Silence and waiting

In the silence there is only God; God in the fabric of attention, in the pattern of breathing, in the texture of the air and the body's weight.

But if we are attentive we'll see that we keeping turning away: to thoughts, to desires, to anxieties, routines - almost anything rather than staying still in the silence. We continually prefer things to their source.

But if we keep watch in the stillness, holding the silence in our own quiet, then we'll find there a presence that is waiting, always. 

"Therefore the LORD waits to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show mercy to you. For the LORD is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him." (Isaiah 30:18 NRSV)

The weight of light

As long as I can remember I have struggled to put words to what I have seen - what I have come to know - inwardly.

Before I turned five, I contracted meningitis, and spent what would have been my first year of school slowly recovering. I spent some of the most peaceful and untroubled hours of my life lying on a rug by the old apple trees in the orchard at the back of our house, under the endless vault of the open sky, listening to distant aircraft passing high overhead, or on a flaking stone bench on the patio, watching the little velvety red mites scampering in the sunlight. Time was unlike anything I'd known before, an open ground of appearing, empty of thought, mostly, but fertile with becoming.

But there was no way to speak of this time, no way to ask anyone what it was I had come to know. It was many years before I read anything I could connect with those days, and with the moments of often unsought stillness and illumination that recurred throughout my early years. And despite reading TS Eliot and CS Lewis and RS Thomas, it wasn't until I learned the Jesus Prayer from Fr Francis Horner SSM at Willen Priory at the age of nearly 30 that I came to realise that it was God I had found in the silence. 

Now, it is always hard to write, even to think, of these experiences. Prose is not built to carry such things: it buckles under the weight of light. Truth cannot be set out in static, logical propositions: definitions and categories are parched and rotted through by the actinic light of what merely is.

All we can do, it seems to me, is point out what it is not. Not structured, not hierarchical, normative, dogmatic. It is not the object of sentences. Thought fails. 

It is only in Christ that the light becomes human enough to touch; and even then, on the Mount of Transfiguration the light undid the three disciples (Luke 9:28ff). It will undo us if we stay still long enough, unknowing. These times outside time are perhaps our little models of the Cross; our "white martyrdom" of prayer that draws us inexorably back, even when we try to turn away. Christ is faithful, even when we are not. 

Paul wrote, "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." (Galatians 2:20 NIV)

The last resort of the helpless

Prayer is something deeper than words. It is present in the soul before it has been formulated in words. And it abides in the soul after the last words of prayer have passed over our lips. 

Prayer is an attitude of our hearts, an attitude of mind. Prayer is a definite attitude of our hearts toward God, an attitude which He in heaven immediately recognizes as prayer, as an appeal to His heart. Whether it takes the form of words or not, does not mean anything to God, only to ourselves. 

What is this spiritual condition? What is that attitude of heart which God recognizes as prayer? ... 

In the first place, helplessness. This is unquestionably the first and the surest indication of a praying heart. As far as I can see, prayer has been ordained only for the helpless. It is the last resort of the helpless. Indeed, the very last way out. We try everything before we finally resort to prayer. 

This is not only true of us before our conversion. Prayer is our last resort also throughout our whole Christian life. I know very well that we offer many and beautiful prayers, both privately and publicly, without helplessness as the impelling power. But I am not at all positive that this is prayer. 

Prayer and helplessness are inseparable. Only he who is helpless can truly pray.

Ole Hallesby, Prayer (1931) pp.10-11 

We grow up learning to admit to almost anything but helplessness. "God helps those who help themselves!" we are taught, even though there is no such verse in all of Scripture. But helping ourselves is really no more than grasping - John Keats' "irritable reaching after fact and reason" - instead of simply waiting in the stillness of longed-for grace. Oliver Murray writes, 

We live in a world in which we are very good at grasping... 

Today, perhaps more than ever, it is about learning to receive the world — reality itself — as gift. Creation points beyond itself, not because we force it to, but because it comes from the hand of a Creator. Christ tells us, "Seek, and you will find." But Christian seeking is not the same thing as grasping. Sometimes we have to become quiet enough to notice what has been there all along. 

"We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us...  And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit..." (Romans 8:26-27 NIV). To remain still, in the open acknowledgement of our own helplessness, is the very heart of prayer. And it's for this reason that contemplative prayer, and especially hesychasm, the prayer of helpless stillness, is so often the shortest way in Christ to God - to the ground of all that is given, of all that is. 

