The Lamb who was slain

Chris Whittington writes:

The great seventh-century teacher of prayer St Isaac the Syrian understood the kingdom of heaven to mean the gift of contemplation, the gift of seeing clearly, of transfigured awareness. With this in mind, we might look again at when Jesus was asked when the kingdom of God would come, as if it wasn’t here and might suddenly appear at the right time in the future. He answered, ‘The coming of the Kingdom cannot be observed, and no one will announce, “Look, here it is,” or, “There it is.” For behold, the Kingdom of God is within you’ (Luke 17.20–21, NAB). 

It’s easy to pass over how deeply challenging Jesus’ answer was. It’s equally easy to overlook the life-changing invitation wrapped within his words. The kingdom is not going to ‘come’, because it’s already present, within us. The kingdom cannot be observed by the thinking, conceptualizing mind. Just as the eye which sees cannot see itself, the kingdom cannot be made into an object of awareness, because it is that which sees, awareness itself – pristine, luminous, the imageless image of God. The kingdom of awareness cannot be observed by the discursive, conceptualizing mind, but it can be known by the heart, by means of a simple, loving intention. At this threshold the mind must fall silent, and allow love to carry us over. 

The Missing Peace, p.26

Awareness is the very heart of the contemplative life, and the means by which it is lived; and yet, as Whittington points out so clearly here, it cannot be seen or touched by rational inquiry. 

Early in his letter to the church at Colossae, Paul writes:

He [Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.  

(Colossians 1:15-20 NRSV) 

If this is so, then Christ crucified stands at the metaphysical core of existence itself: the cross runs all through that is as dye tints the whole body of water to which it is added. More than that: it was not "added", it was there since the beginnings of time itself. The crucifixion is not merely an event that occurred in around 33AD; it is fundamental to the Istigkeit itself, the very ground of being itself. Christ is "the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world." (Revelation 13:8 NIV)

These things cannot be calculated or established by analysis: "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God" (Ephesians 2:8 NRSV). The awareness of what is, of the ground of all becoming, can only be known by unknowing, so that the eyes of the heart may open in the stillness; for "Christ is all and in all" (Colossians 3:11 NRSV).

The mercy of the cross

Paul declares that "sin reigned in death." [Romans 5:21] Sin is the human failure of vocation, with all that this entails. When we sin, we abuse our calling, our privileges, and our possibilities. Our thoughts, words, and actions have consequences. They were meant to. That is what being image-bearers is all about. Sin risks replacing good consequences with damaging ones. Turning away from the source of life, we invite death to fill the vacuum. Both these elements, sin and death, need to be dealt with on the cross. The whole New Testament and Paul in particular declare that this is what was achieved. That is why the cross launches the revolution.

Tom Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Rethinking the Meaning of Jesus' Crucifixion, p.84

Sometimes people who are introduced to the Jesus Prayer in its usual form - Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner - are dismayed by the phrase "a sinner", associating the word with the placing of ticks against a long list of dreary transgressions, rather than an embracing of our own reality in the light of God's mercy.

When we pray for mercy in this way, we are in effect aligning ourselves with the cross. We pray to Jesus, the crucified saviour, for the mercy he has already given on the cross. As Brian Zahnd explains (The Wood Between the Worlds: A Poetic Theology of the Cross, pp.16-17)

But if the point is not appeasement, how do we associate Good Friday with forgiveness? Allow me to suggest that we think about it like this: On Good Friday the sin of the world coalesced into a hideous singularity that upon the cross it might be forgiven en masse...

Jesus was killed, not by God, but by the hands of wicked men. With great violence the principalities and powers sinned the sin of the world into the sinless body of Jesus. When the sins of the world became the sinful singularity of Good Friday, the one who knew no sin was made to be sin (2 Cor 5:21). The body of Jesus hanging upon the cross was made to be the repository for the sin of the world. What does sin look like? ... It looks like the innocent one nailed to a tree bearing in his hands and feet and side the entrance wounds of sin.

Not only does seeing the cross in this light explain the final words of the Jesus Prayer, it gives us a glimmer of insight into the mystery of the intercessory aspect of the Prayer: that it is not merely a prayer for mercy for the one praying, but for all creation in its agony of becoming (Romans 8:22).

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 Human Condition

The contemplative journey, because it involves the purification of the unconscious, is not a magic carpet to bliss. It is an exercise of letting go of the false self, a humbling process, because it is the only self we know. God approaches us from many different perspectives: illness, misfortune, bankruptcy, divorce proceedings, rejection, inner trials. God has not promised to take away our trial, but to help us to change our attitudes toward them. That is what holiness really is. In this life, happiness is rooted in our basic attitude toward reality.

Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

One of the most common objections to the story-book conception of God is the often-heard, "If evil exists, then God must be evil, or incompetent, or else non-existent." I am not going to attempt to rehash all the many and complex arguments of theodicy; they don't convince anyone, anyway. Keating's comment speaks to my own experience precisely. 

Contemplative faith is, as the Quakers say, an experiential faith (see Quaker faith  & practice 19.02) - explanations and arguments appropriate to the rational, discursive mind so often skip over the surface of our deep selves, over the waves of grief and longing, the currents of desire, like stones over the sea; it is only when they have worn themselves out with bouncing that they will sink out of sight. 

It was Karl Rahner who wrote, "The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all." I have written of this before, often enough, but it bears repeating: the human condition is contemplative (whatever name you choose for that) or it has nothing whatever to say to the "fathomless ocean of pain" we are born into. Only love, the love that bore the Cross, can plumb that ocean's depth.

