Free at last!

Jesus legitimated what John was doing, saying it's OK to pour water over people and tell them their sins are forgiven. That's revolutionary. Jews were supposed to follow the Law of Holiness in Leviticus, and suddenly John is making it far too easy to get God to love us, to get God to forgive us. God becomes as available as Jordan River water. And, of course, the irony is that the water is in the desert where water isn't supposed to be.

You can find God everywhere, in other words – outside of institutions, official priesthood or formal observance. One wonders if the churches today even catch John's dangerous corrective.

Richard Rohr, from Jesus' Plan for a New World

Sometimes, as Rohr suggests, the churches just don't get it. Especially among churches that think of themselves as pillars of orthodoxy, it seems to be felt that in order to receive God's grace and mercy in Christ, certain technical hoops need to be jumped through. Whether it's requiring submission to church leadership, signing up for some kind of "recovery" programme, or some specific piece of ceremonial, before we can be "restored to fellowship", it's all bollocks, according to John. God's mercy and forgiveness, in Christ, are as freely available as the waters of a great river, flowing in the arid desert of hypocrisy and jobsworthery and lovelessness.

You think I'm uncharacteristically angry, that maybe I shouldn't use words like "bollocks"? Read Matthew 23! Jesus used some pretty immoderate language on just this subject…

Now, I'm not using this passage from Rohr to argue for withdrawing from all organised church life, slamming the door behind us, and shaking off the dust from our feet. This wasn't Francis' way when dealing with a church at the very least as compromised and corrupt and superstitious and rule-ridden as anything we see today. Christ's call to him was to "repair my house" – not to abandon it. His preaching, and even more, his life, and the lives of the sisters and brothers who followed him, called the church to set its own house in order – and it did, in what must count as one of the greatest revivals in its long history.

It may be necessary to step from one stream of the Church (big 'C') to another, in a way that wasn't open to Francis in his own time, but we need to be clear why we are stepping, and we need to make that clear to the both the church we are joining and the church we are leaving. There is no room for prevarication, uncomfortable though that may be. Or else we may be called to remain where we are, but always to be prepared to speak the truth in love, as it says in our own Third Order Principles, "cheerfully facing any scorn or persecution to which this may lead." ((9) – where it applies to any form of social injustice, but see (7))

I am extraordinarily blessed in the church where I'm serving, and none of what I've just said applies there! But I'm very clearly aware of the facts laid out in Dr Barb Orlowski's original research, to name but one source, and of my own past supporting experience.

The Good News of Advent is that Christ is coming with mercy and judgement, and he will set his people free. Free at last! Praise him, praise him, praise Jesus our Redeemer!

Sorrow, not blame…

Two people commented, on yesterday's post, that my words reminded them of Julian of Norwich. I thought I'd remind myself what she said about these wounds that are glorified as Christ's wounds remain in glory:

God brought into my mind that I should sin, and because of the joy I had in looking on him, I was reluctant to look on this Showing. But our Lord was patient with me, and gave me the grace to listen…

For in every soul that shall be saved there is a godly will that never agreed to sin, and never shall. Just as there is a beastly will in our lower nature that cannot will any good – so there is a godly will our higher nature…

And all our troubles come because our own love fails us…

Also God showed that sin shall not be a shame to man, but a glory. For just as every sin brings its own suffering, by truth, so every soul that sins earns a blessing by love. And just as many sins are punished with much suffering, because they are so bad, even so they shall be rewarded by many joys in heaven because of the suffering and sorrow they have caused here on earth.

For the soul that comes to heaven is so precious to God, and the place so holy, that God in his goodness never allows a soul that shall finally reach there to sin, unless the sin is rewarded – and made known for ever, and blessedly restored by overwhelming worship…

And so our courteous Lord showed them as an example of how it is in part here on earth, and shall be fully in heaven. For there, the mark of sin is turned to honour…

Our Lord holds us so tenderly when it seems to us that we are nearly forsaken and cast away because of our sin – and that we deserve to be.

And, because we are made humble by this, we are raised high in God's sight, by his grace – and also by repentance, and compassion, and true yearning for God. Then sinners are suddenly delivered from sin and from pain, and are taken up to heaven – and even made high saints.

Repentance makes us clean. Compassion makes us ready, and yearning for God makes us worthy.

Though the soul is healed, God still sees the wounds – and sees them not as scars but as honours…

For he looks on sin as sorrow and anguish to those who love him and, because he loves them, does not blame them for it…

Julian of Norwich, Showings (Long Text) Chapters 37-39, tr. Sheila Upjohn (emphases mine)

Oh how true I have found these words! God is merciful and compassionate beyond anything we can imagine. Don't believe me? Don't believe Julian? You only have to do as she did: look to the Cross.

Signs of glory…

The resurrection of Jesus is the basis of our faith in the resurrection of our bodies. Often we hear the suggestion that our bodies are the prisons of our souls and that the spiritual life is the way out of these prisons. But by our faith in the resurrection of the body we proclaim that the spiritual life and the life in the body cannot be separated. Our bodies, as Paul says, are temples of the Holy Spirit (see 1 Corinthians 6:19) and, therefore, sacred. The resurrection of the body means that what we have lived in the body will not go to waste but will be lifted in our eternal life with God. As Christ bears the marks of his suffering in his risen body, our bodies in the resurrection will bear the marks of our suffering. Our wounds will become signs of glory in the resurrection.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I've been off the radar for a week or so – sorry! The week leading up to Advent Sunday was appallingly busy here, and it's after such a week that I realise I'm not 100% well, despite pretending otherwise. The early part of this week I was pretty useless – too tired to sleep properly, which is a nasty vicious circle to get caught in…

I've been thinking a lot about Nouwen's words here, which tie in with an earlier post: Christ, in glory, still bears the wounds of his crucifixion; the Lamb stands like one slain (Revelation 5.6) even as he is worshipped. But our sufferings are only in part physical. As those who have survived capture, imprisonment, even rape or torture, confirm, the worst sufferings are not the physical ones. Somehow, in the life to come, we will bear the spiritual and emotional wounds we have suffered in this vale of tears, and we will bear them as "signs of glory". Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

The secret of prayer…

This is the secret of prayer: to allow oneself to be led by the Spirit. Prayer must not be cast as a struggle to think only of God or to create void and discard distractions. In the poverty of dryness and distraction one must remain before the divine Friend with all one's life exposed, all the whirling thoughts and images that are there. Prayer must be truthful corresponding to the reality one carries within oneself, however miserable. If we satisfy ourselves with nice thoughts about God and believe that we are achieving something, we may be deceiving ourselves. Our concerns and concrete life are not what sets us apart from God, but our not knowing how to place our lives in God's hands and behold them with God's eyes. This is not just another method of concentration, but something necessary for prayer to be Christian. Anyone who reaches total interior silence knows that it is but the consequence of an effort to live only for God and to place all one's life in God's hands.

Kieran Cavanaugh: John of the Cross: Doctor of Light and Love, with thanks to Barbara

Painful experience has shown me that this is true. How often I used to put off prayer till I was "in the right frame of mind", or until I had "some quality time to spend with God". All that happened, of course, was that I put off praying, and when I felt really bad, say if Jan and I had had a row, or I had received some bad news, then I had nowhere to turn except the self-referential spiral of my own inner bitterness.

For me, this brings one of the enormous benefits of praying the hours. No matter how I am feeling, I pray when (or approximately when!) I have scheduled time for the next Office. Four times a day, I come to God in the silence, in the wonderful words of the Daily Office, in the Jesus Prayer, no matter how I am feeling, no matter what has been happening. There isn't really time for prevarication, for generating "nice thoughts about God", and the me God gets is the me that happens to be around at the time. This he can deal with – he is the God of love, and truth, not the God of the brave face, or the God of the pious attitude.

The times when I have most truly encountered God, when I really have met Christ in his mercy and his grace and his indefatigable love, have most often been the times when I have had least to give, when I was dry, and empty of everything but lust and grief, and so so tired. Then I knew it was him – there was nothing left of my pretend piety with which to generate illusions.

