Collaboration or competition?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Costing not less than everything…

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

Morris West, with thanks to inward/outward

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

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

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

Hiddenness & Poverty

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

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

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

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

Both solitude and poverty protect the hiddenness of our lives…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simple obedience...

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a crack in everything…

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

Leonard Cohen, Anthem

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

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

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

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Romans 8.18-25

We can’t know how to pray. But, Paul goes on to remind us (vv.26-27):

…the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

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

A journey through the dark...

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

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

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

I feel that we all sometimes – and I am one of the worst – have far too narrow a sense of what prayer is. Paul wrote, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” (Romans 8.26-27)

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

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

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

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

ibid, pp. 127-128

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

Only in silence and solitude, in the quiet of worship, the reverent peace of prayer, the adoration in which the entire ego-self silences and abases itself in the presence of the Invisible God to receive His one Word of Love; only in these “activities” which are “non-actions” does the spirit truly wake from the dream of multifarious, confused, and agitated existence.

Thomas Merton, Love & Living, Naomi Burton Stone and Br. Patrick Heart, Eds., Harcourt, 1979. p. 20-21

I wish I could express somehow how these words awaken my heart’s longing. They come like some rumour from a distant shore, like the scent of green places across a salt and barren sea at the end of a long voyage.

These are not words of escape, though. Peace yes, but no escape, no final rest until “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8.21) Until then, our silence and our solitude are the risk of radical openness, the love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Corinthians 13.7)

Prayer cannot finally rest in itself as long as there are tears shed, blood spilt, among even the least in God’s creation—for “we know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” (Romans 8.22-23)

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

Hidden and disguised by ordinariness…

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

Georgina Alexander, Following the Silence, p.84

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

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

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

Crossroads…

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

Robert Johnson

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We go to God from Light into Darkness…

Gregory of Nyssa

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Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour.

Jesus (John 12.24-26)

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

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

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

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

St. John of the Cross

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Rose…

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

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

Life after Walsingham…

The Chapel of St Augustine, Walsingham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Psalm 32)

Walsingham–coming home…

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

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

Thank you all, so much, for your prayers!

Walsingham

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

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

Thank you all for your prayers…

We lost it years ago…

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

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

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

John Fenton, from TSSF Contemplatives Newsletter, July 2011

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

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

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

Orate pro nobis!

The penitence of Mr Head

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

Flannery O’Connor, The Artificial Nigger

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

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

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

Christe, Eléison…

The wrecks of comprehension…

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

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

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

Richard Rohr, from an unpublished talk

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

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

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

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

Light in darkness…

In this state of self-abandonment, in this path of simple faith, everything that happens to our soul and body, all that occurs in all the affairs of life, has the aspect of death. This should not surprise us. What do we expect? It is natural to this condition. God has plans for souls and he carries them out very successfully, though they are well-disguised. Under the name of ‘disguise’ are such things as misfortune, illness and spiritual weakness. But in the hands of God everything flourishes and turns to good.

Jean Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence

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I am sometimes surprised when I hear people say, ‘How can you believe in a God that would let something like that happen to me (to my sister, brother, friend, lover…)?’

I know some people, some of whom I respect and admire, who have felt this way. For some reason I never have. I have not led a particularly sheltered life, at least for someone who has lived most of his life in England in peacetime, and I have been close to those who have suffered.

Why don’t I feel this rejection of God? Why don’t I turn away from the one who created this world in which there is such great pain, such injustice, such cruelty? Why don’t I blame him for the suffering of the innocent, the defilement of beauty, the loss of hope?

Of course it’s not because of any spiritual qualities of mine, and I don’t think it’s because I am unusually insensitive to others’ pain. I think the answer, so far as there is one, must have something to do with this ‘self-abandonment’ de Caussade speaks of here.

For some odd reason the sense has become clear to me – in some ways I think it has always been there – that God does have plans for us, and that these plans are indeed, ‘plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.’ (Jeremiah 29.11) God, it seems, would rather do this gently, in peace; but he will do it, no matter what we do, or what is done to us. The Prophets, Jeremiah particularly, make this pretty clear, in their stories of hope and blessing on the far side of war and exile; but the Cross makes it blindingly clear, and, through the grace Christ brought to us there, it opens the door to hope and blessing, to restoration and peace beyond all our trials.

Paul wrote, ‘I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us… We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.’ (Romans 8.18,28)

All things. For me it has somehow always been so. Oh, it’s hard to express this clearly enough without somehow seeming to rebuke those for whom it is terribly different, and I truly don’t want to do that. I just know that God has blessed me even in the worst times with his presence and his love, and he has shown me things I could not otherwise have seen.

