Not long now...

before the first light of dawn comes over the ridge of the Purbeck hills. I'm listening to Brian Eno's beautiful 1'2, with its slow, open piano arpeggios and wordless choir, and the night garden outside the window is still as still.

The silence in the garden before dawn outside Jerusalem must have been absolute, in those last hours before dawn - the air still, no sound from the night birds. Just the whole of Creation, waiting.

I wrote the following, last year, and I'm sorry if anyone's read it before, but I can't find any better words this Easter:

"Tomorrow morning Jesus speaks our name, piercing our incomprehension with his recognition, his knowing, his comprehending us. Our part is to listen – listen into the anechoic disorienting silence, the dead room, the empty garden, long before dawn, “while it was still dark.” This is the time Mary set off, thinking she knew but not even knowing why she went, like we must go, not being able to know why till our Lord calls us by name, but going anyway, into the dark, into the place of tombs, the hortus conclusus, the garden closed to our senses but open to our going in. Listen... listen!"

Good Friday

Couldn't let today go without a post somehow, and yet what is there to say?

Honestly, I'm not trying to be cryptic, but I don't really have words for it somehow. I could describe the Cross service this morning, or the walk I took this afternoon, in the spring sunlight, but that's not it.

Ecce homo...

Watch with me...

For some reason only four of us stayed on to watch after Maundy Thursday communion, foot-washing etc. We finished by saying Compline together in the half dark of the side chapel. Strange silent fellowship of it - the thinning of time again. You could almost sense olive leaves overhead...

It's been a long and rather wonderful day, setting off early to go to the Cathedral for the Chrism Eucharist (renewal of vows and blessing of the oils) - +David preached a truly glorious sermon on unity in grace - and going on till the evening. The grieving stillness after the wonder of the Cathedral was right, somehow reflecting what today is...

Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.
Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor...

Maundy Thursday tomorrow...

Getting closer... Even now it's still frightening to think of it. I suppose I find the foot-washing hard to handle for that reason - the mist of the time between is breaking down, it's like a prolonged anamnesis, un-forgetting after all these years. Time grows very thin towards Easter.

We do not have to save ourselves...

'The Christian has no Law but Christ. Our "Law" is the new life itself which has been given to us in Christ. Our Law is not written in books but in the depths of our own hearts, not by the pen of human beings but by the finger of God. Our duty is now not just to obey but to live. We do not have to save ourselves, we are saved by Christ. We must live to God in Christ, not only as they who seek salvation but as they who are saved.'

Thomas Merton Seasons of Celebration .
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1950: p. 147

"We do not have to save ourselves, we are saved..." It's no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me, and Christ crucified: Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi...

Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens,
your faithfulness to the clouds.
Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains,
your judgements are like the great deep;
you save humans and animals alike, O Lord.

How precious is your steadfast love, O God!
All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
They feast on the abundance of your house,
and you give them drink from the river of your delights.
For with you is the fountain of life;
in your light we see light.

Psalm 36:5-9

In him all Creation is made new - what is crucified at Easter, all that we see as lost, and broken, and hopeless, is truly raised imperishable on the Third Day...

'What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. '

1 Corinthians 15:42-47

Who are the palms for?

Just read a remarkable and uncomfortable post on the Country Contemplative's blog.

Don says, "At Mass today the Passion was read and during its reading and Fr. Bob’s homily I came to realize a significant point, at least for me. The crucified Jesus has become and abstraction. We go to Mass, go through the motions, worship the crucified Savior and don’t see the crucified in our midst. They include the folks on welfare, the wounded and crippled soldiers of our armies, the gay people, the disenfranchised of every sort. They are the crucified today. They are the presence of Jesus in our midst. Whoever is the acceptable victim in our midst can be the crucified Christ for us."

"To accept that sometimes we have to stir up trouble and become very unpopular is to take up a Cross. In Brazil the Bishop said, 'When I give money to the poor they call me a saint; when I ask why they are poor, they call me a Communist.' Surely this is the Franciscan way." Tim Tucker, Slogans and Labels, TSSF Studies UK.