I often think we only know our Lord when we are at the end of ourselves. It's not an easy way to have to find him; but he did say himself that "the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life" (Matthew 7.14) so I suppose it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise…

Hidden…

The resurrection of Jesus was a hidden event. Jesus didn't rise from the grave to baffle his opponents, to make a victory statement, or to prove to those who crucified him that he was right after all. Jesus rose as a sign to those who had loved him and followed him that God's divine love is stronger than death. To the women and men who had committed themselves to him, he revealed that his mission had been fulfilled. To those who shared in his ministry, he gave the sacred task to call all people into the new life with him.

The world didn't take notice. Only those whom he called by name, with whom he broke bread, and to whom he spoke words of peace were aware of what happened. Still, it was this hidden event that freed humanity from the shackles of death.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Sometimes it's we Christians who are baffled. Baffled that the world goes on as always, broken and compromised; that it didn't listen, didn't change forever, at the resurrection. We are hurt and confused that our prayers, and the prayers of all those who went before us, haven't already produced a glorious vindication of Christ, and the confounding of all those who spoke against him, who have spoken against us.

But we are in the Kingdom, and the Kingdom is among us, invisible from outside, and yet gloriously alive within the communion of those who have been saved by that resurrection(Luke 17.20-21), lifted up with Jesus from the darkness of the grave (Romans 8.11).

I love this hiddenness, actually. I know it somehow fits with the way I am, so you might say I was bound to like it, and yet there is more to it than that. No-one can enter the Kingdom by being impressed, by taking the side of the playground bully, as might be the case if the Kingdom were to come in power as we wish it would, like the Jews hoping to see the Romans' backsides well and truly kicked. We only enter the Kingdom, which is "a Kingdom of truth and life, a Kingdom of holiness and grace, a Kingdom of justice, love, and peace" (Preface for the Feast of Christ the King) through love, through loving the Christ who was raised in glory, yes, but in hiddenness and gentleness, whose first contact with humanity was with a frightened girl in the early morning mist, in a quiet garden, calling her name softly into her panic and her tears (John 20.14-18). That is the King of this strange Kingdom, that is the nature of the event whose power changed everything, forever. That is what the gate looks like (John 10.9) that leads into the Kingdom. That is the Christ I love.

Willing…

Willingness and wilfulness*

To enable God we must become willing: that is all we have to do. God will do the rest. In fact, it is very important that we do nothing but become willing. And this willingness is not quietism. It requires every effort; it costs not less than everything. Willingness is not passivity: it is readiness.

Willing for what? Willing to be powerless, willing to limit our seeming power so that God's real power can become active in us, most especially in relation to those things we would like to do for God. Because, as André Louf has pointed out, frequently echoing ancient desert wisdom, the works of asceticism we do by our own effort are entirely pagan: it is only when we run up against the wall of despair at the failure of our efforts, only when we are willing to acknowledge our powerlessness and thus enable God's power to be active in us that our service becomes Christian.

Powerlessness, willing or unwilling, and its associated sense of loss, has long been recognised by modern psychologists as being related to tears of every variety. Perhaps if we had not lost the insight bestowed in the Christian tradition of tears, we might not have needed to invent modern psychology to help us recover it.

Psychology helps us to distinguish between kinds of tears: holy tears are not the same as tears of bereavement, whether this bereavement is for the loss of a person or some other option or thing, although holy tears may permeate other kinds of tears. The grief of bereavement is a response to a more or less unwilling loss; whereas the grief of the way of tears, of repentance, is related to willing loss. The grief of bereavement has a beginning, a middle, and what currently is known as 'closure', a time when the active passage of bereavement ends.

The grief associated with penitence, with the metanoia of being turned inside out is continuous because, as the trust towards God continues and becomes more powerful, the process of being organically transformed, the process of divinisation, also continues. More and more illusion is lost. More and more sense of counterfeit power and control is lost, and tears are an appropriate accompaniment. These tears are the sign both of the Holy Spirit at work in a willing person, and of the willingness itself. They signify a kenotic exchange of love between God and the person. They have nothing to do with melancholy or masochism.

Maggie Ross, Tears and Fire: Recovering a Neglected Tradition VIII 

*see Gerald May, Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology, (San Francisco 1982)

The heart of prayer…

The great commandment is not "thou shalt be right." The great commandment is to be "in love." Be inside the great compassion, the great stream, the great river. As others have rightly said, all that is needed is surrender and gratitude. Our job is simply to thank God for being part of it all. All the burdens we carry are not just ours. The sin that comes up in us is not just our sin; it is the sin of the world. The joy that comes up in us is not just our personal joy; it is the joy of all creation. All we can do is accept and give thanks.

Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs, p. 89

For me, this is the very heart of prayer. If we prayed just as ourselves, however much we thought of ourselves as praying for others, we would still only be like pagans making supplication to their deities. But we are in Christ. We do not pray as isolated individuals sending in applications to head office. We pray in the Name of Jesus – as Henri Nouwen said, "To act in the Name of Jesus, however, doesn't mean to act as a representative of Jesus or his spokesperson. It means to act in an intimate communion with him. The Name is like a house, a tent, a dwelling. To act in the Name of Jesus, therefore, means to act from the place where we are united with Jesus in love."

Not only are we in Jesus, but if we are in him, then like him, all of creation is in some sense in us. We are stardust, finding our way back to the Garden, taking all that is with us in our hearts. Compassion, suffering-with, is not just some soppy sympathy: it is a literal identification. We do carry the burdens of others, just as Christ did on the Cross; we are tempted with the sin of the world, just as Christ was in the wilderness, but in our little way, under the great cloak of his mercy and grace, and in the power of the Spirit, who prays in us as we cannot ourselves pray, being little, and weak (Romans 8.26-27). We do this spiritually, of course. I am not suggesting we attempt to physically suffer the injuries or sickness of others: that would be sympathetic magic, not prayer.

This is what Jesus meant when he said, "I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it." (John 14.13-14) It is this vast and terrifying identification that is involved, that we can only bear because it is done in his strength, his Spirit. As Br. Ramon SSF once said, "We can say that such prayer contains within itself a new theology of intercession. It is not that we are continually naming names before God, and repeating stories of pain, suffering and bereavement on an individual and corporate level, but rather that we are able to carry the sorrows and pains of the world with us into [prayer]."

We carry all creation's joys and beauties, too, in thanksgiving and in joy! Praying like this, with our hearts lost in Christ's heart (Colossians 3) we live in a joy and a strength that is not our own. The Principles TSSF state (28, 29): "We as Tertiaries, rejoicing in the Lord always, show in our lives the grace and beauty of divine joy… We carry within us an inner peace and happiness which others may perceive, even if they do not know its source. This joy is a divine gift, coming from union with God in Christ. It is still there even in times of darkness and difficulty, giving cheerful courage in the face of disappointment, and an inward serenity and confidence through sickness and suffering. Those who possess it can rejoice in weakness, insults, hardships, and persecutions for Christ’s sake; for when they are weak, then they are strong."

In my deepest wound…

Give me your failure; he says I will make life out of it. Give me your broken, disfigured, rejected, betrayed body, like the body you see hanging on the cross, and I will make life out of it. It is the divine pattern of transformation, and it never seems to change.

We'll still be handicapped and terribly aware of our wound, but as St. Augustine says, "In my deepest wound I see your glory and it dazzles me." Our wound is our way through. Or as Julian (of Norwich) also put it, at the risk of shocking us, "God sees the wounds, and sees them not as scars but as honours… For he holds sin as a sorrow and pain to his lovers. He does not blame us for them." (Chapter 39, Showing 13, Revelations of Divine Love) We might eventually thank God for our wounds, but usually not until the second half of life.

Richard Rohr, from Everything Belongs

Somehow for me this meditation of Rohr's does fit in with today, with the celebration of Christ the King. As Rhona pointed out in her sermon today, Christ enthroned in glory still bears on his hands and feet, and in his side, the wounds of crucifixion. When we are welcomed ourselves into his Kingdom, we will be glorified, for sure, and our entire beings will be remade imperishable; but we will still bear the wounds of our sins, and the sins done to us. But glorified! If we were to catch a glimpse of those wounds now, with out mortal eyes, they would indeed dazzle us.

