More treasures of darkness…

The final word for mysticism after the optimistic explosion that we usually call hope, and the ensuing sense of safety, is an experience of deep rest.  It’s the verb I’m told that is most used by the mystics: “resting in God.”  All this striving and this need to perform, climb, and achieve becomes, on some very real level, unnecessary.  It’s already here, now.  I can stop all this overproduction and over proving of myself.  That’s Western and American culture.  It’s not the Gospel at all.

We’ve all imbibed the culture of unrest so deeply.  What got me into men’s work is that I find males are especially driven in that direction.  We just cannot believe that we could be respected or admired or received or loved without some level of performance.  We are all performers and overachievers, and we think “when we do that” we will finally be lovable.  Once you ride on the performance principle, you don’t even allow yourself to achieve it.  Even when you “achieve” a good day of “performing,” it will never be enough, because it is inherently self-advancing and therefore self-defeating.  You might call it “spiritual capitalism.”

Richard Rohr, adapted from Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate

I was just thinking about how to start a post apologising for having been such a blogging slacker over the past few weeks—Jan has had yet more major surgery, though she is now recovering really well—when I came across this from Richard Rohr. How easily we bloggers get drawn into the way of achievement, anxiously scanning our inboxes for comments, clicking on the little “show details” link against our blog in Google Reader to check our weekly stats, when all we really are hoping to do is share what God has shown us, the “treasures of darkness” [links to my own post of that title, quoting Isaiah 45:3] that he has brought to light for us. The way of Christ is the way of suffering, of patience, receiving—not the way of achievement, acquisition, reputation.

Things are still as ambiguous as they were in that post, and of course nursing someone under these circumstances is difficult: an extraordinary mixture of conflicting emotions that even so shows up more and more clearly how we depend on God for each breath, let alone each day stumbling in the footsteps of Christ. But God is good, better than the best of us could ever imagine, and he truly does work in all things for the good of those who love him (Romans 8:28) if only we will keep listening in even those darkest places.

Talking with a friend the other day, we realised that indeed God does not necessarily protect his people from the ills that are part of living in a fallen world, and yet he does protect us in them:

But now, this is what the LORD says—
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have summoned you by name; you are mine.
When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers,
they will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire,
you will not be burned;
the flames will not set you ablaze.
For I am the LORD, your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Saviour…”

(Isaiah 43:1-3a)

Why should we be exempt from the difficulties and losses of our sisters and brothers? We are sinners also: it is only Christ in us who can transmute what we are into something of value. Only by following his steps through the darkest valley can we have light to share.

I’d feel unreasonably diffident saying things like this, in case someone thought I was giving my own little troubles undue weight, if the saints and martyrs, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer all the way back to Paul and Silas in jail after their flogging, didn’t say the same thing… Bonheoffer in particular saw so clearly, even in the concentration camp, that, “To endure the cross is not tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ.”

Lord, have mercy…

Lord, have mercy.

Have mercy on my darkness,

my weakness,

my confusion.

Have mercy on my infidelity,

my cowardice,

my turning about in circles,

my wandering,

my evasions.

I do not ask for anything but such mercy, always, in everything,

mercy.

My life here – a little solidity and very much ashes.

Almost everything is ashes. What I have prized most is ashes.

What I have attended to least is, perhaps…

a little solid.

Lord, have mercy.

Guide me,

make me want again to be holy,

to be a man of God, even though in desperateness and confusion.

I do not necessarily ask for clarity, a plain way, but only to go according to your love,

to follow your mercy, to trust your mercy.

I want to seek nothing at all, if this is possible.

But only to be led without looking and without seeking.

For thus to seek is to find.

[Thomas Merton, Journals, August 2, 1960, IV.28 – with thanks to FlowerDust.net]

Women-stuff…

All this “women-stuff” is not only important; it is half of conversion, half of salvation, half of wholeness, half of God’s work of art.  I believe this mystery is imaged in the Woman of the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse: “pregnant, and in labour, crying aloud in the pangs of childbirth… and finally escaping into the desert until her time” (Revelation 12:1-6).

Could this be the time?  It is always the time!  The world is tired of Pentagons and pyramids, empires and corporations that only abort God’s child.  This women-stuff is very important, and it has always been important; more than this white male priest ever imagined or desired!  My God was too small and too male.  Much that the feminists have said is very prophetic and necessary for the Church and the world.  It is time for the woman to come out of her desert refuge and for the men to welcome her.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations p. 279, day 290

More good sense from Rohr – perhaps we in the Church of England need to hear this clearly, as Andy Wilkes suggests in his recent post about Bishop Barbara Harris, whose linked clip I would strongly recommend…

Richard Rohr, why you need to hear him…

“Most of us assume that the self we’re meant to ‘die to’ is the body self, the sexual self, and the emotional self. We assume that if you just get rid of your body or emotion or sex then we’ll fly towards God. But there’s no evidence for that. In fact, quite the contrary.

“Thomas Merton gave us the language of the true self and false self, instead of the body self and spirit self. It’s not your body self that needs to die, but your false self — your persona, or in Freudian terms your ego, the person you think you need to be, the persona you need to live up to.”

The positive spin on all this talk about death-to-self is that we should, he suggests, passionately, constantly choose God, and union with God. “Prayer is a daily choice to live out of the Great Self, not the small self — the God self, not the you self.”

The act of contemplation helps us to observe the “unobserved” or false self, and by so doing, to gradually detach ourselves from it. But it is not something that comes naturally in our culture. “We are a capitalist society, into accumulation, not detachment,” Fr Rohr says. “That’s why people are attracted to Buddhism. Buddhists have kept their vocabulary and their honesty about the need for detachment up to date, whereas we’re just people who have invested heavily in our own opinions and rightness, with disastrous results.”

The secret to detachment, he suggests, is to learn how to live more fully in “the now, not the past or the future”.

Some people do discover “presence”, he explains, “in love-making, in nature, in the presence of great music. As a spiritual teacher, that would be my whole desire, to say: ‘Don’t just look to the churchy moments.’ If you’re contemplative, you’re going to find these moments everywhere. And once that begins, life is no longer divided into the sacred and the secular: it’s one world.”

Perhaps the main threat to the rise in interest in authentic contemplation is that it becomes just another individualistic pop-spirituality technique, or a therapeutic tool alone.

This is something Fr Rohr is painfully aware of. “In some circles, contemplation is the new trendy thing; but when you draw close to some of these people, you find they have no love for the poor or the outsider. It’s just a new way to feel pious.”

From a 2008 Church Times interview with Fr. Richard Rohr OFM

This interview neatly sums up why I am always so excited about Fr. Richard’s teaching, and why I quote him so often on this blog. If you can, I would urge you to go and hear him at the Third Order sponsored conference this September in London. Oh, I know sometimes there are things in Rohr’s writings that come over, especially out of context, as if he is just another trendy guru of the latest Christian craze, or worse, as if he is just a Christian face for some generalised New Age spirituality. But it really isn’t so. Rohr is a Franciscan through and through, the genuine article, and if you listen to his homilies you will get a sense of how far he is from being a product of his age. As far as the Emerging Church is concerned, it’s much more nearly the case that his age is a product of him!

