From St. Bernard of Clairvaux

Since Scripture says that God made everything for himself, there will be a time when He will cause everything to conform to its Maker and be in harmony with Him. In the meantime, we must make this our desire; that as God Himself willed that everything should be for Himself, so we, too, will that nothing, not even ourselves, may be or have been except for Him, that is according to his will, not ours. The satisfaction of our needs will not bring us happiness, not chance delights, as does the sight of His will being fulfilled in us and in everything which concerns us. That is what we ask every day in prayer when we say, "Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."

To love in this way is to become like God. As a drop of water seems to disappear completely in a quantity of wine, taking the wine’s flavor and color; as red-hot iron becomes indistinguishable from the glow of fire and its own original form disappears; as air suffused with the light of the sun seems transformed into the brightness of the light, as if it were itself light rather than merely lit up; so, in those who are holy, it is necessary for human affection to dissolve in some ineffable way, and be poured into the will of God.

From "Four Degrees of Love" by Bernard of Clairvaux, quoted in Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology, edited by John R. Tyson (Oxford University Press, 1999).

[courtesy of Vicki K Black]

It's a rich man's world... (with apologies to Abba)

Jennifer F at Et Tu? has an excellent post where she laments our Western Christian lack of zeal, our fear of Biblical austerity, and our failure "to stand out like sore thumbs more than [we] do" by living distinctively Christian lives amidst a broken world.

I couldn't help but be struck by the parallel with this account, from Saint of the Day, of a remark by Pope Pius X (1835-1914):

Ever mindful of his humble origin, he stated, "I was born poor, I lived poor, I will die poor." He was embarrassed by some of the pomp of the papal court. "Look how they have dressed me up," he said in tears to an old friend. To another, "It is a penance to be forced to accept all these practices. They lead me around surrounded by soldiers like Jesus when he was seized in Gethsemani."

The entry goes on to state:

Interested in politics, [Pius X] encouraged Italian Catholics to become more politically involved. One of his first papal acts was to end the supposed right of governments to interfere by veto in papal elections—a practice that reduced the freedom of the conclave which elected him.

In 1905, when France renounced its agreement with the Holy See and threatened confiscation of Church property if governmental control of Church affairs were not granted, Pius X courageously rejected the demand.

While he did not author a famous social encyclical as his predecessor had done, he denounced the ill treatment of the Indians on the plantations of Peru, sent a relief commission to Messina after an earthquake and sheltered refugees at his own expense.

This is the attitude we need in order to live prophetic lives among the wealth and pain of our Western culture.

The paradoxical thing is, though, as I said in a comment on Jennifer's post, that in the West the church is so inured to its comfortable lifestyle that, living simply, we can sometimes find ourselves being looked down on by "better-off" believers. (This especially in true of some of the more evangelical churches, ones who consciously claim to resemble New Testament fellowships, I'm sorry to say.)

I think the assumption may be that, if you're following Christ, you will be blessed. Seeing blessing in material terms, comfortably-off believers assume that if you're not "blessed" in the same way, then there must be something amiss with your "Christian walk."

Asceticism is, to some degree, an inevitable part of our Christian calling, part of the way we are to be "salt and light" in a damaged world. We forget this to our peril, and risk becoming like the rich young man in Matthew 19.15-25, who, unable to accept Jesus' call to asceticism, "went away grieving, for he had many possessions..."

Ave Maria... benedicta tu in mulieribus

Sherry W of Intentional Disciples has an interesting post, Raised to the Dignity of Being Causes, where she quotes from St Irenaeus:

Eve... having become disobedient, was made the cause of death for herself and for the whole human race, so also Mary, betrothed to a man but nevertheless still a virgin, being obedient, was made the cause of salvation for herself and for the whole human race... Thus, the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. What the virgin Eve had bound in unbelief, the Virgin Mary loosed through faith.

Against the Heresies, 190AD

I've been thinking a lot about Mary recently: about the extraordinary significance of her choosing obedience, in the face of all human caution and respectability. What an astonishing girl, to risk everything she held dear, her own life even, to become the living bridge between God and mankind, the frail vessel that sheltered the Son of the living God for nine long months, and bore him into an unknowable future.

No wonder - and all wonder - that "all generations will call [her] blessed" whose free choice, to dare all for what must be the most fantastic promise ever made, opened the gate through her own flesh and blood for salvation to come to all Creation (see Romans 8.14-17; 19-21). That she knew very well what she was getting into is shown by the remarkable fact that she had the presence of mind neither to reject, nor accede to, Gabriel's word till she was clear in her mind how this was to come about. And then she chose to obey, to accept the greatest and the strangest gift of the Spirit that ever a human accepted from the hand of God.

Truly she is blessed among women!