Palm Sunday

I seem always to find in Palm Sunday a call to stillness, to wordless prayer. Partly I think it comes from the agonisingly slow movement of the long Passion reading, from Bethany to the tomb, the steadily gathering weight of the cross, the closing in of the "obscurity and torments of [Christ's] Passion" (Thomas Keating), the appalling separation of the Son from God under the iron overcast of our own alienation. The enormity of that stills our every thought or feeling, stills our hearts almost as it stilled his.

Sister Mary David Totah writes:

The point here is that like our Christian life, Christian prayer is going to involve participating in the paschal mystery of Christ. We have to accept death sometimes in order to rise to newness of life. Trying to avoid such death is likely to lead to prayerlessness: just as in life, such avoidance leads to escapism, a lack of depth or commitment. "The less one prays the worse it goes" (Dom John Chapman). Like Christian life, prayer needs the dimension of faith, the conviction that God is acting in and through all the circumstances of our life.

The key here, I think, is to remember that it is "all the circumstances of our life"; even - especially - the worst, the most terrible times of alienation and betrayal, the most meaningless and demeaning times, all the pointless wasteful little occasions of anxiety and remorse as well as the unforeseen catastrophes. It's only by allowing it all into our prayer, surrendering the lot, without excuse or disguise, that our own dereliction, taken up in his, can become against all imagining, our Eastering.

An acuteness of love and attention...

In Sarah Bachelard's recent book A Contemplative Christianity for Our Time, she quotes from the epilogue to Christopher Fry's play A Sleep of Prisoners:

Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul we ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.

We do live, as did the WWII soldiers in Fry's play, in just such a time. Archimandrite Sophrony wrote, some years ago now, as if he were writing yesterday:

It has fallen to our lot to be born into the world in an appallingly disturbed period. We are not only passive spectators but to a certain extent participants in the mighty conflict between belief and unbelief, between hope and despair, between the dream of developing mankind into a single universal whole and the blind tendency towards dissolution into thousands of irreconcilable national, racial, class or political ideologies. Christ manifested to us the divine majesty of man, son of God, and we withal are stifled by the spectacle of the dignity of man being sadistically mocked and trampled underfoot. Our most effective contribution to the victory of good is to pray for our enemies, for the whole world. We do not only believe in - we know the power of true prayer... 

The Jesus Prayer will incline us to find each human being unique, the one for whom Christ was crucified. Where there is great love the heart necessarily suffers and feels pity for every creature, in particular for man; but our inner peace remains secure, even when all is in confusion in the world outside... 

As Bachelard points out, there is no sense in which prayer, let alone contemplative prayer, is to be thought of as a substitute for human endeavour, scientific, political, or whatever. But it is not less than those things. So far from a retreat from or a defence against pain, our calling may be to an acuteness of love and attention so keen and detailed as to constitute prayer itself; an entering, in effect, into the pain of the cross of Jesus that, as Helen Waddell shows in her novel Peter Abelard, goes on and on throughout all history, like a ring in the trunk of a tree; Calvary being only the visible bit, the saw-cut that reveals the ring. The cross, in all of its pain and desolation, continues through all time, the pain itself by which Christ's mercy is present always as redemption and grace.

Whatever technical interpretation we place on the theology of crucifixion and atonement, the direct spiritual experience of "an entire universe of horrifying anguish" (Rebecca Tope) is, to me at least, the most fundamental call to prayer, and the reason why for me only a contemplative practice can come anywhere near answering that call. Not for the first time I am reminded of this passage from Praying the Jesus Prayer by Br Ramon SSF:

We have seen that the Jesus Prayer involves body, mind and spirit... The cosmic nature of the Prayer means that the believer lives as a human being in solidarity with all other human beings, and with the animal creation, together with the whole created order (the cosmos). All this is drawn into and affected by the Prayer. One person's prayers send out vibrations and reverberations that increase the power of the divine Love in the cosmos.

The Christian is well aware of the fact that the world is also evil. There is a falseness and alienation which has distracted and infected the world, and men and women of prayer, by the power of the Name of Jesus, stand against the cosmic darkness, and enter into conflict with dark powers... The power of the Jesus Prayer is the armour against the wiles of the devil, taking heed of the apostle's word, 'Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayers and supplications...' [Ephesians 6.18]

The desert is not a place...

In today's WCCM Lent Reflection, Laurence Freeman writes, "The desert is not a place but a state or direction of mind."

The desert of the heart is a real place, if not a physical one. Some of us may indeed, like the desert fathers and mothers of the 4th century, find that we need to leave everyday life and move away into actual solitude, but most of us don't. Our desert is inward and inescapable; if we fail to realise what is going on, we will probably experience it as something like depression or derealisation. But just as the Spirit "drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness" (Mark 1:12 NRSV),  so we can find ourselves driven into strange and inhospitable places of the mind for a time, often not knowing quite how we got there. For me, the recovery of prayer led to the recovery of faith (yes, that way around!) but for many it will be something different. Just as the inward desert will vary from one person to another, like some sort of Room 101 of the soul, so I am sure that the gate into the oasis will vary too. But somehow, I think, the Cross will be involved - even though it may not have that name for everyone. Rowan Williams: "The incarnate crucified life is burrowing its way through the lost depths and deserts of human experience to burst out on Easter Sunday, bringing with it the lost and the dead."

