Crawling our way back…

Contemplation becomes a way of life.  I don’t like to think of it so much as something I do, but something I am; so I often use the phrase “the contemplative stance.”  It’s a way of living, moving, and being in this world.  The very word means “to see.”

I fully admit that we don’t live all of our twenty-four hours there.  The world keeps pulling us back into our false and small self.  “Put on this hat.  Attach to this identity.  Take on this hurt.  Put on this self-importance,” we say to ourselves.  It’s all right as long as we know how to take it back off again, and rather quickly, if possible.  “Who was I before I was hurt?” is your original face, your true identity in God, your own “immaculate conception.”  We must all crawl our way back to such innocence and such freedom.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Contemplative Prayer (CD)

The Jesus Prayer can be used for worship and petition; as intercession, invocation, adoration, and as thanksgiving. It is a means by which we lay all that is in our hearts, both for God and man, at the feet of Jesus. It is a means of communion with God and with all those who pray. The fact that we can train our hearts to go on praying even when we sleep, keeps us uninterruptedly within the community of prayer. This is no fanciful statement; many have experienced this life-giving fact. We cannot, of course, attain this continuity of prayer all at once, but it is achievable; for all that is worthwhile we must “…run with patience the race that is set before us…” (Hebrews 12:1) …

Prayer has always been of very real importance to me, and the habit formed in early childhood of morning and evening prayer has never left me; but in the practice of the Jesus Prayer I am but a beginner. I would, nonetheless, like to awaken interest in this prayer because, even if I have only touched the hem of a heavenly garment, I have touched it—and the joy is so great I would share it with others. It is not every man’s way of prayer; you may not find in it the same joy that I find, for your way may be quite a different one—yet equally bountiful.

In fear and joy, in loneliness and companionship, it is ever with me. Not only in the silence of daily devotions, but at all times and in all places. It transforms, for me, frowns into smiles; it beautifies, as if a film had been washed off an old picture so that the colours appear clear and bright, like nature on a warm spring day after a shower. Even despair has become attenuated and repentance has achieved its purpose.

When I arise in the morning, it starts me joyfully upon a new day. When I travel by air, land, or sea, it sings within my breast When I stand upon a platform and face my listeners, it beats encouragement. When I gather my children around me, it murmurs a blessing. And at the end of a weary day, when I lay me down to rest, I give my heart over to Jesus: “(Lord) into thy hands I commend my spirit”. I sleep—but my heart as it beats prays on: “JESUS.”

Princess Ileana of Romania, Introduction to the Jesus Prayer

[The Jesus Prayer] is a prayer in which the first step of the spiritual journey is taken: the recognition of our own sinfulness, our essential estrangement from God and the people around us. The Jesus Prayer is a prayer in which we admit our desperate need of a Saviour. For “if we say we have no sin in us, we are deceiving ourselves and refusing to admit the truth” (1 John 1:8).

Fr. Steven Peter Tsichlis, The Jesus Prayer

The pathway to all we truly want…

Unfortunately, in seeing ourselves as we truly are, not all that we see is beautiful and attractive. This is undoubtedly part of the reason we flee silence. We do not want to be confronted with our hypocrisy, our phoniness. We see how false and fragile is the false self we project. We have to go through this painful experience to come to our true self. It is a harrowing journey, a death to self—the false self—and no one wants to die. But it is the only path to life, to freedom, to peace, to true love. And it begins with silence. We cannot give ourselves in love if we do not know and possess ourselves. This is the great value of silence. It is the pathway to all we truly want.

M. Basil Pennington, with thanks to inward/outward

I think if there is one area of growth into something resembling spiritual maturity that I can recognise in myself—and it is recognising, like seeing something in someone else, not anything I have done or could lay claim to—it’s this, that I have come to thirst for silence with an almost physical urgency. It is indeed the pathway to all we truly want: it is the place where we meet with God, Bethel (see Exodus 28:10ff), holy ground, our hearts’ true home. No wonder Jesus himself went away to desolate places (Luke 5:16) to pray, away from the noise of the crowd and the questions and squabbles of his own disciples; and no wonder he advised, “…whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” (Matthew 6:6)

There is indeed something penitential about silence, as Pennington explains. Perhaps this is why, for me as for many others, especially in the Orthodox traditions, the Jesus Prayer, with its strong emphasis on Christ’s mercy and our sinfulness, is itself a doorway to silence within our own hearts.

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

The wind that blows through me...

Once I can recognize the divine image where I don't want to see the divine image, then I have learned how to see.  It's really that simple.  And here’s the rub:  I’m not the one that is doing the seeing.  It's like there is another pair of eyes inside of me seeing through me, seeing with me, seeing in me.  God can see God everywhere, and God in me can see God everywhere.

Notice the very final prepositions of the Eucharistic prayers - "through Him, with Him, and in Him."  They recognize that great prayer isn’t anything I can generate.  It is done to me.  "Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me," one saint* said.  It is always being done to me, and all I can do is get out of the way.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Contemplative Prayer (CD)

This is so deeply true. Prayer isn't, shouldn't be, what we do so much as what God does in us. As Paul explains in Romans 8:26-27, "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."

*(Actually it was DH Lawrence)

Lonely?

In the spiritual life we have to make a distinction between two kinds of loneliness. In the first loneliness, we are out of touch with God and experience ourselves as anxiously looking for someone or something that can give us a sense of belonging, intimacy, and home. The second loneliness comes from an intimacy with God that is deeper and greater than our feelings and thoughts can capture.

We might think of these two kinds of loneliness as two forms of blindness. The first blindness comes from the absence of light, the second from too much light. The first loneliness we must try to outgrow with faith and hope. The second we must be willing to embrace in love.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

This really is my own experience. Yesterday I was writing about silence, but found I had to say, "Silence and solitude are almost the one word to me..." I went on to speak of how I had grown up to love solitude, and to be more deeply at home alone than I ever have been in company, at least until very recently.

As I have spent more and more time alone over the last year or so, people have sometimes asked if I don't get lonely. I've usually replied that I don't really know the meaning of lonely, for myself, anyway. But Nouwen here points to something that is palpable, as real as the presence of another human being, and as individual. If it's loneliness - and loneliness is a kind of sorrow, as most dictionaries define it - then it's a very sweet sorrow, wildly different from the common or garden variety. I'd admit to this kind of loneliness, if that's even the right word for it.

Perhaps this special sort of loneliness is really a sense not of the absence of human company, but of the palpable presence of God. He's not absent, of course, when we are with other people - how could he be? - but we are less able to sense his presence when our attention is taken up with someone else. To revert to the image of silence for a moment, God's voice is still, and small, and easily drowned by other voices. Interestingly, the NRSV translates the phrase in 1 Kings 19:12 as "the sound of sheer silence."

Afraid of silence?

As a rule, most people are afraid of silence.  That’s our major barrier to prayer and to depth.  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 good words can also feed silence.  But even the word of God doesn’t bear a great deal of fruit—it doesn’t really break open the heart—unless it’s tasted and chewed, unless it’s felt and suffered and enjoyed at a level deeper than words.  If you look for the citations of Mary Magdalene in the Gospels, she acts, waits, listens, and asks, and hardly ever “says.”

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

Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations

But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (Jesus, from Matthew 6:6)

I actually (something I could have mentioned in yesterday’s post) do love silence, and being alone. Silence and solitude are almost the one word to me: I have only met one person in whose company I can be truly silent, and as still as if I were alone. But I do truly delight in periods of time spent quite alone, without speaking to another human being.