Rhona recounted this morning, too, an old story of two monks, one young, a novice maybe, and the other perhaps his Prior, or certainly a monk with years of prayer and thought behind him.

The younger says, one summer morning, "When I think of Christ's wonderful mercy, I cannot imagine that he would willingly consign anyone to an eternity outside his glorious Kingdom."

The elder replies, "Why do you keep turning your head aside from the sunlight, and screwing up your eyes?"

"The light is too bright - it hurts my eyes."

"And so it is with Christ, brother. Christ does not turn anyone away; but unless we repent, and receive his forgiveness, we sinners cannot bear his light."

In the Name of Jesus…

Ministry is acting in the Name of Jesus. When all our actions are in the Name, they will bear fruit for eternal life. To act in the Name of Jesus, however, doesn't mean to act as a representative of Jesus or his spokesperson. It means to act in an intimate communion with him. The Name is like a house, a tent, a dwelling. To act in the Name of Jesus, therefore, means to act from the place where we are united with Jesus in love. To the question "Where are you?" we should be able to answer, "I am in the Name." Then, whatever we do cannot be other than ministry because it will always be Jesus himself who acts in and through us. The final question for all who minister is "Are you in the Name of Jesus?" When we can say yes to that, all of our lives will be ministry.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I've been a bit remiss with the blog this past week – been busy with things here – but this I thought I ought to pass on whole, as it were. Nouwen pulls together in these few words so much that we need to know when we are sent, as we are at the end of every Mass, into the world as bits of the Body, to carry his life and his power into all we do and everywhere we go. It is in a sense the outer side of our prayer, where all we ask is in the Name of Jesus, and all our prayer is for the mercy that is his Name.

Our littleness…

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice: they shall have their fill” (Matthew 5:6)

The concept of justice is exactly halfway through the Beatitudes and at the very end again. It’s a couplet saying, This is the point: To live a just life in this world is to have identified with the longing and hungers of the poor, the meek and those who weep.

This identification and solidarity is already a profound form of social justice. This Beatitude is surely both spiritual and social.

Richard Rohr, from Jesus’ Plan for the New World

This is so much what I was saying yesterday: our “identification and solidarity”—our being present to, or refusing to be absent to, the longings and hungers of the created, all the created, human and otherwise—is prayer. I’d go so far as to say that it is our most powerful prayer, since in it we are making ourselves open, submitted, available, to the love and mercy of God in Christ. In this we take our little share in our Lady’s submission, that small and immense “yes” by which our Saviour came into the world. As Rohr says elsewhere:

Mary tells us about the difference between attainment and grace. Grace is everything and everywhere, as she proclaims in the Magnificat.

Because God is everything to Mary, she is not afraid to boast of her own beauty and greatness.

Humanity is God’s miracle by God’s grace, not by our merit.

Mary is the perfect yes to Jesus.

Therefore she is totally fruitful and victorious, and bears Jesus to the world. Mary will always be the most orthodox image of how holiness works in humanity.

This changes everything for me, and brings what I am sure is the point of all this discussion on my part: We must not be mislead by the littleness of our act of surrender. It is through such tiny acts that God redeems the world.

The weeping class…

“Blessed are those who mourn: they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:5)

In this Beatitude, Jesus praises the weeping class, those who can enter into solidarity with the pain of the world and not try to extract themselves from it.

The weeping mode, if I can call it that, allows one to carry the dark side, to bear the pain of the world without looking for perpetrators or victims, but instead recognizing the tragic reality that both sides are caught up in. Tears from God are always for everybody, for our universal exile from home.

Richard Rohr, from Jesus’ Plan for the New World

 

It is difficult to speak of the aim or goal of [contemplative] prayer, for there is a sense in which it is a process of union which is as infinite as it is intimate... The meaning and design of the Jesus Prayer is an ever deepening union with God, within the communion of saints. It is personal, corporate and eternal, and the great mystics, in the Biblical tradition, come to an end of words. They say that "eye has not seen nor ear heard", they speak of “joy unspeakable” and “groanings unutterable” and “peace that passes understanding”.

But there are some things which we can say, which are derivative of that central core of ineffable experience. We can say that such prayer contains within itself a new theology of intercession. It is not that we are continually naming names before God, and repeating stories of pain, suffering and bereavement on an individual and corporate level, but rather that we are able to carry the sorrows and pains of the world with us into such contemplative prayer as opens before us in the use of the Jesus Prayer. God knows, loves and understands more than we do, and he carries us into the dimension of contemplative prayer and love, and effects salvation, reconciliation and healing in his own way, using us as the instruments of his peace, pity and compassion.

Thus we can say that the “prayer of the heart” unites us with the whole order of creation, and imparts to us a cosmic awareness of the glory of God in both the beauty and the sadness of the world. The process of transfiguration for the whole world has begun in the Gospel, but it will not be completed until the coming of Christ in glory. And until that time we are invited, through prayer, to participate in the healing of the world's ills by the love of God. And if we participate at such a level, then we shall know both pain and glory. The life and ministry of Jesus in the gospels reveal this dimension, for Jesus was at one and the same time the “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief”, and the transfigured healer, manifesting the glory of the Father upon the holy mountain.

Brother Ramon SSF Praying the Jesus Prayer Marshall Pickering 1988 (now unfortunately out of print)

As intercessors, all God asks of us is broken hearts—we do not need to find solutions to the prayers we pray, nor just the right words to frame them. God knows what is on our hearts (Romans 8:26-27)—we need only be honest and courageous enough to feel: feel the pain and the grief and the confusion and betrayal and despair the world feels, and to come before our Lord and Saviour with them on our hearts, and ask for God's mercy in the holy name of Jesus.

I suppose this more or less sums up all that God has shown me about prayer over the years. There really aren’t words for anything else I might want, or be able, to say about it. These few will have to do for the moment…

Only the poor are free…

"How blessed are the poor in spirit: the kingdom of Heaven is theirs." (Matthew 5:3)

What an opening line! I always say it's the opener of Jesus' inaugural address. "How happy are the poor in spirit." It's crucial, a key to everything Jesus is teaching.

Poor in spirit means to live without a need for your own righteousness. It's inner emptiness; no outer need for your own reputation. If you're poor in spirit it won't be long before you're poor. In other words, you won't waste the rest of your life trying to get rich because you'll know better.

Richard Rohr, from Jesus' Plan for the New World

I think this openness to poverty is surprisingly crucial to being a Christian in a world concerned, now as in the New Testament era, with getting and spending. As Wordsworth said, in those pursuits we lay waste our time.

St. Francis was right when he took Lady Poverty for his bride. Only in her arms will we find solace for the hunger of the world, and only when we are free from that hunger will we be free to follow Jesus wherever he may be leading us (Matthew 19.16ff). We'll never know (John 1:37-39) until we are free, and are prepared to get up, leave everything, and go with our Lord.

Only the poor are free to know the truth.

This is true… (for Remembrance Day)

This is entitled Advent Credo, but it makes a perfect affirmation for Remembrance Day, as Kathryn at Good in Parts has noted.

Advent Credo

It is not true that creation and the human family are doomed to destruction and loss -
This is true: For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life;

It is not true that we must accept inhumanity and discrimination, hunger and poverty, death and destruction -
This is true: I have come that they may have life, and that abundantly.

It is not true that violence and hatred should have the last word, and that war and destruction rule forever -
This is true: Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, his name shall be called wonderful counsellor, mighty God, the Everlasting, the Prince of peace.

It is not true that we are simply victims of the powers of evil who seek to rule the world -
This is true: To me is given authority in heaven and on earth, and lo I am with you, even until the end of the world.

It is not true that we have to wait for those who are specially gifted, who are the prophets of the Church before we can be peacemakers -
This is true: I will pour out my spirit on all flesh and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions and your old men shall have dreams.

It is not true that our hopes for liberation of humankind, of justice, of human dignity of peace are not meant for this earth and for this history -
This is true: The hour comes, and it is now, that the true worshipers shall worship God in spirit and in truth.

So let us enter Advent in hope, even hope against hope. Let us see visions of love and peace and justice. Let us affirm with humility, with joy, with faith, with courage: Jesus Christ - the life of the world.

