Tuesday in Holy Week

[Holy Week] turns upside down our notions of what real power is and how it is held. It turns upside down our notions of how life-giving change is brought about and the role suffering plays in bringing about that life-giving change... 

The king who rides a donkey, not a war horse, turns our notions about how to bring about peace upside down. Jesus knew the danger he was in and offered himself to us as a pattern for living in dangerous times, personally and politically. We choose who to follow and the choice to follow Jesus is an inner decision to choose life. Jesus didn't show us that he could wield power over life and death, but that in the face of death and destruction it is possible to choose life In the occupied territory of our world, with pain and hatred, we can live differently, live liberated. 

This journey has to be taken for oneself and on a donkey, at peace with oneself and others. Inner peace can bring about external peace, but not force it. There will be times when it feels successful, as it did for Jesus and his followers on Palm Sunday, and times when there is danger and humiliation. Both are to be encountered on the way of peace. 

Justine Allain-Chapman, The Resilient Disciple: A Lenten Journey from Adversity to Maturity

This is a profound insight. The changes so many of us long for, especially in a world threatened by climate change, extremism, and the dangerous posturing of political leaders, will not be brought about by violent protest, vandalism, and aggressive rhetoric. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Corrie and Betsie ten Boom and Martin Niemöller in Nazi Germany, Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela in apartheid-era South Africa, were not failures because of their imprisonment, mistreatment and in some cases death at the hands of despotic regimes. Jesus was not messing about when he told his disciples, "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it." (Matthew 16.24-25)

In Freelance Christianity: Philosophy, Faith, and the Real World, Vance G Morgan writes:

In its Latin roots, to "convert" means to "turn around," but this turning is more often like a sunflower following the sun in its slow course across the sky than a dynamic and once for all event... a steady rain, even a gentle drizzle, is better for my plants and grass than an inch-and-a-half-hour downpour. Beneath the layers of violence, hatred, ignorance and despair, something holy is lurking. Let the gentle drizzle and drops upon the heart release it.

St Seraphim of Sarov, a forest hermit and contemplative in 18th century Russia, famously advised his visitors, "Acquire a peaceful spirit, and around you thousands will be saved." The practice of the Jesus Prayer, indeed of any form of contemplative prayer, is precisely like Vance Morgan's gentle drizzle. This quiet repetition may accomplish, by the grace and mercy of Christ, more than we can imagine.

As Alfred Lord Tennyson once wrote:

More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of…
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God… 

Morte d’Arthur

Monday in Holy Week

I have never much liked the passage from the general confession in the Book of Common Prayer, "We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us."

The God I love is not a martinet filled with anger, insecurity and hubris; he is love, and his humility is so great that he took up our own frail flesh and died a most humiliating and agonising death that we might live. The Prayer Book itself in fact realises this, and addresses God as "the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy." God loves our love, which, in its purest form, is simply a reflection of his, as the moon's light is of sunlight. But we misdirect the clear mirror our hearts were made to be. We miss the mark (the literal meaning of the Greek word for sin, hamartia) and "We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him [the suffering Servant] the iniquity of us all." (Isaiah 53.6)

Simon Barrington-Ward writes:

Pastor Daenstedt [Martin Niemöller's successor at the Dahlem Dorfkirkche in Berlin] expounded the real nature of the relationship with the eternal divine spirit into which, in the person of Jesus Christ, we had all been brought. We were studying 2 Corinthians 5, and the mysterious saying in verse 21, 'For our sake God made him [Christ] to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.' When we were all puzzled by this, Daenstedt exclaimed, with genuine surprise in his voice, 'But this is the heart of our whole life as Christians! It is saying that in the man Jesus Christ, God entered, as nowhere else, into the depths of our human tragedy, our utter frustration, and brokenness. In Jesus Christ also, we could enter into our true destiny, our freedom, our fulfilment, our ultimate joy, our final transformation, beyond death, to be made part of the new creation to come. This is "der süsse Austausch," the "sweet exchange."'

...I saw that our whole life could eventually come to be 'hidden with Christ in God' (Colossians 3.3) and that this was also our ultimate goal. I later learnt the Greeks were to call it theosis, or deification, that is to say, being united by the Spirit through the Son with the Father and so with the triune God, making us 'partakers of the divine nature' (2 Peter 1.4) so that in the transformed life to come the whole creation could be drawn on, by the Holy Spirit, through God's entering into our human life in the person of Christ - the Logos or 'Word' of God - into the very being of God.

"Hidden with Christ in God" - that's what lies at the core of my own experience of this. To be present, really present, to God's love is to be hidden (apparently absent, perhaps) from the world of getting and spending, pride and fear. We, and our little loves, disappear in that great love as the moon's mirror disappears in the blaze of the noonday sun.

Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday is a curious celebration. The heart longs for stillness, waiting for those last days - or mine does - and yet this beginning of Holy Week is full of re-enactment, acclamation, procession, that sit oddly, almost, before the long Gospel account of the crucifixion of our Lord. The Liturgy of the Palms precedes the Liturgy of the Passion, with this year the long reading from Luke's Gospel (22.14-23.56); and yet there is still most of a long week to go before Good Friday.

The silence is there, of course, beneath the shouting and the waving of palms, beneath the uncanny prophecy of Isaiah chapter 50 and Paul's hymn from Philippians 2, beneath the accelerating pain of the Passion narrative itself, just as the silence of our own death lies beneath all the laughter and weeping of our own lives here on earth. Good Friday will come, and the stillness of the tomb before that unimaginable morning, and undreamt glory...

Treasures in hidden places

At the center of reality is a deep, radical, painful, costly fissure that will, soon or later, break every self-arranged pattern of well-being... It cannot be helped, and it cannot be avoided... 

This insistence on the reality of brokenness flies in the face of the Enlightenment practice of denial. Enlightenment rationality, in its popular, uncriticized form, teaches that with enough reason and resources brokenness can be avoided. And so Enlightenment rationality, in its frenzied commercial advertising, hucksters the good of denial and avoidance: denial of headaches and perspiration and loneliness, impotence and poverty and shame, embarrassment and, finally, death. In such ideology there are no genuinely broken people. When brokenness intrudes into such an assembly of denial, as surely it must, it comes as failure, stupidity, incompetence, and guilt. The church, so wrapped in the narrative of denial, tends to collude in this. When denial is transposed into guilt - into personal failure - the system of denial remains intact and uncriticized, in the way Job's friends defended the system. 

The outcome for the isolated failure is that there can be no healing, for there has not been enough candor to permit it. In the end, such denial is not only a denial of certain specifics - it is the rejection of the entire drama of brokenness and healing, the denial that there is an incommensurate Power and Agent who comes in pathos into the brokenness, and who by coming there makes the brokenness a place of possibility. 

Walter Brueggemann, An Unsettling God: The Heart of the Hebrew Bible

*** 

Pain, struggle and suffering are an ordinary part of the human life cycle. The spiritual writer and Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, in his book Falling Upward: A spirituality for the two halves of life, suggests that there is a key time of suffering out of which we are transformed and change the direction of our lives. In the important process of building our life, establishing our identity, home and relationships, we journey through the first half of life. However, the journey to strive successfully is followed by a second journey, often in midlife, because some experience of falling down, brokenness or failure has us at a crisis point or crossroads. This time is the foundation for spiritual growth, a falling upwards where loss of control broadens our horizons and deepens our lives. 

