On retreat!

I'm going off to Compton Durville for an 8-day retreat starting on Friday afternoon, so I'll be leaving a little hole in the blogosphere till next month, effectively. See you then!

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Nazareth & Antioch... and Wool?

In the latest (July 14) post in her Lectionary Blog, Sarah Dylan Breuer quotes at length from an excellent Christianity Today interview with the Rt. Rev. Dr. David Zac Niringiye, Assistant Bishop of Kampala in the Church of Uganda. I'm not going to quote it again here, - I'd strongly encourage you to read it in full - but Dr Niringiye's point is that he has "...come to the conclusion that the powerful, those at the center, must begin to realize that the future shape of things does not belong to them. The future shape of things is on the periphery. The future shape of things is not in Jerusalem, but outside. It is Nazareth. It is Antioch."

I've been thinking a lot about being here in Wool. This is a village in rural Dorset, hidden away from what makes 21st century Britain the way it is, just a dot on the map between Poole and Weymouth. The centre it is not. Yet even years ago, Jan and I were certain that the Lord was calling us here, and that certainty has only grown in the intervening time.

It is very easy, when one reads of the things going on in the church nationally and internationally, the big festivals, the major inner-city evangelism programmes, the National Centre for This and the International Forum for Something Else, to feel a bit irrelevant, as though God had far better things to do than pay much attention to Wool.

Dr Niringiye is right, though. Jesus was from Nazareth, much to Nathaniel's disgust. The Lord's Anointed never was crowned King of the Jews. The closest he got was an ironic label on the Cross where he died, outside the city walls, and when he rose again on the third day, disbelief and rumours. The beginning of the baby church's cross-cultural push, without which it might (had God allowed it) have remained an obscure Jewish sect in the footnotes of history, was in Antioch, not in Jerusalem. St Francis (with the exception of some notable journeys) and St Clare spent all their lives in and around Assisi, not in Rome. Martin Luther, the child of obscure country folk, lived and worked his whole adult life in Wittenberg, not in Paris or Berlin.

The cosmos swung on the pivot of Bethlehem, 2000-odd years ago, far away from the might of Rome or the conceit of Jerusalem, and it was a bunch of tatty local shepherds who brought the first worship to the Saviour of the World. Even now, we don't know their names.

It is not for us to try and assess the importance of what God calls us to do, or where he calls us to serve. Our only answer is the answer Jesus gave to Peter in John 21, "...what is that to you? Follow me!"

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An analogy from a virus...

Mary Landesman, in her regular antivirus column, links a remarkable article from Rabbi Aron Moss, entitled What You Can Learn From a Computer Virus.

The good rabbi explains that there are spiritual lessons we can all learn from such an unfortunately common present-day annoyance, a virus infection in one's computer. He notes three:

1) We are all connected.

I am sitting at my computer and all's well, until an old friend on the other side of the world gets a virus in his computer. Because my name appears in his address book, I become a victim as the virus enters his computer and sends itself to his entire list. So, I get the virus just because he did.

In a similar way, we each have souls all over the world to whom we are connected. Every soul has a soul family, a group of souls that come from the same soul root. When I am down, I can drag my soul brothers and sisters down with me. And if I am inspired, I may shoot a sudden burst of inspiration to someone on the other side of the world.

2) No act is insignificant.

When I see a strange email in my inbox, I have a choice to make. With one click I can delete it and avoid the inconvenience of an infected computer. But a click on the attachment, even by accident, can cause an avalanche of destruction. It was just one little click, but the results were enormous.

So often, it's little acts that are the most powerful. A friendly word to a stranger or a phone call to a friend just to say hello can impact someone's life in ways we can't imagine.

3) One person can change the world.

Every virus starts with one idiot. Someone somewhere has nothing better to do than engage in virtual vandalism. One person's destructive plan can affect millions the world over.

We sometimes feel that our petty little lives are insignificant in the whole scheme of things. In such a vast universe, what difference do I make? The computer virus teaches us that no matter how small we feel, each one of us has the power to change the world. And if so much damage can take such little effort, how much healing and positive energy can be created if we put our minds and hearts to it.

(I hope IsraelNationalNews doesn't mind my quoting this article - I can't find a copyright policy on their site!)

This article reminds me of the quotes from Thomas Merton and Br Ramon SSF I mentioned in my post Why the Jesus Prayer (and all contemplative prayer) matters... It really isn't possible, spiritually, to look at things, let alone people, in isolation. Why I do, what I say, what I pray, does matter. It's not "my own business". Nothing is. We none of us act, think or even dream alone. We are deeply and intimately connected on the most fundamental, ontological level.

As Br Ramon puts it,

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.

Praying the Jesus Prayer by Br Ramon SSF (Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering, 1988) Page 26.

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Classic Merton...

Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one's own - be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid.

            The purpose of education is to show us how to define ourselves authentically and spontaneously in relation to our world - not to impose a prefabricated definition of the world, still less an arbitrary definition of ourselves as individuals. The world is made up of the people who are fully alive in it: that is, of the people who can be themselves in it and can enter into a living and fruitful relationship with each other in it. The world is, therefore, more real in proportion as the people in it are able to be more fully and more humanly alive: that is to say, better able to make a lucid and conscious use of their freedom. Basically, this freedom must consist first of all in the capacity to choose their own lives, to find themselves on the deepest possible level. A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here and there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions … is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of "choice" when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses. It is not free because it is unwilling to face the risk of self-discovery.           

Thomas Merton. "Learning to Live" in Love and Living. Edited by Naomi Burton Stone and Brother Patrick Hart. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979: 3-4.

It's a curious thing that freedom is best found within discipline, just as love is best found within commitment. To the outsider, these things seem paradoxical, unreasonable, but in God's economy they work, in the same, sane way as losing one's life allows one to keep it forever, whereas attempting to preserve it at all costs is fatal (Luke 17:33; John 12:25).

I often think that the freest people I know live within religious communities, under vows, as Merton did. Brother Ramon SSF, a man after St Francis' own heart if ever there was one, once said, "It may mean... that the believer now lives on two levels of paradox - the outward life seeming to exhibit weakness and physical mortality, while the inward life is more and more possessed by the mystery and fire of God's love." (Franciscan Spirituality, SPCK 1994, pp.175-176)

Br Ramon then goes on to quote a passage I love from Gregory of Nyssa, and one which truly sums up what I understand freedom in the end to be - I'll quote it in full:

The idea of epektasis is that the perfect spiritual man is not one who has 'arrived' at a high degree of moral perfection and contemplative knowledge of God. Rather, he is a man who, having attained a high measure, presses on in pursuit of still purer, more vital experience of God's light and truth. The perfect man is the man who is ever moving forward, deeper into the mystery of God. Heaven itself, in this view, consists in an eternal progress into the love and light and life of God, where each fulfillment contains in itself the impulse to further exploration.

(Bamberger Continuum 7.2, 1968, p. 294)

I wonder if CS Lewis had been reading Gregory of Nyssa before he wrote that marvellous passage at the end of The Last Battle:

...but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before. (pp. 173-4.)

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1948 and all that...

Sparked by a TV programme about the years following World War II, I started looking into how things were in Britain in the year I was born. The overall picture was pretty grim: the country was in the midst of an anticlimactic depression, rationing was still in place, and the activities of black-market gangs (the "spivs") were all too reminiscent of the inner-city drug gangs that cause such pain to the police in our own day.

As I looked into that time a little further, more and more parallels kept appearing between then and now. The sense of impending social disintegration, the apparent impotence of the police in the face of both organised crime and individual violence, the prevalence of firearms and firearm-related incidents (so many soldiers had brought their guns home from the war - even my upright uncle had a service revolver and ammo in his desk), the use of edged weapons to intimidate and wound (the cutthroat razor was the weapon of choice - see Brighton Rock).