Of and with the poor…

We can no longer be satisfied by simply being the Church for the poor from our position of establishment.  We must realize that sometimes that very generosity, that very attempt to be good to other people, has kept us in a position of power and superiority.  Somehow we must be of and with the poor, and then be ready for some mistrust and even criticism.
Dom Helder Camara (1909-1999), the holy Archbishop of Recife, Brazil, said it so truthfully, “As long as I fed the poor, they called me a saint.  When I asked, ‘Why are there so many poor people?’ they called me a communist.”

Richard Rohr, April 2010

As Franciscans, I think it is crucial that we face this question. The First and Second Orders, by virtue of their vocation to the Evangelical Counsels, live it out in common with their sisters and brothers in other religious communities—but we as Tertiaries need to examine ourselves rather rigorously on this point, I feel. Though, as our Principles state, “we possess property and earn money to support ourselves and our families,” we must consider how Rohr’s words here question our own vocation.

I don’t have an answer, of course, to these questions. The path God has somehow laid out for me has brought me closer to the way of poverty than some of my sisters and brothers, but this is through what might be called (if you leave God out of it!) force of circumstance: I can claim no holiness, or acuity of discernment, for myself. All that life since the farm accident that stopped me working some years ago has done is to give me a different perspective, a way of seeing that I didn’t have before; a cure, maybe, for a blindness common to so many educated people of my generation, who have not had to live frugally amid abundance. But it has not shown me any specific advice for anyone else… Maybe each of us has to plot our own course through this land of inequalities—it would be so hard to offer advice without appearing to manipulate, or to offer criticism.
One thing I do know. As Franciscans we must look clearly, with wide open eyes, at the poor who live among us, quite as much as at the glamorously poor of what used to be called the Third World. (I am using deliberately provocative language here!) We must set aside the dark glasses of prejudice, the tinted lenses of class, and look, really look, into the eyes of the Big Issue sellers, into the bundles of rags under the city bridges, into the doors of the temporary accommodation dotted even among the prosperous and leafy villages of Dorset, and allow them to ask their own questions of us, of our own vocation to the Third Order of St. Francis…

Precious poverty…

Above all else St. Francis stands for a certain kind of love, a love that empties itself, a love that is so secure that it can be poor. It can let go of its reputation, securities, comforts, and money; because it has found its riches and comforts on another level.

In every age, Francis will be called the little poor man (“IL Poverello”). He was free enough to walk out of the system of rewards, status and security in 13th Century Italy.  He changed sides intentionally.  I remember when my novice master in 1961 told us, almost whispering, “We really are communists!’’  Francis named our community “the brothers of the lower class” (friars minor). Today we call that making a “preferential option for the poor,” and people think it is something new and dangerous.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 275, day 286

Francis was right. Our poverty, our willingness to go without “reputation, securities, comforts, and money” really is our most precious possession in this world. With this power at our disposal, we are invincible, though the world might see us as pitiably insignificant. We are like Christ on the road to the Cross, or like St. Paul, when he wrote:

I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me… (Philippians 4.11-13)

Kinds of simplicity…

One biblical description of poverty is simplicity. People poor in this way are centred in chosen values instead of possessions. And because their life is so centred in clear values—usually God, family, and physical work—they normally don't need to compensate by spending their afternoons in shopping malls, buying more things, or filling up their boredom with distractions.

Few things are needed or desired by the one who lives simply because life is centred on another level of value. And maybe it isn't always specifically religious; maybe it's music, art, nature, volunteerism, or working for a great ideal.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 254, day 265 - Source: Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction

This is one of the best expressions I’ve encountered of the very practical call to simplicity that many of us seem to stumble across on the way, if we seek to follow Francis on the way of the Cross. As Rohr points out, it isn’t in itself specifically Franciscan; it isn’t even specifically Christian, though as many artists, writers, and maybe particularly musicians have discovered over the years, it’s a hard road without a lived and passionate faith to strengthen you…

Brother Ramon SSF says (Franciscan Spirituality, p. 68):

In the Church… we are confronted by the fearful and blazing light of Francis. We can either turn away like the rich young man faced by Jesus’ radical demand, or allow the Franciscan light to dispel our avaricious darkness…

It was not that Francis was a social reformer or an ideological politician warning what love of money would do to the fabric of our society. Rather, he was a follower of Jesus who saw what it would do to spiritual awareness and sensitivity.

The compulsive worship of capital leads the individual and society to a denial of the compassion that relinquishes more than is necessary and shares in simplicity.

It is all there in the gospel. Jesus preached and lived such radical simplicity clearly, and Francis showed it could be done. But no doubt we shall find ways to evade them both!

Br. Ramon has put his finger on it. The Franciscan, the gospel, call to simplicity is not all call to change society—how could it be?—but a call to rescue ourselves from the sinking ship, to put put out the call to everyone we meet, “Save yourselves!”

A question of honour…

Either you see the Body of Christ everywhere or you don’t see it at all. There are finally no divisions, except in our ability to see.  This is a mystical and non-dualistic seeing that connects everything to everything. “There is one God from whom all things come and toward which we all go” (1 Corinthians 8:6), as St. Paul puts it.

God is perfectly hidden in this material world. And for those who have learned how to see, God is even more perfectly revealed. God shines through all things.  You want to kiss trees and honor whatever is, even though you know most will mock or misunderstand.

You are even brought to tears sometimes by the least of the brothers and sisters because the divine image shines through so clearly in those things that have no artificial glitter or self-evident glory.  When you discover it on your own, it is like a secret revelation, and all the more beautiful.

Richard Rohr, adapted from the CD Creating Christian Community

This is interesting. Those whom Rohr suspects will “mock or misunderstand” will probably suspect the Franciscan either of pantheism—imagining that God and the universe are really the same thing—or animism—imagining that inanimate objects have souls, and so are maybe worthy of worship in and for themselves. Of course we are neither of these things: all that is points us to God, and is to be honoured as transparent to him from whose hand it comes. It’s a bit like the old Protestant paranoia about Catholics worshipping Mary. Of course they don’t: they worship the Saviour to whom she gave birth, and to whom her whole life points… but as the lowly girl whom all generations call blessed (Luke 1.46ff), the one to whom the angel Gabriel was especially sent (Luke 1.26ff), she is most certainly to be honoured.

Don’t imagine that I’m saying, or that Fr. Richard is saying either, come to that, that trees and stones are to be accorded the same honour as the Blessed Virgin; but all that God has made is his, and is in that sense holy. And if that is the case, how might we relate to that creation, hurt as it is? Should we not honour and respect it as God’s handiwork, and pray for it with tears, seeing its beauty hurt and broken by our own human sin (Romans 8.18ff)?

It wasn’t meant to be like this…

Natural things can’t be appreciated with a dualistic mind.  Nature almost naturally teaches you non-duality.  If you look long enough at anything in nature it is always non-dual.  It is both this and that.  It’s living and it’s going to die.  It’s gentle and it’s violent.  It’s useful and totally unnecessary.  It’s beautiful yet wild and uncontrollable.  It’s always a mixture of what seems like “good” and what seems like “bad.”

No wonder Jesus told us to learn by observing “the lilies of the field” (Luke 12:27), “the seeds falling to the earth” (Matthew 13:4), “the birds in the sky” (Matthew 6:26),” the red sky in the morning” (Matthew 16:2), and “the very stones crying out” (Luke 19:40).  Was Jesus a New Age tree hugger?  No, he was a Deep Seer of all things, who saw the souls of things.

