Power in weakness…

In and through Jesus we come to know God as a powerless God, who becomes dependent on us. But it is precisely in this powerlessness that God’s power reveals itself. This is not the power that controls, dictates, and commands. It is the power that heals, reconciles, and unites. It is the power of the Spirit. When Jesus appeared people wanted to be close to him and touch him because “power came out of him” (Luke 6:19).

It is this power of the divine Spirit that Jesus wants to give us. The Spirit indeed empowers us and allows us to be healing presences. When we are filled with that Spirit, we cannot be other than healers…

The Spirit that Jesus gives us empowers us to speak. Often when we are expected to speak in front of people who intimidate us, we are nervous and self-conscious. But if we live in the Spirit, we don’t have to worry about what to say. We will find ourselves ready to speak when the need is there. “When they take you before… authorities, do not worry about how to defend yourselves or what to say, because when the time comes, the Holy Spirit will teach you what you should say” (Luke 12:11-12).

We waste much of our time in anxious preparation. Let’s claim the truth that the Spirit that Jesus gave us will speak in us and speak convincingly.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I’m not wholly comfortable with Nouwen’s use of the word “claim” in that final paragraph, but that’s probably just because it reminds me of some of the Prosperity Gospellers’ “claims”! What Nouwen means, though, is that we should trust God in our own weakness, to rest in the fact that it’s his strength, his wisdom, through the Spirit he has given us, that will bring us through whatever difficulties we may face. Bring us through to his glory, to his truth, that is: there is no guarantee in Scripture of our present physical wellbeing, unless we require that to fulfil God’s will. But as he promised to Paul (2 Corinthians 12.9), “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”

Wordle alert…

Everyone seems to be coming out in Wordles, so I thought I’d have to join in:

(Click on the Wordle to see it full size…)

Something Trinitarian going on there, or am I just too full of today’s readings?

A Prayer for Trinity Sunday

God for us, we call You Father,
God along side us, we call You Jesus,
God within us, we call You Holy Spirit.

You are the Eternal Mystery
that enables, enfolds, and enlivens all things,
even us,
and even me.

Every name falls short of your
Goodness and Greatness.

We can only see who You are in what is.
We ask for such perfect seeing.

As it was in the beginning, is now,
and ever shall be.

Amen.

Richard Rohr, “Trinity Prayer”

Move it!

I wrote, last December, a post entitled Free at Last, discussing what has come to be called, not always helpfully I suspect, “spiritual abuse”. I linked to Dr Barb Orlowski’s ground-breaking original research at her Church Exiters website. I cannot recommend this too highly—if you have any experience of this kind of thing, directly or indirectly, or if you are in a position of pastoral or other responsibility where you could inadvertently find yourself involved, you simply must read Barb’s dissertation.

I just received an email from Barb, explaining that her book proposal based on this work has been accepted for publication. This will mean, of course, that while she will be free to publish excerpts, and link to places where you can order the book, the complete text will soon have to be taken down.

So, get on over there pronto, and read this extraordinary work complete, in pdf, before it’s too late!

Freedom and rejection…

We continue to put ourselves down as less than Christ. Thus, we avoid the full honour as well as the full pain of the Christian life. But the Spirit that guided Jesus guides us. Paul says: “The Spirit himself joins with our spirit to bear witness that we are children of God. And if we are children, then we are heirs, heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:16-17).

When we start living according to this truth, our lives will be radically transformed. We will not only come to know the full freedom of the children of God but also the full rejection of the world. It is understandable that we hesitate to claim the honour so as to avoid the pain. But, provided we are willing to share in Christ’s suffering, we also will share in his glory (see Romans 8:17).

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

 

“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2.19b-20 NRSV)

I don’t think our Lord ever said it would be easy, exactly, but what he did say was, “I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” (John 17.15-18 NRSV)

Receive the Spirit…

In whatever way we receive the Spirit, it is just as real and just as good as any other. For some reason egocentric people tend to idealize their way as the only way. God meets us where we are and makes his presence known to us in the way we are most ready to experience it. The Spirit blows where she wills and she fills our hearts in whatever measure we are open to the Spirit. The glory is all to God and not to our technique, method, formula, or church protocol.

When it does happen, we always know that we did nothing to deserve it! It is all God’s graciousness. It is being grabbed by God and lifted to a new place in spite of our best attempts to deny or avoid it.

Richard Rohr, Great Themes of Scripture, pp. 90, 91

The world is cold…

Being the living Christ today means being filled with the same Spirit that filled Jesus. Jesus and his Father are breathing the same breath, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the intimate communion that makes Jesus and his Father one. Jesus says: “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:10) and “The Father and I are one” (John 10:30). It is this unity that Jesus wants to give us. That is the gift of his Holy Spirit.

Living a spiritual life, therefore, means living in the same communion with the Father as Jesus did, and thus making God present in the world.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I’ve been thinking a lot about this being present in the world, being an outpost, a lighthouse, of Christ in this present darkness.

In Poustinia, Ch. V, Catherine Doherty says:

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

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

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

In Ch. IX, she goes on to say:

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

[I am awaiting a copy of my own – the notes above were made from an old copy of Poustinia in the library at Hilfield—my apologies for any errors in my hasty transcription!]

I am shocked at the depth with which this book resonated with me. At last, I seem to have found someone who speaks the hidden language of my own heart!

Praying in Christ…

I’ve just read a wonderful post from Brother Charles the Minor Friar. Really, you should go and read the whole thing—but in my usual way I’ll give you his conclusion, which I found seriously encouraging:

In the end it is not us who pray at all, but the Spirit who prays within us. Thus prayer is the real fruit of our being baptized into the life of the Blessed Trinity. Just as the Spirit conceived the Word of God that He might borrow our humanity from Our Lady, so the Spirit delights to conceive the prayer of Christ in the lives of those who consent to be Christians.

So when we come to praying the psalms, for instance, the primary praying voice is not ours, but Christ’s. He is the righteous one who can pray “my hands are clean” and “I have kept the way of the Lord.” [Psalm 18] Christ can pray this prayer even thought we can't. But since Christian prayer is the prayer of Christ, the righteousness that we hold up to God in sacrifice through our prayer is not our own but Christ’s. It is by his righteousness and obedience that we are saved, after all, not by our own. When we pray these lines it is His voice praying, and his perfect and eternal sacrifice in which the Father delights.

On the level of day to day spirituality, then, Christian prayer is not matter of effort but of consent. The prayer is always there, as the Holy Spirit has stretched the perfect praise of the Blessed Trinity to include our humanity in the Incarnation. We just have to permit the Spirit to pray within us, through Christ our Lord, that his prayer might take shape in our humanity as well.

The way up is down…

The ladder to the Kingdom is hidden within you, and within your soul. Dive down into yourself, away from sin, and there you will find the steps by which you can ascend.

St. Isaac of Syria

For most of us the way up is by climbing the the ladder of success. This almost always takes us into comparison, competition, judgment, and expectation with our neighbour as well as our self. The interior life, however, asks us to first descend, to dive down into our self – not the self of the ego but the Self that was created in the image and likeness of God. This diving down is nothing less than letting go of all the things that we think give us identity and success. Ultimately, it asks us to trust God’s work more than our own work.

The spiritual journey is one of paradox.  So the way down becomes the way up. What would it be like to approach each moment and each relationship without comparison, competition, judgment, or expectation?

[reproduced, with thanks, from Interrupting the Silence]

Crucified, and yet alive...