Flavor of the Month: God isn't "nice"

Sr Claire Joy has a wonderful post today: Flavor of the Month: God isn't "nice" I can't resist quoting at length, especially as what she said is so reminiscent of what Rhona said in her sermon this morning at Holy Rood...

Luke 12: 49-56

Some preachers will focus on the last verse of today's Gospel, where Jesus tells the crowd they can read the weather but not the signs of the times. In our generation apparently we can't do either; global warming being just one case in point. Our celebrant chose the verses in the middle: "Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?" (Well, uh yes. Weren't the angels singing about that at your birth?) "No I tell you, but rather division."

He related the story of a famous theologian who told his class about the experience of his own Sunday school training: In a Texas drawl: "God is naa-ice. And He wants us to be naa-ice."

Well, doesn't he? There are cute little signs in catalogs that say: Nice Matters. And what about Forgive your enemies, turn the other cheek, run the extra mile, give up your life for your friend? The point was, of course, that these are not matters of nice. These are radical dangerous ideas, counter-intuitive to the way the world runs, and if you follow Jesus' radical teachings, you will be divided, and in radical ways. "Father against son, Daughter against mother. Mother-in-law against daughter-in-law." Our church has been fighting over itself since the early days when it was little more than "the way." We call it the Holy Catholic Church, and then go on to accuse each other of apostasy, heresy, apathy. If Jesus came to bring division then he has done well: we are divided.

But there is more to the reading... the very first verse says: "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!" We could take this as a warning, or we could think of it as a promise. Fire is symbolic of punishment and judgment, yes. But it also stands for purification, refining, enlightenment. "How I wish it were already kindled." Maybe he was having a bad day. maybe he was envisioning possibility. Either way, he was reminding us that life isn't always nice, and neither is God. I'm reminded of a line from C.S. Lewis referring to Aslan: Is he safe? Well of course, he's not safe. But he is always good.

The point Rhona brought out so well this morning is that if we are faithful to our Lord, if we really do try and follow him as he asked us to, then how we live will inevitably be set over against the way that others live. When those others are our friends and relatives, people who feel they have a claim on our loyalty, and we then go on to demonstrate that we have a higher loyalty - to one who, in the final analysis, has a higher claim on our lives than they do - then they are going to be hurt. And no attempt at "niceness" on our part will draw the sting from that hurt.

St. Francis and St. Clare knew this only too well. The stories of how Francis had to choose between Jesus and his earthly father, and of how Clare's family attempted to make her choose them, by force, are probably too well known for me to quote here at length, but they are certainly apposite!

If you'd like the accounts in full, you can read about Francis' and Clare's family lives at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06221a.htm for St. Francis, and http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04004a.htm for St. Clare.

Allchin again...

 

There is a closer relationship between faith in the Virgin birth and faith in the bodily resurrection of Christ than might at first sight appear. Both doctrines affirm the depth of Gods love, the extent of his involvement in the human mass, in the very substance of our human history, its reality of flesh and blood. And both doctrines affirm the potential greatness, the infinite openness of that human history. In the reality of flesh and blood, the eternal is made present and made known. It is not surprising that our own society, with its sense of being held in an iron reign of necessity and death, with its particular difficulty in believing that human life can open out into something larger than itself, finds these doctrines difficult to accept. In some sense, however, this has always been the case, for at all times these articles of faith have brought a judgement on our fallen ways of thinking. They are bound to come to our minds first as a cross and only afterwards as a fulfillment.

Neither Christ's conception nor his rising again is an isolated wonder, unrelated to the rest of human history, to the nature of the universe as a whole. The truth, which is revealed in them, is at the same time situated at the heart of history, at the basis of creation and at the goal of history. All stories of strange or miraculous births, and there are many in legends and mythology of man, hint at the potential of a birth from above, at the mystery of each human life as a new creation, a possible point of intersection of the timeless with time. The birth and death of Christ, given from on high, are a full and perfect confirmation of these half-lost human longings. They are at one and the same time a revelation of the mysteriousness of the divine love which goes far beyond anything the mind could have thought or the heart desired, and also a revelation of the mysteriousness of the human calling and destiny. Planted at the heart of mans being there is an openness to what is beyond him.

From The Joy of All Creation by A. M. Allchin (Cowley Publications, 1984).

[From a post by Vicki K Black in Speaking to the Soul]

The world we live in, caught as it is in the "iron reign of necessity and death," is cold and narrow for so many of us. How can we live with our sisters and brothers in the world around us, and not long to throw open the smudged and curtained windows for them onto the more-than-breathtaking beauty of eternity, the clear light and the golden horizon, the paths that lead forever into wonder? If we could only open our hearts truly to that vision, surely our evangelism would change from a crabbed and lifeless duty to a joyful, glorious privilege?

So often we are blind to the riches we have in Christ - like tramps starving amid heaps of unrecognised jewels - and so we live dry, grey lives, and have nothing to share but dry, grey dogmas, on the very borders of the Promised land; bored at the edge of unimaginable glory.

