The great adventure...

All great traditions teach us some form of contemplation, because it is actually a different form of knowledge that emerges inside of the "cloud of unknowing."

It is a refusal to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and finding freedom, grace and comfort in the not needing to know, which ironically opens us up to a much deeper consciousness that we would call the mind of God. That's because our small mind and lesser self is finally out of the way.

Richard Rohr, from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality

I think that's a big part of it - our "small mind and lesser self" are all that occupy us most of the time, and anything that disables that littleness of mind for a while helps us see that there is far more "out there" than we had ever dreamed of. But many things that appear to give us this freedom - sex, danger, Abraham Maslow's "peak experiences" - are ultimately, if used this way, prisons themselves, what we could call idols: things that become (or are already) ends in themselves, rather than gateways to the silence that is the place of God.

Only contemplation gives us freedom. I'm not talking here about the mechanics, the techniques, but simply about that place beyond the grasp of our own littleness that all the technique and methods serve and lead towards. When we dare to allow God to love us, when we open our hears to allow his Spirit to "guide us into all truth" (John 16.13), then the Spirit will show us how to pray (Romans 8.26). That may be a very different way for you than for me, which is why it's hard to be prescriptive - or proscriptive! - about ways and means of prayer. Listen to God. Ask questions. Read. There's an adventure ahead!

The freedom to fall...

The freedom to fall is also the freedom to rise. It's precisely in our failure, our experience of poverty, weakness, emptiness that we come to experience God's restoration and healing love.

You can say, Oh, that's dangerous, it sounds like you're justifying sin. But I'm just trying to be the ultimate realist. Salvation is sin overturned and outdone, as God expands and educates our true freedom.

Free will and freedom of conscience are at the heart of the doctrine of grace and at the center of Christian morality.

Richard Rohr, from The Price of Peoplehood

Sin is behovely - it had to be - but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well...

...I understood that our Lord looks upon his servant with pity, not with blame. For this passing life does not ask that we live completely without blame and sin. He loves us endlessly, and we sin continually, and he shows us our sin most tenderly. And we sorrow and mourn with discretion and turn to look upon his mercy, clinging to his love and goodness, knowing he is our medicine, understanding that we do nothing but sin.

And so we are able to please him, through the humbleness we get from seeing our sin, and we can faithfully understand his endless love, and can praise and thank him...

Julian of Norwich, Showings (Long Text) Chapters 27 & 82 Tr. Sheila Upjohn

If I can add anything to such words, it is simply that I have found them to be true. There is nothing I have done - and there are many things I wish I had not done - that God has not used in the end for my healing, and to show me his mercy in Christ's love. As far as I can see, it's the only way we can ever get to say, "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me..." (Galatians 2.19-20) "for [I] have died, and [my] life is hidden with Christ in God." (Colossians 3.3)

St. Catherine of Siena (slight return...)

I know I said I wouldn't post any more about St. Catherine, but then I found this irresistible passage, and just had to share it here:

A common trick a lot of midlife women play on ourselves is to feel, and act, responsible for everything. But Jesus, via Catherine of Siena, doesn’t recommend this: "I in my providence did not give to any one person or to each individually the knowledge for doing everything necessary for human life. No, I gave something to one, something else to another, so that each one’s need would be a reason to have recourse to the other." In other words, there’s a divine plan for us to need each other. So don’t go trying to do everything for everybody all at once. Treat your psyche with care - mental illness is not in the divine plan for you.

Even Catherine of Siena felt overwhelmed sometimes, and tried to protect herself. Apparently, at least once she did so by retreating to the roof. Some local parents were worried that their baby was possessed by demons, so they set out to ask Catherine for help. When Catherine saw the three on their way to her cottage, she felt so overwhelmed that she hid herself on the roof, muttering all the while, "Alas, every day I am tormented by evil spirits: Do you think I want somebody else's?" On Catherine’s less stressful days, she poked fun at the devil, calling him "the Old Pickpocket." Then, as now, the devil could steal enjoyment of life from you—and one of Catherine’s strategies to keep him at bay was humor... Clearly, Catherine viewed the incessant demands that could lead to depression, anxiety, and mental illness as the work of the devil. And she was determined to remain sane.

