The long haul…

The movement between community and solitariness is woven into the fabric of who we are in Christ. We come individually and make our response to the Word, who invites us to become a new creation and to live in divine intimacy. We nurture our life in Christ as the personal conversation continues and as we gradually learn to do less of the talking and begin to listen. But because our faith commitment joins us to other pilgrims on the way, we are challenged to live the new life together. We become part of that continuing community of God's people who exhibit a willingness to listen to one another.

Elizabeth Canham, Heart Whispers: Benedictine Wisdom for Today

“Lent is a time for turning back if we have wavered, taking the risk of trusting God, and keeping going for the long haul,” as Canon Rosalind Brown writes in this week’s Church Times.

One of the things that moves me most about the Benedictine way of life is their concept of “stability”. Those who know me well will no doubt snigger gently if they read this, since I am, if I want to be especially polite to myself, considerably more Franciscan than Benedictine. Still, I do admire their indefatigable faithfulness, which is most certainly a path of imitatio Christi if ever there was one, and I do recognise how this is reflected in Lent.

This same fidelity is reflected in the many forms of contemplative prayer, especially the Jesus Prayer. Practitioners are counselled not to continually adjust their manners of prayer, but simply to keep on keeping on, faithful to the initial calling and discernment that set them on the path, trusting silently in God for the outcome and destination of their prayer.

Our lives are lived out in community, whether we know it or not. Even if we live the most solitary of lives, far from daily contact with others, still we are members of the great Eucharistic community the Church, the body of Christ, the union of all who are baptised with water and the Spirit, and who share in the Supper of the Lamb.

Faithfulness is our calling, as our Lord was faithful to his. No matter how he was tempted, he lived out his forty days in the wilderness, as he walked the Via Dolorosa on his way to the Cross. One of the meditations that formed part of yesterday’s Stations of the Cross imagined Jesus realising that, weak as he was from shock and loss of blood after being scourged, and exhausted from carrying the cross, he could simply have lain down and died before he ever reached the place of execution; yet he kept going, in faithfulness to his own calling and for the sake of us all.

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

In the light of the Cross…

God's love for us is everlasting. That means that God’s love for us existed before we were born and will exist after we have died. It is an eternal love in which we are embraced. Living a spiritual life calls us to claim that eternal love for ourselves so that we can live our temporal loves—for parents, brothers, sisters, teachers, friends, spouses, and all people who become part of our lives—as reflections or refractions of God's eternal love. No fathers or mothers can love their children perfectly. No husbands or wives can love each other with unlimited love. There is no human love that is not broken somewhere.

When our broken love is the only love we can have, we are easily thrown into despair, but when we can live our broken love as a partial reflection of God's perfect, unconditional love, we can forgive one another our limitations and enjoy together the love we have to offer.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

It is only on the Cross that we see God’s perfect love for what it is. At the Stations of the Cross this afternoon somehow the eyes of my heart were opened to see the account of the Crucifixion as if for the first time. What became clear to me was not so much the physical suffering of our Lord—plain though it was to see—but the infinite love he bore for us, right into and throughout that final agony. Somehow, his very wounds become the love he bears for all that is made, and for every heart that weeps, or has ever wept since time began.

Strangely, perhaps, it is in that last account in John’s Gospel of Jesus’ days on earth that it is most obvious that he is God. I can’t explain this; only it was shown me more clearly than I can possibly write it down. Jesus is Lord, the Christ, the Son of the living God—and it is the Cross that shows it, beyond all uncertainty.

Shirt of Flame, a recommendation

Whether or not you think you are going to agree with it, I do hope you will read this post to the end, for it is some of the most beautiful and truthful writing I have come across recently:

Shirt of Flame: Ecstatic Truth

I’m delighted to have discovered, through a link on Franciscan Quote of the Day, Heather King’s writings. She is one of the most passionate and courageous spiritual writers I have read in recent months, and her blog feed is definitely worth a (prayerful) subscription...

Blood sisters, and brothers...

When God makes a covenant with us, God says: “I will love you with an everlasting love. I will be faithful to you, even when you run away from me, reject me, or betray me.” In our society we don't speak much about covenants; we speak about contracts. When we make a contract with a person, we say: “I will fulfil my part as long as you fulfil yours. When you don't live up to your promises, I no longer have to live up to mine.” Contracts are often broken because the partners are unwilling or unable to be faithful to their terms.

But God didn’t make a contract with us; God made a covenant with us, and God wants our relationships with one another to reflect that covenant. That's why marriage, friendship, life in community are all ways to give visibility to God's faithfulness in our lives together.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

 

We are continually trying to make God in our own image, instead of letting him (re)make us in his. We judge God’s faithfulness by our own faithlessness, God's mercy by our own vindictiveness. But God is not like us, and his covenant is not like our contracts.

 

Jesus spoke of this the night he gave us the Holy Eucharist, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood...” (Luke 22.20) We are living under a new covenant, as the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews wrote (quoting Jeremiah):

This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel
after those days, says the Lord:
I will put my laws in their minds,
and write them on their hearts,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.

In Christ we have a covenant which is written on our very hearts, not some external document. We have become members of his very body, sisters and brothers in blood, his blood. Oh God, give us the grace to live like it!

 

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

 

The Gift of Holiness...

If we are called by God to holiness of life, and if holiness is beyond our natural power to achieve (which it certainly is) then it follows that God himself must give us the light, the strength, and the courage to fulfil the task he requires of us. He will certainly give us the grace we need.

Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness, Bantam Doubleday Dell, p.16

I think sometimes we miss God’s gift of holiness, his grace for healing and growth in Christ, simply because we feel we have to strive for holiness in our own strength, by heroic observances and feats of asceticism, when all the time God is offering us this beautiful thing as a gift of love.

God knows that it is far too easy to take pride in our spiritual achievements. He knows what we are made of, and he doesn’t wish to give us this extra burden of temptation to carry.

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgement following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

Romans 5.15-17

The Fear of the Lord...

Fear is the knowledge of ourselves in the presence of God’s holiness. It is the knowledge of ourselves in His love, and it sees how far we are from being what His love would have us be. It knows Who He is and who we are!

Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island

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‘Rat!’ [Mole] found breath to whisper, shaking. ‘Are you afraid?’

'Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. 'Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet - and yet - O, Mole, I am afraid!'

Kenneth Grahame, Wind in the Willows

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...the fear of the Lord is pure,
   enduring for ever;
the ordinances of the Lord are true
   and righteous altogether.

Psalm 19.9

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Who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord,
a God feared in the council of the holy ones,
   great and awesome above all that are around him?

Psalm 89.6b-7

It is possible we've done too much of recent years to make God seem cosy and friendly in recent years. God is not our Facebook friend; he is the creator, and judge, of all that has been made, and his mercy in Christ is everlasting.

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

The inner wilderness...

The wilderness is not just a desert through which we wandered for forty years. It is a way of being. A place that demands being open to the flow of life around you. A place that demands being honest with yourself without regard to the cost in personal anxiety. A place that demands being present with all of yourself.

In the wilderness your possessions cannot surround you. Your preconceptions cannot protect you. Your logic cannot promise you the future. Your guilt can no longer place you safely in the past. You are left alone each day with an immediacy that astonishes, chastens and exults. You see the world as if for the first time.