Yet the country recovered; on the face of it, it was Clement Atlee's programme of Nationalisation, Aneurin Bevan's cradle-to-grave Welfare State, and the foundation of the National Health Service that helped pull us back from the brink of chaos.

But what was the Church doing? I can find little direct evidence of the current of Christian life in the late 40's and early 50's. Archbishop William Temple had died in office not long after D-Day, and Geoffrey Fisher had taken his place. But what were people praying? How did the ordinary Christian see things developing? What was the Church's stance on the situation, officially and privately? I don't even recall much from CS Lewis, very active through all that period (he published Miracles in 1947, and Mere Christianity in '52) in the way of direct social or prophetic commentary. Evelyn Underhill and Charles Williams, both of whom might have had something interesting to say on the subject, were both dead by 1945. I can't ask either of my parents, nor their sisters or brothers, since all died in between the 70's and the early 90's.

I shall continue to explore, and I'll post anything worth posting. In the meantime, if anyone reading this knows anything about the spiritual dimensions of this strange and troubled period in British history, I'd be more than grateful if they'd point me in the right direction!

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What is it with the building analogies, already?

Jesus used them, CS Lewis used them, and now Matt Summerfield of Crusaders is at it.

I don't know why, since I am one of the world's very least DIY oriented people, and I've never built anything more architectural than a website in my life, but I find these building analogies oddly compelling.

Matt's contention is that, just as we can often pass a building site for months, and not know what on earth is meant to be being built, there being nothing but big holes in the ground and messy heaps of mud and materials, so it is with our lives. God has the architect's drawings - he is the architect - but all we can see is the incomprehensible mess.

I guess I'm even less of a tapestry maker than I am a builder, but there's another analogy I find perhaps almost more compelling than this one. It's the back of the tapestry analogy. You've probably heard this one before, but one of the nicest expositions comes in a post in Waiter Rant's blog:

My thoughts drift back to a time when my godfather and I were in a museum. We’re looking at a medieval tapestry. He’s intently studying the back of it. Puzzled I join him.

“What do you see here?” he asks me.

The back of the tapestry is rough and frayed; betraying the handiwork of the person who made it. The colors are mottled and muted. There’s a lot of darkness.

“A mess,” I reply.

“Yes,” he smiles. “I like looking at the back of the tapestry because it’s a lot like real life. A mess. It makes no sense, there seems to be no order or beauty.”

Then, his arms on my shoulders, he moves me to the front of the tapestry. I look at it. Undimmed by the centuries - it’s gorgeous.

“But every once in a while God gives you a glimpse of the other side and it all begins to make sense.” he says gently.

I’m silent. I know something important has happened but I’m too young to understand.

I look at my godfather. He’s a Byzantine Catholic priest. With his beard and flowing robes he really looks like an Obi-Wan – except he’s the real thing.

“No one is unimportant. We all play a part in designing life’s tapestry. You never know what your effect on people is going to be. When you think the world is ugly, makes no sense, remember there is always another side. If you’re lucky God will grant you a peek.”

“Uh-huh” I nod.

“Remember life is beautiful – even when you can’t always see it.”

You see what he's getting at? It just doesn't make sense - how often do we hear that, even from fellow Christians, all too often from ourselves...? But it's not supposed to make sense, any more than a mucky clay pit is supposed to look like a beautiful building, or the back of a tapestry is meant to look like the front. Whay does it have to be like that? God knows. He really does. One day, he'll let us see the front properly, with the lights on. Till then, we'll just have to keep on walking past the building site and wondering what on earth all that filthy mess is supposed to be about.

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The Way of Repentance

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. (Romans 7:15-20)

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. (1 John 1:5-10)

Paul has put his finger on it here! How frail and contradictory we all are, and how much in need of forgiveness and mercy. Truly there is not one among us who is free from this.

It's not so much that we commit individual sins (though of course we do, all too often!) but that our hearts are inclined always away from God, unless we allow the Spirit continually to re-align us. It's this, rather than any silliness with hair shirts, that is meant by "The Way of Repentance" (see Irma Zaleski's wonderful book of the same title) It sounds fearful and slightly strange, especially to 21st century people, but actually it's gentle and clean, a way of freedom and grace.

I know I do keep on about the Jesus Prayer, but its quiet insistence, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner," is just exactly the healing balm the broken heart (Psalm 51:17) is crying for - Jesus is "gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls." (Matthew 11:29)

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That fine wire, salvation...

I was just reading an article by Victoria Boyson, The Spirit of Salvation, in which she reminds us:

In the beginning, our heavenly Father created us for Himself and He greatly delighted in His creation. He meant for us to be His family and He loved us so much. However, Satan was perverted by His sick jealousy of man and sought to destroy what God loved. He twisted the words of God and lied to mankind in order to devour them.

How the Father mourned the loss of His dear ones that He cherished; how He wept over them. And how Satan used them to hurt God more and more by driving them to sin, then using their sin to torment them all the while "claiming" ownership of them. How it wounded the Father's heart each time His beloved would chose to sin and be driven farther from Him.

It just occurred to me how similar the modus operandi described here is to the philosophy of all terrorism and much violent crime: I don't like you, because you won't do what I want... but I can't get at you directly, so I'll hurt you by hurting those you love... and that will be your fault not mine, because you didn't go along with my wishes in the first place. You had only to give me pride of place in Heaven, and in your affections, and mankind would never have had to suffer the consequences of the Fall; you had only to release the political prisoners, and that busload of schoolchildren need never have been bombed; you had only to cook my meals right, and your daughter need never have been beaten till she couldn't walk.

What are we to do? How can we possibly deal with a tactic like this? The Cross is the only possible answer - there the grief and the mercy of God were drawn through the die of the worst injustice, the ultimate example of the suffering of the innocent, to form the fine but infinitely strong wire of salvation. A free gift, but as Eliot said in Little Gidding "Costing not less than everything..."

Yet again I'm reminded of the hymn I chose for our Songs of Praise evening, "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross", with Isaac Watts' astonishing words, "Did e'er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown? Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were an offering far too small; Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all."

The key lies in what Joyce Huggett describes as the shift in the focus of prayer from what or whom we are praying for - the victims of terrorism, say - to Jesus himself, our crucified Saviour (1 Corinthians 2:2). As Joyce says, "The acute awareness of the presence of Jesus [persuades us] that [we] need not fumble for fine words in order to present to Jesus the needs of others. All that [is] needed [is] that [we] should pass the person or situation into his... hands." (Listening to God, p73) Which is where Michael Ramsey's words, "putting ourselves in his presence, being hungry and thirsty for him, wanting him, letting heart and mind move towards him; with the needs of the world on our heart" come in. Our only possible prayer in the face of ultimate evil (well, my only possible prayer, anyway!) is the prayer of Romans 8:26, letting the Spirit intercede in our stead, "with sighs too deep for words..."

"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner..." And in that mercy a world of grief and pain is washed and washed again "through his most precious blood."

Songs of Praise

We had a Songs of Praise evening at church today - 10 of us each chose their favourite hymn or worship song, and introduced it, explaining why they had chosen that particular piece. We then sang them, with organ or electronic keyboard accompaniment.

Really a strangely moving night - very personal, intimate accounts came out, of people's interior - and exterior come to that - journeys with the Lord, and how these songs had illustrated, ornamented and fed their own pilgrimages.

If anyone feels like doing something different one evening, I can highly recommend the exercise. The BBC Songs of Praise website illustrates the programme that gave rise to the idea, in case anyone's unfamiliar with it, but it's basically very simple and straightforward. You need to announce it, of course, a few weeks in advance, so people have time to think, and musicians have time to practice!