To worship the crucified Christ in spirit and in truth is to see the crucified everywhere. Surely that is the point of Jesus' saying, "Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me." (Mt 25:40) And surely Paul's great concern for the poor and the marginalised in the very early church came from his decision "to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified." (1 Cor 2:2)

Jesus came that all who believe in him might not perish, and died that all might be free. His death is for, first of all, those who know no freedom. It doesn't matter whether slavery is the 18th century variety, or whether it is more up to date sexual or economic slavery, it is still radical unfreedom. And the Gospel is radical freedom. As Jesus quoted himself (Luke 4:18ff, quoting Isaiah 61)

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour."

Merton on Liturgy & Contemplation

Contemplation is a gift of God, given in and through His Church, and through the prayer of the Church. St. Anthony was led into the desert not by a private voice but by the word of God, proclaimed in the Church of his Egyptian village in the chanting of the Gospel in Coptic - a classical example of liturgy opening the way to a life of contemplation! But the liturgy cannot fulfil this function if we misunderstand or underestimate the essentially spiritual value of Christian public prayer. If we cling to immature and limited notions of "privacy," we will never be able to free ourselves from the bonds of individualism. We will never realize how the Church delivers us from ourselves by public worship, the very public character of which tends to hide us "in the secret of God’s face."

from Seasons of Celebration New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1950: pp 26-27

This wonderful quote explains perfectly just how different true contemplative prayer is from the kind of self-regarding "meditation as self-improvement" teachings it is so often confused with by the uninformed and the prejudiced. Not only is real contemplative prayer rooted and grounded in the common life of the church, it is done for a reason, it is done in obedience to God, and it is done for, on behalf of, our sisters and brothers, on behalf of the whole broken Creation itself. (See my article on intercession and contemplative prayer on The Mercy Site...)

Love Anyway...

Many thanks to Fr. Rick OFM for this wonderful quote from Mother Teresa. I'd read it before somewhere, and had then never been able to find it again...

She said:

People are unreasonable, illogical and self-centred.
Love them anyway!
If you are kind, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives.
Be kind anyway!
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and real enemies.
Succeed anyway!
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway!
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway!
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway!
People really need help but may attack you if you try to help them.
Help them anyway!
Give the world your best and it will hurt you.
Give your best anyway!

In the final analysis, it is between you and God.
It was never between you and them anyway.

Wow!

I just read through my last post, double-checking, and then let my eye run on to yesterday's post about the troubling times we live in. Then, looking back to my quote from Sister Abbess's post, I suddenly read the following, as if for the first time: "...grace is the true driving force of good, not external activism."

And there's my answer. I have known for the longest time that my true call is to prayer, while remaining exposed, in all the rawness that entails, to the pain of Creation, human and otherwise. When will I learn to be faithful to that call?

Maybe that's what Lent is all about for me, this year. Maybe God is giving me a real wake-up call. And maybe, just maybe, this is the Romans 8:28 aspect of all the illness and other nuisances this last couple of years?

Oh. There's a thought. Pray for me, gentle reader, please, that I will hear straight and true, and not get this all messed up with my own personal little hopes, fears and preconceptions.

Enclosure at Lent

There's a most moving post at Clare - Light on the Mountain, the blog of the Abbess of the Bethlehem Monastery of the Poor Clares at Barhamsville, Virginia.

What she has to say about blogging (or not, as the case may be) as an enclosed nun adds up, in fact, to a wonderfully concise summary of what enclosure is all about. Do go and read her last post while you can - it will only remain up for around 2 weeks.

Meanwhile, for those of you who miss the whole post (it would not be right to reproduce it in full here, since the Sister Abbess has decided it should only be up on her own blog for a while) here is the core of what she says about enclosure. It should find its way into a dictionary of spirituality somewhere, in my opinion...