From Wisdom from the Middle Ages for Middle-Aged Women by Lisa B. Hamilton. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com

(With thanks to Vicki K Black)

Please do continue to pray for Burma...

especially for the Buddhist monks and nuns caught up in the struggle for justice and peace. There's a long and disturbing account here, which anyone concerned should read: : Myanmar Protest :

No fear...

You can never bring about the Kingdom of God by means of fear (see Romans 14:16-17). It is not the Kingdom of God if it is brought about by fear or coercion.

God allows and respects the freedom of creatures, even to the point of rebellion and blasphemy! The realm of freedom is a prerequisite of virtue, just as it is of sin. It is God's great risk.

Richard Rohr, from The Price of Peoplehood

This should be written up over every desk where people prepare sermons, and in every room where they conduct Bible studies. So much teaching these days, sadly often from the evangelical end of the spectrum, seems to be based on fear. "Don't think that - it isn't Biblical." "Don't ask those questions - it shows lack of faith." "Don't trust, or even love, those people, they'll lead you astray." "Don't read that, it'll poison your mind." "Here be dragons!" "There be demons!"

I don't know which text some people have concealed between the covers of their NIV Study Bible or their NLT Life Application Bible. My Bible contains 1 John 4.16b-19: "God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgement, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us."

God is love. He is also the God of Heaven and earth and all the is, has been and ever will be. Of what should we be afraid, if we are following our Lord, who trusted his Father to the Cross and beyond, into eternal life?

St. Catherine of Siena...

whose day we celebrate today, is one of my favourite people... but according to blogging tradition, I'm going to recycle last years post, since I can't see the point of saying it all again!

To encourage you to click back in time, though, here is my concluding paragraph:

We have so much to learn from people like Catherine. It is so easy to forget that before our own lifetimes, before the wars and rumours of wars of the last century, before the Reformation even, women and men were trying to follow Christ, and encountering all of the same joys and pains we run into ourselves. We so deeply need to listen to our sisters and brothers of the past, and give up flitting distractedly between the end of the New Testament and the beginning of the 20th century!

And the collect for today from The Daily Office SSF:

God of compassion
who gave your servant Catherine of Siena
a wondrous love of the passion of Christ:
grant that your people
    may be united to him in his majesty
and rejoice forever in the revelation of his glory;
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Why blog? (continued...)

Writing is not just jotting down ideas. Often we say: "I don't know what to write. I have no thoughts worth writing down." But much good writing emerges from the process of writing itself. As we simply sit down in front of a sheet of paper and start to express in words what is on our minds or in our hearts, new ideas emerge, ideas that can surprise us and lead us to inner places we hardly knew were there.

One of the most satisfying aspects of writing is that it can open in us deep wells of hidden treasures that are beautiful for us as well as for others to see...

One of the arguments we often use for not writing is this: "I have nothing original to say. Whatever I might say, someone else has already said it, and better than I will ever be able to." This, however, is not a good argument for not writing. Each human person is unique and original, and nobody has lived what we have lived. Furthermore, what we have lived, we have lived not just for ourselves but for others as well. Writing can be a very creative and invigorating way to make our lives available to ourselves and to others.

We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told. We may discover that the better we tell our stories the better we will want to live them.

Henri Nouwen

Little and poor...

When all of our idols are taken away, all our securities and defense mechanisms, we find out who we really are. We're so little, so poor, so empty - sometimes, even so ugly.

But God takes away our shame, and we are able to present ourselves to God poor and humble. Then we find out who we are and who God is for us.

Richard Rohr, from The Great Themes of Scripture

I think this is very close to the heart of the spiritual life. We are all blundering about, trying to do things, be things, have things, and it takes something - very often something pretty close to what we would think of as a disaster - to break through that self-preoccupation and confront us with our own helplessness. Then we can hear God's voice, feel his gentle hand, receive his mercy... and turn to him little and poor still, but little and humble, and gladly knowing our need for him.

