Turning us loose to pray...

I've just read a wonderful post from Brother Bede Thomas Mudge OHC, on, among other things, the Jesus Prayer. He says:

I finished [the evening] with some suggestions about other uses of the Prayer - to accompany people through the day and through the night, and in praying for others, especially when you don't know what to pray for. Just putting a person in your consciousness and praying over them: "Lord Jesus Christ, Word of God, have mercy" is a wonderful way to intercede, and helps us to turn loose of the manipulative approach to God that troubles many of us when we pray.

Do click over and read the whole post!

A bloggers' charter

Writing can be a true spiritual discipline. Writing can help us to concentrate, to get in touch with the deeper stirrings of our hearts, to clarify our minds, to process confusing emotions, to reflect on our experiences, to give artistic expression to what we are living, and to store significant events in our memories. Writing can also be good for others who might read what we write.

Quite often a difficult, painful, or frustrating day can be "redeemed" by writing about it. By writing we can claim what we have lived and thus integrate it more fully into our journeys. Then writing can become lifesaving for us and sometimes for others too.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Nouwen could have written this with today's blogging community in mind, I think. Extending "spiritual discipline" a bit can cover all kinds of blogs other than faith blogs... apart from those blogs concentrating on cars, sex or gardening, there seems to be a persistent spiritual element to blogs even from people who would not think of themselves as "spiritual" at all. Maybe there is something about writing, after all, that connects us, willy-nilly, with the things of the spirit. Certainly many poets would agree!

At the risk of offending those who are not Christians who may find their way here via a keyword search, I can't help but feel that all this is somehow connected with the Word. The Greek, as most people know I guess, is Logos, which translates as "reason", "order", "plan", as well as "word". When we use words, we are using things which have meaning and connection beyond what is dreamt of in most of our philosophies, it seems to me. God spoke, and things came to be. What he spoke was the Word, Jesus, through whom all things were made (John 1:3). Jesus' own words were more than just remarks: he said, "Talitha koum!" and the little girl stood up (Mark 5:40ff); he told dead Lazarus to come out, and out he came (John 11.42). He only had to say, "I am!" and a bunch of hardened, well-armed soldiers and Temple guards drew back fell to the ground (John 18:6).

Jesus said once, "I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father." (John 14:12) Why should we wonder that our words, even words in blogs, can be more "powerful and effective" (James 5:16) than we might expect?

Sent...

Each of us has a mission in life. Jesus prays to his Father for his followers, saying: "As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world" (John 17:18).

We seldom realise fully that we are sent to fulfil God-given tasks. We act as if we have to choose how, where, and with whom to live. We act as if we were simply plopped down in creation and have to decide how to entertain ourselves until we die. But we were sent into the world by God, just as Jesus was. Once we start living our lives with that conviction, we will soon know what we were sent to do.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Substitutes for faith...

The affluent are literally possessed by their possessions. Money and the things it can buy stalks the rich countries like a demon. Mammon offers comforts and pleasures to delight the flesh but demands the soul in return. The attachment of Americans to their standard of living has become an addiction. We can’t stop shopping, eating, consuming….

A successful life leads not to love, wisdom and maturity; progress and success in our society is instead based on adding more to one’s pile of possessions. Our natural course is toward a better job, bigger house and richer lifestyle….

Material goods have become substitutes for faith. It’s not that people literally place their cars on the altar; rather, it is the function of these goods in a consumer society. They function as idols, even though most affluent U.S. Christians, like rich Christians throughout history, would deny it.

Jim Wallis, The Call to Conversion (with thanks to Inward/Outward)

And we wonder, sometimes, why the current economic crisis feels like a crisis of faith...

Lightning rods...

In an extraordinary post over on A Minor Friar, Brother Charles says:

Sometimes I think we don't spend enough time reminding ourselves of the direct connection between the creation and the incarnation. When I talk to kids or even adults about creation, they almost always know that God created the heavens and the earth. But they are often stumped when I ask them how God creates, what particular technique God used. Though it's explicit and obvious in the first creation account in Genesis, it's easily missed that God creates through his speech. "God said," "and so it happened."