St. Stephen of Hungary

 

The Church is universal, but its expression is always affected - for good or ill - by local culture. There are no "generic" Christians; there are Mexican Christians, Polish Christians, Filipino Christians. This fact is evident in the life of Stephen, national hero and spiritual patron of Hungary.

Born a pagan, he was baptized at about the age of ten, together with his father, chief of the Magyars, a group who migrated to the Danube area in the ninth century...

When he succeeded his father, Stephen adopted a policy of Christianization of the country for both political and religious reasons. He suppressed a series of revolts by pagan nobles and welded the Magyars into a strong national group. He sent to Rome to get ecclesiastical organization - and also to ask the pope to confer the title of king upon him. He was crowned on Christmas day in 1001.

Stephen established a system of tithes to support churches and pastors and to relieve the poor. Out of every 10 towns one had to build a church and support a priest...

He was easily accessible to all, especially the poor...

(From Saint of the Day)

---

Although the Church has contributed much to the development of culture, experience shows that, because of circumstances, it is sometimes difficult to harmonize culture with Christian teaching.

These difficulties do not necessarily harm the life of faith. Indeed they can stimulate the mind to a more accurate and penetrating grasp of the faith. For recent studies and findings of science, history and philosophy raise new questions which influence life and demand new theological investigations.

(Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, 62).

St Stephen lived from AD 975-1038. Pope Paul VI promulgated the Pastoral Constitution on 7th December 1965. All this time has passed, and still we don't haven't taken on board these insights. If we had, we wouldn't have the stand-off between Creationism and Evolutionism; we wouldn't have such problems talking openly with Muslims and others living in our communities; and we might even be able to cope reasonably gracefully with the differences of opinion between those of us who long to welcome LGBT people freely into every part of the life of the church, and those who fear this for what they believe to be Biblical reasons!

St. Mary the Virgin

 

It is the moment of the annunciation which makes sense of all other moments. It is a moment which is truly in time, not out of time. It has a whole series of temporal consequences; the embryo begins to stir in the womb. But it is a moment in which eternity has really come, in which God is present and at work. Both the birth and the death of Jesus witness to the depth and immensity of Gods love, and to the infinite openness and potential of human life. And just as, in baptism, the death of each one who is baptized is included in Christ's death, in order that the whole process of dying may become dying into life, so also the birth of each one is included in Christ's birth, in order that the whole process of living may be open to the coming of the Spirit, who is Lord and giver of life.

It is in this sense that we may rightly think of Mary as the mother of us all; in this sense that Andrewes speaks of the font as the womb of the Church, of one substance with the Virgins womb, with a power given it by the Spirit of bringing forth sons of God. From his participation in our human nature follows our participation in his divine nature. The life of eternity enters into time, so that the life of time may find its fulfillment in eternity.

From The Joy of All Creation by A. M. Allchin (Cowley Publications, 1984).

[From a post by Vicki K Black in Speaking to the Soul]

Desert Things

Vicki K Black has posted this remarkable passage

The desert is the threshold to the meeting ground of God and man. It is the scene of the exodus. You do not settle there, you pass through. One then ventures on to these tracks because one is driven by the Spirit towards the Promised Land. But it is only promised to those who are able to chew sand for forty years without doubting their invitation to the feast in the end.

Alessandro Pronzato, quoted in The Desert: An Anthology for Lent by John Moses. © 1997. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com.

The Desert is a place of the heart, almost more than it is a physical isolation. It is a place of stillness apart from the alien concerns of the world, a place where the incrustations of possessions and the desire for possessions (whether things or people or fame or security or anything else...) fall away, and we are alone. There is nothing there to hide us from God.

In being unable to hide from God, we are paradoxically unable to hide from our call to love all our fellow-humans as ourselves. The Desert is not a place to deny human life: it is a place to know the truth of it, and to know that we are bound in love to every other life. In Christ we are part of everyone who has ever lived, part of the whole Creation, for "without him not one thing came into being," (John 1.3) and in the Desert there is nothing to prevent our realising it.

I'm afraid of the Desert myself, and yet it's where I long to be. I think this is more than a shrinking from seeing myself in the mirror of that poverty, that absence of "riches." In folklore, I believe, the Desert is regarded as the dwelling-place of ghosts, and I can sort of see where they're coming from. CS Lewis has a passage somewhere (I can't place it just now, but it's quoted in Rudolph Otto's The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational):

Suppose you were told that there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told "There is a ghost in the next room," and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is "uncanny" rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply "There is a mighty spirit in the room" and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking–described as awe, and the object which excites it is the Numinous.