Being a believer means being clothed in Christ. Paul says: “Every one of you that has been baptised has been clothed in Christ” (Galatians 3:26) and “Let your armour be the Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 13:14). This being “clothed in Christ” is much more than wearing a cloak that covers our misery. It refers to a total transformation that allows us to say with Paul: “I have been crucified with Christ and yet I am alive; yet it is no longer I, but Christ living in me” (Galatians 2:20).

Thus, we are the living Christ in the world. Jesus, who is God-made-flesh, continues to reveal himself in our own flesh. Indeed, true salvation is becoming Christ.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

Colossians 3.1-4

A new home…

To span the infinite gap between the Divine and the human, God’s agenda is to plant a little bit of God, the Holy Spirit, right inside of us! (Jeremiah 31:31-34; John 14:16ff.) The Spirit then operates like a homing device or a divine pace maker, driving us toward life.

This is the very meaning of the “new” covenant, and the replacing or our “heart of stone with a heart of flesh” that Ezekiel promised (36:25-27). Isn’t that wonderful? God gives us the answer, and we are it!

Richard Rohr, from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 97

My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand.

Jesus, from John 10.27-29

Nothing will ever be the same again—the Christian’s life is different, irrevocably so. No wonder we are sometimes persecuted—we just don’t fit in any more, and the ruler of this world (John 14.30) has no power over us (John 17.14) since we belong to the world no longer.

Poor and ordinary…

We must always try to return to the level of our being where we simply “are”, where we’re naked, and where we experience how “good” we are in God, because of God, and in spite of our own limitations.

When we “know God in ourselves and ourselves in God”, as Teresa of Avila advised, we have the freedom to be poor and ordinary. We don’t have to prove anything, we don’t have to defend anything, and we return from this place to the world with greater and enduring strength. And with this strength we’re flung back into the world unafraid.

Richard Rohr, from Simplicity, pp. 96, 97

This is how I long to live, really, now. “The freedom to be poor and ordinary”—it is the truth of our poverty and ordinariness that sets us free. It’s what Jesus spoke of in the Beatitudes (Matthew 4.23-5.8) as the source of our blessing in him. Only when we admit our emptiness and our woundedness can we be filled, healed, even lifted up in his arms to the face of Christ…

God has grown used to our small and cowardly ways of waiting behind closed doors (John 20:19). God knows that we settle for easy certitudes and unsought answers instead of real inner experience. Yet God is determined to break through and lead us deeper.

The Spirit eventually overcomes the obstacles that we present and surrounds us with enough peace so that we can face the “wounds in his hands and his side” (John 20:27)—and then our own inner wounds too. They are finally the same journey. St. Augustine said “In my deepest wound I saw your glory—and it dazzled me!”

Rohr again, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 192- 193, day 205

Accused and condemned…

Persons are known not by the intellect alone, nor by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action.

To shut out the person and to refuse to consider him as a person, as another self, we resort to the impersonal "law" and "nature." That is to say we block off the reality of the other, we cut the intercommunication of our nature and his nature, and we consider only our own nature with its rights, its claims, its demands. In effect, however, we are considering our nature in the concrete and his nature in the abstract. And we justify the evil we do to our brother because he is no longer a brother, he is merely an adversary, an accused, an evil being.

To restore communication, to see our oneness of nature with him, and to respect his personal rights, integrity, his worthiness of love, we have to see ourselves as accused along with him, condemned to death along with him, sinking into the abyss with him, and needing, with him, the ineffable gift of grace and mercy to be saved.

Thomas Merton, Seeds of Destruction, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 254-255

It is this identification, this seeing of “our oneness of nature” with all humanity, all creation, that makes a prayer like the Jesus Prayer possible as intercession. When we pray, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…” we are not asking for mercy merely for ourselves, or confessing merely our own narrow little sins. We pray as creatures, one with all creation—broken, fallen, accused, condemned along with it.

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. 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.

Romans 8.18-23

 

I know a place, a wonderful place
Where accused and condemned
Find mercy and grace
Where the wrongs we have done
And the wrongs done to us
Were nailed there with Him
There on the cross

At the cross (at the cross)
He died for our sin
At the cross (at the cross)
He gave us life again

I know a place, a wonderful place
Where accused and condemned
Find mercy and grace
Where the wrongs we have done
And the wrongs done to us
Were nailed there with You
There on the cross

At the cross (at the cross)
You died for our sin
At the cross (at the cross)
You gave us life again.

 

(Randy & Terry Butler, © 1997 Mercy/Vineyard Publishing )

The Recovery of Love…

We can create the climate and nurture the trust in which a deep giving of ourselves can happen. Much more than the confession of our light or our darkness is involved. What is involved is the recovery of love, itself, the communion that is the deepest need of every life, the unlocking of that infinite capacity that each one has to be a friend and to have a friend. If the pilgrim journey is a journey toward freedom, then the liberating work is the freeing of love in me and the freeing of love in you.

Elizabeth O’Connor, Servant Leaders, Servant Structures, with thanks to Inward/Outward

So much of Grace…

Grace cannot be understood by any ledger of merits and demerits. It cannot be held to any patterns of buying, losing, earning, achieving or manipulating, which is where, unfortunately, most of us live our lives.
Grace is, quite literally, "for the taking." It is God eternally giving away God—for nothing—except the giving itself.

Richard Rohr, from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality

There has been so much of grace just lately. Hilfield, the time in silence, the conversations I had there, the gentle touch of the Spirit, were all grace upon grace. It’s far too soon to go deciding things, but the path looks clearer, and God’s call to the life of prayer is stronger every day. Things are beginning to fall into place. I’m trying to take it easy, to tell myself not to run ahead of myself, that no-one will believe the clarity with which I’m being shown things—but despite everything, I have to admit that I’m excited, and scared, in equal measure.

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

Into God’s territory…

There is another essential aspect of Christianity: the interior, the silent, the contemplative, in which hidden wisdom is more important than practical organizational science, and in which love replaces the will to get visible results.

Thomas Merton, Love and Living, Naomi Burton Stone and Brother Patrick Hart, eds. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975 p. 202

This, if you will pray for me, is where I need to be over the next few days. In a recent article, Bayless Conley wrote:

If God confirms the most important decision [our conversion] we’ll ever make in life by the inward witness of the Spirit, why should we look for some outward sign to give us direction when we’re in a crisis? When you look for the spectacular, you’re liable to miss the supernatural that is right in front of you all along.

Or as Paul says (Romans 8.16): “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.”

What I need is the stillness, the openness (not easy in a crisis of the heart), to hear God’s authentic voice, to hear the secret patterns of the Spirit within all that I am; that same Spirit that led Paul to write (Romans 8.28), “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

I must listen, watch, with all my attention on God, and not on myself or on what I may hope or fear for my path from here, deeper into God’s territory, into the mercy of Christ.

Unless you pray…

Someone will be wounded unless you pray.
Someone will give up unless you pray.
Someone will be deceived unless you pray.
Someone will yield to temptation unless you pray.
Someone will make a foolish choice unless you pray.
Someone will grow faint unless you pray.
Someone will collapse under the load unless you pray.
Someone will go AWOL unless you pray.

Dr Ray Pritchard, Asymmetrical Spiritual Warfare, IX

When you wake with the horrors in the cold hours before dawn, could it be God waking you to pray? Could the terrible things running across your imagination be what you need to pray about, to open that part of your heart that is crushed and torn by them to God’s healing touch, and so become a channel of grace through which Christ’s limitless mercy can heal, rescue, protect?