No purchase on borderless infinity

Nicholas [of Cusa] is thoroughgoing: we are ignorant concerning God and the world and Christ. His starting point is reminiscent of Gregory of Nyssa: we are to explore the implications of divine infinity. Knowledge requires boundaries to things that are to be named and measured, whose relations and distinctions it explores. Knowledge simply has no purchase on borderless infinity. 

JP Williams, Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality, p.103

Prayer - at least, contemplative prayer - is to put ourselves, as comprehensively as we are able, beyond boundaries. We are finite, bounded creatures; yet we are curiously able to reach beyond ourselves, not by knowledge or will, but by yearning, by love. 

John Keats once wrote, in a letter to his brothers,

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

The Complete Works of John Keats: Poems, Plays & Personal Letters, p.763

For Keats, "the sense of Beauty" seems to have given him the beginnings of a "purchase on borderless infinity" - at any rate, he has learned the limitations of knowledge, and of the wonderfully expressed "irritable reaching after fact and reason". 

"All our steps are ordered by the LORD; how then can we understand our own ways?" (Proverbs 20:24 NRSV) Our unknowing extends even to our own actions and intentions. There is not only nothing we can think of God: there is nothing we can do to search him out. All we can do is sit still, and call this stillness prayer.

The author of The Cloud of Unknowing (Ch.6) wrote, "God can be loved, but not thought. By love, God can be embraced and held, but not by thinking..." And this is the point of our prayer: to remain still, in silence, allows the heart to find the empty places that open up within itself. Only when we cease trying to think of God can God be found. In the self-repeating words of the Jesus Prayer, or in the wordlessness of centering prayer, the irritable scratching of the mind after form and definition fails, and love floods in.

If we are to speak of God

If we are to speak of God as he is, then, we need to check what we say as often as possible against the touchstone of our experience of living towards holy encounter... God in Godself is beyond not just our language but our minds. We, who stand under God, don’t have the kind of perspective that would allow us to understand God...

In the same way, if you think about individual words and how we know what they mean, you’ll see that they work by dividing reality up into identifiable bits. Definitions enable us to home in on the right bit of reality – so that we can distinguish between a chair and a bed, for example, or between nutritious plants and poisonous ones. Words are a little bit like the machines that slice salami: they cut up reality into digestible chunks. But God isn’t a ‘bit of reality’. God is the source of the whole thing. So it’s not surprising that words won’t quite work properly when it comes to God.

JP Williams, Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality (introduction)

We cannot go on referring to God as though God were something we had thought up, an optional extra to a real life lived among real things. God is not like that, not even remotely. God is no thing - no thing at all, but the open ground in which what is comes to be.. God is far beyond things, and in him all things live and move and have their being. (Acts 17:28)

But how does this realisation work? For a long time now I have been skirting the wilderness - since the recent pandemic, really. I have defended myself against the wilderness with too many words; and it is in the wilderness that God waits, and always has done. Sarah Bessey: "There isn’t anywhere you’ve been and there isn’t anywhere you’re going where you’re not at home in God’s love. The wilderness is home to God, even the wilderness inside you. Your life is already a place where God is quite at home." (Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith, p.64)

To stand still in love, not in understanding - I'm coming to realise after all this time that that is the only opening to grace. What we are is too fragile, too malleable to do otherwise. As TS Eliot wrote in 'Burnt Norton', "humankind cannot bear very much reality." It is only in admitting my own unknowing that I can listen intently enough into the silence to hear the approach of grace.

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.”

What we really are

We pay attention to our own true nature and by becoming fully conscious of the union of our nature with Christ, we become fully ourselves.