Justine Allain-Chapman, The Resilient Disciple: A Lenten Journey from Adversity to Maturity 

The life of David in the Old Testament - poet, king, composer, sinner - was marked by repeated personal disasters, repeated brokenness, and yet God found him "a man after my own heart" (Acts 13.22) and Jesus himself acknowledged him as his forebear (Matthew 22.41ff).

Falling, brokenness, whether as a result of one's own sin, as David's with Bathsheba, for instance, or, like Job's, as a result of misfortune or the ill-will of another, is not the end, or the point, of life in Christ, but it may well be essential to it. We cannot get to Easter morning except by way of Good Friday, and we cannot get there except by way of Ash Wednesday. "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." (John 12.24)

Somehow, as Julian of Norwich suggested, sin may even be necessary for "all to be well". Certainly the psalmist carries this sense into Psalm 119.67: "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word." Time and again I have found its reflection in my own life, when out of some of the bleakest times God has brought blessing, even "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)

The mercy of Christ is without end, as though his blood were to fill a communion cup, and all the communicant could see, gazing down, was a crystal bottomless pool, the infinity of grace.

The lamp of the Lord

Margaret Silf, writing in The Bible Reading Fellowship's Lent with New Daylight, says (reflecting on Mark 4.26-29),

To sow a seed, all that is needed is to tear open the seed packet and empty the contents into the ground. It would not occur to us to plant the seed packet along with the seed. The seed doesn't need any instructions about how and where it should be sown, how tall it will become, or what it will look like when it blooms. 

Contemplative prayer is a bit like that. It takes us into the depths of our being, where God is indwelling. We place ourselves into that stillness. The rest can be safely left to God. Our prayer doesn't need to give God any instructions as to how it should be answered. It doesn't need to include a wish list for all the blooms that we want our seed to produce... 

Time spent with God in stillness will sprout and grow in ways we do not understand and cannot necessarily see. It will flourish in its own way, and in its own time, without any help. We don't have to give it any instructions, nor should we dig it up to see how it is growing...

This makes so much sense in the context of my own experience in prayer. The call I feel to silence and contemplation, to the simple repetition of the Jesus Prayer as both shield and invocation, only deepens. It is a way of unknowing. Jennifer Kavanagh writes:

Faith is not about certainty, but about trust… Not knowing is not the same as doubt (though they may co-exist). We may not know what, how or why, but our not knowing may co-exist with a firm knowledge that! And where does that knowledge come from? It comes from a different kind of knowing. A knowing that comes from experience.

The discipline of Lent, is not only a time for reexamination and spiritual stocktaking, as it were, but more than this, a heart-following of the way of the Cross. It seems to lead me to find myself again following a path not of some dramatic exterior solitude or renunciation, but an inner eremitism. And this in itself has some features of a little model of the way of the Cross.

Anyone taking the eremitic vocation seriously is bound to feel helpless, quite impotent, in fact. Hermits are determined to help, to make a positive difference, but how? What can one person do, hidden and alone? Sometimes, solitaries may feel blameworthy because they live lives which shelter them from much of the suffering that so harshly mars the existence of their brothers and sisters. Love and compassion well up in them... but is it enough? What should one do and how? This is where passionate intercessory prayer and supplication spontaneously arises. The challenge is to live a life given over to praying for others while accepting that one will seldom, if ever, see any results. One one will be able to ascertain how, or even if, their devoted prayers are efficacious for others. It is a terrible kind of poverty - to live dedicated to helping others, yet never know what good one may be doing. All that hermits can do is hope that they are doing no harm. Believers leave all results to the mercy of their God. Others rely on the interconnectedness of all humanity, trusting that what affects one, affects all. This is a form of intercession expressed less by words than by a way of life. A Camaldolese monk once wrote: "Prayer is not only speaking to God on behalf of humanity, it is also 'paying' for humanity." Suffering is part of the hermit's vocation. One of the most acute forms is to never know whether one's chosen lifestyle is worthwhile or has any value for others. Hermits enter into the darkness, the dusky cloud of unknowing, and walk without any light beyond that which is in their own hearts. Often, unbeknownst even to themselves, they have become beacons for others. 

Karen Karper Fredette and Paul A. Fredette, Consider the Ravens: On Contemporary Hermit Life

Somehow though the call to this kind of giving up, not of chocolate or of social media, but of the right to know - "All our steps are ordered by the Lord, how then can we understand our own ways?" (Proverbs 20.24) - is more than simple obscurity. What the Fredettes write applies to the contemplative life however lived, whether in community or in solitude. These days relatively few of us live in true solitude, and still less of us in the more or less enclosed forms of community traditionally inhabited by contemplatives - the Carthusians, for instance, or the Poor Clares - and so we live not so much hidden lives as lives hidden in plain sight, ordinary, unrecognised and quiet. This hiddenness is really not much more than a way of standing still enough to act as some kind of beacon or antenna for the signals of God's mercy in Christ. A few verses later in Proverbs (20.27) we read, "The human spirit is the lamp of the Lord, searching every inmost part." The light is Christ's, and the signals of his mercy are to us no more than signs; but like the signs in John's Gospel, they seem to be effective in ways we cannot understand.

Angels in Desolation

I was brought up to be a perfectionist: to get it right, preferably first time, or just not to bother. I carried the attitude through into adult life, where it made me unhappy, driven and, at least when it came to farming, effective. But spiritually it was disastrous. Sin crippled me. Not that I was that much more (or less) of a sinner than the next person, nor that my sins were any worse (or any less bad) than theirs, but that the fact of their having been done at all made me incapable of living with myself, incapable of believing I was livable with by anyone, including God. My perfectionism had made me, spiritually speaking, stinking rich in self-regard. Not self esteem, you understand, but self-regard; not self-satisfaction, but self-attention. I could not reach God for the mounds of my own self analysis, my continual self appraisal, just as the rich young man in Mark 10.17-27 couldn't see over his bank balance, and his land, and his possessions.

The maturing contemplative is too poor to be concerned with spiritual progress. If there is a measure of spiritual progress, it will be found in the rib cage of failure: in our debilitating faults, our defeats, our wounds, our solidarity with those who are marginalised from every circle of meaning they belong to. This seems to be the way divine love works, to seek out and indwell where we hurt most. This is the obscure realisation of receptive mind. 

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation and Liberation

Two things rescued me, right in line with Martin Laird's words here. Firstly, the continued practice of contemplation, which I somehow managed - more or less - to stick to through thick and thin; and secondly, a series of disasters and let-downs, beginning with a farm accident that put an end to my farming career, and eventually to my ability to work full-time at all, and ending only when I was able to move away. The confluence of those things led to a remarkable discovery: God was closer to me than ever. Not just that he hadn't abandoned me when things came unglued, but that he seemed closer than ever. He wasn't of course. He'd been there all along; but my heart, being shattered, was somehow opened, not only to God but to all creation in its brokenness, its pain (Romans 8.22-25).

I have come to recognise, from these periods in my own life of desolation and functional solitude (being alone in the sense not necessarily of physical isolation, but of being cut off from understanding and comfort: "You have taken from me friend and neighbour - darkness is my closest friend." (Psalm 88.18)) the truth of what Laird is trying to say in the passage I quoted above.

But there is another strand in the Psalms which is found in its fullest form only in Psalm 119; and that is the recognition of suffering itself as somehow a route to the mercy of God in Christ. It was during these darkest times that I first came to notice these passages clearly, though I must have read them in passing often enough, and to cling to them as to a bit of floating wood in a shipwreck. The three passages occur close together in this longest of Psalms, between v. 67 and v. 75:

67 Before I was afflicted I went astray,
    but now I obey your word.
68 You are good, and what you do is good;
    teach me your decrees...
71 It was good for me to be afflicted
    so that I might learn your decrees...
75 I know, Lord, that your laws are righteous,
    and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me.
76 May your unfailing love be my comfort,
    according to your promise to your servant.