Of course such language may not resonate with everyone; this is part of the whole risky experiment of faith, that we need language as a lamp to see (Psalm 119:105); and yet its necessary failure is the silence of the very desert itself, as isaac of Nineveh saw: "Above anything, welcome silence, for it brings fruits that no tongue can speak of, neither can it be explained." But to communicate this even to ourselves we seem to have to stumble among words and images, doing our best with the tools we find to hand. 

Dark Tales

This evening is particularly quiet. The leaves of the hazels at the back of the garden are hardly moving, and light from the west is casting clean shadows of the roofline on to the trees. This spring the weather is so beautiful - even the rainy days have a clean, healing quality about them - that the threat of the current pandemic seems hard to believe, a dark tale from another time, perhaps, or from a dystopian fiction...

I will extol the LORD at all times;
  his praise will always be on my lips.

I will glory in the LORD;
  let the afflicted hear and rejoice.

Glorify the LORD with me;
  let us exalt his name together.

(Psalm 34:1-3 NIV)

It's interesting, isn't, how David phrases this? If the poet was indeed David (this is one of the psalms whose attribution is most likely to be accurate) then of course he would know about affliction, but the psalms in general are stunningly honest about this kind of thing. In one of my favourite passages from Psalm 119 we read,

[67] Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word...
[71] It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees.

(Psalm 119:67,71 NIV)

Why might this be? We are familiar enough, though very often we struggle to apply it to our own lives, with the concept Paul expresses in Romans 8:28, "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." All things, not just the convenient ones, or the pleasant ones. Of course, the verse is not saying that all things are good - some things, like the situation in which we all find ourselves at the moment, patently are not good at all. But the anonymous poet of Psalm 119 seems to go even beyond the apostle.

I have come to recognise, from periods in my own life of desolation and functional solitude (being alone in the sense not always of physical isolation, but of being cut off from understanding and comfort: "You have taken from me friend and neighbour – darkness is my closest friend." (Psalm 88:18)) the power of this kind of prayer, and how actually to pray the Psalms, to take their words and make them one's own, brings strength and refuge, comfort even, in dark places. I don't think it is hyperbole to say that at these times in my life I would not have come through had it not been for the Psalms.

In some deep mystery these words in the psalms prefigure the cross of Christ, and it is there that understanding begins to break through. Jesus called his disciples to "take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it." (Matthew 16:24-25 NIV) Peter wrote "To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps." (1 Peter 2:21 NIV)

It's really important to understand that none of these insights were my own doing. None came about through any particular insight or perspicuity of mine, still less through any imagined godliness: it was all sheer gift. Nor am I saying that the ultimate healing of wounds of the spirit - such as we all are suffering in these perfect days of springtime, as the earth stretches and heals from the long years of environmental abuse and exploitation - comes purely through the prayerful acceptance of suffering. My survival may, in my own instance, have come that way - but it was only after the passage of many years, and through skilled and patient help, that their effects have finally begun to be something like healed. But their value - that is another matter entirely. One of the hardest things to take is the illusion of the pointlessness of one's own suffering; the realisation that it is not, after all, a waste of life and hope, but a way into endless life and indestructible hope, through and not despite the Cross is what brings us at last to that refuge David described in Psalm 63:6-8,

On my bed I remember you;
I think of you through the watches of the night.
Because you are my help,
I sing in the shadow of your wings.
I cling to you;
your right hand upholds me.

To Pray as We Are

The Jesus Prayer is also called the Prayer of the Heart. In Orthodoxy, the mind and heart are to be used as one. St Theophan tells us to keep our "mind in the heart" at all times. Heart means the physical muscle pumping blood, and emotions/feelings, and the innermost core of the person, the spirit. Heart is associated with the physical organ, but not identical with it. Heart means our innermost chamber, our secret dwelling place where God lives. "The heart is but a small vessel; and yet dragons and lions are there, and there poisonous creatures and all the treasures of wickedness; rough, uneven paths are there, and gaping chasms. There likewise is God, there are the angels, the heavenly cities and the treasures of grace; all things are there." So says St. Macarius. Someone said the heart is a dimension of interior consciousness, awareness, where we come in touch with an inner space, a space of no dimensions. This consciousness is timeless, the place where tears reside and deep contact with the present moment abide, and from which restful movement comes. Acting out of our heart means to act lightly, with vigour and enthusiasm. When not in that inner awareness, we are restless, agitated and self-concerned. There is within us a space, a field of the heart, in which we find a Divine Reality, and from which we are called to live. The mind, then, is to descend into that inner sanctuary, by means of the Jesus Prayer or wordless contemplation, and to stay there throughout our active day, and evening. We descend with our mind into our heart, and we live there. The heart is Christ's palace. There, Christ the King comes to take His rest.

Albert S Rossi,  Saying the Jesus Prayer

There is that in the Jesus Prayer that lives in the very brokenness of the human heart. When we pray the Prayer, we are not trying to pray as we would like to be, or as we think someone else might think we ought to be, but as we actually are. If our hearts are full of pain, full of the darkness of temptation or of betrayal, distracted, covetous, or grieving, then that is how we will pray. This is one reason why, incidentally, I always use the form the the Prayer that includes the final phrase "a sinner" - for that is who I am, and the two words include all these emotions, and more. For in acknowledging myself a sinner, I am acknowledging my identity, my solidarity even, with the rest of humanity, fallen as we are, and even with the rest of creation in the mysterious brokenness it shares with us, in the pain of the mouse in the owl's claws, of the grasslands in drought. And so the Prayer becomes a prayer for all who suffer, human or otherwise; a true intercession, a stepping into the mercy of God on behalf of all that is.