John Main, Word into Silence, p.18

 

The idea of time has many expressions, from chronological to biological, emotional to cosmic. We sometimes feel we have lived a lifetime in a moment. We can feel time as a crucifixion or as a resurrection. The vast figures measuring cosmic time in an expanding universe can seem overwhelming but the few years of a human life can seem more significant and precious. Time and mortality live out the drama of birth and death and the painful mystery of separation. In the light of faith we come by stages to see the all-pervading mystery of union…

This consummation of union, whether it is called nirvana, liberation from rebirth, enlightenment, moksha or heaven is part of the common ground of all religious wisdom when we understand religion in its mystical dimension. It refers to the experience of oneness, the transcendence of the ego’s centre of consciousness, the transformation of the dualistic mind, the movement from the mind’s self-mirroring complexities into the simplicity and pure vision of the heart, the non-duality of the spirit. With a silent passion deeper than their words and differences, all religions point to this. If they do indeed teach this way and not just pay lip service to it, religion offers our often sad and battered humanity a reasonable and empowering hope.

We both lose and find ourselves in the otherness of ultimate reality. This is easy to say but it is a hard paradox to wrestle with. It demands a deepening faith commitment. When the master class of life has taught us enough, commitment meets detachment and solitude, the recognition and acceptance of our uniqueness becomes more attractive and even easier. We gradually withdraw from unnecessary activity and distraction. We become freer from compulsions and addictions.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, p.76-77

What we really are is this. We are not what we think we are, frail isolated intelligences trapped in a zero-sum game of mere survival, creatures of allegiances and enmities, just barely hanging on. We belong. We are part of it all, wavelets on a limitless ocean of grace.

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

Faith is no more, perhaps, than this radical open-heartedness, this helpless surrender to what is, in David Jones’ words, “actually loved and known”. All our practice, all our patience and all our prayers come down to this simple oneness. What we used to be is dispersed, patched and rotted through with light. None of the old certainties can hold. They don’t need to: this trackless brightness beyond the memory of shorelines is the waking heart itself, nothing more.

Silence and language

Even in silence, the linguistic apparatus of our brain continues in the background wash of thought. Even when we avoid the incessant temptation to follow, to identify with thoughts as they arise, we know they are there, spinning their webs of language in the corners of our awareness like spiders in the corners of the window frame.

We can attend to our breathing, to our proprioception, to the sensations of our body resting where it rests; but the thoughts with their language continue as before. What if we were to use the linguistic yearnings of our mind in our contemplative practice itself?

Stephanie Paulsell: “Contemplation… [i]t’s not a capacity we possess; it’s a gift from outside of us—from God… There are these things… reading, meditation, prayer… you can do to make yourself vulnerable and available to the experience, but contemplation is a form of wordless prayer that’s a gift…”

And then there are the prayers of repetition, acting almost as a semantic container for presence, a way of using the mind’s own hunger for language as a route to silence.

True contemplative silence is no more than resting in the objectless awareness that lies at the end of words. And Stephanie Paulsell is right – it is a gift – one that no intention, no act of will can secure. But we can remain still; it seems that, for me at least, stillness is the central thing “you can do to make yourself vulnerable and available”.

All of practice comes down to stillness in the end; and it is only in stillness that words can finally settle out like sediment in the troubled pond of thought, to leave the steady light of what is in the unobscured clarity of awareness.

On prayer

The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Anam Thubten writes:

It might be wonderful if we all prayed now and then. Prayer is a very powerful method. It is a means of inner liberation. Sometimes prayer is our last resort. If we have been walking the spiritual path, trying to become awakened, there may come a point when we realize that we can’t force ourselves to experience this thing called equal flavor. Then prayer is our last resort. Prayer is an act of surrendering and opening our heart, trusting something that is much greater than our own personality, our ego.

There is a deep impulse in each of us that knows how to pray. We don’t have to recite traditional prayers. We can all compose our own prayers. Did you ever have the experience when you were in trouble or when you were confused, that you naturally started praying? Maybe you didn’t know that you were praying. Maybe you didn’t have any concept of who you were praying to. There are some traditions where you have someone divine or sacred that you pray to. There are other traditions, nontheistic traditions, where you pray but you are not praying to anybody. When we are struggling with anything in our consciousness, we can always pray, remembering that we don’t have to be religious or Buddhist to pray. We can ask the universe, “May I have the readiness to overcome my fear.” Or if we are struggling with resentment, we can pray to the universe to help us overcome that. Praying to the universe is a very safe thing to do. We can ask the universe to bestow a shower of blessings on us and help us to overcome our inner demons of resentment, fear, and anger.