Lawrence Kushner, Eyes Remade for Wonder

I wrote a long post about this in Lent a few years ago, but Kushner’s words here remind me of the way that the words of the Jesus Prayer are continually with me. In some crucial way, this path of prayer is an inner wilderness, a desert of the heart. It is strange how God has opened the way before me, and yet I still hang back too often, instead of trusting that pierced hand outstretched to lead me in the way of the pilgrim...

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

Lent and Easter (for Godfrey)

Today we celebrated a Requiem Mass for a dear friend and tireless lifetime servant in our church. Verger, Sacristan, PCC member, Deanery Synod member—you name it, he'd done it in his eighty-one years. We’ll miss him terribly.

Somehow it was appropriate that he went home to his Lord during Lent. Godfrey was the most passionately sacramental of Christians, and he had a deep understanding of church seasons and days. Today’s Mass was just as he had wanted it to be, and we were all there to see him off. The church was packed, and somehow there was as much joy as there were tears.

It struck me last night, when we received Godfrey’s coffin into the church, that he was witnessing in utter truth to his Lord's words, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” (John 11.25-26) We were listening to the words, as we did in the Gospel reading this morning; Godfrey is there. He knows. He is living in the truth of those words.

We are living out our lives in Lent; for Godfrey, it is now, and forever, Easter Day...

Discipline and discipleship

Discipline is the other side of discipleship. Discipleship without discipline is like waiting to run in the marathon without ever practising. Discipline without discipleship is like always practising for the marathon but never participating. It is important, however, to realize that discipline in the spiritual life is not the same as discipline in sports. Discipline in sports is the concentrated effort to master the body so that it can obey the mind better. Discipline in the spiritual life is the concentrated effort to create the space and time where God can become our master and where we can respond freely to God's guidance.

Thus, discipline is the creation of boundaries that keep time and space open for God. Solitude requires discipline, worship requires discipline, caring for others requires discipline. They all ask us to set apart a time and a place where God's gracious presence can be acknowledged and responded to.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Lent is often described as a discipline. The word turns people's minds towards the externals of Lent, fasting particularly. There is so much talk about “giving up chocolate for Lent” (or something else, but usually chocolate among the Christians I know) that you’d think that was all there was to it.

Fasting is good, though I personally think it needs to be about something more than merely going without a treat that’s not especially good for one’s health, but it is only part of what Lent is about. Discipline is not a word many of us are terribly fond of. It has overtones of Victorian schools: cold showers, the cane, and hundreds of lines.

The Principles of the Third Order Society of St Francis include this sentence, “The Third Order of the Society consists of those who, while following the ordinary professions of life, feel called to dedicate their lives under a definite discipline and vows.” Without discipline, the spiritual life cannot go anywhere. Discipline is freedom, strangely enough. When we no longer open the doors of our perception to what the world offers that is not of God then our hearts are free. Jesus himself said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8.31b-32 NIV) That is the sweet heart of discipline.

The use of prayer...

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

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, p. 24

I have so often felt that this was the necessary driving force behind contemplative prayer, at least from an intercessor's point of view. “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” (Romans 8.26 NIV) And if we cannot know even how to pray, how can we know what God's answer might be?

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

Being hidden...

There is much emphasis on notoriety and fame in our society. Our newspapers and television keep giving us the message: What counts is to be known, praised, and admired, whether you are a writer, an actor, a musician, or a politician.

Still, real greatness is often hidden, humble, simple, and unobtrusive. It is not easy to trust ourselves and our actions without public affirmation. We must have strong self-confidence combined with deep humility. Some of the greatest works of art and the most important works of peace were created by people who had no need for the limelight. They knew that what they were doing was their call, and they did it with great patience, perseverance, and love.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I think this is something we truly need to get hold of, now more than ever. Hiddenness is so alien to our culture, and yet I often think that nothing lasting can really be achieved in the spiritual life without its being hidden from the harsh lights of publicity. At times, it needs to be hidden even from ourselves - as Jesus said, “But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” (Matthew 6.3-4 NIV)

This is one of the things that gives me such an appetite for the solitary life. To pray, to study, with no possibility of reward, no reputation...  I wrote a while ago: “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…”

It's difficult to achieve this, too. Our brother St Francis struggled with his longing for solitude and contemplation, and his vocation to preach the Gospel—which inevitably drew him into the public eye, and away from his peace with God.

Elsewhere in the text I’ve quoted at the head of this post, Henri Nouwen wrote:

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.

As always, I struggle with this. It is hard, as I wrote the other day, to balance living a life surrendered to God in prayer with living “in the world”—and yet this balance seems to lie at the heart of the Tertiary vocation. Paul's words keep coming back to me:

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

Colossians 3.1-3

Solitude as community...

We like to make a distinction between our private and public lives and say, “Whatever I do in my private life is nobody else's business.” But anyone trying to live a spiritual life will soon discover that the most personal is the most universal, the most hidden is the most public, and the most solitary is the most communal. What we live in the most intimate places of our beings is not just for us but for all people. That is why our inner lives are lives for others. That is why our solitude is a gift to our community, and that is why our most secret thoughts affect our common life.

Jesus says, “No one lights a lamp to put it under a tub; they put it on the lamp-stand where it shines for everyone in the house” (Matthew 5:14-15). The most inner light is a light for the world. Let's not have “double lives”; let us allow what we live in private to be known in public.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I think one thing that Lent teaches us is that, contrary to much that contemporary life teaches us, and contrary to many of the fantasies we may entertain, we do not live in splendid isolation. No, “though we are many, we are one body in Christ...” (Romans 12.5)

Jesus, faint though he was with hunger, and worn from his weeks of aloneness in the wilderness, could not react in isolation to the temptations he encountered. What he chose then would touch each one of us today, more than 2,000 years later. Our solitude is no different; our thoughts are not our own to play with as we choose. Our surrender is far deeper than that.

The mercy of Christ...

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

If I trust You, everything else will become, for me, strength, health, and support. Everything will bring me to heaven. If I do not trust You, everything will be my destruction.

Thomas Merton. Thoughts in Solitude. (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux) pp.29-30

If we are to trust God, it is in his mercy we are to put our trust. Jesus, in his faithfulness, sacrifice and glorious resurrection, is for us the mercy of God. To trust in that mercy, to surrender ourselves into those arms open on the Cross itself, is the beginning, and the end, of our following. .He is the living word, the beginning and the end. In him and through his and for him all things came to be, and all people. Truly, if he is for us, who can be against us?

It's in realising this, in understanding that in and of ourselves we can do nothing, that we find that in surrendering everything to him, in absolute trust in his mercy, all things will become for us “strength, health, and support.” This is our penitence, the fast that we are called to in Lent: a fast from the self-sufficiency, ambition, and power that were offered to Jesus at the end of his own long fast in the wilderness (Luke 4.1-13) a giving up that prefigures our own dying into the endless mercy of Christ “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 1.24)

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

Ash Wednesday

Last year I put up here a post by Br Dan of Dating God, and looking at it again, I can’t resist doing as he’s done himself, and reposting it today:

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“Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast.”

In 1958 Thomas Merton wrote an essay titled, “Ash Wednesday,” which offers a reflection on the relationship between penance and joy found in the celebration of the beginning of Lent and the marking of our foreheads with ashes. Instead of me rambling on and on here today, I thought it would be good to share more from Merton himself. You can read the entire essay in Seasons of Celebration (FSG 1965), 113-124.

