On not needing to know…

Because we cannot ever “see the heart” as God sees, we cannot really know what is good for us, and especially what is good for others. We don’t know what their true needs are, what is the best solution to their problems, what would assuage their pain. But we don’t need to know. The Jesus Prayer can become for us a powerful way of intercession, of praying for others. By praying the Holy Name over them, by embracing them in our thoughts and our hearts, we surrender each one of them to God’s mercy and love and we trust that God will do what is best for them.

When we intercede for others in this way, when we bring them all to the mercy of Christ—the good and the bad, those whom we love and those whom we cannot love, those who love us and those who hate us—we do what the Lord has told us to do and what he himself did on the cross. This is the great way of love to which he has called us, and is also our work, the only work that truly matters, the work of love.

Irma Zaleski, Living the Jesus Prayer, Canterbury Press, 2011

I’ve written about this intercessory aspect of the Jesus Prayer elsewhere; I have often been troubled by our propensity to analyse problems and tell God what he should do about them—as if we could know! What God calls us to is nothing more nor less than love: simply to care enough carry in our hearts before him our sisters and brothers in creation, human or otherwise; to rejoice with their joys, weep for their pain, cry out with them in their bafflement and their loss…

The first two verses of Psalm 131 read:

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.

This is the very spirit of praying intercession in the Jesus Prayer. Sophrony Sakharov wrote:

The Jesus Prayer will incline us to find each human being unique, the one for whom Christ was crucified. Where there is great love the heart necessarily suffers and feels pity for every creature, in particular for man; but our inner peace remains secure, even when all is in confusion in the world outside...

It has fallen to our lot to be born into the world in an appallingly disturbed period. We are not only passive spectators but to a certain extent participants in the mighty conflict between belief and unbelief, between hope and despair, between the dream of developing mankind into a single universal whole and the blind tendency towards dissolution into thousands of irreconcilable national, racial, class or political ideologies. Christ manifested to us the divine majesty of man, son of God, and we withal are stifled by the spectacle of the dignity of man being sadistically mocked and trampled underfoot. Our most effective contribution to the victory of good is to pray for our enemies, for the whole world. We do not only believe in - we know the power of true prayer...

His Life Is Mine, pp. 127-128

(Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov lived through the years of the Russian Revolution, World War II, and the Cold War. A Russian, he prayed in community at Mount Athos, and later helped found The Monastery of St. John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights, Essex, England. Fr. Sophrony wrote, and taught, on the practice of the Jesus Prayer, and it was to this practice that his life was given.)

One of the most beautiful aspects of the Jesus Prayer is the universality of its calling: anyone, ordained or lay, secular or religious, learned or otherwise, can pray this prayer. It requires no qualifications. Its use is not limited to any one denomination. It is prayed, and taught, from the Orthodox Church, through the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran, the Anglican, and Methodist churches to the Vineyard. (Who knows how many others are involved…) If any of us senses God calling us to this way of prayer, there is nothing to prevent us from just starting—it may turn out to be the answer years of misgivings and difficulties in prayer…

A Bright Sadness…

I’ve been reading Irma Zaleski’s just-published book Living the Jesus Prayer, which I would encourage anyone interested in this way of praying to read.

She says (pp.44-45):

The Jesus Prayer, because it is a path of reality, is a way of learning and accepting the tremendous truth, too often forgotten, that “only God is good.” (Matthew 19:17) We cannot be good, because we do not really know what good is. We can never comprehend the nature of God’s infinite goodness and love. We cannot be, strictly speaking, like God. No effort of our own can make us so…

I think it is true to say that as we walk the way of prayer, as we become more open to God, as we grow closer to him, we become more and more aware of how great an abyss separates us from God…

This longing, this sense of separation from God, is the heart of all true repentance. It is often a source of sadness for us, at times even of tears, that we seem to be so far away from what we have been called to be, so disappointing to ourselves and God. The Fathers often called it “bright sadness,” and considered it a great gift to receive, for it brings us always before the face of God. It teaches us the meaning of mercy and fills us with joy.

These word’s of Zaleski’s say what I have been wanting so much to say here, and have been quite unable to describe in my own words.

These last few weeks have been a strangely painful time, and yet good also. Irma Zaleski says, in the previous chapter:

The way of the Jesus prayer has been called “white martyrdom.” It is the way of the Cross, because there is no greater pain than to stand in the total poverty of our human weakness,to see clearly our misery, our inability to be good. The temptation to judge ourselves, to hate ourselves, would be irresistible if we did not know and had not experienced the merciful, healing power of Jesus.

I think that what has happened has been that this year, with the pilgrimages both to Walsingham and to Medjugorje, I have come so close to the presence of God that I have really not been able to bear the sight of myself in that mirror of glory. It has taken a long while, and much—though perhaps not enough—prayer to come to the point where I can write these words.

God knows where we go from here. I do know that the call (back) to the Jesus Prayer has been growing stronger and stronger since our return from Medjugorje. (The arrival of Living the Jesus Prayer in the post from Amazon, where I had pre-ordered it months ago and then forgotten all about, was one of those striking “coincidences” that God loves so much.)

I will try to be less sporadic in documenting this odd journey, in case it might help anyone reading this blog. It’s often hard, as I said above, to find words for this kind of thing; perhaps Irma Zaleski has given me a lever to crack the door of speechlessness a little ajar…

Forgiveness…

Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is again made clean. The dream explains why we need to be forgiven, and why we must forgive. In the presence of God, nothing stands between God and us--we are forgiven. But we cannot feel God's presence if anything is allowed to stand between ourselves and others.

Dag Hammarskjold: Journal 1956

Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those
who sin against us…

I don’t know of a clearer or more beautiful explanation of how this works than Dag Hammarskjold’s words here. No wagging fingers, no hard bargains; just the truth…

Indwelling Presence…

In the Judeo-Christian creation story, humans were created in the very “image and likeness of God” (Genesis 1.26). Our DNA is divine.

The Divine Indwelling is never earned by any behaviour whatsoever or any ritual, but only recognized and realized (Romans 11.6, Ephesians 2.8-10) and fallen in love with. When you are ready, you will be both underwhelmed and overwhelmed at the boundless mystery of your own humanity.

Without that underlying experience of God as both abyss and ground, it is almost impossible to live in the now, in the fullness of who I am, warts and all, and almost impossible to experience the Presence that, paradoxically, always fills the abyss and shakes the ground.

Richard Rohr, adapted from The Naked Now, p. 22

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We waste so much time seeking God, as though he were a distant land, or a lost object of desire, when he is in every cell and fibre of what we are. What is needed is perhaps harder than any quest: to get out of the way.

I’ve been praying about this chemically-induced depression I’ve been struggling with recently, and I think that part of the problem—as indeed it is with any serious or long-term illness—is that our inner eyes become fixed on some image of ourselves, rather than on our essential image-bearing humanity.

Of course, the part that is left out of the passage from Rohr’s book that I’ve quoted above is the part about our fallenness. We are made in the image of God, all right, but that image is tarnished and obscured by sin. My present tendency to self-obsession and self-pity is no more than an exaggeration of something that is common to us all, which is only overcome by grace.

Grace itself is always there, like the sun’s light. The earth may turn away; clouds may cover the sky, but the faithful sun shines on still. So it is with the grace of Christ: his love never falters—we do.

But now, irrespective of law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets,the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction,since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed;it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.