In the act of prayer, you can feel yourself surrendering all your hopes and fears, and you are freed from your resistance to accepting that you have no control in life. You feel true humility, in which you’re no longer trying to be in charge, but letting life itself be in charge. Let yourself recognize that this is the highest freedom you can have. Try to live that freedom every day as much as you can. There will be moments in your life when you will feel that you don’t need that freedom, but as humans we are going through ups and downs, and in some moments freedom will be the only refuge you have. We human beings are extremely resilient and strong—we have the capacity to be openhearted and to surrender in any situation. It is our innate potential. Let’s use it.

Thubten, in writing of prayer as a means of inner liberation and surrender, comes very close to the spirit behind the Nembutsu and the Jesus Prayer.

Prayers of repetition (as opposed to classical mantras) are not intended to carry any magical charge, nor to bring about an altered state of consciousness. They are merely a form of practice based on repeated surrender to, ultimately, the metaphysical ground in which all things – including ourselves – come to be. In a sense, they are a rehearsal for the final surrender of death; and yet they are prayers of radical simplicity, poverty even. Anyone can use them, at any time.

The Jesus Prayer in particular is prayed in the understanding that the words are self-dissolving, tending always to silence. It is important to remember that the words employed in these prayers of repetition are not limited to, or even mainly about, their literal meaning: they are nearer to a kind of spiritual poetry, perhaps. Their power is not in what they say, but in that they are said. In that lies their gift of liberation, the heart’s stillness. Nothing is accomplished; only grace is revealed as itself.

Objectless

In those deeper waters of Centering Prayer—in those nanoseconds (at first) between the thoughts, when your attention is not running out ahead to grab the next object to alight upon, you taste those first precious drops of an entirely different quality of selfhood… There is a deeper current of living awareness, a deeper and more intimate sense of belonging, which flows beneath the surface waters of your being and grows stronger and steadier as your attention is able to maintain itself as a unified field of objectless awareness.

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice, p.134

The state Cynthia Bourgeault mentions here is of course that which is often referred to, by writers as diverse as Tara Brach and Jiddu Krishnamurti, as “choiceless awareness”, and by Eckhart Tolle as “awareness of Being”. But there is a subtle resonance in Bourgeault’s phrase that I don’t find elsewhere. She goes on (ibid. p.138):

In the classic language of the Christian contemplative tradition, we are practicing moving from a cataphatic way of knowing (i.e., with an object-focused awareness) to an apophatic, or “formless” (i.e., objectless) awareness, emanating from a deeper capacity of the human soul in God.

God, known as the ground of being, Istigkeit, is no thing, and consequently can never be the object of our attention. As the Old Testament story of Moses on the mountain puts it, “you cannot see [God’s] face.” (Exodus 33:20)

In the same way, if you think about individual words and how we know what they mean, you’ll see that they work by dividing reality up into identifiable bits. Definitions enable us to home in on the right bit of reality – so that we can distinguish between a chair and a bed, for example, or between nutritious plants and poisonous ones. Words are a little bit like the machines that slice salami: they cut up reality into digestible chunks. But God isn’t a ‘bit of reality’. God is the source of the whole thing. So it’s not surprising that words won’t quite work properly when it comes to God.

J.P. Williams, Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality, (Introduction)

All that we are, all that is, rests in the open ground as the hazelnut rested in the love of God in Julian’s vision:

And in this vision he [Christ] also showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball, as it seemed to me. I looked at it and thought, ‘What can this be?’ And the answer came to me in a general way, like this, ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for it seemed to me so small that it might have disintegrated suddenly into nothingness. And I was answered in my understanding, ‘It lasts, and always will, because God loves it; and in the same way everything has its being through the love of God.’

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Oxford World Classics, p.6

Only an awareness that, still and intransitive, does not take an object can open itself to reality that can never be its object. Only in silence can we touch that reflecting quiet, the still pool beneath unending light.

A leanness of speech

Faith is not the same as belief. Faith is what Jay Matthews described as staying at the center with God. In my lexicon, God is simply another word for wholeness, awareness, presence, unconditional love, no-thing-ness, openness, totality, the heart of being. What Jay is saying points to an abidance in and as wholeness. Being unconditional love. Seeing as God sees.

In my experience, this means waking up here and now, returning again and again to the openness and the listening presence that is most intimate, the boundless awareness that is always accepting everything and clinging to nothing.