Carlo Carretto wrote...

this about creation:

Here is the miracle of love: to discover that all creation is one, flung out into space by a God who is a Father, and that if you present yourself to it as he does - unarmed and full of peace - creation will recognize you and meet you with a smile.

I, Francis (Orbis 1982)

He also wrote this about prayer:

as long as we pray only when and how we want to, our life of prayer is bound to be unreal. It will run in fits and starts. The slightest upset - even a toothache - will be enough to destroy the whole edifice of our prayer life.

You must strip your prayers... You must simplify, de-intellectualize. Put yourself in front of Jesus as a poor man: not with any big ideas, but with living faith. Remain motionless in an act of love before the Father. Don't try to reach God with your understanding; that is impossible. Reach him in love; that is possible.

taken from Michael L. Gaudoin-Parker The Real Presence through the Ages (Alba House)

And Jesus, when they asked him which was the greatest commandment, replied:

"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: "You shall love your neighbour as yourself."

Love. That is all there is, finally. When everything else has failed, love remains. And all things lead back to love. St Paul saw this perfectly - not only in 1 Corinthians 13:13, but so strongly in Romans 8. The whole chapter, beginning with that great statement of liberation, "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus..." and through all the amazing statements about prayer and the Spirit, and the cry of assurance that begins at v28, drives on to the climactic statement that "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Prayer is love. The Wikipedia article on "Prayer in Christianity" underlines this beautifully: "For the Christian, prayer is love, and to 'Pray always' (Luke 18:1) is to love always." The Jesus Prayer, once it becomes by use bedded into the mind, begins to sing gently under all our thoughts and all our words, fulfilling that injunction of Paul's to "pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 15:17)

Micah recorded the Lord as saying "what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." (6:8 NIV) To love mercy. To love as prayer, and that prayer being a prayer for mercy, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner..."

Annie Dillard wrote:

"Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place?" [Psalm 24:3] There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead - as if innocence had ever been - and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been.

Holy the Firm (HarperCollins 1977, 1984)

And Jesus gave us those two commandments, to love our Lord and to love each other; and our love can surely only truly be shown, as is Jesus' for us, as mercy. Lord Jesus, have mercy - on us and through us - use our love and our prayer as you will, for your mercy, in your Spirit. "Lord here I am - send me! Have mercy on me, a sinner..."

Back again!

Another of my long lacunae, I'm afraid... we've been doing major house tidyings and so forth, and preparing for the village fête one weekend and the church fête the next! One way or another I just haven't got to my desk more than to check emails...

We've planted a few new plants in the garden - a couple of Buddleias, a red shamrock, a couple of Osteospermums - and repopulated the planters and tubs. Should've done all this ages ago, but our hearts weren't in it in the early spring. Somehow we're coming back into bloom ourselves now - Jan especially is blinking in the light like a woman on a train that's just emerged from a long tunnel. I feel like dancing to see her - but all I seem to manage is to be grumpy about all this house rearrangement and so on. I guess I'm a bit like a cat in that respect - things may not be perfect, but I hate 'em being shook up...

Strange, I seem somehow to cope better - more graciously anyway - with adversity than I do with blessing. Maybe I feel I know what's coming with adversity!

I've finally managed to arrange a retreat - going away for 8 days at Compton Durville at the end of July. Somehow I guess I need silence and stillness like a plant needs water, and so much has happened over the last year, or less than a year, that the need has become acute, just to allow things to settle out if nothing else. Do pray that nothing will happen to prevent my going, and that Jan will be well enough that I can leave her without worrying!

Compassionate time...

As so often, I've been thinking about the relationship between contemplative prayer and what people sometimes call "real" prayer - i.e. intercessory or petitionary prayer - and what any of that has to say to circumstances like the Sand Creek Massacre, which Jan has just finished watching dramatised in Soldier Blue. I couldn't watch.

Simon Barrington Ward, in his superb book on The Jesus Prayer, says, "the whole prayer becomes an intercession. Soon, I find that I am no longer praying just for myself, but when I say 'have mercy on me, a sinner' I find that all the situations of grief and terror, of pain and suffering, begin to be drawn into me and I into them. I begin to pray as a fragment of this wounded creation longing for its release into fulfilment. The macrocosm of the world and the microcosm of my own heart look curiously similar and become part of each other. I am in those for whom I would pray and they are in me - Every petition of the prayer becomes a bringing of all into the presence and the love of God."

This of course is the essence of Michael Ramsey's famous remark that contemplative prayer "means essentially our being with God, putting ourselves in his presence... wanting him, letting heart and mind move towards him; with the needs of the world on our heart."

Merton said, "The contemplative life must provide an area, a space of liberty, of silence, in which possibilities are allowed to surface and new choices – beyond routine choice – become manifest. It should create a new experience of time, not as stopgap, stillness, but as "temps vierge" – not a blank to be filled or an untouched space to be conquered and violated, but a space which can enjoy its own potentialities and hopes – and its own presence to itself. One’s own time. But not dominated by one’s own ego and its demands. Hence open to others – compassionate time, rooted in the sense of common illusion and in criticism of it." (The Asian Journals of Thomas Merton (New Directions Publishing Corp. New York, 1975) pp 117, 177)

We in our generation are all too often in danger of crating a false dichotomy between what we perceive as different kinds of prayer. But I think this is more a semantic or else a cultural thing than anything rooted in spiritual reality. I know some within the evangelical community have a deep distrust of contemplative prayer that is rooted in an assumed association with Buddhist and Hindu methods of meditation. Of course there are methodological parallels; but to say that they are effectively the same thing is to say that Salvador Dali is essentially the same as Raphael because they both used certain materials and techniques. Even the most thoroughly Eastern-influenced Christian writer on prayer knows perfectly well that for the Christian prayer is to do with God or it is nothing.

Now, given that prayer is rooted in the belief that the finite can actually communicate with the infinite, and that the infinite is interested in communicating with the finite, then it is odd to assume that such communication must be confined to plain English (or whatever is the pray-er's native language) - or indeed to words at all. After all, doesn't St Paul say that "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." (Romans 8:26)? We are very familiar in our own time with many different forms of communication other than the verbal, so why should we be puzzled that it is the same with God?

The closer we draw to God, the more aware we are of the beautiful signs of his hand in all that he has made, the more we come to know his love and his mercy and his purity, the harder it for us to bear the fallenness of creation. Paul again: "We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved..." Romans 8:22-24. Our contemplation cannot be selfish, self-absorbed - for the closer we are to God, the more our hearts are broken for the suffering, for women, for men, children, even the smallest of the animals, and we come to see their pain and their degradation mirrored in our own lives. So our contemplation becomes intercession - and as we see the mercy and the grace of God in made visible in Christ and at work in the world by his Spirit, so our wonder and our love turns to contemplation, and all our crying returns to, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner..."

God is good...

Over this past week God's blessings and his mercy have been so clear... The details I can't go into one by one, and in any case they probably wouldn't make much sense to anyone else - but there has been such a sense of his "steadfast love" after all the difficulties of the winter. So many things in our lives are coming straight and clear now - he really is "making all things new."

The weather goes on and on bringing out the beauty of this place we live in. This morning is all hazy sunshine and a kind of sheen of light on the leaves like the skin of water on stones in a stream. This light seemed to follow everyone this morning into church - there weren't many of us today, with people away on holiday - but there really was such a clear sense of our being "one body, because we all share in the one bread." Communion was a tangible thing, as though the sacrament itself became visible over us all like that light on the leaves, and for those few moments we were transfigured, like people on the steps of Heaven...

About the Sacred Feminine & such things...