Romans 3.21-26 [my emphasis]

Oh, God, give me the grace to get myself out of the mirror, and watch only for your reflection. Give me the love to care only for those others in whom you have placed your image; give me the strength to weep with them, dance with them, pray for them… for without you I am far too weak.

And yet… Paul also wrote (2 Corinthians 12.9): “[the Lord] said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.”

A Four-fold Franciscan Blessing

May God bless you with a restless discomfort about easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships, so that you may seek truth boldly and love deep within your heart.

May God bless you with holy anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may tirelessly work for justice, freedom, and peace among all people.

May God bless you with the gift of tears to shed with those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, or the loss of all that they cherish, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and transform their pain into joy.

May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you really CAN make a difference in this world, so that you are able, with God's grace, to do what others claim cannot be done.

And the blessing of God the Supreme Majesty and our Creator,

Jesus Christ the Incarnate Word who is our brother and Saviour,

and the Holy Spirit, our Advocate and Guide,

be with you and remain with you, this day and forevermore.

AMEN

[I’ve been unable reliably to trace an original source for this—if anyone knows, I’d appreciate a comment!]

Bible Sunday

Today is Bible Sunday, and the collect for today reads:

Blessed Lord
who caused all holy scriptures
    to be written for our learning
help us so to hear them,
to read, mark learn and inwardly digest them
that, through patience, and the comfort of your holy word,
we may embrace and forever hold fast
    the hope of everlasting life,
which you have given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and forever.

Amen

Sometimes our hearts feel closed and dry—and yet, if we will just listen, or read, quite passively and without examining how we may be taking in what we read or hear, the living water of God’s Word (who is, after all, our Saviour Jesus Christ) will secretly soften and heal us. Its working may be unknown and unrealised, and yet it is true and sure beyond our fallible senses.

Believing in the Church…

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

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

Henri Nouwen

I am so grateful for this! I know that a some people who feel quite spiritual believe that they can find God in country walks, or sitting by the sea, better than they can in a church, but somehow the point is missing here.

Christ is “God-with-us”, Emmanuel, and the Church is the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12.22ff) at whose centre is the Eucharist, where the Body of Christ becomes real and present among us. How can we not be fractured, lost, outside the Body of which we are a part? We cannot live alone; members of any living body, if severed, do not live a wild and fruitful life: they die and shrivel. We must remain in community even when it hurts, even when we cannot for the life of us think what we’re doing there—only as part of a Eucharistic community can the life-blood of Christ, bearing the oxygen of the Spirit, flow freely in our veins.

Thank God for the Church—for each of us, frail and fallible as we are, living in this messy and glorious community of ours, and for the eternal Church “spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners…” (CS Lewis)—our home and our refuge, and our sign…

On struggling…

Last year I wrote that I didn’t see The Mercy Blog as a confessional platform, full of chatty accounts of what I’d been eating, listening to, wearing, worrying about… I’ve tried to stick to this rule, with a few notable exceptions, since I first started the blog in 2005.

I was struck, then, by Jane Sigrist’s comment, when she most generously made TMB her Blog of the Week, that I had “been brave enough to share some of the joys and struggles of [my] journey honestly, often at great depth, yet with a humble simplicity that's an inspiration to others.”

Encouraged, then, by Jane’s remark, I have to confess that I’ve been struggling a bit lately. I suffer from a condition called sarcoidosis, which was first diagnosed back in 1972, and which has been going through a cycle of remission and activity in multiple organ systems ever since. Recently it has been making a nuisance of itself again, and I have been on the usual treatment, high doses of steroids. One of the side-effects of this has been depression, of the “I can’t be bothered to do anything, I’m useless at everything anyway” variety. Reluctant to blog about this, I’ve blogged about nothing – which has contributed another arc to the vicious circle.

By God’s grace things have improved to the point where my consultant feels it’s safe to reduce the dose of steroids, while she keeps a careful eye on the chemical markers. I feel it’s important to try and break out of this grey cotton-wool trap I’ve been in; to resume blogging anyway, regardless of whether I make any sense or not, may be part of this.

I am quite certain that I remain in the palm of Christ’s own pierced hand, however much I may feel like something floating in the bottom of a washing-up bowl. He will make something of this, have no doubt, for “we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8.28 NIV) He does. It’s important to remember this, much as the Psalmists remembered (e.g. in Psalm 77) the past glorious deeds of God, even in exile and captivity:

Your way was through the sea,
   your path, through the mighty waters;
   yet your footprints were unseen.

Psalm 77.19

Pray for me, though, that I may cling tight to that memory, even when his footsteps do remain unseen…

The Feast of St. Francis of Assisi

Most high, omnipotent, good Lord, grant your people grace to renounce gladly the vanities of this world; that, following the way of blessed Francis, we may for love of you delight in your whole creation with perfectness of joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Amen.

Nothing I could write here would better Padre Mickey’s marvellous post. Click over there and read the whole thing…

Breaking Bread…

The two disciples whom Jesus joined on the road to Emmaus recognised him in the breaking of the bread. What is a more common, ordinary gesture than breaking bread? It may be the most human of all human gestures: a gesture of hospitality, friendship, care, and the desire to be together. Taking a loaf of bread, blessing it, breaking it, and giving it to those seated around the table signifies unity, community, and peace. When Jesus does this he does the most ordinary as well as the most extraordinary. It is the most human as well as the most divine gesture.

The great mystery is that this daily and most human gesture is the way we recognise the presence of Christ among us. God becomes most present when we are most human…

When we gather around the table and eat from the same loaf and drink from the same cup, we are most vulnerable to one another. We cannot have a meal together in peace with guns hanging over our shoulders and pistols attached to our belts. When we break bread together we leave our arms - whether they are physical or mental - at the door  and enter into a place of mutual vulnerability and trust.

The beauty of the Eucharist is precisely that it is the place where a vulnerable God invites vulnerable people to come together in a peaceful meal. When we break bread and give it to each other, fear vanishes and God becomes very close.

Henri Nouwen

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Something like this strikes me at every celebration of the Eucharist. “Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread…”

We who share in this most blessed sacrament are truly one, one community, one body of Christ, through the Body by which he is made present to us, this Blood he shed for us. This is real, not some man-made symbol; this uniting is something far deeper than anything that could ever separate us, and far deeper than anything we could ever do ourselves to bring us together. The very act of God is here among us each time we celebrate this most glorious event; how could we ever have thought otherwise? Jesus himself told us, “This is my body… This cup… is the new covenant in my blood…” The verb is clean, present, real. In this moment, so are we – for an instant, at least, we can glimpse the shores of heaven; for a moment, we can be who we were made to be. This “amen” is for each of us, just for a shining second, our own surrender, our “let it be to me according to your word.”

Christ in each of us, the hope of glory…

Medjugorje and after…

It’s the first of October already, and I’ve been putting off posting here simply because, after a full week back home, I’m still fairly speechless about the Medjugorje pilgrimage.

Google will very quickly introduce you to many pages (probably the Wikipedia article already linked here, and its internal links, provide the best place to start, especially for the unfamiliar or sceptical (!) enquirer) dealing with the village, and with the history of Marian pilgrimage to the area. You will easily be able to trace the various controversies surrounding the site, from the early disagreements with the Communist authorities of Yugoslavia, through the Bosnian War of the early 1990s, to the current inquiry by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

But none of these – and as you may imagine I had read plenty before we travelled – had prepared me even slightly for the impact that most Franciscan of places would have on me. It is hard to explain how this came about, and it is this difficulty that has made me strangely reluctant to begin this post.