Joan Tollifson, Walking on Water

It is hard sometimes, writing about the contemplative life; not because it is difficult to find words so much as it is to find what words to leave out. Belden Lane:

When you put a priority on silence and scarcity as taught by the land itself, the language you use will be very sparse. People out in the desert don’t tend to talk much. Having left behind the noise and clutter of city life, the [desert] monks placed a premium on brevity of speech. They knew that words too easily got in the way of what matters most…

The monks’ leanness of speech even affected the way they spoke of God. The vast expanse of the desert had done a job on the mindset of these early Christians. It broke up their dependence on glib answers and theological explanations. They found themselves running out of language very easily. They knew that in God’s own being was a vast expanse beyond their ability to comprehend, not unlike the desert itself. God is ultimately beyond anything that can be put into words…

I have found it increasingly difficult, despite my periodic protestations, to avoid this word “God”. As Joan Tollifson points out, it encompasses so much “wholeness, awareness, presence, unconditional love, no-thing-ness, openness, totality…” even “the heart of being” itself. In other words, this one little word will stand in for whole stacks of other, quite possibly defensive or political, or merely pompous, assertions and jargon on my part.

Too often we would-be contemplatives find ourselves drawn away into argumentation, activism, restlessness, no matter whether we are caught up in the activities of some religious institution, or in some humanist or secular-spiritual one. A long time ago, Isaac of Nineveh (613-700 CE) had this to say,

And this is the definition of stillness: silence to all things.

If in stillness you are found full of turbulence, and you disturb your body by the work of your hands and your soul with cares, then judge for yourself what sort of stillness you are practising, being concerned over many things in order to please God!

For it is ridiculous for us to speak of achieving stillness

if we do not abandon all things and separate ourselves from every care.

Homily 21

The danger, it seems to me, is not that the contemplative might do too little, earning themselves the too often perjorative label “quietist”, but that they might be insufficiently radical in their quietness, and so lose the very thing that had drawn them to silence in the first place.

The Fourth Sunday of Advent

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

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

Isaiah 7:10-14 NIV

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

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

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

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

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

Luke 1:26-38 NIV

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

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

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

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

Church is what?

The period of "doing church" during lockdown was an interesting time. The Dorchester churches were closed of course, as was the Quaker meeting, and while there were various efforts at worship via Zoom, livestreamed sermons and meditations, and other initiatives, by and large - for me at least - the peace of silence, and the practice of the Jesus Prayer, filled the space left with a closeness to God that I hadn't experienced for a long time.

Our experience of church during this current period of uncertain easing of regulations, and imposition of others such as the wearing of face coverings in public gatherings, has been very mixed. As with some shops, there is constant tension and uncertainty around the often ambiguous - if necessary - rules, and continual vigilance, about following one-way routes to and from communion stations, for instance. It has been good to see those we've missed again, and to hear their voices without the interposition of electronics, but in many ways it seems to me that our local Quaker meeting has made the better choice in remaining closed until we are sure that the pandemic is more nearly under control.

What can we learn from these experiences, which come, for me, as a kind of culmination of a quite long process, involving an increasing sense of being drawn to a hiddenness of life and worship, to silence and to stillness? Back in June this year, I wrote:

This seems to be for me more than ever before a time between times. I haven't written much here the last few weeks, not because there's been nothing to say, really, but more because it has come to me without words, this stillness; the waiting so deep that I haven't even been able to find even a cognitive toehold, so to speak, to explain it to myself... this liminal place is for me about more than the result of the current suspension of normal life while we wait for the pandemic to pass.  It is a place God has brought me to, in that hidden way he has. 

These anything but ordinary weeks of near-isolation, bereft of so many of the distractions of ordinary life, have brought me here, against all expectations.

It seems that to remain hidden (Colossians 3:3) with Christ in God, unknowing, is at least for me the narrow path to, and the gift of, God's own presence, where even our own steps are unknown to us: our God who is entirely beyond our own comprehension, whose name can only be a pointer, as Jennifer Kavanagh says, to something beyond our description. In silence itself is our hiddenness, our unknowing, where God waits within our own waiting (Isaiah 30:18).

Where does this leave us? What is to be learned - or to put it another way, what might the Spirit be showing me - of the path ahead? The final sentences of Steve Aisthorpe's The Invisible Church read:

There is a growing realisation that church is what occurs when people are touched by the living Christ and share the journey of faith with others. Whether that occurs in an historic building or online or . . . wherever, is unimportant.