The Desert, then, is the place of encounter with the Numen. There is a very real sense, no pious figure of speech, in which we do meet God face to face - or as nearly face to face as we could survive - in the Desert. There is a sense of the possible terror of this (though in a different context) in Hebrews 10.31: "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

Yet within awe there is something far more than shrinking: there is a quite desperate longing, which goes way beyond "risking one's life for." The sense of it is captured once for all in that psalm of the desert heart, number 42:

As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
When shall I come and behold
the face of God?

St. Clare

Today is St. Clare's Day. She is my very favourite Franciscan person, I think. There's a long article this month on the online St. Anthony Messenger site, and I've taken the liberty of extracting a few bits, since they are so much better than anything I could write myself:

Within each of us is the potential to be a light focusing attention on God's presence in our world. Clare of Assisi's life reveals just how much light she shed.

As a friend and as cofounder of the Franciscan movement, she supported Francis as he discerned God's message for himself and his followers. Together with her sisters, she wrote the first Rule written for religious women by a woman. She modeled the ability for the authority or power of a group to be held by the entire group (collegiality).

This year, the Franciscan family throughout the world celebrates the 750th anniversary of Clare's death in August 1253. Her life continues to speak to all of us. She challenges us to incorporate simplicity, singleness of purpose and unity within families and communities into the complexity of our 21st-century lives...

Clare was born in 1193 in Assisi, a small town in the scenic Umbrian Valley of Italy. She was born of nobility, the oldest child of Ortulana and Favarone di Offreduccio.

At the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century, Italy was a cauldron of political and military strife. Society was divided into two groups: the maiores and minores. The maiores were the nobility. The minores were former serfs, who had become merchants, craftsmen and field workers. These two groups were continually fighting for power among themselves.

In her early youth, Clare was exiled to Perugia. While the men in the family were off fighting their wars, the women chose to live as penitents. Ortulana, along with her daughters, as well as other women among Clare's family and friends, were fasting, praying, bringing food to the poor and visiting prisoners.

This time of suffering and exile became a time of spiritual formation. Many of the women living with Clare in Perugia, including her mother and sisters, later became some of Clare's first followers in San Damiano.

In 1205, Clare's family returned to Assisi. Francis had already begun his conversion. He had publicly renounced his father and started rebuilding San Damiano. In 1208, he began preaching. Clare's cousin Rufino became one of his early followers.

Clare's household had to have experienced the stir that Francis was causing. An eyewitness, cited in the Acts of the Process of Canonization [of Clare], said that, during this time, Clare went to hear Francis preach, gave him some money to rebuild churches and to feed the poor, and arranged to talk to him in private.

Clare and Francis were both experiencing God breaking into their lives, changing them and calling them to give themselves over to God. Both were facing unknowns and both were probably frightened and unsure of themselves. It must have been a comforting grace to meet a kindred spirit and to encounter another human being who was experiencing the same call and facing the same doubts.

Clare's sister Beatrice tells us (in the document of the canonization process) that Francis first initiated the visit with Clare. Some speculation suggests that women were asking to join his movement and Francis needed a strong woman to lead the others...

Francis and the brothers received Clare on Palm Sunday night at the chapel of St. Mary of the Angels (the Portiuncula) in the year 1212. Shortly after this, she was taken to San Paolo, a Benedictine monastery in Bastia.

The men in Clare's family were not happy with her following Francis. Their power and wealth were diminishing with the changes in society. Clare was beautiful and they had hoped that her marriage would bring prestige and continued wealth into the family. They followed her to San Paolo with every intention of bringing her home.

Clare instead held on to the altar and claimed sanctuary. She had made her choice. She would never turn back.

Clare's sister Catherine, soon to be called Agnes, joined Clare. The two lived for a while with a group of Beguines (13th-century women under vows) in Sant'Angelo in Panzo until Francis brought them to the church of San Damiano. There, the Lord gave them sisters and their community grew quickly...

Clare's community was to be vastly different from the monastic communities of her time. The sisters were to live poorly without large land holdings. Like Francis, their Rule would be to embrace the gospel form of life. They would all be of equal rank, and all decisions affecting their life would be made by all of them.

They would have an abbess, but she would consider herself "the servant of the sisters" and she would lead more by her example of virtue than by instruction or admonition.

Clare was the perfect follower of Francis. She understood his message and would spend her entire life making it a lived reality. Her life and the lives of the early sisters, however, were not easy ones.

Francis died young. Clare outlived him by 27 years. She remained firm and kept the ideal alive, despite Francis' absence and the dissension among his brothers. The Church would see the poverty of her life as too difficult. She negotiated with popes and worked to get her Rule approved until the day before she died—August 10, 1253...

Clare was a woman of prayer, and her entire life was lived in trust of the God whom she knew loved her. She needed little material wealth because she trusted that God would care for all her physical needs. God never let her down. It takes deep faith to live so, but anyone who has tried to live dependent on God learns quickly the joy of simplicity.