“Ash Wednesday is for people who know that it means for their soul to be logged with these icy waters: all of us are such people, if only we can realize it.

“There is confidence everywhere in Ash Wednesday, yet that does not mean unmixed and untroubled security. The confidence of the Christian is always a confidence in spite of darkness and risk, in the presence of peril, with every evidence of possible disaster…

“Once again, Lent is not just a time for squaring conscious accounts: but for realizing what we had perhaps not seen before. The light of Lent is given us to help us with this realization.

“Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focussed on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a saviour.”

Thomas Merton on Ash Wednesday « Dating God

Leaning into Lent…

Contemplation (the prayer beyond words and ideas) is a way to describe what Jesus did in the desert. It is not learning as much as it is unlearning. It is not explaining as much as containing and receiving everything, and holding onto nothing. It is refusing to judge too quickly and refining your own thoughts and feelings by calm observation and awareness over time—in the light of the Big Picture.

You cannot understand anything well once you have approved or disapproved of it. There is too much you there. Contemplation is loosening our attachment to ourselves so that Reality can get at us, especially the Absolute Reality that we call God.

Contemplation is the most radical form of self-abandonment that I can imagine. It is most difficult if there is not a profound trust that there is Someone to whom I can be abandoned! Such self-forgetfulness paradoxically leads one to a firm and somewhat fearless sense of responsibility. Now I can risk responsibility precisely because I know the buck does not stop here. There is a co-creation going on, a life giving synergism that is found somewhere between surrender and personal responsibility, God fully “co-operating with those who love God” (Romans 8.28), as St. Paul says it.

Richard Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace

As we draw near to Lent, I’m reminded strongly of my own call to contemplative prayer, and the urgent need to reconcile with it the other calls of my Christian life: my own local church, TSSF, my contacts in the other churches on the Isle of Purbeck.

Contemplation allows us to get caught up, consciously, in the purposes of God. (Note that I said consciously, not conceptually. This is awareness, not ratiocination; reason is too blunt an instrument.) Paul goes on to say:

[C]reation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption… the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will.

Romans 8.20-27 NIV

As humans we cannot avoid our fallenness being caught up in the brokenness of creation (theologians call this Original Sin) but instead of acting this out in the relationships and obligations of our lives (moral theologians call this sin) we allow our connectedness to make us somehow available in prayer to become part of the very cry of creation. There is in each of us, if only we will look clearly into the lens of grace offered us in prayer, that which will echo every pain, and each cause of pain, in all that is made. Our surrender to this call is, in its very little way, like our Lord’s surrender to the Cross, and as voluntary.

It was once explained to me by a dear friend and mentor that one of the reasons those called to the contemplative life tend to live in community is that the love and discipline of community life support and protect its members in this hard and vulnerable vocation. Those of us who live outside community have opportunities, and struggles, our more enclosed sisters and brothers are spared. In some way we must resist the ever-growing temptation to plunge ourselves into activity—much of it good and blessed in itself—rather than risk this appalling surrender that is the only door to our true healing, and to the healing of those for whom we pray.

Jesus said it all, really, in one short sentence: “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it.” (Luke 17.33)

Words and the Word...

Words, words, words. Our society is full of words: on billboards, on television screens, in newspapers and books. Words whispered, shouted, and sung. Words that move, dance, and change in size and color. Words that say, "Taste me, smell me, eat me, drink me, sleep with me," but most of all, "buy me." With so many words around us, we quickly say: "Well, they're just words." Thus, words have lost much of their power.

Still, the word has the power to create. When God speaks, God creates. When God says, "Let there be light" (Genesis 1:3), light is. God speaks light. For God, speaking and creating are the same. It is this creative power of the word we need to reclaim. What we say is very important. When we say, "I love you," and say it from the heart, we can give another person new life, new hope, new courage. When we say, "I hate you," we can destroy another person. Let's watch our words.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I seem to have been somewhat caught up in other things these last few days, and I'm sorry I haven't been blogging here as much as I'd have liked. But thinking about the readings for tomorrow, I was struck yet again by John's glorious introduction to his Gospel:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (John 1.1-5)

I think Nouwen was only partly right when he suggested that words have lost their power. I think that words may have lost their power for some of us; in and of themselves, they are as powerful as they ever were.

Jesus is the living Word, and all words are somehow almost sacramental as a result. Matthew 5.21-22 suggests something of this power: we would do well, it seems to me, to try and keep this in mind. In this season, when everything seems to be coming out in little pink hearts, we sometimes forget that, as Nouwen reminds us, "When we say, 'I love you,' and say it from the heart, we can give another person new life, new hope, new courage." These words are a tiny act of creation, a small but very real part in Jesus' glorious affirmation, "Behold, I make all things new."

Joyful in hope…

Joy is what makes life worth living, but for many joy seems hard to find. They complain that their lives are sorrowful and depressing. What then brings the joy we so much desire? Are some people just lucky, while others have run out of luck? Strange as it may sound, we can choose joy. Two people can be part of the same event, but one may choose to live it quite differently than the other. One may choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise. The other may choose despair and be destroyed by it.

What makes us human is precisely this freedom of choice.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

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

I think sometimes that enduring joy is simply accepting in our own lives that Paul’s remark in Romans 8.28 is literally true. It may seem odd to us, but if we let him, if we choose to trust, God will lead us into that truth.

I say this in all trepidation, since there are things in some people’s lives (there have been some in mine) that truly cannot by any human standards be said to be good, and I am not saying for a minute that we should by some spiritual sleight of hand attempt to say that they are. But God will, in the end, work in all things to bring that promise to pass.

It is a weak and sentimental Christianity that plants roses at the foot of the Cross; yet in the worst that evil could do, in the final triumph of all that is cruel and perverse and heartless, Christ was able to put to death death itself. “…he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.” (Isaiah 53.5 NIV)

This is hope. “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.” (Romans 12.12 NIV)

The prayer of sharing…

Joy is hidden in compassion. The word compassion literally means “to suffer with.” It seems quite unlikely that suffering with another person would bring joy. Yet being with a person in pain, offering simple presence to someone in despair, sharing with a friend times of confusion and uncertainty… such experiences can bring us deep joy. Not happiness, not excitement, not great satisfaction, but the quiet joy of being there for someone else and living in deep solidarity with our brothers and sisters in this human family. Often this is a solidarity in weakness, in brokenness, in woundedness, but it leads us to the centre of joy, which is sharing our humanity with others.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

This is of course wonderfully true just as Nouwen writes it here—and note that he is saying “being with a person in pain, offering simple presence to someone in despair, sharing… confusion and uncertainty…” not “offering solutions”—but it is also deeply true of prayer.

Intercessory prayer, at least the intercession of the contemplative, does not mean presenting God with accurate analyses of the situation or the person we are praying for, nor presenting him with detailed solutions we have worked out which he is to bring to pass “in Jesus’ name.” True intercession, as I understand it, is simply being with the person in God’s presence—being in God’s presence with the person held in our love and our shared distress. As Michael Ramsey once wrote, “Contemplation means essentially our 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.”