 

From Testimony: The Word Made Flesh, by Daniel Berrigan, S.J. Orbis Books, 2004.

A witness to Christ in the world...

Kathryn, at Good in Parts, calls this "a mission statement to follow to the ends of the earth." I can quite see what she's getting at:

How does the Church witness to Christ in the world? First and foremost by giving visibility to Jesus' love for the poor and the weak. In a world so hungry for healing, forgiveness, reconciliation, and most of all unconditional love, the Church must alleviate that hunger through its ministry. Wherever we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the lonely, listen to those who are rejected, and bring unity and peace to
those who are divided, we proclaim the living Christ, whether we speak about him or not.

It is important that whatever we do and wherever we go, we remain in the Name of Jesus, who sent us. Outside his Name our ministry will lose its divine energy.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Our witness to Christ cannot be other than this, to follow in his footsteps, to take, like him (see Luke 4.18) Isaiah 61 as our job description:

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
to provide for those who mourn in Zion—
to give them a garland instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit...

Can I get a witness?

There are more people on this planet outside the Church than inside it. Millions have been baptised, millions have not. Millions participate in the celebration of the Lord's Supper, but millions do not.

The Church as the body of Christ, as Christ living in the world, has a larger task than to support, nurture, and guide its own members. It is also called to be a witness for the love of God made visible in Jesus. Before his death Jesus prayed for his followers, "As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world" (John 17:18). Part of the essence of being the Church is being a living witness for Christ in the world.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

We are all witnesses - it's just a matter of to what, or to whom, our lives bear witness.

Holy God,
Holy and mighty,
Holy and immortal,
Have mercy on us…

Yes, you did!

Congratulations, America!

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voices could be that difference.

It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

It's the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America...

What a man!

Who are the poor?

The poor are the centre of the Church. But who are the poor? At first we might think of people who are not like us: people who live in slums, people who go to soup kitchens, people who sleep on the streets, people in prisons, mental hospitals, and nursing homes. But the poor can be very close. They can be in our own families, churches or workplaces. Even closer, the poor can be ourselves, who feel unloved, rejected, ignored, or abused.

It is precisely when we see and experience poverty - whether far away, close by, or in our own hearts - that we need to become the Church; that is hold hands as brothers and sisters, confess our own brokenness and need, forgive one another, heal one another's wounds, and gather around the table of Jesus for the breaking of the bread. Thus, as the poor we recognise Jesus, who became poor for us…

When we claim our own poverty and connect our poverty with the poverty of our brothers and sisters, we become the Church of the poor, which is the Church of Jesus. Solidarity is essential for the Church of the poor . Both pain and joy must be shared. As one body we will experience deeply one another's agonies as well as one another's ecstasies. As Paul says: "If one part is hurt, all the parts share its pain. And if one part is honoured, all the parts share its joy" (1 Corinthians 12:26).

Often we might prefer not to be part of the body because it makes us feel the pain of others so intensely. Every time we love others deeply we feel their pain deeply. However, joy is hidden in the pain. When we share the pain we also will share the joy.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

This point about preferring to remain aloof from the body lies at the heart of my concern for those who choose to remain outside the church. I know that in most cases they are not doing so in order to escape their obligations to the poor: far from it, in so many cases they are the poor, according to Nouwen's definition here. But holding ourselves back from the daily, often far from inspiring, life of the church represents to some extent a withholding of surrender, a withholding of some part of ourselves from our sisters and brothers, or so it seems to me.

There is a tendency to think about poverty, suffering, and pain as realities that happen primarily or even exclusively at the bottom of our Church. We seldom think of our leaders as poor. Still, there is great poverty, deep loneliness, painful isolation, real depression, and much emotional suffering at the top of our Church.

We need the courage to acknowledge the suffering of the leaders of our Church - its ministers, priests, bishops, and popes - and include them in this fellowship of the weak. When we are not distracted by the power, wealth, and success of those who offer leadership, we will soon discover their powerlessness, poverty, and failures and feel free to reach out to them with the same compassion we want to give to those at the bottom. In God's eyes there is no distance between bottom and top. There shouldn't be in our eyes either.

Nouwen, ibid.

Many of those outside the church, those who yet know themselves as Christians, are there outside the doors precisely because of the weakness of leaders within the church. I wonder if they, the hurt and the dispossessed, have a vocation special to themselves? I wonder if God is not calling those who know the problems and the dangers most intimately, to pray for those whom they have all too often come to know as their enemies?

The marginal are the centre of the Church...

Those who are marginal in the world are central in the Church, and that is how it is supposed to be! Thus we are called as members of the Church to keep going to the margins of our society. The homeless, the starving, parentless children, people with AIDS, our emotionally disturbed brothers and sisters - they require our first attention.

We can trust that when we reach out with all our energy to the margins of our society we will discover that petty disagreements, fruitless debates, and paralysing rivalries will recede and gradually vanish. The Church will always be renewed when our attention shifts from ourselves to those who need our care. The blessing of Jesus always comes to us through the poor. The most remarkable experience of those who work with the poor is that, in the end, the poor give more than they receive. They give food to us.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Following on from yesterday's post, Nouwen underlines what seems to me to lie at the heart of being church, in the sense of being the body of Christ in the world. It seems to me that there are two sides to this, but they are two sides of the one thing. There is the mystical side, the unity of the Church in the Eucharist - "though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in the one bread..." - and there is the unity of the Church in mercy, in being Christ to the world, and that brings us straight to the poor. As St. Teresa of Avila said:

Christ has no body now, but yours.
No hands, no feet on earth, but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which
Christ looks compassion into the world.
Yours are the feet
with which Christ walks to do good.
Yours are the hands
with which Christ blesses the world.

Jesus' own job description from Isaiah 61, quoted in Luke 4.18, leaves us in no doubt:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free...

The poor are given to the Church…

Like every human organization the Church is constantly in danger of corruption. As soon as power and wealth come to the Church, manipulation, exploitation, misuse of influence, and outright corruption are not far away.

How do we prevent corruption in the Church? The answer is clear: by focusing on the poor. The poor make the Church faithful to its vocation. When the Church is no longer a church for the poor, it loses its spiritual identity. It gets caught up in disagreements, jealousy, power games, and pettiness. Paul says, "God has composed the body so that greater dignity is given to the parts which were without it, and so that there may not be disagreements inside the body but each part may be equally concerned for all the others" (1 Corinthians 12:24-25). This is the true vision. The poor are given to the Church so that the Church as the body of Christ can be and remain a place of mutual concern, love, and peace.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I've been thinking about what we've been saying about poverty recently - see my last few posts, and the links and comments - and what Nouwen says here seems profound far beyond the present discussion. It seems to go the root of revival and renewal in the Church: there seems to be a cycle, almost, whereby the church grows fat and worldly, and people have to go back to the poverty of Christ, and standing there, call out to the rest of us, "And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God." (Micah 6.8 NIV) It happened with the Desert Fathers, with St. Francis, with the Wesleys, with the Catholic Worker Movement, with the Sojourners, and with many many others throughout the history of the Church, quiet workers of renewal as much as, or more than (usually unwilling!) founders of new denominations.

The poor are not objects of "charity" for the Church; they are not projects or statistics, still less embarrassments: they are its heart and its purpose - just as Christ's poverty, his emptiness (Philippians 2.7-8) is not the result of accident or chance, but lies at the very centre of his work of salvation: his becoming obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross.

Night Prayer

Now that the sun has set,
I sit and rest, and think of you.
Give my weary body peace.
Let my legs and arms stop aching.
Let my nose stop sneezing.
Let my head stop thinking.
Let me sleep in your arms.

Traditional Dinka prayer (Sudan)
(Found in Phil Cousineau, ed., Prayers at 3 A.M. Quoted in Jane Redmont, When in Doubt, Sing.)
With thanks to Jane's blog Acts of Hope

Back to the Cross…

When you see a poor man, you must consider the one in whose name he comes, namely, Christ, who took upon himself our poverty and weakness. The poverty and sickness of this man are, therefore, a mirror in which we ought to contemplate lovingly the poverty and weakness which our Lord Jesus Christ suffered in his body to save the human race.