I suspect that the fear of silence is for most people far worse than the experience itself would be. Were they prepared to give it a fair trial, they might like it. The years of childhood and adolescence for many, if not most, people, hold little silence. I have to admit it wasn’t so for me. I grew up mostly living alone with my mother, a painter and sculptor, who needed time alone with her work. In the 50s people did not worry as they do today about children spending time alone, and I used to go for long, all-day walks along the shore with no companions except the crying gulls, and the God who has never left me, even when I have left him; and I was happy. Only at school, in constant human company, and with constant human demands and expectations, did I learn to be properly unhappy.

God’s word is heard in silence: as Rohr points out, there can be little true hearing without it. But crucially silence is the Holy Spirit’s own language, and only true silence, or the defeat of our own words in contemplative prayer (or in the prayer of tongues), can allow us to hear… And we so need the Holy Spirit, our counsellor and friend (John 14:15-26). Without his guiding, how can we find even the next step. We need silence like we need water, and the thirst for silence is as urgent spiritually as the other is physically. Come, Holy Spirit!

The loving of blogs, and other things…

Dear Sue, she of Discombobula, has seen fit to bestow on me the “I Love Your Blog” award. I am really touched that she’d do that—her own blog is unfailingly beautiful, shamingly honest, full of deep and searching faith: truly one of my own favourites.

Sue says, wisely and typically, of the supposed rules that attach to accepting this decoration, “I hate rules.  The last rule of this award is to pass this on 10 bloggers .  Never forget, however, that rules are made to be broken and so if you don't want to play, feel free not to.” Right on, Sue. I won’t. I have a blogroll, and I link to blogs I love. I can’t imagine selecting 10.

Another stipulation of this blog-loving award thingy is that one should list 10 things one loves. Ah, now that’s more like it… but only 10? Well, the best amplifiers go to 11, they say…

In no particular order (you are not to assume one, either, see?):

Christ’s mercy. Why do you think this blog is called what it it? More necessary than the air we breathe, more beautiful than any made thing. Can’t stop thinking about it, ever, really.

My sisters and brothers in Christ. Honestly. More and more. How could I live without you lot? Lovely, impossible, irresistible—we are family, in the deepest possible way.

The Third Order Society of St. Francis. See above, with bells on.

Music. Oh, we agree on this one, Sue! Playing music, listening to music, mucking around with the endlessly fascinating technicalities of music, learning stuff and finding out there’s just so much more to learn. Oh, what a glorious gift, what an incredible way to have fun…

Beer. Good beer, mind. I am entirely unashamed in my contempt for the brewing conglomerates. Beer should be local, idiosyncratic, individual, delicious.

Living simply. I truly do really really enjoy doing without stuff I don’t need. This isn’t a virtue, it’s a delight.

Created things, particularly animals. (Special mention for cats here…) I can’t get over the fact that God has made this creation of his so various, so endlessly marvellous (I’m seriously beginning to run out of adjectives…). See what Gerard Manley Hopkins had to say about it. Which brings me to…

Poetry. As necessary as mathematics, and as exacting. David knew what he was about when he set out to write those Psalms. And that reminds me…

The Bible. I really do love the Bible. All of it. Read Psalm 119 if you want to know why.

The sea. I am always most myself by, on, occasionally in, the sea, somehow.

Someone who knows who she is. Never would have imagined…

So there we are. Not according to the rules, but it’s the best I can do. My heart is very full, an unexpected side-effect of a silly blogospherical game. Or more than that?

The contemplative mind…

The contemplative mind is the most absolute assault on the secular worldview that one can have, because it is a different mind from what we’ve been taught in our time.  The calculative mind, or the egocentric mind, reads everything in terms of personal advantage and personal preferences.  As long as we read reality from that small self with a narrow and calculating mind, I don’t think we’re going to see things in any new or truly helpful way…

Paul uses a wonderful and telling phrase:  “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).  It is a radically different sense of self that he is trying to describe.  Until I have come to that realization myself, I have not been transformed, spiritually speaking.

Contemplative prayer draws us to our True Self, who we are “hidden with Christ in God” as Paul says in Colossians 3:3.  This is the only self that actually exists.  We came forth from God and our deepest DNA is divine.  We are not human beings trying to become spiritual; we are already spiritual beings and the profound question is always, “What does it mean to be human?”  I believe that is why Jesus came as a human being and consistently called himself a “son of man” more than the Son of God.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Contemplative Prayer (CD)

Paul said, “…for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3, my italics) and Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24) That is what our age finds so intolerable. As CS Lewis pointed out somewhere, death is the ultimate obscenity for our age—we are quite happy with any amount of sexual exploitation or financial cupidity, but we don’t want to talk about death. Oh, we’ll talk about dying, even about assisted dying, about the “right to die” happily enough—but death, death itself… nooo, TMI! It’s the threat of the extinction of the self, the final denial of all those desires we are told we deserve to have fulfilled, that we can’t cope with. No wonder we don’t want to know.

Jesus went on to say, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (John 12:25) Only the way of the Cross leads on to life, “[f]or the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18)

Filling a vase with water…

“Whoever remains in me as I remain in them, will bear much fruit” (John 15:5).  That’s the preferred language of all the mystics—the language of union.  If it’s not some language of union and healing, don’t trust it as authentic religious language.  Unfortunately, religion has largely descended to a language of exclusion, which is almost the exact opposite.

Mother Teresa said that a person consciously filling a vase with water—out of union with and love for God—is giving more glory to God than a priest at the altar who is standing there in a state of anger, superiority, or separateness.  It’s all about the “Who,” not the “what” and we spend all of our time concentrating on the “what” that I should do or not do.  If you get the “Who” right, the “what” does not matter too much.  It will always be good…

Richard Rohr, adapted from Contemplative Prayer (CD)

Oh, how I long for those who trouble Synod with their arguments, schismatism, “anger, superiority, or separateness” to simply stop, sit still, and get this. There really is so little need for all the pain and the nonsense, and to be prepared to sin in order to be right is the worst bargain going, in the light of eternity, as Jesus kept pointing out to the scribes and Pharisees…

True faithfulness…

Our emotional lives move up and down constantly. Sometimes we experience great mood swings: from excitement to depression, from joy to sorrow, from inner harmony to inner chaos. A little event, a word from someone, a disappointment in work, many things can trigger such mood swings. Mostly we have little control over these changes. It seems that they happen to us rather than being created by us.

Thus it is important to know that our emotional life is not the same as our spiritual life. Our spiritual life is the life of the Spirit of God within us. As we feel our emotions shift we must connect our spirits with the Spirit of God and remind ourselves that what we feel is not who we are. We are and remain, whatever our moods, God’s beloved children…

Are we condemned to be passive victims of our moods? Must we simply say: “I feel great today” or “I feel awful today,” and require others to live with our moods?

Although it is very hard to control our moods, we can gradually overcome them by living a well-disciplined spiritual life. This can prevent us from acting out of our moods. We might not “feel” like getting up in the morning because we “feel” that life is not worth living, that nobody loves us, and that our work is boring. But if we get up anyhow, to spend some time reading the Gospels, praying the Psalms, and thanking God for a new day, our moods may lose their power over us…

When someone hurts us, offends us, ignores us, or rejects us, a deep inner protest emerges. It can be rage or depression, desire to take revenge or an impulse to harm ourselves. We can feel a deep urge to wound those who have wounded us or to withdraw in a suicidal mood of self-rejection. Although these extreme reactions might seem exceptional, they are never far away from our hearts. During the long nights we often find ourselves brooding about words and actions we might have used in response to what others have said or done to us.

It is precisely here that we have to dig deep into our spiritual resources and find the centre within us, the centre that lies beyond our need to hurt others or ourselves, where we are free to forgive and love…

Our emotional lives and our spiritual lives have different dynamics. The ups and downs of our emotional life depend a great deal on our past or present surroundings. We are happy, sad, angry, bored, excited, depressed, loving, caring, hateful, or vengeful because of what happened long ago or what is happening now.