Somehow – and for me it has always seemed to be caught up in the practice of the Jesus Prayer – these blessings have come about in the conscious, if not intentional, abandonment of my own self-interest. Somehow, as far as I have been able to respond to God’s call to set down my own instincts to self preservation, and abandon myself into his hands, I have been blessed with ‘treasures of darkness
and riches hidden in secret places.’ (Isaiah 45.3)

‘God is light and in him there is no darkness at all…’ (1 John 1.5) But his light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. (John 1.5)

Sister Death

In the desert tradition, death is a companion, a friend. St. Francis of Assisi called death "sister." He was a believer of extraordinary power, at home with the desert way of believing. Death, far from being the terror we encounter at the end of our earthly existence, is the companion and friend who walks with us now. Sister Death is with us always. Her shadow marks and influences every moment.

To live our life from the point of view of our death is not necessarily a capitulation to despair, to withdrawal, to passivity. Rather, it can become the basis for our being and doing in the world. The more we refuse to look at our own death, the more we repress and deny new possibilities for living.

Alan Jones, Soul Making

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We don’t talk enough about death. We talk endlessly, in a kind of grim voyeurism, about killing, but we try hard not to mention death, our own death. Even we Christians tend to shy away from the subject.

If we avoid the subject of death, we avoid the subject of dying more. I know the feeling. As I get older, the time of my own death, my own dying, draws nearer. I am now much closer to the end of my life, whenever that is to be, than I am to its beginning. Since I enjoy life, the love and company of my fellow creatures, the delights of nature and art, I don’t like to think of leaving them. Besides, there is no guarantee that my dying will be peaceful, or pleasant. It might be violent; or it might be messy and protracted, bereft of dignity and intelligence.

Yet our dying is not something outside God’s mercy. By the grace of the Incarnation our Lord went this way before us, making clear the path through the sacrifice of the Cross. There is no moment that we are without Christ’s mercy, for in Julian of Norwich's words, “the sweet eye of pity and love is never lifted off us.”

I keep coming back to last Sunday’s Gospel reading from John 14:

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‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.’ Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.’

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The way leads through death to eternal life. It did for Jesus; it will for us, if we love him. Of course Death is our Sister. It is she who will lead us home, to the place our hearts have been longing for all these years. I truly believe, from my own close experience as well as from everything I’ve read, that Death is gentle, however un-gentle may be the means of our dying. We are far from perfect, even the best of us, and yet Christ’s mercy is everlasting, and without limit; mercy triumphs over judgement.

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But you, beloved, build yourselves up on your most holy faith; pray in
the Holy Spirit; keep yourselves in the love of God; look forward to the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. (Jude 1.20-21)

But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting
on those who fear him. (Psalm 103.17)

O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good,
for his steadfast love endures for ever. (Psalm 136.1)

Balance and the Franciscan calling…

Franciscans... Wordless witnesses of life...
These are faithful who, in the midst of their own community, demonstrate their capacity for understanding and acceptance, sharing of life and destiny, solidarity for what is noble and good. They radiate their faith in values and their hope in something that is not seen.
We stir questions in the hearts of those who see how we live:
Why are they like this?
Why do they live this way?
What or who is it that inspires them?
We are who God calls us to be: witnesses to the Gospel by action. Servants of the unworthy servants of God.

From Wrestling with Angels

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Every great secret makes one poor, it seems.  Like a powerful sexual encounter, it cannot be shared and therefore it cannot be understood or valued by others.  As a result, it is almost always misunderstood, especially by those who have not yet discovered their own secret or found their own “private room.”  The secret of divine intimacy is by definition unshareable, ineffable, and mysterious even to the one who enjoys it.  It makes you great, but it also makes you very lonely, and often the subject of cruel accusations, comparisons, and spiritual competition.

Being a beloved son [or daughter] will not make you fit in, but in fact will make you an outsider in almost all circles—sometimes even to yourself, as you question your own self-assuredness and doubt your own best moments.  Every secret makes one poor and lonely, living alone in rooms of doubt—the doubt that comes from an unshareable ecstasy.

Richard Rohr, from Soul Brothers: Men in the Bible Speak to Men Today,
pp. 91-92, 93

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I’ve been much troubled, recently, by the need for balance in my life. Balance between prayer and action, between music and (non-musical) writing, between solitude and community, between Church and the world, and especially between the expectations of others and my obligations to them.