For me, the Jesus Prayer opens up more and more landscapes of prayer as the years go by, where our praying, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” leads the heart on into that deep sharing of pain, despair, confusion, uncertainty. It is, just as Nouwen writes here, “a solidarity in weakness, in brokenness, in woundedness…” and though it is often hard to pray this way, and our sharing of others’ grief in prayer can lead to real tears of our own, still it does lead us truly to “the centre of joy, which is sharing our humanity with others.”

On not being so different after all…

At first sight, joy seems to be connected with being different. When you receive a compliment or win an award, you experience the joy of not being the same as others. You are faster, smarter, more beautiful, and it is that difference that brings you joy. But such joy is very temporary. True joy is hidden where we are the same as other people: fragile and mortal. It is the joy of belonging to the human race. It is the joy of being with others as a friend, a companion, a fellow traveller.

This is the joy of Jesus, who is Emmanuel: God-with-us.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

In London over the weekend, I was struck by just this thought, walking across the Millennium Bridge, travelling on the Tube, sitting in The Palms of Goa watching Charlotte Street fill up in the early evening… So many sisters and brothers, their lives at least as intricate and loved as mine, going about their days on this earth of ours—and I found myself loving them, holding them before God in my own heart I suppose, in a way I had never been conscious of before.

London has all too often been hard to visit, difficult to be in; this time, though, it was all delight. I’m not saying I want to move there again after so many years and so many changes, yet I found again my love of this glorious, scarred, beautiful ball of energy and grace that is our capital. I was there with Susan, of course—but even so, this city is a pretty special place on its own. And being there, I became part of the place again: vulnerable I suppose, open to the spirit of the place, and so, somehow, part of its blessing myself. I am so grateful…

Desperate measures…

It is a world-shattering disclosure that the stream of life is a single stream, though it takes various forms as it spills over into time and space. This disclosure is made to anyone whose discipline sends him on high adventure within his own spirit, his own inner life. By prayer, by the deep inward gaze which opens the eyes of the soul to behold the presence of God, a person feels the steady rhythm of life itself. We seem to be behind the scene of all persons, things and events. The deep hunger to be understood is at last seen to be one and the same with the hunger to understand.

Howard Thurman, with thanks to inward/outward

I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. (Jesus, in John 14.6)

Sometimes, I think, we underestimate the metaphysical element of our faith. If all we had was a social Gospel, or an ethical handbook, we would be blessed, certainly, but our faith would have no meaning beyond this little life we live in. Annie Dillard once wrote:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

(Teaching a Stone to Talk, Harper & Row, 1982)

We are not “sufficiently sensible of conditions.” This is a life and death thing we have embarked upon; the God we worship is the unseen, unheard source of all that is, yet he gave himself to be born of a young Jewish girl in a country province of an occupied nation, far away from anything or anyone that mattered. What part of this do we not understand? Our faith is nothing if not a desperate measure, a mad leap into the glory of a love unthought of, a hope unthinkable no matter how long, or deep, the thought.

Mercy. If it were not for his mercy, the mercy of that inconceivable sacrifice of the Cross, we would have no hope at all. As it is, we do have hope—and faith, and love, limitless, unending. And the greatest of these is love.

Enmeshed…

To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives—the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections—that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for.

Let’s not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

This speaks to me very clearly at the moment, when God seems to be leading me step by step through the pathways that led me here, stopping every now and again to point out some little thing, some sudden glint of grace, or some still aching heartbreak that bridged some otherwise impassable divide between life and faith.

For nearly 25 years, now, I have known Romans 8.28 to be the defining verse of the Bible for me. There is so much pain, so much wrong in this broken and still beautiful world, and my life has been shadowed by both, and has caused both in its turn. Yet in all things God does work for the good of those who love him; and he has brought such peace, and such light, out of the darkest times, that I find myself more and more entangled in the purposes of this verse, and more and more dependent on the mercy it implies. The shadow of the Cross lies over it all.

As this odd journey goes on, my prayer draws down to this, too. I am so enmeshed in the the fallenness of the created world (I think this is what is meant by original sin) that, like everyone, every thing I do or think or say affects all creation for better or for worse. We are here, and nowhere else. We cannot ask for mercy for ourselves without asking for mercy on all that is made; our cry for justice is the cry of all the oppressed, now and since the beginning. This is the only way my prayer can work at all—perhaps it is the only way prayer ever works. It is how the Cross itself works, how its sacrifice is continually opened for us again in every Mass…

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

A caveat…

 

With thanks to http://www.jimnolansblog.com/isabella-bannerman-cartoons/

Freedom in solitude…

All human beings are alone. No other person will completely feel like we do, think like we do, act like we do. Each of us is unique, and our aloneness is the other side of our uniqueness. The question is whether we let our aloneness become loneliness or whether we allow it to lead us into solitude. Loneliness is painful; solitude is peaceful. Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community.

Letting our aloneness grow into solitude and not into loneliness is a lifelong struggle. It requires conscious choices about whom to be with, what to study, how to pray, and when to ask for counsel. But wise choices will help us to find the solitude where our hearts can grow in love.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Finding my own way between solitude and loneliness has been an interesting journey, these past few years. I am coming to realise just how important solitude is to me; and yet I often don’t use it as well as I should. Solitude, it seems to me, is a priceless gift, a thing one should not take for granted. Like all spiritual gifts, it is all to easy to waste…

So long as one is not lonely, there is an immense freedom in solitude. The heart expands, somehow, in this unaccustomed space, and thought becomes free and spacious too. Somehow I find myself able to think recklessly about, feel for, love, people against the mere thought of whom I’d have felt I had to defend myself had I not had this marvellous freedom.

Our Lord knew all about the power of solitude—it was why he “would withdraw to deserted places and pray.” (Luke 5.16) It seems to me that if we follow him, we must follow him here, as the disciples were often invited to do. (Mark 6.31)

Perhaps this is a very tiny reflection of the sort of thing that used to happen to the Desert Mothers and Fathers. Those who sought them out (at least the ones who sought them out for more than mere curiosity) found in them an extraordinary openness and love, and an ability to see and hear their visitors more clearly than anyone they met in the normal course of events in the city or wherever. Needless to say, my solitude, and my faithfulness to it, are insignificant compared with theirs; yet this freedom, this willingness, eagerness even, to be vulnerable, grows in me daily—and all the more as God sets me, in prayer, increasingly free from the past.

Come and see…

Often we want to be able to see into the future. We say, “How will next year be for me? Where will I be five or ten years from now?” There are no answers to these questions. Mostly we have just enough light to see the next step: what we have to do in the coming hour or the following day. The art of living is to enjoy what we can see and not complain about what remains in the dark. When we are able to take the next step with the trust that we will have enough light for the step that follows, we can walk through life with joy and be surprised at how far we go. Let’s rejoice in the little light we carry and not ask for the great beam that would take all shadows away.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

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Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. (Psalm 119.105)

I’m not entirely sure why I find this so moving. My whole life I’ve longed for a powerful headlight and a map and a compass, when all God provides – all he promised to provide – is an oil-lamp that casts enough light for the next step…

Somehow the next step is all we see, though. Our hearts are full enough the tears and glory of the present moment – or they should be – without trying to play chess openings with the future. But we forget that, and stay awake at night trying to work it out, consequence by consequence. God knows it doesn’t work…

God’s word “is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (Hebrews 4.12) We so easily forget: it is this which is to light our way, If this is our guide, if we will be content with this light, then Christ, who is the living Word, full of grace and truth, will take us by the hand as he took Andrew, saying, “Come and see…”

The bridge of prayer…

Prayer is the bridge between our conscious and unconscious lives. Often there is a large abyss between our thoughts, words, and actions, and the many images that emerge in our daydreams and night dreams. To pray is to connect these two sides of our lives by going to the place where God dwells. Prayer is “soul work” because our souls are those sacred centres where all is one and where God is with us in the most intimate way.