But it does take something, and that's an uncomfortable thought. I often think of Romans 8.28 - "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose" - in this context, as well as Julian of Norwich's remark that "sin is behovely".

Daien T Haseo quotes an old Shin Buddhist hymn,

Obstructions of karmic evil turn into virtues
It is like the relation of ice and water
The more the ice, the more the water
The more the obstructions, the more the virtues.

which carries the sense of this quite as well as any Christian writing. God will use all our weaknesses to make his strength manifest in our lives, if only we will recognise our own helplessness to anything about it for ourselves. We need to be reduced to that place where, like Bartimaeus, all we can do is cry, "Lord Jesus, have mercy on me!" (Mark 10:46-52) It is a dreadfully uncomfortable, deeply embarrassing place to fall into for us who have been brought up with the pride and the self-reliance that is instilled in us from our school-days, if not before; but it is necessary. We need to be discombobulated before God!

She whom all generations call Blessed

Risk all for love, Jesus tells us, even your own life. Give that to me and let me save it. The healthy religious person is the one who allows God to save.

If this is the ideal Christian attitude toward God, then Mary is the ideal Christian of the Gospels. She sums up in herself the attitude of the poor one whom God is able to save. She is deeply aware of her own emptiness without God (Luke 1:52), for the fulfillment of God's promise (1:54); for God's work (1:45,49), and a full personal surrender: "Let it be!" (1:38).

Richard Rohr, from The Great Themes of Scripture

I often wonder why, in the face of facts like this about Mary's character, some of my fellow Anglicans, not to mention others from (especially) evangelical backgrounds, get all panicky when they hear people referring to "our Lady", or "the Blessed Virgin". How have they read Luke 1 for these things not to be blindingly obvious?

And Mary said,
"My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants for ever."

(Luke 1.46-55)

Holiness...

Real holiness doesn't feel like holiness; it just feels like you're dying. It feels like you're losing it. And yet, you're losing it from the center, from a place where all things are One, where you can joyously, graciously let go of it. You know God's doing it when you can smile, when you can trust the letting go.

Richard Rohr, from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction

This is just wonderful - I think it should be written in huge letters over the doors of churches, and set as a signature in all spiritual directors' emails.

I don't know much, personally, about real holiness, but I do know about feeling like I'm losing it, feeling like I'm dying. And I know this much: the times when I have most felt like that have been the times when I've been most aware, often much later, that God was with me, that his mercy filled every waking moment, and every moment asleep.

Nothingness before God

The nothingness we fear so much is, in fact, the treasure that we long for. We long for the space where there is nothing to prove and nothing to protect; where I am who I am, and it's enough.

Richard Rohr, from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction

Living Peacefully...

We live each day surrounded by images of the horrors of our world. Each week brings stories of a world weary with violence. How can we not feel powerless in this? How can we remain committed to a life of nonviolence when so many of the world's ways seem to point in the other direction?

My husband and I were asked to reflect on this dilemma at a recent Christian Peacemaker Teams workshop. Through preparing for this workshop, we realized that living nonviolently involves two separate yet interconnected practices: an outer, visible witness to a life of peace; and the more hidden, attentive work of being present to the small details of our lives. The outer practice is more noticeable, and is often more gratifying - who doesn't feel better after participating in a peace march? And yet, as I learn over and over again, the greatest impact I can have in my tiny world is the way I choose to be present to others and to the world around me. If, daily, I can speak to my children with absolute patience and listen to them as deeply as I would wish that listening from someone else; if, daily, I refrain from the easier tack of speaking ill of someone in order to appear stronger myself; if, daily, I make choices that cause less damage to this beautiful planet - then I know my journey of nonviolence continues, despite the invisibility of its workings.

In a world so broken, I need to believe that living peacefully, both in the grander picture and in the smallness of my own life, will make some difference to the work of "creating something new in the skin of the old."