Certainly I experienced nothing “supernatural” in the external way. The widely reported and well-attested miracles of healing still go on, but I did not experience these directly during our stay. The experiences I did have were entirely spiritual and internal, and too private to write of here or anywhere.

What has remained, apart from a greatly deepened love of our Lady herself, is an odd kind of spiritual certainty – a sureness of heart, if I can use such a phrase. This life that I have lived, its twists and turns, the many things I would have wished otherwise, is a gift from God’s own hand. It is thoroughly permeated by the Holy Spirit, and so lived-in by Christ. I cannot choose the best bits. All that I have lived through works in the end together for my own good (Romans 8.28!); somehow for the healing of my tangled heart.

Yet again the call is to prayer, to the simplification of life. I seem to be incapable of living without getting caught up in stuff. Increasingly I’m coming to understand why men and women are called to live in community, where “stuff”, physical and social, is owned by the community, and they themselves are not caught up in it in such a personal way as we are who live in the world.

I know too how easily trying to live with less stuff can in itself become a hobby, can become “stuff” in its own right. Try entering “minimalist blog” into your favourite search engine, and you will find a legion of (mostly) young (mostly) American women and men whose waking hours seem to be devoted to working out how to live with increasingly less stuff – not all of it physical stuff, by any means. That isn’t what I’m getting at.

There is a passage in the Principles of the Third Order Society of St. Francis which reads, “Those of us who have much time at our disposal give prayer a large part in our daily lives. Those of us with less time must not fail to see the importance of prayer and to guard the time we have allotted to it from interruption.” I have made a fairly poor showing on either count, on the whole, and it is mostly to do with my attachment to stuff: social, intellectual, even spiritual stuff quite as much as physical stuff.

I am rambling. Medjugorje has been for me about far more than un-stuffing. It is, though, about living one-pointedly. The mistake some Protestants make is to imagine that Catholics worship Mary. They love her, honour her, turn to her; but she herself is continually pointing them to her Son. Medjugorje has been for me an experience of being called to leave everything and follow him, being called far deeper into the place Paul describes in the opening verses of Colossians 3:

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

In the end, it’s simply about trust – trusting Jesus enough actually to believe the Beatitudes, I suppose…

Back Home…

I’d meant, of course, to write an informative, well-illustrated blog post, all about my trip to Western Herzegovina, and the pilgrimage to Medjugorje, but I’m too blown away to find many words.

I’d expected Medjugorje to be an amazing place, even for remarkable things to happen spiritually – but I hadn’t bargained for this blessed country. I love this place – the landscape, the people, the sound of the language.

Of course, neither my words nor the many thousands that have been written about Medjugorje since 1981 can really convey much of value about the pilgrimage itself. These words do, perhaps: ‘“Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.” This [the Eucharist] is my glue…’ Ian Morgan Cron (quoting Eugene O’Neill) in Church Times, 23 September 2011.

Off again…

More pilgrimaging: Medjugorje this time…

I’ll write all about it when I get back at the end of next week.

Holy Cross Day

It is not possible to look at the present condition of our land and people and find support for optimism. We must not fool ourselves.

It is altogether conceivable that we may go right along with this business of "business," with our curious religious faith in technological progress, with our glorification of our own greed and violence always rationalized by our indignation at the greed and violence of others, until our land, our world, and ourselves are utterly destroyed. We know from history that massive human failure is possible....

On the other hand, we want to be hopeful, and hope is one of our duties. A part of our obligation to our own being and to our descendants is to study our life and our condition, searching always for the authentic underpinnings of hope. And if we look, these underpinnings can still be found.

Wendell Berry, Economy, Freedom and Community, and Sex
with thanks to inward/outward

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Many people live with the unconscious or conscious expectation that eventually things will get better; wars, hunger, poverty, oppression, and exploitation will vanish; and all people will live in harmony. Their lives and work are motivated by that expectation. When this does not happen in their lifetimes, they are often disillusioned and experience themselves as failures.

But Jesus doesn't support such an optimistic outlook. He foresees not only the destruction of his beloved city Jerusalem but also a world full of cruelty, violence, and conflict. For Jesus there is no happy ending in this world. The challenge of Jesus is not to solve all the world's problems before the end of time but to remain faithful at any cost.

Henri Nouwen

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I wrote about this last month, but these passages, arriving in email newsletters, reminded me again just how vital, and hard, it is to keep these things in mind always.

Today is Holy Cross Day. Today we remember Jesus’ victory over sin and death, and the fact that his cry from the Cross – τετέλεσται (tetelestai), it is finished – means something much more like, “It is completed. I’ve done it!” than “I’m done for!” (There’s a good article in Open Source Theology on this which is well worth reading.)

Paradoxically, perhaps, I find Nouwen’s conclusion, in the passage I’ve quoted, very heartening. If Jesus had preached a happy ending in this world, then where is it? Instead we see a world riven with “cruelty, violence and conflict.” Our own hearts are broken, divided, and unfaithful. Well, mine is, anyway. Pain is the rule rather than the exception in our lives. Even at our happiest, the shadow of loss and death lies across our sunlit hours like a stain.

Jesus knows this: it is why he came to be born as man, born from that frail and unthinkably courageous girl whom we call, down all generations, blessed, and to die so horribly as she stood vigil at the foot of that Cross. It is why that death was not the final victory of death, but the final victory of life, and why Mary’s grief was swallowed up in glory. Death is not the end: it is transformed. It is now the door to eternal life, and to a new Heaven and a new earth, in which

[God] will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.

Revelation 21.4

The Cross is indeed Holy. From an instrument of torture and death, Jesus’ blood has made it into our refuge, the fountain and source of grace, mercy and peace to all who believe. Holy, and glorious!

More about trust & mercy…

In a world so full of social and political turmoil and immense human suffering, people of faith will often be ridiculed because of their so-called ineffectiveness. Many will say: “If you believe that there is a loving God, let your God do something about this mess!” Some will simply declare religion irrelevant, while others will consider it an obstacle to the creation of a new and better world.

Jesus often tells his followers that, as he was, they will be persecuted, arrested, tortured, and killed. But he also tells us not to worry but to trust in him at all times. “Make up your minds not to prepare your defence, because I myself shall give you an eloquence and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to resist or contradict” (Luke 21:14-15). Let’s not be afraid of scepticism and cynicism coming our way, but trust that God will give us the strength to hold our ground…

When we are anxious we are inclined to over prepare. We wonder what to say when we are attacked, how to respond when we are being interrogated, and what defence to put up when we are accused. It is precisely this turmoil that makes us lose our self-confidence and creates in us a debilitating self-consciousness.

Jesus tells us not to prepare at all and to trust that he will give us the words and wisdom we need. What is important is not that we have a little speech ready but that we remain deeply anchored in the love of Jesus, secure about who we are in this world and why we are here. With our hearts connected to the heart of Jesus, we will always know what to say when the time to speak comes.

Henri Nouwen

I have to keep reminding myself of the truth of this… If ever there was a man who was inclined to “over prepare” it’s me. I find it so hard to trust that God trusts me enough to put his words into my mouth, his love in my heart, however often he does it. As usual, I don’t even really know how to pray about this – but, as usual, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” (Romans 8.26)

Why is it so hard to trust that God has our backs in everything, and that whatever happens to us in human terms, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8.28)?