The ups and downs of our spiritual lives depend on our obedience - that is, our attentive listening - to the movements of the Spirit of God within us. Without this listening our spiritual life eventually becomes subject to the windswept waves of our emotions…

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

This is shockingly true. It’s hard for we who were young in the sixties and seventies to admit it, but so much of the practical philosophy of our time was based around, “If it feels good, do it…” that we accept our feelings as being as given as the weather, as immune to will and intention as the changing seasons. Not so. Feelings are not wrong – they can be beautiful, and true – but they are fertile ground for the father of lies to plant his seeds. The answer is not to cauterise our feelings, to become heartless, tight-lipped prudes; far from it, our calling is truly to open our hearts, to love God, and our fellow-creatures, with a steadfast and settled intent. This is true faithfulness, and only from this ground will spring the lovely fruits of the Spirit - healing, nourishing, making whole again, bringing Christ alive in our hearts as he promised,

“I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17:18-23)

Criss-Cross

In being still
    the word dissolves in birdsong,
    distant sounds
        after harvest –
    engines, half-heard voices
         across the valley.

The word dissolves –
    logos in simple bread,
        dark wine -
into the very cells of us.
We grow Christ
    within us,
become what we have eaten,
    a new and imperceptible birth.
We are not what we thought.

Above us the sky is blue
    between clouds,
Mary-dress blue.
It magnifies the Lord,
    leads what we could become
        up to the swallows’ paths,
    criss-crossed with altitude,
        hope,
    the way back home.

Mike Farley
(written at Hilfield Friary)

Only you…

Inner authority (which I always describe as the power to “author” life in others) does not have to do with transmutation of forms and order and title, and the changing of power roles, but the transmutation of our very substance.  This is the needed “transubstantiation.”  For this reason, I cannot give up on Jesus.  He’s such an easy one to believe and follow and love.  He uses everything to help, heal, and change people. 

The genius of Jesus’ ministry is that he uses tragedy, suffering, betrayal, and death itself, not to wound us but in fact to bring us to God.  So there are no dead ends for Jesus.  Everything can be transmuted and everything can be used.  EVERYTHING!

Failure itself is the raw material of salvation…

Richard Rohr, from The Authority of Those Who Have Suffered

Talking with a friend recently I happened to remark that what I miss in any other faith is Jesus. I may have put it in an unhelpfully offhand way, but it is true. Jesus is the way and the truth and the life, and without him it’s hard to imagine how we could ever be set free, truly free (John 14:6; 8:32). He is the everlasting mercy of God (Jude 1:21), and the healer of all who will turn to him… nothing whatever will be able to keep us from his love (Romans 8:35ff), as the martyrs (all those who suffer and die for their faith) show us daily, still.

[Title from Andy’s Park’s song of the same name]

A Name and a waiting...

A candle of the Lord is the soul of man, but the soul can become a holocaust, a fury, a rage. The only cure is to discover that, over and above the anonymous stillness in the world, there is a Name and a waiting. Many people suffer from a fear of the self. They do not feel at home in their own selves. The inner life is a place of dereliction, a no-man's-land, inconsolate, weird. The self has become a place from which to flee.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, with thanks to  inward/outward

Faithfulness is consecration in overalls. It is the steady acceptance and performance of the common duty and immediate task without any reference to personal preferences--because it is there to be done, and so is a manifestation of the Will of God... The fruits of the Spirit get less and less showy as we go on. Faithfulness means continuing quietly with the job we have been given, in the situation where we have been placed; not yielding to the restless desire for change. It means tending the lamp quietly for God without wondering how much longer it has got to go on. Steady, unsensational driving, taking good care of the car. A lot of the road to heaven has to be taken at 30 miles per hour.

Evelyn Underhill, The Fruits of the Spirit.

People should not worry as much about what they do but rather about what they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will also be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on what we are, for it is not our works which sanctify us but we who sanctify our works.

Meister Eckhart, with thanks to  inward/outward

Sorry for the silence since Connect 2010. I've been trying to make sense of my own feelings. Nearly a week of being so close with my sisters and brothers in Christ, of worship and prayer and talking, of just being church, is not easy to put into words. It might sound trite to some to call it a glimpse of Heaven, of the Kingdom to which our Lord is betrothed, but honestly that's how it was.

Things are not going to be the same, even if there is not another Connect in next or subsequent years, even if those who were there try to forget what they saw, and heard, and felt. The Church (deliberate big 'C') in the Isle of Purbeck knows now, very practically and simply, that it is one, that our different ways of doing things, our different comfort zones in worship and in the minor application of doctrine, are pretty irrelevant beside the great love our Lord has put into our hearts one for another...

"By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." (John 13:35)

We are in a state of waiting. The Kingdom is here,  and yet it has not yet come. (Mark 1:15; Luke 11:2; 11:20; 12:31) And yet we are not alone, far from it. Our waiting lives within the Name of Jesus; all we are is in his wounded hands. What shall we fear? (Romans 8:28-39)

Tomorrow, I'm off to Hilfield Friary, for the Caring for Creation in a World of Crisis weekend. More when I get back, I hope...

Chosen, blessed, broken, given…

Jesus is taken by God or, better, chosen by God. Jesus is the Chosen One. From all eternity God has chosen his most precious Child to become the saviour of the world. Being chosen expresses a special relationship, being known and loved in a unique way, being singled out. In our society our being chosen always implies that others are not chosen. But this is not true for God. God chooses his Son to reveal to us our chosenness.

In the Kingdom of God there is no competition or rivalry. The Son of God shares his chosenness with us. In the Kingdom of God each person is precious and unique, and each person has been given eyes to see the chosenness of others and rejoice in it…

Jesus is the Blessed One. When Jesus was baptised in the Jordan river a voice came from heaven saying: “You are my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests on you” (Mark 1:11). This was the blessing that sustained Jesus during his life. Whatever happened to him - praise or blame - he clung to his blessing; he always remembered that he was the favourite child of God.

Jesus came into the world to share that blessing with us. He came to open our ears to the voice that also says to us, “You are my beloved son, you are my beloved daughter, my favour rests on you .” When we can hear that voice, trust in it, and always remember it, especially during dark times, we can live our lives as God’s blessed children and find the strength to share that blessing with others…

Jesus was broken on the cross. He lived his suffering and death not as an evil to avoid at all costs, but as a mission to embrace. We too are broken. We live with broken bodies, broken hearts, broken minds or broken spirits. We suffer from broken relationships.

How can we live our brokenness? Jesus invites us to embrace our brokenness as he embraced the cross and live it as part of our mission. He asks us not to reject our brokenness as a curse from God that reminds us of our sinfulness but to accept it and put it under God’s blessing for our purification and sanctification. Thus our brokenness can become a gateway to new life…

Jesus is given to the world. He was chosen, blessed, and broken to be given. Jesus’ life and death were a life and death for others. The Beloved Son of God, chosen from all eternity, was broken on the cross so that this one life could multiply and become food for people of all places and all times.

As God’s beloved children we have to believe that our little lives, when lived as God’s chosen and blessed children, are broken to be given to others. We too have to become bread for the world. When we live our brokenness under the blessing, our lives will continue to bear fruit from generation to generation. That is the story of the saints - they died, but they continue to be alive in the hearts of those who live after them - and it can be our story too…

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

All our lives are to be lived as a subset of Christ’s, it seems to me. This must be what following him really means. What surprises me is how long it has taken for me to see this at all clearly…

Community? What do we know…?

At Connect 2010 at Holton Lee—we’re having a glorious time, despite the wind and the rain, and the very hard work by the organising team keeping everything running notwithstanding—I’ve been profoundly moved by the team from the Lee Abbey Community in particular. Yesterday morning, the Warden, David Rowe, spoke well about the work and the foundation of Lee Abbey; but what touched me, as a Franciscan, more than anything were the accounts by various community members, both young and not quite so young, of how they had come to Lee Abbey, and their experience of living in community there.