St. John says as much in the prologue to his gospel, how the world was created through the Word. As Christians we believe that Jesus Christ is that same Word made flesh. The same Word which, when spoken, makes the creation happen is made human in Christ. So God's act of creating the world and the Incarnation of the Word are very closely correlated. I would even dare to say that the world is created so that the Word might become incarnate in it, so that the Word made flesh might die and rise within it in order to communicate to the creation the creative power of the Word.

The Resurrection, then, a recapitulation of the first day of creation when God separated the light from the darkness. This is also part of the reason why we celebrate the Easter season as a "week of weeks." During the whole of the first week we pray in "on this Easter day" in the preface to the Eucharistic Prayer, because the Easter Octave is the "Sunday" in the seven weeks of the season. The Easter season imitates and commemorates both the creation through the Word and the re-creation through the Word made flesh, and reminds us that we are on pilgrimage to a destiny in which these are the same thing.

The gift of rebirth in the Resurrection is for the whole of creation. For God insists on saving the world and pours out upon it the very force of creation itself in the dying and rising of Christ.

This is what lies at the very heart of what I understand about prayer. We do not pray as isolated individuals, crying out our demands to a brazen sky. No, we pray as part of creation, already dead and already raised (Colossians 3:3; Romans 6:8) with Christ: we are lightning rods for "the very force of creation itself" in Christ. We are very like lightning rods in fact, small and insignificant things, dull and spindly, left out in the weather. Yet the Holy Spirit will flow (unhindered if we are poor enough in ourselves) through us, bringing healing and renewal, and the hope of the Resurrection, not only to those we might remember to pray for by name, but to everyone, and every thing, towards whom our hearts are open.

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will. (Romans 8.18-27)

The Cross bridge...

He who was also the carpenter's glorious son set up his cross above death's all-consuming jaws, and led the human race into the dwelling place of life. We give glory to you, Lord, who raised up your cross to span the jaws of death like a bridge by which souls might pass from the region of the dead to the land of the living. We give glory to you who put on the body of a single mortal and made it the source of life for every other mortal. You are incontestably alive. Your murderers sowed your living body in the earth as farmers sow grain, but it sprang up and yielded an abundant harvest of people raised from the dead.

Come, then, my brothers and sisters, let us offer our Lord the great and all-embracing sacrifice of our love, pouring out our treasury of hymns and prayers before him who offered his cross in sacrifice to God for the enrichment of us all.

From a sermon of Ephrem of Edessa, Deacon (AD 373) found in Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, edited by J. Robert Wright. Copyright © 1991, Church Publishing Incorporated, NY, with thanks to Vicki K Black

Freedom!

True freedom is the freedom of the children of God. To reach that freedom requires a lifelong discipline since so much in our world militates against it. The political, economic, social, and even religious powers surrounding us all want to keep us in bondage so that we will obey their commands and be dependent on their rewards.

But the spiritual truth that leads to freedom is the truth that we belong not to the world but to God, whose beloved children we are. By living lives in which we keep returning to that truth in word and deed, we will gradually grow into our true 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 centre 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...

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.

from Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey.

Jesus said, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." (John 8:31-32)

So much of our lives, it seems to me, are led according to the by now unconscious, internalised, teaching we received from our parents. If we are truly fortunate, this will be the Gospel of Christ - but for so many of us it is not.

I have still, at the age of 60, to struggle daily against expectations built into my whole perception of my own self-worth. I "know", because I was taught it at an age when I was too young to know that there was any other point of view, that love is earned, and may at any time be withdrawn if one fails to meet expectations. I "know" too that one's worth as a person, one's right to exist in another's eyes, only comes at the price of meeting certain targets, of coming up with the goods, both educationally and creatively.

To hear the Gospel, truly to hear it, years after I had first accepted intellectually the truth of our faith, was for me to hear that justification is by faith alone: that there is nothing I could do to earn it, and that nothing I can in my frail humanity fail to do can lose it for me. To read the 8th chapter of Paul's Letter to the Romans properly was one of the greatest liberations in all my life. And yet it was only in trying to live according to what I read in the Gospels that I was able to understand it. Nouwen says, "By living lives in which we keep returning to that truth in word and deed, we will gradually grow into our true freedom..." and I have come to know that he was right!

