Distance

Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. (Colossians 3:1-3 NIV)

This is, for many of us, intrinsically a hidden time. We live in varying degrees of isolation, most of us not at work in the physical sense, with most of our usual means of society closed to us - church, the pub, trains and buses, the everyday chat of shop and office - and we are confined to distance.

We fret to escape lockdown. We talk - at a distance - of what we may do when this is all over, where we'll go, whom we'll see. Some of us bend the rules; a few of us break them, and find themselves rightly in trouble with the police.

But Henri Nouwen wrote, in Bread for the Journey,

The largest part of Jesus' life was hidden. Jesus lived with his parents in Nazareth, "under their authority" (Luke 2:51), and there "increased in wisdom, in stature, and in favour with God and with people" (Luke 2:52). When we think about Jesus we mostly think about his words and miracles, his passion, death, and resurrection, but we should never forget that before all of that Jesus lived a simple, hidden life in a small town, far away from all the great people, great cities, and great events. Jesus' hidden life is very important for our own spiritual journeys. If we want to follow Jesus by words and deeds in the service of his Kingdom, we must first of all strive to follow Jesus in his simple, unspectacular, and very ordinary hidden 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...

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.

We are in a time of solitude and poverty, all of us: even if we are stuck in a crowded house with three generations and someone with frank symptoms; even if we have a good pension, or a conveniently work-from-home job. The things we depended upon for our identity, our place in society, for our sense of our selves, have gone as surely as they go for those living the vowed religious life, or for those who have lost home and livelihood in some personal disaster. We are bereft.

digitalnun, in this morning's Easter post, writes:

This morning, as we think about those women meeting Jesus as they come away from the tomb, it may be helpful to consider the obvious. They did not find Jesus where they expected to find him. They found him - or rather, he found them - where they did not expect, as they were coming away, disappointed at not being able to fulfil the task they had laid upon themselves. Sometimes we have to learn that what we think is important isn't; that what God wills is ultimately best for us all; and that we shall meet God at a time and place of his choosing, not ours. We just have to be ready - and that is undoubtedly the hardest task of all.

We grieve for our closed churches, our empty meeting houses. But perhaps there is something going on behind the scenes. Perhaps if we keep very still, the shy Spirit may touch us in the distance, closer than breathing, with the softest wing of grace.

This morning in the silence...

This morning in the silence I was struck by the fact that - although I often feel that I struggle with maintaining a little life of prayer and "keeping low" in what some would describe as the privilege of my life here in the quiet west country - in many ways this is no more than our human susceptibility to what is traditionally called temptation. We are frail, temporary creatures, and we react in often very predictable ways to our own circumstances.

When we find ourselves in hardship, whether through poverty, ill-health or any other trouble, we tend towards bitterness, which keeps us from appreciating, or even seeing, let alone gratitude for, God's blessings; though admittedly they may be hidden and obscure, "treasures of darkness" (Isaiah 45.3 NRSV).

When we find ourselves living peaceful lives of relative comfort (what the Bible often refers to as "prosperity", rather  than the Fortune 500 variety!) we tend towards complacency, as though we could somehow take credit for our good fortune - a point of view that a sudden illness will quickly correct. They are God's blessings anyway, and he knows why he has given them to us for a while.

It's coming to seem to me that all we can do is grow where we are planted (1 Corinthians 7.17-24) and remain there to grow the best fruit we can.*

George Fox, as so often, has a word for this:

Keep in the wisdom of God that spreads over all the earth, the wisdom of the creation, that is pure. Live in it; that is the word of the Lord God to you all, do not abuse it; and keep down and low; and take heed of false joys that will change. (Qfp 19.32)

as does the Psalmist:

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
    my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
    too great and too marvellous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
    like a weaned child with its mother;
    my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord
    from this time on and forevermore.  

(Psalm 131)

* Unless indeed we are direct victims of abuse or injustice, in which case God's call is presumably to come out of there, and our duty to follow; but that is another story.