Just sayin’…

One of the dangers of blogging…

Wonderful post on Tim Chester’s blog:

We [bloggers] commend one another for echoing back the same thoughts. All the time, we feel we are part of the cognoscenti, the cabal of people who know what is right. But ‘on the last day we stand or fall on the approval of one Person, one Master, the Lord Jesus.’

Scary. Read it. Go on, read the whole thing…

The weapon of worship...

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Martin Luther

I think sometimes in this world of iTunes and mall music, we don't quite realise what we’ve got hold of. Music is a spiritual weapon, one of the greatest blessings God has given to humanity.

Ray Pritchard has written tellingly of the role of music in the life of prayer in his wonderful series Asymmetrical Spiritual Warfare:

Preaching is one thing.

Prayer is one thing.

But music is something else.

It touches the heart and soul at a level too deep for words. Music is not better than preaching or better than prayer, but music takes the words of the sermon and brings them home to the heart, and music lifts our spirit to believe the words we bravely utter in prayer...

Music is a weapon of spiritual warfare. And the devil hates it when we sing. He hates our music because our singing rouses our souls, gives us courage, lifts our hearts, restores our faith, builds our confidence, unites our voices, and lifts up the name of the Lord like a mighty banner.

Music is not just preparation for warfare. Music is spiritual warfare. When God’s people sing together, we invade the devil’s territory...

Go ahead.

Drive the devil nuts.

Keep on singing and drive him away.

He hates the music God loves.

Satan hates a singing church.

So sing out and make the devil mad.

One final word. I add this because we live in a day when music has become a contentious issue in many churches. For the last fifteen years we’ve heard a great deal about “worship wars” that have torn apart many local congregations. Instead of using music to fight the devil, we’ve used music as a weapon to fight each other. How sad. How tragic. How Satan must crow over our divisive attitudes. Ask God to deliver you from musical smugness. As I have traveled the world, I have learned that God’s people worship him in a bewildering variety of styles, languages, accents and rhythms. When we look down on others whose musical tastes differ from our own, we run the risk of destroying the unity of the body of Christ. We don’t all worship the same way, and that’s okay. But we do worship the same Lord. And it’s in his name that we will win our battle with the devil. Keep the main thing the main thing and all will be well.

Singing will bring new strength to your spiritual walk.

Singing will bring new power to your spiritual warfare.

Singing will build up your faith.

Singing will strengthen the whole church of God.

God loves it and the devil hates it when you sing for the glory of God.

Sing out … and you will see the salvation of the Lord... Amen.

Dr Ray Pritchard, Asymmetrical Spiritual Warfare, V

A call to prayer

I feel God is impressing on me more and more the need to pray for a revival along the lines of the Wesleyan Revival of the 18th Century. In so many way we are at a similar point: there is deep distrust of Government - a sense of kakistocracy, government by the worst and least suitable people; a distrust of the Police and the armed forces (seen very clearly in the reaction to the G20 demos); moral decline; addiction; a weakening, or at least the appearance of weakening, in the traditional churches; rampant atheism; unrest overseas, with consequent commitment of home troops abroad... it goes on and on.

Now, I'm not in the least concerned here about the rights and wrongs of different political parties, different attitudes to things like civil liberties, policing and immigration, and so forth. Justice must always be at the heart of our prayer, as Isaiah 61 was at the heart of Jesus' prayer - in fact, his entire ministry. What concerns me is the unrest, the public cynicism and distrust, that these things engender. We are in danger as a society as 18th Century society was from the Jacobite Risings, the French Revolution, even in some ways the American Revolution and the Enlightenment - all of which were ideas which clearly appealed to the British public in view of the rottenness of the state in which they lived. We have only to look at the appeal of the BNP on the one hand, and radical Islam on the other, to see how we are flirting with similar ideas in our own time.

I've been looking into the Wesleyan Revival, and I'm really encouraged to see that God rescued the British people, and saved others throughout the world, and eventually revived the poor old broken CofE, as well as helping to alleviate the former persecution of Baptists, Presbyterians and other "non-conformists" by means of the rise of Methodism, without there necessarily needing to be freedom from strife within the leadership. See Wesley's falling out with Whitefield over the former's Arminianism vs. the latter's Calvinism - they mended their friendship, but never did agree theologically. But the Revival went ahead nonetheless.

God is just filling my heart with longing for his glory, his grace, his mercy, on our land in this time, our own time, and in our grandchildren's time. We must pray. I know that I'm no one to lead anything, but I know I have to pray for those who might. I'm sure the Prayer House movement is crucial to this, as well as a revival of prayer in local churches even deeper and greater than that which began in the 1990s. We must truly "pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying..." (Eph 6:18) until God's fire falls. I've never been so sure of anything.

Disclaimer: this is a call to prayer, not to political debate. I am not a politician, and I don't want to enter into that arena, as it would be a distraction from the purpose of this post, and I'll moderate any comments to avoid it. However, if anyone is genuinely curious about any of the issues I've raised, I'll do my best to point them to things I've read / heard / seen that have informed my response to what I feel is God's call, to me at least, in all this.

This post is likely to make more sense if you also read my recent Letting ourselves go...

Letting ourselves go...

If we can let ourselves go in prayer and speak all that is in our minds and hearts, if we can sit quietly and bear the silence, we will hear all the bits and pieces of ourselves crowding in on us, pleading for our attention. Prayer’s confession begins with this racket, for prayer is noisy with the clamor of all the parts of us demanding to be heard. The clamor is the sound of the great river of being flowing in us.

Ann & Barry Ulanov, Primary Speech, with thanks to Inward/Outward

This is another of those places where the relationship between contemplation and intercession becomes clearer and clearer. The "great river of being" is more than just "all the parts of us demanding to be heard": it is broken creation itself demanding to be heard, crying out in our hearts for healing... As Paul says, in that most wonderful chapter 8 of his letter to the Romans (vv 18-27), it is in some extraordinary way through us that creation will be restored. That has to be our prayer: for Christ to make all things new (Rev 21:5) no matter what the cost - and this is the scary bit - to ourselves (Romans 8:17).

Can we drink the cup?

When the mother of James and John asks Jesus to give her sons a special place in his Kingdom, Jesus responds, "Can you drink the cup that I am going to drink?" (Matthew 20:22). "Can we drink the cup?" is the most challenging and radical question we can ask ourselves. The cup is the cup of life, full of sorrows and joys. Can we hold our cups and claim them as our own? Can we lift our cups to offer blessings to others, and can we drink our cups to the bottom as cups that bring us salvation?

Keeping this question alive in us is one of the most demanding spiritual exercises we can practice.We all must hold the cups of our lives. As we grow older and become more fully aware of the many sorrows of life - personal failures, family conflicts, disappointments in work and social life, and the many pains surrounding us on the national and international scene - everything within and around us conspires to make us ignore, avoid, suppress, or simply deny these sorrows. "Look at the sunny side of life and make the best of it," we say to ourselves and hear others say to us. But when we want to drink the cups of our lives, we need first to hold them, to fully acknowledge what we are living, trusting that by not avoiding but befriending our sorrows we will discover the true joy we are looking for right in the midst of our sorrows.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

For me, at any rate, this is what lies at the heart of prayer. Nouwen's words bring me back, yet again, to Isaac of Nineveh's:

An elder was once asked, “What is a merciful heart?” He replied:

“It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, and for all that exists. By the recollection of them the eyes of a merciful person pour forth tears in abundance. By the strong and vehement mercy that grips such a person’s heart, and by such great compassion, the heart is humbled and one cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in any in creation.