The only way dualistic thinking is possible long term is if you stay inside of words, concepts, and ideas, as if they were reality itself.  Once you meet factual reality, it’s always non-dual or both-and, and it takes a merciful, compassionate, and often forgiving mind to receive it exactly as it is—and let it teach you whatever it has to teach you.

Richard Rohr, adapted from The Soul, The Natural World, and What Is

I know what Rohr is getting at, here, and yet somehow something gives me pause. I can’t help remembering Isaiah 65:25:

The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent—its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain…

and Revelation 21:3-4:

I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

For all that Rohr says here, sounding disconcertingly like the hip Americanised Taoism of Alan Watts, it wasn’t meant to be like this. It won’t always be like this. The story of the Fall in Genesis may not be the police report that young Earth creationists like to imagine, but it is true nonetheless. Something happened. We screwed up in some unimaginably profound way, and opened the door to evil across the earth. Creation is broken. It is beautiful, and glorious, and it speaks of God in every molecule, but here on Earth at least it is broken. Pain and grief and death and injustice stride the world like ghastly spectres, feeding where they will. We cannot celebrate this! Our desperate prayer must be for mercy, and justice, and healing, and one day our prayers will be answered, as glorious as God has promised. It is only through the Cross that this healing can flow; perhaps it wouldn’t be too presumptuous to suggest that this is the reason for the Cross, that this is what lies behind the Incarnation itself (Philippians 2:5-11; Colossians 2:14-15; Romans 8:18-25)

St. Isaac of Nineveh, writing back in the 7th century, had it right:

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.”

An unexpected consequence…

Joy is not a requirement of Christian discipleship, it is a consequence. It is not what we have to acquire in order to experience life in Christ; it is what comes to us when we are walking in the way of faith and obedience.

Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

I never realised this in the early years of my Christian life. Strangely, it was not until I had followed Christ long enough to become “familiar with suffering” (Isaiah 53.3), until I could say with the writer of Psalm 119 that “it was good for me to be afflicted” (vv. 67-71) that I realised the truth of what Peterson is saying here. But it is true, every word of it; and the joy of Christ is a joy no-one can take away… As Paul says,

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,

‘For your sake we are being killed all day long;
   we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

(Romans 8.31-39)

A prayer…

Loving God, we love how you love. We love how you free us. We love what you have given and created. Help us to recognize, Holy One, and to rejoice in what is given, even in the midst of what is not given. Help us not to doubt, Good God, what you have given us, even when we feel our shortcomings. We thank you for the promise and sign of your love in the Eternally Risen Christ, pervading all things in the Universe, unbound by any space or time. We praise you for sharing this One Life, your Spirit with all of us.

We offer you our lives back in return. We offer you our bodies, our racing minds and restless hearts into this one wondrous circle of Love that is You. 

Amen.

(Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations )

Out of the ruins…

Is there proof of the resurrection? Why can we not glance at what is going on in the church and, staggered by spectacular grace, believe? The problem can be stated bluntly: The church is all too human. We scarcely see some mystical vision of the “invisible” church marching through time and space “like a mighty army.” No, to us the church is a human organization that lives in peculiar, mortgaged buildings, several of which are to be found in any American village competing like Wendy’s and McDonald’s for the American religious consumer.

The church wears a human face; it breaks store-bought bread, preaches into microphones, sings remarkably trite poetry in hymns, and puts up signs to attract customers like liquor stores or gas stations. Was it not C.S. Lewis who had the devil remark that the best way to disillusion Christian people was to keep their minds flitting back and forth between high-sounding phrases, such as “the body of Christ,” and the actual human faces of people in church pews?

Church affairs are seldom soul-sized; they tend to be tedious. Although we strain to jazz up church services with storytelling sermons and so-called creative worship, trivial is still trivial. Perhaps in South Africa or in regions of South America martyrs may blaze, but here in America we seem to be stuck with what Søren Kierkegaard described as “the caricature of Christianity.” The church we see is all too human…

When church is reduced to church management and the soul is scaled down to psychological promptings, who can speak of resurrection or spot surprising signs of redemptive power among us? No burned martyrs light our skies; ministers burn out instead. No Christians are persecuted; they merely perish from boredom. Where there is no significant cross, how can resurrection have meaning?…

In preaching the reality of resurrection today, we must begin by being scandalously honest about the church. It is not merely a matter of not being smart, prominent or wealthy--we may have all of these types in our congregations. But certainly we stumble along at the brink of apostasy and would sell out Jesus Christ for a good deal less than thirty pieces of silver any day. We may make biblical noises, but are usually bored silly by biblical study. We praise the Lord but, increasingly, long for leisurely Sunday bathrobed brunches with coffee, fruit and the ponderous Times… We must begin with an open-eyed acknowledgment of our corrupted Christian communities.

Then, just maybe, we can be surprised by the life of Christ living in the midst of our common lives. Look, we continue to break bread--women and men, labor and management, black and white—at the table of the Lord. We preach, and oddly enough the good news seems to be heard through our inept testimonies. And once in awhile, backed up against the wall, we are forced to speak for peace or justice. To be honest, we know everything is happening in spite of our natural inclinations. We can begin to name grace in the midst of our brokenness, and sense, even today, that the risen Christ continues ministry among us.

David Buttrick is professor emeritus at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University. This essay is excerpted from his book, The Mystery and the Passion, with thanks to inward/outward.

It occurs to me that we would do well, here in England, to read this carefully. We are concerned, and rightly so, with threats to our freedom to exercise our religious conscience, preach the Gospel, witness to our faith, pray for people, and so on. But perhaps out of this atmosphere of suspicion, the abuse of law, and political correctness gone malignant, new energy, and a new sense of Christian identity, may emerge. God has a disturbing way of bringing the best out of the worst, as Paul describes in Romans 8.28ff, and as the Resurrection supremely demonstrates. Perhaps it would be right to pray that out of the ruins of a demoralised and marginalised church a new and glorious thing may arise, fuelled by the very forces that had hoped to finish it off once for all?

A word in season?

Reading often means gathering information, acquiring new insight and knowledge, and mastering a new field. It can lead us to degrees, diplomas, and certificates. Spiritual reading, however, is different. It means not simply reading about spiritual things but also reading about spiritual things in a spiritual way. That requires a willingness not just to read but to be read, not just to master but to be mastered by words. As long as we read the Bible or a spiritual book simply to acquire knowledge, our reading does not help us in our spiritual lives. We can become very knowledgeable about spiritual matters without becoming truly spiritual people.

As we read spiritually about spiritual things, we open our hearts to God’s voice. Sometimes we must be willing to put down the book we are reading and just listen to what God is saying to us through its words.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Perhaps this is something we bloggers, tweeters and Facebook posters need to consider very carefully. Certainly, for myself, I’ve been finding that I need to be liberated from the self-imposed tyranny these things can inflict (with all the paradox inherent in that sentence). I find it’s far too easy to become conditioned to a way of reading that involves filleting and gathering in a very similar way to how Nouwen describes academic reading. Being prepared to lay this down involves a sort of humility, a poverty of results, that we may find as difficult as would the scholars Nouwen is writing about…

On being a part of it all…

Henceforward, I hope your belief can be in the Cosmic Christ.  We believe in Jesus Christ.  Did anyone ever tell you those are two distinct faith affirmations?  To believe in Jesus is to trust and love the man who walked on this earth.  To believe in Christ is to include absolutely everything in creation, and most especially our own self, which is the receiver station that HAS to get it right.

