The Holy Land—Coming Home

It’s more than a week now since I returned to Dorset from the Holy Land, and I’m still struggling to put into words how the trip has affected me.

In Christian terms, the phrase “Holy Land” is usually defined as the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, occupied by present-day Israel and Palestine. It is a Holy Land, though, in very truth, the stone of it, pinned, as it were, to the centre of all that has been made… despite all the centuries of pain and loss, the brokenness, all the politics, the violence, occupation, dispossession; despite all the hope and all the longing, this place is holy in a way quite unlike anywhere else I’ve been.

None of this is to be understood on a historical, nor a cultural level. The encounters with what must be God himself in this place have been unlike anything I’ve felt anywhere else. This is an unmediated land, where the light falls inescapably between then and then, in the place of now.

I had expected a weight of history, a sense of passing cultures—Canaanite, Israelite, Roman, Islamic. I had expected to be startled by a sense of place, moved by memories in the density of stone. I had expected a new angle on the Gospels, perhaps some illumination of the Messianic prophecies they claim to fulfil. I had not expected to walk straight into God.

The Lord said to Moses, ‘I will do the very thing that you have asked; for you have found favour in my sight, and I know you by name.’ Moses said, ‘Show me your glory, I pray.’ And he said, ‘I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, “The Lord”; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But’, he said, ‘you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.’ And the Lord continued, ‘See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.’

Exodus 33.17-23

We read this passage as it appears in the Lectionary, and somehow we don’t (well, I don’t) expect such an encounter ourselves. And yet this describes exactly how I felt in some places in that Land.

It is easy, somehow, to see how the early Church Fathers came up with the doctrine of the Trinity. The presence of Christ is so strong in places such as Jacob’s Well, where he talked with the Samaritan woman (John 4.1-54), or the place on the shore of the Sea of Galilee where he restored Peter (John 21). The work of the Holy Spirit was plain in incident after incident, in the continual illumination of Scripture as we read our way through our journey, pausing to pray and to read at each stop on the way. But there were times, too, especially in the two afternoons we had to ourselves in Jerusalem, when I was able to be alone, where there was a crystal immediacy that would, save for its measureless mercy, have overcome the little human consciousness as the sun overcomes the brief flowers of the high Judean wilderness. Even then, though, it was difficult even to know what one had known, for lack of words.

I know that for myself I can’t be the same man I was before this trip: that the ancient tales of pilgrimage, the sense that the Holy Land is a place one must visit at least once in a lifetime, have all come true. I’m aware that all this might sound like hyperbole to those whose faith is rooted at home, in deep relationships, the steady pattern of worship. It might seem hyperbole even to some of my fellow pilgrims, or at least like speaking of what should remain hidden, and I’m not really sure myself whether I ought to be so public with these inner things. But I do know that the opposite is true. We are often far too reluctant to speak of God as real, or of what is sometimes called mystical experience as if it were a present possibility for the ordinary Christian like me…

We can have ideas of God, but God is not an idea. We can dream of God, not to mention encounter God in dreams, but God is not a dream. We can hope for, long for God, but God is not wishful thinking. God is real, far more real than we are, and somehow, and for some reason beyond our capacity entirely to understand, he has made this beautiful, tragic, dusty place somewhere he will, if we are even slightly open to him, become to us as David Jones once said, the “actually loved and known.”

The Holy Land

Off on pilgrimage again, this time to the Holy Land. If I find the chance, I may send a post or two from there. Otherwise, see you all in a fortnight.

Pray for me…

God is far closer than I had imagined…

Your True Self is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16.26). Your essence, your exact “thisness,” will never appear again in another incarnation. . . .

You (and every other created thing) begin with a divine DNA, an inner destiny as it were, an absolute core that knows the truth about you, a blueprint tucked away in the cellar of your being, an imago Dei that begs to be allowed, to be fulfilled, and to show itself. As it says in Romans (5.5), “It is the Holy Spirit poured into your heart, and it has been given to you.” . . .