Looking back over past posts here - try a search within this blog (the search box is top left, by the orange Blogger logo) for the word "hiddenness" - I have the uncomfortable sense of being crept up on, in the way that God so often has. In the past, those who sought to follow Christ sometimes came to a time in their lives when they felt drawn, like St Aidan or St Cuthbert, to climb into a coracle and paddle away to some offshore island; or like the Desert Fathers and Mothers, to move out into the all but trackless desert. Perhaps I am at some analogous stage in my life. I don't know. But the kind of qualified solitude that I found during the period of complete lockdown was a healing thing, an unsought wholeness and peace with God, a sense of being in the right place, against all expectations.

I seem to find myself quoting the author of Proverbs here, again and again, when he writes:

All our steps are ordered by the LORD; how then can we understand our own ways?

(Proverbs 20:24 NRSV)

But it's true; and in accepting that, and in waiting quietly for whatever God may yet reveal, there is a peace and a contentment that I had not anticipated.

Truth

Pontius Pilate infamously asked Jesus, "What is truth?" (John 18:38) and philosophers from Socrates through Kant to Erich Fromm have attempted to give their own answers. But I am coming to believe that the incessant exercise of the human power of reason actually takes us further from truth itself, as much as it may seek to know about it.

John Starke, in The Possibility of Prayer, writes:

Throughout the Gospels we find Jesus resisting the powerful and pompous and going to the outcast and the humble... If we want to experience what God does in us and around us, which is quiet and subtle, we must make ourselves low. Prayer is the regular practice of lowering ourselves to better views of his work... It's a strange irony that prayer is the strengthening of an inner muscle that does nothing more than boast in weakness [2 Corinthians 12:9]

Unless we can be still in prayer, and cease from our anxious reasoning, and surrender to God's presence in the space between one breath and another, one morsel of bread and the next crumb, the experience will slip past us, and the memory fail.

John Bellows wrote:

I know of no other way, in these deeper depths, of trusting in the name of the Lord, and staying upon God, than sinking into silence and nothingness before Him… So long as the enemy can keep us reasoning he can buffet us to and fro; but into the true solemn silence of the soul before God he cannot follow us.

In the true littleness of our silence truth for a moment lifts to us the mirror of God. "Faith", said Jennifer Kavanagh, "is not about certainty, but about trust." In our stillness, our unknowing, our very lowliness, is the very place Jacob found: "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven." (Genesis 28:17 NIV)

Between Times

This seems to be for me more than ever before a time between times. I haven't written much here the last few weeks, not because there's been nothing to say, really, but more because it has come to me without words, this stillness; the waiting so deep that I haven't even been able to find even a cognitive toehold, so to speak, to explain it to myself.

Psalm 130 holds a hint of it:

Out of the depths I cry to you, LORD;
Lord, hear my voice.
Let your ears be attentive
to my cry for mercy.

If you, LORD, kept a record of sins,
Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness,
so that we can, with reverence, serve you. 

I wait for the LORD, my whole being waits,
and in his word I put my hope.
I wait for the Lord
more than watchmen wait for the morning,
more than watchmen wait for the morning. 

(Psalm 130:1-6 NIV)

One thing has become clear, though, and that is that this liminal place is for me about more than the result of the current suspension of normal life while we wait for the pandemic to pass.  It is a place God has brought me to, in that hidden way he has. The very next Psalm contains the words:

My heart is not proud, LORD,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me. 

But I have calmed and quietened myself,
I am like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child I am content. 

(Psalm 131:1-2 NIV)

It seems to me that this is a whole and healing word for this time. So much that happens in our spirit is hidden from our conscious, busy minds. I for one am always looking for explanations, structures, timescales; but within the pupa case, larval structures break down. The developing adult butterfly, or bee, or whatever, is immobile, undifferentiated. You couldn't guess, unless you were an entomologist, what the silent pupa might become.

The author of Proverbs saw this unformed quality of our life in God, when he wrote:

All our steps are ordered by the LORD;
how then can we understand our own ways? 

(Proverbs 20:24 NRSV)

 Paul, in one of my favourite passages from his writings, saw it, too:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. 