For this reason, such a person offers up tearful prayer continually even for irrational beasts, for the enemies of the truth, and for those who harm her or him, that they be protected and receive mercy. And in like manner such a person prays for the family of reptiles because of the great compassion that burns with without measure in a heart that is in the likeness of God.”

St. Isaac of Nineveh (7th century)

This kind of prayer, that I once clumsily dubbed "contemplative intercession", is the closest thing I know to an obedience to Paul's instruction in to "pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints." (Ephesians 6:18) It's not an easy option, and certainly it is a million miles from some people's idea of contemplative prayer, a sort of mantric self-realisation programme for spiritual connoisseurs. It's entirely down-to-earth, really, but it is the only answer that works (for me, anyway) to Romans 8:26-27:

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

Strangely, hard though it can be to bring ourselves to pray with this degree of vulnerability (a particularly poignant way of imitating Christ, if you recall that "vulnerability" means "liable to be wounded) it is not without immediate rewards, as Paul hints elsewhere:

Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. (I Thessalonians 5:16-18)

A land full of bloodshed, and a city of injustice...

David Gushee has a post that every Western Christian ought to read, on the Associated Baptist Press website, entitled "A Christian's lament over the Pew torture poll".

He says,

Dear Jesus,

Everyone seems to be talking about the poll put out last week by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. They found that 62 percent of white evangelical Protestants believe “the use of torture against suspected terrorists to gain important information” to be often or sometimes justified. Only 16 percent of this group -- a community that by self-definition is very, very serious about following you -- believes torture is never justified. That number was lower than any other group polled.

I think that what really got people’s attention with this poll, Lord, is that both evangelical identity and church attendance were positively correlated with support for torture. Thirteen percent more evangelicals said torture was often or sometimes justified than in the general population. In other words: The more often people go to church, the more they support torture. So those of your followers who go to church every week support torture at 54 percent, while those who seldom or never go support it at 42 percent...

But, Jesus, can it be that the problem is that the churches are already empty? Can it be that the institution that you founded to advance your mission in the world is already empty of any understanding of what it might really mean to follow you? Is it already empty of people who take your teachings and example so seriously that they might have the capacity to resist seductive and dangerous ideas floating around our culture -- like the idea that if torture “works” to “protect national security,” and thus is something that followers of Jesus Christ ought to support as good loyal Americans?

Is your church already empty of courageous leaders who are willing to lose their jobs in order to say a resounding NO to a heretical idea like that? Is it already empty of people who understand that if you are a Christian, you cannot serve two masters, like, for example, Jesus and National Security? Is it already empty of people who understand that because all human beings are made in your image, there are some things that we just can’t do to anyone, no matter who they are?

What is this thing called “Christianity” in this country, Lord Jesus? Does it have anything to do with you? It seems a strangely Americanized thing, a disastrously domesticated faith toward which people can nod their heads in loyalty as long as it doesn’t conflict with their full participation in whatever this country feels like it wants to do.

You founded an international, countercultural movement filled with followers who did everything you taught them to do to advance the peaceable and just reign of your Father in this rebellious world. We American Christians have turned it into a culture-religion that has nothing to say even about, say, waterboarding, slamming people repeatedly into walls, forced nudity, prolonged shackling, 11 days of sleep deprivation, psychological terror, sexual humiliation, religious desecration, and so much more! Or that even supports all of this to protect ... America!

O Jesus, what have you to do with a religion like this? “I spit you out of my mouth” -- these words of yours somehow come to mind (Rev. 3:16)!

But really you ought to go and read the whole thing.

I wonder what the result would be in this country, in the UK? Probably less support I think, both within and without the churches - but with the present government's human rights record sinking lower and lower (witness the policing of the G20 demonstrations) I wonder how long it will remain like that. Do read David's article, though, and think and pray it through for yourself. This is important. If we don't know what we as Christians think about things like this, how can we possibly know how to be the hands and feet, and voice, of Jesus in the election booth, or on the street? How can we pray, unless our hearts are broken for those who suffer such things?

Turning us loose to pray...

I've just read a wonderful post from Brother Bede Thomas Mudge OHC, on, among other things, the Jesus Prayer. He says:

I finished [the evening] with some suggestions about other uses of the Prayer - to accompany people through the day and through the night, and in praying for others, especially when you don't know what to pray for. Just putting a person in your consciousness and praying over them: "Lord Jesus Christ, Word of God, have mercy" is a wonderful way to intercede, and helps us to turn loose of the manipulative approach to God that troubles many of us when we pray.

Do click over and read the whole post!

A bloggers' charter

Writing can be a true spiritual discipline. Writing can help us to concentrate, to get in touch with the deeper stirrings of our hearts, to clarify our minds, to process confusing emotions, to reflect on our experiences, to give artistic expression to what we are living, and to store significant events in our memories. Writing can also be good for others who might read what we write.

Quite often a difficult, painful, or frustrating day can be "redeemed" by writing about it. By writing we can claim what we have lived and thus integrate it more fully into our journeys. Then writing can become lifesaving for us and sometimes for others too.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Nouwen could have written this with today's blogging community in mind, I think. Extending "spiritual discipline" a bit can cover all kinds of blogs other than faith blogs... apart from those blogs concentrating on cars, sex or gardening, there seems to be a persistent spiritual element to blogs even from people who would not think of themselves as "spiritual" at all. Maybe there is something about writing, after all, that connects us, willy-nilly, with the things of the spirit. Certainly many poets would agree!

At the risk of offending those who are not Christians who may find their way here via a keyword search, I can't help but feel that all this is somehow connected with the Word. The Greek, as most people know I guess, is Logos, which translates as "reason", "order", "plan", as well as "word". When we use words, we are using things which have meaning and connection beyond what is dreamt of in most of our philosophies, it seems to me. God spoke, and things came to be. What he spoke was the Word, Jesus, through whom all things were made (John 1:3). Jesus' own words were more than just remarks: he said, "Talitha koum!" and the little girl stood up (Mark 5:40ff); he told dead Lazarus to come out, and out he came (John 11.42). He only had to say, "I am!" and a bunch of hardened, well-armed soldiers and Temple guards drew back fell to the ground (John 18:6).

Jesus said once, "I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father." (John 14:12) Why should we wonder that our words, even words in blogs, can be more "powerful and effective" (James 5:16) than we might expect?

Sent...

Each of us has a mission in life. Jesus prays to his Father for his followers, saying: "As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world" (John 17:18).

We seldom realise fully that we are sent to fulfil God-given tasks. We act as if we have to choose how, where, and with whom to live. We act as if we were simply plopped down in creation and have to decide how to entertain ourselves until we die. But we were sent into the world by God, just as Jesus was. Once we start living our lives with that conviction, we will soon know what we were sent to do.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Substitutes for faith...

The affluent are literally possessed by their possessions. Money and the things it can buy stalks the rich countries like a demon. Mammon offers comforts and pleasures to delight the flesh but demands the soul in return. The attachment of Americans to their standard of living has become an addiction. We can’t stop shopping, eating, consuming….

A successful life leads not to love, wisdom and maturity; progress and success in our society is instead based on adding more to one’s pile of possessions. Our natural course is toward a better job, bigger house and richer lifestyle….