If we can receive it within us and believe that we are simultaneously son of God and son of earth, daughter of heaven and daughter of this world, and they don’t cancel one another out, we’ll fall in love with Jesus like never before.  Because we’ll realize that he did human incarnation first; he trusted this mystery first—and was kind enough to include us in the process! (Read Ephesians 1:3-14 and hear it perhaps for the first time!)

That’s what Paul means when he says in various places that Jesus is the "first of many brothers and sisters.”  He is leading “the great triumphal parade.”  He is at the beginning of a universal procession.  But WE’RE the procession!

Richard Rohr, adapted from The Cosmic Christ

We so need to hear this. Well, I do anyway. How can we pray unless we realise this kinship with all creation?—a kinship which exists in and through the living Christ, through whom all things came into being (John 1.3) and in whom all things coinhere (Colossians 1.17). We are not islands, as John Dunne realised: our lives are interwoven in Christ with all that is—and it is in Christ that our prayer encompasses, in his mercy, whether we realise it or not, all that is.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me (and on all that has been made), a sinner…

Who will separate us from the love of Christ?

The resurrection does not solve our problems about dying and death. It is not the happy ending to our life's struggle, nor is it the big surprise that God has kept in store for us. No, the resurrection is the expression of God's faithfulness to Jesus and to all God's children. Through the resurrection, God has said to Jesus, "You are indeed my beloved Son, and my love is everlasting," and to us God has said, "You indeed are my beloved children, and my love is everlasting." The resurrection is God's way of revealing to us that nothing that belongs to God will ever go to waste. What belongs to God will never get lost.

Henri Nouwen, Our Greatest Gift,  HarperOne, 1995, 2009, with thanks to inward/outward

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. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

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

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,

'For your sake we are being killed all day long;
   we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.'

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8.18-39 (NRSV)

Coming to meet us…

I am the Christ.
It is I who destroyed death,
who triumphed over the enemy,
who trampled Hades underfoot,
who bound the strong one
and snatched man away to the heights of heaven;
I am the Christ.

Come then…
It is I who am your ransom, your life,
your resurrection,
your light,
your salvation, your king.
I am bringing you to the heights of heaven,
I will show you the Father who is from all eternity,
I will raise you up with my right hand.

From Melito of Sardis, quoted in Seeking Life: The Baptismal Invitation of the Rule of St. Benedict by Esther de Waal, Liturgical Press, 2009, with thanks to Episcopal Cafe.

It is Jesus we meet during Lent, whom we follow into the darkest valley of his humanity; and it is the risen Christ, whose home is with the Father beyond time and space, who comes to meet us at Easter, as he came to meet Mary in the garden at dawn. We may not recognise him for a moment—but though he is our Lord and our Saviour his hands and feet and side are still pierced, and he is our friend and our brother, still and always.

The victory of love...

The series of events which were worked out to their inevitable end in Holy Week sum up and express the deepest secrets of the relation of God to men. That means, of course, that Christianity can never be merely a pleasant or consoling religion. It is a stern business. It is concerned with the salvation through sacrifice and love of a world in which evil and cruelty are rampant. Its supreme symbol is the Crucifix - the total and loving self-giving of man to the redeeming purposes of God.

Because we are all the children of God, we all have our part to play in God's redemptive plan; and the Church consists of those souls who have accepted this obligation, with all that it costs. Its members are all required to live, each in their own way, through the sufferings and self-abandonment of the Cross, as the only real contribution which they can make to the redemption of the world. Christians, like their Master, must be ready to accept the worst that evil and cruelty can do to them, and vanquish it by the power of love.

(Evelyn Underhill, from The Fruits of the Spirit, with thanks to inward/outward)

Alleluia, he is risen…

He is risen indeed… Alleluia!

A Dream of the Rood

Listen:
I will disclose      the deepest vision
that came in a dream      at night’s centre
when all human voices      rested in sleep.
It seemed I beheld      the tree of the Mystery
rise in the heavens,      spinning out rays
of perfect light.      That beacon glowed
spattered with gold,      shining with jewels,
clear to earth’s corners:      five gems
defined the crossbeam.      All God’s angels were witness,
splendid throughout eternity.      This was no common gallows.
Many observed it:      both angelic hosts
and men on earth:      it ran through creation.
The victory wood was a marvel,      and I, stained with my sins,
cut with my shame,      saw the glory tree
robed in its honour,      radiating splendour,
decked with gold,      magnificently cased
in precious stones,      the axle of power.
Yet through that radiance      I could witness
the primal agony      when it first began
to bleed on its right side.      I was overwhelmed with sorrow,
afraid of this terrible vision.      I saw the moving beacon
change the nature of its raiment:      sometimes it was soaked through,
drenched with heavy blood,      sometimes it blazed with treasure…

I prayed to the tree,      glad in spirit,
strong in zeal,      though I was alone,
small in my solitude.      Then my soul
urged me forward;      I had to endure
my hour of longing. Now my life’s hope
is to seek out      that triumphant wood
as a lone pilgrim      so that all souls
may fully adore it.      This is my hope,
the strength of my heart:      my purpose comes
straight from the Cross.

(from A Dream of the Rood, (Anglo-Saxon) tr. Karl Young)

The leastness of Christ...

We live in a debilitating dichotomy. We hear the images of Jesus being the lamb, the lamb led to slaughter; and Jesus being the servant kneeling with a towel and a basin, washing feet as he gets ready to go to the cross; and the weeping Christ, riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. We want to believe we, too, are moving toward this sort of surrender of power and control, wanting no person to feel the weight of our authority. But we don't yet embody it. We don't yet live as though the way to God, the way of fulfilment, is the downward way. We spend our best thinking and energies on the upward way and are distressed if we are not recognized or appreciated.

The closer we get to the end of life, the more meaningful the symbols of weakness become. I've noticed this time and time again: people of power, the closer they get to the end, the more they appreciate the images of weakness. Jesus didn't live a great life but end that life poorly. No, the crowning of his life was the death that he died. The poverty, the leastness of those final hours, the death, is the glory.

N. Gordon Cosby, from a sermon on September 24 1989, with thanks to inward/outward

I haven't found anything that has so clearly described what God has been showing me during this strange and at times terrifying Lent!

Once again, apologies for being so bad at keeping up this blog. Jan has been in hospital for major surgery, and is coming home this afternoon. This isn't a confessional type of blog, which is why I haven't said more day by day about the extraordinary mixture of emotions this has involved - but I would be grateful for your prayers, for us both...

Faith alone...

Faith alone can give us the light to see that God's will is to be found in our everyday life. Without this light, we cannot see to make the right decisions.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, p. 38

We are all bound to seek not only our own good, but the good of others. Divine providence brings us in contact, whether directly or indirectly, with those in whose lives we are to play a part as instruments of salvation.

Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness, Image Books, 1963, p. 40

I'm sorry to have been so out of touch recently. Difficult personal circumstances, involving among other things regular visits to a friend in hospital, have conspired to keep me distracted and unable to focus on writing on the scattered occasions when I have been able to sit down at the keyboard. But I haven't forgotten this blog, nor have I forgotten that this Lent is drawing down through Passiontide towards Good Friday.