As we in the three Orders (First Order Brothers and Sisters, Second Order Sisters, and the sisters and brothers of the Third Order) of the Society of St. Francis consider afresh what being a community in Christ really means, we need I believe to look very closely at the experience of communities outside the ARC Yearbook, and especially at their sometimes very different take on spiritual formation.

I am very excited about all this, I have to admit, and I’m really looking forward to more conversations with my sisters and brothers from other kinds of communities. Our God is a God of community, from his very nature as Trinity on out to all the farthest reaches of incarnation, the finest capillaries and nerve endings of the body of Christ. I’m convinced that this is an urgent—maybe our most urgent—calling, the very heart of how we as Christians can serve those who do not yet know their Saviour and their King…

Connect 2010 begins...

Not sure how much I’ll be able to blog for the rest of this week, as I’m at Connect 2010 at Holton Lee.

Just found this wonderful quote from Richard Rohr, which pretty much sums up how I’m feeling!

God cares, for some wonderful reason, despite all of our smallness and silliness. Divine love does not depend on our doing nice or right things. Divine love is not determined by the worthiness of the object of love but by the Subject, who is always and only Love. God does not love us if we change, as we almost all think; but God loves us so that we can change.

No matter what we do, God, in great love and humility, says, “That’s what I work with. That’s all I work with!” It’s the mustard seed with which God does great things. Our life experiences, “good and bad alike,” are invited to the great wedding feast (Matthew 22:10). They are the raw material that God uses to prepare the banquet.

Richard Rohr
June 2010

Perspective distortion...

The ego wants to ensure us that the things we do are all significant and worthy of our attention, that this event will make me important. Our activities become attempts at self validation and little life merit badges. We all enjoy putting another check on our life resume, or even on our spiritual resume.

Much religion uses God to bolster one’s own self-image, I am afraid. True religion would not be attached to self-image at all, but only to God. In fact, the closer you actually get to the Light, the more of your own shadow you see. Maybe that is why a lot of people do not persevere on the journey toward the Lover.

Christian life has little to do with me doing anything right. It has everything to do with falling in love with a Lover who always does everything right. What I love is that Lover and not my own accomplishments; nor am I surprised or unduly humiliated by my own failures. We must come to know who is always the Lover and who is always the beloved.

Richard Rohr, Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, adapted from p.23, Day 22

I think Rohr is right here. It’s a strange fact that as I go on in this life of trying to follow Christ, the more obvious is the distance between us. It’s a perspective thing, possibly. The closer a camera lens is to an object it’s focused on, the greater the apparent perspective. The farther away it is, the less the distance between related objects appears to be. It’s called perspective distortion. The phrase makes me slightly uncomfortable…

The wings of my dove are sheathed with silver...

To enter into solidarity with a suffering person does not mean that we have to talk with that person about our own suffering. Speaking about our own pain is seldom helpful for someone who is in pain. A wounded healer is someone who can listen to a person in pain without having to speak about his or her own wounds. When we have lived through a painful depression, we can listen with great attentiveness and love to a depressed friend without mentioning our experience. Mostly it is better not to direct a suffering person's attention to ourselves. We have to trust that our own bandaged wounds will allow us to listen to others with our whole beings. That is healing...

It is important to know when we can give attention and when we need attention. Often we are inclined to give, give, and give without ever asking anything in return. We may think that this is a sign of generosity or even heroism. But it might be little else than a proud attitude that says: "I don't need help from others. I only want to give." When we keep giving without receiving we burn out quickly. Only when we pay careful attention to our own physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs can we be, and remain, joyful givers.

There is a time to give and a time to receive. We need equal time for both if we want to live healthy lives.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I'm not sure how far this applies to everyone, but I find that there is a hidden cost to this kind of thing - which may be what Nouwen is talking about when he speaks of giving ourselves time to receive - which feels like a kind of weariness that I at least don't automatically associate with its source. I find myself listening eagerly at one time, and then later, maybe hours later, suddenly unaccountable very tired. We need, I think, to give God time to heal us, at least as much as we need to consciously receive from other people.

Sleep is a gift from God's Holy Spirit which we have a terrible tendency to undervalue, and undervalue at our peril. Even Jesus slept, and slept deeply, too (Mark 4:38).

"I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the LORD sustains me." (Psalm 3:5)

"In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat - for he grants sleep to those he loves." (Psalm 127:2)

[Title refers to Psalm 68:13]

Love...

Let us keep this truth before us.

You say have no faith?
Love - and faith will come.

You say you are sad?
Love - and joy will come.

You say you are alone?
Love - and you will break out of your solitude.

You say you are in hell?
Love - and you will find yourself in heaven.

Heaven is love.

Carlo Caretto, In Search of the Beyond, with thanks to inward/outward

The Society of the Walking Wounded

Nobody escapes being wounded. We all are wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not "How can we hide our wounds?" so we don't have to be embarrassed, but "How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?" When our wounds cease to be a source of shame, and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.

Jesus is God's wounded healer: through his wounds we are healed. Jesus' suffering and death brought joy and life. His humiliation brought glory; his rejection brought a community of love. As followers of Jesus we can also allow our wounds to bring healing to others.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

The Society of the Walking Wounded was a progressive rock band I played in many years ago, but the name seems now to have been prescient in an odd way. As Nouwen suggests here, it's only as walking wounded that we can actually minister Jesus' healing to those who suffer.

I think this fact is often forgotten by many in the Church generally, leaders as well as laypeople. We feel we have to be happy shiny well-adjusted people all the time, our clean and ironed clothes hiding no scars, and it just isn't so. People like that, to the extent that they do truly exist outside of hypocrisy, can't help those who are hurt. Their toothpaste grins feel like a rebuke, their clear eyes and perfect skin are a judgement on the ones whose lives have come apart, who are broken by illness, crippled by debt, shaken to their centres by divorce or addiction.

Not only are our wounds a source of healing, but our very shame, the shadow that has passed across our own lives, is a door opening onto the mercy of Christ. If we accept this, open-heartedly, then we can stop worrying, stop peering in cars' wing-mirrors and the windows of other people's eyes to see if our spiritual ties are straight, and "fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God." (Hebrews 12:2)

Connect 2010

Next week, starting on Tuesday night, I'm going to be at Connect 2010 at Holton Lee.

From the website:

What is Connect?

Connect 2010 is a five-day teaching and worship event where hundreds of people of all ages can connect and grow together in Word and Spirit. The last three days will include family camping and a change of flavour as young families invade the site.

More than 30 south Dorset churches are involved in organising the event, which is held at Holton Lee (between Poole and Wareham in Dorset), just a few minutes walk from the beautiful Poole Harbour and with its own stunning heathland walks in 350 acres.

The family weekend (July 16, 17, 18) will include a full programme of children’s activities in their own separate marquee, a chill out zone on Saturday evening for 13's to 17's plus a variety of fun family events throughout the weekend.

If you come, look me up. I'll be the one wearing a Tau Cross and a green Prayer Ministry Team name-tag!

In one of those God-incidences that is always surprising, but shouldn't ever be, this morning's email from Richard Rohr's Centre for Action and Contemplation reads as follows:

Greatness emerges when, above all else, people are confident. When we believe - together - that life is good, God is good and humanity is good, we become very safe and salutary people for others.  What we seem to suffer from today is a lack of confidence, which would become a calm self confidence.  St. Therese of Lisieux wisely said that her entire spirituality was about "confidence and gratitude"!

We can all do exciting and imaginative things when we are confident that we are a part of a story line that is going somewhere and is connected to something good.  Without this, it is very hard to be either confident or grateful.