I just found this wonderful post, "Sacred Feminine?" on OTRgirl's fine blog. What she says about Mary Magdalene bears quoting in full:

Dan Brown maintains that by Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene and having a child with her he was elevating women. Frankly what Jesus really did for Mary was much more radical. He saw her as a person. He didn’t have to have sex with her, marry her, or have children with her for her to be valuable. He instead recognized her intrinsic worth. In most societies around the world and throughout history, that has not been true. Even now in the US most of my single women friends are agonizing about still being single. Without anyone saying it, there’s a sense that something is ‘wrong’ with them. If they were smarter, nicer, prettier, more willing to compromise, etc. surely they’d be married by now. But Jesus values women for themselves. They were part of the group of disciples as unmarried women. He let himself be touched in public by an ‘unclean’ woman (who wept over his feet, dried them with her—unbound=prostitute—hair, and anointed his feet with perfume). His masculinity didn’t need a woman for validation and he valued the feminine in woman without needing to possess her.

OTRgirl is so strong and clear about this, that I was groping after in posts like "Upside Down..." and "A special deformity of conscience?" She's nailed the DaVinci Code thing good and proper, and made a superb point about one of my favourite Gospel people in one hit. Stunning stuff!

Sunshine and things...

Listening to Clannad, to Maire Brennan's extraordinary voice, that is more joyful and more tragic than anyone's I know. Suddenly wanting to be in Ireland again. There are bits of me that belong to that beautiful broken land and that are never quite whole unless I'm there. But I've never seriously considered moving there, somehow. Odd creature I am, I think...

I am going to have to do something about this growing obsession with soundscapes - strange thing for a guitarist to get into, unless they happen, like Steve Hillage, to stumble across their very own Miquette Giraudy! Very hard to do anything in this territory without keyboards...

Dorset is wonderful in the sunshine - there's a clear golden light over everything, and the air is heavy with the scent of flowers, except when a light sea breezes springs up to bring the freshness back. Behind the house the bank of the old chalk-pit rises up in solid wall of green, inhabited by solitary warblers and little families of titmice... God is very good, and, "Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made." (Romans 1:20) Not too hard to understand or see on a day like today!

Abelard, Eckhart and Keats

This passage came up this evening at our LPA course, strangely, since it is for the third or fourth time I have stumbled across it recently:

From somewhere near them in the words a cry rose, a thin cry, of such intolerable anguish that Abelard turned dizzy on his feet, and caught at the wall of the hut. "It's a child's voice," he said.

Thibault had gone outside. The cry came again. "A rabbit," said Thibault. He listened. "It'll be in a trap. Hugh told me he was putting them down."

"O God," Abelard muttered. "Let it die quickly."

But the cry came yet again. He plunged through a thicket of hornbeam. "Watch out," said Thibault, thrusting past him. "The trap might take the hand off you."

The rabbit stopped shrieking when they stooped over it, either from exhaustion, or in some last extremity of fear. Thibault held the teeth of the trap apart, and Abelard gathered up the little creature in his hands. It lay for a moment breathing quickly, then in some blind recognition of the kindness that had met it at the last, the small head thrust and nestled against his arm, and it died.

It was that last confiding thrust that broke Abelard's heart. He looked down at the little draggled body, his mouth shaking. "Thibault," he said, "do you think there is a God at all? Whatever has come to me, I earned it. But what did this one do?"

Thibault nodded.

"I know," he said. "Only, I think God is in it too."

Abelard looked up sharply.

"In it? Do you mean that it makes him suffer, the way it does us?"

Again Thibault nodded.

"Then why doesn't he stop it?"

"I don't know," said Thibault. "Unless it's like the prodigal son. I suppose the father could have kept him at home against his will. But what would have been the use? All this," he stroked the limp body, "is because of us. But all the time God suffers. More than we do."

Abelard looked at him, perplexed. "Thibault, do you mean Calvary?"

Thibault shook his head. "That was only a piece of it--the piece that we saw--in time. Like that." He pointed to a fallen tree beside them, sawn through the middle. "That dark ring there, it goes up and down the whole length of the tree. But you only see it where it is cut across. That is what Christ's life was; the bit of God that we saw. And we think God is like that, because Christ was like that, kind, and forgiving sins and healing people. We think God is like that forever, because it happened once, with Christ. But not the pain. Not the agony at the last. We think that stopped."

Abelard looked at him, the blunt nose and the wide mouth, the honest troubled eyes. He could have knelt before him.

"Then, Thibault," he said slowly, "you think that all this," he looked down at the little quiet body in his arms, "all the pain of the world, was Christ's cross?"

"God's cross," said Thibault. "And it goes on."

From Peter Abelard
by Helen Waddell

It brings me back once again to the thought that we, if we are truly to follow Christ, to become like him, then there is this terrible identification, this empathy, in all the full sense of the word.

Merriam Webster's Medical Dictionary defines empathy like this:

the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner...

but it's deeper than that. John Keats spoke famously of "negative capability" - by which he seemed to mean not only the ability to open oneself to experience (including, crucially, others' experience) but also to remain within that experience, or knowledge, without attempting to reduce it to intellectually manageable proportions - or in Keats' own words: "that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."

Only so can we truly respond to the quality that Meister Eckhart just called istigkeit, is-ness... Negative capability is a kind of empathy "which permits us simply to let things be in whatever may be their uncertainty and their mystery." (Nathan Scott)

But don't imagine - as I think Eckhart's contemporary detractors imagined - that this implies a kind of detachment, a cold withdrawal from the world and the suffering creatures that inhabit it. In 1985 the Pope, John Paul II, said: "Did not Eckhart teach his disciples: 'All that God asks you most pressingly is to go out of yourself - and let God be God in you'? One could think that, in separating himself from creatures, the mystic leaves his brothers, humanity, behind. The same Eckhart affirms that, on the contrary, the mystic is marvellously present to them on the only level where he can truly reach them, that is in God."

Paul said, "...you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God." (Colossians 3:3)

Eckhart makes the vital link between Abelard and Keats - that as we are open uncritically to our created sisters and brothers, human and otherwise, we are able as Christians to be open in Christ, and that this openness is in itself somehow redemptive, as we simply walk with them through the dark valley, bearing the light of Christ in our own hearts.

From this comes true prayer, for it is only in this condition of openness to suffering in Christ that we are able to pray for people and situations as they are rather than as we conceive them to be, or as we assume they ought to be.

I want to finish with a quote I've mentioned before, from Br. Ramon SSF, where he explains this kind of prayer better than anyone I know:

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]

From Praying the Jesus Prayer by Br Ramon SSF (Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering, 1988) Page 26.

Summer (not) in the City

The weather here has been just plain wonderful - warm, bright, sunny but just a little sea breeze to stop it getting stifling. The kids are out playing football everywhere, happy dogs chasing after them, and Figgy the cat sits on the warm earth under the Ceanothus bushes, coming in to cool off covered in pollen and smelling of honey.

Dear Betty died today, a peaceful end to her long battle with cancer. Well into her seventies, she was one of the greatest enthusiasts for Vineyard-style worship (so long as it wasn't too loud) and so sure of God's love for her, and for his church. We'll miss her. The whole village will. She's happy now, of that I'm completely certain, no more worries, no more pain. She'll find her towel laid out by the crystal sea, and an end to tears forever.

God's love is stronger even than death. "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose... Who will separate us from the love of Christ? ...For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8:28-39)

The sun goes on shining.

I sometimes wonder if our love of the sun, and our corresponding depression when we are deprived of it for long, isn't some kind of premonition of that time when "the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb." (Revelation 21:23). We are made to walk in the light, and our hearts are sick till that day when the light of the world, and of all worlds, will shine for us always, with no clouds, no distorting mirror, no need to shield our eyes - for "then [we] will know fully, even as [we] have been fully known." (1 Corinthians 13:12)

Some more reflections on Merton...