Thus, we must pray without ceasing so that we can become truly whole and holy.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Following on from yesterday’s post, I wonder how many others find, as I do, that the more they pray, the more they dream? Last summer I wrote:

The longer I go on in this life that is about prayer, the less I realise I know about it. As Rohr [says], 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.

Our dreams are rooted deep in a life we see little of in our waking hours; our prayer, I increasingly feel, is rooted there too. Certainly contemplative prayer draws on the sap that root lifts up from the dark soil of our human, and beyond human, connectedness. Each of us is the end-point of countless generations; still more, each of us is God-made, Spirit-breathed. The imprint of our making is on us, whether we will recognise it or not, and so is the imprint of our redemption: we are marked with the Cross. If this is what we are, how can we not be a part of each other, of all, ultimately, that is made, for “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” (John 1.3 NIV)?

In each of us the memory of our heart’s path is traced, often quite unconsciously. Everything that has moved us, grieved us, concerned us is there, waiting to be touched, woken. Associations will often do it, as Marcel Proust found when he tasted the madeleine he had dipped in his tea, but they produce a frail, surface recollection, quite unlike the deep and resonant representations of dreams.

Deepest of all, perhaps, is prayer. In prayer God is reaching out to us, far more than we are reaching for him, and he knows all; for in Christ all things hold together (Colossians 1.17). Paul also reminds us (Romans 8.27) that “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.”

What is happening here? I think that God is reaching down to these hidden, seemingly forgotten connections with the needs and pains and brokenness of others, and is retrieving our unspoken prayers in the silence of contemplation, or of sleep. This is an extraordinary, profound thing, and I think it is here that the distinction between dream and prayer becomes blurred. To be honest, there is much I simply don’t know about these shadowed paths of prayer, but I think that possibly, if we (as is often attested to in the Orthodox tradition) find ourselves praying the Prayer as we go to sleep, it will run quietly on in some part of our mind even in the deepest sleep, and our hearts, remaining attuned to God in Christ Jesus, will be open to that gentle touch that lifts our memories to prayer. And who is to say that our dreams may not echo that divine lifting, that holy, unthought-of participation in the work of redemption that goes on, even as the Cross goes on, in every generation till our Lord’s return.

Stella Maris…

Our minds are always active. We analyse, reflect, daydream, or dream. There is not a moment during the day or night when we are not thinking. You might say our thinking is “unceasing.” Sometimes we wish that we could stop thinking for a while; that would save us from many worries, guilt feelings, and fears. Our ability to think is our greatest gift, but it is also the source of our greatest pain. Do we have to become victims of our unceasing thoughts? No, we can convert our unceasing thinking into unceasing prayer by making our inner monologue into a continuing dialogue with our God, who is the source of all love.

Let’s break out of our isolation and realize that Someone who dwells in the centre of our beings wants to listen with love to all that occupies and preoccupies our minds.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

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Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

1 Thessalonians 5.16-18

There is so much we cannot know by thinking, including some of the most fundamental questions regarding “life, the universe and everything…” – how then can we know how or what to pray for everyone of whose pain or need we come to hear. How can we possibly “pray without ceasing” as Paul recommends?

I so often find myself adrift in strange seas these days, my hair and beard crusted with the salt of old tears, that my heart fills up with the longing for God, for his mercy and his judgement, before I am even aware of what is going on. As I do gradually become aware, all I really know are the words of the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…” Was I praying the Prayer all along? Was it praying me? I don’t know. But the shadow of the Cross lies over it all, and the figure of our Blessed Lady seems to draw alongside me in the twilight air. She is, after all, Stella Maris, the Sea Star…

Epiphany!

The Epiphany is an ancient Christian feast day and is significant in a number of ways. In the East, where it originated, the Epiphany celebrates the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist in the River Jordan. It also celebrates Jesus' birth.

The Western Church began celebrating the Epiphany in the 4th century where it was, and still is, associated with the visit of the magi (wise men) to the infant Jesus when God revealed himself to the world through the incarnation of Jesus. According to Matthew 2:11 they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

BBC – Religions

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A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter…

TS Eliot, ‘The Journey of the Magi’

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Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy is Lord of all creation?
Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy would one day rule the nations?
Did you know
that your Baby Boy is heaven's perfect Lamb?
The sleeping Child you're holding is the Great, I Am…

Mark Lowry & Buddy Greene, ‘Mary Did You Know?’

In Epiphany we begin to glimpse who this Baby is; we start to realise that the Angel of the Annunciation was speaking no less than the sober truth when he said, “And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” (Luke 1.31-33)

Lord God, open our eyes to see your Son as he truly is, Lord of all, Saviour of the world and all creation (Romans 8.21), your Name and your Word who is exalted above all things (Psalm 138.2)…

Broken bread…

There is a great difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control, and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control over its development, and to make it available in large quantities. Success brings many rewards and often fame. Fruits, however, come from weakness and vulnerability. And fruits are unique. A child is the fruit conceived in vulnerability, community is the fruit born through shared brokenness, and intimacy is the fruit that grows through touching one another's wounds. Let’s remind one another that what brings us true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness…

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

It seems to me that this distinction lies at the heart of much that grieves us in our society. There is a deep longing in the heart of each of us for fruitfulness, a longing to really make a difference, to be able to go to our rest feeling that we have truly made a difference. But since we don’t understand about fruitfulness, since society has lied to us about success since our school days, we imagine that that is what we are longing for; and so we strive ever harder to be successful. We may very well achieve success, too, but we find that it is hollow and barren, a dry husk where we had anticipated something very different.

I wonder if this deep disappointment that is inherent in all success may not be the reason why so many people who achieve success seem to go off the rails, falling victim to drink, drugs, misplaced sex, even suicide? For however hard they try, however much success they achieve in their chosen field, be it rock music, football, or finance, they will never experience that fruitfulness for which their hearts long.

This is a spiritual thing. Only God could have put this longing for fruitfulness in our hearts, since this is one of the ways in which we are made in his image. Our strength is not in success, achievement, domination; our strength is that which is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12.9) and our wounds, like Christ’s, are the place of our healing and the heart of our love. Like him (Philippians 3.10), in our little way, we are broken; it is broken bread which feeds, and goes on feeding, each others’ broken hearts, and in so doing, mends our own…

A New Year…

Lord, thank you for the gift of time. Thank you for the great geological ages, through which you shaped this beautiful world. Thank you for the generations of people who have lived and worked here; walked, dreamed and loved here.

Thank you, Lord, for this last year we have lived, for all that we have seen and heard and felt, whether they have seemed good to us or bad, for “we know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8.28)

Bless us, dear Lord, in this New Year. Teach us to use well the time you give us to serve you, to serve each other, in love and grace all this coming year…

Who is there to trust?

Life is unpredictable. We can be happy one day and sad the next, healthy one day and sick the next, rich one day and poor the next, alive one day and dead the next. So who is there to hold on to? Who is there to feel secure with? Who is there to trust at all times?