Material goods have become substitutes for faith. It’s not that people literally place their cars on the altar; rather, it is the function of these goods in a consumer society. They function as idols, even though most affluent U.S. Christians, like rich Christians throughout history, would deny it.

Jim Wallis, The Call to Conversion (with thanks to Inward/Outward)

And we wonder, sometimes, why the current economic crisis feels like a crisis of faith...

Lightning rods...

In an extraordinary post over on A Minor Friar, Brother Charles says:

Sometimes I think we don't spend enough time reminding ourselves of the direct connection between the creation and the incarnation. When I talk to kids or even adults about creation, they almost always know that God created the heavens and the earth. But they are often stumped when I ask them how God creates, what particular technique God used. Though it's explicit and obvious in the first creation account in Genesis, it's easily missed that God creates through his speech. "God said," "and so it happened."

St. John says as much in the prologue to his gospel, how the world was created through the Word. As Christians we believe that Jesus Christ is that same Word made flesh. The same Word which, when spoken, makes the creation happen is made human in Christ. So God's act of creating the world and the Incarnation of the Word are very closely correlated. I would even dare to say that the world is created so that the Word might become incarnate in it, so that the Word made flesh might die and rise within it in order to communicate to the creation the creative power of the Word.

The Resurrection, then, a recapitulation of the first day of creation when God separated the light from the darkness. This is also part of the reason why we celebrate the Easter season as a "week of weeks." During the whole of the first week we pray in "on this Easter day" in the preface to the Eucharistic Prayer, because the Easter Octave is the "Sunday" in the seven weeks of the season. The Easter season imitates and commemorates both the creation through the Word and the re-creation through the Word made flesh, and reminds us that we are on pilgrimage to a destiny in which these are the same thing.

The gift of rebirth in the Resurrection is for the whole of creation. For God insists on saving the world and pours out upon it the very force of creation itself in the dying and rising of Christ.

This is what lies at the very heart of what I understand about prayer. We do not pray as isolated individuals, crying out our demands to a brazen sky. No, we pray as part of creation, already dead and already raised (Colossians 3:3; Romans 6:8) with Christ: we are lightning rods for "the very force of creation itself" in Christ. We are very like lightning rods in fact, small and insignificant things, dull and spindly, left out in the weather. Yet the Holy Spirit will flow (unhindered if we are poor enough in ourselves) through us, bringing healing and renewal, and the hope of the Resurrection, not only to those we might remember to pray for by name, but to everyone, and every thing, towards whom our hearts are open.

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

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

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will. (Romans 8.18-27)

The Cross bridge...

He who was also the carpenter's glorious son set up his cross above death's all-consuming jaws, and led the human race into the dwelling place of life. We give glory to you, Lord, who raised up your cross to span the jaws of death like a bridge by which souls might pass from the region of the dead to the land of the living. We give glory to you who put on the body of a single mortal and made it the source of life for every other mortal. You are incontestably alive. Your murderers sowed your living body in the earth as farmers sow grain, but it sprang up and yielded an abundant harvest of people raised from the dead.

Come, then, my brothers and sisters, let us offer our Lord the great and all-embracing sacrifice of our love, pouring out our treasury of hymns and prayers before him who offered his cross in sacrifice to God for the enrichment of us all.

From a sermon of Ephrem of Edessa, Deacon (AD 373) found in Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, edited by J. Robert Wright. Copyright © 1991, Church Publishing Incorporated, NY, with thanks to Vicki K Black

Freedom!

True freedom is the freedom of the children of God. To reach that freedom requires a lifelong discipline since so much in our world militates against it. The political, economic, social, and even religious powers surrounding us all want to keep us in bondage so that we will obey their commands and be dependent on their rewards.

But the spiritual truth that leads to freedom is the truth that we belong not to the world but to God, whose beloved children we are. By living lives in which we keep returning to that truth in word and deed, we will gradually grow into our true freedom...

When we are spiritually free, we do not have to worry about what to say or do in unexpected, difficult circumstances. When we are not concerned about what others think of us or what we will get for what we do, the right words and actions will emerge from the centre of our beings because the Spirit of God, who makes us children of God and sets us free, will speak and act through us.

Jesus says: "When you are handed over, do not worry about how to speak or what to say; what you are to say will be given to you when the time comes, because it is not you who will be speaking; the Spirit of your Father will be speaking in you" (Matthew 10:19-20).

Let's keep trusting the Spirit of God living within us, so that we can live freely in a world that keeps handing us over to judges and evaluators...

When you are interiorly free you call others to freedom, whether you know it or not. Freedom attracts wherever it appears. A free man or a free woman creates a space where others feel safe and want to dwell. Our world is so full of conditions, demands, requirements, and obligations that we often wonder what is expected of us. But when we meet a truly free person, there are no expectations, only an invitation to reach into ourselves and discover there our own freedom.

Where true inner freedom is, there is God. And where God is, there we want to be.

from Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey.

Jesus said, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." (John 8:31-32)

So much of our lives, it seems to me, are led according to the by now unconscious, internalised, teaching we received from our parents. If we are truly fortunate, this will be the Gospel of Christ - but for so many of us it is not.

I have still, at the age of 60, to struggle daily against expectations built into my whole perception of my own self-worth. I "know", because I was taught it at an age when I was too young to know that there was any other point of view, that love is earned, and may at any time be withdrawn if one fails to meet expectations. I "know" too that one's worth as a person, one's right to exist in another's eyes, only comes at the price of meeting certain targets, of coming up with the goods, both educationally and creatively.

To hear the Gospel, truly to hear it, years after I had first accepted intellectually the truth of our faith, was for me to hear that justification is by faith alone: that there is nothing I could do to earn it, and that nothing I can in my frail humanity fail to do can lose it for me. To read the 8th chapter of Paul's Letter to the Romans properly was one of the greatest liberations in all my life. And yet it was only in trying to live according to what I read in the Gospels that I was able to understand it. Nouwen says, "By living lives in which we keep returning to that truth in word and deed, we will gradually grow into our true freedom..." and I have come to know that he was right!

But, knowing all this, I still have to struggle. For me, the false programming I received as a child acts as one of the "powers" Nouwen refers to, and which Paul describes so movingly in Romans 8:38-39: "For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." I have daily to take up the armour of God (Ephesians 6:10-18) to resist it, to cut it down with the sword of the Spirit, for if I do not, I find that it grows up unbidden again, like brambles, in the background of my sense of who I am.

Nouwen is right when he speaks of "living lives in which we keep returning to that truth [of the Gospels] in word and deed." We do indeed have to "keep returning." Our enemy will not, this side of Glory, allows us to rest in this truth, to appropriate it once for all. But it is right anyway, I think, that we shouldn't. Paul says again, "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him..." (Romans 8:28) and here it seems he is doing just that. As long as we remain part of a creation as yet not fully liberated (ibid. 18-25) we will forget, or the bramble re-growth of whatever it is obscures our hearing of the Word that sets us free.

Truly, nothing will ultimately be able to "separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord" but in order actually to live our lives in the freedom of that truth, we have to "remain" ("abide" NRSV) in Christ (John 15), living according to his teaching - for it is only then that we will "will know the truth, and the truth will set [us] free." (John 8:32)

Alleluia!

He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

A white silence...