John Duns Scotus (1265-1308), the Franciscan philosopher . . .called each soul a unique “thisness” (haecceity), and he said it was to be found in every act of creation in its singularity. For him, God did not create universals, genus, and species, or anything that needed to come back again and again to get it right (reincarnation), but only specific and unique incarnations of the Eternal Mystery—each one chosen, loved, and preserved in existence as itself—by being itself. And this is the glory of God!

Richard Rohr, excerpted from Immortal Diamond: the Search for Our True Self (due for publication February 2013)

The Holy Spirit is the un-thought-of member of the Trinity. He is truly God, yet he is in each of us, the thread that binds us, the light in our eyes—in the eyes of every creature (Psalm 104.27-30).

We cannot touch or see the Holy Spirit, as we cannot touch or see the thisness of ourselves. There are no tests for the presence of the Spirit. Sometimes when we are least aware of it, the Spirit is working most strongly in us.

God is all, and in all. When we know this, when we have seen it for ourselves, we are changed (Galatians 5.22,23) and sometimes hardly recognise ourselves, almost as Mary Magdalene failed to recognise her risen Lord in the dawn garden, till he spoke her name (John 20.16).

I have found these recent days most strange, and the patterned light shifts across the things that are, like leaf-dapples in a summer forest. God is far closer than I had imagined.

Today, I had an epiphany

[In] finding your True Self, you will have found an absolute reference point that is both utterly within you and utterly beyond you at the very same time. This grounds the soul in big and reliable truth. “My deepest me is God!” St. Catherine of Genoa shouted as she ran through the streets of town, just as Colossians had already shouted to both Jews and pagans, “The mystery is Christ within you—your hope of Glory!” (1:27).

The healthy inner authority of the True Self can now be balanced by a more objective outer authority of Scripture and mature Tradition. Your experience is not just your experience, in other words. That’s what tells you that you are not crazy. That God is both utterly beyond me and yet totally within me at the same time is the exquisite balance that most religion seldom achieves, in my opinion. Now the law is written on both tablets of stone (Exodus 31.18) and within your heart (Deuteronomy 29.12-14), and the old covenant has rightly morphed into the new (Jeremiah 31.31-34).

Richard Rohr, excerpted from Immortal Diamond: the Search for Our True Self (due for publication February 2013)

Today, I had an epiphany. At least, I suppose that’s a reasonable way to describe it, since I can’t think of another word…

I was looking, as it happened, at one of those red emergency call pulls, a red nylon cord with a dangling triangular, red, translucent plastic handle, when I realised that God was in everything—not just in some theoretical, theological way, but actually, tangibly present. Not, you understand, that everything is God, but that he is there, as much as there is space between the subatomic particles of all matter.

More than that, God is at the very heart of all that is, living and true, alive—oh, so gloriously alive—and that that life is love itself. More than that, it is the love of God in Christ that holds us, saves us, builds a bridge between our frail and temporary lives and that measureless permanence that gives to the interstellar chasms their being, as much as to a little red plastic emergency call pull, and to me.

Paul says there is “one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4.6) and that Christ “himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together…” (Colossians 1.17)

That is how it was. I have read and re-read these words in the New Testament, and they have been only words. Today, in a small red plastic triangle, they were plain experience, nothing more.

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

Unforgettable and shining…

Conservatives look for absolute truth; liberals look for something “real” and authentic. Spouses look for a marriage that will last “’till death do us part.” Believers look for a God who never fails them; scientists look for a universal theory. They are all on the same quest. We are all looking for an immortal diamond: something utterly reliable, something loyal and true, something we can always depend on, something unforgettable and shining.

There is an invitation and an offer for all of these groups from John’s very short Second Letter, when he writes: “There is a truth that lives within us that will be with us forever” (2 John 2). But most of us know very little about this, so we end up as St. Augustine admits in his Confessions: “Late have I loved you, Beauty so very ancient and so ever new. Late have I loved you! You were within, but I was without.”

Richard Rohr, excerpted from Immortal Diamond: the Search for Our True Self (due for publication February 2013)

We are all in the same boat, to begin with. I can remember this quest for “something unforgettable and shining” almost as far back as I can remember anything. Like everyone, I assumed it was outside myself, but I did see even from my early childhood that somehow it was what “made everything work” as I described it to myself.