This was for me the key to the whole thing: the way that my loneliness, defeat and distress made sense, how it did in fact connect with the Gospel - which is after all to be translated "Good News" - and how through some deep mystery it connected intimately with the Cross, and with the utter stripping of the Cross. It is only in that condition that we can dare to know nothing, because there is nothing else but Christ, and him crucified. (1 Corinthians 2.2)

Desolation is a place that seems somehow dear to God, oddly enough. It was in the wilderness that God revealed himself to Abraham and to Jacob, to Moses and to Elijah; and it was into the wilderness that he called his Son - drove him, according to Mark - to face his own temptation to self-reliance, and in the wilderness that the angels ministered to him. It is only in the wilderness, it seems to me, that we have little enough to cling to that we can see what has been before us since long before we were conceived: that God is nearer to us than our own breathing, than the earth beneath our blistered feet.

Lady of silences, pray for us...

We are nearly at the beginning of Lent, late this year. Last year we were already a fortnight past Ash Wednesday by today's date, at the end of the second week, nearly - where Eliot wrote,

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness...

The silences of Lent begin "with the voice of God, singing the praise of Jesus, the Son. Just as this affirmation calls Jesus into the wilderness (Mark 1.9-13), so it calls us, too." (Jane Williams, The Merciful Humility of God) Here, after thirty or so presumably uneventful years, was the beginning of the fulfilment of Simeon's words to Mary in the temple (Luke 2.34-35). Yet she remained, throughout her Son's trial and crucifixion, that "Lady of silences..." as she entered her own most terrible wilderness (John 19.25-27). "Here is your mother..." Not a word.

"Remember that you are dust..." The priest's words echo over the beginning of Lent, calling us to listen to our own frailty, our own finiteness. "And to dust you shall return." The dust of the wilderness, from which we were made, dry in the singing heat that rises from the parched dust, dry as the rock from which it was worn by the wind, by the sun.

Lady of silences, pray for us. As the weight of the words raises our dust in the dry heat, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

Grace and pain, and love

The practice of contemplation is good not only for us but also for the entire world. Many testimonies throughout the contemplative tradition bear witness to this. Not least among these is that of the author of The Cloud of Unknowing: "This is the work [the practice of contemplation] of the soul that pleases God most. All the saints and angels rejoice in this work and hasten to help it with all their might... All the people living on earth are marvellously helped by this work, in ways you do not know."... 

Typically the first great motivator on this pathless path is the sense that this appeals strongly to something within us. The other great motivator is despair. There are times in our lives, sometimes lasting rather a long while, when just being silent and still is the least painful thing we can manage right now, when all our effort is crushed into barely surviving, just keeping one nostril above water. After discovering that pain itself has a silent centre and that our own pain is not private to us, however deeply personal it is, something opens us from within, especially if we are too poor to desire any such opening should ever happen (but we cannot make ourselves poor in order to make this happen.) 

What brings us to the practice of contemplation does not matter. What matters is that we give ourselves to this practice at least once a day...

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation and Liberation

Contemplation, like pain, is not a private enterprise. This may seem an odd statement. After all, we speak of "my practice" as though it belonged to us; we say, "I am in pain" as though we were enclosed in it as in our own room. But grace does not allow this kind of solipsism. We pray as somehow representative of all that is involved in being human - the generations of DNA, the common rhythm of our breathing - and we suffer in the same way. My pain is inextricably bound up in yours, merely by our common inheritance of a nervous system, and emotions. How can we not love, even our enemies, when we are of the same flesh, the same breath? The very word "compassion" is derived from the Latin for "suffering with".

Contemplation is such a simple thing, and yet its power, for us and for all whom our hearts embrace, is without any limit I have been able to discern. Insofar as it liberates us from the illusion that God is something we lack, for which we have to look, and restores us to the plain awareness that "God is the all-loving, groundless ground of being" (Laird, ibid.) it is obviously limitless. The gradual opening out of the patient practice of whichever stream of contemplative prayer we find carries us is not a thing that can be measured, or predicted, however. It is all grace. Our whole path is gift, God's uncountable mercy. As Martin Laird points out in the passage I've cited above, we cannot even take things away in the order to bring it about. It isn't ours to bring about.

Paul explained in his letter to the Christians in Rome that "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) Love for God enfolds all those others, human and otherwise, who, like us, have their very being in the "groundless ground" of God, and so does God's endless work for good flow through us to all whom we love. It is so simple. There is nothing to it. As TS Eliot said, it is "Quick now, here, now, always - A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything)..."

Love in Time of War

If we are called to contemplative prayer and mean to respond to that call, we must face the fact that this will require a great deal of us - the sacrifice of time, courage to persevere, patience to endure the pain of deepening self-knowledge, fortitude in times of temptation, faith when the way is obscure, and the love which is ready to make every new surrender as the Spirit calls... It has been well said that contemplatives war against the real enemy, and ultimately against the only enemy, for whereas in the world we are up against effects, the contemplative is brought face to face with causes, with the ultimate truths which lie behind the visible... 

And do we realise that as we grow older and the vigour of mind and body begin to decline, this is the work which the Holy Spirit desire to entrust increasingly to the faithful, the work which the author of The Cloud [of Unknowing] does not hesitate to describe as the most far-reaching and deepest work of all? 

Robert Llewelyn, Prayer and Contemplation

I wrote a few months ago here of the difficulty inherent in being called into the contemplative way, especially as one who is - despite their undoubted membership of the Body of Christ, and of the community that is inextricably part of that - not living as part of a formal religious community. I wrote then,

This life of inner solitude and hiddenness - for it is hidden from our own selves within as well as outwardly - is in many ways lived for others. We stand out in the wind, and in some mysterious way we relive Moses' experience on Mount Sinai, when the Israelites said to him, "You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die." 

The ghosts we outstare are not our own merely; somehow in the silence of prayer we find ourselves confronting the ghosts of those we live amongst, touching the shadows that our post-Enlightenment age casts across all our lives, touching, as did the monks of Mount Athos during the years of the Stalin's purges and Hitler's atrocities, the dark skirts of chaos and cruelty that brush continually against our civilisation.

It would be easy, at least as an observer, to romanticise this struggle, but in truth it isn't remotely glorious in itself. Like physical hardship, it is messy and unpleasant, and for the one caught up in it, it is a place of fear and of self-doubt. One cannot see the way ahead, and the outcome of even the least moment of prayer is hidden from the one praying. But God is merciful, and in the midst of this inner work there are glimpses of the uncreated light between the shadows among which we all too often move, and our prayer does, as I wrote once, "tend... always to stillness, to wholeness of mind and spirit, to the peace of God, beyond our understanding..." It is that same peace, ultimately, that we seek for those with whom our prayer and our lives are inextricably caught up, simply by virtue of the love of our shared humanity.

The Heart's Silence is the Essence of Prayer

We are perhaps accustomed to think of contemplative prayer as belonging to those times when we kneel or stand in silence in the presence of God. Certainly the heart's silence is of the essence of such prayer, but this does not necessarily mean the absence of words, and there will be many times when the recitation of the divine office or some other form of vocal prayer, such as the rosary, will reveal themselves as contemplative in nature. Often, for example, in saying the psalms of the office we may be drawn beyond the words to the very heart of prayer, our attention no longer on the words but on God himself. 