I have not been posting as regularly as I would have liked to, recently. I'll try and write more on why after Easter, but actually these last weeks have also been externally scattered, in a good way, with old friends from across the world and from the other end of the country coming to visit, and to see around our county, and to be shown some of the lovely hidden places of Purbeck!

Barbara, of barefoot towards the light, has a wonderful little post on the Easter Triduum, where she speaks of "withdraw[ing] behind a white silence." I think, as the hours pass on towards Good Friday, that that is the right place for me, too. As Barbara also says, "it is more than called for."

Empty hands, empty heart...

When someone gives us a watch but we never wear it, the watch is not really received. When someone offers us an idea but we do not respond to it, that idea is not truly received. When someone introduces us to a friend but we ignore him or her, that friend does not feel well received.

Receiving is an art. It means allowing the other to become part of our lives. It means daring to become dependent on the other. It asks for the inner freedom to say: "Without you I wouldn't be who I am." Receiving with the heart is therefore a gesture of humility and love. So many people have been deeply hurt because their gifts were not well received. Let us be good receivers.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Christianity is precisely a liberation from every rigid legal and religious system. This is asserted with such categorical force by St. Paul that we cease to be Christians the moment our religion becomes slavery to "the Law" rather than a free personal adherence by loving faith to the risen and living Christ: "Do you seek justification by the Law... you are fallen from grace... In fact, in Christ Jesus neither circumcision or its absence is of any avail. What counts is faith that expresses itself in love" (Gal. 5:4, 6).

Thomas Merton. Seasons of Celebration

Do you see the connection? It is the gift of grace, the gift we celebrate with increasing force over these days leading up to Easter, that we must receive with open hands, and an open heart. It's probably a cliché, but our hands cannot receive if they are clenched in possession or defence, and our hearts cannot receive if they are full of stuff. It is the empty hands, the empty heart, that will receive the priceless gift of love that Christ has for us at Easter. It is to the anawim, to the helpless poor, that Jesus was sent, as he described when he quoted from Isaiah 61 at the start of his ministry, as Luke records (4.16-21).

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven...

(Matthew 5.3)

Striving to surrender...

Seeking God is not just an operation of the intellect, or even a contemplative illumination of the mind. We seek God by striving to surrender ourselves to Him whom we do not see, but who is in all things and through all things and above all things.

Thomas Merton. Seasons of Celebration, p. 224.

Do you know that you are never absolutely sure you're right when you're living in faith? That's exactly why it's called "faith"! At the crucial moments in your life's decision making, you are always trusting in God's guidance and mercy and not in your own perfect understanding. You're always "falling into the hands of the living God" as Hebrews (10:31) says, letting God's knowing suffice, God's arms save.

Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality

I think at long last I am coming to see the truth of statements like this... God knows it's taken long enough, but he is a patient God, and he's allowed me to go gradually learning this way of surrender, because I am by nature such an un-surrendering person. I somehow find it comforting to look back over Jesus' own life, and to realise (the extreme example being in the garden at Gethsemane, Luke 22:39-49) the even he didn't find surrender easy, perfectly though he did in the end do it.

Word and silence...

As a people, we are afraid of silence. That’s our major barrier to prayer. I believe silence and words are related. Words that don't come out of silence probably don't say much. They probably are more an unloading than a communicating.

Yet words feed silence, and that's why we have the word of God... the written word, the proclaimed word. But the written and proclaimed word, doesn't bear a great deal of fruit - it doesn't really break open the heart of the Spirit - unless it's tasted and chewed, unless it's felt and suffered and enjoyed at a level beyond words.

If I had to advise one thing for spiritual growth, it would be silence.

Thomas Merton, from Contemplative Prayer

We need to bring all our reading, all our thoughts and our feelings, into silence. It is in silence that God is (1 Kings 19.12 NRSV - after all the wind and earthquake and fire, "a sound of sheer silence").

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will. (Romans 8.26-27)

But it is only in silence that we can give the Spirit room to search the depths of our hearts.

At peace with time...

Fundamentally the Christian is at peace with time because Christians are at peace with God. We need no longer be fearful and distrustful of time, because we understand that time is not being used by a hostile "fate" to determine our lives in some sense which we ourselves can never know, and for which we cannot adequately be prepared. Time has now come to terms with Man's freedom.

Thomas Merton. Seasons of Celebration, p. 47.

For some reason I love thinking about time. I don't do it as much as I used to, but it's cleansing in some odd way, and healing, to think of who and what and when one is against the great field of time, the web on which God weaves all things.

About the Holy Spirit and the Bible - some old thoughts revisited...

I know I've been a bit quiet here recently, and I thought a word of explanation was due. Somehow God has been opening up to me things that I had neglected. The Spirit has been I guess rather "like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old." (Matthew 13.52)

So, in the spirit of all this, I revisited some of my old writings on The Mercy Site, and I thought I'd share with you some bits I found that seemed to explain something of what's been going on:

------------------------

The Bible is far more than an old book about the way things were: "Your word, O LORD, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens." Psalm 119:89; "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away." Jesus, in Matthew 24:35.

Then, it literally feeds us: "… man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD." Deuteronomy 8:3; "Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation." 1 Peter 2:2.

It guides us in all we do: "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path." Psalm 119:105; "The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple." Psalm 119:130.

But it has even more power than that: "I am not ashamed of the Gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes." Romans 1:16; "Is not my word like fire," declares the LORD, "and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?" Jeremiah 23.29; "… the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." Ephesians 6:17; "For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart." Hebrews 4:12.

But if the Bible is to be so much to us, if it is to be our guide and our protection and our weapon and our food, then how can we manage this? Even pocket Bibles are somewhat awkward to have with us every minute of every day, and how can we stop and look up Scripture every time we have a choice to make, every time we are tempted or annoyed or challenged or endangered? The Bible tells us: "These commandments I give you today are to be upon your hearts." Deuteronomy 6:6; "No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and your heart so you may obey it." Deuteronomy 30:14; "I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you." Psalm 119:11; "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly..." Colossians 3:16.

How can the Bible dwell in us like that? How can we learn the whole Bible to use like that?

There is an old tradition in some churches known as learning Memory Verses: certain verses, useful for various situations and circumstances and states of mind we may find ourselves in are committed to memory, using a variety of mnemonic tools well tested over time. That works - until you find yourself in a situation you've never learnt a verse for. Then you get to panic. Or go your own way…

The human mind is a wonderful thing, with capacities far beyond what we mostly expect of it, and abilities the greatest of us hardly begin to tap into. But the Holy Spirit knows all about them, all about the unused 3/4 of the human brain. He also knows all about Scripture. If only we will soak ourselves in the Bible, if only we will read and read, and think about, and pray about, all we have read, if only we will take the time to let the Holy Spirit burn the Word into our minds like the little laser that burns data onto an optical disc, then we will slowly begin to realise for ourselves the truth that the Word of God is in our heart, that suddenly, strangely, we find just the right word for just the situation we find ourselves in, that when we find ourselves tempted to sin, that we can answer, as Jesus did in the desert, "It is written..."