Thinking it to be outside myself, as I grew up I looked for it in science, art, chemicals, philosophy, sex – everywhere but within. To be honest, I was afraid of what I might find, despite the increasingly reckless experiments I tried.

Gradually, though, I began to find it: not through an increasingly desperate and extreme search for something beyond myself, but truly within, gently, quietly, through prayer and contemplation—not looking for “It” but looking for mercy, for grace; then “the truth that abides in us and will be with us for ever” found me.

It seems to me that only in simultaneously realising that the hollowness, the brokenness, the pain of the world are reflected in me, and that the only response to them is love, however apparently helpless and wounded such loving renders my own heart, that the “unforgettable and shining” opens at the heart’s own core, and reaches out to all creatures, every one.

Faith and not imagination…

It is faith and not imagination that gives us supernatural life, faith that justifies us, faith that leads us to contemplation.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, New Directions, p.154

Faith is not the same as imagination—in fact it is in some ways the diametrical opposite. Faith means looking at the truth the heart knows, and not blinking; standing before God in the utter silence, and listening.

Somehow I think it is faith, and not imagination, which is the work of poets and musicians, and the best of painters and sculptors. We need to look at truth without blinking if we are going to produce work that is likely to last; even if lasting is in the heart of one person who truly listens to an improvised bass fill, played live, and hears the heart of the one who played it, and is different afterwards, perhaps for the rest of their life.

Singleness of heart…

Mysticism begins when the totally transcendent image of God starts to recede; and there’s also a deepening sense of God as imminent, present, here, now, within me. Augustine’s line was “God is more intimate to me than I am to myself” or “more me than I am myself.” St. Catherine of Genoa shouted it in the streets, “My deepest me is God!” In other words, the One Beyond is also one with me…

You must overcome your primary alienation to know truthfully—and what you learn is that the Beyond One is doing the knowing through you! You are not alone. The gap has been overcome from the other side. God is no longer “out there.” At this point, it’s not like one has a new relationship with God; it’s like one has a whole new God! “God himself is my counsellor, and at night my innermost being instructs me,” says the Psalmist (Ps. 16.7).

After the beginnings of mystical experience, one finds that what makes something secular or profane is precisely to live on the surface of anything. It’s not that the sacred is over here and the profane is over there. Everything is profane if you live on the surface of it, and everything is sacred if you go into the depths of it—even your sin. Jesus lived and loved the depths of things, as all mystics do.

So the division for the mystic is not between the secular and the sacred, but between the superficial and the profound. Karl Rahner, the German Jesuit, who was an expert at Vatican II, loved to call this “the mysticism of ordinary life.”

Richard Rohr, excerpted from Immortal Diamond: the Search for Our True Self (due for publication February 2013)

We must be careful how we read this. Rohr is writing very much from inside the experience he is describing, and statements like, “everything is sacred if you go into the depths of it—even your sin” are easily misunderstood. Rohr is not saying that sin is in itself holy; merely that our own sin, if we are truly open to the grace God gives to us through the Cross, is the sacred ground from which our holiness grows, like wheat from the muck that is spread on the land. But the muck of sin must be well ploughed in for it to nourish the grain that falls into the earth and dies (John 12.24).

Jesus himself said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God…” Matthew 5.7-8) That purity is singleness of heart, that longing for mercy Paul wrote of in Romans 8.18-24.

Once again, it is the Jesus Prayer that pulls all this together, makes (to the heart, at least) sense of its contradictory truth:

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

God wastes nothing…

The Perennial Tradition invariably concludes that you initially cannot see what you are looking for because what you are looking for is doing the looking. God is never an object to be found or possessed as we find other objects, but the One who shares your own deepest subjectivity—or your “self.” We normally called it our soul. Religion called it “the Divine Indwelling…”

For the True Self, there is nothing to hate, reject, deny, or judge as unworthy or unnecessary. It has “been forgiven much and so it loves much” (Luke 7.47). Compassion and mercy come easily now, once you live from inside the Big Body of love. The detours of the False Self were all just delaying tactics, bumps in the road, pressure points that created something new in the long run, as pressure does to carbon deep beneath the earth. God uses everything to construct this hard and immortal diamond, our core of love. And diamonds, they say, are the hardest substance on this earth. It is this strong diamond of love that will always be stronger than death.