It was St. Faustina Kowalska who wrote in her diary the words she heard from Jesus, “Proclaim that mercy is the greatest attribute of God.” And it was she too who wrote, “I do not understand how it is possible not to trust in God, who can do all things. With God, everything; without God, nothing.”

God’s mercy in Christ, his provision for each of us, is absolute. If only we could learn to trust him, even the darkest days, and death itself, would be redeemed by that mercy, given back to us as treasures of darkness, as he promised to the prophet Isaiah:

I will give you the treasures of darkness
and riches hidden in secret places,
so that you may know that it is I, the Lord,
the God of Israel, who call you by your name.

Isaiah 45.3

9/11

Anger and wrath, these also are abominations,
   yet a sinner holds on to them.

The vengeful will face the Lord’s vengeance,
   for he keeps a strict account of their sins.
Forgive your neighbour the wrong he has done,
   and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray.
Does anyone harbour anger against another,
   and expect healing from the Lord?
If someone has no mercy towards another like himself,
   can he then seek pardon for his own sins?
If a mere mortal harbours wrath,
   who will make an atoning sacrifice for his sins?
Remember the end of your life, and set enmity aside;
   remember corruption and death, and be true to the commandments.
Remember the commandments, and do not be angry with your neighbour;
   remember the covenant of the Most High, and overlook faults.

Sirach 27.30-28.10

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Franciscan prayers for peace

Franciscan bloggers writing on 9/11

http://datinggod.org/2011/09/09/moving-tribute-to-an-ordinary-hero-of-911/

http://datinggod.org/2011/09/10/september-11-2001-sometimes-words-are-not-enough/

http://datinggod.org/2011/09/11/scripture-for-911-forgive-forgive-forgive/

http://feelinggreen.typepad.com/green_patches/2011/09/elegiac.html

http://littleportionhermitage.blogspot.com/2011/09/prayer-ground-zero.html

http://brjackspreachingministry.blogspot.com/2011/09/911-wrath-and-anger-are-hateful-things.html

http://friarminor.blogspot.com/2011/09/91111.html

There will be others, but these are the ones I found most moving, and useful.

Trust in God…

I do not understand how it is possible not to trust in God, who can do all things. With God, everything; without God, nothing.

St. Faustina Kowalska, with thanks to Friar Rex

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Absolutely – these last few days with my dear TSSF sisters and brothers at Hilfield has demonstrated this so beautifully. Trust, and the patience and littleness that grow out of trust, are the ingredients of humility, of which the Principles so memorably says, “Humility confesses that we have nothing that we have not received and admits the fact of our insufficiency and our dependence upon God. It is the basis of all Christian virtues. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux said, `No spiritual house can stand for a moment except on the foundation of humility’. It is the first condition of a joyful life within any community.” (The Principles of the Third Order)

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me.” (Jesus, in John 14.1 NIV)

Retreating...

Off to Hilfield Friary tomorrow for our TSSF Area Team Retreat; I’ll be back on Friday sometime…

I am so fond of Hilfield – set deep in the skirts of the Dorset Downs, it really does feel like A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else, in Ursula le Guin’s words.

We’ll be staying in Bernard House,

the loveliest of the guest houses, I think.

It will be good just to be part of the rhythm of Friary life, to settle into these ancient patterns that are new every time, and to renew my acquaintance with Olive the Cat. More when I get back…

Who is a God like you?

Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity
and passing over the transgression
of the remnant of your possession?
He does not retain his anger for ever,
because he delights in showing clemency.

He will again have compassion upon us;
he will tread our iniquities under foot.
You will cast all our sins
into the depths of the sea.  

You will show faithfulness to Jacob
and unswerving loyalty to Abraham,
as you have sworn to our ancestors
from the days of old.

Micah 7.18-20

What I find so astonishing is that it is this which we re-member, make true again, at the Eucharist each Sunday. As Jesus was present among his disciples in fulfilment of these words, so he is among us now, in all his presence, his majesty, his divine istigkeit, to heal, and forgive, and to make all things new. Praise him!

Being blown around?

We’re called to be faithful to God, not to a way of life, because we are a pilgrim people. So I’d kind of like us not to be so focused on numbers. It’s more about listening deeply to the Spirit. The danger with communities or churches with declining numbers is that they become too inwardly focused. We need to be prepared to look at things anew and maybe make radical changes…

Sr. Annaliese CSC, in the Church Times back page interview

I find this an immensely reassuring comment. Franciscans particularly find themselves called to be faithful to God, rather than to a way of life, which was St. Francis’ point about resisting the idea foundations, buildings, libraries… He wanted his followers to be free to follow, wherever the Spirit might be leading.

I’ve struggled with this in my own life, I have to admit. It is very easy to become attached to a way of life, and to cling to that instead of to God. Besides, people are often puzzled and disappointed when one shifts gear, as it were, feeling that one’s been unfaithful to something to which they are themselves deeply committed – a particular church fellowship, a home group, or even a denomination.

Jesus himself said, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit…” (John 3.8) and it made poor Nicodemus anxious. But we must be gentle, and pray continually. As Sr. Annaliese said later in the same interview, “Prayer is so important… Our whole life is to be prayer, together and at a deeply personal level. I couldn’t have done anything without that…”

Walsingham 950

On the Diocese of Exeter website you’ll find a superb sermon by Bishop Michael Langrish on Walsingham 950. Do read it all the way through, even if you think you may not be going to agree with him!

Words…

It takes two things for prayer to come to pass--a person and a word. Prayer involves right relationship between those two things. But we have lost that relationship. Involved as we are in many relationships, our relationship to words has become totally obscured. We do not think about words, although few things are as important for the life of the spirit as the right relationship to words. Words have become clichés, objects of absolute abuse. They have ceased to be commitments.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom, with thanks to inward/outward

I often think that the relationship between word and prayer we find in prayers of repetition, whether the Cloud of Unknowing’s “sharp dart of longing love”, or the Jesus Prayer, the Hail Mary, or any other, is a cleansing one. Words used like this, as bare prayers, unencumbered with emotional baggage or conceptual complications, are as free from cliché and abuse as we can get, almost.

Holding to this discipline, allowing the words to be merely what they are, a plain approach to God in God’s own terms, is perhaps the closest we can come to Heschel’s “right relationship”. We are not trying to achieve anything here; we are letting God do that, merely “being with God, putting ourselves in his presence, being hungry and thirsty for him, wanting him, letting heart and mind move towards him; with the needs of the world on our heart…” (Michael Ramsey)

Real prayer

“Contemplation,” or “meditation” in some groups, was rediscovered in contemporary times beginning with the writings of Thomas Merton in the 1950s and 1960s. The word most Christians are more familiar with is simply “prayer.”

Unfortunately, in the West, prayer had become something functional; something you did to achieve a desired effect—which too often puts the ego back in charge. As soon as you make prayer a way to get what you want, you’re not moving into any kind of new state of consciousness. It's the same old consciousness, but now well disguised: “How can I get God to do what I want God to do?” It's the egocentric self deciding what it needs, but now, instead of just manipulating everybody else, it tries to manipulate God.