O Radix Jesse

O Radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum,
super quem continebunt reges os suum,
quem Gentes deprecabuntur:
veni ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare.

O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples;
before you kings will shut their mouths,
to you the nations will make their prayer:
Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.

---

There is no mention of any moral worthiness, achievement or preparedness in Mary, only humble trust and surrender. She gives us all, therefore, a bottomless hope in our own little state. If we ourselves try to "manage" God, or manufacture our own worthiness by any performance principle whatsoever, we will never bring forth the Christ but only ourselves.

Mary does not manage, fix, control or "perform" in any way. She just says "Yes!" and brings forth the abundance that Isaiah promises (Isaiah 48:17-19). This is really quite awesome, and counters any economic notion of earning or performing.

Adapted from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr

I think that we have hardly thought through the immense implications of the mystery of the incarnation. Where is God? God is where we are weak, vulnerable, small and dependent. God is where the poor are, the hungry, the handicapped, the mentally ill, the elderly, the powerless. How can we come to know God when our focus is elsewhere, on success, influence, and power? I increasingly believe that our faithfulness will depend on our willingness to go where there is brokenness, loneliness, and human need.

If the church has a future it is a future with the poor in whatever form. Each one of us is seriously searching to live and grow in this belief, and by friendship we can support each other. I realize that the only way for us to stay well in the midst of the many "worlds" is to stay close to the small, vulnerable child that lives in our hearts and in every other human being. Often we do not know that the Christ child is within us. When we discover him we can truly rejoice.

Henri Nouwen, Sabbatical Journey: The Diary of His Final Year

I am reminded of St. Bonaventure’s devotion to the poverty of the Blessed Virgin (see e.g. The Life of St. Francis, Ch.7) who brought nothing to her encounter with the angel, and asked for nothing, but simply surrendered. How can we respond, except in silence, and the poverty of our own hearts?

Hidden Things

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

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

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

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

McColman again:

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

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

"Sinners make the best contemplatives"

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Peaceable Kingdom…

When we think of oceans and mountains, forests and deserts, trees, plants and animals, the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the galaxies, as God's creation, waiting eagerly to be “brought into the same glorious freedom as the children of God” (Roman 8:21), we can only stand in awe of God's majesty and God's all- embracing plan of salvation. It is not just we, human beings, who wait for salvation in the midst of our suffering; all of creation groans and moans with us longing to reach its full freedom.

In this way we are indeed brothers and sisters not only of all other men and women in the world but also of all that surrounds us. Yes, we have to love the fields full of wheat, the snow-capped mountains, the roaring seas, the wild and tame animals, the huge redwoods, and the little daisies. Everything in creation belongs, with us, to the large family of God…

All of creation belongs together in the arms of its Creator. The final vision is that not only will all men and women recognise that they are brothers and sisters called to live in unity but all members of God's creation will come together in complete harmony. Jesus the Christ came to realise that vision. Long before he was born, the prophet Isaiah saw it:

The wolf will live with the lamb,
the panther lie down with the kid,
calf, lion and fat-stock beast together,
with a little boy to lead them.
The cow and the bear will graze,
their young will lie down together.
The lion will eat hay like the ox.
The infant will play over the den of the adder;
the baby will put his hand into the viper's lair.
No hurt, no harm will be done
on all my holy mountain,
for the country will be full of knowledge of Yahweh
as the waters cover the sea.

(Isaiah 11:6-9)

We must keep this vision alive…

Long before Jesus was born the prophet Isaiah had a vision of Christ’s great unifying work of salvation. Many years after Jesus died, John, the beloved disciple, had another but similar vision: He saw a new heaven and a new earth. All of creation had been transformed, dressed with immortality to be the perfect bride of Christ. In John’s vision the risen Christ speaks from his throne, saying: “Look, I am making the whole of creation new. …. Look, here God lives among human beings. He will make his home among them; they will be his people, and he will be their God, God-with-them. He will wipe away all tears from their eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness or pain. The world of the past has gone” (Revelation 21:5; 21:3-4).