Saint Francis of Assisi, from the Legend of Perugia - 89

Thinking about my last post here, it occurs to me that there is slightly more to this statement of St. Francis' than meets the eye. In our love for the poor, and in all we do to find them justice, we must not neglect the demands that justice itself makes on us, that we treat all human beings as equal in the eyes of God, and so equal in our eyes too.

Francis' love for the poor did not mean that he despised the rich. Indeed, Francis cautioned his friars not to look down on those "wearing soft or gaudy clothes and enjoying luxuries in food or drink" (RegB c.2). All the members of the brotherhood were equal, no matter what their social or economic background; no one was to cling to office within the brotherhood (LP 83).

The OFM JPIC Resource Book Part 2, 1: Option for the Poor, p. 4

Our hands must never be too full to reach out to whoever needs us, female or male, human or animal. We must open wide our arms to them all. There must be nothing to separate us: not education or possessions, nor detachment from them. In a comment on my last post, Barbara said, tellingly, "Voluntary poverty, I guess, can become something one clings to instead of God. Simplicity, on the other hand, leaves room for God. Without justice, it is hollow."

We must "Let the same mind be in [us] that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross." (Philippians 2.5-8)

Somehow it seems to me that all this talk of poverty comes back to the Cross.

Poverty and simplicity…

In an excellent post at St. Edward's Parish Blog today, Fran asks, "How do you define poverty?"

"We are very quick to equate poverty with money. Perhaps we need to reflect more deeply", she says, and goes on to ask, "Ultimately how can we examine the poverty in our own lives and use that to both transform and be transformed?"

Thinking about this, I was reminded of Rowan Clare Williams' words in A Condition of Complete Simplicity, where she writes,

To be poor, sadly, is still to be without a voice and without power… Arguably, 'the poor', wherever they are, are still less than people. The very phrase, 'the poor', lumps together and depersonalizes billions of individuals with different unique stories and voices which are seldom heard, because the rich and powerful shout more loudly.

It can be tempting for those attracted by Franciscan simplicity to rhapsodize about the ennobling properties of poverty. This is dangerously patronizing. It is important to understand that there is an essential difference between poverty as a chosen, life-giving option and the poverty which denies and dehumanizes. Living in un-chosen poverty does not ennoble. Instead of freeing the mind from 'distractions' about food and clothes and other material concerns, they become an obsession. Far from being set free to live abundantly, this kind of poverty concentrates the mind on the mechanics of blind survival. A poor people are not necessarily any freer from materialism than the rich; they merely have less opportunity to indulge their desires. For the sake of clarity, then, it is necessary to draw a distinction between involuntary poverty, and a choice (or vocation) to live in simplicity in defiance of a world which defines us by what we have.

Over at Inward/Outward, there is a quote from Bill Moyers' foreword to Jim Willis' Faith Works: Lessons From the Life of an Activist Preacher:

Charity is commendable; everyone should be charitable. But justice aims to create a social order in which if individuals choose not to be charitable, people will not go hungry, unschooled or sick without care. Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth; justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance. Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table.

Where does this take us?

Poverty, unsought, crushes the heart and dulls the mind; simplicity, chosen, whether the absolute poverty of St. Francis and his contemporary followers, or the simplicity enjoined on members of the Third Order, to "live simply and to share with others… accept[ing] that we avoid luxury and waste, and regard our possessions as being held in trust for God" (The Principles, 11), sets the heart free and clears the mind.

We who choose simplicity, whether the circumstances of our natural lives have provided us with much, as St. Francis' had, or little, as with many of the early Tertiaries, must put ourselves either personally at the service of of those whose poverty in un-chosen, or at the service of finding for them justice, and a place, by right of simply being human, at the table. As The Principles state (7), "Our Order sets out, in the name of Christ, to break down barriers between people and to seek equality for all. We accept as our second aim the spreading of a spirit of love and harmony among all people. We are pledged to fight against the ignorance, pride, and prejudice that breed injustice or partiality of any kind."

It seems to me that these thoughts may have relevance beyond the Third Order Society of St. Francis in these days of economic insecurity and environmental concern. You don't need to be a Franciscan to choose a life of simplicity and justice - but St. Francis may still have things you can learn from, and his beautiful and Christ-like heart may strengthen and comfort you as you try to work out your calling.

We ourselves are words of His…

Contemplation is life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source. It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes beyond reason and beyond simple faith… It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, in words, or even in clear concepts.

Contemplation is also the response to a call: a call from Him Who has no voice, and yet Who speaks in everything that is, and Who, most of all, speaks in the depths of our own being; for we ourselves are words of His. But we are words that are meant to respond to Him, to answer to Him, to echo Him, and even in some way to contain Him and signify Him. Contemplation is this echo. It is a deep resonance in the inmost center of our spirit in which our very life loses its separate voice and re-sounds with the majesty and the mercy of the Hidden and Living One…

…contemplation is more than a consideration of abstract truths about God, more even than affective meditation on the things we believe. It is awakening, enlightenment and the amazing intuitive grasp by which love gains certitude of God's creative and dynamic intervention in our daily life.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, New York: New Directions Press, 1962

May the Force be with you…

The word healing comes from a word meaning "entire" or "complete," and signifies a restoration to wholeness. For that reason it is a more "holistic" word than therapy. While many people are helped by psychotherapy, I suspect that there are also many like me who have benefited from occasional counselling but have received more help from spiritual practices such as prayer and lectio divina, or holy reading. Perhaps the most radical aspect of the psychology of the desert monastics is the extent to which they believed that Scripture itself had the power to heal. In The Word in the Desert, his study of how thoroughly the early monks integrated Scripture into their lives, Douglas Burton-Christie notes that they regarded these "sacred texts [as] inherently powerful, a source of holiness, with a capacity to transform their lives."

Appreciating this monastic perspective on the Bible means abandoning the modern tendency to regard it as primarily an object of intellectual study, or as a handy adjunct to our ideology, be it conservative or liberal. The desert father who expounds on the inherent value of meditating on Scripture by observing, "Even if we do not understand the meaning of the words we are saying, when the demons hear them, they take fright and go away," insults our intelligence. What is left to us, if we relinquish our intellectual comprehension? Isn't it necessary to retain more control than that? Maybe not, if we want to experience the Word of God as these monks did, as "a living force within them."

From Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books, 2008), with thanks to Vicki K Black

I just love this. I love it. I love it. I love it. I have for so long felt that there was a force, which I couldn't exactly name, in Scripture as you read it in the Daily Office, unvarnished, free from commentary or sermon, short of devotional notes. Just the Word of God, standing there before us, rather as Jesus stood before Pilate. We are changed merely by being in its presence. Healed. Made whole. And we do not need to know the mechanism behind our healing. There words of Norris' are such liberation: to read someone else describing just what I've been feeling is - for me at any rate, full of self-doubt as I am - healing in itself!

Unmerciful servants?

Unless and until you understand the biblical concept of God's unmerited favour, God's unaccountable love, most of the biblical text cannot be interpreted or tied together in any positive way.

It is the key and the code to everything transformative in the Bible.

In fact, people who have not experienced the radical character of grace will always misinterpret the meanings and the direction of the Bible. The Bible will become a burden and obligation more than a gift.

Richard Rohr, from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality

I think what Rohr is writing about here may well lie at the root of the abuse Christians sometimes suffer, disastrously, in church situations, and which I touched on in passing yesterday. I don't think abuse within churches, often referred to as "spiritual abuse", arises from any one denomination, or even from any one strand of churchmanship, more vulnerable though some may be to it than others. I think the problem lies just where Rohr explains it, when people, pastors especially, fail truly to grasp the depth, the essential nature, of God's mercy in Christ, and of the limitless grace that pours out from it. It may be that, as Rohr says, they have not experienced it; or it may be that, having experienced it they have failed to appropriate it for themselves, and thus they cannot pass it on. Or they may, horrifically, have actually forgotten it. Like the people in the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:1-23) they may have known Christ's mercy, but the daily responsibility of their positions, and the continual friction of church life, and perhaps most importantly the lack of support - who is pastoring the pastor? - have strangled the memory of grace, and they find themselves hanging onto the mere framework of the word.