...to love another as a person we must begin by granting him his own
autonomy and identity as a person. We have to love him for what he
is in himself, and not for what he is to us. We have to love him for
his own good, not for the good we get out of him. And this is
impossible unless we are capable of a love which ‘transforms’ us,
so to speak, into the other person, making us able to see things a he
sees them, love what he loves, experience the deeper realities of his
own life as if they were our own. Without sacrifice, such a
transformation is utterly impossible. But unless we are capable of
this kind of transformation ‘into the other’ while remaining
ourselves, we are not yet capable of a fully human existence.

From Disputed Questions by Thomas Merton
(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, New York, 1960) Page 104.

This is a very deep thing Merton is saying here, and it has huge implications not only for pastoral care, but also for the life of prayer. To pray for someone is to love them, in a way just as practical as feeding them or clothing them or listening to them. But if our love is to reach the depths of identification Merton is hinting at here, then our prayer may look very different from the conventional intercessory model.

On the home page of The Mercy Site I quote Michael Ramsey: "Contemplation is for all Christians... [It] means essentially our being with God, putting ourselves in his presence, being hungry and thirsty for him, wanting him, letting heart and mind move towards him; with the needs of the world on our heart."

In order to love, to pray, like this we need to become entirely vulnerable to the world, defenceless, without keeping ourselves back from the sometimes unbearable reality confronting us. But we don't, truly we don't, need to be able accurately to delineate the problem, sociologically, medically, economically, politically... still less do we need to be able to dream up an answer to it. God knows all about the problem, far more intimately and accurately than we ever could, and he, the all-wise God, knows how to bring his mercy to bear on it. No, what he needs from us is our love - a love that cares enough to risk breaking our hearts for those who suffer, as Jesus was broken for us.

We need to be open to the pain of creation, but open in and with God. Such openness in our own strength might overwhelm our minds and hearts - but to be open in Christ, through the Spirit, is the most redemptive act we as humans are capable of. And we are all capable of it. It doesn't require a degree, any special aptitude, rigorous training - it just needs love.

Mea culpa!

It's been far too long since I posted anything... Really have kept meaning to, but there's been so much going on, and when I've had the time my head's been going in all kinds of directions.

However...

I'll try and get into the habit of posting at least someting regularly - it's not fair to have a blog and leave it unattended, I always think.

Looking back to my last post on May 15th, I should record that I finally said, "yes" and have begun the offical Lay Pastoral Assistant training. Feels like a huge step, somehow. I don't think it's the job itself - and in our church it's very much what you make it, so I can major on prayer rather than visiting if that's where the Lord puts me (it usually is!) - but more that it's a kind of irrevocable commitment to work within the Anglican church  from now on. Well it feels irrevocable. It also feels incredibly right. I have less doubt than I've had about anything since beginning the long Franciscan trail. God has finally nailed me, I think, and so here I shall stay, nailed...

There's a lot to think about. I do know that coming here to Wool, Jan and I both felt so strongly that God was calling us to serve this community, to work here, in this and the surrounding villages, and despite some pretty strong human nudges away from here, nothing has changed that. I've felt too, increasingly strongly, that one of the real challenges to the chuch in England at the moment is ministering to the rural community, and that the CofE is probably the only church in a position to do so. I've been praying about this for years now - so I can't really complain if God has taken me at my word, and decided to make me a bit of the answer to my own prayers!

More of this later - I need to go and put some rice on to boil...

Sine proprio (take 3)

As if in answer to my thoughts earlier today, this just arrived from The Merton Foundation in their weekly email:

If we want to be spiritual, then, let us first of all live our lives. Let us not fear the responsibilities and the inevitable distractions of the work appointed for us by the will of God. Let us embrace reality and thus find ourselves immersed in the life-giving will and wisdom of God which surrounds us everywhere.

From Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Publishers, New York, 1958) Page 46-7.

I think I am all too prone to "fear the responsibilities and the inevitable distractions of the work appointed for [me] by the will of God."

I'm not sure if saying, "Once bitten, twice shy" actually amounts to a sin in itself, but it can most certainly lead to missing the mark, which is what the OT Hebrew for sin means, after all. "God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline." (2 Tim 1:7)

Sine proprio (take 2)

This has been a good but troubling week. I'm still struggling with this question of sine proprio - without possessing, as I think it ought to be translated.

It's remarkable how, every time I think I've decided that my call is just to prayer, something else comes up. Only this week the Lord did it again, and I've been asked by two of the people whom I most respect as Christians and as friends to consider taking a quite significant step in terms of ministry. It would be very much what I chose to make it (at least, that's what they say!) but it would involve a fair bit of, well, stuff, as Wimber used to call it.

I think I'm getting caught in a trap of my own making, really. I have been praying so much for this community, that we'd be shown how the church can most effectively serve this rural yet deprived area, with all of its very disparate areas of need, and its uniquely rural forms of alienation... I've always said that one has to be prepared to be at least part of the answer to one's own prayers...

Hah!

Now, is my longing (a longing St Francis had throughout his life) just to be alone with God, to be close to him, near him, to know him more and more, something that, however good it may be in itself, is ultimately selfish, akin to the disciples' longing to make dwellings on the Mount of Transfiguration?

Judy's sermon yesterday on John 15 struck me all of a heap. She said that when we do abide in the vine, thoroughly, we don't have to struggle to find things to do to serve the Lord. We just have to live in the situations in which we find ourselves, and respond. Respond out of that ingrafted vineiness that is the life in Christ, respond out of the love with which he has filled us, and in which we abide. Let it overflow. Don't mind about the mess. Let it slop out all over.

Perhaps I am being called to risk more of myself, not to protect my time (which half the time I then waste...), not to possess even that. Sine proprio as radical in its own way as Francis' and Clare's physical poverty?

Figgy

I did promise to post a picture of Figgy, the contemplative cat. This is she, in typical pose! (I hate to admit it, but that's my desk in typical pose as well...)

A special deformity of conscience?

There are crimes which no one would commit as an individual which he willingly and bravely commits when acting in the name of his society, because he has been (too easily) convinced that evil is entirely different when it is done ‘for the common good.’ As an example, one might point to the way in which racial hatreds and even persecution are admitted by people who consider themselves, and perhaps in some sense are, kind, tolerant, civilized and even humane. But they have acquired a special deformity of conscience as a result of their identification with their group, their immersion in their particular society. This deformation is the price they pay to forget and to exorcise that solitude which seems to them to be a demon.

From Disputed Questions by Thomas Merton
(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, New York, 1960) Page 183.

This quotation from Thomas Merton underlines what I was writing about in my 'E' Word post the other week. We, as Christians, the very people who ought to be immune to this sort of thing, practice it regularly as part of our denomination identity. In point of fact, it's very rare these days that we do it on racial grounds, but when we come to matters of conscience, or worse, matters of sexual identity, then we are right up there with the professionals. Consider the following quote from an Evangelical social concern website:

"Christians would never want to be homophobic or discriminate against homosexuals out of bigotry or prejudice. Christians of course earnestly desire the repentance and salvation of homosexuals. However, the Bible is clear that the only rightful sexual relationship for which we were created, is a relationship between a man and a woman. Consequently there are times when Christians need to be free to discriminate against homosexuals."

Really? Should we be free to discrminate against people? Again, I have to refer us to the popular wristband slogan, "What Would Jesus Do?"

Now remember, the Bible is far clearer about the only rightful sexual relationship between a man and a woman being within marriage than it is about homosexual relations. Yet, do we find Jesus "discriminating against" adulterers? Remember, he let one go off to act as the first recorded evangelist even before she had straightened out her tangled sex life (John 4:28-30) - and he saved another from the punishment decreed by the Law of Moses (John 8:3-11) using the extraordinary words, "Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again." Forgiveness and counsel, even trust for ministry. I don't see discrimination there.