In our daily Third Order cycle of prayer, the 24th of the month is the day for praying for one’s calling as a Franciscan, and so these things were on my mind and heart as I came into my time of silent prayer. Three quarters of that prayer time were, predictably, anything but silent, and were divided perhaps equally between distractions and turmoil. However, in the last quarter a great peace settled on me. Here am I, writing about the Jesus Prayer, about the intercessory dimension of contemplative prayer, and all things like that, and the answer to all these things is right there with me, only I hadn’t seen it…

It is so simple. If I come to the Lord with these things on my heart, with anything on my heart really, all I need to do is trust, and the answers will be given me. I don’t need to know how they’ll be given – directly, through the words or actions of others, through circumstances or the movement of my own longing – I just need to trust that they will be given, and go on with the Prayer. As Michael Ramsey once wrote, “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…” And am I not myself of the world? Only too clearly I am!

Anguish and mercy…

A person may go on pondering deeply in intense emotion about his needs, about the need of the moment. That is not yet prayer. Adding "in the name of God" to it will not make it prayer. It is the cry of anguish which becomes a realization of God's mercy that constitutes prayer. It is the moment of a person in anguish forgetting his anguish and thinking of God and God's mercy. That is prayer.... It may last a moment but it is the essence of a lifetime.

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

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This comes very close to the heart of why I pray, and how I pray. For me, it is only this coming together of our human anguish and God’s mercy – which would be a possible description of the Cross – that makes prayer possible. If God were to allow me to feel the anguish of the world as keenly as he does, but were not to let me see how his mercy was poured out on the Cross, my despair would be beyond bearing, truly.

Perhaps this is why the Jesus Prayer, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,’ is prayed so passionately so many years after it was first formulated in the time of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. I have written of this before, but I cannot think that I have seen the need for such a prayer more clearly than in these words of Heschel’s. The degree of anguish that we see in the world, that we suffer along with (which is what the word ‘compassion’ means) doesn’t permit any lesser prayer, and certainly cannot be comprehended in our words. I always think it was something like that that Paul was getting at when he wrote, 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…’

Terra incognita…

Much of what we find in the eyes of Jesus must first have been in the eyes of Mary. The mother’s vision is powerfully communicated to her children. Mary had to be his first “spiritual director,” the one who gave the vision to Jesus, who taught Jesus how to believe. What was in Jesus’ eyes was somehow first in hers. And in both of their eyes is what they both believe about God.

Mary holds us naked at each end of life: the Madonna first brings us into life, and then the grief-stricken mother of the Pieta hands us over to death. She expands our capacity to feel, to enter the compassion and the pain of being human. She holds joy deeply, where death cannot get at it. Jesus learns by watching her.

The mother teaches us by the way she suffers his birth and then stands at the foot of the cross. Not a word is spoken in either place; she simply trusts and experiences deeply. In other words, she is present. Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations,
pp. 153-154, day 163

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I’m only too well aware how long it is since I updated The Mercy Blog, and this passage from Richard Rohr goes some way towards explaining why I don’t seem to have been able to bring myself to write anything here.

This Lent was most definitely a time for experience rather than words. I wrote quite a bit in the weeks leading up to Easter, and when Easter Day came, with its joy and new hope, I posted the few photographs I’d taken at the dawn service on the beach, had breakfast, went to Mass at St Mark’s, and found myself incapable of writing a word. The time after Easter was a time of extraordinary joy, and a deep, unexpected, at times painful, cleansing.

The lengthening spring days have been filled with laughter and sunlight, and the nights with complex, baffling, often distressing dreams. There have been no words for this process, no way to describe it to myself, nothing for the mind to grasp and handle. I have had merely to let God – and it has been hard enough at times even to name him – get on with it. For almost the first time in thirty years I have found it hard even to pray the Jesus Prayer; or should I say it has been hard to bring myself to begin. Once started, my heart has often clung to the Prayer as to a lifeline, and I have found a thread of light on this dark ocean. Mary herself, I think, has been the Sea Star. I have discovered her waiting sometimes, at the edge of vision, when I was least looking for her. “Hail Mary, full of grace…” She is.

I have never known this before, a time of light, and growing peace, when my rational mind was dark, not with “dark thoughts” but with an absence of thought, and an inability to comprehend the changes God has been working in me. Truly this has been a time when the glory has been God’s alone, for I have not been able even to understand what he has been up to.

Time and again I have turned to the Psalms, to Psalm 131: “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvellous for me.” (v1)

and to Psalm 145: “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made.” (vv8-9)

Of course I don’t quite know where I am in all this: since I have no maps for this terra incognita I have no idea of the extent of this land. God’s goodness to me continues to astonish me, his faithfulness is absolute. Here are blessings I never imagined, depths of love I cannot sound.

I will try to post here more regularly, try to find words at least to indicate the edges of what is quite beyond words.

“The Lord is just in all his ways, and kind in all his doings. The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth. He fulfils the desire of all who fear him; he also hears their cry, and saves them.” (Psalm 145.17-19)