Meanwhile, I thought I'd just post these snippets from Thomas Merton, which seem to sum up the things God has been showing me this last week or so...

Something Different…

an unedited repost from inward/outward

How are you doing at this point in your Lenten journey?

I don’t mean, have you successfully stayed away from candy or caffeine or cigarettes, or whatever you “gave up for Jesus” this year. I don’t mean, have you prayed, rested, or helped others more; or worried, complained, or bought stuff less.  I just mean, I wonder how you’re doing, feeling, being as we turn the corner to the week that leads up to the week that leads up to Easter.

Is excitement or dread becoming more predominant? Is there increasingly space in you for “a song every day, a song every day” (to quote Abraham Joshua Heschel from yesterday’s entry)? Are you feeling bold and proud to be among Jesus’ friends, eager to see what happens, or are you already shrinking away into the crowd a bit? Are you glad to be taken again on this adventure of faith or ready to have a different adventure? There are no right answers; I’m just wondering how it is for you.

At this point on the path that is inevitably winding its way to a cross, I find myself wishing that something different might (please, please, please) happen this year. I don’t want to watch him go through it all again. I don’t want to try to go through it with him.

I’m so bad at it, this part of the story. All these slow hours leading up to the hours that lead up to his death. Another execution, like that isn’t our answer for everything we don’t know what else to do with. And do any of us know what to do with Jesus, really?

What do we do with undeserved, lavish, scandalous love? Generally, we condemn it. We refuse it entry. Or we turn it into a revered treasure that gets hung on the walls of our inner and outer sanctuaries, but isn’t allowed to change our lives. In some immature way or another, we kill it.

The days now grow stumbly and slow ... and yet go all too fast. Will my failures and disappointments and good-intentions-but-ultimately-refusals to love go to my grave with me? If I could really let them die this time, might they become catalysts of resurrection?

Will anything be different this year, Jesus? Will I?

Kayla McClurg facilitates inward/outward and other points of connection for The Church of the Saviour.

Heroically faithful?

What matters in the contemplative life is not for you or your Director to be always infallibly right, but for you to be heroically faithful to grace and to love. If God calls you to Him, then He implicitly promises you all the graces you need to reach Him. You must be blindly faithful to this promise.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, New Directions, 1961, p. 244

This seems very close to the lesson God is trying to teach me this Lent. Nothing else, it seems, will do. What we have here seems to be very close to Jesus’ own journey to the Cross. Only his faithfulness, only his preparedness to go, despite the dreadful awareness of the consequences he showed in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 6.36ff; Luke 22.39ff) as far as his Father called him to, trusting only in the bare knowledge of his Father’s love, allowed the Cross to bring to us, to all creation, the healing grace that will make all things new. Merton is right: it is a heroic faithfulness to which we are called if we are to take up our own cross and follow him. God grant us the courage to trust that the grace is there, will always be there, to bring us through…

Crucial…

O Lord, this holy season of Lent is passing quickly. I entered into it with fear, but also with great expectations. I hoped for a great breakthrough, a powerful conversion, a real change of heart; I wanted Easter to be a day so full of light that not even a trace of darkness would be left in my soul. But I know that you do not come to your people with thunder and lightning. Even St. Paul and St. Francis journeyed through much darkness before they could see your light. Let me be thankful for your gentle way. I know you are at work. I know you will not leave me alone. I know you are quickening me for Easter—but in a way fitting to my own history and my own temperament.

I pray that these last three weeks, in which you invite me to enter more fully into the mystery of your passion, will bring me a greater desire to follow you on the way that you create for me and to accept the cross that you give to me. Let me die to the desire to choose my own way and select my own desire. You do not want to make me a hero but a servant who loves you.

Be with me tomorrow and in the days to come, and let me experience your gentle presence. Amen.

Henri J.M. Nouwen, A Cry for Mercy: Prayers from the Genesee, Doubleday

I don’t know that I had as beautiful a purpose as Nouwen had in mind for this Lent, but certainly I had a purpose. I felt that this Lent would be somehow crucial, yet I misunderstood, partly at least, that word “crucial”. Like most people of my time, I had thought of crucial as “important or essential as resolving a crisis” (Merriam-Webster) first, and, even as a Franciscan with some shreds of school Latin left, only secondly as relating to the way of the Cross.

I was wrong. God has chosen this Lent to show me even more clearly my own poverty, my own powerlessness—my own desperate need for hiddenness and silence—by taking me a way that is a million miles from the clarity and decisiveness of that dictionary definition. This is a way of darkness very like, in some ways, Paul’s and Francis’. It most certainly involves dying “to the desire to choose my own way and select my own desire.” It even involves dying to the desire to select my own terms of surrender.

A couple of years ago I wrote a post entitled Of God and Cows, which might be worth clicking over and re-reading. In it, I pointed out that the only way effectively and kindly to care for cows was to earn their trust. The only way through times like this is to trust God, to trust blindly, in fact—something which goes against everything a Western man (or woman, but perhaps especially man) has been brought up to believe, and against which every fibre of my being wants to scream. But it is the only way. As CS Lewis once wrote:

If human life is in fact ordered by a beneficent being whose knowledge of our real needs and of the way in which they can be satisfied infinitely exceeds our own, we must expect a priori that His operations will often appear to us far from being beneficent and far from wise...

You are no longer faced with an argument which demands your assent, but with a Person who demands your confidence... the assent, of necessity, moves us from the logic of speculative thought into what might perhaps be called the logic of personal relations.

CS Lewis, The World's Last Night and Other Essays, Mariner Books

The Use of Prayer…

What is the use of prayer if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, p. 24

Listening in the spiritual life is much more than a psychological strategy to help others discover themselves. In the spiritual life the listener is not the ego, which would like to speak but is trained to restrain itself, but the Spirit of God within us. When we are baptised in the Spirit—that is, when we have received the Spirit of Jesus as the breath of God breathing within us—that Spirit creates in us a sacred space where the other can be received and listened to. The Spirit of Jesus prays in us and listens in us to all who come to us with their sufferings and pains.

When we dare to fully trust in the power of God’s Spirit listening in us, we will see true healing occur.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8.24b-27)

The hole in our soul…

Do you realize with what difficulty surrender will come to a fixing, managing mentality?  There’s nothing in that psyche prepared to understand the spiritual wisdom of surrender.  All of the great world religions teach surrender.  Yet most of us, until we go through “the hole in our soul” don't think surrender is really necessary.  At least that’s how it is for those of us in First World countries.  The poor, on the other hand, seem to understand limitation at a very early age. They cannot avoid or deny the hole in their soul.

The developing world faces its limitation through a breakdown in the social-economic system.  But we, in the so-called developed world, have to face our limitations, it seems, on the inside.  That’s our liberation theology.  We must recognize our own poor man, our own abused woman, the oppressed part of ourselves that we hate, that we deny, that we’re afraid of.  That’s the hole in our soul.  It’s the way through, maybe the only way, says the crucified Jesus.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 66, day 71

Oh, this is hard. It’s the hardest thing I know to face my own broken, beaten self, the part that actually has followed his Lord this far on the via Crucis, and has the wounds to show for it. But I know that for me at least it is the only way, and all my attempts to evade it, and everyone else’s well-meaning efforts to help me evade it, are no use at all.