Both Isaiah and John open our eyes to the all-inclusive nature of Christ’s saving work…

The marvellous vision of the peaceable Kingdom, in which all violence has been overcome and all men, women, and children live in loving unity with nature, calls for its realisation in our day-to-day lives. Instead of being an escapist dream, it challenges us to anticipate what it promises. Every time we forgive our neighbour, every time we make a child smile, every time we show compassion to a suffering person, every time we arrange a bouquet of flowers, offer care to tame or wild animals, prevent pollution, create beauty in our homes and gardens, and work for peace and justice among peoples and nations we are making the vision come true.

We must remind one another constantly of the vision. Whenever it comes alive in us we will find new energy to live it out, right where we are. Instead of making us escape real life, this beautiful vision gets us involved.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

We are all together in this now, we followers of Christ. This is the judgement we await at Advent, a judgement of mercy, of endless grace.

We feel so helpless when we look at the suffering in the world, the misunderstandings, the betrayals, the tragic confusions behind each suicide, the cruelty and rejection faced by those who love and trust, the small, the weak, the dependent—children, animals, the poor.

Nouwen’s words here remind us that there is always something we can do, small as it may seem to us. It is love that matters. “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” (1 John 4.16) However poor, however baffled, we can love. This very emptiness, this helplessness we feel may be our greatest asset in the economy of Christ, who said himself that, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…”

Maranatha!

"Come, Lord Jesus" is a leap into the kind of freedom and surrender that is rightly called the virtue of hope. The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves.

We are able to trust that the Lord will come again, just as Jesus has come into our past, into our private dilemmas, and into our suffering world. Our Christian past then becomes our Christian prologue, and "Come, Lord Jesus" is not a cry of desperation but an assured shout of cosmic hope!

Adapted from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr, p. 5

I think this may be one of the longest lessons to learn in this life of prayer. To relinquish the longing for closure, resolution, satisfaction is a fierce kind of poverty; Lady Poverty can be a passionate, and unexpected, lover!

A Bright Sadness…

I’ve been reading Irma Zaleski’s just-published book Living the Jesus Prayer, which I would encourage anyone interested in this way of praying to read.

She says (pp.44-45):

The Jesus Prayer, because it is a path of reality, is a way of learning and accepting the tremendous truth, too often forgotten, that “only God is good.” (Matthew 19:17) We cannot be good, because we do not really know what good is. We can never comprehend the nature of God’s infinite goodness and love. We cannot be, strictly speaking, like God. No effort of our own can make us so…

I think it is true to say that as we walk the way of prayer, as we become more open to God, as we grow closer to him, we become more and more aware of how great an abyss separates us from God…

This longing, this sense of separation from God, is the heart of all true repentance. It is often a source of sadness for us, at times even of tears, that we seem to be so far away from what we have been called to be, so disappointing to ourselves and God. The Fathers often called it “bright sadness,” and considered it a great gift to receive, for it brings us always before the face of God. It teaches us the meaning of mercy and fills us with joy.

These word’s of Zaleski’s say what I have been wanting so much to say here, and have been quite unable to describe in my own words.

These last few weeks have been a strangely painful time, and yet good also. Irma Zaleski says, in the previous chapter:

The way of the Jesus prayer has been called “white martyrdom.” It is the way of the Cross, because there is no greater pain than to stand in the total poverty of our human weakness,to see clearly our misery, our inability to be good. The temptation to judge ourselves, to hate ourselves, would be irresistible if we did not know and had not experienced the merciful, healing power of Jesus.

I think that what has happened has been that this year, with the pilgrimages both to Walsingham and to Medjugorje, I have come so close to the presence of God that I have really not been able to bear the sight of myself in that mirror of glory. It has taken a long while, and much—though perhaps not enough—prayer to come to the point where I can write these words.