Madeline Burghart, L'Arche, Toronto

I seem to be surrounded at the moment by this sense that truly living as God has called us to live does make a difference. We need not necessarily go out and interfere with people to change things. We don't necessarily have to rail against them, legislate against them, prosecute them, make war on them, to bring God into people's lives. In fact, it's probably all to the good if we don't do most of those things.

It's all one unbroken fabric with what I have come to realise about prayer: that - for me at any rate - the most effective prayer is not the one possessed of all the facts, zealous in enumerating them before the Throne of God, and diligent in formulating answers to our prayers, and in asking God to plonk the divine rubber stamp on them: "Approved. Let it be so. God." It's very often the prayer where "we do not know how to pray as we ought" (Romans 8.26) and just cry out to God, clinging closely to his mercy, trusting in his Spirit, that really makes the difference.

The cry of my heart for solitude, for a life "hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3.3), is not a solipsistic, self-centred withdrawal from the world after all, but an opening of all of myself to be "crucified with Christ" that I may no longer live as myself, "but it is Christ who lives in me." (Galatians 2.19-20) Then, perhaps, I might be able to be of some use!

Being a bit mad...

Barbara Crafton, at The Geranium Farm, has an article entitled "The Good of the Group", where she says:

I guess many of us just like to be on teams, to be part of something larger than ourselves. We like to put forth a mighty effort, focusing on it together, and to feel the might of its spirit when we do so. We multiply ourselves when we work with others, and we savor the power of that.

This is so true of most people that it has created major moral problems, more than once. Rheinhold Neibuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society is about just this: the moral power of the individual to transcend himself for the sake of the whole becomes demonic when the values of the whole are demonic. Neibuhr adduced the figure of "the good German" to illustrate this: a patriot who follows orders and loves his country, carried, by the very fact of his devotion, into a perverse moral universe in which it becomes an act of righteousness to kill innocent people. We wonder, often, how so many ordinary people could have participated in the horror of the Holocaust. How did they get so unmoored from their own sense of good and evil? The question makes us uneasy; our moral sense may be a lot more community-relative than we like to think it is. It's not just ourselves that we must transcend. Sometimes we must transcend our whole world...

This is important. It's important in little ways, like the cultural imperatives I wrote about the yesterday, where violence as a way of thinking is inherent in people's very upbringing, and it's important in big ways, like Auschwitz and Abu Ghraib. We grow up, we bring our own children up, conditioned to put the mores of the group ahead of individual conscience, and to use violence as a response to suffering, and then we wonder how these atrocities occur.

Of course, most people wouldn't admit to these forms of upbringing, if you put it like that. But look at "team spirit", look at fraternities and sonorities, look at "keeping in with the neighbours / up with the Joneses", look at "standing up for oneself" when it actually means using explicit or implicit violence to stand up for the values of the family, or the school, or the cadet force, or...

Henri Nouwen wrote:

When you are interiorly free you call others to freedom, whether you know it or not. Freedom attracts wherever it appears. A free man or a free woman creates a space where others feel safe and want to dwell. Our world is so full of conditions, demands, requirements, and obligations that we often wonder what is expected of us. But when we meet a truly free person, there are no expectations, only an invitation to reach into ourselves and discover there our own freedom.

Where true inner freedom is, there is God. And where God is, there we want to be.

Is there a contradiction here? Freedom in this sense is above all freedom from the very "conditions, demands, requirements, and obligations" I've been writing about, and yet Nouwen is speaking of the attractiveness of the free woman or man.

I wonder if this doesn't lie close to the heart of the Gospel message... Jesus was apparently a shockingly attractive man. People, sometimes in crowds, would leave everything, families, livelihoods, homes, just to be with him, to listen to him speak and to watch what he did. And yet, ultimately, it was the people who condemned him to death, calling for the release of Barabbas (Matthew 27) rather than Jesus from Roman custody.