This is an immense tragedy for the one who finds themselves in such a position, but it can be equally a tragedy for those for whose souls they are responsible. Harsh though it may sound, Jesus has a word for those who have received mercy, yet fail to pass it on (Matthew 18.21-35). But what of those who have allowed them to come to such a place: those who have failed to take care of their pastors, failed to watch out for signs of weariness and pain, failed even to pray for them? None of us can risk complacency, I think…

The beloved physician…

Luke, which is a familiar form of Lucius, was a Gentile, a physician, and a close friend of Paul (Col. 4:10ff.), a fellow worker with Paul (Philemon. 24), and a companion of Paul’s in prison, probably in Rome (2 Tim. 4:11). Greek was obviously his native tongue, as his language is flawless Koine, the common Greek of the time (which was much less sophisticated than the language of Homer and the great philosophers). He was a Gentile, and thus probably a Greek, although Lucius was a common Roman name and all upper-class Romans were fluent in Greek. It is most likely that he was Greek, however, and there is much circumstantial evidence that he was from Philippi.

No one knows how he came to be in Judea… It is possible that as a physician Luke was attached to the Roman army. Most good physicians spent at least some time in their training as army doctors or as surgeons to the gladiators. This exposed them to a wide variety of critical wounds through which they could learn anatomy and surgery on a living patient…

There is no evidence that Luke ever met Jesus, and he was thus never considered an apostle. He was highly regarded by Paul as an evangelist, however. Also, his knowledge of many details of Jesus’ birth and childhood support the ancient tradition that he was a close friend of Mary, who shared these stories with him. His account of the crucifixion also indicates that, while he probably did not witness it, he was particularly interested in the physiological aspects of it. One would expect this of a physician. If he were a Roman or associated with the Roman army, he would have seen many crucifixions…

He apparently worked alongside Paul for years, remaining with him right to the end. He was obviously loved and admired by Paul. After Paul’s death in about 64 CE, Luke apparently continued to evangelize in his home region, and sometime in the early 80s CE he wrote his Gospel and the book of Acts, the first history of Christianity.

From “Luke” in All the People in the Bible: An A-Z Guide to the Saints, Scoundrels, and Other Characters in Scripture by Richard R. Losch (Eerdmans, 2008) with thanks to Vicki K Black

Being Church…

The two main sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist, are the spiritual pillars of the Church. They are not simply instruments by which the Church exercises its ministry. They are not just means by which we become and remain members of the Church but belong to the essence of the Church. Without these sacraments there is no Church. The Church is the body of Christ fashioned by baptism and the Eucharist. When people are baptised in the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and when they gather around the table of Christ and receive his Body and Blood, they become the people of God, called the Church…

The Church is the people of God. The Latin word for "church," ecclesia, comes from the Greek ek, which means "out," and kaleo, which means "to call." The Church is the people of God called out of slavery to freedom, sin to salvation, despair to hope, darkness to light, an existence centered on death to an existence focused on life.

When we think of Church we have to think of a body of people, travelling together. We have to envision women, men, and children of all ages, races, and societies supporting one another on their long and often tiresome journeys to their final home…

The Church is holy and sinful, spotless and tainted. The Church is the bride of Christ, who washed her in cleansing water and took her to himself "with no speck or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and faultless" (Ephesians 5:26-27). The Church too is a group of sinful, confused, anguished people constantly tempted by the powers of lust and greed and always entangled in rivalry and competition.

When we say that the Church is a body, we refer not only to the holy and faultless body made Christ-like through baptism and Eucharist but also to the broken bodies of all the people who are its members. Only when we keep both these ways of thinking and speaking together can we live in the Church as true followers of Jesus…

The Church is an object of faith. In the Apostles' Creed we pray: "I believe in God, the Father, ... in Jesus Christ, his only Son in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting." We must believe in the Church! The Apostles' Creed does not say that the Church is an organization that helps us to believe in God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. No, we are called to believe in the Church with the same faith we believe in God.

Often it seems harder to believe in the Church than to believe in God. But whenever we separate our belief in God from our belief in the Church, we become unbelievers. God has given us the Church as the place where God becomes God-with-us.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I am deeply concerned for people who live as Christians outside any church. I know that in so many cases they are women and men who have been deeply hurt, mistreated, abused, within church communities, and cannot now trust themselves to church as family, just as sometimes victims of sexual and other kinds of abuse by relatives cannot trust themselves to stable relationships. But not all "out of church Christians" are in this situation.

Of course there are those too who simply believe they are better off out of it - "I don't need to go to church to be a Christian!" - and many of them have deeply thoughtful and principled reasons for their position.

I am by no means making a case here for the established churches - Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian or whatever - over against less formal groups of Christians, from Warehouse Church to home church. What I am saying is that, as Nouwen points out above, being a Christian is necessarily being church. "For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptised into one body - Jews or Greeks, slaves or free - and we were all made to drink of one Spirit." (1 Corinthians 12.12-13) If we are isolated from the rest of the body, we may be like a toe that has been cut off, and left on the side of the road. Our position may not be not encouraging. We may simply shrivel and die; but we mustn't forget that there are crows… and that worries me.

I shall have to go on thinking, and above all praying, about this…

Still more imperfect...

The entire universe seems to be operating out of a chaos theory of one sort or another. And whatever made us think that we are different than that? Well, the thing that did it more than anything else was religion. It taught us that we could be perfect.

When I spiritually direct people I strongly counsel them to mistrust any heroic gestures. They are much more food for the ego than they are food for God. God does not need your heroics - God needs who you really are. That is all you can ever give to God, not an idealized or perfect self...

Once you know that God has loved you even in your unlovability - which is always the character of a vital spiritual experience - you can't be dualistic anymore, all quid pro quo thinking falls apart.

Now you're inside of mystery that holds imperfection. So now what does perfection become? Perfection becomes not the exclusion of the contaminating element, the enemy, but in fact perfection is precisely the ability to include imperfection. That's perfection!

Richard Rohr, from The Little Way

And that, my friends, is the final answer to all those who would, in our churches and elsewhere, who would discriminate against anyone on the grounds of race, income, background, appearance, sex, sexuality, or anything else. In Christ, "there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of [us] are one."

Imperfect...

Imperfection is the organizing principle of the entire human and spiritual enterprise. In the great spiritual traditions imperfection is not to be just tolerated, excused, marginalized, contextualized or even forgiven. It is the very framework inside of which God makes the God-Self known and calls us into union.

You can't talk about union when you are talking about two perfections. It's like trying to put two balloons together. They are both so whole, inflated and entire - they don't need one another.

Richard Rohr, from The Little Way

How long will it take us to realise, as Christians, that perfection just isn't within our grasp. We cannot choose perfection. St. Francis wasn't perfect. St. Teresa of Avila, whom we remembered yesterday, wasn't perfect. You have only to look at their writings, or those (especially in Francis' case) of their contemporaries, to see that they were under no illusions themselves. Abba Moses the Black, one of the holiest of the Desert Fathers, famously recognised this of himself:

When a brother committed a fault and Moses was invited to a meeting to discuss an appropriate penance, Moses refused to attend. When he was again called to the meeting, Moses took a leaking jug, filled with water, and carried it on his shoulder… When he arrived at the meeting place, the others asked why he was carrying the jug. He replied, "My sins run out behind me and I do not see them, but today I am coming to judge the errors of another." On hearing this, the assembled brothers forgave the erring monk.

This passage carries within it the seed of the explanation of that strange passage in Matthew's Gospel, where Jesus says, "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 7.48) For this comes directly after his remarks about loving and forgiving people, even our enemies... precisely Moses' point.

Only Jesus, himself true God from true God, can forgive out of perfection. We can only do it out of our own imperfection, our own need of forgiveness.

Blog Action Day: a call to prayer

Today, just in case you missed it, is Blog Action Day.

A quick Google Blogsearch will turn up thousands of posts relating to today, most of them full of ingenuity and compassion, detailing practical ways to alleviate poverty in developing countries, help those who have fallen through the economic floor in Western nations, and address the financial fear that has brought so many of us in the West over the past few weeks to stare into the hollow eyes of the spectre of poverty in our own communities, which seemed only a year ago to be so secure and prosperous.