Why is it so hard for us simply to accept what our dear brother Paul has long since taught us, that “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 4.19b-20) and “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3.3) These are not pious platitudes—they are Christ’s absolute truth, bloody, broken, glorious. Only in that death will we live forever; only in that defeat will we triumph…

The Beginning of Blessedness…

The dark night is not an abstract notion on some list of spiritual experiences every seeker is supposed to have. The dark night descends on a soul only when everything else has failed. When you are no longer the best meditator in the class because your meditation produces absolutely nothing. When prayer evaporates on your tongue and you have nothing left to say to God. When you are not even tempted to return to a life of worldly pleasure because the world has proven empty and yet taking another step through the void of the spiritual life feels futile because you are no good at it and it seems that God has given up on you, anyway.

This, says John, is the beginning of blessedness. This is the choiceless choice when the soul can do nothing but surrender.

(Source: Dark Night of the Soul: St. John of the Cross)

Mirabai Starr, with thanks to inward/outward

This fits closely, it seems to me, with my post on Monday. There is so much we do not understand, cannot understand, of God’s ways with man and time. We simply do not have the senses required to perceive it—we might as well try and see ELF radiation with the naked eye. All we can perceive are the effects God has on the heart of man—ultimately I think, what we know as the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5.22-23).

All our prayer is to be prayed in the dark, then; all the light we know is the light of Christ, and that the patch directly before our feet, the next step (Psalm 119.105)

Don’t think, though, that all this is something esoteric, reserved for the special people, the chosen ones. All it is is love. David had it right:

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
   my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
   too great and too marvellous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
   like a weaned child with its mother;
   my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.

(Psalm 131)

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…

Trust the Stream

“There is a river, whose streams gladden the city of God...” (Psalm 46:4).

The stream flowing through our lives is from eternity to eternity. It is artesian. It is totally adequate. Everything we need is borne by that stream. Its origin is the realm beyond, and it carries infinite resources. In this space-time realm, conditioned as we are, the stream can seem to be a trickle. It seems puny against the drugs we’re battling, against the divisions among us or the power of greed that fuels our economy.

When we’re up against all the world’s needs and lacks—the way we perceive life—the stream seems inadequate. But in fact, it is a powerful, surging, cleansing tide that purifies all it touches. It is a grace torrent. It flows irrespective of merit. It carries everything that a human being has ever needed—and could ever want. Whatever we need will flow by at just the opportune moment. Our problem is that we’re not attuned to the stream. We don’t see it. We’re not even looking in the river’s direction.

But when we wait in expectancy, looking at the stream and then recognizing what we need as it floats by, we simply reach out and take the gift. It’s an effortless way of living. Usually we’re not attuned to effortlessness. We’re too busy striving. We’re holding forth and carrying on and trying to reach our goals. The wisdom of the stream is the opposite of this. What I’m talking about is moving from a conceptual awareness of God’s care—the idea of God’s providence—to trusting the flow of that stream that carries everything we need and will bring it at just the opportune moment…

Jesus found it difficult to understand his disciples’ anxiety. He was so in the river, he was so aware that the stream carried everything that was needed, that he couldn’t understand why others were having so much trouble with the idea. What he says is to set our minds on God’s realm, God’s justice, before everything else. Everything else will be given by the stream. This is different from achievement and different from making things happen. Do not be anxious about tomorrow, Jesus says. You’ll have plenty to think about when tomorrow comes. Now the stream is flowing.

Once we get accustomed to noticing the stream, and we spend more time near the stream, taking from it what is being given, there comes another step: actually getting into the water and resting in its flow. Even when the flow is a torrent, we know we are safe. We trust the flow. We become non-resistant. We become receptive. We trust the power of the divine presence, which longs to take our one little life to its divine destination. Even if we’re in deep water, we trust the flow and are not afraid. We simply wait in expectancy to round the next bend, looking in wonder at the view. Always a new view. Effortlessness, expectancy and wonder are how we live, rather than striving.

Faith, in the biblical sense, is trusting the flow and revelling in the view and being carried beyond all existing boundaries. Faith is being excited about the final destination, even when the destination is mystery. When Jesus says, “Believe in God, believe also in me,” he is saying, “Get into the stream with us. It’s a stream of pure grace and mercy. Go into its depths and find us there.”

(N. Gordon Cosby, reposted complete from inward/outward)

Just like the Cross…

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 now I know it is mostly ego.  There is nothing glorious about any actual 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 or God.

The very essence of any experience of trial is that you want to get out. A lack of purpose, of meaning—is the precise suffering of suffering! 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 immediately given.  The soul can live without success, but it cannot live without meaning.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 86, day 94

I can so witness to the truth of Rohr’s words here. The experience of meaninglessness, the sense that almost any circumstances than the present ones would be more godly, more formative, more obviously holy to oneself and to the world, is overwhelming. Nothing, it seems, could be farther from the tragic dignity of suffering for the sake of one’s faith. The present circumstances are just a mess, bloody and tangled and degrading, “nothing to do with goodness or holiness or God.” Just like the Cross, really, when you think about it…

Odd metrics…

Well, that’s sort of comforting, I suppose…

(Hat-tip to Sue, who scored 33.3%…)

Stop counting…

The most important, the most real, and lasting work of the Christian is accomplished in the depths of his own soul. It cannot be seen by anyone, even by himself. It is known only to God. The work is not so much a matter of fidelity to visible and general standards, as of faith: the interior, anguished, almost desperately solitary act by which we affirm our total subjection to God by grasping his word...

Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness, Image Books, 1963, p. 56.

It’s as if what is unbreakable—the very pulse of life—waits for everything else to be torn away, and then in the bareness that only silence and suffering and great love can expose, it dares to speak through us and to us. It seems to say, if you want to last, hold on to nothing. If you want to know love, let in everything. If you want to feel the presence of everything, stop counting the things that break along the way.

Mark Nepo, with thanks to Inward/Outward—source: www.marknepo.com

Hiddenness, even from oneself. Is that what it comes down to? The Spirit’s work in the depths beyond the reach of self-knowledge, analysis. “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 8.27) To lose everything, even one’s own sense of what is going on in one’s own heart, to consciously allow the tearing away of all that is not God—surely that is the furthest reach of faith, beyond which is no-thing but God.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…

Grace upon grace…

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8.28)

St. Paul says here that God both initiates and cooperates in all human growth.  All we can offer is the good will of love.  God “works together with” us, which means both our workings are crucial.  We are real partners. Every moment, God is trying to expand our freedom to love.  Can you imagine that?

God is forever trying to make our choices more alive, more vital, more clear, more true. So much so, that God even uses our mistakes and our sins in that one providential direction. Nothing at all is wasted, nothing!  If that’s not the providence of God, what else would be “providential”?

God seems to be working for our wholeness, for our liberation, for our integrity probably more than we are.  At least that is what the saints always say.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 187, day 200

For more than 20 years now I’ve found this passage to be one of the most comforting, most heart-warming verses in the entire Bible. I don’t know that I can really add much to Rohr's words here, except that reading them in the CAC Daily Meditation has made my day!