Richard Rohr, from Hope Against Darkness

This event has grown from a glimmer of an idea into this wonderful thing in what seems like no time at all - but it's not without a pre-echo, as it were. You can read my account of the event at Wareham 11 years ago on The Mercy Site.

Our Vicar at Holy Rood, Rhona, writes in her pastoral letter in July's Parish News:

People often ask why the churches don't work together more closely. It's true the amount of time we spend worshipping together is relatively small. But churches work together to a remarkable degree, supporting one another to a variety of ways. They are often overlooked as much of this is less visible to the general public...

A major new joint venture that is gathering the churches together from across south Dorset takes place at Holton Lee, Sandford this month. More than 30 different churches are involved in organizing Connect 2010. It is a five-day teaching and worship event where people of all ages can connect and grow together in Word and Spirit. We see it as a time for recognising our shared faith and mission and to find what things we can do better together than apart. It aims to be outward looking, not so much getting over hurdles as reaching shared goals.

Come and join us in this adventure of making strengthening old connections and forging new ones.

Do click over and read the whole letter... and do consider coming and joining in if you're going to be in the area. I rather suspect this will be something not to miss!

Singing to God...

All animals who lift their voices at dawn sing to God. The volcanoes and the clouds and the trees cry to us about God. The whole creation cries to us penetratingly with a great joy about the existence and the beauty and the love of God. The music roars it into our ears, the landscape calls it into our eyes. In all of nature we find God's initials, and all God's creatures are God's love letters to us.

All of nature burns with love created through love to light love in us. Nature is like a shadow of God, a reflection of God's beauty. The still, blue lake is a reflection of God. In every atom lives an image of the trinity, a figure of the trinitarian God. And also my own body is created to love God. Each of my cells is a hymn about the Creator and an ongoing declaration of love.

Ernesto Cardenal, To Live Is to Love - with thanks to inward/outward

What is truth?

The hope on the other side of despair is the unique gift of God to those who walk the journey called faith.  That is why faith, hope, and love overlap.  You cannot really have one without the other two.  The hope united with faith and love is not based on anything in particular working out. It is a hope that comes to those who wait and walk at the same time.

Such full hope believes that Reality can be trusted after all. It knows that Someone is good somewhere. Goodness is at the beginning and the bottom of all of this. Goodness will surely and finally win out. Such comfort allows one to trust, hope, and love all at the same time.

Richard Rohr, from Near Occasions of Grace

This morning the air is clear and fresh, and the sunlight like a golden fluid pouring over the rim of the bank behind the house, and truth is something you can taste, and hold. Jesus said, "I am the way and the truth and the life... 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 14:6; 8:31b-32, NIV)

A healing quiet...

In the early evening we see the stars begin to appear as the sun disappears over the horizon. The light of day gives way to the darkness of night. A stillness, a healing quiet comes over the landscape. It's a moment when some other world makes itself known, a numinous presence beyond human understanding. We experience the vast realms of space overwhelming the limitations of our human minds. As the sky turns golden and the clouds reflect the blazing colors of evening, we participate for a moment in the forgiveness, the peace, the intimacy of things with each other.

(Thomas Berry, with thanks to inward/outward)

Blogging as an ancient literary form...

You know, it occurs to me that blogging is actually a very ancient literary form. Since printed books became affordable, we have grown used to longer and longer means of expression, longer and longer arguments: a Ph.D. thesis approach to even devotional writings, covering all the bases, supported by critical evidence and exhaustive textual references. But is wasn't always so. The Desert Fathers and Mothers often did not even write down their thoughts, but spoke them in short, rounded little sayings that could stand on their own, and whose truth was self-evident, self-contained, rather like the Biblical Proverbs, or perhaps more accurately, like the stories and parables Jesus told.

Very like blog-posts, in fact...

The axle of all that is...

Until we walk with despair, and still have hope, we will not know that our hope was not just hope in ourselves, in our successes, in our power to make a difference, in our image of what perfection and wholeness should be.   We need hope from a deeper Source.

Until we walk with despair, we will never uncover the Real Hope on the other side of despair. Until we allow the crash and crush of our images, we will never discover the Real Life beyond what only seems like death.

This very journey is probably the heart of what Jesus came to reveal.

Richard Rohr, from Near Occasions of Grace 

Goodness, I do love Richard Rohr sometimes! This is not only "the heart of what Jesus came to reveal", but it is the very heart of my own experience. It is what makes sense of what we experience, both the everyday pain of the death of friends, beloved animals, the loss of so many all-too-human dreams, and the existential despair that is often treated as a subject for psychotherapy, but in fact is a true apprehension (known to Buddhist philosophers as vipassanā) of the human condition without Christ's Cross and all that lies on the far side of that event.

This hope is literally glorious, for it is indefatigable, pure, and everlasting. It is a hope that can laugh at death, bring joy to martyrs in their last agony, and confuse and terrify the tyrants and slavemasters of this broken world. This hope is the sole reason that true Christian faith has proved quite indestructible, despite the fall of empires, civilisations and churches.

Truly the Cross is the tree of life, the very axle of all that is, the healing of the worlds; for it is only here that we can actually observe the fact that "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it" (John 1:5) and know for ourselves that "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 2:20)

What friends are for...

"Jesus Christ, our Lord, whose footsteps we're to follow, called his betrayer 'friend' and willingly handed himself over to his crucifiers. Our friends, then, are all those who unjustly inflict upon us tests and ordeals, shame and injury, sorrows and torments, martyrdom and death. They are the ones we should love most, for what they're really inflicting upon us is eternal life."

St. Francis of Assisi, with thanks to Friar Rex

Perfect joy?

Servant of God, if you apply yourself to acquiring and preserving, both in heart and demeanour, that joy which comes from a pure heart and is won by devotion to prayer, the devils can do you no harm. They say, 'This servant of God is as happy when things are going badly as when all is well, and so we cannot find an opening to enter him and hurt him.

St. Francis of Assisi

We as Tertiaries, rejoicing in the Lord always, show in our lives the grace and beauty of divine joy. We remember that we follow the Son of Man, who came eating and drinking, Who loved the birds and the flowers, Who blessed little children, Who was a friend to tax collectors and sinners and Who sat at the tables of both the rich and the poor. We delight in fun and laughter, rejoicing in God’s world, its beauty and its living creatures, calling nothing common or unclean. We mix freely with all people, ready to bind up the broken-hearted and to bring joy into the lives of others. We carry within us an inner peace and happiness which others may perceive, even if they do not know its source.

This joy is a divine gift, coming from union with God in Christ. It is still there even in times of darkness and difficulty, giving cheerful courage in the face of disappointment, and an inward serenity and confidence through sickness and suffering. Those who possess it can rejoice in weakness, insults, hardships, and persecutions for Christ’s sake; for when they are weak, then they are strong.

The Principles of the Third Order, Society of St. Francis, 28, 29

I think this is what I was trying to say in my earlier post. However hard, even unbearable, we may find the misfortunes that all of us encounter from time to time, we are not defeated as long as our refuge is in God, in the boundless mercy of Christ. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, "To endure the cross is not tragedy; it is the suffering which is the fruit of an exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ."

Merton on Solitude

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

From Thomas Merton: A Life in Letters: The Essential Collection, Shannon & Bochen (eds.), HarperOne  2008

Downward mobility...

The society in which we live suggests in countless ways that the way to go is up. Making it to the top, entering the limelight, breaking the record - that's what draws attention, gets us on the front page of the newspaper, and offers us the rewards of money and fame.