This is one reason religion is so dangerous and often so delusional. If religion does not transform people at the level of both mind and heart, it ends up giving self-centred people a very pious and untouchable way to be on top and in control. Now God becomes their defence system for their small self! Even Jesus found this to be true of the scribes, Pharisees, and teachers of the law.

Richard Rohr, adapted from CAC Foundation Set: Gospel Call to Compassionate Action (Bias from the Bottom) and Contemplative Prayer (CD, DVD, MP3)

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At the heart of this lies my own uneasiness with many of the assumptions we make about prayer: that it is indeed functional, a means of getting God to do things for us, out there, in the world. And of course he does – we have only to read the accounts of the Gospel miracles to see that, or to read David’s anguished psalms of loneliness and betrayal to realise how freely God’s mercy is given to the broken heart. We mustn’t become so high-minded about prayer that we lose touch with that most fundamental of relationships. Jesus himself taught us to pray, “Our Father in heaven…”

A human father, though, would be soon grieved by a child who only ever spoke to him to ask for something. A healthy parent/child relationship consists in far more than an endless stream of demands!

Real prayer must allow God to change us, to open our hearts to his presence, his loving. More than that, when we come into God’s presence in prayer, we are coming with all the pain and loss of the world on our hearts, for it is all a part of each of us. And that I feel, is the meaning of the phrase “original sin”: not some inherited naughtiness, but our inescapable identity with a broken and spoiled world, in which cruelty is law, and might appears always to be right. Coming before God in conscious acknowledgement of that identity is true penitence, and true intercession.

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

Fearful and wonderful…

How long shall I be in the world of the voice and not of the world of the word? For everything that is seen is voice and is spoken with the voice, but in the invisible world there is no voice, for not even voice can utter its mystery. How long shall I be voice and not silence, when shall I become word in an awareness of hidden things; when shall I be raised up to silence, to something which neither voice nor word can bring?

John the Solitary 5th c., from Sebastian Brock, 'John the Solitary, On Prayer', Journal of Theological Studies, New Series, 30 (1979), 84-101, p. 87, with thanks to Voice in the Wilderness

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Word without voice? Word as silence?

Sometimes I think music subsists as much in its silences as in its sounds: beyond the attack and decay of a note is the time before it was sounded, and the time after. Beyond its pitch is an infinity of vibrations that are not sound; beyond its scale degree are uncountable microtones.

We are this kind of thing ourselves – there was a time when each of us was not, and there will be a time after us, and yet our limited lives are shot through with eternity. A bit of the Spirit – who, being spirit, cannot be divided – is in each who lives, human or otherwise (Psalm 104.30), and so the perishable will somehow put on imperishability (1 Corinthians 15.42ff), and we shall “become word in an awareness of hidden things” – not in these glimpses, reflections in broken water, but in steady truth and certain rest, and

“God himself will be with [us];
he will wipe every tear from [our] eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”

(Revelation 20.3-4).

Just as the Kingdom is here, and yet to come, within us, yet about to break upon us, so we live in eternal life even now: our little, sleep-rounded lives lie in the palm of that piercèd hand that made the vaults of Orion, the unimaginable distances and lambent deeps of interstellar space. Truly, we are fearfully and wonderfully made…

Collaboration or competition?

When you truly know, the giveaway is that you know that you do not know! Truly holy people are always humble. If you are not humble, you have not experienced the Holy One. If you don’t see humility in religion, you know it’s not on the right course.

The prophets are always calling Israel to such humility. They represent the self-critical and honest part of religion. Without the prophetic element, religion is always self-serving and idolatrous. True prophets please nobody, neither left nor right, which are mere ideologies. According to Jesus, the whole world will hate you if you follow him (Matthew 10:22). When you are truly prophetic, both the left and the right will mistrust and attack you.

Richard Rohr, adapted from CAC Foundation Set: Gospel Call to Compassionate Action (Bias from the Bottom) and Contemplative Prayer (CD, DVD, MP3)

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I know I keep on saying this in one way or another, but I do feel that what Rohr says here has a bearing on how we view prayer. Too often prayer assumes that if we do not know, then we ought to, and oceans of ink and forests of trees are expended by good and honest Christian charities producing and distributing prayer bulletins, prayer newsletters, prayer diaries and other aides de prière, so that supporters may pray in a more informed manner.

Perhaps those who put so much effort and so many resources into producing these publications intend us merely to be better informed, and so come to prayer with their needs closer to our hearts; but I worry that some of us will simply founder beneath the burden of detail, and fail to pray at all since we cannot pray for everything. In any case, God’s purposes may be greater and stranger than anyone may imagine who is caught up in the day-to-day minutiae of running an aid agency or a homeless shelter.

We need prophets, as Rohr so rightly says. We need, too, those who come before God in reckless prayer, crying out for mercy and justice, not for specific instances of charity. Of course we are right to pray for charities, Christian and otherwise, and for their work. Some of us may be called, by reason of personal involvement, perhaps, to pray extensively of one or another. But prayer activism is not the same as prophetic prayer.

Nor, come to that, does prophetic prayer consist in recasting Jeremiads in terms of contemporary events, like so many “words” coming out of certain Christian camps in recent years, proclaiming God’s wrath and judgement on corrupt and disobedient nations as if the Incarnation and all that follows from it had never happened.

We live in the Kingdom; but the Kingdom is not yet. We are redeemed; but the world is not, nor will it be. Someday there will be a new heaven and a new earth. Meanwhile, we work and pray to build the Kingdom one kindness at a time, knowing that it will never be more than an outpost of love in a broken and dying world. Jesus knew that, which is why he rebuked Peter for trying to keep him from the Cross (Matthew 16.23).

Elaine Aron, in her book The Highly Sensitive Person, argues persuasively for society's need for sensitive, reflective people just as much as for extraverted, dynamic types. She categorises them as (p.18 et passim) “priestly advisors”, informing and balancing the “warrior kings” whom both the media and the man in the street tend to value above all. It seems to me that Christian society has just as deep a need as any other for those who are called to the contemplative rather than the active to take their vocation seriously. As Aron points out, introverts are not failed extraverts: they are a different, and equally valuable, kind of human being. Being human is a collaboration, not a competition, or at least it should be.

Perhaps those of us who are called not to “know how to pray as we ought”, but to pray, as Paul said in Romans 8.26-27, within the Spirit’s own intercession, need to stop feeling like second-class citizens of the Kingdom, but to realise that we are a vital part of its growth, as important as – though not more important than – those who are called to give their lives in active service. We need to talk, to inform each other, to understand each other. But it is easier, maybe, for activists to publish prayer bulletins than it is for contemplatives to communicate their calling to live out their intercession. Hence, perhaps, blogs like this?

Costing not less than everything…

It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment or the courage to pay the price. One has to abandon altogether the search for security and reach out to the risk of living with both arms open. One has to embrace the world like a lover. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence.

Morris West, with thanks to inward/outward

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It seems to me that this comes very close to Jesus’ remark in Matthew 16.24-26, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?”

We are not our own. Our very life has been given to us, and what do we have to offer in return but our life? God will receive that gift more tenderly than we can imagine, and will keep it more surely than any human defence. All things come from him, and of his own do we offer him (1 Chronicles 29:14).