Richard Rohr, excerpted from Immortal Diamond: the Search for Our True Self (due for publication February 2013)

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8.28)

It’s hard to write about things like this without making oneself out to be more than one is – or I find it so, anyway. But what experience I do have does bear out what Rohr is saying here. It was Julian of Norwich who wrote, “Lord Jesus, I have heard you say: ‘Sin is behovely, but all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well’.”

God wastes nothing. The human heart is built to feed on pain, even as it lives in joy, much as we might like not to admit it; from that nourishment grow some of the loveliest flowers of our kind. After all, on that soil grew the great Tree of the Cross…

On knowing…

In the first aborted ending to Mark’s Gospel—the oldest Gospel—the text ends on a very disappointing and thus likely truthful note: “They ran away from the tomb frightened out of their wits. They said nothing to a soul, for they were afraid” (16:5-8).

Such running from resurrection has been a prophecy for Christianity, and much of religion, just as in these early Scriptures. I interpret this as the human temptation to run from and deny not just the divine presence, but our own true selves, that is, our souls, our inner destiny, our true identity. Your True Self is that part of you that knows who you are and whose you are, although largely unconsciously. Your False Self is just who you think you are—but thinking doesn’t make it so.

We are made for transcendence and endless horizons, but our small ego usually gets in the way until we become aware of its petty preoccupations and eventually seek a deeper truth. It is like mining for a diamond. We must dig deep, and yet seem reluctant, even afraid, to do so.

We are not so at home with the resurrected form of things despite a yearly springtime, healings in our bodies, the ten thousand forms of newness in every event and every life. The death side of things grabs our imagination and fascinates us as fear and negativity always do, I am sad to say. We have to be taught how to look for anything infinite, positive, or good, which for some reason is much more difficult.

We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve “the problem of evil,” yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is “the problem of good.” How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results.

Somehow resurrection—which I am going to equate with the revelation of our True Selves—is actually a risk and a threat to the world as we have constructed it. After any “raising up” of our True Selves, we will no longer fit into many groups, even much of religious society, which is often obsessed with and yet indulgent of the False Self, because that is all it knows.

Richard Rohr, excerpted from Immortal Diamond: the Search for Our True Self (due for publication February 2013)

It seems to me, deeply scary though it sounds, as though we must die to the idea of God, the idea of Christ as the Jesus of countless retold stories, in order to meet him at all. As Cynthia Bourgeault points out in her book Wisdom Jesus, his early disciples did not meet the Jesus we know, the crucified and risen Saviour of the world. They met a most unusual Man, and they weren’t sure who he was, or where his life really began… and yet they knew, they knew something so profound that they would give up everything to follow him, be near him, listen to his words and witness the things he did.

“Your True Self is that part of you that knows who you are and whose you are, although largely unconsciously.” We do know, if only we will stop thinking about how we know. The encounter with Christ takes place beyond all boundaries of history and geography, and our hearts will know him, as surely as we know our own breathing, even as our minds struggle even to name the truth we have just walked into.

On the Feast of St Francis...

On our great feast day of Francis, let me elaborate a little further on what we Franciscans believe to be “the Univocity of all Being.” Univocity, in Latin, means “one voice.” When you speak of God, when you speak of angels, when you speak of humans, when you speak of animals, when you speak of trees, when you speak of fish, when you speak of the earth, you are using the word “Being” univocally, or with one foundational and common meaning.

They all participate in the same Being to varying degrees. And being is One, as is God. It might seem like an abstract philosophical position, but I hope you can see how life-changing it is. Now we have an inclusive and consistent universe where everything is sacred, where you can’t divide the world into the sacred and profane any more. God is revealed in everything and uses everything without exception (1 Corinthians 15.28; Colossians 3.11).

Thus later biographers have brilliantly called Francis “an authentic spiritual genius” and “our one sincere democrat” (lowercase “d”). Today we bless all the creatures in his honour!

