The Peace of God

In the silence of Ascension Day, what is peace? The quietness of sunlight holds something that does not depend on an absence of noise, a resolution of antinomy.

Jesus said, "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid." (John 14.27) and "I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world." (John 16.33)

As we live, change and death are always with us. This is the way things are made, and connect; depend one upon another and give rise to new life. We are vulnerable in the very way we are made. The wounds that we acquire will not bleed always, but the marks will remain, like the marks on the risen Jesus' hands and feet. Jacob limped, for the rest of his life presumably (Genesis 32.31), after his encounter with God at Peniel.

Things don't have to be mended to be healed, and as long as we are part of this earth from which we are made, there will be an ache, a hollow place, where we long for - we long for peace, we long for "sweet permanence" as Kerouac said somewhere. What we are longing for is God, who in Jesus is with us always (Matthew 28.20) Paul learned contentment through Jesus "who strengthen[ed him]" in all circumstances, "whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want." (Philippians 4.12) All we really need is trust: as Jesus said, "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me." (John 14.1)

It is Enough

Sometimes when I attempt to explain the practice of the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”, especially to Friends, someone will react along the lines of, “Oh, I hate this morbid preoccupation with sins! Surely we all need more self-esteem, not less?”

Now, while of course I sympathise with the bruised heart demanding comfort, not condemnation, I think this objection is an understandable misunderstanding. In the original Greek, as taught in the Philokalia onwards, the word for sinner is ἁμαρτωλόν (hamartolón) – a word which is not, in the Eastern Orthodox context, chiefly concerned with transgressing one of a list of Naughty Things, but with the sense of failing to be what one might be, of missing the mark. And this is a sense of sin to which I can all too readily relate!

Sin in the Orthodox Christian understanding is “missing the mark” (the literal meaning of the Greek word for sin, hamartia), falling short of the glorious purpose for which God created mankind. It is also understood as separation from God, since intimate communion with God is the normal state of mankind from which most people have fallen. Sin is imperfection, anything which fails to live up to the fullness of life in Christ for which man was created.

The Bible sometimes uses legal metaphors to refer to sin, likening it to crime, that is, crime against God's law. For Orthodox Christianity, while making use of legal imagery, the more dominant imagery used for sin is also drawn from Scripture, and that is that sin is a kind of disease, an affliction for which salvation is the cure.

The Orthodox Wiki

In Pure Land Buddhism there is a useful, rather delightful term, bombu nature. Attractive though the word may be, the concept is a relentlessly honest summing-up of the human condition. Kaspalita Thompson writes:

Recognising our bombu nature is a hard thing to do – it means really looking at what motivates our actions, and how we are compelled by greed, and hate and delusion. It means noticing when all the stuff we have pushed into our long black bag [in Jungian terms, our shadow] starts to leak out and taking responsibility for for that, and it sometimes means looking into the long bag itself and seeing what is there, in the darkest places of our psyche.

Any form of contemplative prayer will bring us face to face with this imperfect, often broken, nature that is ours by dint of simply being human. Mother Mary Clare SLG discusses this at length in her book Encountering the Depths (SLG Press 1981). She says,

When we are not attentive listeners it is not only our own personal relationship with God that will be diminished, but even possibly the direct communication between God and another person. Our dissipation of mind, instability and lack of courage to face ourselves, or to be vulnerable to others, frustrates God’s intention that our prayer be a clear pathway to the discernment of the needs of each other. The most difficult and decisive part of prayer is acquiring this ability to listen…

In prayer, as in all our lives, we are in need of God’s mercy. If we are honest, our imperfection, our incompleteness, somehow, is at the root of who we are. When we pray, “have mercy on me, a sinner”, we are not striking a pose, nor beating ourselves up for masturbating or eating chocolate. We are simply being realistic. In her TED talk The Power of Vulnerability, Brené Brown says,

This is what I have found: To let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen ... to love with our whole hearts, even though there's no guarantee -- and that's really hard, and I can tell you as a parent, that's excruciatingly difficult -- to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror, when we're wondering, "Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this this passionately? Can I be this fierce about this?" just to be able to stop and, instead of catastrophizing what might happen, to say, "I'm just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable means I'm alive." And the last, which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we're enough.

And strangely, this is what accepting ourselves as hamartolón, this is what accepting our bombu nature, accepting ourselves as above all in need of mercy comes down to. We are enough, because we are loved by God. We are enough because we rest in the ground of being, incomplete as we are; because we have been given the grace to know our need of mercy, and to ask for it. It is enough.

[Also published on Silent Assemblies]

Justice by any other name...

Do you respect that of God in everyone though it may be expressed in unfamiliar ways or be difficult to discern? Each of us has a particular experience of God and each must find the way to be true to it. When words are strange or disturbing to you, try to sense where they come from and what has nourished the lives of others. Listen patiently and seek the truth which other people's opinions may contain for you. Avoid hurtful criticism and provocative language. Do not allow the strength of your convictions to betray you into making statements or allegations that are unfair or untrue. Think it possible that you may be mistaken.

Quaker Faith & Practice 1. Advices and Queries: 17

It seems to me that the contemplative way, even perhaps the way of Christ itself, is summed up in these words. Certainly it seems to have been how our Lord treated others himself (see e.g Mark 7.24ff; John 4.1-42) and it is exactly this quality of open-heartedness that contemplative prayer seems to foster.