Robert Llewelyn, Prayer and Contemplation

As Llewelyn goes on to point out, these words are perhaps particularly true of the Jesus Prayer; but I am intrigued by his reference to the Psalms in this context. For me, it is not so much reading the Psalms in the context of the daily office that strikes me, but reading them alone, late at night, especially when my heart is troubled about something.

Psalm 25.8-11:

Good and upright is the Lord;
    therefore he instructs sinners in his ways.
He guides the humble in what is right
    and teaches them his way.
All the ways of the Lord are loving and faithful
    toward those who keep the demands of his covenant.
For the sake of your name, Lord,
    forgive my iniquity, though it is great...

Psalm 32.1-2:

Blessed is the one
    whose transgressions are forgiven,
    whose sins are covered.
Blessed is the one
    whose sin the Lord does not count against them
    and in whose spirit is no deceit.

Psalm 119.75-77

I know, Lord, that your laws are righteous,
    and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me.
May your unfailing love be my comfort,
    according to your promise to your servant.
Let your compassion come to me that I may live,
    for your law is my delight.

What seems to be at the root of this process, for me at any rate, is the sense of the words as so containing the longing, the contrition or the exaltation (Psalm 100, for example) of the heart that they bring the one praying to the end of words themselves. This is why the Jesus Prayer is, in this context, such a complete form of prayer. There can be no Christian, surely, who cannot pray, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner" with sincerity and intentionality. And in its quiet repetition, as Bishop Kallistos Ware says,

Like a drop of ink that falls on blotting paper, the act of prayer should spread steadily outwards from the conscious and reasoning centre of the brain, until it embraces every part of ourselves. 

It is in our very inability, our unknowing, that we find God - or rather, perhaps, that we are open to his finding us. Christ himself, in whose name we pray, taught us (Luke 18.12-14) that it was the tax collector who owned himself a sinner, rather than the Pharisee who was so certain of his place in the economy of salvation, who "went home justified". That is why contemplation is so bound up in contrition, it seems to me. Only when we have reached the end of ourselves can we find the beginning of the heart's silence. Ware again:

For the heart has a double significance in the spiritual life: it is both the centre of the human being and the point of meeting between the human being and God.

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give up all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you. 

RS Thomas, 'The Bright Field', in Collected Poems, 1945–1990

These are dark times, with the prospect of constitutional crisis, economic unrest, and of leaving the EU without a working exit agreement looming over us like dark cloud-shadows. And things are no better, it seems, for our old allies in the US.

Writing of Christian mindfulness in the context of pilgrimage - a discipline in which she recommends the Jesus Prayer, by the way - Sally Welch writes:

Mindfulness is not a fair-weather method of meditation, of making space to encounter God; nor are we taught that to ignore suffering or evil makes it go away. We are told to face up to it, to acknowledge its existence, but then to put it from us, 'for it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come' (Mark 7.21)... 

Nor must we use any past experiences to project frightful outcomes, but must simply call upon God to support us. 'You have given me the shield of salvation, and your right hand has supported me; your help has made me great,' says Psalm 18.35. G.M. Hopkins, that master of descriptive beauty, echoes this truth in his reminder that 'all things counter, original, spare, strange' can teach us God's grace; that they were created by him to shine forth with his beauty, strange though it may seem to us. So, too, our times of suffering are not undertaken alone but in the company of Christ who can redeem all things.

When I read that last sentence, it was as though a door opened for me - of course! This was the experience I have had over and over again in the most difficult times of my life: "Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with ..." (Psalm 23) For me, the simple recitation of the Jesus Prayer - Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner - has been enough to keep the eyes of my heart open to his presence.

In this way, suffering, and the fear of suffering, become Eucharistic. The presence of Christ is not confined to the sacrament, surely; and he is with us in suffering through the Cross. As Jane Williams writes:

'Glory' is found in relating, in the unbreakable witness of Son, Father, and Spirit to the reality that everything flows from love.This is too simple to be credible. It is so simple that it becomes obscure and baffling. Even more baffling is John's insistence that the Cross is the most obvious and visible manifestation of Jesus' power. John 3.14, 8.28 and 12.32 all speak of Jesus being 'lifted up'. 'exalted', on the Cross, and in each case this enigmatic statement comes in the context of a statement or discussion about the relationship between Father and Son. Indeed, John 3.14 is followed by the famous: 'For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son' (John 3.16). Somehow, the Cross is the power of the merciful humility of God, hidden in plain sight. Here, if only we could see it, is the origin of the universe, in the unbreakable love of the Father and the Son.

But our word 'Eucharist' comes from the Greek for thanksgiving ("taking bread, he gave you thanks...") and thanksgiving - and this is very strange - is all caught up in suffering. We can see it beginning to appear in Psalm 119.71-75:

It was good for me to be afflicted
    so that I might learn your decrees.
The law from your mouth is more precious to me
    than thousands of pieces of silver and gold...
Your hands made me and formed me;
    give me understanding to learn your commands.
May those who fear you rejoice when they see me,
    for I have put my hope in your word.
I know, Lord, that your laws are righteous,
    and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me...

Its clarification, as it were, though, is in Paul's letters. Romans 8.17: "Now if we are children, then we are heirs - heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory"; 2 Corinthians 1.5: "For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ"; and sealed together with the words I keep coming back to, from Romans 8.28, "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."

We are not alone under the leaden skies of January - and above, as it always does, the sunlight strikes silver from the upper surface of the thickest clouds. This is no sentimental silver lining. The cold rain is still as cold, and the shadows as dense; but they are not the end of the story - far from it.

When we were still powerless...

I have been struck before by the parallel between the Quaker practice of holding someone or something in the Light - being simultaneously and intentionally aware of them, and of the presence of God - and what I have come to call contemplative intercession.

Theophan the Recluse wrote:

Divine action is not something material: it is invisible, inaudible, unexpected, unimaginable, and inexplicable by any analogy taken from this world. Its advent and its working within us are a mystery… Little by little, divine action grants to man increased attention and contrition of the heart in prayer…

The spirit of prayer comes upon man and drives him into the depths of the heart, as if he were taken by the hand and forcibly led from one room to another. The soul is taken captive by an invading force, and is willingly kept within, as long as this overwhelming power of prayer still holds sway over it.

(Quoted in The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology, ed. Timothy Ware & Chariton of Valamo)

Time and again, recently, I find myself woken in the night by the recollection, or the sudden awareness, of the need, or pain, of someone, human or otherwise. Often these are ones of whom I know very little in a factual sense. I cannot "pray for them" in the conventional sense of making explicit petitions on their behalf to an anthropomorphised conception of God in my own mind - how could I? - but I can keep them close in my heart as I sink into my awareness of the constant steadfast love of God, and of his unfailing presence that sustains all things (Hebrews 1.3). (For me, the Jesus Prayer is enough engagement for what is left of my conscious mind, enough to help keep it out of the way.)

The heart being the place where God's love meets us (Romans 5.5-6) it meets too there the one whom we are holding in our heart. Nothing else seems to be needed. It is the simplest, and yet in my little experience, the hardest and most painful thing. But it is good, and wholesome, and given by God in that place which is so far nearest, most open to his own love as it reaches us by his Holy Spirit.