Only Jesus, the Christ. He is our Lord, our shepherd, our rock, our stronghold, our refuge, our brother, our guide, and our friend. He came from God to be with us. He died for us, he was raised from the dead to open for us the way to God, and he is seated at God's right hand to welcome us home. With Paul, we must be certain that “neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nothing already in existence and nothing still to come, nor any power, nor the heights nor the depths, nor any created thing whatever, will be able to come between us and the love of God, known to us in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

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

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude. (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux), p.29

The Jesus Prayer is for me the most perfect, tiny encapsulation of this. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…” In those words lie all the trust, all the security, of faith itself.

Of course we won’t always feel like that. The worms of doubt and the sinkholes of despair will always be there waiting. Years of learned responses, years of self-denigration, will claim the day as their own. That’s what is so good about a prayer like the Jesus Prayer. Praying in the Spirit is all very well, but the enemy of our souls can so easily set up impenetrable barricades in our hearts before we can react, or even notice. But a prayer that is so simple, that has been repeated formally and informally day after day, month after month, doesn’t need consciousness of the Spirit’s presence. We can say those words however dry, however broken we are, however meaningless they seem.

They are not meaningless. This is not some pattern of nonsense syllables: this is a prayer to the Son of the living God, and he will answer. He will. Nothing else could have brought me through some of the darkest days of the last ten years or so.

For all that I’ve written so often here about the intercessory and contemplative aspects of the Jesus Prayer, we mustn’t be too high-minded to remember its sheer usefulness as a lifebelt. But, and it is perhaps a big but, it won’t be as much use as it should be if we merely keep it on a shelf for emergencies. The Jesus Prayer is a way of life, a practice as demanding in itself of faithfulness and mindfulness as any path of Christian prayer. Only when it becomes a habit as close as one’s own heartbeat can it open the door of our broken heart to the Lord who stands at the door and knocks, whether we know it or not…

St John, Apostle and Evangelist

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.He was in the beginning with God.All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it… And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

(John 1.1-5; 14)

Today we celebrate the feast of St John, Apostle and Evangelist. The Lectionary reading today focus on his letters—but it is the sheer, staggering metaphysics of his Gospel prologue that gets me every time. The mere existence of anything, let alone our ability to perceive it, relate to it, be at all in ourselves, sometimes gives me attacks of vertigo just thinking about it.

I remember, when it was first beginning to dawn on me that there might be something in the Christian faith after all, reading this passage for the first time in a modern translation, and thinking, “Why does no-one teach this at school? This changes everything!” It answered at a stroke all those aching questions that kept me awake in the early hours: at last all the wonderings and speculations and fretful study and inadvisable experiments were superseded by 96 words that were as solid and true as a steel bolt… In a sense, the rest of my life has been an outworking of that moment.

I didn’t then read the opening of John’s first Letter (if letter is what it was supposed to be) but after the immediacy of his Gospel, which I read right through after that experience with the prologue I somehow knew what he meant. If what he had experienced with Christ those three years in Judea and Samaria meant anything, they meant just what he said, and that meant there was no going back, no matter how I struggled:

We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us—we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true;but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

(1 John 1.1-10)

Christmas night…

Sometimes people assume that ‘good’ Christians have no doubts, never ask questions, never experience a sense of bewilderment in the face of cruelty or disaster. That is demonstrably untrue. To be a Christian is surely to live with uncertainty, relying on the gift of faith to bridge the gap between our understanding and our questioning…the God we seek is not a God afar off, but God-with-us, one who has shared our humanity and calls us to share in his divinity…

There in a nutshell is what Christmas is about. In his compassion and love, God wills to take our human flesh and blood and redeem us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. Our salvation is very near. It began with Mary’s generous-hearted consent to be the Mother of God. It will take physical shape with the birth of Jesus on Christmas night. It will be completed only when all are one with Him in the Kingdom. Truly, this is ‘a mystery hidden from long ages, a secret into which even angels long to look!

from Digitalnun’s iBenedictines blog

Each Christmas might be our last on earth. There is such a glorious fragility about this season, when we celebrate the birth of a tiny, vulnerable baby—who just happened to be the Son of God—to a young Jewish girl far from home in the middle of occupied territory, Her faith, the loyalty of her husband Joseph, the kindness of strangers, opened the door to eternity in the person of that little new-born lad.

Christmas night is holy. Of all nights of the year there truly is an uncanny glory about this one. This is no myth, no fairy-tale to hold back the dark. This is God, touching all that he has made with the most tender love, the most glorious power of mercy—with his saving grace made Mary’s Son…

O Emmanuel

O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster,
exspectatio Gentium, et Salvator earum:
veni ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster.

O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
Come to save us, O Lord our God.

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O Virgo virginum, quomodo fiet istud?
Quia nec primam similem visa es nec habere sequentem.
Filiae Jerusalem, quid me admiramini?
Divinum est mysterium hoc quod cernitis.

O Virgin of virgins, how shall this be?
For neither before you was any like you, nor shall there be after.
Daughters of Jerusalem, why marvel at me?
The thing which you behold is a divine mystery.

(Alternative Antiphon in English Medieval usage, up to and including the New English Hymnal)

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Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. (Isaiah 7.14)

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O come, Lord Jesus, and heal what is so broken. Restore the places long desolate; make young again the broken hearts. What we cannot understand, make clear. Where there is no justice, let your judgement bring us mercy.

O Rex Gentium

O Rex Gentium, et desideratus earum,
lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum:
veni, et salva hominem,
quem de limo formasti.

O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
Come and save the human race,
which you fashioned from clay.

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Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. (Isaiah 7.14)

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I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
              Is immortal diamond.

('That Nature is...' Gerard Manley Hopkins)

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Don't say goodbye (I know you can save us)
Don't wave goodbye (and nothing can break us)
Don't say goodbye (I know you can save us)
You can bring us back again
You can bring us back again

('Save Us', Feeder)

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(2008’s post, slightly reheated)

Daring to speak?

The experience of the fullness of time, during which God is so present, so real, so tangibly near that we can hardly believe that everyone does not see God as we do, is given to us to deepen our lives of prayer and strengthen our lives of ministry. Having experienced God in the fullness of time, we have a lifelong desire to be with God and to proclaim to others the God we experienced.

Peter, years after the death of Jesus, claims his Mount Tabor experience as the source for his witness. He says: “When we told you about the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, we were not slavishly repeating cleverly invented myths; no, we had seen his majesty with our own eyes ... when we were with him on the holy mountain” (2 Peter 1:16-18). Seeing God in the most intimate moments of our lives is seeing God for others.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I think this may be one of the most valuable things we can do as Christians, both for those who don’t know Christ, and for those of our sisters and brothers who find themselves astray in shadowed places, and wondering if their faith was just a story they were telling themselves, long ago…

It’s hard, though, sometimes to convey the immediacy of encountering God without seeming to “boast”, as Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 11 & 12. I don’t know what the answer to this is; if St Paul tied himself up in knots about it, I can’t imagine what I could do. Still, sometimes the only thing that matters is the eye-witness account, the person who can stand up and say, “I was there: I saw that…”

We are in a season of miracle; angels threaded the skies over Bethlehem those 2,000-odd years ago, and we must not be surprised to meet them even now. God has not ceased to speak with humankind, even if not many listen. (Did they then?) We must dare to speak, perhaps (even though we feel as foolish as our brother Paul felt) of things that so far beyond our understanding that our words fall like bright flecks of ice, and are lost in “snow on snow, in the bleak midwinter, long ago…” Perhaps if we try, we shall find the words are given to us, and the Holy Spirit will speak what needs to be said… I don’t know. I am way out of my depth…

O Oriens

O Oriens,
splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae:
veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Morning Star,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

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Pre-industrial people were far more connected to the natural cosmos and seasons than we are today, and were very aware that today is the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, and not really the death of the sun—but its rebirth! The liturgical year was easily connected to the seasons of nature. The Latin word was Oriens, also translated “The Dayspring” (see Luke 1.78), and used as an image of Jesus, the Rising Son/Sun who is always leading us into the future horizons of time and history.