As I said yesterday, society doesn't much like folks who live free of cultural imperatives, from the will of the crowd. Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Steve Biko, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, came to a sticky end. St. Francis (see this account, paragraphs 5 & 6) had a most painful interview with his own father, who was standing almost as a representative of his class and society, and were it not for the far-sighted intervention of his Bishop, things might have turned out worse than they did.

Writing of St. Benedict Joseph Labre, Leonard Foley OFM, says:

In a modern inner city, one local character kneels for hours on the sidewalk and prays. Swathed in his entire wardrobe winter and summer, he greets passers-by with a blessing. Where he sleeps no one knows, but he is surely a direct spiritual descendant of Benedict, the ragged man who slept in the ruins of Rome's Colosseum. These days we ascribe such behavior to mental illness; Benedict’s contemporaries called him holy. Holiness is always a bit mad by earthly standards.

Perhaps we are called to be a bit mad. If you recall, Jesus' own family (Mark 3.20-30) thought him more than a bit mad, as did Francis' townsfolk of him!

Freedom!

When we are spiritually free, we do not have to worry about what to say or do in unexpected, difficult circumstances. When we are not concerned about what others think of us or what we will get for what we do, the right words and actions will emerge from the center of our beings because the Spirit of God, who makes us children of God and sets us free, will speak and act through us.

Jesus says: "When you are handed over, do not worry about how to speak or what to say; what you are to say will be given to you when the time comes, because it is not you who will be speaking; the Spirit of your Father will be speaking in you" (Matthew 10:19-20).

Let's keep trusting the Spirit of God living within us, so that we can live freely in a world that keeps handing us over to judges and evaluators.

Henri Nouwen - with thanks to the Henri Nouwen Society

One of the things I've noticed about trying to live outside of cultural imperatives is that there's a tendency for people to find it disconcerting, offensive almost. I suppose in a way they feel judged by someone "going to the side and doing it differently," as Richard Rohr said of St. Francis. Perhaps this is one of those little reflections of Jesus' own life you sometimes get when you try to follow him. After all, he said himself, "If they persecuted me, they will persecute you." (John 15.20)

What strikes me about Nouwen's words is that by the Spirit within us Jesus himself sets us free from all the fear, the paranoia, that comes with living on the wrong side of the cultural tracks. It actually doesn't matter any more, so long as we ourselves are living out of the centre of love. We may indeed suffer, but through the Spirit, through love, it will be made redemptive. As Paul said, "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose." (Romans 8.28) Nouwen is, I think, giving us a glimpse of how that might work.

Little things...

please little minds, they say. I'm disproportionately delighted by having discovered that if you increase the text size (Firefox Ctrl++) in the Blogger WYSIWYG editor, you can actually see what you're doing, and it becomes a very useful little tool. Saves time firing up that great blunderbuss of Windows Live Writer, and it pleases me in the way GMail does, in that you can do pretty much everything you need right in a browser tab, which seems elegant and right.

Years ago I worked for a while for Pathfinder Telecom - the outfit that pioneered VideoPlus, though I worked on their least-cost routing operation - and all the interfaces that we used to control the SQL routing databases and (remotely) the individual customers' LCRM modules, worked through web pages. I thought then how neat that was, with all the software server-side, and the thin-client workstations simply using browsers.

Like I said, little things...

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

The cross, as we see again and again, is the "coincidence of opposites": One movement going vertical, another going horizontal, clearly at cross-purposes.

When the opposing energies of any type collide within you, you suffer. If you agree to hold them creatively until they transform you, it becomes redemptive suffering.

This stands in clear and total opposition to the myth of redemptive violence, which has controlled most of human history, even though it has never redeemed anything. Expelling the contradictions instead of "forgiving" them only perpetuates the problem.

Richard Rohr, from Hope Against Darkness

This is really a continuation of my previous post, or a prequel to it perhaps. But I've been thinking a lot about this today, and looking back over my life I can see how I've all too often bought into the myth of redemptive violence myself.

It seems to me that violence is so much more than the physical act of causing damage to another's body. Violence is a way of life, a way of thinking, that is profoundly at variance to Christ's way. Violence exists in the refusal to forgive, in the impulse to retaliate in whatever form, in the refusal myself to suffer, but to attempt to expel, as Rohr suggests, the suffering onto another.