The Grace of Trust

Looking down 1900ft from the Cabo Girão skywalk, Madeira

There are times when we can do all that a fellow creature needs if only he will trust us. In getting a dog out of a trap, in extracting a thorn from a child's finger, in teaching a boy to swim or rescuing one who can't, in getting a frightened beginner over a nasty place on a mountain, the one fatal obstacle may be their distrust. We are asking them to trust us in the teeth of their sense, their imagination, and their intelligence. We ask them to believe that what is painful will relieve their pain and that what looks dangerous is their only safety. We ask them to accept apparent impossibilities: that moving the paw farther back into the trap is the way to get it out – that hurting the finger very much more will stop the finger hurting – that water which is obviously permeable will resist and support the body – that holding onto the only support within reach is not the way to avoid sinking – that to go higher and onto a more exposed ledge is the way not to fall. To support all these incredibilia we can rely only on the other party’s confidence in us – a confidence certainly not based on demonstration, admittedly shot through with emotion, and perhaps, if we are strangers, resting on nothing but such assurance as the look of our face and the tone of our voice can supply, or even, for the dog, on our smell. Sometimes, because of their unbelief, we can do no mighty works. But if we succeed, we do so because they have maintained their faith in us against apparently contrary evidence. No one blames us for demanding such faith. No one blames them for giving it. 

CS Lewis The World's Last Night

I have been struck recently by the truth of this passage for my own relationship with God. The times in my life when I have come through the most difficult circumstances have been those times when I have been most conscious of the infinite trustworthiness of God. Quite literally, if I had not trusted God's grace and mercy, especially as Paul explains it in chapter 8 of his letter to the Romans, I couldn't have come through to be sitting here writing this. And yet, of myself, I am not capable of that kind of trust, when all the evidence of sense and intellect points to the radical untrustworthiness of the whole situation. To trust God enough to walk out on what appears to be thin air is only possible through prayer; to trust God enough to pray rather than run is sheer grace, an act simply inaccessible to the unaided human will.

The priest, abolitionist and ex-sea captain and slave trader John Newton, who knew a thing or two about desperate situations, wrote sometime before 1779:

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
   That sav'd a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
   Was blind, but now I see. 

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
   And grace my fears reliev'd;
How precious did that grace appear
   The hour I first believ'd! 

Thro' many dangers, toils, and snares,
   I have already come;
'Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
   And grace will lead me home...

All that is is gift. There is nothing else. The air we breathe, the slender band of temperatures in which we can survive, the earth beneath our feet, the steady beating of our hearts - we brought about none of this by our own will or intention, and we cannot sustain any of it by our own will or intention either. Whatever happens, we cannot fall out of God, who holds all time, all things, within the love that is his istigkeit, his own being:

I saw that [our Lord] is to us everything which is good and comforting for our help. He is our clothing, who wraps and enfolds us for love, embraces us and shelters us, surrounds us for his love, which is so tender that he may never desert us. And so in this sight I saw that he is everything which is good, as I understand. 

And in this he showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand… 

In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God preserves it. But what did I see in it? It is that God is the creator and protector and the lover. For until I am substantially united to him, I can never have perfect rest or true happiness, until, that is, I am so attached to him that there can be no created thing between my God and me. 

Julian of Norwich, Showings, Ch. 5 

Prayer beneath the Cross

As we move into the new year, we find ourselves - at least I do - looking at the broken condition of the world, with its shame and confusion, its poverty and intolerance, its extremism and cruelty, wondering what on earth is going on, and whether, in view of the increasingly desperate findings of climate science, whether there will be an earth to be going anywhere in a few years' time. Jesus is Lord? Really?

Tom Wright:

Jesus is the Lord, but it's the crucified Jesus who is Lord - precisely because it's his crucifixion that has won the victory over all the other powers that think of themselves as in charge of the world. But that means that his followers, charged with implementing his victory in the world, will themselves have to do so by the same method. One of the most striking things about some of (what we normally see as) the later material in the New Testament is the constant theme of suffering, suffering not as something merely to be bravely borne for Jesus' sake, but as something that is mysteriously taken up into the redemptive suffering of Jesus himself. He won his victory through suffering; his followers win theirs by sharing in his. 

(Simply Jesus)

There is more than one way to read Wright's words here, and he has left it, perhaps deliberately, for us to navigate our own path through the ambiguity. Those of us who are called to a more outwardly active response to the world may indeed find ourselves living out Jesus' victory in terms of physical suffering at the hands of the rulers and authorities of this present darkness (Ephesians 6.12), as so often happens in non-violent protest. But I think there is more to it than this. The beginning of this chapter of Paul's letter to the Christians in Ephesus contains advice about living honestly and justly within the existing social framework of his time, not revolution. Sometimes of course resistance to outright injustice may be inescapable, but this is not what Paul is writing about. He goes on to say (6.10-12):

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armour of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

We in the West all too often see heaven as "somewhere else" - a distant land far away from earth, where good people go on death to be with God, and are then very puzzled by this idea of "forces of evil in the heavenly realms". But as Tom Wright explains in the book I quoted above, "In ancient Judaism and early Christianity, heaven and earth, God's world and our world, overlap and interlock in various ways that put quite a different spin on all sorts of things." Spiritual forces of evil are real forces nonetheless; more real, perhaps, than their earthly expressions in terms of armies, secret police, and mob rule.

Prayer is indeed, as Paul points out, spiritual warfare. But this is Jesus' war: it is fought with weapons of love and suffering, not of conflict and destruction. Our struggles in prayer (and they are struggles, make no mistake) are not fought by curses and invective against the "enemy", nor by long rants advising God what he should do to whom; but by taking into ourselves, in the shadow of the Cross, the pain and grief of the suffering world, bringing them to our crucified and risen Lord for his healing, his mercy. As St Isaac of Nineveh recounted,

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

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

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

The Jesus Prayer - new page

There is much material in this blog, as well as in my others, on the Jesus Prayer - what it is, how it is prayed, and why, and things to be aware of if you feel you are being called to this form of contemplative prayer. But they are scattered among other material, and, even using the 'label' or 'category' function, not that easy to read in anything like a coherent way.

So - I have decided to put up a page pulling what seems to me to be the best of this kind of material together. The page appears in the top menu, under the header photograph, and immediately above the most recent post, but you might too easily miss it, so the link is here.

Do click through and have a look - and if there's anything you'd like to see there but can't, do leave a comment on this post - you can't comment directly on these static pages.

My scallop-shell of quiet

The Lily Cross in All Saints Church, Godshill

Give me my scallop shell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope's true gage,
And thus I'll take my pilgrimage. 

Sir Walter Raleigh

This fragment from a much longer poem is supposed to have been written immediately before Raleigh's impending execution; in fact he was spared for the time being, and lived another 15 years or so. I found it printed on a small blue card, in All Saints Church at Godshill.

I've been vaguely familiar with these lines for many years, but I had forgotten them till I found this small card in a rack with other such things, at the back of the church, and bought it to bring home.

At the entrance to the church, in the porch by the south door, is a modern framed extract (beginning "You are not here to verify...") from TS Eliot's 'Little Gidding'. I have reproduced the whole section from which it is taken:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

I am not aware that the ancient church in this little village deep inland on the Isle of Wight has ever been a place of pilgrimage as such. If so, the fact is not mentioned in any history of the parish I have seen - though there was a Benedictine priory nearby at Appuldurcombe. But All Saints seems to me like a pilgrim church. Up a steep hill above the village, with its medieval lily cross on the wall above the reserved Blessed Sacrament, it somehow asks to be approached quietly, with reverence - not for the building, but for what it means - as at the end of a long journey.