God knows where we go from here. I do know that the call (back) to the Jesus Prayer has been growing stronger and stronger since our return from Medjugorje. (The arrival of Living the Jesus Prayer in the post from Amazon, where I had pre-ordered it months ago and then forgotten all about, was one of those striking “coincidences” that God loves so much.)

I will try to be less sporadic in documenting this odd journey, in case it might help anyone reading this blog. It’s often hard, as I said above, to find words for this kind of thing; perhaps Irma Zaleski has given me a lever to crack the door of speechlessness a little ajar…

Hiddenness & Poverty

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…

One of the reasons that hiddenness is such an important aspect of the spiritual life is that it keeps us focused on God. In hiddenness we do not receive human acclamation, admiration, support, or encouragement. In hiddenness we have to go to God with our sorrows and joys and trust that God will give us what we most need.
In our society we are inclined to avoid hiddenness. We want to be seen and acknowledged. We want to be useful to others and influence the course of events. But as we become visible and popular, we quickly grow dependent on people and their responses and easily lose touch with God, the true source of our being. Hiddenness is the place of purification. In hiddenness we find our true selves…

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…

When we enter into solitude to be with God alone, we quickly discover how dependent we are.  Without the many distractions of our daily lives, we feel anxious and tense.  When nobody speaks to us, calls on us, or needs our help, we start feeling like nobodies.  Then we begin wondering whether we are useful, valuable, and significant.  Our tendency is to leave this fearful solitude quickly and get busy again to reassure ourselves that we are “somebodies.”  But that is a temptation, because what makes us somebodies is not other people's responses to us but God's eternal love for us. 

To claim the truth of ourselves we have to cling to our God in solitude as to the One who makes us who we are. 

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey, by Henri J.M. Nouwen , © 1997 Harper San Francisco

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I have found that these passages from the Henri Nouwen Meditation & Reflection emails over the past few days explain better than anything I’ve read why I’ve found myself increasing tending to withdraw slightly from public involvement with things, from blogging – at least as regularly as I sometimes have – and even from some bits of church life.

Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” (Matthew 5.3) When know we have nothing we have not been given, know we are nothing, then God can flood the heart with his mercy, with his Holy Spirit, with Christ to whom the Spirit bears witness (John 14.25), and there is the Kingdom of Heaven in all its now-ness, its kairos. This is why I have sometimes found it, odd though it sounds, hard to cope with good times. God’s presence is so obvious, so close, in times of real hardship and distress that it feels almost as if one may lose him in the days of wine and roses.

God grant me sufficient hiddenness always. As I said once, quite a while ago, I do long to be more like ivy, that flourishes in shadowed places.

O Clavis David…

O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel;
qui aperis, et nemo claudit;
claudis, et nemo aperit:
veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris,
sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;
you open and no one can shut;
you shut and no one can open:
Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,
those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me…he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.” (Isaiah 61:1)

In this reading from Isaiah, the prophet describes the coming Servant of Yahweh.  It is precisely this quote that Jesus first uses to announce the exact nature of his own ministry (Luke 4:18-19).  In each case Jesus describes his work as moving outside of polite and proper limits and boundaries to reunite things that have been marginalized or excluded by society:  the poor, the imprisoned, the blind, the downtrodden.

Jesus’ ministry is not to gather the so-called good into a private country club but to reach out to those on the edge and on the bottom, those who are “last” to tell them they are, in fact, first!  That is almost the very job description of the Holy Spirit, and therefore of Jesus… and for that matter of us as bearers of Emmanuel, God with us!

Adapted from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr, pp. 36-37

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

(St. Teresa of Avila)

O Radix Jesse…

O Radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum,
super quem continebunt reges os suum,
quem Gentes deprecabuntur:
veni ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare.

O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples;
before you kings will shut their mouths,
to you the nations will make their prayer:
Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.