Beyond this, all is thanksgiving; as Eliot said, “A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)…”

Hiddenness & Poverty

Hiddenness is an essential quality of the spiritual life. Solitude, silence, ordinary tasks, being with people without great agendas, sleeping, eating, working, playing... all of that without being different from others, that is the life that Jesus lived and the life he asks us to live. It is in hiddenness that we, like Jesus, can increase “in wisdom, in stature, and in favour with God and with people” (Luke 2:51). It is in hiddenness that we can find a true intimacy with God and a true love for people.

Even during his active ministry, Jesus continued to return to hidden places to be alone with God. If we don’t have a hidden life with God, our public life for God cannot bear fruit…

One of the reasons that hiddenness is such an important aspect of the spiritual life is that it keeps us focused on God. In hiddenness we do not receive human acclamation, admiration, support, or encouragement. In hiddenness we have to go to God with our sorrows and joys and trust that God will give us what we most need.
In our society we are inclined to avoid hiddenness. We want to be seen and acknowledged. We want to be useful to others and influence the course of events. But as we become visible and popular, we quickly grow dependent on people and their responses and easily lose touch with God, the true source of our being. Hiddenness is the place of purification. In hiddenness we find our true selves…

If indeed the spiritual life is essentially a hidden life, how do we protect this hiddenness in the midst of a very public life? The two most important ways to protect our hiddenness are solitude and poverty. Solitude allows us to be alone with God. There we experience that we belong not to people, not even to those who love us and care for us, but to God and God alone. Poverty is where we experience our own and other people's weakness, limitations, and need for support. To be poor is to be without success, without fame, and without power. But there God chooses to show us God's love.

Both solitude and poverty protect the hiddenness of our lives…

When we enter into solitude to be with God alone, we quickly discover how dependent we are.  Without the many distractions of our daily lives, we feel anxious and tense.  When nobody speaks to us, calls on us, or needs our help, we start feeling like nobodies.  Then we begin wondering whether we are useful, valuable, and significant.  Our tendency is to leave this fearful solitude quickly and get busy again to reassure ourselves that we are “somebodies.”  But that is a temptation, because what makes us somebodies is not other people's responses to us but God's eternal love for us. 

To claim the truth of ourselves we have to cling to our God in solitude as to the One who makes us who we are. 

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey, by Henri J.M. Nouwen , © 1997 Harper San Francisco

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I have found that these passages from the Henri Nouwen Meditation & Reflection emails over the past few days explain better than anything I’ve read why I’ve found myself increasing tending to withdraw slightly from public involvement with things, from blogging – at least as regularly as I sometimes have – and even from some bits of church life.

Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” (Matthew 5.3) When know we have nothing we have not been given, know we are nothing, then God can flood the heart with his mercy, with his Holy Spirit, with Christ to whom the Spirit bears witness (John 14.25), and there is the Kingdom of Heaven in all its now-ness, its kairos. This is why I have sometimes found it, odd though it sounds, hard to cope with good times. God’s presence is so obvious, so close, in times of real hardship and distress that it feels almost as if one may lose him in the days of wine and roses.

God grant me sufficient hiddenness always. As I said once, quite a while ago, I do long to be more like ivy, that flourishes in shadowed places.

Simple obedience...

Tertiaries recognise the power of intercessory prayer for furthering the purposes of God’s kingdom, and therefore seek a deepening fellowship with God in personal devotion, and constantly intercede for the needs of his church and his world. Those of us who have much time at our disposal give prayer a large part in our daily lives. Those of us with less time must not fail to see the importance of prayer and to guard the time we have allotted to it from interruption. Lastly, we are encouraged to avail ourselves of the sacrament of Reconciliation, through which the burden of past sin and failure is lifted and peace and hope restored.

The Principles of the Third Order - The Third Way of Service, Prayer

It's strange how much more clearly this has been coming to speak to me over recent months, and how strongly I've been convicted of my own failure to live by it. Remarkable, too, how easy it is to find excuses for filling that "much time" that I have at my disposal with other things than prayer.

Temptation always sells us so short. God has more to give us than we can possibly ask imagine, and yet we allow ourselves to be led away by the least alternative. Well, I do. And yet I find that even what little obedience I manage to give to God's call to prayer as my chief calling is rewarded so generously that I haven't the tears to acknowledge it.

On this day after St. Clare's Day, I keep remembering these word's from Clare's Testament: "I bless you during my life and after my death, as I am able, out of all the blessings, with which the Father of mercies has blessed and will bless His sons and daughters in heaven and on earth and a spiritual father and mother have blessed and will bless their spiritual sons and daughters. Amen."

God has so blessed me over these last months, with blessings I couldn't have imagined, or dreamt up for myself. He is faithful beyond our understanding, and we know so little of gratitude. And so we have Christ's mercy beneath us as a cupped hand, and our Lady's simple obedience as our light, our Stella Maris: "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word..." How hard that is for us, sinners that we are, and yet how necessary. It's strange, but I sometimes actually find myself these days longing for that simple obedience, as Francis and Clare did...

There is a crack in everything…

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen, Anthem

We are fallen things in a fallen world. This place is broken. It was broken a very long time ago, and it has been falling to bits ever since. We cannot stand aside from this brokenness. Schadenfreude is prohibited. We are in this, all of us, up to our necks. You can read the first few chapters of Genesis how you like – it makes no difference to me whether you take it as literal, metaphorical or merely allegorical – it comes to the same thing in the end. Jesus knew this very well. He spoke of it often, most tellingly perhaps in the parable of the weeds (Matthew 13.24-30):

He put before them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?” He answered, “An enemy has done this.” The slaves said to him, “Then do you want us to go and gather them?” But he replied, “No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.” ’

He knew that it was painful and despair-inducing to live like this, and he knew we would always try to find ways to mend things, to pull up weeds. He knew too that it would be impossible to get it right – trying to pull up the bad stuff we’d injure and destroy the good. We can see this principle at work every day in Afghanistan, in Syria, Somalia… We can’t help it, perhaps, we have to try and fix it; we can’t bear to watch and do nothing. Paul saw this too:

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.

Romans 8.18-25

We can’t know how to pray. But, Paul goes on to remind us (vv.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.

We need to learn to stay still, to wait on the Harvester at the end of things. Till then, all I can do is pray as I have been shown, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…”

A journey through the dark...

The news from around the world is strange and disturbing again: the stock markets appear to be in panic, tyrants threatened with displacement seem to be getting a second wind, and the freedom of the Press (through its own excesses, to be sure) could well be under threat even in our own country. If ever there was a time for a call to prayer, it’s now.

Very often we understand these words “call to prayer” in a very direct intercessory sense. We think of “claiming”, “rebuking”, “pronouncing the judgements of God”; and if like me we are called to a very different way of prayer, we conclude that it can’t be addressed to us.

Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov lived through the years of the Russian Revolution, World War II, and the Cold War. A Russian, he prayed in community at Mount Athos, and later at The Monastery of St. John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights, Essex, England, and like most Orthodox religious, he was a contemplative. Sophrony wrote, and taught, on the practice of the Jesus Prayer, and it was to this practice that his life was given.