Richard Rohr, from an unpublished talk in Assisi, Italy, May 2012

Interestingly, in the verses Rohr has quoted here, it is in Christ that this unity comes about. This, as much as anything, seems to be what the Incarnation is all about: creation itself, matter, is drawn into God, is of one being with him, just as Christ himself is described in the Nicene Creed.

This always reminds me of the concept of Buddha-nature, of which Orgyen Tobgyal Rinpoche writes: "It is because this ground or sugatagarbha or potential is common to all beings that they are capable of attaining enlightenment. If they did not have such a ground then they could never become buddhas."

Of course all this is implicit in Scripture, especially in the first chapter of St John's Gospel, and in the "farewell discourses" of our Lord that John records in chapters 13-17. It took St Francis, with his clear sight and extraordinary openness, to show the Church what it might look like in the "actually loved and known", as David Jones put it.

Sinking down to the seed…

Give over thine own willing, give over thy own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything and sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart, and let that grow in thee and be in thee and breathe in thee and act in thee; and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of Life, which is its portion.

Isaac Penington,1661, from Quaker Faith & Practice

This sinking down to the seed is the heart of our prayer, who are called to this odd way of relating to God. When we pray through the darkness, holding to the way we’ve been called into, whether the Jesus Prayer, centring prayer, or any other contemplative way, then a knowledge of God grows in us, opening very slowly, till we become aware of it not by any direct perception, but by seeing it reflected in all that is loved. That way, it is shared, and with it the grace and mercy that Christ is, with creation itself, and with each separate and longing creature that has been made.

Gentle lightning…

We are told that St. Francis used to spend whole nights praying the same prayer: “Who are you, God? And who am I?” Evelyn Underhill claims it’s almost the perfect prayer. The abyss of your own soul and the abyss of the nature of God have opened up, and you are falling into both of them simultaneously. Now you are in a new realm of Mystery and grace, where everything good happens!

Notice how the prayer of Francis is not stating anything but just asking open-ended questions. It is the humble, seeking, endless horizon prayer of the mystic that is offered out of complete trust. You know that such a prayer will be answered, because there has already been a previous answering, a previous epiphany, a previous moment where the ground opened up and you knew you were in touch with infinite mystery and you knew you were yourself infinite mystery. You only ask such grace-filled questions, or any question for that matter, when they have already begun to be answered.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Following the Mystics Through the Narrow Gate (CD/DVD/MP3)

 

Somehow I find the openness of St Francis’ prayer extraordinarily moving. As I wrote the other day, we humans are very slow to trust, even in our own Creator and Redeemer. In our own prayer, we reach up to God, but only in response to his grace—to the movement of his Holy Spirit towards us. It’s a bit like a lightning stroke, perhaps—as the stepped leader reaches down from the cloud to earth, so a smaller streamer of opposite charge reaches up from earth to meet it. When they touch, the great lightning stroke itself is formed.

We are too prone to credit ourselves with the responsibility for our own spiritual lives. Thank God, we don’t have such a heavy burden to carry. Being created things, we depend entirely upon the mercy of God, Christ, of whom John wrote, “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” All that we are rests in God, and his touch awakens us to reach up to him, as a sleepy cat will sometimes reach up her paw to someone reaching down to touch her…

Swimming in mercy...

…When we think of mercy, we should be thinking first and foremost of a bond, an infallible link of love that holds the created and uncreated realms together. The mercy of God does not come and go, granted to some and refused to others. Why? Because it is unconditional - always there, underlying everything. It is literally the force that holds everything in existence, the gravitational field in which we live and move and have our being. Just like [the] little fish swimnming desperately in search of water, we, too - in the words of Psalm 103 - "swim in mercy as in an endless sea." Mercy is God's innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope

"God's innermost being turned outward..."?

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being... And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth." (John 1.1,2,14)

The mercy of God, in which we swim as in an endless sea, is Christ himself, who says, "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them." and, "I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me." (John 6.56; 17.20,21)

We are not beyond mercy, outside mercy, or bereft of it; nor can we be. When we cry out to Christ for his mercy, we are crying out as those who seek to realise what they already have, like the man who cried out "I believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9.24)

Faithful at any cost?