There is no mention of any moral worthiness, achievement or preparedness in Mary, only humble trust and surrender.  She gives us all, therefore, a bottomless hope in our own little state.  If we ourselves try to “manage” God, or manufacture our own worthiness by any performance principle whatsoever, we will never bring forth the Christ but only ourselves.

Mary does not manage, fix, control or “perform” in any way.  She just says “Yes!” and brings forth the abundance that Isaiah promises (Isaiah 48:17-19).  This is really quite awesome, and counters any economic notion of earning or performing.

Adapted from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr, p. 32

I think that we have hardly thought through the immense implications of the mystery of the incarnation. Where is God? God is where we are weak, vulnerable, small and dependent. God is where the poor are, the hungry, the handicapped, the mentally ill, the elderly, the powerless. How can we come to know God when our focus is elsewhere, on success, influence, and power? I increasingly believe that our faithfulness will depend on our willingness to go where there is brokenness, loneliness, and human need.

If the church has a future it is a future with the poor in whatever form. Each one of us is seriously searching to live and grow in this belief, and by friendship we can support each other. I realize that the only way for us to stay well in the midst of the many “worlds” is to stay close to the small, vulnerable child that lives in our hearts and in every other human being. Often we do not know that the Christ child is within us. When we discover him we can truly rejoice.

Henri Nouwen, Sabbatical Journey: The Diary of His Final Year (Sunday December 24, 1995, Freiburg, Germany). © Henri J.M. Nouwen. Published by The Crossroad Publishing Company.

I love these words—I am reminded of St. Bonaventure’s devotion to the poverty of the Blessed Virgin (see e.g. The Life of St. Francis, Ch.7) who brought nothing to her encounter with the angel, and asked for nothing, but simply surrendered. How can we respond, except in silence?

Bare necessity…

Contemplation is the awareness and realization, even in some sense experience, of what each Christian obscurely believes: “It is now no longer that I live but Christ lives in me.”

Hence contemplation is more than a consideration of abstract truths about God, more even than affective meditation on things we believe. It is awakening, enlightenment and the amazing intuitive grasp by which love gains certitude of God’s creative and dynamic intervention in our daily life. Hence contemplation does not simply “find” a clear idea of God, and confine him within the limits of that idea, and hold him there as a prisoner to whom it can always return. On the contrary, contemplation is carried away by him into his own realm, his own mystery and his own freedom. It is a pure and a virginal knowledge, poor in concepts, poorer still in reasoning, but able, by its very poverty and purity, to follow the Word “wherever he may go.”

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, New Directions Books, 1961, pp. 5-6

It is that poverty and purity towards which we must always be straining, it seems to me. It’s that which underlies all Francis’ romance with Lady Poverty, and all the Franciscan teachings regarding simplicity and poverty. We sometimes forget, Franciscans as much as others, that simplicity is far more about purity and contemplation than it is about lifestyle. St Francis was, for all his preaching, and his founding of the Orders that bear his name, a contemplative at heart.

Even saying this somehow muddles what I’m trying to say. This is why, perhaps, this inescapable muddle-headedness of mine, God has called me so clearly to the practice of the Jesus Prayer. Here, for me at least, is the very definition of “a pure and a virginal knowledge, poor in concepts, poorer still in reasoning, but able, by its very poverty and purity, to follow the Word ‘wherever he may go.’” It is as necessary to me now as the air I breathe; perhaps, even, rather more necessary in the long run…

Losing it...

Courage is connected with taking risks. Jumping the Grand Canyon on a motorbike, coming over Niagara Falls in a barrel, or crossing the ocean in a rowboat are called courageous acts because people risk their lives by doing these things. But none of these daredevil acts comes from the centre of our being. They all come from the desire to test our physical limits and to become famous and popular.

Spiritual courage is something completely different. It is following the deepest desires of our hearts at the risk of losing fame and popularity. It asks of us the willingness to lose our temporal lives in order to gain eternal life...

The society in which we live suggests in countless ways that the way to go is up. Making it to the top, entering the limelight, breaking the record - that's what draws attention, gets us on the front page of the newspaper, and offers us the rewards of money and fame.

