Person to Person...

I believe in person to person. Every person is Christ for me, and since there is only one Jesus, that person is the one person in the world at that moment.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Virtually everyone today believes that it is possible to love only two or three people. When Jesus talks about loving our neighbor as ourselves, or the Compassionate Buddha tells us to love the whole world as a mother loves her only child, we believe it is all metaphorical. Mother Teresa says no, it is literal. Two or three people are not enough for our capacity to love. We should be able to love everyone - not feel a vague sentiment for a faceless mass, but actually be in love with every individual.

from Eknath Easwaran's Words to Live By (Copyright 1999 and 2005 by The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation.)

Death is not the enemy

The knowledge that Jesus came to dress our mortal bodies with immortality must help us develop an inner desire to be born to a new eternal life with him and encourage us to find ways to prepare for it.

It is important to nurture constantly the life of the Spirit of Jesus - which is the eternal life - that is already in us. Baptism gave us this life, the Eucharist maintains it, and our many spiritual practices - such as prayer, meditation, spiritual reading, and spiritual guidance - can help us to deepen and solidify it. The sacramental life and life with the Word of God gradually make us ready to let go of our mortal bodies and receive the mantle of immortality. Thus death is not the enemy who puts an end to everything but the friend who takes us by the hand and leads us into the Kingdom of eternal love.

(With thanks to the Henri Nouwen Society)

I love this passage of deep comfort - it always reminds me of the end of St. Francis' Canticle of the Creatures:

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Bodily Death,
From whose embrace no mortal can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin!
Happy those she finds doing Your will!
The second death can do them no harm.

Praise and bless my Lord, and give Him thanks
And serve Him with great humility.

Why we pray...

For once, Merton is not writing here about prayer, but though he doesn't mention it straight out, what he wrote here surely formed the background to much of the necessity of his praying:

Unfortunately, the true Christian concept of love has sometimes been discredited by those who have sentimentalized it, or formalized it in one way or another. A sincere subjective disposition to love everyone does not dispense from energetic and sacrificial social action to restore violated rights to the oppressed, to create work for the workless, so that the hungry may eat and that everyone may have a chance to earn a decent wage. It has unfortunately been all too easy in the past for the man who is well fed to entertain the most laudable sentiments of love for his neighbor, while ignoring the fact that his brother is struggling to solve insoluble and tragic problems.

Mere almsgiving is no longer adequate, especially if it is only a gesture which seems to dispense from all further and more efficacious social action. This is not always, of course, a question of genuine insincerity: but the "good works" that measured up to the needs of small medieval communities can no longer serve in the fantastic and worldwide crisis that is sweeping all mankind today, when the population of the world is counted in billions, which double in forty, twenty, and then fifteen years. In such a case, the dimensions of Christian love must be expanded and universalized on the same scale as the human problem that is to be met. The individual gesture, however commendable, will no longer suffice.

The key problem of humanism is the problem of that authentic love which united man to man not simply in a symbiotic and semiconscious relationship but as person to person in the authentic freedom of a mutual gift.

Thomas Merton. "Christian Humanism" in Love and Living. Naomi
Burton Stone and Brother Patrick Hart, editors. New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1979: pp. 124, 130.

I make no apology for repeating here a passage I quoted the other day in another post, from an essay by Br. Ramon SSF in Praying the Jesus Prayer Together :

The cosmic nature of the [Jesus] Prayer means that the believer lives as a human being in solidarity with all other human beings, and with the animal creation, together with the whole created order (the cosmos). All this is drawn into and affected by the Prayer. One believer's prayers send out vibrations and reverberations that increase the power of the divine Love in the cosmos.

The Christian is well aware of the fact that the world is also evil. There is a falseness and alienation that has distracted and infected the world, and men and women of prayer, by the power of the Name of Jesus, stand against the comic darkness, and enter into conflict with the dark powers... [Ephesians 6] The power of the Jesus Prayer is armour against the wiles of the devil, taking heed of the apostle's word, "Pray at all times in the Spirit..."

Outlaws!

You realize that prayer takes us beyond the law. When you are praying you are, in a certain sense, an outlaw. There is no law between the heart and God. The law is outside our intimate relationship with God and if you bring a law into the intimate relationships with God, you mess things up. Between the soul and God there are no laws. But that is not a natural situation; it is the result of redemption, the result of Christ.

[Thomas Merton in Alaska: The Alaskan Conferences, Journals and Letters]

(with thanks to Gabrielle)

The cleansing act of deconstruction...