Many people live with the unconscious or conscious expectation that eventually things will get better; wars, hunger, poverty, oppression, and exploitation will vanish; and all people will live in harmony.  Their lives and work are motivated by that expectation.  When this does not happen in their lifetimes, they are often disillusioned and experience themselves as failures.

But Jesus doesn't support such an optimistic outlook.  He foresees not only the destruction of his beloved city Jerusalem but also a world full of cruelty, violence, and conflict.  For Jesus there is no happy ending in this world.  The challenge of Jesus is not to solve all the world's problems before the end of time but to remain faithful at any cost.

Henri Nouwen - with thanks to the Henri Nouwen Society

Faithfulness; trust; mercy. It seems to me that these three are inextricably linked. God's mercy, Christ himself, is faithful beyond our imagining, and it is only in him that our own little faithfulness can subsist at all. We trust so little.

Irma Zaleski says, "It is our failure of trust, our turning away from God and focusing on ourselves - our self-centredness - our need to protect ourselves at all cost, which the Fathers considered the root of all sin. Because we are unable to anybody or anything, and, above all else, because we are unable to trust God, we are compelled to reply on our own resources, to attempt to find our own happiness, and to fulfil our own desires and needs. We are imprisoned, stranded on the island of our self. We are all exiles from Paradise."

The only way out is repentance: trusting God in Christ enough to give up struggling, give up our self-reliance, and to cry out unceasingly, like some 21st-century Bartimaeus, for mercy, in whatever words, or wordlessness, we are given...

The Name of Jesus

36. The use of the Holy Name not only brings anew the knowledge of our own union with Jesus in His incarnation. The Name is also an instrument by which we may obtain a wider view of Our Lord's relation to all that God has made. The Name of Jesus helps us to transfigure the world into Christ (without any pantheistic confusion). Here is another aspect of the invocation of the Name: it is a method of transfiguration.

37. It is so in regard to nature. the natural universe may be considered the handwork of the Creator... It can be considered as the visible symbol of the invisible divine beauty... And yet all this is insufficient. Creation is not static. It moves, striving and groaning, towards Christ as its fulfilment and end. (Romans 8.21,22) What we call the inanimate world is carried along by a Christward movement. All things were converging towards the Incarnation. The natural elements and the products of the earth, rock and wood, water and oil, corn and wine, were to acquire a new meaning and to become signs and means of grace. All creation mysteriously utters the Name of Jesus: 'I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.' (Luke 19.40) It is the utterance of his Name that Christians should hear in nature. By pronouncing the Name of Jesus upon natural things, upon a stone or a tree, a fruit or a flower, the sea or a landscape, or whatever it is, the believer speaks aloud to the secret of these things, he brings them to their fulfilment, he give an answer to their long and apparently dumb waiting... We shall say the Name of Jesus in union with all creation...

38. The animal world may also be transfigured by us. When Jesus remained forty days in the wilderness, he 'was with the wild beasts.' (Mark 1.13) We do no know what happened then, but we may be assured that no living creature is lift untouched by Jesus' influence. Jesus himself said of the sparrows that 'not one of them is forgotten before God.' (Luke 12.6) We are like Adam when he had to give a name to all the animals... Scientists call them as they think fit. As to us, if we invoke the Name of Jesus upon the animals, we give them back their primitive dignity which we so easily forget--the dignity of living beings being created and cared for by God in Jesus and for Jesus...

On the Invocation of the Name of Jesus, Lev Gillet (A Monk of the Orthodox Church)
Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, 1949

This is one of the most extraordinary and profound passages on prayer that I have read. (The 'Invocation of the Name of Jesus' referred to is, of course, the Jesus Prayer, as the book explains elsewhere.) All that is necessary in prayer is to bring those we hold in our hearts, in our perception even, into the presence of Christ by this prayer of the Name.

Yet Gillet's theology of the Prayer is more radical even than this. (It is small wonder this little book is not better known nor more widely available!) Earlier he writes:

27. The Name of Jesus brings us more than his presence. Jesus is present in the Name as a Saviour, for the word 'Jesus' means just this: saviour or salvation... Jesus began his earthly mission by healing and forgiving...