The way of Jesus is radically different. It is the way not of upward mobility but of downward mobility. It is going to the bottom, staying behind the sets, and choosing the last place! Why is the way of Jesus worth choosing? Because it is the way to the Kingdom, the way Jesus took, and the way that brings everlasting life.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

All too often, I think, we Christians are the last to realise that what society regards as misfortune may be for us the greatest blessing. The Beatitudes (Matthew 5) spell this out for us, and yet we consistently don't get it. We interpret grief as something to be "got over", poverty as "an attack from the devil." Doing so, I think we risk missing the blessings Jesus has promised us - cf. Luke 18:29-30.

We need to have the courage of our convictions, we Franciscans especially. Our faithfulness is not to the world's values, nor even Christ's, but to Jesus himself. We cannot go on looking for the world's rewards, judging ourselves by the world's standards. We have to be happy being a bit strange, raggedy even, the kind of people who get misunderstood, but without rancour and without affectation. Our only rewards are the ones we have been promised. This is the way that Jesus took, and we can only follow, surely?

Why are we waiting?

"It comes like a gentle dew" (Isaiah 45:8). Grace comes when you stop being preoccupied and stop thinking that by your own meddling, managing and manufacturing you can create it.

We're trained to be managers, to organize life, to make things happen. That's what's built our culture, and it's not all bad. But if you transfer that to the spiritual life, it's pure heresy. It doesn't work. You can't manage and manoeuvre and manipulate spiritual energy. It's a matter of letting go. It's a matter of getting the self out of the way, and becoming smaller, as John the Baptist said. It's a matter of the great kenosis, as Paul talks about in Philippians 2:6-11, the emptying of the self so that there's room for another.

It's very hard for us not to fix and manage life and to wait upon it, "like a gentle dew."

From Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr, with thanks to inward/outward

I think this is, for me, the hardest lesson. When I read Psalm 119:105, "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path", I always want a pocket GPS receiver, or at least a folding map, rather what's promised in the psalm, which would have been the little, glimmering patch of light shed by an oil lamp such as the Hebrews used, barely enough to show the next step on the path.

Our waiting is our poverty; our willingness to wait is our acceptance of our own emptiness, our almost complete lack of the riches of foreknowledge. God alone truly knows what is to come (Romans 8:29; 11:2). We exist on the uncertain shoreline of the future - we are creatures of the tidemark, between the solid land of what has been, and the unthinkable currents of time itself. 

God, grant me the grace to wait for grace itself - take from me my constant fretting, and teach me how to simply let you be God. Please.

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…

Precious poverty…

Above all else St. Francis stands for a certain kind of love, a love that empties itself, a love that is so secure that it can be poor. It can let go of its reputation, securities, comforts, and money; because it has found its riches and comforts on another level.

In every age, Francis will be called the little poor man (“IL Poverello”). He was free enough to walk out of the system of rewards, status and security in 13th Century Italy.  He changed sides intentionally.  I remember when my novice master in 1961 told us, almost whispering, “We really are communists!’’  Francis named our community “the brothers of the lower class” (friars minor). Today we call that making a “preferential option for the poor,” and people think it is something new and dangerous.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 275, day 286

Francis was right. Our poverty, our willingness to go without “reputation, securities, comforts, and money” really is our most precious possession in this world. With this power at our disposal, we are invincible, though the world might see us as pitiably insignificant. We are like Christ on the road to the Cross, or like St. Paul, when he wrote:

I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me… (Philippians 4.11-13)

Kinds of simplicity…

One biblical description of poverty is simplicity. People poor in this way are centred in chosen values instead of possessions. And because their life is so centred in clear values—usually God, family, and physical work—they normally don't need to compensate by spending their afternoons in shopping malls, buying more things, or filling up their boredom with distractions.