Violence against oneself is a strange and complex thing. I have never been able to relate to physical self-harm, and even though I have been very close to people who have done this I have not been able to understand their explanations. But inner violence I have known all too well, and it seems to me that it is yet another attempt to expel the suffering; only in this instance to expel it from the present, conscious part of me onto another part: my past, perhaps, or the instinctive, emotional part of myself.

Love is the opposite of violence, in this sense. Love accepts suffering, holds it, absorbs it, and ultimately transforms it into "redemptive suffering". Love "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends." (1 Corinthians 13.7-8)

Martin Luther King understood this, as did Gandhi, and it lies, spoken or unspoken, at the heart of all of Desmond Tutu's words - he who said once, "A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons."

The only way...

A core principle of the Center for Action and Contemplation is: The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. Just go ahead and live positively "in God, through God, with God."

In the short run, you will hold the unresolved tension of the cross. In the long run, you will usher in something entirely new and healing.

This was the almost intuitive spiritual genius of Saint Francis. He wasted no time attacking the rich churches and pretentious clergymen; he just went to the side and did it differently.

Richard Rohr, from Hope Against Darkness

I find this the most extraordinarily encouraging remark. Somehow something at the deepest level of me wakes up, opens its eyes and looks into the dawn, and smiles. This is how I have always longed to live, and even since childhood I have somehow known that the culturally acceptable answers - as I grew up, these were roughly "Fight all that opposes you, with your fists if at all possible..." - were just wrong. I knew that, even when I appeared even to myself to accept them. As I have grown older, and have grown to know my Lord a little better, it has grown clearer and clearer that St. Francis' way is the only possible way for me to live. It's not a matter of a better way, or a preferable way, or a holier way: it's just the only way I can do it now.

Be praised, my Lord, by all those who forgive for love of you
and who bear weakness and tribulation.

Blessed are those who bear them in peace:
for you, Most High, they will be crowned...

(St. Francis of Assisi, from Canticle of the Creatures)

Be Still? You’re Kidding, Right?

Wonderful post from John at Jesus the Radical Pastor - needs no commentary from me!

Be still, and know that I am God.
Be still, and know that I AM.
Be still, and know.
Be still.
Be.

I was first led in this prayer by Franciscan scholar Richard Rohr at The Ooze in Seattle.

Be.

How shall we “be still” in a culture where stillness is considered laziness?

How shall we “be” in a culture where silence is a sign of uncomfortable weakness?

How shall we “be” in a culture where “the eyes of faith” are considered blindness?

How shall we “be” in a culture where singleness of purpose is considered ineptness in a multi-tasking world?

How shall we “be” in a culture where simplicity is considered lack of initiative amidst consumer-driven frenzy?

How shall we “be” in a culture where homo sapiens has evolved to homo narcissus?

How shall we “be still” in a culture that interprets “be still” as “be run over”?

How shall we “be still” in churches that mimic the culture?

How shall we “know God” when God is just another word on our “priority list”?

The glorious freedom of the children of God...

I've just read an extraordinary post by Abbot Joseph of Mt. Tabor Monastery, Redwood Valley, California, all about the Johannine vision of Christ - as befits the Superior of a Byzantine Catholic community...

He says (better to read the whole post, but here are the bits that struck me so forcibly):

Jesus says that when He is lifted up He will draw all men to Himself (John 12:32), and here He is referring simultaneously to his crucifixion and resurrection/ascension. "Lifted up" is a euphemism for crucifixion, but it also means "exalted." This is one way that the evangelist unites the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection in his Gospel. It is the glorified Christ, that is, Christ both crucified and risen, who calls us all to eternal life in Him.

It should be clear that if we are all being drawn closer to Christ, then we are also being drawn closer to each other. We all "meet" in Him. God is love, and Jesus came to reveal that divine truth, to love us to the full, and to give us the new commandment: "Love one another as I have loved you" (John 13:34-35). Christians are supposed to be recognized by their love for one another.