[The somewhat artificial date for Jesus' birthday was chosen to be December 25, because it was not until a few days after this that early astronomers could assess the rebirth of the sun, and so this became the Roman celebration of the birth of the sun and for Christians—Jesus' birth day!]

So go outside on this shortest day of the year (or longest if you live in Australia, New Zealand, Bangalore, or Singapore!), and know that whatever it appears to be, it is about to change! But who would suspect? The great change is totally hidden from us because we are still inside of it and too close to it.

Richard Rohr, December 2011

The people who walked in darkness
   have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness—
   on them light has shined.

(Isaiah 9.2 )

…for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.

(Malachi 4.2)

We cannot know what God is doing—his ways are not our ways, and his paths are beyond understanding. But God is faithful and just, slow to anger and full of compassion and steadfast love. If only we would trust him!

O Clavis David

O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel;
qui aperis, et nemo claudit;
claudis, et nemo aperit:
veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris,
sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;
you open and no one can shut;
you shut and no one can open:
Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,
those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

---

I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David;
he shall open, and no one shall shut;
he shall shut, and no one shall open.

(Isaiah 22.22)

His authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.
He will establish and uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time onwards and for evermore.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.

(Isaiah 9.7)

I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness,
I have taken you by the hand and kept you;
I have given you as a covenant to the people,
a light to the nations,
to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
from the prison those who sit in darkness.

(Isaiah 42.6-7)

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me…he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.

(Isaiah 61:1)

Come, Lord Jesus, Holy and Anointed One, and lead us out from darkness into your everlasting light…

O Radix Jesse

O Radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum,
super quem continebunt reges os suum,
quem Gentes deprecabuntur:
veni ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare.

O Root of Jesse, who stands a sign among the peoples;
before you kings will shut their mouths,
to you the nations will fall rapt in prayer:
Come and deliver us, and delay no more.

---

Jesus is the fulfilment of the prophecies of Isaiah (11.1,10) and Micah (5.1), the one who was to come, as Paul explains in Romans 15.12. But he is the one who is still to come, to bring healing and restoration to all of Creation – which is why we still pray, "Come and deliver us, and delay no more."

All that we are cries out for healing, justice, restoration, and only in Christ are these things finally possible. Advent draws down to this longing, this cry.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus, come!

Hail, space for the uncontained God!

(from the Akathistos Hymn, Greece, VIc)
We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always
the tall lily.
Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.
But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.
The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.
God waited.
She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.
____________________________
Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.
More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.
______________________________
She had been a child who played, ate, slept
like any other child – but unlike others,
wept only for pity, laughed
in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence
fused in her, indivisible.
Called to a destiny more momentous
than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,
only asked
a simple, 'How can this be?'
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
perceiving instantly
the astounding ministry she was offered:
to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power –
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.
Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love –
but who was God.
This was the minute no one speaks of,
when she could still refuse.
A breath unbreathed,
Spirit,
suspended,
waiting.
____________________________
She did not cry, "I cannot, I am not worthy,"
nor "I have not the strength."
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light,
the lily glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings.
Consent,
courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.

Denise Levertov, with grateful thanks to Catholic Ireland

O Adonai

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,
qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,
et ei in Sina legem dedisti:
veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.

O Lord and ruler of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

---

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
and with fear and trembling stand;
ponder nothing earthly minded,
for with blessing in his hand
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
our full homage to demand.

King of kings, yet born of Mary,
as of old on earth he stood,
Lord of lords in human vesture,
in the Body and the Blood
he will give to all the faithful
his own self for heavenly food.

Rank on rank the host of heaven
spreads its vanguard on the way,
as the Light of Light descendeth
from the realms of endless day,
that the powers of hell may vanish
as the darkness clears away.

At his feet the six-winged seraph;
cherubim with sleepless eye,
veil their faces to the Presence,
as with ceaseless voice they cry,
”Alleluia, alleluia!
Alleluia, Lord Most High!”

Words: Liturgy of Saint James (fifth century);
trans. Gerald Moultrie (1829-1885), 1864

Music: Picardy (French carol as in The English Hymnal, 1906)

O Sapientia

Starting in the first millennium of Christianity, there was a build-up to the feast of Christmas. Each day an antiphon was sung dramatically at Vespers (sundown prayer) presenting central and alluring metaphors for the Incarnation of the Eternal Christ. (Remember that the Jewish tradition had all feasts begin at sundown on the previous day. Religious feasts were originally observed sundown to sundown. They transitioned to midnight to midnight with the invention of the clock.)

In these O Antiphons, when read backwards in the monastic illustrated Psalters, the opening letters of each day spelled across the page ERO CRAS, or “Tomorrow I will be.” It was an ancient form of very effective religious theatre and presentation.

Today, December 17, begins with the letter S for sapientia. Wisdom—sophia in Greek, sapientia in Latin, sabiduria in Spanish—was the feminine metaphor for the Eternal Divine, as found especially in the books of Proverbs and Wisdom. One might partner or compare Sophia with Logos, which is the masculine metaphor for the Divine. It is interesting that Logos was used in John's Gospel (1.9-14) and became the preferred tradition, but Sophia was seldom used outside of the monasteries. On December 17 we invoke the feminine image of God as Holy Wisdom.

Richard Rohr, December 2011

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,
attingens a fine usque ad finem,
fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia:
veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other,
mightily and sweetly ordering all things:
Come to teach us the way of prudence.

The sun is gilding Swanage this early afternoon with peace and beauty. It is easy to remember these words today, how Wisdom “mightily and sweetly order[s] all things.” One day, it will be so forever, and “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well…”

The Peaceable Kingdom…

When we think of oceans and mountains, forests and deserts, trees, plants and animals, the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the galaxies, as God's creation, waiting eagerly to be “brought into the same glorious freedom as the children of God” (Roman 8:21), we can only stand in awe of God's majesty and God's all- embracing plan of salvation. It is not just we, human beings, who wait for salvation in the midst of our suffering; all of creation groans and moans with us longing to reach its full freedom.