Over the years, I have valued our enclosure as a means of eliminating the distractions that keep us from fulfilling our vocation to focus on serving God in worship and prayer for his people. I also value it for the message it gives to the world, saying that God has exclusive rights over the human being, that we have here no lasting city but are traveling to our true home in heaven, that we are more profoundly united to those we love in the heart of Christ than if we were physically close to them, and that grace is the true driving force of good, not external activism. But I was forgetting something important.

Enclosure is also our way of following Christ in his self-emptying. It is saying to the world in the words of the psalmist, “Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name give the glory”. We deny our selves, our ego, our desire to be seen, heard, admired in favor of a life “hidden with Christ in God”.

What's the time?

Lent being a time of penitence, and penitence having so much to do with reconciliation, I can't help but find myself continually thinking about non-violence, and what we can or should do to oppose the new totalitarianism in which we find ourselves post 9/11.

Both in this country, and in the USA, the traditional bastions of freedom and democracy, dawn police raids, the deportation of families whose children have been born and raised in our countries, wire-tapping, secret renditions, detention without trial, the manipulation and gagging of the free press, are becoming commonplace. At what point do we decide that we can no longer say, "It's not our business?" At what point do we decide that following our Lord involves more than saying, "Oh, what a shame?"

Like many who will be reading this, and like many Germans in the 1930s, I was raised to respect military honour, and the principle of fighting for what is right. My own father, a much-decorated RAF WWII veteran, who played his own part in the deployment of the cold-war nuclear deterrent, resigned from his post-service job with a major military contractor on moral grounds. We spent long hours, after his retirement, debating the morality of war, and I had, and still have, the highest respect for his integrity and his Christian witness.

Have we now reached the point, or are we approaching the point, where the old values don't apply? Like the many Germans from military backgrounds who finally, and at times at the highest cost, refused to support Hitler, are we being faced with asking the question, "Is this something completely different?" Does a new, and different, set of rules apply?

If it does, then everything is different, and the approach of Martin Luther King, or Mahatma Ghandi, or even of Sophie Scholl, may be the way to go. Armed opposition to injustice only makes matters worse, as thousands of Palestinians accidentally testify. There is a fascinating article on Sophie Scholl, and an equally fascinating debate in the comments section, at the National Catholic Reporter's NCR Café. Go read - prayerfully!

Perhaps some of you out there would like to comment on all this? I could do with some honest and prayerful debate. I have no intention here of thumping any tubs, but I can't just sit still and say nowt!

Back online...

Hopefully, my computer problems are now sorted out... after yet another motherboard transplant, and a new PSU. Oh, well...

If all this kit holds together now, I should be back to (reasonably) regular posts here. If everything suddenly goes dead, just pray for my hardware, again!

More computer problems...

Many apologies for not having posted here this month, and for not having replied to any emails from The Mercy Site - I'm still having hardware problems, which may turn out to be terminal! Not good, as a new PC is not in the budget at the moment, at all...

I'll do what I can, and I'll keep you informed as best I can with what's going on when I can borrow someone's machine to log on for a minute...

Lent continues, and in the open spaces of time God is gradually showing me things I hadn't seen before. I've been reading Sr Helen Julian's notes on The Cloud of Unknowing, and I think I'm beginning to understand just a little. That wonderful book has been impenetrable to me somehow since I first tried to read it many years ago, and it's really quite an adventure to be able to grasp a little of what The Cloud author is getting at... of which more as soon as I get the chance.

It's our TSSF Area Chapter on Saturday - I'm really looking forward to the renewal of vows, and to catching up with everyone... I'll try and post a word or two about it here sometime next week.

Receiving the gift of God's mercy...

Lent is a preparation to rejoice in God’s love. And this preparation consists in receiving the gift of God’s mercy - a gift which we receive insofar as we open our hearts to it, casting out what cannot remain in the same room with mercy.