And once this starts to happen, then perhaps the strangest thing begins to happen to us. We start to fall in love, in the oddest way, with the Word of God. We actually start to find we can say, with the author of Psalm 119, "Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long." (v 97) Or with Jeremiah, "...your words… were my joy and my heart's delight, for I bear your name, oh LORD God Almighty." (15:16)

"Listen," said the apostle Paul, "I will tell you a mystery..." I am going to tell you a mystery now. I feel really strange saying this, because it is so great a mystery that it scares me even to think about it. But it is very simple really, it is very logical. The Bible, Holy Scripture, is the Word of God, agreed? Its human authors were so closely inspired by the Holy Spirit that what the wrote down are the very words of God, and the whole canon of Scripture together is the Word of God. And who, or what, is the Word of God? "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God… The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us." (John 1:1, 14). And what did Jesus say? "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you." (John 14:18) He was speaking of the Holy Spirit in this famous passage, but he said. "I will come to you." You see, we can't make artificial distinctions among the persons of the Holy Trinity. God is one: "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one." (Deuteronomy 6:4) He is God in Three Persons, but he is still One. Take one bit, you've got the lot, if you will forgive my speaking of God like that.

So, if we have the Bible, we have Jesus. He is with us. If we have the Word of God in our hearts, we have Jesus in our hearts. If we obey the commands of Jesus - the commands of God, which the psalmist of Psalm 119 so loved - "[we] will know the truth, and the truth will set [us] free." (John 8:32) - and as Jesus (14:6) is "the way and the truth and the life" we will know him. And the Holy Spirit (16:13) "will guide [us] into all truth."

In one profound sense, Scripture is a perfect circular argument. It is inescapable. Try as we may, we cannot evade or avoid its demands on our life, its profound transformation of our very selves. The Christian life is like a quicksand: one real stride into and you're gone, no way back. Accept one thing, and you've suddenly accepted the whole thing, all its profound and outrageous claims on us, on every second of our time, on every aspect of our lives. We suddenly find we have given it all away, we are not our own any more, and even the very life in us has changed, has been taken over. Nothing will ever be the same again. We've fallen in love, we've taken the step, and there's no way back. And all we can do is press on, with our brother Paul: (Philippians 3:12-14) "Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." ...

The Jesus Prayer developed in the years directly after the times described in the Acts of the Apostles, when people - both men and women - went out into the desert to pray, sometimes for many years. They ran into the same problem Paul identifies in Romans 8:26 ("We do not know what we ought to pray for..."), and they searched the Scriptures - including the (at that time, very!) New Testament - for an answer. They found it in the prayers people addressed to Jesus: Peter's "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16); the Canaanite woman's "Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me!" (Matthew 15:22); the tax collector's "God, have mercy on me, a sinner!" (Luke 18:13). They found themselves praying, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!" and somehow in its repetition it was complete, somehow it both answered and spoke out their hearts' cry, not only for themselves, but for all the aching world and its people...

This intercessory dimension of what is in effect a contemplative style of prayer was a revelation to me, though I had known of the Jesus Prayer for many years. It was not until the Holy Spirit brought it out for me, as it were, and illuminated the scriptures from which it is built, that I began to realise the incredible completeness of the Bible's teaching on prayer. Truly it is inexhaustible - and it is never superseded, never out-of-date. "Your word, O LORD, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens. Your faithfulness continues through all generations." (Psalm 119:89-90)

The whole of prayer, just like The Jesus Prayer, is to be founded in the Bible - in the Word of God.

(Slightly edited and adapted from The Mercy Site)

Magdalene's Musings: What is a Cross? Lenten Meditation

I saw this wonderful post linked from the excellent Jane Redmont's Acts of Hope, and just had to post a link myself. Here's some real angel-strengthening for your Lenten Desert!

Magdalene's Musings: What is a Cross? Lenten Meditation

A most counterintuitive thing...

Pain teaches a most counterintuitive thing - that we must go down before we even know what up is. In terms of the ego, most religions teach in some way that all must "die before they die." Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. I would define suffering very simply as "whenever I am not in control."

If religion cannot find a meaning for human suffering, humanity is in major trouble. All healthy religion shows us what to do with our pain. Great religion shows us what to do with our pain. Great religion shows us what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust.

If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.

If there isn't some way to find some deeper meaning to our suffering, to find that God is somewhere in it, and can even use it for good, we will normally close up and close down. The natural movement of the ego is to protect itself so as not to be hurt again.

Richard Rohr, from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 25

I'm not sure that I would go along with Rohr all the way when he defines suffering as simply "whenever I am not in control," but I'm not sure I can come up with a better one-liner.

This is an important passage nonetheless. In many ways it answers the unanswered questions in my previous posts on suffering. More of this tomorrow, I hope. I just couldn't resist posting this now!

Do good to your servant
       according to your word, O LORD.

Teach me knowledge and good judgment,
       for I believe in your commands.

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

You are good, and what you do is good;
       teach me your decrees.

Though the arrogant have smeared me with lies,
       I keep your precepts with all my heart.

Their hearts are callous and unfeeling,
       but I delight in your law.

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

The law from your mouth is more precious to me
       than thousands of pieces of silver and gold.

(Psalm 119.65-72)

God calls us to suffer the whole of reality...

Our remembrance that God remembers us will be the highway into the future, the straight path of the Lord promised by John the Baptizer (Luke 3:4). Memory is the basis of both pain and rejoicing: We cannot have one without the other.

Do not be too quick to heal all of those memories, unless that means also feeling them deeply and taking them all into your salvation history. God calls us to suffer the whole of reality, to remember the good along with the bad. Perhaps that is the course of the journey toward new sight and new hope. Memory creates a readiness for salvation, an emptiness to receive love and a fullness to enjoy it.

Strangely enough, it seems so much easier to remember the hurts, the failures and the rejections. In a seeming love of freedom God has allowed us to be very vulnerable to evil. And until we have learned how to see, evil comes to us easily and holds us in its grasp.

Yet only in an experience and a remembering of the good do we have the power to stand against death. As Baruch tells Jerusalem, "you must rejoice that you are remembered by God" (Baruch 5:5, NAB). In that remembrance we have new sight, and the evil can be absorbed and blotted out.

Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 26

"God calls us to suffer the whole of reality..." I feel somehow that that is true not only in the sense that Rohr implies, being prepared to recall the good in our own lives as well as the bad we more easily remember, but also in the sense that we must be prepared to suffer along with others - for that is the meaning of compassion, to suffer (or feel) with - whoever or wherever they are, and to rejoice with them also.

I have sometimes thought that the capacity for compassion - I mean compassion for all of creation, not just for our fellow human beings - lies at the heart of what it means to be human. When we pray, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner", with our hearts open to the suffering, and the joy, of the whole of reality, then we are making ourselves into little lightning rods, conducting into all we hold in our hearts some of the immeasurable mercy of Christ. As he was God's love and grace and mercy (see e.g. Psalm 145.8-9) so we are, in however small a way, Christ's.

The LORD is gracious and compassionate,
       slow to anger and rich in love.

The LORD is good to all;
       he has compassion on all he has made...

The LORD is faithful to all his promises
       and loving toward all he has made.

The LORD upholds all those who fall
       and lifts up all who are bowed down...

My mouth will speak in praise of the LORD.
       Let every creature praise his holy name
       for ever and ever.

(Psalm 145:8-9; 13-14; 21)

Illusions, and a reality...

During our short lives the question that guides much of our behaviour is: 'Who are we?' Although we may seldom pose that question in a formal way, we live it very concretely in our day-to-day decisions.

The three answers that we generally live - not necessarily give - are: 'We are what we do, we are what others say about us and we are what we have,' or in other words: 'We are our success, we are our popularity, we are our power.'

Jesus came to announce to us that an identity based on success, popularity and power is a false identity - an illusion. Loudly and clearly he says: 'You are not what the world makes you; but you are children of God.'