How much God loves us…

God made a covenant with us. The word covenant means “coming together.” God wants to come together with us. In many of the stories in the Hebrew Bible, we see that God appears as a God who defends us against our enemies, protects us against dangers, and guides us to freedom. God is God-for-us. When Jesus comes a new dimension of the covenant is revealed. In Jesus, God is born, grows to maturity, lives, suffers, and dies as we do. God is God-with-us. Finally, when Jesus leaves he promises the Holy Spirit. In the Holy Spirit, God reveals the full depth of the covenant. God wants to be as close to us as our breath. God wants to breathe in us, so that all we say, think and do is completely inspired by God. God is God-within-us. Thus God’s covenant reveals to us to how much God loves us.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I’ve been thinking about God’s love for us this Lent. I remember my disappointment when I first discovered that the word “Lent” comes merely from the Middle English lenten, lengthen. I wanted it to have some meaning that conveyed more of the sense I had of Lent as a time between, a waiting time. A time when the usual preoccupations are placed in abeyance—for that is what fasting is—in order that we can see clearly the way of the Cross, the way we all must walk if we follow our Saviour.

Nouwen’s words here, the movement from God-for-us, through God-with-us to God-within-us, describe somehow our own journey on the path of faith. Well, mine at least. It is not till we realise that, in some way we cannot yet understand, the universe is in the hand of one whose love for us, whose will to our good, is beyond any love we have ever known, that we can understand why Christ would be born, fragile flesh out of fragile flesh, to walk among us, Emmanuel, God-with-us, touchable, woundable, able to be killed. It is not till we have seen his love, known his smile, the warmth of his hand lifting us, his voice saying, “Do not be afraid…” that we can begin to understand the Cross. And it is only as we stand with his mother beneath that cross that we can see what resurrection means, how far he had to rise that blessed morning that he met the other Mary in the half-light and asked the reason for her tears. Unless they are our tears too, we cannot know what Jesus meant when he said that we will know his Spirit, because he will be in us. (John 14.15-17) Only as we weep now for all the world’s loss and pain can the risen Christ dwell in us (John 17.23), for his hands are wounded still, and his side pierced. His glory, his victory, carry his woundedness beyond death to everlasting life—and so shall we be ourselves (John 17.22,24)—for he is forever the Lamb who was slain, yet lives, and his death has brought us life that will outlast the stars (Romans 5.10).

The gift of faith…

Faith reaches the intellect not simply through the senses but in a light directly infused by God. Since this light does not pass through the eye or the imagination or reason, its certitude becomes our own without any vesture of created appearance, without any likeness that can be visualized or described.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, New Directions, 1961, p. 132

God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

Ephesians 2.4-10

I am so grateful for these words. I know it might sound a bit much to some people, but truly I keep finding that the only way I can live is by faith, through the hope that is mine, being saved; and through the love I have for my sisters and brothers in Christ, as well as the ones who don’t know who he even is. Yet if you asked me to explain in concrete terms why I have faith, I who grew up so far from the Lord, I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that I didn’t have faith then, and I do now; I wasn’t saved then, now I am; I had love for no one but myself, and now my heart is full. I have nothing whatever for which I can take the credit. Like Paul, I want to say, “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Galatians 6.14)

On not becoming evil...

So we will pose the great spiritual problem in this way, "How do I stand against hate without becoming hate myself?"

We would all agree that evil is to be rejected and overcome; the only question is, how? How can we stand against evil without becoming a mirror - but denied - image of the same? That is often the heart of the matter, and in my experience is resolved successfully by a very small portion of people, even though it is quite clearly resolved in the life, death and teaching of Jesus.

Jesus gives us a totally different way of dealing with evil - absorbing it in God (which is the real meaning of the suffering body of Jesus) instead of attacking it outside and in others. It is undoubtedly the most counter-intuitive theme of the entire Bible.  It demands real enlightenment and conversion for almost all of us.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, pp. 143, 145

Our default understanding seems to be more like that of the Star Wars universe than Christ's. I can only assume that this has to do with the Fall, described in Genesis 3 as Eve's and Adam's eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We can see this in operation in every war fought across the earth at any point in history, especially in the so-called "just wars". I am not meaning necessarily to criticise here the theory of jus ad bellum: I am merely pointing out that however good the reasons for going to war, however noble and necessary the aims, jus in bello never works. As we saw tragically in the second Gulf War, those on the side of good become evil in order to combat evil, just as Rohr describes.

The Cross is both the symbol and the means of the final defeat of evil. Only on the Cross can we see evil for what it truly is, on the Cross of Christ and on the countless crosses carried, knowingly or unknowingly, by all mortal life. It is only through the Cross that all suffering finally is redeemed (Romans 5 passim; 8.18ff) and it is only in Christ that the dark side is finally overcome (John 1.1-5) Easter is not a festival with bunnies; it is not even just a Christian festival. It is a cosmic event on a par with creation itself - the healing of all that is broken (Revelation 21.1-5) and wrong, the making of all things new again, the Kingdom come, shalom at last...  

Only in silence…

Only in silence and solitude, in the quiet of worship, the reverent peace of prayer, the adoration in which the entire ego-self silences and abases itself in the presence of the Invisible God to receive His one Word of Love; only in these “activities” which are “non-actions” does the spirit truly wake from the dream of multifarious, confused, and agitated existence.

Merton, Thomas. Love & Living. Naomi Burton Stone and Br. Patrick Heart, Editors. Harcourt, 1979. p. 20-21

I wish I could express somehow how these words awaken my heart’s longing. They come like some rumour from a distant shore, like the scent of green places across a salt and barren sea at the end of a long voyage.

These are not words of escape, though. Peace yes, but no escape, no final rest until “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8.21) Until then, our silence and our solitude are the risk of radical openness, the love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Corinthians 13.7)

Prayer cannot finally rest in itself as long as there are tears shed, blood spilt, among even the least in God’s creation—for “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 8.22-23)

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…

A Lenten Prayer

The Lenten season begins. It is a time to be with you, Lord, in a special way, a time to pray, to fast, and thus to follow you on your way to Jerusalem, to Golgotha, and to the final victory over death.

I am still so divided. I truly want to follow you, but I also want to follow my own desires and lend an ear to the voices that speak about prestige, success, pleasure, power, and influence. Help me to become deaf to these voices and more attentive to your voice, which calls me to choose the narrow road to life.

I know that Lent is going to be a very hard time for me. The choice for your way has to be made every moment of my life.  I have to choose thoughts that are your thoughts, words that are your words, and actions that are your actions. There are not times or places without choices. And I know how deeply I resist choosing you.

Please, Lord, be with me at every moment and in every place. Give me the strength and the courage to live this season faithfully, so that, when Easter comes, I will be able to taste with joy the new life that you have prepared for me.

Amen.

(from The Road to Daybreak, Henri J. M. Nouwen)

Treasures of darkness...

[W]e have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. (2 Corinthians 4.7-12 NRSV)

I've not been able to get this passage out of my head since our Assistant Priest Judy mentioned it in her powerful sermon yesterday morning. Later in the same letter Paul says (12.7b-10) that he will gladly boast of his weaknesses, that the power of Christ may dwell in him.