St Paul makes a similar point when he writes that Christ has "broken down the dividing wall of hostility," since He unites us in His peace (Ephesians 2:14). We all like to sing "Christ is risen" at Easter, but do we fully understand what His resurrection requires of us? The One who draws all to Himself in love, expects us to love not only Him, but also those whom He loves. If Jesus has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, why do we insist on rebuilding it? Such walls are built not only between different churches, but even within the same church...

Now, it is clear from St Paul's writings (see 1 Corinthians 5:13) that unrepentant evildoers must be cast out of the Christian community. But most of the problems that Christians encounter with one another are simply differences of opinion or agenda, or worse, prejudices and arrogance. These are things that build up dividing walls, but Christ wants them to be torn down. Are we willing to swallow our pride and live as humble followers of our crucified and risen Lord? To love others even when it is difficult is to be "crucified," and to experience the love of Jesus in return is to be raised up again...

I think that sometimes people live in unchristian ways because they haven't yet experienced the grace and freedom given to the children of God. They don't realize what God has given them through the resurrection of his Son. So they live as if they were never redeemed, as if they hadn't heard the Gospel of love, as if they had no hope for eternal life - that is, they live according to their own will and hold others in contempt...

Jesus is risen from the dead, and He calls us to rise, too. But before we can rise in heavenly glory, we have to learn how to rise above animosity and pettiness and all that keeps us from loving one another as Jesus has loved us. If only we could look at this life through the eyes of eternity, we would see that the bottom line of life in this world is the Great Commandment: love God and love others. Without this we will not be able to enter eternal life when we cross the threshold of death...

Oh, this speaks to my heart! Readers of the early posts on this blog will have deduced already that I came to my present church out of much grief and division in another fellowship, and in another denomination. Walking from there into the open arms of Christ's love incarnate in his people was like walking from death to life, truly.

"I think that sometimes people live in unchristian ways because they haven't yet experienced the grace and freedom given to the children of God. They don't realize what God has given them through the resurrection of his Son. So they live as if they were never redeemed..." I think these are some of the saddest words I have read for a long time.

I pray for Christ's illimitable mercy on us all, and especially when we don't, effectively, know that we are redeemed. Please, please, let us all throw off all that hinders us, and walk into the glorious freedom of the children of God! (Hebrews 12.1; Romans 8.21 NIV)

Sshh, quiet...

Mystify us, arouse and confuse us. Shatter our illusions and plans so that we lose our way, and see neither path nor light until we have found you, where you are to be found and in your true form - in the peace of solitude, in prayer, in submission, in suffering, in succour given to another, and in flight from idle talk and worldly affairs. And, having tried all the known ways and means of pleasing you and not finding you any longer in any of them, we remain at a loss until, finally, the futility of all our efforts leads us at last to leave all to find you henceforth, you, yourself, everywhere and in all things without discrimination or reflection. For, how foolish it is, O Divine Love, not to see you in all that is good and in all creatures. Why, then, try to find you in what you are not?

Jean Pierre de Caussade: The Sacrament of the Present Moment with thanks to Inward/Outward

I've been continuing to think about the Reason for blogging, having been challenged by Gartenfische's remarkable post. It is all too easy, given our human natures, for blogging, even the best bloggers' blogging, to fall into "idle talk and worldly affairs." I know I've done it.

I'm not talking, of course, about the occasional important "off-topic" post, a heads-up about some humanitarian campaign about Tibet, or Burma, or urban deprivation or rural poverty. What I'm talking about is what St. Paul called "disputes about words" (1 Tim 6.4), and things like that.

I'm not making a case for a solemn, sanctimonious, joyless piety. I'm not trying to outlaw catblogging. I'm not complaining about a certain Panamanian Padre's dog-toys. I'm just saying that if we're blogging for something other than our own self-satisfaction, perhaps sometimes quiet is the better part. Sometimes we walk on holy ground, and we might need to take off our shoes.