Perhaps this intercessory dimension of the Jesus Prayer may help to explain the difficulty sometimes encountered in its practice. I don't mean the ordinary kind of distraction, shopping lists or fantasies drifting across the field of prayer, but a real and painful struggle that sometimes makes it all but impossible inwardly to pronounce even the words of the Prayer. This kind of struggle seems not to be written of much in recent literature, though it crops up often enough in the writings of St Macarius (300-391AD) and others of his period. In his now out of print booklet Praying the Jesus Prayer (Marshall Pickering 1988) Brother Ramon SSF, though, wrote,

The Christian is well aware of the fact that the world is also evil. There is a falseness and alienation which has distracted and infected the world, and men and women of prayer, by the power of the Name of Jesus, stand against the cosmic darkness, and enter into conflict with dark powers. 'For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.' The power of the Jesus Prayer is the armour against the wiles of the devil, taking heed of the apostle's word: 'Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication.' [Ephesians 6.12,18 RSV]

But I don't want to make too much of this aspect of the use of the Prayer. It does happen, and so it is as well to be aware of it, but it is not what the Prayer is all about. We are praying for the mercy of God in Christ, and it is only through the cross of Christ that God's mercy can heal us, and the wounds for which we pray. "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." (John 1.5 NIV) In the repetition of the Jesus Prayer, we are ourselves walking the way of the cross, playing our own small part in its mercy.

Deserts, Silence, Solitudes

It seems strange to say, but what can help modern man find the answers to his own mystery,and the mystery of him in whose image he is created, is silence and solitude - in a word, the desert. Modern man needs these things more than the hermits of old...

Deserts, silence, solitude are not necessarily places, but states of mind and heart. These deserts can be found in the midst of the city, and in the every day of our lives. We need only to look for them and realise our tremendous need for them. They will be small solitudes, little deserts, tiny pools of silence, but the experience they will bring, if we are disposed to enter them, may be as exultant and as holy as the one God himself entered. For it is God who makes solitude, deserts and silences holy.

Catherine Doherty, Poustinia

Eve Baker, too, writes:

The desert to which the solitary is called is not a place, but something that must be there below the surface of ordinary human existence. It is nowhere, a place of thirst after God…

The disciplines of solitude will be different for everyone. Maintaining an inner cell of quiet will be a greater struggle for the person with family obligations or for those whose life involves working closely with other people… It is like having a compass in one’s hand, pointing to the true north. The busyness of life will swing the needle, but it will return again to the same direction.

Prayer is not so much a matter of specific occasions, forms, words, but a constant orientation towards God which becomes habitual. This is the hidden life which goes on inside the external one which differs little from any other human life except for the hidden search for solitude, silence and simplicity...

Once again I find myself in the position of coming to realise, painfully, that for me there has to be a pattern of a very interior asceticism. As Baker says, "Dramatic gestures are easy, simple faithfulness requires more effort." External commitments, too, however tempting it may be to make a positive, practical contribution to a community that makes room for me in its heart, are actually a danger to this interiority of prayer, and to my own hidden life within it.

Doherty again:

The presence of  a person who is in love with God is enough… nothing else is needed…

When you are hanging on a cross you can't do anything, because you are crucified. That is the essence of a poustinik's contribution… The poustinik’s loneliness is of salvific and cosmic proportions… By hanging on the cross of his loneliness, his healing rays, like the rays of the sun, will penetrate the earth…

The world is cold. Someone must be on fire so that people can come and put their cold hands and feet against that fire...

The poustinik's whole reason for going into loneliness - into solitude - his whole reason for exposing himself to temptation, is always for others. It is always in identification with… Christ, with his whole life, with his crucifixion. It is then the way to our resurrection and that of others.

Pope Paul VI's 1969 Instruction on the Contemplative Life includes this passage: "To withdraw into the desert is for Christians tantamount to associating themselves more intimately with Christ's passion, and it enables them, in a very special way, to share in the paschal mystery and in the passage of Our Lord from this world to the heavenly homeland."

This is hard. For so much of the life we have grown up to expect to live is based on the approval of others, their companionship and encouragement on a path towards a shared objective, that actually to set out into this desert of the heart is in many ways as lonely and difficult as it must have been for the women and men setting out into the solitary places of Egypt and Syria back in the 3rd century AD. But like their journey, it is not done alone. Like them, we must each of us be part of a community of faith; in the deepest and truest sense, a Eucharistic community, where we may live among our sisters and brothers, supported, if not always by their absolute understanding, at least always by their love.

Lord, hear my voice...

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
    Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
    to the voice of my supplications! 

If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
    Lord, who could stand?
But there is forgiveness with you,
    so that you may be revered. 

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
    and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
    more than those who watch for the morning,
    more than those who watch for the morning. 

O Israel, hope in the Lord!
    For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
    and with him is great power to redeem.
It is he who will redeem Israel
    from all its iniquities.

Psalm 130

This last week or more I have been quite unwell, with a sudden, painful and exhausting illness that has left me incapable of anything useful at all really. (I'm getting rather better now - not to worry!) Not for the first time I was struck that, above all, physical pain is boring. It hoards for itself all one's energy and attention, and gives nothing back. Prayer of a sort is possible, entirely essential, yet even the attention required for something so simple as the Jesus Prayer is recaptured by the pain by the simple expedient of increasing, or at least appearing to increase.