In this way we are indeed brothers and sisters not only of all other men and women in the world but also of all that surrounds us. Yes, we have to love the fields full of wheat, the snow-capped mountains, the roaring seas, the wild and tame animals, the huge redwoods, and the little daisies. Everything in creation belongs, with us, to the large family of God…

All of creation belongs together in the arms of its Creator. The final vision is that not only will all men and women recognise that they are brothers and sisters called to live in unity but all members of God's creation will come together in complete harmony. Jesus the Christ came to realise that vision. Long before he was born, the prophet Isaiah saw it:

The wolf will live with the lamb,
the panther lie down with the kid,
calf, lion and fat-stock beast together,
with a little boy to lead them.
The cow and the bear will graze,
their young will lie down together.
The lion will eat hay like the ox.
The infant will play over the den of the adder;
the baby will put his hand into the viper's lair.
No hurt, no harm will be done
on all my holy mountain,
for the country will be full of knowledge of Yahweh
as the waters cover the sea.

(Isaiah 11:6-9)

We must keep this vision alive…

Long before Jesus was born the prophet Isaiah had a vision of Christ’s great unifying work of salvation. Many years after Jesus died, John, the beloved disciple, had another but similar vision: He saw a new heaven and a new earth. All of creation had been transformed, dressed with immortality to be the perfect bride of Christ. In John’s vision the risen Christ speaks from his throne, saying: “Look, I am making the whole of creation new. …. Look, here God lives among human beings. He will make his home among them; they will be his people, and he will be their God, God-with-them. He will wipe away all tears from their eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness or pain. The world of the past has gone” (Revelation 21:5; 21:3-4).

Both Isaiah and John open our eyes to the all-inclusive nature of Christ’s saving work…

The marvellous vision of the peaceable Kingdom, in which all violence has been overcome and all men, women, and children live in loving unity with nature, calls for its realisation in our day-to-day lives. Instead of being an escapist dream, it challenges us to anticipate what it promises. Every time we forgive our neighbour, every time we make a child smile, every time we show compassion to a suffering person, every time we arrange a bouquet of flowers, offer care to tame or wild animals, prevent pollution, create beauty in our homes and gardens, and work for peace and justice among peoples and nations we are making the vision come true.

We must remind one another constantly of the vision. Whenever it comes alive in us we will find new energy to live it out, right where we are. Instead of making us escape real life, this beautiful vision gets us involved.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

We are all together in this now, we followers of Christ. This is the judgement we await at Advent, a judgement of mercy, of endless grace.

We feel so helpless when we look at the suffering in the world, the misunderstandings, the betrayals, the tragic confusions behind each suicide, the cruelty and rejection faced by those who love and trust, the small, the weak, the dependent—children, animals, the poor.

Nouwen’s words here remind us that there is always something we can do, small as it may seem to us. It is love that matters. “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” (1 John 4.16) However poor, however baffled, we can love. This very emptiness, this helplessness we feel may be our greatest asset in the economy of Christ, who said himself that, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…”

Multitudes of obligations?

Much of our acceptance of multitudes of obligations is due to our inability to say No. We calculated that the task had to be done, and we saw no one ready to undertake it. We calculated the need, and then calculated our time, and decided maybe we could squeeze it in somewhere. But the decision was a heady decision, not made within the sanctuary of the soul.

A Testament of Devotion by Thomas R Kelly, with thanks to inward/outward

So much of our Christian life, not to mention elsewhere, is taken up with this “acceptance of multitudes of obligations” that we assume that this is the natural, right and inevitable way to be a Christian. Well, I all too often find myself making that assumption, anyway. It is so hard to turn around, and allow God to look at the whole thing from within us. But it was Jesus himself who said, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

Dear Mary of Bethany, I think she must have been a particular favourite of Jesus’. Her devotion, her single-mindedness, her willingness to step right outside her culture, her final and absolute faithfulness—it isn’t hard to see why she would have a particular place among his followers. Whether or not you accept the Catholic identification of her with Mary Magdalene, Mary is the woman of tears (John 11.33), the one who saw, where her brothers had so clearly failed to see, the Cross standing directly across the path of her Lord (John 12.1-8), and anointed him for that journey, and as Matthew and Mark (26.13; 14.9) record, he recognised her for it. “Truly I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

Truly, there is need of only one thing. Mary got it right where her sister, and most of us, fail. No wonder we pray, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…”

The life that is most truly and wholly ours…

The contemplative finds God not in the embrace of “pure love” alone but in the prophetic ardour of response to the “Word of the Lord”: not in love considered as essential good but in love that breaks through into the world of sinful men in the fire of judgment and of mercy. The contemplative must see love not only as the highest and purest experience of the human heart transformed by grace, but as God's unfailing fidelity to unfaithful man…

The contemplative life will therefore need to be understood... in terms of living experience and witness...

Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 1998) p.133

I think this cannot be emphasised strongly enough. We need to understand that our life of prayer, especially if we are called to the contemplative life, is not a solipsistic, “self-actualising” activity, or some kind of relaxation technique aimed at producing a pleasant, stress-free state of mind, still less a quest for psychedelic experience. The contemplative vocation is a call to battle, a call to prophetic witness, and to a life lived in the shadow of the Cross.

We cannot all be, like Thomas Merton, widely published and influential in and beyond the religious life. We are not all called to martyrdom like Maximilian Kolbe or Charles de Foucauld. God does not call us to imitate others, except possibly his Son or his blessed Mother, he calls us to the life that is most truly and wholly ours. We may be surprised, when we ourselves arrive at the throne of grace, to discover that some of the most highly blessed of the saints in glory are those who were most easily overlooked in their life on earth. It is enough to serve in the place in which God has placed us, married or single, in work or out of work, in sickness or in health, in a village church or in community, as a humble if prayerful servant like Brother Lawrence or in the life of a Doctor of the Church.

God’s call to us is a call of love; to love someone is to desire most passionately all that is good for them, all that leads them home to love Itself. Even for us humans the purest love is like that—what must God’s love for us be like? Perhaps we can see, if we live our lives in the light of the Cross…

One perfect vessel…

The Annunciation story (Luke 1.26-38) is the crescendo point to scripture’s theme of total grace and gift. Did you ever notice that Mary does not say she’s “not worthy”? She only asks for clarification: “How can this happen? I am a virgin” (Luke 1.34). She never asks if, whether, or why!

That is quite extraordinary and reveals her egolessness. Mary becomes the archetype of perfect receptivity. It takes the entire Bible to work up to one perfect vessel that knows how to say an unquestioning yes to an utterly free gift.

Richard Rohr, from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, pp. 31-32

Rohr here puts his finger on what I have felt about our Lady ever since I’ve been a Christian. In one sense she appears to be an ordinary, humble Jewish girl, engaged to a village craftsman; yet she is as Rohr says, “one perfect vessel that knows how to say an unquestioning yes to an utterly free gift.”

Paradox. God’s dealings with his creation seem to be wrapped in paradox; he through whom all things were made came to be born of a virgin, a helpless baby at the very hinge of history…

Amen. Even so, come., Lord Jesus

Maranatha!

"Come, Lord Jesus" is a leap into the kind of freedom and surrender that is rightly called the virtue of hope. The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves.

We are able to trust that the Lord will come again, just as Jesus has come into our past, into our private dilemmas, and into our suffering world. Our Christian past then becomes our Christian prologue, and "Come, Lord Jesus" is not a cry of desperation but an assured shout of cosmic hope!

Adapted from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr, p. 5

I think this may be one of the longest lessons to learn in this life of prayer. To relinquish the longing for closure, resolution, satisfaction is a fierce kind of poverty; Lady Poverty can be a passionate, and unexpected, lover!