Remember, I'm writing about adultery, the only cause for which Jesus permitted divorce out of hand. A capital offence, according to the Law. Jesus said plenty against adultery, yet when confronted with actual adulterers, women adulterers at that, against whom his culture discriminated most rigorously, he behaved with the most astonishing love and generosity. About homosexuality he said not a recorded word, for or against; and yet we claim Scriptural warrant (a warrant which on careful analysis raises all manner of exegetical and hermeneutical questions - but that's another issue altogether - read this for one interesting point of view) to behave more harshly to homosexuals than Jesus did to adulterers. If anything qualifies as an example of Merton's "special deformity of conscience," I reckon that does.

Sine proprio...

People usually translate the Latin phrase sine proprio as "without property", or "poverty". But as Francis of Assisi used it, perhaps a better translation would be "without possessing".

Gordon Plumb, in an article in the Third Order Chronicle for Summer 2003, remarks that the words "... refer rather to a way of living without grasping (and are thus far more about attitudes and values than about intrinsic wealth or the lack of it)."

I've been increasing being challenged recently by the thought that God's call on my life is to prayer, and that my own Franciscan vocation is probably to be understood, at least in a great part, as living sine proprio anything else. There has been a process of stripping going on here that dates back at least to that occasion some years ago when I really asked God to let me know his Son, really know him, before anything else. It's since then that this has been going on, that everything I've tried to do that isn't at least in some sense prayer has just come to bits in my hands, to the point that I'm almost scared to touch anything in case I break it.
After all, every "career move", whether in the world or in the church, has fallen to nothing in ways that surely bear the imprint of God's hand, his holy and paradoxical way doing things that is so alien to us: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD" (Isaiah 55:8)

By now, the challenge is acute, almost a daily pain. It wakes me in the night; all my thoughts and desires are confronted by it, measured against it. It will not go away.

What I need to do now, I suppose, is to try, with the help and discernment of my Franciscan brothers and sisters, not to mention (as always!) Jan, to find out how this is to be lived practically. Following Francis following Christ is always an entirely practical exercise, however ridiculous that may seem to the average pair of eyes in the world!

I've been thinking...

I see it's over a week now since I posted here, and I know I've been a bit remiss.

I've been thinking, or at least attempting to think. I know there are connections, and if I could see what they are, I could make sense of something that's itching at the edges of my mind. The trouble is, I don't think I'd like that sense very much.

Anyway, I'd better tell you some of the things that have been flittering about, and just maybe writing them down will help put things into some sort of order at least. OK, let's make a list:

• It won't have escaped your notice that the British Government is going through something of a hard time at the moment, and the chrome on the New Labour wagon is blistering and flaking a little.
• Cruelty to animals is on the up & up in this country.
• The same sort of thing is happening with children, with the elderly, with people with learning disabilities and physical disabilities. The incidence of cases - well, reported cases anyway - of neglect and cruelty seems to be increasing.
• People trafficking is becoming a major industry in some places in the larger British cities, and the Police seem impotent to combat it.
  
• The racist BNP, the British National Party, has been making significant gains in the local elections, especially in some parts of London.
• The Liberal Democrats seem to have woken from their woozy Kennedy daze, and are looking around at the way things are...
• The Conservatives are publicly describing themselves as compassionate.
  
• Animal rescue centres are receiving increased donations, and increased interest from potential adopters. Their online presence is increasing, and this is helping animals to be re-homed who might otherwise remain in their pens.
• The same sort of thing is happening with charities dedicated to helping vulnerable people. Even Lottery funding is finding its way to these organisations.
• The religious right is becoming increasingly hardline in its response to sexual diversity, and even in some places to the (ordained) ministry of women in the church.
• Some churches, or Christian movements, which till very recently have been on the left - or progressive, or emergent (you fill in the rest) - wing of Evangelicalism, have been moving further right.
• The old, British modernist liberalism seems to be losing its grip on the imagination of the CofE.
• There is what I read as the beginnings of a kind of postmodernist Liberal Evangelicalism within said institution, and a little colour is coming back into its cheeks as a result. Even presumed Catholic institutions like the religious communities are catching some of it...
  
• I could go on, but that's quite enough for the moment.

What's going on here? Why are things polarising like this? What is going on in the spiritual realm to give rise to effects like this among us creatures of flesh and blood? Remember, "our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." (Eph 6:12) Paul counsels us to "take up the whole armour of God..." (v. 13) and the very first part of that armour, as Paul describes it, is the belt of truth, and the second is the breastplate of righteousness.

Our prayer needs to be for truth and righteousness - or justice. At the beginning of Prayer Week 2006 let's remember that. Remember "...we live as human beings, but we do not wage war according to human standards; for the weapons of our warfare are not merely human, but they have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to obey Christ." (1 Cor 10:3-5)

Let's pray for truth and justice, in the world and in the church - but let's be prepared, like Paul, to stand up for them as well, and, if necessary, to take the consequences as God gives us grace (2 Cor 12:9) to allow his strength to be made perfect in our weakness...

Friday Five: Procrastination

I HAVE to do this one!

1. Guitar forums - endless hours not just exchanging tips & tricks with other guitarists the world over, but playing silly games of album cover consequences, guess the riff, and other enthralling pursuits ;-)
2. Guitar manufacturers' websites, guitar amplifier manufacturers' websites, guitar string manufacturers' websites, guitar accessory manufacturers' websites... you're getting the hang of it now?
3. Reading stuff I keep in the bathroom - computer mags, but mostly (how did you guess) guitar catalogues, guitar amplifier catalogues, guitar... Oh, you fill in the rest...
   
4. Rearranging my (computer) desktop - rearranging the real one? Not a hope...
5. Going up & down stairs several times because each time I 'forget' to bring something either up or down. No, really, this is a form of procrastination...

Things I don't do to procrastinate: cleaning things. Weeding the garden. Calling people I ought to call. Writing overdue letters, even emails...

H'mm. 12 steps, anyone?

The ‘E’ Word

Following a link, ultimately from a post on Good In Parts, I found a fascinating article by John Buckeridge, the editor of Christianity magazine. You can read it in full here.

John’s argument is that the word ‘evangelical’ is no longer useful to describe the current of church life that it once did. He says:

Half a century ago words like ‘gay’, ‘ecstasy’ and ‘wicked’ meant something very different than they do today. In the past ‘evangelical’ stood for four key values:

• a commitment to the authority and centrality of scripture,

• a call to personal faith and repentance,

• the centrality of Christ’s death as our substitute,

• putting faith into action through evangelism and social action.

Now to the unchurched and people of other faiths – evangelical is increasingly shorthand for: right-wing US politics, an arrogant loud mouth who refuses to listen to other people’s opinions, men in grey suits who attempt to crowbar authorised version scripture verses into every situation, or ‘happy-clappy’ simpletons who gullibly swallow whatever their tub thumping minister tells them to believe. Large parts of the British media seem happy to paint evangelicals into that stereotype. Today in the UK ‘evangelical’ is often linked with the ultimate 21st century swearword ‘fundamentalist’. The result is the name ‘evangelical’ which years ago, may have smelt of roses – now has the aroma of the manure that fertilises the bush.

This has connections with my ‘Upside Down’ post, only what I was suggesting was more than a play on words. I fear that our actual thought processes, our ways of relating to God and to our neighbour, our capacity to love, to minister grace, to embody Christ in his mercy and his purity, are being eroded by what is happening as right-wing attitudes and fundamentalist hermeneutics infiltrate the evangelical church. (Think of George Orwell’s definition of doublethink!)

I am deeply disturbed by all this.

I was reading someone’s summary of their own character in a blog profile somewhere the other day, and it set me thinking. Am I a romantic?

Now, if romantic implies expensive boxes of chocolate, small bunches of dewy red roses, tuxedos and patent-leather dancing shoes for men, and floaty dresses and stiletto heels for women, then I’m not, not, not a romantic. No way.