Now, I’m writing this not to complain - others have far worse to contend with, over far longer timescales, which must bring their own perspective - but simply as a heads-up, and to myself, a reminder. Physical pain is not the worst thing, far from it, but it is appallingly effective at capturing the limelight, especially when it manages to prevent sleep as well, and so its ally exhaustion makes impossible even the last shreds of resolve.

The paradox of the title of this post from Psalm 130 is that a voice is really what one doesn't seem to have at times like these. Not a physical voice, or the sort of voice usually associated with mental prayer. But there is something, something that calls out "of the depths", and there is a piece of oneself, far down, that holds onto the Lord, and even onto his remembered word, through everything. The problem is, I find, becoming and remaining conscious of that - or wanting to, and being unable.

Somehow I find a holding cross does help the soul to wait, even when the mind can't make sense of anything much at all. This little piece of olive wood (mine came from the groves around the Mount of Olives many years ago) is nothing in itself, but it seems to make a kind of bridge over this period of uselessness, and to connect in the most healing way possible with our Lord's own suffering. I can't speak more of this: the conscious mind is aware only of flickering shadows, but the heart knows, and it knows what that bit of wood means. And that is enough.

"A fathomless ocean of pain..."

The low, repetitive bawling was a distant throb of distress that Lilah had never grown used to, even though  it happened every time a cow gave birth. Sometimes, at night, it was unbearable, the bereft mother calling and calling for her baby, the embodiment of despair. Sometimes it seemed to Lilah that in her short life she had been party to a fathomless ocean of pain and misery, that all this suffering was there inside her, barely supressed by her flippant ways and habitual optimism. And sometimes she couldn't stop herself imagining every hurt and cruelty; every experimental laboratory; every horse used in war; every animal ill-used in the service of man; every creature sent terrified to the abattoir. All of it added up to an entire universe of horrifying anguish, and she had to breathe slow and deep to be able to carry on.

This passage (the wider context of the narrative makes it clear that the character's experience is not confined merely to questions of animal husbandry, but relates equally to her grief at the murder of her father, and to the inhumanity of humankind generally) from the murder mystery A Dirty Death, by Rebecca Tope, reminds me of the assertion, explained so well in Helen Waddell's own novel Peter Abelard, that the cross of Jesus goes on and on throughout all history, like a ring in the trunk of a tree; and that Calvary is but the visible bit, the saw-cut through the tree that reveals the ring. The cross, with all of its pain and desolation, continues through all time, the sacrifice by which Christ's mercy is present always as redemption and grace.

Whatever technical interpretation we place on the theology of crucifixion and the atonement, the direct spiritual experience of "an entire universe of horrifying anguish" is, to me at least, the most fundamental call to prayer, and the reason why for me only a contemplative discipline comes anywhere near answering that call. Not for the first time I am reminded of this passage from Praying the Jesus Prayer by Br Ramon SSF:

We have seen that the Jesus Prayer involves body, mind and spirit... The cosmic nature of the Prayer means that the believer lives as a human being in solidarity with all other human beings, and with the animal creation, together with the whole created order (the cosmos). All this is drawn into and affected by the Prayer. One person's prayers send out vibrations and reverberations that increase the power of the divine Love in the cosmos.

The Christian is well aware of the fact that the world is also evil. There is a falseness and alienation which has distracted and infected the world, and men and women of prayer, by the power of the Name of Jesus, stand against the cosmic darkness, and enter into conflict with dark powers... The power of the Jesus Prayer is the armour against the wiles of the devil, taking heed of the apostle's word, 'Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayers and supplications...' [Ephesians 6.18]

Deep calls to deep...

In one of his sermons, entitled 'The Depth of Existence', the theologian Paul Tillich speaks of God in terms of 'depth'. He says that 'the name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God'... Once a person has known the depth that is in the bleakest emptiness, then they are in a strange way open to the depth that is in the most sublime fullness. And in a mysterious way - and this is at the heart of Christianity - the emptiness even becomes the fullness. 'Blessed are the poor in spirit', says Jesus, 'for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven'. For such a person their practice of prayer can be described in terms of these four words: 'Deep calls to deep.' [Psalm 42.7]

Patrick Woodhouse, Life in the Psalms

These few words from Patrick Woodhouse's beautiful book capture something I have been trying to find words for for a very long time. The Apostle Paul writes, "For in [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross." (Colossians 1.19-20) Even here the fullness (pleroma) of incarnation is caught up in the self-emptying (kenosis) of the cross (Philippians 2.7-8).

These scraps of Paul's struggles to find words for the ineffable, and bits of his Greek that have become for us today technical terms of academic theology, don't come near the actual encounter that Woodhouse is hinting at. That's hardly surprising, as they seem to be close to the core of contemplative prayer itself, that is found only in silence; and then only as pure gift, the fleeting touch of the Spirit's wing.

But in extremis, at the far edge of being human, the "bleakest emptiness" can be so shot through with the presence of Christ, with the weight of his mercy, that it is almost like coming home. It is hard to describe, but possibly the nearest I can get is to say that, without the pain (physical or emotional) being in the least lessened, the nearness of God in Christ, mediated through that dreadfulness, is so much more significant than any personal experience, even this, that the heart rejoices in the midst of its distress. Jesus nailed it, in fact, in the Beatitudes.