28. The Name of Jesus not only helps us to obtain the fulfilment of our needs... (John 16.23-24) But the Name of Jesus already supplies our needs. When we require the succour of Our Lord we should pronounce his Name in faith and hope, believing that we already receive what we ask for. Jesus Himself is the supreme satisfaction of all men's needs. And He is that now, as we pray. Let us not regard our prayer in relation to fulfilment in the future, but in relation to fulfilment in Jesus now. He is more than the giver of what we and others need. He is also the gift. He is both giver and gift, containing in Himself all good things... This is quite another thing than if he had merely given them to us. Now we may find in his Name all that he is. Therefore the Name of Jesus, in so far as it links us with Jesus Himself, is already a mystery of salvation...

(ibid.)

When I discovered this little pamphlet (it is only 32 pages long) on the bookshelf in one of the guest houses at Hilfield Friary, it was like discovering that someone had put words to my own deepest intuitions and longings. It struck me speechless for a long time, and I am only just beginning to try and think through some of the implications, at least for my own life of prayer. I'll try to write more here shortly.

Fasting of the heart…

Fasting of the heart means hearing, but not with the ear... The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty, to the ear, or to the mind. Hence it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right there before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind. Fasting of the heart empties the faculties, frees you from limitation and from preoccupations. Fasting of the heart begets unity and freedom... If you can do this, you will be able to go among men in their world without upsetting them. You will not enter into conflict with their ideal image of themselves...

Look at this window. It is nothing but a hole in the wall, but because of it the whole room is full of light. So when the faculties are empty, the heart is full of light. Being full of light, it becomes an influence, by which others are secretly transformed.

The Way of Chuang Tzu Thomas Merton, with thanks to Diane Walker

Fasting of the heart… I have hesitated to post here, because I haven’t had the words for what has been happening within by own heart. Perhaps a kind of fasting is the best way to describe it. So much that we mistake for certainty is in fact preconception, and we cling to our preconceptions as to lifebelts in the great wash of God’s presence.

We do not realise the vastness of God – at least, I don’t – the sheer appalling otherness of this istigkeit we presume to worship.

Aslan is no tame lion, as CS Lewis reminded us. Our Lord’s incarnation is often said to dissolve the distances between God and man, but what kind of a man was it his disciples, the women and men who walked and ate and drank with him day in and day out, actually knew? He terrified them on occasion (Matthew 14:22-33), struck them witless with awe (Luke 9:23-33), baffled them (John 6.43-68), and, after his resurrection, was at times simply unrecognisable (Luke 24.15-16; John 20.14-15).

“…what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” as the Psalmist (8.4) says. A presence so great that he encompasses the galaxies, the vast interstellar chasms, and yet knows and cares for the fall of a sparrow… What can we know of such a presence, except what we are shown by him?

Tiny and broken, what can we cry but, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner?

The George Smileys of the spiritual life…

Hiddenness is an essential quality of the spiritual life. Solitude, silence, ordinary tasks, being with people without great agendas, sleeping, eating, working, playing ... all of that without being different from others, that is the life that Jesus lived and the life he asks us to live.  It is in hiddenness that we, like Jesus, can increase “in wisdom, in stature, and in favour with God and with people” (Luke 2.51).  It is in hiddenness that we can find a true intimacy with God and a true love for people.

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

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

It’s tempting to think of hiddenness as more dramatic than it is: heroic journeys to the depths of the wilderness, hermits whose very doors have been bricked up. And yet that isn’t really hiddenness—extreme eremitism brings its own fame.

Hiddenness, especially in today’s society, is much more likely to consist in being plain and unremarkable, George Smileys of the spiritual life…

I don’t find this easy. I’m as drawn as the next person to getting up to things that may show me in a favourable light, to getting involved with visible stuff to a point where I can no longer remain hidden. A lot of these things are good and useful in themselves, and yet they don’t seem to help with the life of prayer at all. I’ve explored these things before in this blog, yet I don’t seem any closer to an answer. Meanwhile, I still long to live like ivy, constant in the shadowed places…

A blessing of St Clare of Assisi

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May he show his face to you and be merciful to you. May he turn his countenance to you, my sisters, and daughters, and give peace to you, and to all the others who come and remain in your company as well as to others now and in the future, who have persevered in every other monastery of the Poor Ladies.