If on the other hand it implies long walks on the beach at sunset, going to sleep in one another’s arms, giving one’s heart and one’s commitment and one’s total intimacy to one other person, then I am definitely a romantic.

Am I an evangelical?

Now, if this implies uncritical acceptance of the industrial west, our foreign policy and our policies on economics, immigration, social welfare, housing; if it implies reading the Bible as one might read a manual for a washing machine, applying literally both Old Testament laws and every paragraph of all Paul’s letters to our own ways of doing church; if it implies a way of life lived according to instructions from church leadership that can’t be questioned in case one is thought disobedient or lacking in accountability; if it means in practice (no matter what may be said in theory) preferring law to grace, rules to love, doctrinal and ethical purity to mercy and acceptance, then I’m so not an evangelical.

If on the other hand it implies treating the Bible as God’s inspired word to his creation; if it implies taking seriously the Good News of Jesus, in all its grace and mercy, all its power and radically demanding purity, then maybe I am.

If I’m not an evangelical, then am I a liberal?

Well if that implies treating the Bible as no more than another set of axiomatically questionable ancient texts to be demythologised; if it implies treating the Good News of Jesus as just another set of ethical ramblings by a long-dead wise man; if it implies treating theology as just another academic discipline properly confined within the corridors of universities, and prayer as one of many techniques of self-hypnosis, then no, no chance.

But if it implies understanding the Bible as God’s word given to imperfect, culturally conditioned human beings, and expressed not only in history, theology and moral instruction, but also in poetry, polemic and narrative; if it implies recognising that while Paul wrote some of the most penetrating and profound theology, and some of the most poignant personal meditations on God and life, some of his letters contain very limited, particular advice to individual local churches that are not only very different from each other but immensely different culturally from anything we might encounter, especially in the west; if it implies “freedom to develop unique ways of approaching God and talking about Christianity”, and freedom from “dogmatic statements and claims of absolute truth on finer doctrinal points” (quotes from Wikipedia), then maybe I am.

Not for the first time, I’m so grateful simply to be able to call myself a Franciscan!

[Sorry about all the 'I's - you can read 'one' if you prefer, but personally one feels uncomfortable writing as though one were a member of the Royal Family...]

A bit more Merton

"It is useless to try to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with everything we have done. In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from effects that are beyond our control and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting an immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition."

From No Man is an Island by Thomas Merton
(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, New York, 1955) Page 121.

Merton getting to me again, thanks to The Merton Foundation's weekly email. He is so right here... I'm sorry to complain again about some of the charismatic/evangelical ways of doing things - and I don't mean to tar everyone with the same brush, truly - but there does tend to be an unspoken assumption that all of our lives, and the results and effects thereof, are under our control. The wholly admirable LutheranChik has an extraordinary post here, where among some very salutory remarks for people like me who tend to critcise other (our own old) ways of doing things, she remarks, "The bottom line, in the words of Luther, is that we're all beggars... The good news is that God refuses to let that prevent God from claiming us, from saving us, from seeking to befriend us. If death itself wasn't going to stop Christ, then the cluelessness of his friends certainly wasn't going to either." And that of course includes us.

We don't after all have to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps... we don't have to manufacture our own righteousness. Jesus has reached down into the worst pit we can dig for ourselves, and drawn us up into his risen life with his own strong, gentle, nail-pierced hand. All we have to do is to cry, with Bartimaeus and with the tax-collector at the Temple, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!"

Jesus, Saviour, Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, you have done it already...!

Psalm 84 & stuff

LutheranChik left a comment on my last post to the effect that she's always loved the verse (3) from Psalm 84 that reads “Even the sparrow has found a home ... where she may have her young – a place near your altar, O Lord Almighty, my King and my God.”

Me too.. I love that whole psalm. There are just irreplaceable lines so full of our Lord's grace and beauty, and the yearning of our response:

"Happy are those whose strength is in you,
in whose heart are the highways to Zion.

As they go through the valley of Baca
they make it a place of springs;
the early rain also covers it with pools."

and

" For a day in your courts is better
than a thousand elsewhere.
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
than live in the tents of wickedness."

Oh Amen!

CS Lewis knew this feeling so well - it's at the heart of this wonderful passage from The Last Battle:

They had seen strange enough things at the Doorway. But it was stranger than any of them to look round and find themselves in warm daylight, the blue sky above them, flowers at their feet and laughter in Aslan’s eyes. He turned swiftly round, crouched lower, lashed himself with his tail and shot away like a golden arrow.

“Come further in! Come further up!” he shouted over his shoulder. But who could keep up with him at that pace?

If that's what awaits us on the other side, then that's, as I think it was Gandalf and Pippin who agreed, "not so bad..."

"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8:38-39)

Thinking a lot about death, and about God's love for all his creatures, just at the moment (Matthew 10:29 and so on). We had to have our beloved dog Mable (yes, spelled like that) put to sleep on Tuesday, at the age of 16. She had finally become so old she could hardly walk up the steps to the back lawn, and could only eat chicken, hand-fed. She had her last Easter with us, and died licking Jan's hand. She'd been our constant companion, friend and comforter since the age of 6 weeks... she was an indefatigable ally of the cats, and the hens, and the calves and the lambs, and the best farm ratter ever! A true lurcher (whippet/collie mix) and one of the gentlest dogs I've known. We'll miss her.

St Clare & her Cats - one of my favourite icons

St Clare apparently loved cats, and had one special one who would sit on her bed as she knitted. Clare had trained her so that if the ball of yarn fell away, the cat would jump down and bring it back to her.

I don't know how many cats there were at San Damiano, but I love the way this icon shows a couple rubbing round her ankles.

The icon is by Terence Nelson - his note on it reads, in part:

As in her life, St. Clare devoutly holds the monstrance with the Blessed Sacrament in protection of the monastery. At her feet are cats, symbolizing the contemplative life. Consistent with Franciscan love of nature, a sparrow nests in the colonnade, “Even the sparrow has found a home ... where she may have her young – a place near your altar, O Lord Almighty, my King and my God.” (Psalm 84:3)

Cats symbolising the contemplative life? Yes, I could go along with that!

Figgy, our little round black rescue cat, loves to pray with me in the early mornings, either sitting on my lap or on the desk in front of me. If I have my Bible or Office folder open, she'll often put a paw on the open page to hold it for me. If I ever forget to let leave my study door ajar for her, she makes a terrible fuss till I do!

Upside down...

I wonder if I’ll get used to God turning my mental and spiritual world upside down on a regular basis? So many unspoken – not to mention spoken – evangelical assumptions are getting exposed by the light of grace that I’m getting slightly vertiginous.

I was mildly offended the other day when I tried one of Beliefnet’s little “What kind of Christian are you?” quizzes and discovered I was supposed to be a “Jerry Falwell Christian”. Now given that the alternatives included Hilary Clinton and Bishop Spong I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it was a nasty shock all the same. It did however have the side-effect of spurring me to write this post.

For so many years I’d been sinking into a kind of grace vacuum. One of the comforting things about all but the finest and most self-aware evangelicalism is that there’s a set of rules and regulations to steer by... that the risks inherent in faith (John Wimber: “faith is spelled R-I-S-K”) are replaced by codes of practice. There are so many of them, going by names like “accountability”, “purity”, “Bible-believing”...

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not knocking the actual things themselves. We all need to be accountable, we all need moral clarity, we all most certainly need the Bible at the very centre of our faith and praxis. What worries me are the packages that come with these words.

We affirm our faith in the Bible as the core of our understanding of God, as his word, as inspired by his Holy Spirit and “useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” and we find we’ve bought into a hermeneutic that applies Old Testament strictures, and very specific, localised New Testament advice, uncritically to life 2,000+ years later and in a very different cultural setting.