Pilgrimage is increasingly a pattern that calls to me. As I wrote elsewhere here, "We cannot know the way; but our steps are indeed ordered by the Lord (Proverbs 20.24), if we love him, and will only draw near to him in prayer. He simply says, as he always does, 'Go', or even 'What is that to you? Follow me!' (John 21.21)" Somehow I find I no longer have the need I once had to be sure of the way.

Happy Christmas!

[With thanks to Andalusia Star News]

Happy Christmas to all The Mercy Blog readers!

Before I was afflicted...

Walter Brueggemann writes, in Praying the Psalms, of their use of the "language of disorientation and reorientation... as old in the Bible as the call to Abram and Sarai to leave their place and go to another" - where of course they are not only relocated, but transformed, as their new names, Abraham and Sarah, remind us and them. Brueggemann goes on to associate disorientation with "the wrong place", characterised in the Psalms with the image of "the pit" - as for instance in the opening of Psalm 28:

To you, Lord, I call;
you are my Rock,
do not turn a deaf ear to me.
For if you remain silent,
I shall be like those who go down to the pit.
Hear my cry for mercy
as I call to you for help,
as I lift up my hands
towards your Most Holy Place.

Reorientation Brueggemann associates with the image of finding safe refuge under the protective wings of God - for instance in Psalm 61:

...lead me to the rock that is higher than I.
For you have been my refuge,
a strong tower against the foe.
I long to dwell in your tent for ever
and take refuge in the shelter of your wings.

or perhaps even more tellingly in Psalm 63:

On my bed I remember you;
I think of you through the watches of the night.
Because you are my help,
I sing in the shadow of your wings.
I cling to you;
your right hand upholds me.

As Brueggemann points out, this need not be understood as escapism: it may simply be the acknowledgement of "that the resources for life are not found in "us" but will have to come from another source outside of self. It is the recognition of the disoriented person that a new orientation must come as a gift." (ibid.)

I have come to recognise, from periods in my own life of desolation and functional solitude (being alone in the sense not necessarily of physical isolation, but of being cut off from understanding and comfort: "You have taken from me friend and neighbour – darkness is my closest friend." (Psalm 88.18)) the power of this kind of prayer, and how actually to pray the Psalms, to take their words and make them one's own, brings strength and refuge, comfort even, in the darkest places. I honestly believe that at these times in my life I would not have come through had it not been for the Psalms.

But there is another strand in the Psalms' treatment of suffering that I have not seen in Brueggemann's account, and which is found in its fullest form only in Psalm 119; and that is the recognition of suffering as in itself somehow a route to healing and restoration. It was in this darkest time that I mentioned in the last paragraph that I first came to notice these passages clearly, though I must have read them in passing often enough. The three passages occur close together in this longest of Psalms, between v. 67 and v. 75:

67 Before I was afflicted I went astray,
    but now I obey your word.
⁶⁸ You are good, and what you do is good;
    teach me your decrees...
⁷¹ It was good for me to be afflicted
    so that I might learn your decrees...
⁷⁵ I know, Lord, that your laws are righteous,
    and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me.
⁷⁶ May your unfailing love be my comfort,
    according to your promise to your servant.

This was for me the key to the whole thing: the way that my loneliness and distress made sense, how it did in fact connect with the Gospel - which is after all to be translated "Good News" - and how through some deep mystery it connected intimately with the Cross. I had not at that time read the Catechism of the Catholic Church - not that I have read the whole thing now! - and so I was unaware of this passage:

The cross is the unique sacrifice of Christ, the "one mediator between God and men". But because in his incarnate divine person he has in some way united himself to every man, "the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery" is offered to all men. He calls his disciples to "take up [their] cross and follow (him)",[Mt.16:24] for "Christ also suffered for (us), leaving (us) an example so that (we) should follow in his steps."[1Pet.2:21] In fact Jesus desires to associate with his redeeming sacrifice those who were to be its first beneficiaries. This is achieved supremely in the case of his mother, who was associated more intimately than any other person in the mystery of his redemptive suffering. Apart from the cross there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven.[St. Rose of Lima] 

Catechism of the Catholic Church, CCC618 [some refs. abbreviated]

This is one of those passages which some may find hard to take; but I can honestly say that it was quite simply my own experience. In turning to Christ in the Jesus Prayer, in these words from Psalm 119, and psalms like 61 and 63, the suffering that I had come into became, once accepted for what it was, itself the means of my endurance.

It's really important to understand that none of this was my doing. None of it came about through any particular insight or perspicuity of mine, still less through any imagined godliness: it was all sheer gift, as Brueggemann recognises. Any resources for this kind of survival must come from beyond the self, which is of course why it is so widely recognised that in matters of mental health the first and often the most vital step is to talk to somebody! Nor am I saying that the ultimate healing of these wounds of the spirit comes purely through the prayerful acceptance of suffering. My survival may, in my own instance, have come that way - but it was only after the passage of many years, and through skilled and patient help, that their effects have finally come to be something like healed. But their value - that is another matter entirely. One of the hardest things to take is the illusion of the pointlessness of one's own suffering; the realisation that it is not, after all, a waste of life and hope, but a way into endless life and indestructible hope, through and not despite the Cross (as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, "No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief...") is what brings us to that refuge, "in the shadow of [his] wings..."

O Radix Iesse

O Radix Iesse, 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, standing as a sign among the peoples;
before whom kings will shut their mouths,
whom the nations will implore:
Come to deliver us, and do not now delay.

In Praying the Psalms, Walter Brueggemann writes,

...in the Psalms the use of language does not describe what is. It evokes into being what does not exist until it has been spoken. This kind of speech resists discipline, shuns precision, delights in ambiguity, is profoundly creative, and is itself an exercise in freedom. In using speech in this way, we are in fact doing in a derivative way what God has done in the creation narratives of Genesis. We are calling into being that which does not yet exist (compare Romans 4.17).

Unlike the language of fact and description we use in everyday talk, in the speech of politics and commerce, law and engineering, the Psalms are not seeking documentation and control, information processing. They are in the highest sense poetry - in which case perhaps Brueggemann misses the point when he says they "resist discipline, shun precision" - for then their discipline and precision are of another order entirely. They are a use of language parallel to (at least in a derivative way) God's speaking of the Word that brings all things to existence - the Word, in fact, who was with God in the beginning, "the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not." When we use language like this we are drawing, and drawn, closer and closer to Christ in the the Word, the mercy, that he is. As a poet of more discipline and precision than I dare to attempt once wrote,

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. 

TS Eliot, Four Quartets, 1, Burnt Norton, section II

And the dance that Christ is Lord of is life, and light, and becoming. "In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." (John 1.4,5) If we remain in Christ (John 15.7) ultimately the dark will not overcome us, either, for all that that light lies, like the light of eternity, on the far side of dying. He comes, indeed, to deliver us, and will not delay - already, his word accomplishes his purpose; it will not return to him empty... (Isaiah 55.11)

First published on A Long Restlessness, 19/12/2018

Stranger and more real...

Along the coast from Santana, Madeira

Susan and I recently returned from Madeira, where we spent my 70th birthday. To leave the grey chill of England behind, for the clear skies, warmth and crystal air of this tiny, mountainous island far out in the Atlantic was the best birthday present I can remember.

I don't often write this kind of blog post, but I have been so surprised to have reached the age of three-score years and ten that I couldn't forbear to mention it here. Every since I became fully aware of the limits of a lifespan I have expected to die young. There have been some practical reasons for this - a family history of heart disease, a dangerous occupation for much of my life, several of my closest friends dying in their 40s - but I'm not sure that these things explain the pervasive sense I have had of death being a constant, not unfriendly, companion. I've written something of this elsewhere, and yet I've not been able to put into words this quality of companionship, of death as a close and not unwelcome, still less unwholesome, presence.