I'm not an ingenious person, economically, and I've never been any use to any fundraising initiative, beyond holding the odd collecting tin. Kiva Loans and the economics of poverty in marginalised communities make my head spin. But I can pray.

Prayer is so often seen as a last resort: "We've tried everything, and nothing works. All we can do is pray!" But if we are Christians, if we really believe Jesus' words in Matthew 7, "Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened…" prayer should be our first resort.

I've said so often in this blog that most of my readers will know what is coming next before I type it, but it isn't even necessary to know what to pray for, in order to pray. Yes, of course we can, and should, inform ourselves in every way possible, about poverty, and the many global initiatives to combat it; but we don't need to frame in thoughts and words what we feel God should do about it. We need only to hold the needs of the world on our hearts before God, remembering 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. 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)

God will use our tears, our bafflement, our frustration, in ways we cannot imagine, and may never know.

Please pray. Please don't think, as I am tempted to think sometimes, "It's no use, I can't do anything about this." But be prepared, always, to be part of God's answer to your own prayers. He may have uses for you, for me, that we've never even begun to think of…

Losing it…

I am drawing a distinction here between self and self-image. Giving up this self-image involves letting go the illusion of power; particularly of the illusion that we are in control and that we can control, and that we should control. It is our desire to control that brings us to slavery, because our own designs are limited, and cannot help but end in a closed system, a dead end. The closed system may give us a sense of security, but it obviates possibility. And salvation - being sprung from a trap - means possibility.

What do we mean by control? Giving up the world, in Isaac's definition, is often rightly put in terms of self-control. But this is not the world's entrapping control. Self-control is really a gathering of the fragments of self-image in order to be emptied, in order to lose control. It involves letting go the illusions of power that keep us full of self-image. Self-image must be emptied out, in order that God, who is always emptying out divine mercy on creation, might enter, indwell, and pour out through us the transfiguring Spirit onto the earth. This right kind of letting go control is especially important in terms of our ideas of how God works in us, in terms of what, or how important we think particular gifts are. Often we are trapped by our ideas of God and holiness.

God's life is able to dwell in us whether or not we cooperate. We exist by mercy. But if we are to grow into the image, the mirroring, of God's willing powerlessness, we need to increase our capacity to have the divine love poured out through us. In ancient tradition, God 'absented' a bit, or 'pulled aside the skirts of glory' in order to make room for the creation, since God was everywhere. The kenosis of God begins with creation, because God is committed to be involved in it, to give it freedom, to suffer-with in its joys and sorrows, in its bewilderment and pain. And it means that God willingly limits God's power to intervene and control.

Maggie Ross, Voice in the Wilderness

"It is our desire to control that brings us to slavery." Isn't that why so many people are so afraid, why so many people are in real trouble, in the present financial situation? We invest in order to control our future. I'm reminded of an lady in her 80s on the BBC South news last night, who feared she had lost her life savings (some £500,000) in the Icelandic banking debacle. She spoke of her dismay, since she had assumed she had ensured a comfortable future for herself, and now she was in her own words "reduced to penury" - which actually meant that she and her widowed daughter would now have to live on their state pensions, like so many others. What really seemed to be worrying her was that she had lost control of her future: that all her planning had, through no intention of her own, come to nothing.

All our attempts at control actually make us more vulnerable. Jesus said, "…those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it." (Luke 9.24)

As Maggie Ross says, we exist by mercy. We have to let go of our illusory sense of control over our lives, the illusion of power that leads us to imagine we can keep hold of our life, that we can be captains of our souls, and let God be and do what God is and does, trusting that in his love and his mercy all he does is for our good, in the end (Romans 8.28); and that he will, finally, set all things free (Romans 8.18-25).

I want to see…

We must never presume that we see. We must always be ready to see anew. But it's so hard to go back, to be vulnerable, and to say to your soul, "I don't know anything."

Try to say that: "I don't know anything."

Maybe you could think of yourself as an erased blackboard, ready to be written on. For by and large, what blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don't need to know.

We have to pray for the grace of beginner's mind. We need to say with the blind man, "I want to see…"

Spirituality is about seeing. It's not about earning or achieving. It's about relationship rather than results or requirements.

Once you see, the rest follows.

You don't need to push the river, because you are in it. The life is lived within us, and we learn how to say yes to that life.

If we exist on a level where we can see how "everything belongs," we can trust the flow and trust the life, the life so large and deep and spacious that it even includes its opposite, death.

Richard Rohr, from Everything Belongs

I think being on the edge is like this. Everything we truly are we already are, and yet the spiritual life is a life of becoming. The thing is, it's a life of becoming who we actually are, and that's not the way that culture, our Western culture especially, sees it. We are brought up to believe it all comes down to the bottom line, to earning and achieving, results and requirements. If we live out this "life so large and deep and spacious", we become incredibly threatening to the society of earning and achieving, results and requirements, and we will be driven out onto the edge, if we're not there already.

I don't want anyone to feel, though, that I'm saying this with any sense of a chip on my shoulder, or of being hardly done by. It's fine out on the edge, truly. It's only society that represents it to us as nasty out on the edge. Jesus, Francis, Clare and Cuthbert are better company than most bankers and stockbrokers, and a good deal more reliable, too. I like it out on the edge. The air off the sea is clean, and if I'm going to belong anywhere, I belong there.

At the edge we see…

Many ancient Celtic sites are on the edge - Iona, Lindisfarne, Whithorn, Whitby, Jarrow, Bardsley, Burgh, Bradwell.

At the edge we see horizons denied to those who stay in the middle.

Walking along a cliff-top our bodies and souls face each other and that is how we grow.

The edge is in fact always the centre of spiritual renewal.

The Christian Church has always been renewed by those it placed on the edge, such as St. Francis and John Wesley.

Jesus lived life with the marginalised - the lepers, prostitutes and tax-collectors.

Jesus was edged out of the synagogue, out of the temples, out of the city, out of society and out of life - yet remained totally in touch with the heart of life.

We are called to mould the kingdoms of the earth so that they reflect the Kingdom of Heaven.

Any Christian movement that becomes respectable risks being brought from the edge to the centre - and so is given the kiss of death.

How will I keep myself on the spiritual edge?

Martin Wallace, Celtic Reflections, Tim Tiley Ltd.

I seem to be writing rather a lot on the subject of edges just at the moment, and I keep finding other people's writings about edges, too, like this remarkable passage from a little book I was given as a gift at my Profession the other day.

About sin…

Sin is a great teacher. Of course, we all have sinned as Romans makes very clear. One of the wonderful discoveries as you work with Jesus is that he is never upset at sinners. Go through the four Gospels, it is very clear in the text.

It's amazing the energy we put into ferreting out sinners, punishing and excluding them, and yet Jesus is only upset at people who don't think they are sinners.

Richard Rohr, from The Little Way 

 

When a brother committed a fault and Moses was invited to a meeting to discuss an appropriate penance, Moses refused to attend. When he was again called to the meeting, Moses took a leaking jug, filled with water, and carried it on his shoulder… When he arrived at the meeting place, the others asked why he was carrying the jug. He replied, "My sins run out behind me and I do not see them, but today I am coming to judge the errors of another." On hearing this, the assembled brothers forgave the erring monk.

Moses the Black, one of the Desert Fathers

What a day…

…we all had at Hilfield Friary! It was our Francistide Area Chapter - four of us were professed together at the midday Eucharist, and then two were noviced at the afternoon Third Order Office. We had a wonderful time: tears and laughter and love and God's incredible blessings shared between Tertiaries from all across the Blackmore Vale, and with the Brothers - and to put the icing on the cake Bishop Tim was there too. He gave us a talk on our Diocese's link with the Sudan in the morning, managing to be profound and funny, heartbreaking and encouraging all at the same time, and then he filled us in on events at Lambeth after lunch.

Thank you, dear friends of the blogosphere, for your prayers for me today. They were most certainly answered, and with interest…

Thanks and blessings and love to you all!

Prayers please...

Please pray for me as I make my Life Profession to the Third Order at midday tomorrow...