We affirm our understanding of morality as having to do with the outworkings of Jesus’ “two greatest commandments” (Matthew 22:37-39) and we suddenly discover we’ve bought into a set of largely unwritten rules that excludes minorities and the marginalised from fulfilling God’s call on their lives in ministry, and that applies a “give 10% of gross income or else” rule to people living on means-tested benefits.

We affirm our need of accountability, and we discover we really shouldn’t accept a lift from someone of the opposite sex (or maybe it’s the same sex if someone suspects we may swing that way) unless there’s at least one other person of their sex (or maybe it’s our own sex?) (scratches head a while) in the car.

My point, if I haven’t laboured it too far already, is that we have to be so careful that our strongly-held convictions don’t lead us to buy into value systems that we don’t belong in, and that can lead us to unthinkingly reinforcing those sets of assumptions, promulgating them, judging others by them, seeking to re-arrange their lives in accordance with them...

You remember those wristbands that were so popular a few years ago, with the letters WWJD stamped on them? Perhaps we should revive the fashion. Would Jesus refuse to speak to a woman alone in case some busybody or easily led and morally challenged person got the wrong idea? Well did he? (John 4) Would Jesus refuse to accept God’s call in someone’s life because she didn’t measure up to the lifestyle yardsticks of the religious establishment? Did he? (Luke 10:42)

Andy Hickford has an interesting observation in an article in the April issue of Christianity magazine: “Then of course there’s Jesus! When it comes to Jesus and the law, it can be a bit confusing. Matthew 5:17 says that Jesus came to fulfil the law. Romans 3:31 says that he upholds the law. In Romans 7:6 it says that Jesus released us from the law and in Ephesians 2 Paul writes that Jesus abolished the law! So, just what is the relationship between Jesus and the Old Testament’s laws?! Basically, Jesus replaces the Old Testament law. In him it is all fulfilled and upheld, because he completes it. We are released from its regulation and condemnation- that’s what meant by ‘He abolished the law.’ However, its wisdom and history is fulfilled in Christ.”

It’s odd, but I’ve discovered more honesty and grace, more love and clear, courageous thinking on things like this within the “established churches” than anywhere else recently. I don’t know just what God’s up to with the Anglican Communion at the moment, but within these ivy-clad ancient walls there’s a positive explosion of Christlikeness going on. You've only to look in a few of the blogs in the Blogging Episcopalians webring (link in the sidebar) to see what I mean.

Grace, grace, grace... “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” (John 1:16-17)

Easter Vigil

Sunlight early on cold stone
dry and rough
against our fingers;
the new fire flutters,
clinging to its twigs
in the wall angle,
against a chill breeze.

He is risen, and his light
finds our hearts in the still of dawn,
our bodies only half awake,
our white breath following us
to the porch and the great candle:
his light given,
that we must give and give.

He Is Risen!

He is risen indeed!

Alleluia!

Easter Saturday...

the day taken out, like an empty hole in time, anechoic, no-thing.

Prayer is like this very often, a place without a place, “waterless over the harsh rocks, down the dry valley of heedless stones...”

What could have happened in the tomb, between Joseph and Nicodemus leaving, and that dawn of glory? There will never be a way to know: those hours were outside time, and what we are, creatures of days and years, cannot comprehend it.

Again prayer: the truer our prayer, the more we come to him who will forever be beyond our comprehension. We meet him as nearly face to face as we could ever bear, and yet we don’t recognise him. We don’t have the equipment to take him in – we are as uncomprehending as a profoundly deaf man at a symphony concert, or a blind cave salamander in a measureless cavern of crystal.

Tomorrow morning, Mary had this problem. She met her Lord and her Saviour face to face, and thought he was the gardener. Maria Boulding, from Marked for Life - Prayer in the Easter Christ:

Prayer is listening, listening to the word. Like Mary Magdalene we hear many words, but at rare intervals we hear the really piercing word, the word that affirms us in our beings, the fiat that creates and re-creates us. This word is our own name. It is the secret name written on the white stone that no one knows except him who receives it, the secret truth of our own person that we do not yet fully know ourselves but only glimpse, because it is only potentially true as yet, true to God but not yet fully brought to birth.

Tomorrow morning Jesus speaks our name, piercing our incomprehension with his recognition, his knowing, his comprehending us. Our part is to listen – listen into the anechoic disorienting silence, the dead room, the empty garden, long before dawn, “while it was still dark.” This is the time Mary set off, thinking she knew but not even knowing why she went, like we must go, not being able to know why till our Lord calls us by name, but going anyway, into the dark, into the place of tombs, the hortus conclusus, the garden closed to our senses but open to our going in. Listen... listen!

Darkness and Sun Shadows

Darkness
and sun-shadows - the I AM
broken, thirsting forsaken.

The sun’s light failed
and the curtain tore
forever.

You, Jesus, agnus Dei,
qui tollis peccata mundi
accomplished this;

and wrecked despair
against the constant keep
of hope.

Back Home!

Holy Week seems like a good place to turn over a new blogging leaf, and Maundy Thursday particularly appropriate. Though we are many...

I’ve been well and truly convicted by reading Kathryn’s astonishing Good in Parts, as well as my long-time favourite Roman Catholic blogger and solitary Karen Marie Knapp. The Mercy Blog has been so impersonal, especially recently – and yet my life has been in such passionate turmoil over the period I’ve been posting here. I’ve been less than honest I guess, not speaking of the extraordinary journey God’s been taking me on over the last few months, and how he’s brought me back to the Anglican church after 7 years in the Baptist church, and the next 11 in the Vineyard. I’ll have to omit some of the finer details, as they involve other people, but suffice it to say it’s been quite a ride!

It’s crucially important too that for the last 3 years or so I’ve been involved in a conversation with various Franciscans, culminating in my being noviced as a Tertiary on March 4 this year. It just feels so right – Helen Julian CSF, in an essay published in New Daylight, calls it “finding a home.” And so it is. I’ve never been more sure of anything since marrying Jan!

As Mercy Site readers will know, the contemplative life has been drawing me in more and more deeply since, oh, 1978 at least, when I was introduced to the Jesus Prayer by Fr Francis Horner SSM, on an extended visit to Willen Priory. (He gave me Per Olof Sjögren’s wonderful book to read!) About that time, too, I began to read Thomas Merton, and he opened my eyes to the wonderful riches of the church’s experience in prayer. So wherever I’ve been, that’s been the centre of it all – the longing of God in my heart for closeness, intimacy; and the pain he’s let me feel for creation, for all my sister and brother creatures, human and otherwise – an ache that just doesn’t go away but gets stronger over the years and months, like St Paul says in Romans 8:19-23: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.”

But the amazing thing that’s happened since I began to explore this possibility of returning to the Anglican church, is the joy of coming back to liturgical prayer. I’d been noticing for a few years that my own private “quiet times” had been taking on a more and more liturgical shape, all by themselves somehow, with psalms and readings and regular bits of Scripture that kept coming back, and which I guess I’d have to call canticles. Coming back to this kind of prayer among my sisters and brothers, especially in the context of the Eucharist, has been mind-blowing. I can only describe it as being like being carried along by a deep and powerful river, rather than splashing about trying to swim in the pools.

Some of my past colleagues might be saying to themselves here, “OK as far as it goes, maybe, but what about the Spirit? What about freedom in worship?” All I can say is that I’ve found the Holy Spirit to be alive and well and living in the Church, in every bit of it, in every denomination and movement and flavour. (Unless people really make a determined effort to shut him out, I suppose, but I have to admit I’ve yet to see this theoretical possibility in practice!) And he’s the same Spirit, yesterday and today and forever. I have found so much of grace, of love, of mercy – of Jesus – over recent months. No, I’m not missing out – I feel more like the woman in Luke 15, who lost her coin and found it again, “Rejoice with me!”