Clutter blocks freedom and blurs perception. Living simply helps one develop an attitude or willingness to be emptied. One quickly learns what is important. Those who live simply learn to live with open hands: to appreciate what is given but to be equally willing to let go, when letting go is what is needed.

Contemplative living was Clare's reason for living simply. One needs to be poor to have the space to meet God. Clare, by her way of life, witnessed to others the one thing necessary and found herself united with all people in sharing her need for and reliance on God...

Clare wrote four letters to Agnes of Prague, the queen of Bohemia, who became a Poor Clare. (Clare's sister Agnes is known as Agnes of Assisi.) In her third letter to Agnes, she writes, "The soul of a faithful person is greater than heaven itself, since the heavens and the rest of creation can not contain the creator and only the faithful soul is God's dwelling place and throne. As the glorious Virgin of Virgins carried Jesus materially, so we too, by following in her footprints, especially those of poverty and humility, can without a doubt, always carry Him spiritually in our chaste and virginal bodies, holding the one by whom all things are held together, possessing that which in comparison with the other transitory possessions of the world, we will possess more securely."

Taking these words to Agnes seriously would change the way people look at themselves and others. The answer lies within. The realization of this "indwelling of God" calls for a respect and an appreciation for who we are. Clare taught her sisters to see themselves as temples of God, mirrors of Christ and revelations of the Holy Spirit. Such servanthood holds none of the unhealthy implications of being either slaves or doormats.

It calls us to mirror the self-emptying compassion we have seen mirrored in Jesus. It is the same Jesus, as we clearly know, who dwells in our neighbor. Our neighbors are also temples of God, mirrors of Christ and revelations of the Spirit. Our God dwells in each of us and each of us uniquely manifests our God.

Like Mary, we are called to birth our God for one another, to bring to life the reality of God's presence.

"One needs to be poor to have the space to meet God." I wish I could explain how those words make my heart sing! There is so much to the life of prayer that is hidden, that belongs behind closed doors, or far away from anyone (Matthew 6.6; Matthew 14.23; Luke 6.12, and so on...) and true poverty is like that. Jesus called it a blessed state (Matthew 5.3; Luke 6.20).

Jesus wasn't talking about the poverty of injustice, the grinding famine that so many in the world are facing today, so much as about being "poor in spirit" (Matthew 5.3). Francis and Clare were like that. Their very real physical poverty, being chosen as it was, was an almost sacramental reflection of their spiritual poverty and purity, that known emptiness, emptied-ness, that is the place of God; and that has its holiest parallel in the virgin womb of our Lady, by which "all generations will call [her] blessed" in that she was empty so that she might bear God.

Gardening, and John chapter 4

We've rather neglected our little back garden this year, what with ill-health and heavy rain. In the front it's mostly lawn, and quite dry, so it's easy to keep on top of; whereas the back garden, sloping quite steeply up to the old chalk bank behind, is damp and fertile, and breeds ivy and bindweed and nettles and all manner of rampant things in the most alarming way.

Now we're taking it back.

Jan, as usual, started it, with great plans which, although they can't come to fruition till the autumn, when we can start seriously moving shrubs without too much risk of damage, need at least the resolution of doing something right away. So we've been extending the top patio, and we've moved the water feature off the patio onto its own slab by the drop down to the lower level, beside the steps, where it looks cool and inviting, the water bubbling up over the (imitation) stone sphere and trickling sweetly down into the (imitation) stone basin. It's starting to look nice again, little by little.

Sorry for such an obvious parallel, but that just is how our spiritual lives get sometimes - neglected, and overgrown with rank, nasty things. The way out, though, is not to despair, to call oneself derisive names, to give up on the whole idea of spiritual formation and return to some more nominal kind of Christianity. The only way out is gently, gradually, not trying to clear the whole mess in an afternoon, but being content with one day at a time.

In one of my favourite chapters, John 4, Jesus doesn't try to change the whole of the Samaritan woman's tangled love-life in the course of a single conversation. In fact, he doesn't overtly try and change her life at all: he merely describes it. And, unlike so many of our churches today, Jesus doesn't demand evidence of "fruit in her life" before he'll allow her to preach the Gospel to her own people. That's right: a woman, a foreigner, and a loose-living one at that, preaching the Gospel just as she was, still stained with the life she'd been leading, not even baptised, preaching the Gospel.

We will get things wrong, we will let our lives get overgrown from time to time, but we must just do what we can, what there is right in front of us to do; and not go beating ourselves up over what we have done and what we have failed to do. Surely we at least owe ourselves the grace Jesus showed to this amazing woman, whose faith so far outstripped her righteousness?

A new look

I decided that the poor old Mercy Blog, just two years old now, was looking a bit tired and cluttered. So here's a fresh face, hopefully a bit easier to read, and rather less stuffy-looking.

Hope you like it...