The Prayer for Mercy

Pain is unpleasant, yes, but it is an unexpected gift. Without it, we’re unable to detect danger, even if it’s present. It may not always feel like it, but medically speaking, pain is a gift, and I would submit to you that spiritually speaking, pain is a gift as well.

The messiness in our lives is either the offspring of pain or the catalyst for pain. But even when we come to understand that messes and suffering are certainties in a sinful world, it doesn’t make them any less painful. If I know somebody is going to punch me in the face, it’s still going to hurt. Just because I know it’s coming doesn’t mean it won’t be painful; it simply means I’ll be prepared. If we look carefully, though, we’ll find that quite often our wounds become great sources of wisdom.

Luke Lezon, The Gift of Pain... (BibleGateway blog)

He said not: Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be afflicted; but He said: Thou shalt not be overcome. God willeth that we take heed to these words, and that we be ever strong in sure trust, in weal and woe. For He loveth and enjoyeth us, and so willeth He that we love and enjoy Him and mightily trust in Him; and all shall be well.

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, viii.ii

We tend often to assume, even those of us who ought to know better, that the Christian life should be serene and untroubled, and that God, if he answers prayer, should do as we ask, and "take away" our suffering and our distress. This is not what we learn from Scripture, nor from the lives of those who seek to live by it. If we have lived much at all, and are honest with ourselves, we know it is not so in our own lives, either.

Suffering seems to be a part of what it is to be human, at least in this life, on this broken world. It cannot be otherwise, even though all the  wealth of the wealthy and the power of the powerful seem ultimately to be directed towards staving that off that for as long as possible.

As Christians we are followers of Christ, as Paul explained: "Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God." (Ephesians 5.1-2) Jesus himself pointed out that "whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple." (Luke 14.27)

But there is more to this than a stoic acceptance of the inevitability of pain. As I have experienced it, certainly, pain can act as a call to prayer like nothing else. The Psalmist knew this: "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word. You are good, and what you do is good; teach me your decrees… It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees." (Psalm 119.67-68,71)

The trouble, of course, with prayer in suffering is that a conventional understanding of prayer won't work, mostly. What are we to pray for? That our affliction be "taken away"? And if it is not, what then? A few brave and compassionate souls might ask that their suffering might somehow be subtracted from that of ones for whom they pray, something like Charles Williams' idea of "substitution and exchange". But that implies, perhaps, a knowledge of others' sufferings, and the capacity to enumerate them, that may just not be there. Great pain, physical, emotional, or spiritual - especially perhaps spiritual - has a way of wiping all else from the mind of the sufferer. The whole world becomes one's pain; or one's pain becomes one's whole world. I don't really know which it is.

This is where, once again, contemplative practice comes in; and where the great benefit of already having a contemplative practice begins to show itself. One cannot very easily learn, I think, even so simple a practice as the Jesus Prayer in the midst of one's pain. But I have found that even in the worst of times I can cling to the Prayer as to a bit of floating wreckage in a storm - and it is here that, perhaps, the strangest thing of all takes place. For even in the most consuming pain one's loves and one's concerns are still there, in the depths of the heart: it's just that they are no longer visible, as it were, to a conscious mind almost entirely overwhelmed with distress. But if even the least splintered plank of prayer remains afloat - or perhaps if it does not, to the tormented mind - then the work of the cross still goes on in the  darkness. The prayer of the heart touches, even then, the existence of those whom we, however obscurely, love, though we no longer even know their names. The mercy of God is limitless, because it is Christ: and the prayer for mercy is always answered (Luke 18.35-33). 

On the edge...

Limen is the Latin word for threshold. A “liminal space” is the crucial in-between time—when everything actually happens and yet nothing appears to be happening. It is the waiting period when the cake bakes, the movement is made, the transformation takes place. One cannot just jump from Friday to Sunday in this case, there must be Saturday! This, of course, was always the holy day for the Jewish tradition. The Sabbath rest was the pivotal day for the Jews, and even the dead body of Jesus rests on Saturday, waiting for God to do whatever God plans to do. It is our great act of trust and surrender, both together. A new “creation ex nihilo” is about to happen, but first it must be desired. . . . 

Remember, hope is not some vague belief that “all will work out well,” but biblical hope is the certainty that things finally have a victorious meaning no matter how they turn out. We learned that from Jesus, which gives us now the courage to live our lives forward from here. Maybe that is the full purpose of Lent. 

Richard Rohr, Wondrous Encounters: Scripture for Lent, Saint Anthony Messenger Press, 2010

--- 

...the post-liminal is the changed state. The re-emergence, blinking, into the daylight from the shadows. The postliminal is a transformed state, it is the time when we come down from the mountain with our faces bright. When we walk among our friends, unrecognisable. When we return to the tribe as an adult, having left as a child. When we arrive at our destination unknown, amid the acrid stench of whale vomit. Because the liminal state cannot last, it cannot be properly sustained over a very long period of time, except perhaps by cats. The intensity is too much, it is too draining. 