Jonathan Hall has a long, excellent article over at the Ooze, which I'd encourage you to read in its entirety. In it he says:

I was motivated to write this article after reading Jacques Derrida's "On Hospitality", which was recommended to me one day by a professor from South America for my research project on migration and conflict. I put down that article feeling I was onto something great, but also feeling overwhelmingly in the dark regarding what deconstruction really meant to me...

The act of deconstruction can be illustrated by examining the concepts "Justice" and "law". Imagine that justice is "undeconstructable". Justice is not a construct itself, but rather some future state, something indescribable, even impossible. Law, on the other hand, is a representation of Justice here and now, or rather, situated in some specific place and time. Law is contingent. It is historically and contextually embedded.

So what is deconstruction in relation to these two concepts? Law is the construction of Justice, its representation in a given time and place, relative to specific historical, cultural, psycho-social reference points. To deconstruct "law" is to reveal its boundedness in this network of relationships, to uncover its contingency, its dependency on a specific set of historical circumstances...

So what is the value of deconstruction (reconstruction)? The value is, I think, two-fold.

First, it is to reinvigorate constructions by crafting them in relation to the present. In so doing, they are made functional again. The law must govern a changing social world. The construction of justice in the present (the law) cannot fulfill its own standard of justice if it is not relevant to its current context.

Second, deconstruction can occur in such a way that it points to Justice, the undeconstructable, the unknowable, the impossible future. Reconstruction is limited to situating concepts once again in a context, but in the process we may hint at what Justice might be. We never attain it. Our representations cannot mirror the "undeconstructable". But the process of deconstruction and reconstruction may point towards it, hint at it, long for it, cry out for it, cry for it.

Deconstruction is thus the continual longing for the undeconstructable, and in that sense it is deeply relevant to a religious standpoint and a belief in the existence and relevance of God. It is not relativism, but rather a seeking of the truth with immensely high standards. It is unsatisfied with modernity and its constructions which, though attempts at perfection, ultimately fail to reflect the True, the Good, the Beautiful; or in the case of law, Justice. It is in the striving that we come closest to Justice, and indeed, to God and all that is undeconstructable. Or, in paraphrasing something Jack Caputo has said, it is in the dark of night that faith has superior capacity as a way of knowing. The darkness stands between our deconstructions, or reconstructions (and our rational capacity), and that which lies beyond. In looking towards the future, the impossible, it is ultimately faith that guides us...

It is by continuously deconstructing and reconstructing that we become better at seeking God, and also ourselves. Our imaginations of God and ourselves will never be correct. We must be playful with them, with the language and concepts we use to describe them, to act on them. We must focus not on better constructions, but better processes of deconstruction that point towards the undeconstructable.

Our job is to point, not to capture. Perhaps it is only God that is. We are only becoming.

Stirring stuff, and strangely moving for someone like me, who has in the past tended to read Derrida as corrosive to faith, and to the possibility of a valid encounter with truth. Either I misunderstood, and needed Jonathan's fresh and lucid reading, or Jonathan has built upon Derrida's foundation a new thing. Either way, he's done something pretty tremendous, which deserves far greater recognition than this article will probably receive.

The Lord is gracious & merciful!

Gillian Gibbons, the teacher jailed in the Sudan for allegedly insulting religion after she allowed her primary school class to name a teddy bear Muhammad, has been freed! Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir pardoned her after a meeting with two British Muslim peers, Baroness Warsi and Lord Ahmed.

Ibrahim Mogra from the Muslim Council of Britain told BBC News 24 that the whole saga was very damaging for the image of the Muslim faith.

"Each time we have stories like these, that distort what Islam stands for or misrepresents what the compassion of Muslim law stands for.

"Then we have repercussions and people begin to feel that Islam has no place in modern society, whereas we believe that Islam is for all time to come.

"I have not come across one single Muslim in our country who has supported what has happened.''

President Omar al-Bashir had been under pressure from Sudanese hard-liners to ensure Gillian served her full sentence. There had even been calls for a retrial and for the sentence to be increased. She had been held in a secret location due to fears for her safety.

Please let's continue to pray, not only for Gillian's safe return home, but for love and compassionate understanding between people of faith, whether Christian or Muslim, over this deeply troubling incident.

Advent is a time of standing still...