I feel somewhat the same as Paul. Although I have never been one to make my private life public, and this blog was never intended as any sort of reality show, I cannot escape the feeling that I am supposed somehow to share what God is doing in all of this. Like my illustrious predecessor, I am daily finding treasures of darkness, and riches hidden in secret places, and I can't quite keep quiet about it, and it's necessary to include just a little personal detail so as to make what I say comprehensible. My present situation, still unresolved, still neither married not single, is one that is a daily hurt. Jan had to return from the USA earlier this year, and circumstances beyond the control of either of us keep us living here in the same house. It's a situation that, although I did nothing to bring it about, I cannot help but be ashamed of. It stands in the way of all I try to do.

And yet... As a Franciscan, I am predisposed in some deep way to a longing for poverty. (Francis himself, after all, fell in love with "Lady Poverty", a bride he once described as "a wife of surpassing fairness.") There is economic poverty, of course, but for me the crucial thing is the poverty of action, the poverty of self-determination. In this, which really is for me a most painful thing, I am discovering not only a capacity in myself for surrender to God that I never knew I had, but God's goodness, his mercy and his grace. I am getting to know Christ in ways that I never could have done left to myself, that I never could have dreamed of discovering however closely I had attempted, of my own strength, to follow him.

And that's the point. We are called to take up our own crosses and follow Jesus, but we don't usually - well, I didn't - realise just what this means. Jesus' way of the Cross was a way of surrender. From the garden in Gethsemane to the tomb where he was laid, Jesus surrendered himself first of all to his Father, then to his enemies, and finally to his friends. We can only follow him by our own act of surrender - more properly, like Jesus himself, by successive acts of surrender.

For me, it has turned out as Leonard Cohen described, "Love is not a victory march / It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah." Yet God is good. Only through the most radical surrender can we find out how good. Only by letting go of all we possess can we really follow our Saviour who gave up everything for us. Only in being emptied can we be filled. Only in loss can we finally be found.

There is such hope in this, such utter and unquenchable hope. On the far side of the worst than can happen, Christ waits for us, his pierced hand stretched out to draw us into perfect joy.

I assume death will be like this. Certainly it seems to have been so for those who have been able to tell us something of the way of their own passing. As Paul said in his letter to the Romans, "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (8.38-39)

The odd thing is that it is only in these strange conditions of radical poverty that we can actually know these things as true. These are the "treasures of darkness" themselves. We seem to find, like the man who sold everything to buy the pearl of great price, that it is more than worth it. The love of Christ is greater, and stranger, and he himself is closer, than we had ever suspected. All we need is the faith of the Psalmist who wrote, in Psalm 119, "It is good for me that I was humbled, so that I might learn your statutes... Let your steadfast love become my comfort according to your promise to your servant. Let your mercy come to me, that I may live; for your law is my delight."

Nothing we could ever hope to own...

In the Franciscan Third Order we are called to a life of simplicity (see The Principles, Days 10-12), even poverty. In our Western, 21st century life this is an odd thing to understand. I am only just beginning to get a handle on what it might mean, and this only by means of God's showing me its implications in ways that don't allow me to take credit for anything, still less act the hero as I might otherwise be inclined to do.

I am coming to believe that my 20-odd year obsession with Romans 8:28 is actually central to our understanding of the Franciscan way in these odd and troubled times. God does truly work in all things for the good of those who love him, and who are called according to his purpose. In many ways our poverty lies in this, our giving up of our own ambitions to self-determination, self-actualisation, and our abandoning of ourselves to God's grace, his sheer unconditioned gift. Our hopes and dreams are not ours really, not our own to bargain with, to lay plans for, as though we had our future at our own disposal.

I watched an extraordinarily moving film clip today (thanks Dria) of Market Street in San Francisco just days before the earthquake of 1906. The street was full of people, horses, traffic going about their own lives, following their own plans - so full of life and hope. I dare say Port-au-Prince looked much that way on the morning of January 12th.

We cannot know our lifetime. Our next breath is a gift we cannot deserve, and the one after that. We have this moment in which to love God, to love our sister, our brother, the cat who lies against the keyboard, the birds we feed in the garden. In all these things God works for good beyond our imagining, even when they seem so frail, so tragically able to be hurt. Like Jesus in the garden, we are called to an unthinkable trust. That is our poverty, all our riches, nothing we could ever hope to own.

Well...?

Hat-tip to Christine Sine.

Visit The Robin Hood Tax website.

Consolation...

Consolation is a beautiful word. It means "to be" (con-) "with the lonely one" (solus). To offer consolation is one of the most important ways to care. Life is so full of pain, sadness, and loneliness that we often wonder what we can do to alleviate the immense suffering we see. We can and must offer consolation. We can and must console the mother who lost her child, the young person with AIDS, the family whose house burned down, the soldier who was wounded, the teenager who contemplates suicide, the old man who wonders why he should stay alive.

To console does not mean to take away the pain but rather to be there and say, "You are not alone, I am with you. Together we can carry the burden. Don't be afraid. I am here." That is consolation. We all need to give it as well as to receive it.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

The consolation of friends is a precious and irreplaceable thing. You know who you are - thank you! 

The plague that destroys at midday...

One of the perils of the contemplative life that our age seems to have forgotten to watch out for is a condition called accidie, or acedia. The excellent if brief Wikipedia article describes it as follows:

Acedia (also accidie or accedie, from Latin acidĭa, and this from Greek ἀκηδία, negligence) describes a state of listlessness or torpor, of not caring or not being concerned with one's position or condition in the world. It can lead to a state of being unable to perform one's duties in life. Its spiritual overtones make it related to but distinct from depression. Acedia was originally noted as a problem among monks and other ascetics who maintained a solitary life...

The demon of acedia holds an important place in early monastic demonology and psychology. Evagrius of Pontus, for example, characterizes it as "the most troublesome of all" of the eight genera of evil thoughts. As with those who followed him, Evagrius sees acedia as a temptation, and the great danger lies in giving in to it.

In her remarkable A Book of Silence, Sara Maitland remarks,"It is very difficult to describe the effects of accidie, because its predominant feature is a lack of affect, an overwhelming sense of blankness and an odd restless and dissatisfied boredom." (p. 108) It is pre-eminently the sin of social networking, and of the online life generally.

I often used to wonder what this was that came over me, so that I could spend hours  messing around at the keyboard, and have nothing to show for it at the end. Now I think I begin to understand. Just as the enemy of our souls uses other good and wholesome things about being human, like sex, and food, and companionship, so these new means of communication and learning become means of our being pulled off course, diverted from the ways God has prepared for us to walk in.

John Cassian compared acedia to "the plague that destroys at midday" of Psalm 91 (90 in the Greek numbering). This affliction is not depression properly speaking, though I think some contemporary psychiatrists would so diagnose it, but a spiritual issue, sin if you will. Certainly the old eremitical writers like Cassian recognised it as such. It is prayer, and simplicity, and plain obedience to the order of one's own rule, as well as simple physical work, that will set us free. But perhaps above all prayer. We could do worse than start with Psalm 91...

Trust...

My hope is in what the eye has never seen. Therefore, let me not trust in visible rewards. My hope is in what the heart of man cannot feel. Therefore let me not trust in the feelings of my heart. My hope is in what the hand of man has never touched. Do not let me trust what I can grasp between my fingers.

Let my trust be in Your mercy, not in myself. Let my hope be in Your love, not in health, or strength, or ability or human resources.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1999, pp. 29-30

This is so close to what God has been showing me over the last year... We know so very little of his purposes for us, let alone for those we meet and serve and love. Our trust is all we can bring, a gift that can only be held  in open hands.