The way of Jesus is radically different. It is the way not of upward mobility but of downward mobility. It is going to the bottom, staying behind the sets, and choosing the last place! Why is the way of Jesus worth choosing? Because it is the way to the Kingdom, the way Jesus took, and the way that brings everlasting life.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Let go of the private dream for the dream of God. Most of us live in the past, carrying our hurts, guilts and fears. We have to face the pain we carry, lest we spend the rest of our lives running away from it or letting it run us. But the only place you'll ever meet the real is now-here. It's the hardest place for us to live, the place where we're most afraid to live, because it feels so empty and boring. Now-here almost always feels like nowhere, and that's precisely where we must go.

Richard Rohr, from Jesus' Plan for a New World

I am so grateful for this movement in my own life. I don't know to what extent I could claim to have chosen this: probably I didn't choose it to any great extent. At the time, each step down seemed like misfortune, or at least force of circumstance. But at each step I met Jesus, holding out his pierced hand to help me down. Truly. This isn't some kind of pious fantasy, but plain experience - as concrete and even ordinary, and yet as glorious, as today's midsummer sunlight.

God's beautiful mercy in Christ is greater than any of the messes we make. John was nothing less than factually accurate when he wrote, (John 1:5) "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." It doesn't. It couldn't, ever. Put a light in a dark place, and however deep the darkness, the light doesn't grow less - but the darkness lessens...

Preaching without words, again…

Faith can’t really be taught; faith is usually caught. One receives it more by osmosis than by direct instruction. Those who are animated by living faith, openly trusting in God and one another, pass on faith.  Children who grow up where the family’s faith is generating love, where a fulfilling life vision is being celebrated, and the inner meaning of things is taken seriously, naturally receive the gift of faith. Children do not imitate what their parents dutifully believe nearly as much as they are attracted to what authentically excites their parents.

If a person is teaching religion without offering some energetic faith to catch, then teaching religion is largely a waste of time. It actually becomes an immunization and blockage against the real thing, as so many of us have learned. Real faith is too real to ignore or to dismiss.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Radical Grace, St Anthony Messenger Press, 1996

Messy and shameful...

Jesus says: "If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him... take up his cross and follow me" (Matthew 16:24). He does not say: "Make a cross" or "Look for a cross." Each of us has a cross to carry. There is no need to make one or look for one. The cross we have is hard enough for us! But are we willing to take it up, to accept it as our cross?

Maybe we can't study, maybe we are handicapped, maybe we suffer from depression, maybe we experience conflict in our families, maybe we are victims of violence or abuse. We didn't choose any of it, but these things are our crosses. We can ignore them, reject them, refuse them or hate them. But we can also take up these crosses and follow Jesus with them.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I think this has been one of the hardest things for me to learn. Like so many people, I have wasted years looking for a good cross, a noble, praiseworthy cross, one that everyone can see is holy and admirable. I've ignored, and tried to avoid, the real, messy, shameful ones I've been given - the ones just like Jesus', actually. Those are the ones he asks us to take up so that we can, truly, follow him...

The fire in the dark...

We are always in need of repentance, of the willingness to acknowledge our state of forgiveness; we are always being forgiven, transfigured and forgiving, and thus being part of God's transfiguration of creation.

Sin both matters terribly and matters not at all: matters terribly as a vehicle for evil, and matters not at all because it can be transformed in the love of God. Sin, which we cannot avoid, and the acknowledgement of sin, can be a balancing factor, not a morbid preoccupation. It is rather a knowledge that adds reality to the assessment of decisions we are about to make, and brings us to a kind of self-knowledge that surpasses gladness because of the fire in the dark, and the fire in our tears.

And because we are one organism our tears cannot stop with ourselves; our responsibility cannot stop with a narcissistic perception of where our sin leaves off and another's begins. The more we participate in transfiguration, the less we fear, the less we feel we have to control. Thus the boundaries between ourselves and others become less defined and finally disappear altogether, not because we are finding ourselves by testing ourselves against the actions and reactions of others, but precisely because we are being found in God and thus need less self-reflection.

From The Fountain and the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire by Maggie Ross, Paulist Press, 1987

with thanks to Episcopal Café

Losing it...

Courage is connected with taking risks. Jumping the Grand Canyon on a motorbike, coming over Niagara Falls in a barrel, or crossing the ocean in a rowboat are called courageous acts because people risk their lives by doing these things. But none of these daredevil acts comes from the centre of our being. They all come from the desire to test our physical limits and to become famous and popular.

Spiritual courage is something completely different. It is following the deepest desires of our hearts at the risk of losing fame and popularity. It asks of us the willingness to lose our temporal lives in order to gain eternal life...

The society in which we live suggests in countless ways that the way to go is up. Making it to the top, entering the limelight, breaking the record - that's what draws attention, gets us on the front page of the newspaper, and offers us the rewards of money and fame.

The way of Jesus is radically different. It is the way not of upward mobility but of downward mobility. It is going to the bottom, staying behind the sets, and choosing the last place! Why is the way of Jesus worth choosing? Because it is the way to the Kingdom, the way Jesus took, and the way that brings everlasting life.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

All too often, I think, we Christians are the last to realise that what society regards as misfortune may be for us the greatest blessing. The Beatitudes (Matthew 5) spell this out for us, and yet we consistently don't get it. We interpret grief as something to be "got over", poverty as "an attack from the devil." Doing so, I think we risk missing the blessings Jesus has promised us - cf. Luke 18:29-30.

We need to have the courage of our convictions, we Franciscans especially. Our faithfulness is not to the world's values, nor even Christ's, but to Jesus himself. We cannot go on looking for the world's rewards, judging ourselves by the world's standards. We have to be happy being a bit strange, raggedy even, the kind of people who get misunderstood, but without rancour and without affectation. Our only rewards are the ones we have been promised. This is the way that Jesus took, and we can only follow, surely?

Glorious freedom…

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!”   I wonder where this modern demand for certitude came from, which has produced fundamentalism?

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 and God’s arms save.  Although, it does say in the same verse that it is a “scary” or “awesome” thing to do.

Richard Rohr, from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, Saint Anthony Messenger Press, 2008, p. 136

The opposite of faith is not intellectual doubt, because faith is not localized primarily in the mind. The opposite of faith, according to a number of Jesus’ statements is anxiety. If you are fear-based and “worried about many things,” as he says in Luke 10:41, you don’t have faith in a Biblical sense.  Faith is to be able to trust that God is good, involved, and on your side. So you see why it takes some years of inner experience to have faith.  It is not just that somewhat easy intellectual assent to doctrines or an agreement with a moral position.   This has passed as the counterfeit of faith for far too long.

When you cannot rely upon an Infinite Source, you yourself become your primary reference point in terms of all preferences, needs, results, and controls.  That would make anybody both anxious and insecure.

Richard Rohr, from Jesus’ Plan for a New World, Rohr, Fisher and Feister, St Anthony Messenger Press, 1996, p. 118

This connects very closely, I think, with my previous post.

I’m not sure that I would concur in any unqualified way with Rohr's insistence that “…it takes some years of inner experience to have faith.” Certainly faith takes years to mature, and deepen; but if seasoned, vintage faith were the only kind, what on earth was Jesus talking about when he commended people for their saving faith whom he'd only that moment met? (e.g. Luke 7:1-9; 8:42-48)

However, Fr. Richard is certainly right about trust vs. fear. Whether we reach this position by a “leap of faith” or by years of hard-won experience (Psalm 119:71) it is our trust that in all things God will work for our good, for our very best, in mercy, truth and power (Romans 8:28) that slips us from the grip of the enemy and sets us firmly within “the glorious freedom of the children of God.” (Romans 8:21 NIV).

Pain, pleasure and joy...

Life in this world is full of pain. But pain, which is the contrary of pleasure, is not necessarily the contrary of happiness or joy. Because spiritual joy flowers in the full expansion of freedom that reaches out without obstacle to its supreme object, fulfilling itself in the perfect activity of disinterested love for which it was created...