One of the keys to surviving the liminal stage, despite its troubling lack of ritualised rites of passage, is to look for someone who has passed this way before: a guide, a supporter, a teacher, coach or midwife. Someone with the ability to understand the difficulties of the liminal stage, and to help us through them. They help us not to rush the process, a child is should be born only when it is ready, and a key Christian metaphor has long been that of being ‘born again’. While this has been taken to mean many things, it’s worth consciously reflecting on in the context of liminality. Those of us who dwell on the threshold, slipping and winding like black cats through the shadows of the in-between-time, must be looking for the way through, that moment of re-birth. That point when we come out of the darkness, and out in to the light. The process of birth is markedly helped by the presence of a midwife, and/or a doula, just as so many of the rites of passage in our lives are helped by those with the subtle skill and experience to help us navigate them. If you find yourself in a liminal space, as you will inevitably do at various times in your life: dwelling on another threshold, look for help from those who have already passed that way, you may recognise them from their shining faces, their rough desert clothes, or from the overpowering smell of whale vomit, or maybe even sometimes from the holes in their hands and feet.

Simon Cross, Dwellers on the threshold. Simonjcross.com/longform (August 2019)

This passage from Simon Cross' essay (do click through and read the whole thing) reminds me how I have often thought that the cross is the final liminal place, the very edge between heaven and earth, death and the endless life of God. I say, "the cross is" intentionally: for, as Thibault explained to Peter Abelard, the cross goes on through all time, like the grain in a tree. It is there in the grief of those who have completely lost their way, in the death of the innocent, in the tears of the betrayed.

Paul the Apostle wrote, "for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God." (Colossians 3.3) The liminal space is a kind of death, and the dead are our companions there, which is perhaps why we pray along with "angels and archangels and all the company of heaven", amongst "so great a cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12.1). Our own dying will be into liminality again, into the still cross-shadowed presence of our Saviour, and accompanied by the prayers of those who have gone before. And even though all these crossings of the in-between time are necessarily made in solitude, we are not alone.

All prayer is...

Simon Cross, Oasis chaplain, writer and teacher, has this to say in the most recent of his weekday meditations (7/5/2019: 'No Hiding Place'):

One of the most famous of all the ancient Jewish songs we call the Psalms is number 139, which talks about the writer's understanding of God. A contemporary Christian view of God tends towards a view of the divine that is at once distant, and controlling. This is a way of thinking that owes as much to Greek mythology as anything else. 

The God of the 139th Psalm on the other hand is somehow different: "If I go to the highest heights, you are there, if I make my bed in the depths, you are there." God is at once in all places. We tend to think of this physically, that there is no 'where' that God isn't. But actually the text goes beyond even this, beyond the physical: the word we translate as 'depths' is the Greek word šə·’ō·wl (sheol), which means 'grave' or even 'hell'. This is an idea which transcends physicality. 

There is nowhere, in life, or in death, surmises the poet, that is beyond his sense of the divine. This is not a remote, controlling God, not the 'deadbeat dad' of popular religion, it is an intimate, animated divinity, coursing like life itself through the veins and arteries of the universe, present in every dimension. The poetic language used here speaks of an idea of the divine which transcends the kind of boundaries which we seek to put in to place, nothing is cut off. This is a very deep idea of God.

As John Pritchard points out,

[In prayer] we cannot expect arbitrary interruptions of the natural course for our personal benefit. The dead of Auschwitz rule out the possibility of a cosy, domesticated view of how God relates to his world. But let's also recognise that there are no 'laws' of nature as such, just generalisations of observable experience. The fabric of creation has a much more open texture than we once thought... 

When we pray for things to change in a situation, therefore, we are not throwing pebbles at some iron wall of 'natural law'. We are co-operating with God in enabling his loving presence to come to bear on the situation, and so inevitably affect it... The supernatural is an infinite projection of the natural, to the point where it is transformed.

Now I happen not to like the word "supernatural". When it isn't conjuring up images of séances and ouija boards, it reminds me of some humanists explaining why they don't believe in that snowy-bearded puppet-master in the clouds. But if, as Pritchard says, there is more to reality than metrics and observation, and Newtonian mechanics, it may be an inevitable usage; if God is indeed "an intimate, animated divinity, coursing like life itself through the veins and arteries of the universe, present in every dimension" then there is nowhere and nothing that is outside God, not even the very worst of times. As Thibault reminded Peter Abelard in Helen Waddell's eponymous novel, in all the pain of the world, and in all its grief and loss, the cross of Christ, the cross of God in Christ, goes on and on.

"[T]he Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.’" (I Corinthians 11.23ff) And so the prayer of the Church goes on, and on into unimaginable futures, in the unimaginable humility of God, who in Jesus "was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate." If indeed it is, as he said, his body and his blood that become one with us, knit with all the we are, cell by cell and breath by breath by the very processes of human biology, then in that plain fact the mercy of Christ is without end, an infinity of grace. All prayer is, can ever be, is simply owning that.

No Path Around

May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. 

Galatians 6:14 

I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. 

Philippians 3:10-11 

It is to the cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his/her master. No path to redemption can make a path around it.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

To continue in prayer leads on to the cross. There really isn't any way past that, nor an honest way to make it seem less painful. Perhaps truly to pray is to become a small incarnation, a tiny model of our Lord; then to pray might mean simply to take up the cross ourselves, since it is a refusal to turn away from the pain that runs inextricably through existence, like a red thread in the bright weave of what is. Easter is not a metaphor, and resurrection lies only on the far side of the cross that is no more than absolute surrender, helplessness entirely embraced at whatever the cost.