Ursula le Guin begins her A Wizard of Earthsea with the words (attributed to "the oldest song, The Creation of Éa"):

Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.

For all that I have grieved those I've lost over the years - my parents, my dear friends - I have never had the sense of death as an enemy. Quite the opposite - death has sat across from me for so many years, good-humouredly watching, gently reminding me that, as Pippin said when Gandalf explained dying to him, "That isn't so bad..." That once “the grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass,” then we know that really, in the end, truly, it’s OK. We never were alone, and love is a very good name for God - for that Source of all in which all things from galaxies to wood mice grow, and are held. That out of which, finally, we can never fall, but which will call us home to endless light, and the healing of all wounds.

And so here I am, rather unexpectedly, an old man. It's good. I am happier these days than I have ever been, and life is sweeter. After all these years, it has proved true 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) It's just a little stranger, and more real, than I had thought.

Originally published on A Long Restlessness, 9/12/2018

"I Surrender All"

In this humanistic age we suppose man is the initiator and God is the responder. But the living Christ within us is the initiator and we are the responders. God the Lover, the accuser, the revealer of light and darkness presses within us. ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock.’ And all our apparent initiative is already a response, a testimonial to His secret presence and working within us. The basic response of the soul to the Light is internal adoration and joy, thanksgiving and worship, self-surrender and listening. 

Thomas R Kelly, Quaker faith & practice 2.10 

The spiritual hunger of the contemplative can be satisfied only by a full surrender of the soul to God. The longing of a contemplative soul finds its completion precisely in this deeper offering and surrender to God. The manner in which God draws this surrender in prayer is a mysterious aspect of each contemplative life. It has its unique variations in each life, but one essential fact is that a complete surrender of the soul is demanded by the nature of love. The need to offer all to God becomes a dominant urge within the contemplative soul and, indeed, within prayer itself. God seems to find circumstances in which the contemplative soul is faced with this need as the only manner in which it can live out its hunger for God. The surrender that takes place in prayer is often simply a response to what God has shown as an exclusive option for a soul if it is to plunge ahead in its relationship of absolute love for God. 

Donald Haggerty, The Contemplative Hunger

I have found that, as Fr. Haggerty in fact goes on to say, there is no roadmap for this interior process, no way to predict when one might be brought up against an instance of this kind of surrender. It is not something that could be taught in some imagined course on the contemplative life, or foreseen by a perceptive spiritual director, except in the most general sense. As Haggerty says,

We [come to] release our natural grip on possessiveness, our clinging to passing things that are bound to disappear eventually from our lives. We have to learn at times not to defend ourselves against those losses when they come...

We cannot bargain with God over this kind of surrender, I find. There may be unlooked-for compensations further along this line, strange blessings in place of what we have relinquished. Or quite unexpectedly, what we have given up may be restored to us, maybe in another form. But we can never see these things ahead of time, and we can never ever say to God, "I'll give up this if you'll give me that." That isn't how it works.

But God is gentle, beyond our understanding or expectation. He does not demand these surrenders, nor force them on us. We come to realise that "God wants nothing but complete surrender, although he will never make an absolute demand for it (Haggerty)." Circumstances, it is true, may take things from us - an illness, an accident, a betrayal may take away things we have held dear - but there is always the opportunity not to surrender them to God, but to fight to recover them, to demand compensation, to find someone or something to blame... Sometimes, though, I have discovered, there is a real inward hint ahead of time: "If you accept this course of action, there will be consequences," almost as clear as a heard voice. The stronger the call to whatever it is, the more radical the choice, the clearer the inward hint. It is never explicit - one does not know what the consequences may be, in my experience - but it is there, along with the absolute sense of rightness of the possible action.

The realness of these things is inescapable. The call to surrender, to trust against trust in God, is not remotely imaginary. René Voillaume wrote:

All the great Christian contemplatives are unanimous in their testimony: whatever the spiritual path, the union with God is perceived by them as real, a more existential reality, more solid, more full of being and certainty than any other experience of the physical world. In this sense, it is true to say that contemplatives are the most realistic of men.

There are many times in one's life, though, that these instances of surrender are simply absent, and when they do appear they can be so unexpected as to seem momentarily unreal. They come not usually as answers to prayer, but in the context of prayer - sometimes fervent prayer, maybe not of petition or intercession, but of longing contemplation. I have found them in the smallest occasions of life, as well as at the great crossroads of change and pilgrimage. The one thing that does seem to be common to them all is that they are done in the shadow of the Cross. They are ways to lay down one's life, with all that that phrase entails. They are ways to pain; and, like the Lord we follow, we cannot see beyond that to whatever unimaginable Resurrection may lie on the other side.

There is something, too, of the forgiveness of the Cross about these strange occasions God brings to us. These losses may come through the action, or inaction, of someone else. Our acceptance of the surrender may open the door to harm, intentional or unintentional, at the hands of someone else. Then they become opportunities not only of renouncement, relinquishment, of some known good, but of love and forgiveness; in the utter mystery of God, love and forgiveness not only of our oppugner, but of ourselves. They can thus be strange acts of cleansing, healing even - a glimpse of purgatory on earth, if that is not a presumptuous suggestion.

Oddly, these occasions of loss - and that is what they are, make no mistake - are also occasions of grace. They lie under the great overarching promise of Romans 8.28, "[a]nd we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose" and they can be, like all losses rightly accepted, windows into the purposes of God himself. Weak though our vision is in this life (1 Corinthians 13.12), we can glimpse through them something of the vast economy of Heaven, the fields of blessing and redemption that lie beyond the final door, the last living surrender to God in the arms of Sister Death.

Originally published on A Long Restlessness, 7/11/2018

Strange Grace

Mist over Horseshoe Bay

When you stop to think about it, grace is actually a strange idea. We learn, from our earliest childhood, that things operate by the laws of cause and effect: if you drop something, it hits the ground; if you disobey someone in authority, there will be consequences. We learn, too, that events have causes. If the cause of a given event is not immediately obvious - it starts raining, for instance - then look harder. There's a cloud up there somewhere.

It is tempting, for some of us at any rate, to try this with grace. We are blessed: we must have done something right somewhere. Conversely, we still make the category mistake over which Jesus corrected his disciples in John 9.1-5.

The healing of our own hearts is all grace. We so easily live, all of us, clenched in a spiritual version of the cause and effect paradigm: we feel bad, so we must have done something wrong; if we wish to feel better, we need to find the thing that will please God - or at least press the right psychological button - so that we are somehow put right again.

In his book Dying Well: Dying Faithfully, John Wyatt, Professor of Ethics and Perinatology at University College London, points out that the medieval Ars moriendi, Latin texts on the art of dying of presumed Dominican origin,  contain the idea of despair over our past as a temptation we must face. Demons are sometimes shown tormenting the dying with lists of their misdeeds

...in a terrible parody of the words 'Ecce homo' ('Behold the man!') said about Jesus - 'Ecce peccata tua', ('Behold your sins!'). Part of the subtlety of the accusations is that the demons quote scripture to demonstrate the righteousness of God, the seriousness of the individual sins and failures, and the impending judgement... 

If loss of faith is loss of belief and trust, despair is the loss of hope... 

In one of the Ars moriendi images, an angel visits a dying man and encourages him by pointing to figures from the Scriptures who repented and received forgiveness... 