Advent is a time of standing still and yet making a pilgrimage. It is an inner pilgrimage, a pilgrimage in which we don’t use our feet. We stand still; yet in a manner of speaking, we walk a thousand miles across the world - just because we choose to stand still. So, then, let us enter, you and I, into the pilgrimage that doesn’t take us from home. For ours is a pilgrimage of the spirit, which is a thousand times harder than a journey of the feet. Let us arise and go.

Catherine Doherty, from Donkey Bells (Madonna House)

(hat-tip to Gabrielle for her beautiful post quoting this passage)

Here is Truth knocking at our door...

These passages are from the beautiful website of St. Hugh's Charterhouse, near Horsham in West Sussex, where the Carthusian monks live a life, largely in solitude, devoted to contemplative prayer:

Our principal endeavour and goal is to devote ourselves to the silence and solitude of cell. This is holy ground, a place where, as a man with his friend, the Lord and his servant often speak together; there is the faithful soul frequently united with the Word of God; there is the bride made one with her spouse; there is earth joined to heaven, the divine to the human. The journey, however, is long, and the way dry and barren, that must be travelled to attain the fount of water, the land of promise.(Statutes, 4.1)...

Silence is the air the solitary breathes. The Fathers called it "the language of the world to come". From being an exterior discipline it is gradually interiorised, a mystery of awareness and communion with the Real that so surpasses our busy words and concepts.

Here is Truth knocking at our door, speaking of his Love....

The monk is moulded by this rhythm [of the liturgical hours] and his prayer is taken up into that of Christ and the Church far beyond the limits of his individual concerns. He stands before God with and on behalf of all. Like Christ, he assumes and sometimes experiences in the nakedness of his solitude their sufferings and weaknesses as well as their hope and faith. It is from this place that his prayer in Christ has redemptive power beyond his knowing.

This is from an essay by Br. Ramon SSF in Praying the Jesus Prayer Together :

The cosmic nature of the [Jesus] Prayer means that the believer lives as a human being in solidarity with all other human beings, and with the animal creation, together with the whole created order (the cosmos). All this is drawn into and affected by the Prayer. One believer's prayers send out vibrations and reverberations that increase the power of the divine Love in the cosmos.

The Christian is well aware of the fact that the world is also evil. There is a falseness and alienation that has distracted and infected the world, and men and women of prayer, by the power of the Name of Jesus, stand against the comic darkness, and enter into conflict with the dark powers... [Ephesians 6] The power of the Jesus Prayer is armour against the wiles of the devil, taking heed of the apostle's word, "Pray at all times in the Spirit..."

St Theophan the Recluse said (in a passage referring specifically to the Jesus Prayer) "Prayer is to stand with the mind in the heart before God, and so go on standing before him unceasingly day and night, until the end of life."

Something is definitely going on here. If these folk, who have dedicated their whole lives to prayer, are to be believed, then prayer is possibly the most important thing we can do. God doesn't call everyone to the way of contemplative prayer, but those whom he does call - and I'm speaking quite strongly to myself here - must never succumb to the feeling that they are wasting their time, that they would be better employed doing something practical for their fellow men. That would be like Mary levelling Martha's criticism at herself, instead of allowing our Lord himself to explain things to her sister. We must never feel that our calling is a higher one than that of our more practical or didactic sisters and brothers, but neither should we allow ourselves to worry that it is different from theirs.

I'm sounding very serious here, but to be honest the whole thing is full of joy as well as sorrow, of laughter as well as tears... after all, what better or more cheerful company could we have, than his who walked with those two on the Emmaus road that afternoon?

Last-minute Friday catblogging

Lulu thinks she's a dog. Not only does she follow us everywhere we go, but she has even sunk to this:




















(That's a lamb bone, by the way...)

(Yes, I know it's messy to put the tray on the floor - your point is?)

Sowing Time...

Here is a further meditation from Henri Nouwen, on resurrection. Following on from the one I posted on Monday, Nouwen is thinking about the wonderful persistence of all the dear particulars of our lives, the things we live by and live for, our loves and our griefs, even the shape our own faith takes within our life on earth.

When I was a young man, before I had discovered the glorious grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, I used sometimes to grieve for hours over all the things I loved, the familiar beauty of the trees and the birds, the strange wonders of deep space and human love, feeling that they were all in the end meaningless, since they would fall through decay into nothing. Now I know better, my heart sings every time I think of the things Henri Nouwen is writing about here!