True joy is found... in the intense and supple and free movement of our will rejoicing in what is good not merely for us but in Itself.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, New Directions Books, 1961, Shambhala Publications Inc., 2004, p. 259

I have found this to be true. As I've explained elsewhere here, things have at times have been very painful, and often bleak, over the last year and a bit. Yet joy has never, not for an instant, abandoned me. Oh, there have been times when I have abandoned joy; but that's a different matter altogether, one addressed by the Psalmist:

I long for your salvation, O LORD, and your law is my delight.
Let me live that I may praise you, and may your laws sustain me.
I have strayed like a lost sheep. Seek your servant, for I have not forgotten your commands.

(Psalm 119: 174-176, NIV)

We must give words...

The word must become flesh, but the flesh also must become word. It is not enough for us, as human beings, just to live. We also must give words to what we are living. If we do not speak what we are living, our lives lose their vitality and creativity. When we see a beautiful view, we search for words to express what we are seeing. When we meet a caring person, we want to speak about that meeting. When we are sorrowful or in great pain, we need to talk about it. When we are surprised by joy, we want to announce it!

Through the word, we appropriate and internalize what we are living. The word makes our experience truly human...

The word is always a word for others. Words need to be heard. When we give words to what we are living, these words need to be received and responded to. A speaker needs a listener. A writer needs a reader.

When the flesh - the lived human experience - becomes word, community can develop. When we say, "Let me tell you what we saw. Come and listen to what we did. Sit down and let me explain to you what happened to us. Wait until you hear whom we met," we call people together and make our lives into lives for others. The word brings us together and calls us into community. When the flesh becomes word, our bodies become part of a body of people.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

We are not the kind of creatures who live alone, for ourselves. Solipsism is an illness, not a viable philosophy. As God remarked (Genesis 2:18), it is not good for humankind to be alone. Even those of us who are called to live as solitaries live in, and for, the community that is the Church.

What Nouwen says here reminds me of the poet's vocation. Derek Walcott memorably remarked:

(the) good poet is the proprietor of the experience of the race.... he is and has always been the vessel, vates, rainmaker, the conscience of the king and the embodiment of society, even when society is unable to contain him...

the conceit behind history, the conceit behind art, is its presumption to be able to elevate the ordinary, the common, and therefore the phenomenon. That's the sequence: the ordinary and therefore the phenomenon, not the phenomenon and therefore its cause. But that's what life is really like - and I think the best poets say that... it is the ordinariness, not the astonishment, that is the miracle, that is worth recalling.

Our speaking is deeply embedded in who, what, we are (Genesis 2:19). There is an extent to which we cannot really be said to know something unless we can describe it to ourselves (the study of epistemology is much concerned with this); and personal experience suggests that much of this knowing lies in the very act of attempting to describe something to another. As EM Forster famously said, "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?"

Christ is the living word. It is his life in us (John 17:22-23) is not less than word. Creation itself began with God's word in Christ (John 1:1-3) and all we truly are begins with Christ's word in us, the very image of God.

Love, joy, peace...

How do we know that we are infinitely loved by God when our immediate surroundings keep telling us that we'd better prove our right to exist?

The knowledge of being loved in an unconditional way, before the world presents us with its conditions, cannot come from books, lectures, television programs, or workshops. This spiritual knowledge comes from people who witness to God's love for us through their words and deeds. These people can be close to us but they can also live far away or may even have lived long ago. Their witness announces the truth of God's love and calls us to act in accordance with it...

Living a spiritual life is living a life in which our spirits and the Spirit of God bear a joint witness that we belong to God as God's beloved children, (see Romans 8:16). This witness involves every aspect of our lives. Paul says: "Whatever you eat, then, or drink, and whatever else you do, do it all for the glory of God" (Romans 10:31). And we are the glory of God when we give full visibility to the freedom of the children of God.

When we live in communion with God's Spirit, we can only be witnesses, because wherever we go and whomever we meet, God's Spirit will manifest itself through us...

How does the Spirit of God manifest itself through us? Often we think that to witness means to speak up in defence of God. This idea can make us very self-conscious. We wonder where and how we can make God the topic of our conversations and how to convince our families, friends, neighbours, and colleagues of God's presence in their lives. But this explicit missionary endeavour often comes from an insecure heart and, therefore, easily creates divisions.

The way God's Spirit manifests itself most convincingly is through its fruits: "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self-control" (Galatians 5:22). These fruits speak for themselves. It is therefore always better to raise the question "How can I grow in the Spirit?" than the question "How can I make others believe in the Spirit?"

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey 

I am reminded of the remark attributed to St. Francis (though no one has apparently been able to trace its source*), "Preach the gospel at all times; if necessary use words."

Of course it isn't an either/or: neither Francis nor Henri Nouwen meant to imply that. But our words, should we use them, can only be counter-productive unless we do live in the fruits of the Spirit, "...love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control." (NIV)

Jesus came that we might have life, 'and have it to the full' (John 10:10). People around us will only be drawn in if they see this quality of fullness and richness of our life together, but not if they see laws and legalism. Bees are attracted by honey, not vinegar.

Ian Paul, Wordlive

(*In Chapter XVII of his Rule of 1221, however, Francis did tell the friars not to preach unless they had received the proper permission to do so. Then he added, "Let all the brothers, however, preach by their deeds.")

Seaside Rock... (post number 1000)

Words are important. Without them our actions lose meaning. And without meaning we cannot live. Words can offer perspective, insight, understanding, and vision. Words can bring consolation, comfort, encouragement and hope. Words can take away fear, isolation, shame, and guilt. Words can reconcile, unite, forgive, and heal. Words can bring peace and joy, inner freedom and deep gratitude. Words, in short, can carry love on their wings. A word of love can be the greatest act of love. That is because when our words become flesh in our own lives and the lives of others, we can change the world.

Jesus is the word made flesh. In him speaking and acting were one...

Words that do not become flesh in us remain "just words." They have no power to affect our lives. If someone says, "I love you," without any deep emotion, the words do more harm than good. But if these same words are spoken from the heart, they can create new life.

It is important that we keep in touch with the source of our words. Our great temptation is to become "pleasers," people who say the right words to please others but whose words have no roots in their interior lives. We have to keep making sure our words are rooted in our hearts. The best way to do that is in prayerful silence.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

We seem to me to be incarnate beings through and through. God's image is written in us like the words in a stick of seaside rock - but it is written in the flesh and blood, bones and neurons of which we are made. We are not ghosts stuck in machines, awaiting some kind of liberation: we are all of a piece, and holy.

Saying this, of course, gives us an odd sense of responsibility. If we are like sticks of rock, but bearing the image of God all the way through instead of the words "Blackpool Rock", then wherever we go, whatever we do, that image goes with us. The name for thinking about this is perhaps "penitence"...

A thought: this is post number 1000 on The Mercy Blog. Perhaps I should order a commemorative stick of rock?

On not wriggling...

In brief, do everything as though in the presence of God and so, in whatever you do, you need never allow your conscience to wound and denounce you, for not having done your work well.

Proceeding in this way you will smooth for yourself a true and straight path to the third method of attention and prayer which is the following: the mind should be in the heart - a distinctive feature of this third method of prayer. It should guard the heart while it prays, revolve, remaining always within, and thence, from the depths of the heart, offer up prayers to God. (Everything is in this: work in this way until you are given to taste the Lord.) When the mind, there, within the heart, at last tastes and sees that the Lord is good, and delights therein (the labor is ours, but this tasting is the action of grace in a humble heart), then it will no longer wish to leave this place in the heart... and will always look inwardly into the depths of the heart and will remain revolving there, repulsing all thoughts sown by the devil...