Henri Nouwen, from Here and Now: Living in the Spirit with thanks to inward/outward

Called...

So many terrible things happen every day that we start wondering whether the few things we do ourselves make any sense. When people are starving only a few thousand miles away, when wars are raging close to our borders, when countless people in our own cities have no homes to live in, our own activities look futile. Such considerations, however, can paralyse us and depress us.

Here the word call becomes important. We are not called to save the world, solve all problems, and help all people. But we each have our own unique call, in our families, in our work, in our world. We have to keep asking God to help us see clearly what our call is and to give us the strength to live out that call with trust. Then we will discover that our faithfulness to a small task is the most healing response to the illnesses of our time.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

It think this is a better way than I could have found myself to explain what I mean about my call to prayer, especially as it relates to the suffering we've discussed in the last few posts. As the Principles of the Third Order (TSSF) states (13):

We as Tertiaries desire to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, whom we serve in the three ways of Prayer, Study, and Work. In the life of the Order as a whole, these three ways must each find full and balanced expression, but it is not to be expected that all members devote themselves equally to each of them. Each individual's service varies according to their abilities and circumstances, yet as individual members our Personal Rule of Life must include each of the three ways.

I don't think these priorities are set for life, like the colour of our eyes. I know very well that nowadays God's main call on my life is to prayer, then to study, and last to work, in the form of Parish work. It has not always been so. When I was farming, my call to prayer was still very strong, perhaps the strongest call, helped as it was by the long solitary hours involved in herdsmanship; but study came a long way down the list. I hadn't time for study, beyond reading my Bible and some easy notes; and if I had had time, I'd simply have fallen asleep! Yet dairy farming is a vocation, if ever there was one, as exacting in its way as medicine or teaching.

The point of suffering?

Suffering is the necessary feeling of evil. If we don't feel evil we stand antiseptically apart from it, numb. We can't understand evil by thinking about it. The sin of much of our world is that we stand apart from pain; we buy our way out of the pain of being human.

Jesus did not numb himself or withhold from pain. Suffering is the necessary pain so that we know evil, so that we can name evil and confront it. Otherwise we somehow dance through this world and never really feel what is happening.

Brothers and sisters, the irony is not that God should feel so fiercely; it's that his creatures feel so feebly. If there is nothing in your life to cry about, if there is nothing in your life to complain about, if there is nothing in your life to yell about, you must be out of touch. We must all feel and know the pain of humanity. The free space that God leads us into is to feel the full spectrum, from great exaltation and joy, to the pain of mourning and dying and suffering. It's called the Paschal Mystery.

The totally free person is one who can feel all of it and not be afraid of any of it.

Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 209

This passage brings me to the very heart of what I understand by prayer. The pain we feel in suffering, and still more in compassion (suffering-with), is the pain of the Cross. There is for me no escaping this. It's what Paul is speaking of when he says:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly... In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will." (Romans 8.22-23; 26-27)

Creation, the whole web of life and death, birth and agony, is caught up in what I have to call the mystery of the Fall: "For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God." (Romans 8.20-21)

Because I don't understand; because as a human being I simply cannot get my heart around the enormity of the world's pain, nor my head around the intricate and endless pattern of causation the gives rise to it; because as a mortal being I cannot comprehend - though I can worship - the economy of salvation, the way the Cross opens the way for "a new Heaven and a new earth" when "[God] will wipe every tear from [his creation's] eyes [when t]here will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away..." (Revelation 21.1, 4), I cannot pray straightforward prayers of intercession, as I can for some individual situation of sickness or need. This is why God seems to have called me particularly to pray the Jesus Prayer, so that in my identity with, my compassion for, the pain of the world, I can pray, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner", since somehow "me" now includes all that I suffer with, and my sin somehow now includes, or is one with (and this hurts) the sin that causes that universal suffering.

The Jesus Prayer is for me the perfect prayer, since in its cry for mercy it is both petition and intercession, but intercession that transcends my own feebleness and limitation; yet in its repetition, it brings the little mind to silence, and allows the vast stillness of the love of God to come and gentle my crushed and crying heart, and in some way I don't understand, allows a little more of the mercy of Christ into this broken place we live in together.

Pointless suffering...

When I was young, I wanted to suffer for God. I pictured myself being the great and glorious martyr. There's something so romantic about laying down your life. I guess every young person might see themselves that way. But there is nothing glorious about the moment of suffering when you're in the middle of it. You swear it's meaningless. You swear it has nothing to do with goodness or holiness.

The very essence of the desert experience is that you want to get out. A lack of purpose, of meaning - that's what causes us to suffer. When you find a pattern in your suffering, a direction, you can accept it and go with it. The great suffering, the suffering of Jesus, is when that pattern is not given.

Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 86

This is so much my own experience it literally took my breath away when I read it. At the various moments of transforming suffering I have lived through, there has always been the sense, "Oh, if only there were some sense in this! If only I were suffering for God, standing nobly in the face of persecution, I could bear it. But this! This degrading, pointless misery... doesn't mean anything, isn't useful for anything - it's just wasted pain, messy, grinding, shameful. Oh, God, why?"

And yet, "we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." (Romans 8.28)

All things. Even the shameful, squirming, self-pitying pointless empty pain.

The LORD is gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and rich in love.

The LORD is good to all;
he has compassion on all he has made...

The LORD upholds all those who fall
and lifts up all who are bowed down...

The LORD is righteous in all his ways
and loving toward all he has made.

The LORD is near to all who call on him,
to all who call on him in truth.

(Psalm 145:8,9,14,17,18)

I don't know about you, but I really can't think of a time when I've called on the Lord in so much truth as in those times. Or any times when his answer has been so clear.

"It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees." (Psalm 119:71)

It really is true, isn't it?

The fertile soil of mercy...

[W]e know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. (Romans 8.28)

St. Paul says that God both initiates and cooperates in all human growth. God "works together with" us, which means both our workings are crucial. Every moment, God is trying to expand our freedom. Can you imagine that?

God is trying to make this choice more alive, more vital, more clear, more true. God even uses our mistakes and our sin in that regard. Nothing at all is wasted. I believe that's profoundly true. If that's not the providence of God, what else would be "providential"?

The provident care of God is that God is working for our wholeness, for our liberation, probably more than we are.

Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 187

True sanctity does not consist in trying to live without creatures [material goods]. It consists in using the goods of life in order to do the will of God. It consists in using God's creation in such a way that everything we touch and see and use and love gives new glory to God.

Thomas Merton, Seasons of Celebration, p. 137

These things being true, our broken lives must look different to us from now on. The things we regret, the pain that crushes our chests in the hours before dawn, the wrongs we have done, and the wrongs done to us, are not the waste places we thought they were, but are the fertile soil of Christ's mercy:

I know a place, a wonderful place
Where accused and condemned
Find mercy and grace
Where the wrongs we have done
And the wrongs done to us
Were nailed there with You
There on the Cross.

Randy & Terry Butler, 'At the Cross' (Vineyard Music, Touching the Father's Heart #17)

Concrete demands?

The real purpose of Christian asceticism is then not to liberate the soul from the desires and needs of the body, but to bring the whole person into complete submission to God's will as expressed in the concrete demands of life in all its existential reality.

Thomas Merton, Seasons of Celebration, p. 138

This would do very well to explicate the strange place I find myself in at the moment... And it really is "life in all its existential reality" that is doing all the work, and not any of my own feeble attempts at any form of discipline!