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God 

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. 

(Romans 8:22-28 NIV)

As the Psalmist wrote, I am content. These anything but ordinary weeks of near-isolation, bereft of so many of the distractions of ordinary life, have brought me here, against all expectations.

It seems that to remain hidden (Colossians 3:3) with Christ in God, unknowing, is at least for me the narrow path to, and the gift of, God's own presence, where even our own steps are unknown to us: our God who is entirely beyond our own comprehension, whose name can only be a pointer, as Jennifer Kavanagh says, to something beyond our description. In silence itself is our hiddenness, our unknowing, where God waits within our own waiting (Isaiah 30:18).

Sink down to the seed

Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. (John 12:24 NIV)

---

Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart. For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. For, "All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever." And this is the word that was preached to you. (1 Peter 1:22-25 NIV)

One of the things people - myself included - seem to find most difficult in these days of the pandemic is enforced inability to act. It is as though we long to do something - anything! - to break out of this inaction. But strange, powerful things happen in stillness. Seeds lie dormant over winter in order to germinate germinate in spring; insect larvae, quiet in their pupae, become butterflies, or bright beetles that scamper in sunlight.

The quiet heart, if it accepts inaction, can allow God's wonders to come to be. Waiting is an act of patience, an openness to what may come. St Romuald's brief rule for Camaldolese monks ends,

Empty yourself completely and sit waiting,
content with the grace of God,
like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing
but what his mother brings him.

And Isaac Pennington put it:

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

(Quaker faith & practice 26.70)

Blessed

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
From the house of the Lord we bless you.
The Lord is God,
and he has made his light shine on us.
With boughs in hand, join in the festal procession
up to the horns of the altar. 

You are my God, and I will praise you;
you are my God, and I will exalt you. 

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
his love endures for ever. 

Psalm 118.26-29 NIV

Today is the day known as Palm Sunday in the calendars of the liturgical churches, when Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, riding on a donkey, (Matthew 21.1-11) is remembered in readings and the Eucharist. Only a few days later he was to be crucified, having been hailed as, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord..."

The name of the Lord is the name of God, the Tetragrammaton, the pulse that underlies being itself, and in this name we encounter Christ (John 1.1ff) Michael Lewis puts it like this: "The name of Jesus is the image of the ineffable Name, just as Jesus is the Image of the invisible God." (The Name of God: The Revelation of the Merciful Presence of God)

Advices and queries 4 reads,

The Religious Society of Friends is rooted in Christianity and has always found inspiration in the life and teachings of Jesus. How do you interpret your faith in the light of this heritage? How does Jesus speak to you today? Are you following Jesus’ example of love in action? Are you learning from his life the reality and cost of obedience to God? How does his relationship with God challenge and inspire you?

Ben Wood, in a long post, Spiritual Practice with Jesus & Mary Oliver, which I'd strongly recommend you click through and read in its entirety:

If Jesus is the model we should have in mind, what do the Gospels tell us about him? What kind of practical action did he favour?  Principally, Christlike action begins, not with an esoteric notion of spiritual practice, but with attentiveness... [Jesus] was soaked in every deep structure of the human experience, not by transcending his time and place, but by sinking down into it. Begin at home, he seems to say. You cannot find love and grace through novelty or travel. Only stillness and rootedness will do... 

When we seek to find the bottomless meaning in every moment: in a spider’s web caught by the sun, in the face of another, the deep grey of the sky; there is the Kingdom. We need not leave home to be spiritually at home. We need not go far to be in the arms of love.

To remain still is hard, when our worship, whether filled with the sound and poetry of the Palm Sunday liturgy, or in the silence of Meeting, is made impossible in fellowship and sharing by the necessary isolation of life in a pandemic, and we itch and squirm with anxiety and the frustrated impulse to "do something, anything!" But it is only in the stillness and in the staying put that we hear the name of God, in the echo of the chasms between the particles that dance in the atoms of all that is.

The Lake of Stillness

One of the problems sometimes voiced around the practice of prayer actually has nothing to do with its practice at all, but more to do with its metaphysics. What I mean is that all too often someone will feel that they cannot pray because they don't understand "how it works", or because they can't quite fathom whom they're supposed to be praying to.