Therefore our holy fathers, hearkening to the Lord... have renounced all other spiritual work and concentrated wholly on this one doing, that is on guarding the heart, convinced that, through this practice, they would easily attain every other virtue, whereas without it not a single virtue can be firmly established. Some of the fathers called this doing, silence of the heart; others called it attention; yet others - sobriety and opposition (to thoughts), while others called it examining thoughts and guarding the mind.

Keep your mind there (in the heart), trying by every possible means to find the place where the heart is, in order that, having found it, your mind should constantly abide there. Wrestling thus, the mind will find the place of the heart.

From Simeon the New Theologian (949-1022), in Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart, translated by E. Kadloubovsky and G.E. H. Palmer (London: Faber and Faber, 1951) with thanks to Episcopal Cafe

Those who are in a hurry delay the things of God. (St. Vincent de Paul)

I am in a strange place at the moment, full of ideas and hopes - and trepidations! - and yet oddly unable to do anything about it. I am, as I keep saying in these recent posts, in the hand of Christ, like some little animal scooped up from beside the road. I know I have been rescued, and yet all my instinct is to wriggle and scrabble frantically. But just like the small creature beside the road, my escape would be the death of me - all I can do is wait for my Lord to set me gently down wherever it is he has in mind, in a safe place where I can live, and grow, and do what it is he has made me to do...

Safe at last...

Fear of life leads to excessive fear of death... In some way one must pay with life and consent daily to die, to give oneself up to the risks and dangers of the world, to allow oneself to be engulfed and used up. Otherwise, one ends up as though dead, in trying to avoid life and death.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.

Jesus, Luke 9:24

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.

Paul, Galatians 2:19b-20

Perhaps if we could only forget, for a while, that there are worse things than death, we could realise that our life is far more than this present breathing, this little tent of frail flesh and bone... We are safe in Christ's wounded hand, and all we are is his. Did he not say, "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." (John 10 27-28)?

It is enough...

I keep being drawn back to Thursday's post. We know so little of what God is actually doing with us, and yet we do know that God has a way of working in deep paradox, bringing light out of darkness, and new life out of what appears to us to be death.

Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be." John 12:24-26a)

What we are has so often to be broken for what God longs for us to be to come about.  "Elisha had to break his plough, which represented his financial security, before he could qualify for a double portion of God's Spirit (1 Kings 19:19-21). Mary had to break her alabaster box, which represented her dowry and hope for marriage, in order to receive Christ's highest commendation (Mark 14:3-9)." (From a UCB devotional a friend sent me.) Sometimes it happens without our willing it. David did not intend his world to fall apart when he first looked at Bathsheba from his rooftop (2 Samuel 11-12); but he ended up realising (Psalm 51:17) that "[t]he sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise..."

God does not ever intend us harm; but he knows our fallenness, and he knows that we cannot be kept from harm without losing our freedom to choose to love each other, and to love him. So often what lies on the far side of the worst we can imagine is better than the best we can imagine. That is the story of the Cross (John 12:26b-28), and it is the story of all our human loss and all our human hope.

Where does this leave us? I made a stab at it the other week, in my post More treasures of darkness... We cannot know where God is taking us. All we can know is the next step, in faithfulness to his word (Psalm 119.105). All our trust, all our future, rests in Christ's pierced hands. It is enough. There truly is nothing else to know.

Nothing else to know...

Zephaniah, addressing a slum of Northern Kingdom refugees in Jerusalem (Zephaniah 3:14-18), and Paul, writing to the Philippians from his chains (Philippians 4:4-7), both counsel an unprecedented and unwarranted joy to their listeners.  Were they naïve or pie in the sky believers?  Probably not, because the whole of anything always contains parts and reasons for joy and contentment.  To accept and live in the whole of things is to be “holy.”  The unified field of God does not blot out all sadness and tragedy entirely, but it somehow and surely co-exists with it.  Joy and sadness can live together within us at the same time, and afterwards we learn to never despair because of the dark sides of things.  The dark side is never the whole, although in the short term it often appears to be.

Richard Rohr, Radical Grace, p.9

We so often don't realise what is happening to us. We live in God's hand, in the wounded hand of Christ; truly all we are is his. There is, in the end, nothing else to know.

Why are we waiting?

"It comes like a gentle dew" (Isaiah 45:8). Grace comes when you stop being preoccupied and stop thinking that by your own meddling, managing and manufacturing you can create it.

We're trained to be managers, to organize life, to make things happen. That's what's built our culture, and it's not all bad. But if you transfer that to the spiritual life, it's pure heresy. It doesn't work. You can't manage and manoeuvre and manipulate spiritual energy. It's a matter of letting go. It's a matter of getting the self out of the way, and becoming smaller, as John the Baptist said. It's a matter of the great kenosis, as Paul talks about in Philippians 2:6-11, the emptying of the self so that there's room for another.

It's very hard for us not to fix and manage life and to wait upon it, "like a gentle dew."

From Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr, with thanks to inward/outward

I think this is, for me, the hardest lesson. When I read Psalm 119:105, "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path", I always want a pocket GPS receiver, or at least a folding map, rather what's promised in the psalm, which would have been the little, glimmering patch of light shed by an oil lamp such as the Hebrews used, barely enough to show the next step on the path.

Our waiting is our poverty; our willingness to wait is our acceptance of our own emptiness, our almost complete lack of the riches of foreknowledge. God alone truly knows what is to come (Romans 8:29; 11:2). We exist on the uncertain shoreline of the future - we are creatures of the tidemark, between the solid land of what has been, and the unthinkable currents of time itself. 

God, grant me the grace to wait for grace itself - take from me my constant fretting, and teach me how to simply let you be God. Please.

Christe eleison…

Jesus, the Blessed One, mourns. Jesus mourns when his friend Lazarus dies (see John 11:33-36); he mourns when he overlooks the city of Jerusalem, soon to be destroyed (see Luke 19:41-44). Jesus mourns over all losses and devastations that fill the human heart with pain. He grieves with those who grieve and sheds tears with those who cry.

The violence, greed, lust, and so many other evils that have distorted the face of the earth and its people causes the Beloved Son of God to mourn. We too have to mourn if we hope to experience God's consolation.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Tears can be a gift of the Holy Spirit.  At the point when you can’t achieve the game of perfection, all you can do is offer to God who you are today, warts and all.  Your willingness to offer your imperfect gift, knowing it will be totally received, brings you to tears—“holy tears.”  There are many gifts of tears, however; sometimes you just cry for the pain and suffering of others, even though you yourself are not suffering at all.  I am sure most of you have experienced such holy tears, maybe even today when we remember the many who have died so young, so alone, and sometimes so needlessly.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate... Seeing God in All Things
(Winter Conference 2010)

Once I wrote:

What do I mean by "perennial brokenheartedness"? Well for me, it appears outwardly in the way that I cannot ignore suffering, real  or fictional, human or animal, which gives rise to my rather antisocial inability to watch or read much in the way of TV, films or novels. Inwardly, it is an inability, especially in prayer, to turn my heart away from pain.

It gets embarrassing too. Once, years ago, appalled at my own hard-heartedness in prayer, I prayed for the gift of tears. Bad idea. That's the kind of prayer God seems to take a particular delight in answering. Now, of course, I can't stop my helpless tears when I pray, or get involved in certain sorts of conversations.

Of course I've often tried to minimise such things. Even these days, it's embarrassing enough for women to be this way. When men do it it's downright odd. Besides, the more I can minimise it to myself, the more I can insulate myself from the transferred suffering of others, as well as from whatever internal suffering of my own is going on.

Over the past few months, God has been finding me out again. I can’t pretend any more. I seem to be becoming transparent, leached by a light beyond me, thin and half-seen even in my own mirror. I’m not quite sure what I am becoming—I only know whose I am. Christe eleison…