I, Clare, a servant of Christ, a little plant of our most holy Father Francis, a sister and mother of you and the other poor sisters, although unworthy, beg our Lord Jesus Christ through his mercy and the intercession of his most holy Mother Mary and blessed Michael the Archangel and all the holy angels of God, of our blessed Father Francis, and all men and women saints, that the heavenly Father give you and confirm for you this most holy blessing in heaven and on earth. On earth, may he multiply you in his grace and his virtues among his servants and handmaids in his Church Militant. In heaven, may he exalt you and glorify you among his men and women saints in his Church Triumphant.

I bless you during my life and after my death, as I am able, out of all the blessings with which the Father of mercies has and does bless his sons and daughters in heaven and on earth and a spiritual father and mother have blessed and bless their spiritual sons and daughters. Amen.

Always be lovers of your souls and those of all your sisters. And may you always be eager to observe what you have promised the Lord.

May the Lord always be with you and may you always be with him. Amen.

The Testament of St Clare

The very earth of Heaven...

All great spirituality teaches about letting go of what you don’t need and who you are not. Then, when you can get little enough and naked enough and poor enough, you’ll find that the little place where you really are is ironically more than enough and is all that you need. At that place, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect.

That place is called freedom. It’s the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don’t feel the need to eliminate anybody because they’ve come to the place where, as I like to say, everything belongs. To live from this place cuts the roots of violence at their very foundation, for there is not even any basis for fear or anger or protection or hatred. Negativity must be nipped in the bud—that is to say, in the mind.

Richard Rohr

I often think of this strange freedom - as regular readers will remember, there have been times over the seven years I've been blogging here when things have been very much stripped away - and of how often I have found these words of Rohr's to be quite concretely true. (This post details the beginning of these things, and this one the continuation.)

CS Lewis, in The Great Divorce, puts these words into the mouth of one of the saints in Heaven, "There is no meantime... All that is over. We are not playing now..."

Indeed. This is the kind of place Fr Richard's "little place" is, and as he points out, "At that place, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect."

This is not "a" freedom. It is not one of several we may choose amongst. It is freedom, and eventually, it will be all we have. It is, as Lewis saw so clearly, the very earth of Heaven...

The Ground of Mercy

...True solitude is selfless. Therefore, it is rich in silence and charity and peace. It finds in itself seemingly inexhaustible resources of good to bestow on other people.

The true solitary must recognize that he is obliged to love other men and even all things created by God... Love is his solitude

Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island pp.248, 251

What we think we are, the things we use usually to define our identities, will not outlast us. They are nothing but straw in the wind, less than the blown spray of the rising waves: for we have died, and our lives are hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3.3).

In her book Living the Jesus Prayer, Irma Zaleski writes:

The way of the Jesus prayer has been called “white martyrdom.” It is the way of the Cross, because there is no greater pain than to stand in the total poverty of our human weakness,to see clearly our misery, our inability to be good. The temptation to judge ourselves, to hate ourselves, would be irresistible if we did not know and had not experienced the merciful, healing power of Jesus.  (pp.42-43)

It is a mistake, though, to see it as something outside ourselves, or something that could be imposed by a superior on another. Only God can call us, as Irma Zaleski points out:

How do we know that we are called to this way of prayer? In a way, we don't. If we feel drawn to try it, we should try it. It doesn't really matter what our motives are. If our motives are not pure (and whose ever are?), God will purify them. If it is not God's will for us, we shall not persevere, but if it is God's will, we shall soon know. The Jesus Prayer, like any true love, is never imposed on us. It never does violence to our deepest spiritual desires and longings, but instead fulfils them. (ibid., pp.16-18)

Lord, lead us each, lead me, into the way of true repentance. Show us the condition of being human; lead us back to the Ground of our being...

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner...