupation. In fact it is passive and vulnerable, even weak. As Paul recorded the Lord's words, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." (2 Corinthians 12.9) It is only when our anxious, fiddly minds are out of the way that God can truly work in us, through us, and we become his to use however he needs.

Perhaps this is why penitence us so vital in both prayer and pastoral ministry. It is only when we truly recognise ourselves as sinners that we can see ourselves as channels of grace, mere transmission lines for the power of Christ's mercy...

Judging…

We spend an enormous amount of energy making up our minds about other people. Not a day goes by without somebody doing or saying something that evokes in us the need to form an opinion about him or her. We hear a lot, see a lot, and know a lot. The feeling that we have to sort it all out in our minds and make judgments about it can be quite oppressive.

The desert fathers said that judging others is a heavy burden, while being judged by others is a light one. Once we can let go of our need to judge others, we will experience an immense inner freedom. Once we are free from judging, we will be also free for mercy. Let’s remember Jesus' words: “Do not judge, and you will not be judged” (Matthew 7:1).

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

---

A brother asked Abba Poemen, “If I see my brother sin, is it right to say nothing about it?” The old man replied, “Whenever we cover our brother's sin, God will cover ours; whenever we tell people about our brother's guilt, God will do the same about ours.”

The Paradise of the Desert Fathers

Among the many things people discuss giving up for Lent—chocolate, social media, TV, beer, biscuits, swearing—it’s odd that judging others appears so infrequently. But then, of course, I really mustn’t judge people who give up funny things for Lent, must I?

All the strayed and stolen sheep...

How do we learn to bless, rather than damn, those with whom we disagree, those whom we fear, those who are different? ... All of Creation groans in travail. All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.... To look for hell, not heaven, is a kind of blasphemy, for we are called to live in hope.

Madeline L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow

I have strayed like a lost sheep.
Seek your servant, for I have not forgotten your commands.

Psalm 119.176 NIV

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...

Blood sisters, and brothers...

When God makes a covenant with us, God says: “I will love you with an everlasting love. I will be faithful to you, even when you run away from me, reject me, or betray me.” In our society we don't speak much about covenants; we speak about contracts. When we make a contract with a person, we say: “I will fulfil my part as long as you fulfil yours. When you don't live up to your promises, I no longer have to live up to mine.” Contracts are often broken because the partners are unwilling or unable to be faithful to their terms.

But God didn’t make a contract with us; God made a covenant with us, and God wants our relationships with one another to reflect that covenant. That's why marriage, friendship, life in community are all ways to give visibility to God's faithfulness in our lives together.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

 

We are continually trying to make God in our own image, instead of letting him (re)make us in his. We judge God’s faithfulness by our own faithlessness, God's mercy by our own vindictiveness. But God is not like us, and his covenant is not like our contracts.

 

Jesus spoke of this the night he gave us the Holy Eucharist, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood...” (Luke 22.20) We are living under a new covenant, as the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews wrote (quoting Jeremiah):

This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel
after those days, says the Lord:
I will put my laws in their minds,
and write them on their hearts,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.

In Christ we have a covenant which is written on our very hearts, not some external document. We have become members of his very body, sisters and brothers in blood, his blood. Oh God, give us the grace to live like it!

 

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

 

The Gift of Holiness...

If we are called by God to holiness of life, and if holiness is beyond our natural power to achieve (which it certainly is) then it follows that God himself must give us the light, the strength, and the courage to fulfil the task he requires of us. He will certainly give us the grace we need.

Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness, Bantam Doubleday Dell, p.16

I think sometimes we miss God’s gift of holiness, his grace for healing and growth in Christ, simply because we feel we have to strive for holiness in our own strength, by heroic observances and feats of asceticism, when all the time God is offering us this beautiful thing as a gift of love.

God knows that it is far too easy to take pride in our spiritual achievements. He knows what we are made of, and he doesn’t wish to give us this extra burden of temptation to carry.

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgement following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

Romans 5.15-17

Being hidden...

There is much emphasis on notoriety and fame in our society. Our newspapers and television keep giving us the message: What counts is to be known, praised, and admired, whether you are a writer, an actor, a musician, or a politician.

Still, real greatness is often hidden, humble, simple, and unobtrusive. It is not easy to trust ourselves and our actions without public affirmation. We must have strong self-confidence combined with deep humility. Some of the greatest works of art and the most important works of peace were created by people who had no need for the limelight. They knew that what they were doing was their call, and they did it with great patience, perseverance, and love.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I think this is something we truly need to get hold of, now more than ever. Hiddenness is so alien to our culture, and yet I often think that nothing lasting can really be achieved in the spiritual life without its being hidden from the harsh lights of publicity. At times, it needs to be hidden even from ourselves - as Jesus said, “But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” (Matthew 6.3-4 NIV)

This is one of the things that gives me such an appetite for the solitary life. To pray, to study, with no possibility of reward, no reputation...  I wrote a while ago: “I feel an intense hunger for hiddenness; I long to be like a wren, living out its life deep in an ivied hedgebank, hardly seen among the dense leaves and underscrub. Somehow all this has to do with the heart, too: mine is too full to accomplish anything outwardly, still less to write more for the time being…”

It's difficult to achieve this, too. Our brother St Francis struggled with his longing for solitude and contemplation, and his vocation to preach the Gospel—which inevitably drew him into the public eye, and away from his peace with God.

Elsewhere in the text I’ve quoted at the head of this post, Henri Nouwen wrote:

If indeed the spiritual life is essentially a hidden life, how do we protect this hiddenness in the midst of a very public life? The two most important ways to protect our hiddenness are solitude and poverty. Solitude allows us to be alone with God. There we experience that we belong not to people, not even to those who love us and care for us, but to God and God alone. Poverty is where we experience our own and other people's weakness, limitations, and need for support. To be poor is to be without success, without fame, and without power. But there God chooses to show us God’s love.

Both solitude and poverty protect the hiddenness of our lives.

As always, I struggle with this. It is hard, as I wrote the other day, to balance living a life surrendered to God in prayer with living “in the world”—and yet this balance seems to lie at the heart of the Tertiary vocation. Paul's words keep coming back to me:

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.

Colossians 3.1-3