But, knowing all this, I still have to struggle. For me, the false programming I received as a child acts as one of the "powers" Nouwen refers to, and which Paul describes so movingly in Romans 8:38-39: "For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." I have daily to take up the armour of God (Ephesians 6:10-18) to resist it, to cut it down with the sword of the Spirit, for if I do not, I find that it grows up unbidden again, like brambles, in the background of my sense of who I am.

Nouwen is right when he speaks of "living lives in which we keep returning to that truth [of the Gospels] in word and deed." We do indeed have to "keep returning." Our enemy will not, this side of Glory, allows us to rest in this truth, to appropriate it once for all. But it is right anyway, I think, that we shouldn't. Paul says again, "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him..." (Romans 8:28) and here it seems he is doing just that. As long as we remain part of a creation as yet not fully liberated (ibid. 18-25) we will forget, or the bramble re-growth of whatever it is obscures our hearing of the Word that sets us free.

Truly, nothing will ultimately be able to "separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord" but in order actually to live our lives in the freedom of that truth, we have to "remain" ("abide" NRSV) in Christ (John 15), living according to his teaching - for it is only then that we will "will know the truth, and the truth will set [us] free." (John 8:32)

Alleluia!

He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

A white silence...

I have not been posting as regularly as I would have liked to, recently. I'll try and write more on why after Easter, but actually these last weeks have also been externally scattered, in a good way, with old friends from across the world and from the other end of the country coming to visit, and to see around our county, and to be shown some of the lovely hidden places of Purbeck!

Barbara, of barefoot towards the light, has a wonderful little post on the Easter Triduum, where she speaks of "withdraw[ing] behind a white silence." I think, as the hours pass on towards Good Friday, that that is the right place for me, too. As Barbara also says, "it is more than called for."

Empty hands, empty heart...

When someone gives us a watch but we never wear it, the watch is not really received. When someone offers us an idea but we do not respond to it, that idea is not truly received. When someone introduces us to a friend but we ignore him or her, that friend does not feel well received.

Receiving is an art. It means allowing the other to become part of our lives. It means daring to become dependent on the other. It asks for the inner freedom to say: "Without you I wouldn't be who I am." Receiving with the heart is therefore a gesture of humility and love. So many people have been deeply hurt because their gifts were not well received. Let us be good receivers.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Christianity is precisely a liberation from every rigid legal and religious system. This is asserted with such categorical force by St. Paul that we cease to be Christians the moment our religion becomes slavery to "the Law" rather than a free personal adherence by loving faith to the risen and living Christ: "Do you seek justification by the Law... you are fallen from grace... In fact, in Christ Jesus neither circumcision or its absence is of any avail. What counts is faith that expresses itself in love" (Gal. 5:4, 6).

Thomas Merton. Seasons of Celebration

Do you see the connection? It is the gift of grace, the gift we celebrate with increasing force over these days leading up to Easter, that we must receive with open hands, and an open heart. It's probably a cliché, but our hands cannot receive if they are clenched in possession or defence, and our hearts cannot receive if they are full of stuff. It is the empty hands, the empty heart, that will receive the priceless gift of love that Christ has for us at Easter. It is to the anawim, to the helpless poor, that Jesus was sent, as he described when he quoted from Isaiah 61 at the start of his ministry, as Luke records (4.16-21).

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven...

(Matthew 5.3)

Striving to surrender...

Seeking God is not just an operation of the intellect, or even a contemplative illumination of the mind. We seek God by striving to surrender ourselves to Him whom we do not see, but who is in all things and through all things and above all things.

Thomas Merton. Seasons of Celebration, p. 224.

Do you know that you are never absolutely sure you're right when you're living in faith? That's exactly why it's called "faith"! At the crucial moments in your life's decision making, you are always trusting in God's guidance and mercy and not in your own perfect understanding. You're always "falling into the hands of the living God" as Hebrews (10:31) says, letting God's knowing suffice, God's arms save.

Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality

I think at long last I am coming to see the truth of statements like this... God knows it's taken long enough, but he is a patient God, and he's allowed me to go gradually learning this way of surrender, because I am by nature such an un-surrendering person. I somehow find it comforting to look back over Jesus' own life, and to realise (the extreme example being in the garden at Gethsemane, Luke 22:39-49) the even he didn't find surrender easy, perfectly though he did in the end do it.

Word and silence...

As a people, we are afraid of silence. That’s our major barrier to prayer. I believe silence and words are related. Words that don't come out of silence probably don't say much. They probably are more an unloading than a communicating.

Yet words feed silence, and that's why we have the word of God... the written word, the proclaimed word. But the written and proclaimed word, doesn't bear a great deal of fruit - it doesn't really break open the heart of the Spirit - unless it's tasted and chewed, unless it's felt and suffered and enjoyed at a level beyond words.

If I had to advise one thing for spiritual growth, it would be silence.

Thomas Merton, from Contemplative Prayer

We need to bring all our reading, all our thoughts and our feelings, into silence. It is in silence that God is (1 Kings 19.12 NRSV - after all the wind and earthquake and fire, "a sound of sheer silence").

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will. (Romans 8.26-27)

But it is only in silence that we can give the Spirit room to search the depths of our hearts.

At peace with time...

Fundamentally the Christian is at peace with time because Christians are at peace with God. We need no longer be fearful and distrustful of time, because we understand that time is not being used by a hostile "fate" to determine our lives in some sense which we ourselves can never know, and for which we cannot adequately be prepared. Time has now come to terms with Man's freedom.

Thomas Merton. Seasons of Celebration, p. 47.

For some reason I love thinking about time. I don't do it as much as I used to, but it's cleansing in some odd way, and healing, to think of who and what and when one is against the great field of time, the web on which God weaves all things.

About the Holy Spirit and the Bible - some old thoughts revisited...

I know I've been a bit quiet here recently, and I thought a word of explanation was due. Somehow God has been opening up to me things that I had neglected. The Spirit has been I guess rather "like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old." (Matthew 13.52)

So, in the spirit of all this, I revisited some of my old writings on The Mercy Site, and I thought I'd share with you some bits I found that seemed to explain something of what's been going on:

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The Bible is far more than an old book about the way things were: "Your word, O LORD, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens." Psalm 119:89; "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away." Jesus, in Matthew 24:35.

Then, it literally feeds us: "… man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD." Deuteronomy 8:3; "Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation." 1 Peter 2:2.

It guides us in all we do: "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path." Psalm 119:105; "The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple." Psalm 119:130.

But it has even more power than that: "I am not ashamed of the Gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes." Romans 1:16; "Is not my word like fire," declares the LORD, "and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?" Jeremiah 23.29; "… the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." Ephesians 6:17; "For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart." Hebrews 4:12.

But if the Bible is to be so much to us, if it is to be our guide and our protection and our weapon and our food, then how can we manage this? Even pocket Bibles are somewhat awkward to have with us every minute of every day, and how can we stop and look up Scripture every time we have a choice to make, every time we are tempted or annoyed or challenged or endangered? The Bible tells us: "These commandments I give you today are to be upon your hearts." Deuteronomy 6:6; "No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and your heart so you may obey it." Deuteronomy 30:14; "I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you." Psalm 119:11; "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly..." Colossians 3:16.

How can the Bible dwell in us like that? How can we learn the whole Bible to use like that?

There is an old tradition in some churches known as learning Memory Verses: certain verses, useful for various situations and circumstances and states of mind we may find ourselves in are committed to memory, using a variety of mnemonic tools well tested over time. That works - until you find yourself in a situation you've never learnt a verse for. Then you get to panic. Or go your own way…

The human mind is a wonderful thing, with capacities far beyond what we mostly expect of it, and abilities the greatest of us hardly begin to tap into. But the Holy Spirit knows all about them, all about the unused 3/4 of the human brain. He also knows all about Scripture. If only we will soak ourselves in the Bible, if only we will read and read, and think about, and pray about, all we have read, if only we will take the time to let the Holy Spirit burn the Word into our minds like the little laser that burns data onto an optical disc, then we will slowly begin to realise for ourselves the truth that the Word of God is in our heart, that suddenly, strangely, we find just the right word for just the situation we find ourselves in, that when we find ourselves tempted to sin, that we can answer, as Jesus did in the desert, "It is written..."