Defensiveness in matters of faith seems to be an endless problem. Fundamentalists of whichever faith seem to suffer from it, and along with it seems to go a deep distrust of the contemplative life. One can see this, for instance, in the persecution of Sufis by Islamic fundamentalists, and the online campaigns mounted against Christian contemplative prayer a few years ago by Christian fundamentalist groups in the USA. Of course contemplation is worrying to fundamentalists - it is the openness and well, fairness, that it seems to engender that is so threatening to a mindset "which refuses to allow its ideas to be examined or challenged." (McGrath & McGrath, 2007)

 Justice is another name, it seems, for vulnerability - for that is where openness leads. The heart is God's own place, and true prayer opens the heart to God in Christ through the Holy Spirit. There doesn't seem to be any other way...

Intuition...

...I decided to take responsibility for what I wanted, and to trust God to take it from there.

Intuition may be one way of speaking about how God does that - takes things from here to there, I mean. Since intuition operates lower down the frontal lobe, it is not easy to talk about how it works. In general, I tend to not pay much attention to it until I have completed all my research, compiled my lists of pros and cons, and made a rational decision based on facts. then, when I cannot sleep because the rational decision seems all wrong to me, I start paying attention to to gyroscope of my intuition, which operates below the radar of my reason. I pay attention to recurring dreams and interesting coincidences. I let my feelings off the leash and follow them around. When something moves in my peripheral vision, I leave the path to investigate. It would be a pity to walk right by a burning bush. At this point, reason is all but useless to me. All that remains is trust. Will I trust my intuition or won't I? The more I do, the more intuitive I become. This is as close as I can come to describing the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church

In the language of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, I am an INFP, a personality type which is known to "engage the outside world primarily with intuition." (from the Wikipedia article) Barbara Brown Taylor's words here rang so powerfully true when I read them that I had to put the book down for an hour to settle the singing in my heart before I could bear to leave them to read on. For me, this quality of intuition is, as Brown Taylor describes, inextricably involved with my whole experience of the spiritual, indeed of the Holy Spirit.

It has taken me most of a lifetime to recover the sense of myself as who I am. Growing up as the only child of a painter and sculptor (my father, a musician and RAF officer, was absent for most of my childhood) in a beautiful village on the Sussex coast, I was a happy loner, a lover of life and of all that lived, until I found myself at a notably harsh boys' prep school, where I was taught to forget all that foolish trustingness, and to become as cruel and hard as any of my classmates - more so, since, to keep to the Myers Briggs typology, a personality type denied becomes its own shadow. I became defensive, and hid my real nature so deep that I all but forgot its existence. It was only the endless patience and ingenuity of God, mediated through so many people over the years, that allowed me back out into the sunlight and warmth, to the sound of the bees in the lavender, the touch of the long stamens of the Roses of Sharon.

How essential it is that we keep hold of who we are; how much more essential that we help each other to do so. Intuition, at least for those of us for whom it is a major function, is just as Barbara Brown Taylor describes, a gyroscope. More, for me at least, a gyrocompass that, set free by understanding and acceptance of what it is (and here the Myers Briggs indicator can be such a liberating thing) will, if I let it, keep me on a heading to God's purpose. I may not understand at all what that is, rationally, but "[a]t this point, reason is all but useless to me".

"All that remains is trust." And so it is. To trust, to open, to fall back into the everlasting arms of the God who made me part of all that is, is the sweet centre of what has come to be faith. "O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvellous for me..." (Psalm 131.1)

Unforgettable and shining…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you experienced?

The heart-stirrings of a good man are good; those of a wicked person are wicked; but everyone must learn how to combat intrusive thoughts, and turn the bad into good. This is the mark of the soul that is well versed.

How does this come about, you will ask?

Here is the way of it: just as a man knows when he is cold or when he feels hot, so does the man who has experienced the Holy Spirit know when grace is in his soul, or when evil spirits approach.
The Lord gives the soul understanding to recognize His coming, and love Him and do His will. In the same way the soul recognizes thoughts which proceed from the enemy, not by their outward form but by their effect on her [the soul].

This is knowledge born of experience; and the man with no experience is easily duped by the enemy.

St Silouan - with thanks to Glory to God for all Things

To be vulnerable to one's own heart - that's the thing. Only by being prepared to listen into the hollow of one's very being (a thing some Buddhists call  vipassanā) can we begin truly to allow the Spirit to pray in us, for us...

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8.26-27)

Good Shepherd Sunday

Jesus answered, ‘I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father's hand. The Father and I are one.’

(John 10:25-30)

Today is one of my favourite days in the church calendar. I find the image of our Lord as shepherd, and of ourselves as sheep, extraordinarily moving and reassuring. The mercy of Christ is just particularly that—we are foolish, and we get lost; he finds us, holds us, regardless of what may be thrown at us, regardless of all we fear, and think we perceive…

No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.

(1 Corinthians 10:13)

Fruitfulness…

There is a great difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control, and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control over its development, and to make it available in large quantities. Success brings many rewards and often fame. Fruits, however, come from weakness and vulnerability. And fruits are unique. A child is the fruit conceived in vulnerability, community is the fruit born through shared brokenness, and intimacy is the fruit that grows through touching one another's wounds. Let’s remind one another that what brings us true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness.

From Henri J.M. Nouwen’s Bread for the Journey.