Our short lives on earth are sowing time. If there were no resurrection of the dead, everything we live on earth would come to nothing. How can we believe in a God who loves us unconditionally if all the joys and pains of our lives are in vain, vanishing in the earth with our mortal flesh and bones? Because God loves us unconditionally, from eternity to eternity, God cannot allow our bodies - the same as that in which Jesus, his Son and our savior, appeared to us - to be lost in final destruction.

No, life on earth is the time when the seeds of the risen body are planted. Paul says: "What is sown is perishable, but what is raised is imperishable; what is sown is contemptible but what is raised is glorious; what is sown is weak, but what is raised is powerful; what is sown is a natural body, and what is raised is a spiritual body" (1 Corinthians 15:42-44). This wonderful knowledge that nothing we live in our bodies is lived in vain holds a call for us to live every moment as a seed of eternity.

The wonderful knowledge, that nothing we live in our body is lived in vain, holds a call for us to live every moment as a seed of eternity.

"What will we find there?"

An absolutely stunning poem from Catherine+ - if you go and visit the original post you'll see she has some beautiful photographs to illustrate it:

"What will we find there?"

Tell me again
why I am standing in a bitter wind
sand flying all over
and around me

trying to fasten a saddle
on this stubborn camel
trying to keep my goods
from being lost to the desert.

Best robes and turbans
packed and still I wonder
will I really need them
where I am going,

off on some journey
where I am not sure of
what is to be found...
or whom?

There was the dream,
there was the voice that
well, seemed to speak
with such authority,

with such crystal clarity
I could not help myself
but move with purpose
to follow, of all things...

A star, immense,
stunningly bright
the effulgence of which
never have I seen.

Across the open dunes
we wonder, what is beneath
that star...
What will we find there,

some miracle, some treasure
a fortune teller, a prince?
Too early to tell
So we wait...

Wondering...


Catherine+

A Leap of Faith?

In a quite remarkable post over at Two Fruits in the Sukka, Linda McMillan says:

There is an epidemic in Christianity that I call the sick, sick ministry of making people feel better. We all seem to have an interest in giving an answer that will provide immediate relief, make people feel something besides their burning and overwhelmed souls. And, as an added bonus, it usually makes us feel better too...

But, here’s ol’e Hanukkah Lindy with the hard truth for you: If you want to get to Lamed, there’s fire and water to go through. It’s hard. It’s a fucking bitch, in fact. You will feel like giving up. Some well-meaning but stupid people will try to help you through these difficulties. They will say things like “If you take a leap of faith you either find your self caught by an angel or you learn to fly.” That’s bullshit. Because if annihilation is not a possibility, it’s not really a leap of faith, is it? Better to go alone than with faithless friends.

You might actually drown. It’s a possibility, you know, if you want to get to Lamed. You could be burned away completely. Is it worth the risk, the very real risk? To be honest, I don’t know because I am not there. I often doubt that it is. But, I’ll tell you this: even if I am overcome by fire or water, I’ll take my chances with the one who bled and died on a cross… no angels, no flying… just dying.

Do go and read the whole post, if only to find out exactly what she means by Lamed, and then read through the rest of Linda's fascinating blog. She's worth getting to know...

Crossing Over...

"And I saw the river over which every soul must pass to reach the Kingdom of Heaven, and the name of the river was Suffering...and I saw the boat which carries souls across the river, and the name of that boat was Love."

St. John of the Cross

(With thanks to Our Lady's Little Scribe)

Walking wounded...

Archbishop Michael Ramsey, it is reported, said to his ordinands:

In your service of others, you will feel, you will care, you will be hurt, you will have your heart broken. It is doubtful if any of us can do anything at all until we have been very much hurt, and until our hearts have been very much broken. And this is because God’s gift to us is the glory of the crucified - being sensitive to the pain and sorrow that exists in so much of the world.

Wounded rising...

The resurrection of Jesus is the basis of our faith in the resurrection of our bodies. Often we hear the suggestion that our bodies are the prisons of our souls and that the spiritual life is the way out of these prisons. But by our faith in the resurrection of the body we proclaim that the spiritual life and the life in the body cannot be separated. Our bodies, as Paul says, are temples of the Holy Spirit (see 1 Corinthians 6:19) and, therefore, sacred. The resurrection of the body means that what we have lived in the body will not go to waste but will be lifted in our eternal life with God. As Christ bears the marks of his suffering in his risen body, our bodies in the resurrection will bear the marks of our suffering. Our wounds will become signs of glory in the resurrection.