And once this starts to happen, then perhaps the strangest thing begins to happen to us. We start to fall in love, in the oddest way, with the Word of God. We actually start to find we can say, with the author of Psalm 119, "Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long." (v 97) Or with Jeremiah, "...your words… were my joy and my heart's delight, for I bear your name, oh LORD God Almighty." (15:16)

"Listen," said the apostle Paul, "I will tell you a mystery..." I am going to tell you a mystery now. I feel really strange saying this, because it is so great a mystery that it scares me even to think about it. But it is very simple really, it is very logical. The Bible, Holy Scripture, is the Word of God, agreed? Its human authors were so closely inspired by the Holy Spirit that what the wrote down are the very words of God, and the whole canon of Scripture together is the Word of God. And who, or what, is the Word of God? "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God… The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us." (John 1:1, 14). And what did Jesus say? "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you." (John 14:18) He was speaking of the Holy Spirit in this famous passage, but he said. "I will come to you." You see, we can't make artificial distinctions among the persons of the Holy Trinity. God is one: "Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one." (Deuteronomy 6:4) He is God in Three Persons, but he is still One. Take one bit, you've got the lot, if you will forgive my speaking of God like that.

So, if we have the Bible, we have Jesus. He is with us. If we have the Word of God in our hearts, we have Jesus in our hearts. If we obey the commands of Jesus - the commands of God, which the psalmist of Psalm 119 so loved - "[we] will know the truth, and the truth will set [us] free." (John 8:32) - and as Jesus (14:6) is "the way and the truth and the life" we will know him. And the Holy Spirit (16:13) "will guide [us] into all truth."

In one profound sense, Scripture is a perfect circular argument. It is inescapable. Try as we may, we cannot evade or avoid its demands on our life, its profound transformation of our very selves. The Christian life is like a quicksand: one real stride into and you're gone, no way back. Accept one thing, and you've suddenly accepted the whole thing, all its profound and outrageous claims on us, on every second of our time, on every aspect of our lives. We suddenly find we have given it all away, we are not our own any more, and even the very life in us has changed, has been taken over. Nothing will ever be the same again. We've fallen in love, we've taken the step, and there's no way back. And all we can do is press on, with our brother Paul: (Philippians 3:12-14) "Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." ...

The Jesus Prayer developed in the years directly after the times described in the Acts of the Apostles, when people - both men and women - went out into the desert to pray, sometimes for many years. They ran into the same problem Paul identifies in Romans 8:26 ("We do not know what we ought to pray for..."), and they searched the Scriptures - including the (at that time, very!) New Testament - for an answer. They found it in the prayers people addressed to Jesus: Peter's "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16); the Canaanite woman's "Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me!" (Matthew 15:22); the tax collector's "God, have mercy on me, a sinner!" (Luke 18:13). They found themselves praying, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!" and somehow in its repetition it was complete, somehow it both answered and spoke out their hearts' cry, not only for themselves, but for all the aching world and its people...

This intercessory dimension of what is in effect a contemplative style of prayer was a revelation to me, though I had known of the Jesus Prayer for many years. It was not until the Holy Spirit brought it out for me, as it were, and illuminated the scriptures from which it is built, that I began to realise the incredible completeness of the Bible's teaching on prayer. Truly it is inexhaustible - and it is never superseded, never out-of-date. "Your word, O LORD, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens. Your faithfulness continues through all generations." (Psalm 119:89-90)

The whole of prayer, just like The Jesus Prayer, is to be founded in the Bible - in the Word of God.

(Slightly edited and adapted from The Mercy Site)

Magdalene's Musings: What is a Cross? Lenten Meditation

I saw this wonderful post linked from the excellent Jane Redmont's Acts of Hope, and just had to post a link myself. Here's some real angel-strengthening for your Lenten Desert!

Magdalene's Musings: What is a Cross? Lenten Meditation

A most counterintuitive thing...

Pain teaches a most counterintuitive thing - that we must go down before we even know what up is. In terms of the ego, most religions teach in some way that all must "die before they die." Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. I would define suffering very simply as "whenever I am not in control."