Few things are needed or desired by the one who lives simply because life is centred on another level of value. And maybe it isn't always specifically religious; maybe it's music, art, nature, volunteerism, or working for a great ideal.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 254, day 265 - Source: Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction

This is one of the best expressions I’ve encountered of the very practical call to simplicity that many of us seem to stumble across on the way, if we seek to follow Francis on the way of the Cross. As Rohr points out, it isn’t in itself specifically Franciscan; it isn’t even specifically Christian, though as many artists, writers, and maybe particularly musicians have discovered over the years, it’s a hard road without a lived and passionate faith to strengthen you…

Brother Ramon SSF says (Franciscan Spirituality, p. 68):

In the Church… we are confronted by the fearful and blazing light of Francis. We can either turn away like the rich young man faced by Jesus’ radical demand, or allow the Franciscan light to dispel our avaricious darkness…

It was not that Francis was a social reformer or an ideological politician warning what love of money would do to the fabric of our society. Rather, he was a follower of Jesus who saw what it would do to spiritual awareness and sensitivity.

The compulsive worship of capital leads the individual and society to a denial of the compassion that relinquishes more than is necessary and shares in simplicity.

It is all there in the gospel. Jesus preached and lived such radical simplicity clearly, and Francis showed it could be done. But no doubt we shall find ways to evade them both!

Br. Ramon has put his finger on it. The Franciscan, the gospel, call to simplicity is not all call to change society—how could it be?—but a call to rescue ourselves from the sinking ship, to put put out the call to everyone we meet, “Save yourselves!”

The Beginning of Blessedness…

The dark night is not an abstract notion on some list of spiritual experiences every seeker is supposed to have. The dark night descends on a soul only when everything else has failed. When you are no longer the best meditator in the class because your meditation produces absolutely nothing. When prayer evaporates on your tongue and you have nothing left to say to God. When you are not even tempted to return to a life of worldly pleasure because the world has proven empty and yet taking another step through the void of the spiritual life feels futile because you are no good at it and it seems that God has given up on you, anyway.

This, says John, is the beginning of blessedness. This is the choiceless choice when the soul can do nothing but surrender.

(Source: Dark Night of the Soul: St. John of the Cross)

Mirabai Starr, with thanks to inward/outward

This fits closely, it seems to me, with my post on Monday. There is so much we do not understand, cannot understand, of God’s ways with man and time. We simply do not have the senses required to perceive it—we might as well try and see ELF radiation with the naked eye. All we can perceive are the effects God has on the heart of man—ultimately I think, what we know as the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5.22-23).

All our prayer is to be prayed in the dark, then; all the light we know is the light of Christ, and that the patch directly before our feet, the next step (Psalm 119.105)

Don’t think, though, that all this is something esoteric, reserved for the special people, the chosen ones. All it is is love. David had it right:

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
   my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
   too great and too marvellous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
   like a weaned child with its mother;
   my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.

(Psalm 131)

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

Stop counting…

The most important, the most real, and lasting work of the Christian is accomplished in the depths of his own soul. It cannot be seen by anyone, even by himself. It is known only to God. The work is not so much a matter of fidelity to visible and general standards, as of faith: the interior, anguished, almost desperately solitary act by which we affirm our total subjection to God by grasping his word...

Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness, Image Books, 1963, p. 56.

It’s as if what is unbreakable—the very pulse of life—waits for everything else to be torn away, and then in the bareness that only silence and suffering and great love can expose, it dares to speak through us and to us. It seems to say, if you want to last, hold on to nothing. If you want to know love, let in everything. If you want to feel the presence of everything, stop counting the things that break along the way.

Mark Nepo, with thanks to Inward/Outward—source: www.marknepo.com

Hiddenness, even from oneself. Is that what it comes down to? The Spirit’s work in the depths beyond the reach of self-knowledge, analysis. “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 8.27) To lose everything, even one’s own sense of what is going on in one’s own heart, to consciously allow the tearing away of all that is not God—surely that is the furthest reach of faith, beyond which is no-thing but God.

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