(With thanks to the Henri Nouwen Society)

I was delighted to find this snippet from Henri Nouwen - it has long seemed to me that this must be the case. Surely all that is good and true in us will rise embodied in the resurrection; I know how much I depend, for any good that is in me, on things I've suffered over the years. I know too that the healing I've received for those wounds has not been a matter of wiping the slate clean, of making it as though these things had never happened. Much more it has been about carrying those wounds with Christ into all that I am, and all that I do, so that in a very little way I can shadow his brokenness, and out of my own hurt reach out towards the hurting. To the extent that I can be this, I am being true to my Lord.

A Real King

In today's Almost Daily eMo, Barbara Crafton is meditating on Luke's account of the Crucifixion. She says:

"The people stood by, watching Jesus on the cross; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, "He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!"
Luke 23:35

Notice that it is the leaders who direct this taunt at the crucified. They assume that the messiah will be privileged by virtue of his status. Before anyone else, they think, surely the leader's life will be preserved. He will make saving himself a priority. That's one of the ways in which we'll be able to tell he's the boss.

This is a serious flaw in their understanding of what it means to lead...

We will not follow those who do not lead by example. A leader must purchase our faithfulness with his own. He cannot expect us to be more self-giving than he is willing to be. If we know our leaders are willing to lay it all down for us, we will lay it all down for them. And if our leaders preach and model nothing beyond what self-interest prompts, they will get back nothing more than our own self-interest. "What's in it for me?" will be the extent of our political and moral debate. For many citizens and far too many leaders, it already is.

This is the Feast of Christ the King. Christian or no, anyone can strive to be Christ-like. And our leaders must strive to be Christ-like, too: refusing to send their people anywhere they will not go themselves.

This is important stuff, a necessary antidote to so much of what we read in the news. It's worth going and reading the whole piece, if only for Barbara's glimpse of the British Royal Family in wartime...

More goodness from Henri Nouwen...

The resurrection of Jesus was a hidden event. Jesus didn't rise from the grave to baffle his opponents, to make a victory statement, or to prove to those who crucified him that he was right after all. Jesus rose as a sign to those who had loved him and followed him that God's divine love is stronger than death. To the women and men who had committed themselves to him, he revealed that his mission had been fulfilled. To those who shared in his ministry, he gave the sacred task to call all people into the new life with him.

The world didn't take notice. Only those whom he called by name, with whom he broke bread, and to whom he spoke words of peace were aware of what happened. Still, it was this hidden event that freed humanity from the shackles of death.

(With thanks to the Henri Nouwen Society)

The power of hidden things again, of obscurity and avoiding the public gesture, the fanfare and the announcement. Hidden not because esoteric, not because revealed only to an inner ring of those-who-know, but hidden in plain view, like plants that thrive in shadow, like the lives of countless women and men whose lives of prayer have sustained the Church throughout history from desert places, forests, and anchorages far from cathedrals and the courts of earthly kings.

The Real God

SaltSister has a remarkable post, Doubting God, where she shares very honestly her own experience of coming to the utter end of herself, and her ideas about God, and finding that, "The best thing God ever did for me is shoot the world out from under me. When nothing worked any more and I had no reason to believe anybody's fix-it doctrine for anything, the real God appeared in the midst of it. Only the part that was worth believing remained. I don't know how it happened, but I guess that was the last time I ever had major doubts."

You should really read the whole thing, but I can't resist reproducing here her list of 5 things about God. She says:

There are only a few things I really believe about God consistently. Because they are so few, I don't have to wrestle with doctrines about "50 ways to bend God’s arm". Here is what I know:

1. God isn't going to help me build my kingdom. He's going to burn it to the ground and build His own. ("Not I, but Christ.")
2. He leads the blind, not the sighted.
3. Prayer initiated by the Holy Spirit is God's own idea and is always answered with an unqualified "yes".
4. In time, what I don't understand will come to light.
5. If I am destroyed, He will raise me up.

Figures, I suppose...

Daft quiz, peculiarly apt result...

Your results:
You are Hulk

Hulk 80% Spider-Man 75% Superman 70% Robin 60% The Flash 60% Iron Man 60% Supergirl 53% Batman 50% Green Lantern 50% Catwoman 35% Wonder Woman 33%

You are a wanderer with amazing strength.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Hat tip to Mother Laura, the original Wonder Woman!

A Scrap of Eckhart...

Apprehend God in all things,
for God is in all things.

Every single creature is full of God,
and is a book about God.

Every creature is a word of God.

Meister Eckhart (1260-1328)

With thanks to Jan, who posted it first...