If religion cannot find a meaning for human suffering, humanity is in major trouble. All healthy religion shows us what to do with our pain. Great religion shows us what to do with our pain. Great religion shows us what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust.

If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.

If there isn't some way to find some deeper meaning to our suffering, to find that God is somewhere in it, and can even use it for good, we will normally close up and close down. The natural movement of the ego is to protect itself so as not to be hurt again.

Richard Rohr, from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 25

I'm not sure that I would go along with Rohr all the way when he defines suffering as simply "whenever I am not in control," but I'm not sure I can come up with a better one-liner.

This is an important passage nonetheless. In many ways it answers the unanswered questions in my previous posts on suffering. More of this tomorrow, I hope. I just couldn't resist posting this now!

Do good to your servant
       according to your word, O LORD.

Teach me knowledge and good judgment,
       for I believe in your commands.

Before I was afflicted I went astray,
       but now I obey your word.

You are good, and what you do is good;
       teach me your decrees.

Though the arrogant have smeared me with lies,
       I keep your precepts with all my heart.

Their hearts are callous and unfeeling,
       but I delight in your law.

It was good for me to be afflicted
       so that I might learn your decrees.

The law from your mouth is more precious to me
       than thousands of pieces of silver and gold.

(Psalm 119.65-72)

God calls us to suffer the whole of reality...

Our remembrance that God remembers us will be the highway into the future, the straight path of the Lord promised by John the Baptizer (Luke 3:4). Memory is the basis of both pain and rejoicing: We cannot have one without the other.

Do not be too quick to heal all of those memories, unless that means also feeling them deeply and taking them all into your salvation history. God calls us to suffer the whole of reality, to remember the good along with the bad. Perhaps that is the course of the journey toward new sight and new hope. Memory creates a readiness for salvation, an emptiness to receive love and a fullness to enjoy it.

Strangely enough, it seems so much easier to remember the hurts, the failures and the rejections. In a seeming love of freedom God has allowed us to be very vulnerable to evil. And until we have learned how to see, evil comes to us easily and holds us in its grasp.

Yet only in an experience and a remembering of the good do we have the power to stand against death. As Baruch tells Jerusalem, "you must rejoice that you are remembered by God" (Baruch 5:5, NAB). In that remembrance we have new sight, and the evil can be absorbed and blotted out.

Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 26

"God calls us to suffer the whole of reality..." I feel somehow that that is true not only in the sense that Rohr implies, being prepared to recall the good in our own lives as well as the bad we more easily remember, but also in the sense that we must be prepared to suffer along with others - for that is the meaning of compassion, to suffer (or feel) with - whoever or wherever they are, and to rejoice with them also.

I have sometimes thought that the capacity for compassion - I mean compassion for all of creation, not just for our fellow human beings - lies at the heart of what it means to be human. When we pray, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner", with our hearts open to the suffering, and the joy, of the whole of reality, then we are making ourselves into little lightning rods, conducting into all we hold in our hearts some of the immeasurable mercy of Christ. As he was God's love and grace and mercy (see e.g. Psalm 145.8-9) so we are, in however small a way, Christ's.

The LORD is gracious and compassionate,
       slow to anger and rich in love.

The LORD is good to all;
       he has compassion on all he has made...

The LORD is faithful to all his promises
       and loving toward all he has made.

The LORD upholds all those who fall
       and lifts up all who are bowed down...

My mouth will speak in praise of the LORD.
       Let every creature praise his holy name
       for ever and ever.

(Psalm 145:8-9; 13-14; 21)

Illusions, and a reality...

During our short lives the question that guides much of our behaviour is: 'Who are we?' Although we may seldom pose that question in a formal way, we live it very concretely in our day-to-day decisions.

The three answers that we generally live - not necessarily give - are: 'We are what we do, we are what others say about us and we are what we have,' or in other words: 'We are our success, we are our popularity, we are our power.'

Jesus came to announce to us that an identity based on success, popularity and power is a false identity - an illusion. Loudly and clearly he says: 'You are not what the world makes you; but you are children of God.'