The cross means abandoning all that makes for our own safety, every last attempt at self-preservation; “For,” as Paul wrote in his letter to the Colossians (3.3), "you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God." In slightly more practical terms, what seems to be happening in inward prayer is that the pain and grief that accrues in the soul like silt, so often both unsought and unrecognised, simply as a result of our living out our lives in the world as it is, is accepted, borne up into the presence of Christ in us and nailed, as it were, to the cross of our willing defencelessness. In prayer we no longer seek "a path around" our own suffering, and that of all that we love, but are willing that it be lived out in and through our own surrender. Only this way, it seems to me, can we allow the mercy of God to come to birth in our lives, and in the lives of those for whom we pray. Cynthia Bourgeault: 

When we think of mercy, we should be thinking first and foremost of a bond, an infallible link of love that holds the created and uncreated realms together... Mercy is God's innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love.

Good Friday

For none of us lives for ourselves alone, and none of us dies for ourselves alone. If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living. 

Romans 14:7-9 

For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. 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. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing! 

Galatians 2:19-21

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest." (Psalm 22:1-2) There can be few psalms, apart from Psalm 23, which come so instinctively to our lips. When all we have dreamed of and planned for comes unglued, when our closest friends have turned away, when our very bodies betray us, these are the words we find ready, just as Jesus did on the cross.

There is always a point at which we shift internally from pouring our energy into doing what we can, striving to make something happen, to knowing that we are in a mysterious new territory where we are urged and invited to hand over our life, or someone else's, to God. This may not always be a situation that will lead to death, of course, but one where letting go of our claim and handing it over to God's grace is what brings about change and unexpected new life. 

Justine Allain-Chapman, The Resilient Disciple: A Lenten Journey from Adversity to Maturity

"Whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord." Paul's insight that in God we live and move and have our being (Acts 17.28) is not merely a quotation from Epimenides, nor even a theological formulation, but a plain statement of existential fact. "Paul is describing an immediate encounter. God is not merely over us, ruling us, but we are actually embraced by him, we exist in him, within his being." (Emilie Griffin, Wonderful and Dark is this Road: Discovering the Mystic Path) Jesus, despite the cross and all that came after, fell not out of God but into the hands of his Father; yet even he could not see that far, it seems, in those last hours of pain and desolation. Nor must we expect to: death is real, and terrible - and yet it is not the end, but the beginning. All that is, and ever has been, rests in grace; we are not lost, but found, and the infinity of mercy that is God's love in Christ is not a strange thing to be sought after, but our own true home at last. We have only to be still, this night, and wait.

Tuesday in Holy Week

[Holy Week] turns upside down our notions of what real power is and how it is held. It turns upside down our notions of how life-giving change is brought about and the role suffering plays in bringing about that life-giving change... 

The king who rides a donkey, not a war horse, turns our notions about how to bring about peace upside down. Jesus knew the danger he was in and offered himself to us as a pattern for living in dangerous times, personally and politically. We choose who to follow and the choice to follow Jesus is an inner decision to choose life. Jesus didn't show us that he could wield power over life and death, but that in the face of death and destruction it is possible to choose life In the occupied territory of our world, with pain and hatred, we can live differently, live liberated. 

This journey has to be taken for oneself and on a donkey, at peace with oneself and others. Inner peace can bring about external peace, but not force it. There will be times when it feels successful, as it did for Jesus and his followers on Palm Sunday, and times when there is danger and humiliation. Both are to be encountered on the way of peace. 

Justine Allain-Chapman, The Resilient Disciple: A Lenten Journey from Adversity to Maturity

This is a profound insight. The changes so many of us long for, especially in a world threatened by climate change, extremism, and the dangerous posturing of political leaders, will not be brought about by violent protest, vandalism, and aggressive rhetoric. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Corrie and Betsie ten Boom and Martin Niemöller in Nazi Germany, Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela in apartheid-era South Africa, were not failures because of their imprisonment, mistreatment and in some cases death at the hands of despotic regimes. Jesus was not messing about when he told his disciples, "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it." (Matthew 16.24-25)

In Freelance Christianity: Philosophy, Faith, and the Real World, Vance G Morgan writes:

In its Latin roots, to "convert" means to "turn around," but this turning is more often like a sunflower following the sun in its slow course across the sky than a dynamic and once for all event... a steady rain, even a gentle drizzle, is better for my plants and grass than an inch-and-a-half-hour downpour. Beneath the layers of violence, hatred, ignorance and despair, something holy is lurking. Let the gentle drizzle and drops upon the heart release it.

St Seraphim of Sarov, a forest hermit and contemplative in 18th century Russia, famously advised his visitors, "Acquire a peaceful spirit, and around you thousands will be saved." The practice of the Jesus Prayer, indeed of any form of contemplative prayer, is precisely like Vance Morgan's gentle drizzle. This quiet repetition may accomplish, by the grace and mercy of Christ, more than we can imagine.

As Alfred Lord Tennyson once wrote:

More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of…
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God… 

Morte d’Arthur

Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday is a curious celebration. The heart longs for stillness, waiting for those last days - or mine does - and yet this beginning of Holy Week is full of re-enactment, acclamation, procession, that sit oddly, almost, before the long Gospel account of the crucifixion of our Lord. The Liturgy of the Palms precedes the Liturgy of the Passion, with this year the long reading from Luke's Gospel (22.14-23.56); and yet there is still most of a long week to go before Good Friday.

The silence is there, of course, beneath the shouting and the waving of palms, beneath the uncanny prophecy of Isaiah chapter 50 and Paul's hymn from Philippians 2, beneath the accelerating pain of the Passion narrative itself, just as the silence of our own death lies beneath all the laughter and weeping of our own lives here on earth. Good Friday will come, and the stillness of the tomb before that unimaginable morning, and undreamt glory...