We are the Body of Christ…

When we gather for the Eucharist we gather in the Name of Jesus, who is calling us together to remember his death and resurrection in the breaking of the bread. There he is truly among us. "Where two or three meet in my name," he says, "I am there among them" (Matthew 18:20).

The presence of Jesus among us and in the gifts of bread and wine are the same presence. As we recognise Jesus in the breaking of the bread, we recognise him also in our brothers and sisters. As we give one another the bread, saying: "This is the Body of Christ," we give ourselves to each other saying: "We are the Body of Christ." It is one and the same giving, it is one and the same body, it is one and the same Christ.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

This is an astonishing thought, and it makes sense, somehow, of the feeling I always have at the Eucharist, of incredible closeness to my sisters and brothers at the altar rail. It always slightly surprises me that this intensely personal, intimate almost, sense I have of Christ's presence in "broken bread and wine outpoured" is not a private thing. We are so used in our time to thinking of the words "private" and "personal" as being inextricably connected, yet here they certainly are not. In fact, the more personal, immediate, is the sense of the presence of Christ, and of his indwelling Spirit, the stronger this feeling I have of love, and more than we normally understand by love, for those around me. Truly we who are many are one body, because we all share in one bread. It isn't any longer a liturgical formula: it's experienced reality, as ordinary and real and concrete and sensible as bread, say, or wine.

Living in the Presence...

Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is, rather, a stance. It's a way of living in the Presence, living in awareness of the Presence, and even of enjoying the Presence.

The full contemplative is not just aware of the Presence, but trusts, allows, and delights in it. All spiritual disciplines have one purpose: to get rid of illusions so we can be present. These disciplines exist so that we can see what is, see who we are, and see what is happening.

Richard Rohr, from Everything Belongs

Watchwords...

Guard against all pride, vanity, envy, avarice, the cares and worry of this world, detraction and complaining. And if you do not have book-learning, do not be eager to acquire it, but pursue instead what you should desire above all else, namely, to have the Spirit of the Lord and his grace working in you, to pray always with purity of heart and to have humility, patience in persecution and in infirmity, and to love those who persecute and rebuke and slander you, because the Lord says, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44). "Blessed are those who are persecuted in the cause of uprightness: the kingdom of Heaven is theirs" (Matthew 5:10). "Anyone who stands firm to the end will be saved" (Matthew 10:22).

Saint Francis of Assisi
Rule of 1223
Ch. X

How much I need to hear these words, every day! When I look back at these ancient documents of our three Orders, I am sometimes just totally amazed at St. Francis' wisdom and grace, and the love he had for his Brothers, and for St. Clare and the rest of his Sisters in the Second Order. What a man! What else could I want to be than a Franciscan? Why did I ever think anything else?

H'm. Makes me go all silly, sometimes, thinking about it.

St. Francis, seen from Panama…

Padre Mickey in Panama has just about the best essay on St. Francis you're likely to read, even today. Like the Padre would say, all ya gotsta do is click!

St. Francis said these things…

 

I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.

Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.

If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.

St. Francis said these things…

St. Francis and the larks...

The larks are birds that love the noonday light and shun the darkness of twilight. But on the night that St. Francis went to Christ, they came to the roof of the house, though already the twilight of the night to follow had fallen, and they flew about the house for a long time amid a great clamour, whether to show their joy or their sadness in their own way by their singing, we know not. Tearful rejoicing and joyful sorrow made up their song, either to bemoan the fact that they were orphaned children, or to announce that their father was going to his eternal glory. The city watchmen, who guarded the place with great care, were filled with astonishment and called the others to witness the wonder.

Thomas of Celano, Tractatus de Miraculis - 32

Sophisticated urban Westerners will often lift a weary eyebrow at stories like this, but those of us who have also spent years out in the countryside in all weathers, and at the strangest times of day, may be less inclined to... of which more sometime later, perhaps.

Walking to the edge…

Most simply and yet most difficultly, Francis is saying that we cannot change the world except insofar as we have changed ourselves. We can only give away who we are. We can only offer to others what God has done in us. We have no real head answers. We must be an answer. We only know the other side of journeys that we have made ourselves. Francis walked to the edge and so he could lead others to what he found there.

Richard Rohr, from Hope Against Darkness

The journey to the edge is a different kind of pilgrimage. I think often we have each to live through own time when the Spirit drives us "out into the wilderness" - and like Jesus, whom we follow, we cannot do what we have been called to do until we have obeyed, and faced the darkness head on. How can we help people whose pain we cannot understand, or bring Christ to people whose lives are lived in lands we haven't dreamed of? Francis could have achieved nothing had he remained on his horse: it was only when he dismounted, and embraced the leper in the road's dust, that he was released into God's calling for life.

In a tiny piece of bread…

Let all humankind tremble,
let the whole world shake
and the heavens rejoice
when Christ, the Son of the living God,
is on the altar
in the hands of a priest.
O admirable heights and sublime lowliness!
O sublime humility!
O humble sublimity!
That the Lord of the universe,
God and the Son of God,
so humbles himself
that to save us
he conceals himself in a tiny piece of bread!

From the "Letter to the Entire Order" of Francis of Assisi, quoted in God Seekers: Twenty Centuries of Christian Spiritualities by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2008), with thanks to Vicki K Black

The great divide...

Francis' reading of the gospel is of utmost relevance today. His focus and emphasis is the same as Jesus'. His life was an enacted parable, an audiovisual aid to gospel freedom; it gives us the perspective by which to see as Jesus did: the view from the bottom.

He insists by every facet of his life that we can only see rightly from a disestablished position. He wanted to be poor most of all - simply because Jesus was poor...

Jesus and Francis had no pragmatic agenda for social reform. They just moved outside the system of illusion, more ignoring it than fighting it and quite simply doing it better.

Don't waste any time dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys. Hold them both together in your own soul - where they are anyway - and you will have held together the whole world.

You will have overcome the great divide - in one place of spacious compassion. You, little you, will have paid the price of redemption. God takes it from there, but always by replicating the same pattern in another conscious human life.

Richard Rohr, from Hope Against Darkness

I think these words are becoming more and more relevant each day we live in these troubled times. We are no longer free to imagine that we can insure against our own mortality, that we can pay for protection against the brokenness and impermanence of things.

Curiously, I remember being struck with this thought one day when I was very young, maybe 20 or 21, a young rock musician in London with never an idea of becoming a Christian. I was sitting on the nice new Habitat sofa of my nice flat in Putney, thinking about the words of a song I was trying to write, when it suddenly occurred to me that nothing would last. Not my words, nor my music, nor anything I was working for or trying to achieve, not any of the people I loved or cared for, past, present or future. Not the music of my friends, nor of the contemporaries I admired but had yet to meet, nor the music of the old bluesmen; not György Sándor Ligeti's nor Gustav Mahler's, not even Bach's. Everything beautiful, and loveable, and good that I knew would fall to dust, and the howling dark of the interstellar spaces would swallow it up.

I wish I could say that I turned to God in my horror and desolation; but I didn't. My music darkened, and I turned increasingly to psychedelics, filling notebooks with my findings as I tried to find answers to questions I could hardly frame.

The rest is a long story... but finally it's only in following Francis that I have found the answer lying in Rohr's words here, "You will have overcome the great divide - in one place of spacious compassion. You, little you, will have paid the price of redemption. God takes it from there, but always by replicating the same pattern in another conscious human life." For the great divide is more than the divide between rich and poor, more even than the divide between good and evil: it is the final, awful divide between l' être et le néant, between all things and no-thing. God takes it from there.

At this time our Lord showed me an inward sight of his homely loving. I saw that he is everything that is good and comforting to us. He is our clothing. In his love he wraps and holds us. He enfolds us in love and will never let us go.

And then he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazlenut, in the palm of my hand - and it was round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind's eye and I thought: "What can this be?" And answer came: "It is all that is made." I marvelled that it could last, for I thought it might have crumbled to nothing, it was so small. And the answer came into my mind: "It lasts, and ever shall, because God loves it." And so all things have being through the love of God.

Julian of Norwich, Showings (Long Text) Chapter 5, tr. Sheila Upjohn