Henri Nouwen, from Here and Now: Living in the Spirit with thanks to inward/outward

Called...

So many terrible things happen every day that we start wondering whether the few things we do ourselves make any sense. When people are starving only a few thousand miles away, when wars are raging close to our borders, when countless people in our own cities have no homes to live in, our own activities look futile. Such considerations, however, can paralyse us and depress us.

Here the word call becomes important. We are not called to save the world, solve all problems, and help all people. But we each have our own unique call, in our families, in our work, in our world. We have to keep asking God to help us see clearly what our call is and to give us the strength to live out that call with trust. Then we will discover that our faithfulness to a small task is the most healing response to the illnesses of our time.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

It think this is a better way than I could have found myself to explain what I mean about my call to prayer, especially as it relates to the suffering we've discussed in the last few posts. As the Principles of the Third Order (TSSF) states (13):

We as Tertiaries desire to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, whom we serve in the three ways of Prayer, Study, and Work. In the life of the Order as a whole, these three ways must each find full and balanced expression, but it is not to be expected that all members devote themselves equally to each of them. Each individual's service varies according to their abilities and circumstances, yet as individual members our Personal Rule of Life must include each of the three ways.

I don't think these priorities are set for life, like the colour of our eyes. I know very well that nowadays God's main call on my life is to prayer, then to study, and last to work, in the form of Parish work. It has not always been so. When I was farming, my call to prayer was still very strong, perhaps the strongest call, helped as it was by the long solitary hours involved in herdsmanship; but study came a long way down the list. I hadn't time for study, beyond reading my Bible and some easy notes; and if I had had time, I'd simply have fallen asleep! Yet dairy farming is a vocation, if ever there was one, as exacting in its way as medicine or teaching.

The point of suffering?

Suffering is the necessary feeling of evil. If we don't feel evil we stand antiseptically apart from it, numb. We can't understand evil by thinking about it. The sin of much of our world is that we stand apart from pain; we buy our way out of the pain of being human.

Jesus did not numb himself or withhold from pain. Suffering is the necessary pain so that we know evil, so that we can name evil and confront it. Otherwise we somehow dance through this world and never really feel what is happening.

Brothers and sisters, the irony is not that God should feel so fiercely; it's that his creatures feel so feebly. If there is nothing in your life to cry about, if there is nothing in your life to complain about, if there is nothing in your life to yell about, you must be out of touch. We must all feel and know the pain of humanity. The free space that God leads us into is to feel the full spectrum, from great exaltation and joy, to the pain of mourning and dying and suffering. It's called the Paschal Mystery.

The totally free person is one who can feel all of it and not be afraid of any of it.

Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 209

This passage brings me to the very heart of what I understand by prayer. The pain we feel in suffering, and still more in compassion (suffering-with), is the pain of the Cross. There is for me no escaping this. It's what Paul is speaking of when he says:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly... In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will." (Romans 8.22-23; 26-27)

Creation, the whole web of life and death, birth and agony, is caught up in what I have to call the mystery of the Fall: "For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God." (Romans 8.20-21)

Because I don't understand; because as a human being I simply cannot get my heart around the enormity of the world's pain, nor my head around the intricate and endless pattern of causation the gives rise to it; because as a mortal being I cannot comprehend - though I can worship - the economy of salvation, the way the Cross opens the way for "a new Heaven and a new earth" when "[God] will wipe every tear from [his creation's] eyes [when t]here will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away..." (Revelation 21.1, 4), I cannot pray straightforward prayers of intercession, as I can for some individual situation of sickness or need. This is why God seems to have called me particularly to pray the Jesus Prayer, so that in my identity with, my compassion for, the pain of the world, I can pray, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner", since somehow "me" now includes all that I suffer with, and my sin somehow now includes, or is one with (and this hurts) the sin that causes that universal suffering.

The Jesus Prayer is for me the perfect prayer, since in its cry for mercy it is both petition and intercession, but intercession that transcends my own feebleness and limitation; yet in its repetition, it brings the little mind to silence, and allows the vast stillness of the love of God to come and gentle my crushed and crying heart, and in some way I don't understand, allows a little more of the mercy of Christ into this broken place we live in together.