Thomas Merton. Seasons of Celebration. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1950: p. 116

"Receiving the gift of God's mercy" - this reminds me so much of the secret working of the Jesus Prayer, how it softly works its transformations in the praying heart, without our even being aware that it's happening. All we know is that we pray the Prayer as best we can; and then one day we wake up, and we realise we have changed. Maybe we have changed only subtly - or maybe a deep and radical shift has come over us, and everything is different. We don't know how it happened. It is only the gift of God's mercy, that we had been praying for all this time...

"The heart is but a small vessel; and yet dragons and lions are there, and there poisonous creatures and all the treasures of wickedness; rough, uneven paths are there, and gaping chasms. There likewise is God, there are the angels, the heavenly cities and the treasures of grace; all things are there." St. Macarius, The Homilies.

"We don't say the Jesus Prayer, or enter wordless contemplation, to get 'some benefit.' We don't pray to reduce our stress, or strengthen our immune system, or lose weight, or add years to our life. On the contrary, we enter prayer to follow Christ, to become open to Him. His way is the Way of the Cross." Albert S Rossi. Saying the Jesus Prayer. St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary.

Merton - a suitable thought for Lent?

The Holy Spirit never asks us to renounce anything without offering us something much higher and much more perfect in return. Self-chastisement for its own sake has no place in Christianity. The function of self-denial is to lead to a positive increase of spiritual energy and life. The Christian dies, not merely in order to die, but in order to live...

Seasons of Celebration [SC]. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1950. p. 130.

Merton has put his finger on the fundamental agreement between the penitential understanding of Lent, and the life-affirming understanding of the season. It's like CS Lewis' picture of the demon of lust, having been killed by the angel, being transformed into a glorious, and rideable, stallion. (The Great Divorce Bles, 1946; Fount, 1977. pp. 89 ff) But Lewis' demonised ghost suffered when its familiar was killed, and we shouldn't think that the pain of that death will be more bearable in view of the life to follow - cf. Mark 8:34. I imagine it's a bit like trying to explain to a cow why she must have her feet trimmed, or to a little boy why he has to go to the dentist...

It's an odd thing, Lent...

It's an odd thing, but there really does seem to be "something in " the penitential quality of Lent. I know people sometimes say these days that they feel there's something life-denying about the idea of a penitential season anyway, and that it should be replaced with a celebration of being human, or something to that effect. I've plenty of sympathy with them: after all, we are fully human, as Jesus himself was in his time on earth, and he carries that humanity with him into the risen life he calls us into. His mercy is upon our humanity and our frailty, not on some perfected, bloodless, alchemical essence; and to pretend otherwise tends towards a very warped and jaundiced view of what it is to be human.

But - and it's a big but - the humanity we all inhabit, and on which Jesus' mercy rests, is a fallen, broken humanity this side of heaven, and different in many ways from the life we shall know with him in glory. And we need to recognise that. We need to truly take it on board, and look our own fallenness straight in the eye, and say, "Yes, that's me. It always has been, and without your grace, my Lord, it always would be."

Oh God, it hurts. It's so degrading, looking at the mess inside the pleasant, wholesome exterior. Come on, it is a mess. No good pretending otherwise.

Of course we are capable of good, and love, and self-sacrifice - increasingly so, as the pure water of the Spirit cleanses us, and the good leaven of Christ works its way through out dough. But we'll always let ourselves down, we'll always let him down, all the way to our dying day.

I used to think Paul was being a bit hypocritical, when he wrote in 1 Timothy 1.15: "The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners - of whom I am the foremost." But he's right, and it seems to me the further I go, the longer I go on trying to follow my Lord, the more I realise just how much mess there is still in me. In all of us, yes - but that doesn't lessen or somehow defuse that fact that it is there in me.

And this is what I think Lent is about - this Lent anyway, for me. If God is ever to do anything with me, I have to look straight at who I really am: not who I'd like to be, nor who I hope you might believe me to be, but who I actually am. And then there might be something approaching solid ground...

Ash Wednesday

Yes, I know today's Thursday - I just couldn't write about yesterday while it was still yesterday, for some reason.