A Dominican Lesson

Sherry W, at Intentional Disciples, has an interesting note on St. Dominic:

When St. Dominic went to Rome, presenting a plan for an Order of Preachers to
the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. At first, this was not possible, as the
council had prohibited the formation of any new religious orders. But Dominic
got around that by choosing the Rule of Augustine for his order, and in 1216 the
official sanction came from Honorius III.

On his trip to seek authorization, he reportedly received a personal tour of
the Vatican's treasures by the pope. "Peter can no longer say, 'Silver and gold
have I none,'" said Innocent III, referring to Acts 3:6.

Dominic, now wholly dedicated to his life of poverty, replied, "No, and
neither can he say, 'Rise and walk.'"

Sherry's note:
But St. Dominic could and did. Among other things, he
raised a boy from the dead in the presence of numerous trustworthy witnesses who
testified to that fact after his death.

I think we need to remember, when sometimes we despair of the church we have been called to live and work in, be it Anglican, Roman Catholic, Lutheran or whatever, that corruption or worldliness is no barrier to individual holiness, nor to what God may do through those individuals he has called aside for his work. Look at what St. Francis accomplished, within what must have seemed a most unpromising and compromised church in his day. A struggling church is no excuse not to work within it, for it, with it... it's no excuse either for not loving it, and all the living stones who form it.

How God sees a drop of water...

Suppose a river or a drop of water, an apple or a sand, an ear of corn or an herb. God knows infinite excellencies in it more than we. He sees how it relates to angels and to men, how it proceeds from the most perfect lover to the most perfectly beloved, how it represents all his attributes. And for this cause it cannot be beloved too much. God the author and God the end is to be beloved in it; angels and men are to be beloved in it; and it is highly to be esteemed for all their sakes. O what a treasure is every sand when truly understood! Who can love anything God made too much? His infinite goodness and wisdom and power and glory are in it. What a world would this be, were every thing beloved as it ought to be!

From Centuries by Thomas Traherne, quoted in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).

This, quoted by Vicki K Black for the Feast of the Transfiguration, is not only a perfect example of why I have loved Thomas Traherne for so long, but is as Franciscan a view of Creation as you're likely to want!

Praying together...

'Private prayer is like straw scattered here and there: If you set it on fire it makes a lot of little flames. But gather these straws into a bundle and light them, and you get a mighty fire, rising like a column into the sky; public prayer is like that.'

St. John Vianney (1786-1859)

This is true, undoubtedly; but the private prayers of someone living an active life within their church - above all, being part of the Eucharistic fellowship - are a different matter... That's more like lots of little packets of explosive connected together with fuses, or 'lead-lines,' like the arrangements demolition contractors use for building implosions. Each one is a separate thing, and by itself its explosion would be insignificant; but link them together, and they can bring down the greatest of strongholds.

Limitations (Barbara Crafton)

The following was lifted whole from a post by Lisa at The Episcopal Majority:

 

The Limitations of Like Minds
by the Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton

Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. (Luke 6:22)

Respect for conscience is the great gift of Anglican life together. You are not me, and you never have to become me. You have your own journey, and it is not mine. Together we serve the God who created us both, and we can do so even if we disagree, and even if our disagreement is about very important things. We do not have to be a community of like-minded people. We can just agree to serve.

A community of like-minded people has no internal method of self-correction and self-examination; the most it can do is monitor conformity to unquestioned norms. The friction of argument and the energy it produces is the potent fuel of ideas, in the human community. All our intellectual progress has been accomplished by questioning assumptions.

If an orthodoxy can bear such scrutiny, it remains as it was. If it cannot, it changes. So it has ever been. A questioning mind is not the devil's work. It is one of the fruits of baptism. We pray for it at the font.

That is why we have married priests, why we have women priests. It is why we have restored the ministry of deacons in the Church. It is why the disabled are not barred from serving in ordained ministry. It is why women who have recently given birth are not considered ritually unclean. It is why Christians need not observe the large and complex corpus of Jewish law. It is why the Church is very different in our century from what it was in the 19th. Or in the 16th. Or the 4th.

This is not a betrayal of principle. It is the way human beings live. We live in history as fish swim in water, and history only moves forward. The realm of God to which we look is without time, but the world in which we now live is bound to history. Eyes open, brain in gear and spirit available for instruction, we move with its current.

Don't try to abandon history, for you cannot, not while you are here. Don't try to stop it. Instead, talk to it. Look at it. Listen to it. The human family has many ways of being in the world, and all are instructive in some way. It is the height of hubris to think that we know all there is to know about God's ways because we understand our own. It cuts God out of our story, and makes it a very local story indeed. A story about us alone.

About the Author: Barbara Cawthorne Crafton is an Episcopal priest, spiritual director and author. She was rector of St. Clement's Church in Manhattan's Theatre district. She was also a chaplain on the waterfront of New York, and served both historic Trinity Church, Wall Street and St. John's Church in Greenwich Village. She was a chaplain at Ground Zero during the recovery effort after the WTC bombing. She writes and gardens at The Geranium Farm.