The medieval writers frequently emphasized the importance of meditating on the figure of Christ on the cross... But there seems to be a deeper mystery than merely being an external observer of Christ's sufferings... The apostle Paul summed up his own personal hope in these words: '...that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death' (Philippians 3.10, emphasis added). In some indescribable way we can have the privilege of entering into and identifying with the sufferings of Christ on the cross...

Scott J. Hafemann writes:

In our day of self-help and age of technology and technique, it is important to keep in mind that God is both the initiator and object of this [inner] reconciliation. Our propensity is to view the gospel as our opportunity to reconcile God to us by showing him how much we love him, rather than seeing it as God’s act in Christ by which he reconciles us to himself by demonstrating his own love for us. The gospel is not our chance to get right with God, but God’s declaration that he has already made us right with him. The gospel does not call us to do something for God that he might save us; it announces what God has done to save us that we might trust him. 

(The NIV Application Commentary: 2 Corinthians)

God’s love for us, temporary and powerless as we are, somehow reaches us through this spiritual hyperlink that is the cross, and it is the crucified Jesus to whom we turn for mercy.
Mercy is to me the heart of prayer – and not only because it is the Jesus Prayer that is the centre of my own prayer. Cynthia Bourgeault writes:

…When we think of mercy, we should be thinking first and foremost of a bond, an infallible link of love that holds the created and uncreated realms together. The mercy of God does not come and go, granted to some and refused to others. Why? Because it is unconditional – always there, underlying everything. It is literally the force that holds everything in existence, the gravitational field in which we live and move and have our being. Just like [the] little fish swimming desperately in search of water, we, too – in the words of Psalm 103 – “swim in mercy as in an endless sea.” Mercy is God's innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love.

The cross of course is “God’s innermost being turned outward… in love” – and it is at the cross that, in the words of the Vineyard song, we find mercy and grace.

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

A Long Pilgrimage

Over the years I have had more than thirty homes. Eight of the moves, starting before I was able to walk, were fitted in before I was 20, thanks to my peripatetic mother. I must have caught the bug, for I simply carried on, as jobs and personal circumstances moved me around the country; my church affiliations have changed too - not quite so often! - sometimes along with my address. And yet I have longed for contentment, envied those whose settled lives enabled them simply to stay put and watch the seasons change, and the years bring the patterns of history across a settled landscape.

Michelle Van Loon, in her moving book Born to Wander: Recovering the Value of our Pilgrim Identity, quotes Søren Kierkegaard:

Faith expressly signifies the deep, strong, blessed restlessness that drives the believer so that he cannot settle down at rest in this world, and therefore the person who has settled down completely at rest has also ceased to be a believer, because a believer cannot sit still as one sits with a pilgrim's staff in one's hand - a believer travels forward.

Pilgrimage, though, is more than moving on. Van Loon (ibid.) distinguishes three "parallel, sometimes overlapping streams" of pilgrimage in Scripture:

• Moral pilgrimage focuses on everyday obedience to God.
• Physical pilgrimage emphasises a bodily journey to a holy site in order to seek God.
• Interior pilgrimage describes the pursuit of communion with God through prayer, solitude and contemplation.

Restlessness, as Michelle Van Loon points out, is potentially a powerful compass. As she reminds us, St Augustine of Hippo wrote, "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." My own restlessness has been an odd alternation between my own self-will, and (often misplaced) longings, and God's calling me back on to the path to "communion with [him] through prayer..." Again and again I am reminded of Proverbs 20.24: "All our steps are ordered by the Lord; how then can we understand our own ways?"

But how can we know that we are on the right path? Gradually, I am coming to the conclusion that we cannot. When God called Abram, he merely said, we are told, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land I will show you" (Gen 12.1) "The land I will show you..." Not the land I have shown you, the land to which I have given you directions and a grid reference. "So Abram went, as the Lord had told him..." (v. 4) And Abram wandered around all over the place, from adventure to misadventure, not knowing the way; but in the end he came to the place where God could say to him, "Raise your eyes now, and look from the place where you are, northwards and southwards and eastwards and westwards..." (Gen 13.14) and Abram saw the land to which he had been called.

We cannot know the way; but our steps are indeed ordered by the Lord, if we love him, and will only draw near to him in prayer. He simply says, as he always does, "Go", or even "What is that to you? Follow me!" (John 21.21)

Silence is a curious thing...

Silence is a curious thing. It is not by any means merely the absence of noise, but a stripping away of much that occupies our waking minds – thought, conclusion, classification, knowing. We operate in definitions, boundaries, alternatives, and what we encounter in silence lies beyond all distinctions.

We sit in meeting for worship, held in the presence of Friends, or alone, our minds quietened with our own practice, be it watching our breath, or something like the Jesus Prayer, and our discursive, directed mind falls away to a background murmur (or gabble, if we’re having a bad day!) to leave a brilliant darkness, an unknowing awareness that is permeable to the Spirit; it is a place where we may find ourselves exclaiming, with Jacob (Genesis 28.16), “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!”

More and more I am convinced that to remain hidden (Colossians 3.3) with Christ in God, unknowing, is at least for me the narrow path to God’s own presence, where even our own steps are unknown to us (Proverbs 20.24); God who is entirely beyond our own comprehension, whose name can only be a pointer, as Jennifer Kavanagh says, to something beyond our description. In silence itself is our hiddenness, our unknowing, where God waits within our own waiting (Isaiah 30.18)…

What Silence Is For

I have written a post on my other blog, Silent Assemblies, that goes some way to explaining how I see one aspect of silence. It may be of interest to Mercy Blog readers, but as it is written from an explicitly Quaker point of view, and tries to address certain current Quaker concerns, I shall only link to it here:

What Silence Is For

Map Making

One of the things that seem to happen in the spiritual life is that "as we mature we add experience to the original 'deposit of faith' and it changes us - changes how we think, speak, act and pray." (JP Williams, Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality)  As we go on, a process of stripping inevitably takes place: a leaving behind of much that seemed essential to our comfort, our identity, even to our relationship with God.

A page further on in her study, Janet Williams writes, describing this stage of our spiritual journey as "an ascent",

... it feels like an ascent because we find ourselves not simply exchanging one scene for another but - at least sometimes - acquiring a larger perspective, being able to see how the partial glimpses that seemed so different at the time are parts of a broader landscape, being able to reconcile and integrate what earlier seemed irreconcilable. In a sense, we don't just leave a particular landscape as we ascend, we also leave ourselves behind, the versions of ourselves that were comfortable in the old places. In another sense, what we leave behind is God - a version or view of God, that is. Just as the higher up we stand, the bigger the horizon is, so too with God; as Augustine says, 'God is always greater, no matter how much we have grown.'

...although we have to be careful not to mistake this, there is a kind of growing distance from earlier concerns: not that we cease to care about injustice or unkindness but that we are less narrow in our sympathies.

Memory, or rather, remembering, plays its part here. Thinking back over the path that led us here, we can see that, "All our steps are ordered by the Lord; how then can we understand our own ways?" (Proverbs 20.24)

This is often partly repentance as much as recall, even as we remember the places where we stumbled painfully among the rocks, or strayed off the way altogether for a while. But remembering allows us to see the pattern, see the way we have been led. As the author of Proverbs goes on to say, "The human spirit is the lamp of the Lord, searching every inmost part." (20.27) Our self-awareness illuminates a map, almost, of our leading. Not only do we see God's hand in all we have done, guiding us even when we have missed the path, but we see the way back: back to incarnation, back to the life of creation, to the pain and need of the world - the things by which we were drawn to prayer in the first place...