Our morning service was one of those extraordinary times when you know God's doing huge things beneath the surface, but you can't see clearly what he's doing. Just huge slow upwellings of the Spirit, like the surface indications of powerful movements beneath the surface of deep water.

Reading Psalm 51 together always brings me to tears - so much so that I could hardly read the printed words, and I sat there in the choir stalls sniffing helplessly. Being such a good (read 'bald') target, I got a specially good mark of ashes, and some very funny looks on the way home... The beginnings of seasonal humility...?

I'll try and write some more tomorrow... for now I'm sort of haunted by shreds of Eliot's poem, and I find it hard to find my own words, "about the centre of the silent Word..."

Our true context

Only when we see ourselves in our true human context, as members of a race which is intended to be one organism and "one body," will we begin to understand the positive importance not only of the successes but of the failures and accidents in our lives. My successes are not my own. The way to them was prepared by others. The fruit of my labors is not my own: for I am preparing the way for the achievements of another. Nor are my failures my own. They may spring from the failure of another, but they are also compensated for by another’s achievement. Therefore the meaning of my life is not to be looked for merely in the sum total of my achievements. It is seen only in the complete integration of my achievements and failures with the achievements and failures of my own generation, and society, and time. It is seen, above all, in my integration in the mystery of Christ.

From: No Man Is An Island. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company

I'm not sure exactly why, but I found this really encouraging - perhaps it's something to do with the bit about "It is seen, above all, in my integration in the mystery of Christ..." The idea that our failures, as much as our successes, are all caught up in that mysterious intentionality is just amazing... Romans 8:28 applying to what we stuff up, as much as it does to what misfortunes may happen to us!

If you belonged to the world...

If I had no choice about the age in which I was to live, I nevertheless have a choice about the attitude I take and about the way and the extent of my participation in its living ongoing events. To choose the world is not then merely a pious admission that the world is acceptable because it comes from the hand of God. It is first of all an acceptance of a task and a vocation in the world, in history and in time. In my time, which is the present. To choose the world is to choose to do the work I am capable of doing, in collaboration with my brother and sister, to make the world better, more free, more just, more liveable, more human. And it has now become transparently obvious that mere automatic "rejection of the world" and "contempt for the world" is in fact not a choice but the evasion of choice. The man, who pretends that he can turn his back on Auschwitz or Viet Nam, and act as if they were not there, is simply bluffing.

From: Contemplation in A World of Action. NY: Doubleday and Company, 1971: 164-165

This is a terrifying quote, really, for someone like me - a man who likes a quiet life, is appalled by confrontation and violence, and just likes to live and let live. And yet our Lord didn't really offer the option of a quiet life. He said, "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember the words I spoke to you: 'No servant is greater than his master.' If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also..." John 15:18-20 (NIV)

We cannot as Christians sit quietly on the sidelines while the world gets the next Dachau, the next Gulag, ready for action. Even if we know that our call is to the prayer place, and not to the physical barricades, we will have to bear the consequences. The emotional and spiritual consequences most certainly - but we can't forget either the old maxim that we must be prepared to be the answer - or part of the answer - to our own prayers. If we pray for someone to do or say something to stand up against evil, against our growing British surveillance society, for instance, we mustn't be too surprised if God says, in the words of the old National Lottery adverts, "It's you!"

And I shudder.

God, give me the grace to walk in your ways, always, please. Otherwise I'd run in my ways, right away from any such thing...

Back again...

Sorry for more than a week without posting anything here - my PC became rather ill, and had to go in for a motherboard and processor transplant. Radical surgery indeed, and I've only just collected it today. I have to say it's pretty much like having a new machine inside the old casing - very nice!

It's been an interesting week - I've been thinking and praying, and reading Jürgen Moltmann - rather glad of the freedom from electronic distractions, even if it has been occasionally frustrating!

I'll write more tomorrow - it's getting late, and I'm only just getting to the end of the huge lump of (mostly pretty irrelevant) emails that had built up!