Sacred Meal

(A wonderful extract posted by Vicki K Black at Speaking to the Soul)

From very early times, human beings have shared meals together, and seen in such an act a symbol of fellowship, common life, common love. The sharing of food and fellowship, the drinking of wine in the atmosphere of warmth and joy, such activities are among the most important in life. It is not surprising therefore that at the heart of the worship and experience of God in Christian tradition is the activity of a meal, the Eucharist. Christian spirituality is of a eucharistic type, that is, it comes to see and know and even digest God within the framework of the liturgy of eating and drinking. It has thus the marks of an active and social experience, not those of a passive and private one. And both the involvement in action, and the social character of the experience, are of the essence, and not simply incidental aspects, of the Christian spiritual path. It is an experience of God which takes place within the context of an action involving movement, responses, manual acts, greetings of our fellow participants, the offering of gifts, the receiving of communion; and this action is the action of a community in which individuals are caught up. It is not therefore on the fringes of the common life, but at its centre, that Christian spirituality, even Christian contemplation, happens. ‘Now is the time for God to act’ as the Eastern liturgy says of the eucharistic action. To come to the sacred meal of the community is to expect a divine encounter, it is both to consume and be consumed.

From Experiencing God: Theology as Spirituality by Kenneth Leech (Harper and Row, 1985).

Merton on contemplation

As so often, Thomas Merton has the perfect follow-on from my last post... What Merton says about drugs could apply as well to any form of 'contemplative technique' practiced outside the framework of faith.

This is from the Merton Institute Newsletter:

'Contemplation is not a deepening of experience only, but a radical change in one's way of being and living, and the essence of this change is precisely a liberation from dependence on external means to external ends. Of course one may say that an opening of the "doors of perception" is not entirely "external" and yet it is a satisfaction for which one may develop a habitual need and on which one may become dependent. True contemplation delivers one from all such forms of dependence. In that sense it seems to me that a contemplative life that depends on the use of drugs is essentially different from one which implies liberation from all dependence on anything but freedom and divine grace. I realize that these few remarks do not answer the real question [about drugs and contemplation] but they express a doubt in my own mind.'

Thomas Merton. Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968: 217.

Meditation, Contemplation and Prayer

I was having a long conversation with a friend earlier today, about the nature of different sorts of prayer. What, he wanted to know, was the difference between contemplation and meditation, and how could we know whether we are doing anything useful by engaging in these things, or should we be concentrating on more 'useful' kinds of prayer?

I was very taken by his questions, somehow. He seemed to be speaking not only for himself but for so many Christians these days, who are puzzled by the relationship between the more widely known kinds of petition and intercession, and these strange new worlds of prayer.

I don't know if this is the place to go into this whole question in great depth, but the answers I tried to give my friend might be worth outlining here.

The Wikipedia article, Christian Meditation, is introduced with the following words, 'Christian meditation is meditation in a Christian context. The word meditation has come to have two different meanings: (1) continued, intent, focused thought; and (2) a state of quiet, intentionally unfocused, "contentless" awareness. This double meaning has contributed to misunderstanding and disagreement about the nature, role, and even the appropriateness of Christian meditation. Traditionally, the word meditation (meditatio) had the first meaning, and another word, contemplation (contemplatio) was used for the second. (These words, however, have nearly the reverse meanings in Eastern spiritual traditions, contributing to the confusion.)'

Meditation, then, in Christian practice, is concerned generally with discursive thought; contemplation, on the other hand, is concerned with its avoidance! I would personally take issue with the word 'contentless' in referring to Christian contemplation. Michael Ramsey, for instance said this, 'Contemplation is for all Christians... [It] means essentially our being with God, putting ourselves in his presence, being hungry and thirsty for him, wanting him, letting heart and mind move towards him; with the needs of the world on our heart.' (Canterbury Pilgrim) It is, however, in itself wordless, as Paul explains in Romans 8.26-27: 'Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.'

The line blurs, of course, with prayers of repetition, whether the very simple, often single word, style taught by John Main, and employed as a fall-back (when pure contemplation falters) by the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, or the more complex and definitely not contentless Jesus Prayer, 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' Here the words are used as a way into contemplation, a springboard as it were. Robert Llewlyn, in A Doorway to Silence (DLT, 1986), has the picture of a large, old pheasant crossing a wide lawn, where it ran along the grass, rising up to fly a few yards, then, tired, returning to earth to run a few more paces, and then repeating the performance. He points out that just as the pheasant had the good, solid earth to return to, we have the good, solid words of our prayer.