I feel that we all sometimes – and I am one of the worst – have far too narrow a sense of what prayer is. Paul wrote, “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 8.26-27)

We cannot, humanly, know how to pray in the direct, petitionary sense under these – or many – circumstances. Coming before God with our list of demands, and our advice on how best to fulfil them, simply won’t do, given the extraordinary complexity of world events, and the limited nature of the human mind. Sophrony understood this. He wrote, “Sometimes prayer seems to flag, and we cry, ‘Make haste unto me, O God’ (Ps. 70.5). But if we do not let go of the hem of his garment, help will come. It is vital to dwell in prayer in order to counteract the persistently destructive influence of the outside world.” (His Life Is Mine p.64)

Later in the same book Sophrony addressed directly the issue of prayer in a world such as ours:

The Jesus Prayer will incline us to find each human being unique, the one for whom Christ was crucified. Where there is great love the heart necessarily suffers and feels pity for every creature, in particular for man; but our inner peace remains secure, even when all is in confusion in the world outside...

It has fallen to our lot to be born into the world in an appallingly disturbed period. We are not only passive spectators but to a certain extent participants in the mighty conflict between belief and unbelief, between hope and despair, between the dream of developing mankind into a single universal whole and the blind tendency towards dissolution into thousands of irreconcilable national, racial, class or political ideologies. Christ manifested to us the divine majesty of man, son of God, and we withal are stifled by the spectacle of the dignity of man being sadistically mocked and trampled underfoot. Our most effective contribution to the victory of good is to pray for our enemies, for the whole world. We do not only believe in - we know the power of true prayer...

ibid, pp. 127-128

I wrote 18 months ago about this, and what I wrote seems so relevant to this question of prayer in the midst of a broken and despairing world that I thought I should repost it in its entirety here:

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.

Thomas Merton, Love & Living, Naomi Burton Stone and Br. Patrick Heart, Eds., 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…

Hidden and disguised by ordinariness…

To live a life of prayer in the world, hidden and disguised by the ordinariness of our outward appearances and circumstances makes us a ‘hermit in community’. Prayer makes our enclosure for us and we are naturally protected from over-involvement with outer things because we have come to know that those things can never give us fulfilment. We sense when to withdraw from, to be moderate with, outward activity. This is not a discipline imposed by will-power, by our own choice, but an attitude to life that becomes an intuitive response to the call to be silent and to wait on God. There is a sense in which one attains to a great freedom and liberty by not having to rely on outward structures. A hermit in community is not necessarily solitary but he/she will have to find their own (idio-rhythmic) rhythm of life, which is always unique for each person and will allow time for solitude, silence, prayer, reading and study…

Georgina Alexander, Following the Silence, p.84

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I hope these few further words from Georgina Alexander’s excellent book will speak more clearly than I have been able to in my own unaided words to those who will have been puzzled, even hurt, by my increasing withdrawal from some areas of church life, especially the more exuberant and public ones. It’s important to emphasise that not only is this “not a discipline imposed by will-power, by our own choice,” it isn’t imposed by the will or influence of anyone else. God is doing this; it is his call. The last few weeks, as I explained earlier, have been unlike anything I can remember, and all I can do is attempt to be faithful.

There is such a powerful sense of God’s love surrounding me, of being held in the palm of his hand, and – I say this with some trepidation – of at last being in the centre of his will, at last being where he has called me to be. All that matters is Christ; all this has somehow to serve his Kingdom, to be some kind of channel of his mercy…

“Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory,
for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness.” (Psalm 115.1)

Crossroads…

I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees.
I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees…

Robert Johnson

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We go to God from Light into Darkness…

Gregory of Nyssa

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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. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour.

Jesus (John 12.24-26)

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One day I was standing in my room doing nothing in particular when I suddenly felt as if ‘something’ had fallen off me. It was as if I had been wearing a warm and protective overcoat and it had suddenly disappeared. My first reaction was to try to get it back on again, but I didn’t know what it was that had fallen off or where it had gone… it was a time of being unable to ‘do’ anything by an act of my own will-power. I could fulfil all my duties and obligations regarding other people but when I had time on my own it was as if there was some obstruction that prevented me from making up my mind, and I would dither about, wanting to ‘do’ something but not knowing what it was. It was as if there was an invisible barrier in front of me and whichever way I looked I couldn’t get past it.Whatever I did do, I knew that that was not what I wanted to do. Whatever I had, I knew that that was not what I wanted to have. I didn’t want ‘anything’ but I did want ‘something’ and I knew not what it was…

It is difficult to explain it more clearly but there was a distinct sense of a change of aim and direction that was taking place from the depths within. I knew that it was not a self-organized change but was a result of being in a state of ‘unknowing’ for such a long time… As I said, the significant thing to note is that this was not a self-chosen movement; there was no way in which it could have been self-chosen because it had been guided from a deeper level than that of usual consciousness. It was an insight that had to come from within myself, which explains why no advice from anyone on the outside could have ever helped me, though I might have continued to seek confirmation.

Georgina Alexander, Following the Silence, pp.63-64, 64-65

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If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.

St. John of the Cross

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Mrs Alexander’s book should be required reading for anyone who suspects they may be being called to a life of prayer lived outside the walls of a contemplative community – her description here matches my own recent experience so closely that I could almost have written it myself.

I am finding myself more and more reluctant to post here: not because I wouldn’t wish to stand by everything I’ve written here (well, most of it, anyway!) but because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find words for what God is doing with me. More and more I find myself feeling that if I have anything to contribute along this path of ours, it is not in what I might do, but merely in being faithful, open, accepting what God gives, accepting the grace and mercy of Christ, without grasping at it; living along this almost transparent thread of only perceiving, of not trying to achieve. Not for the first time, I’m reminded of a Zen saying I read once – and now cannot find – to the effect that it’s only when we have given up seeking after enlightenment that we can become enlightened.

I feel an intense hunger for hiddenness; I long to be like a wren, living out its life deep in an ivied hedgebank, hardly seen among the dense leaves and underscrub. Somehow all this has to do with the heart, too: mine is too full to accomplish anything outwardly, still less to write more for the time being…

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When you awaken your heart, you find to your surprise that your heart is empty. If you search for the awakened heart, there is nothing but tenderness. You feel sore and soft, and if you open your eyes to the rest of the world, you feel tremendous sadness. It occurs because your heart is completely open, exposed. It is the pure raw heart that has the power to heal the world.

Chogyam Trungpa, quoted in A Path With Heart by Jack Kornfield, with thanks to inward/outward

 

The Rose…

Dat Rosa Mel Apibus The Bee Gets its Honey from the Rose (Mary)
Jan Oliver

On this most glorious day, when the sea sparkles like moving glass, and the Gospel reading was of Thomas, dear wondering Thomas, making his glorious affirmation of the risen Lord, and a new baby was baptised into the Church at the Eucharist at St Mark’s, it’s good to remember our Lady, the faithful Rose from whom such sweetness sprang!

Life after Walsingham…

The Chapel of St Augustine, Walsingham

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It isn’t easy to begin to describe the TSSF Pilgrimage to Walsingham. The external facts are easy enough to read about on the website, but the experience itself is far less accessible to words or pictures. The lovely buildings, set in beautiful gardens, are well enough known to need no introduction from me. What you don’t see is the sheer sense of holiness that pervades the place. I kept catching myself walking around a corner and feeling like Jacob, who “was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’” (Genesis 28.17)

God speaks with a strange clarity in places like this, and yet it is hard to share in such a public way as this the things one hears. Certainly we left Walsingham both knowing very clearly the intensity of God’s call to prayer, and the urgent necessity of our response, which has been strangely echoed in the recent experience of other Christians in Swanage. The true extent of that call on our lives, though, is only gradually becoming clear.

Somehow the Holy Spirit soaks into one with the water of that place, and as Paul says, “God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit…” (Romans 8.27) It’s very uncomfortable. Increasingly it’s impossible to get away with hiding one’s mind from one’s heart. But God is very gentle, even if he is God…

Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered.
Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity,
and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

While I kept silence, my body wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.

Then I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not hide my iniquity;
I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’,
and you forgave the guilt of my sin.

Therefore let all who are faithful
offer prayer to you;
at a time of distress, the rush of mighty waters
shall not reach them.
You are a hiding-place for me;
you preserve me from trouble;
you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.

I will instruct you and teach you the way you should go;
I will counsel you with my eye upon you.
Do not be like a horse or a mule, without understanding,
whose temper must be curbed with bit and bridle,
else it will not stay near you.

Many are the torments of the wicked,
but steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the Lord.
Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous,
and shout for joy, all you upright in heart.

(Psalm 32)

Walsingham–coming home…

Back home after the most blessed Pilgrimage, I’m trying prayerfully to work out the implications, which are profound. A great deal happened, spiritually, in those few crowded days at Walsingham, in ways that I’ve not experienced before. The longer this life with Christ goes on, the less I think I know of God’s ways with humankind – or perhaps I simply realise that those ways are more diverse than I had ever imagined.

As things gradually become clear, or rather as they gradually accrue words with which to think about themselves, I’ll try to share some of them here…

Thank you all, so much, for your prayers!

Walsingham

Here we are at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. I’ve found Wi-Fi access, free, thanks to the Shine people.

God is very good – this most beautiful place is so full of grace and peace, and it’s a joy to be among our fellow pilgrims. My heart is too full to write much more now, but I’ll try to post here during the Pilgrimage…

Thank you all for your prayers…

We lost it years ago…

Let us therefore not be anxious because we are getting better, but rather worse. Let us give up the idea of spiritual progress, if that means being more holy, more devout. God meets us in the absence of things, all sorts of things. And this is good news. Because we are not getting any better, we are getting worse. We are not making any progress, we are regressing fast.

The only qualification is to have no qualifications, the only admission ticket is to admit we don’t have one, we lost it years ago. The trouble is we have been looking for it ever since. Just say, “I haven’t got anything to show you. I can’t prove a thing. I can’t really tell you who I am or provide a good reference – or any reference – or tell you whom to ring up, I’m an unqualified, unskilled, inexperienced non-entity.”

Say that, and what he will say is, “Come in my dear. You are the very person we’ve been looking for!”

John Fenton, from TSSF Contemplatives Newsletter, July 2011

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Anyone who believes in coincidence should have been with me this morning. After a troubled night, I woke feeling exactly as Fenton describes here. After I’d washed and dressed, later than usual, I picked up the post, and there was the new issue of the TSSF Contemplatives Newsletter. “Oh, great!” I thought, “I’m supposed to be one of those. What a joke…” But I sat down to read it over a mug of coffee and a piece of toast, and there was this passage from Fenton looking at me, set in bold type. Somewhere, I’m profoundly grateful. God has found me, as he always does, wherever I try to hide from him.

For some odd reason, the deeper my happiness, the deeper my penitence needs to be. This is not false humility, at least I hope it isn’t, but merely the increasing sense that I don’t deserve anything really. What I am is so intrinsically flawed, so broken, that I can’t even lay claim to gradual improvement. Grace is all I can lay claim to, and that only by means of – by way of – the Cross.

Tomorrow we are setting off for Norfolk, to join the TSSF Pilgrimage for the 950th Anniversary of the Shrine at Walsingham on Sunday. I’ll take the laptop along, but I don’t know how easy it will be to get Wi-Fi. If I can, I’ll post from there.

Orate pro nobis!

The penitence of Mr Head

Mr Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought him self a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no Sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.

Flannery O’Connor, The Artificial Nigger

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This, the last paragraph but one in Flannery O’Connor’s strange, disorienting story, comes close to describing what Alan Jones, in Soul Making, describes as the gift of tears, and which I understand to be the root of true intercessory prayer. It is the realisation of our complete identification with our sister and brother creatures, no matter who they may be.

Quoting part of this passage from O’Connor’s story, Jones says, “Flannery O’Connor, in story form, describes the double action of the gift of tears. I am able to see in such a way that I not only judge myself with the judgement of God, but I am given the grace to love myself with the love of God. My tears, then, are the tears of joy as well as of sorrow.”

But there is more than this. As Mr Head sees, there is no sin too monstrous for us to claim as our own. All the we are grows from the same root in Adam, and his and Eve’s sin is our own, and all the sins that follow, ever. For this reason we cry, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”; and for this reason our cry is valid for all that lives, and we are ourselves no more than one of the little watercourses by which Christ’s mercy comes to comfort a creation lost in uncountable pain (see Romans 8.19ff).

Christe, Eléison…

The wrecks of comprehension…

Mary’s understanding of her nothingness is also saying something about you. Your worthiness is given. It is not attained. It is God in you searching for God. It is God in you that believes and hopes and cares and loves. There is nothing that you can take credit for. It is something you just thank God for!

Eventually you will not be inclined to say, “I prayed today.” Rather, you will want to say, “Prayer happened today—and I was there!” Whatever you do in communion is prayer. When your mind, your heart and your body are all present; that kind of full presence is automatically prayer. At that moment God is able to use you and speak to you.

I believe Mary is the model for being used by God. And we, like her, are just standing here saying, “Let it be done unto me” (Luke 1.38). All we can do is let it happen.

Richard Rohr, from an unpublished talk

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The longer I go on in this life that is about prayer, the less I realise I know about it. As Rohr says here, prayer happens. Sometimes, I’m not even sure I am there. Prayer is all wrapped up in dreams, these days, too. Some nights are so filled with dreaming that is prayer, or prayer that is dreaming, that I’m not always sure what is sleep and what is not. But these are not dreams of the prophetic, “God gave me a dream – better sit up and write it down!” variety. They rise out of sleep like the wrecks of crippled warships rising out of sand and silt, full of pain and the memory of pain, and sink again in the half-waking susurration of the Jesus Prayer. They are nothing I do; their content has generally nothing to do with my life or even my experience.

My day-life goes on, filled with light and truth as never before. My Susan and I are engaged now, and our parallel Third Order vocations are calling us into a “community of two” – we are so excited to see where God might take us in this path together. The more obscure and baffling these sleeping prayers become, somehow, the more blessed are these long days of early summer.

But this mystery of prayer continues darker than ever. It’s as though my mind has no reference for what is going on, rather as something illuminated by radiation outside the human visual spectrum appears dark to us, and yet may be bathed in a light we cannot see. I feel like Abram asleep after meeting Melchizedek, blanketed by “a deep and terrifying darkness” that I don’t understand. And yet I know that it is God’s darkness; that it means nothing but good, and peace, and healing for things that are not in my experience.

All I can do is be here, try to be present to what God is doing, as best I can, and leave the outcome up to him. Our Blessed Lady is my guide and mentor; she went this way before, to an extent no-one else has ever been called to go. From the Annunciation, to the Cross, and on to Pentecost, she was present in silence to God’s highest doing. From the beginning, her life was a surrender more active than we can comprehend, more passionate in its stillness than our hearts can embrace. No wonder all generations call her Blesséd…