But prayer is the most natural thing. In the stillness of our own heart - whether in Quaker Meeting for Worship, when we are deeply involved in liturgical worship, or when we are alone and quiet - our awareness rests in a stillness that is infinitely more than ourselves, however we might want to describe that. (Actually it might be better if we didn't try to describe it, at least to ourselves!) In our heart also are those we love, whether personally,  or generally, as in awareness of those who suffer, friends who are ill or alone, the anguish of war or our anxiety for the planet. All our stillness becomes a place where the concerns of our heart lie in the greater stillness within which we worship, like pebbles on the floor of a vast, silent lake.

Ruth Burrows writes:

We must remember that prayer takes place at the deepest level of our person and escapes our direct cognition; therefore we can make no judgement about it. It is God's holy domain and we may not usurp it.  We have to trust it utterly to God... We must be ready to believe that 'nothingness' is the presence of divine Reality; emptiness is a holy void that Divine Love is filling...

Eckhart Tolle, in a moving response to a questioner at a public meeting makes the point that to be conscious is to suffer, and to be involved with the suffering of all beings, within the "one consciousness" that is the ground of being itself. And this is the point; simply to be there, to be with all that is, consciously. How that "makes a difference" is not the point; our heart knows, and in that conjunction within stillness prayer is.

Here, Now

The purity is a question of
names. We are here to utter them. This is
a prayer. I have it now between my
teeth and my eyes, on my forehead. Know
the names. It is as simple as the purity
of sentiment: it is as simple
as that.

(JH Prynne, from Kitchen Poems)

"To everyone who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it." (Revelation 2.17)

The door of the year, this long year, is closing now. What we are called matters.

Just now, in the early evening, it is quiet here, the lights through the trees hardly disturbing the first hours of dark, the air cold now, not even moving the tracery of bare twigs across from the window.

"Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for him;
do not fret over those who prosper in their way,
over those who carry out evil devices."
(Psalm 37.7)

How the heart cries for stillness, in the clamour of obligation and rebuttal; and yet stillness is given, inside each moment. Only now is the divine touchable, and now, as if the instant were bread, and wine, in the space between breathing.

Mercy, the mercy that is Christ with us, can only rest on what actually is, here, now, in the moment given.

Quick now, here, now, always-
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

(TS Eliot, from Four Quartets)

Abide in the Shadow

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don’t agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ.

(CS Lewis, Letters to Malcolm)

Therefore my spirit faints within me;
    my heart within me is appalled.

I remember the days of old,
    I think about all your deeds,
    I meditate on the works of your hands.
I stretch out my hands to you;
    my soul thirsts for you like a parched land.
Selah
Answer me quickly, O Lord;
    my spirit fails.

(Psalm 143.4-7)

Before I was afflicted I went astray,
but now I obey your word....

It was good for me to be afflicted
so that I might learn your decrees.

(Psalm 119.67, 71 NIV)

We spend much of our lives, it seems to me, avoiding pain. It can't be done. It can't actually be done with emotional pain, I have discovered, any more than it can with physical pain. But, strangely, that's OK.

What?

Mostly, severe, persistent pain and anxiety arise from things we cannot change. Little things, like the pain of sitting too long in one place, or thinking of something unpleasant that we saw on the news, can be changed easily enough, by moving, or by thinking of something else. But grief, loss and arthritis are of sterner stuff.

But there is one thing we can do: keep still. Abide, in the words of Psalm 91, in the shadow of the almighty. "To abide is to bear or to endure. The Psalms are calling us to abide in the midst of anxiety and fear by remembering God’s past action and awaiting God’s future action." (Psalms: Anxiety and Fear - Warren Truesdale)

Affliction, like pain, and death, comes to us all, however fortunate or unfortunate we may be in the world's eyes. Only keep still, and wait. Remember, as the psalmist did in Psalm 119, how God's love has endured, how he has brought good of harm, joy out of grief (Romans 8.28) in the past even of our own lives. Wait for the Lord; be still and wait for the Lord (Psalm 27.14, Psalms 37.7).

Strangely, I have come to be so grateful for these "afflictions", physical and spiritual. There is more peace than we can understand in simply being still, in sitting with God in prayer, sitting with what is, and letting God do what God does; what he has done supremely on the cross, in the death and resurrection of Jesus himself. "Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 4.5-7)