Llewlyn is referring in this book to the Rosary, which is another crossroads prayer. As prayed in its traditional form, involves prayers of repetition (the Hail Mary, the Lord's Prayer, the Gloria) underpinning discursive meditation on the 'Mysteries,' key events in the life of Jesus, and of his Mother. Many people who pray the Rosary find that, usually after long use, it can lead directly into contemplation, which process is the whole subject of A Doorway to Silence (DLT, 1986), whose subtitle is 'The Contemplative Use of the Rosary.'

So is contemplation a waste of time, pointless navel-gazing, or worse, opening the back door of our minds to whatever spiritual entity might decide to come strolling in?

Of course if you keep in mind Michael Ramsey's definition above, you will begin to see that contemplation is anything but selfish introspection, and if you consider Paul's account of the role of the Spirit in the passage I quoted from Romans, you will see that the mind is very far from being left undefended.

As I said in an earlier post today, 'Contemplation brings us continually closer to God, and so we get all tangled up in his love and his mercy.' One of the great early teachers of contemplation, St Isaac of Nineveh, the 7th Century anchorite and unwilling Bishop, said:

'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 with without measure in a heart that is in the likeness of God."'

A final word from one of the great contemplatives of the Middle Ages, Catherine of Siena:

'The secret of Christian contemplation is that it faces us with Jesus Christ toward our suffering world in loving service and just action...'

After the retreat...

Following my retreat, I spent quite some time just catching up on things - as if I'd been away for months! - and just trying to let things settle down in my mind to the point where I could express them slightly coherently.

I have always, I guess, known that intercession and contemplative prayer are all tangled up together somehow. I think it's pretty hard to be a contemplative - well, a Christian contemplative anyway - without being an intercessor as well; and, I suppose, hard to be an intercessor at any depth without at least some contemplative dimension to our prayer.

Contemplation brings us continually closer to God, and so we get all tangled up in his love and his mercy. All those things that have touched us, friends' grief, news reports of pain and loss, things we see and hear casually - or so we think - on our way through life, get "treasured up" (just as our Lady treasured the things she heard about her Son) in our hearts without our realising it, and increasingly so as we become increasingly saturated with grace through our contemplation, and we somehow cling crying to God with "sighs too deep for words" (Romans 8.26) not knowing why our contemplation has turned suddenly to tears...

The other aspect of the retreat was very strongly rooted in Mother Julian's teaching itself... she says, (Revelations of Divine Love, Long Text, Ch. 39, tr. Upjohn) "...though the soul is healed [of sin, through contrition, compassion, and longing for God] God still sees the wounds - and sees them not as scars but as honours."

And this, which made sense of many things I'd been feeling but had not understood: "The soul that would remain in peace must, when another's sins come to mind, flee as from the pains of hell, searching into God for remedy and help against it... For looking on another['s]... sin makes, as it were, a thick mist before the eyes of the soul, so that for a time we cannot see the beauty of God..."

Not only was there much healing involved in these passages for me personally, but I began to understand why I find things like reality TV, soaps, "true confessions," and many sorts of drama and fiction pretty well unbearable. I have often wondered why this should be - it's more than an aversion, more like a spiritual allergy, to the extent I can't stay in the same room if someone's watching this stuff on television - and now I realise I'm not the only one to feel like this!

I don't know if anyone else has this reaction, but I find a strange thing about going on retreat is that while I arrive home buzzing with everything that happened, full of a kind of leaping spiritual energy, I quickly become bogged down in the quotidian, and within a week or so I feel miles away from that place of stillness before God... then gradually, from somewhere below the conscious threshold the Spirit brings me back, brings me to where I can understand - or at least, find a few words for - what happened. Then, I find I have changed; not how I'd expected, usually, but changed nonetheless.

I've been thinking...

I've been thinking about what this blog's for, and why I'm keeping it. (Is that what you do with a blog, keep it, like a diary? Or do you blog it? Blogging a blog? H'mm...) I really enjoy reading other people's chatty blogs, with all the details of their holidays, what they're wearing, their neighbours, and their pets - and I'm not saying I'll never write about such things here - but somehow it doesn't feel like the reason I started this.

There are also some very churchy blogs around, full of nothing but learned disquisitions on ecclesiology, past, present and future, and abstruse issues in philosophical theology, and I have to confess I keep most of those in my feed reader for a week or two, and then unsubscribe again once I've built up a couple of dozen unread posts. So, if I'm to do to others what I'd like to be done to me, it's not very fair of me to try and keep one of those going, even supposing I had the academic equipment to manage it...

When I came back from retreat I said, "Maybe later I'll try and say something about the spiritual side of this, but at the moment it still feels very private." But that is why I started this blog, to try and keep track of my own thoughts on prayer, and things related to prayer, and to share them in case there might be resonances for anyone else.

I was writing recently to a friend, trying to tell her a bit about my retreat, and all that had happened in those few short days, when it occurred to me that that was what I should be doing here. That was the reason I had first begun. So...