Friday, March 15, 2024

An acuteness of love and attention...

In Sarah Bachelard's recent book A Contemplative Christianity for Our Time, she quotes from the epilogue to Christopher Fry's play A Sleep of Prisoners:

Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul we ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.

We do live, as did the WWII soldiers in Fry's play, in just such a time. Archimandrite Sophrony wrote, some years ago now, as if he were writing yesterday:

It has fallen to our lot to be born into the world in an appallingly disturbed period. We are not only passive spectators but to a certain extent participants in the mighty conflict between belief and unbelief, between hope and despair, between the dream of developing mankind into a single universal whole and the blind tendency towards dissolution into thousands of irreconcilable national, racial, class or political ideologies. Christ manifested to us the divine majesty of man, son of God, and we withal are stifled by the spectacle of the dignity of man being sadistically mocked and trampled underfoot. Our most effective contribution to the victory of good is to pray for our enemies, for the whole world. We do not only believe in - we know the power of true prayer... 
The Jesus Prayer will incline us to find each human being unique, the one for whom Christ was crucified. Where there is great love the heart necessarily suffers and feels pity for every creature, in particular for man; but our inner peace remains secure, even when all is in confusion in the world outside... 

As Bachelard points out, there is no sense in which prayer, let alone contemplative prayer, is to be thought of as a substitute for human endeavour, scientific, political, or whatever. But it is not less than those things. So far from a retreat from or a defence against pain, our calling may be to an acuteness of love and attention so keen and detailed as to constitute prayer itself; an entering, in effect, into the pain of the cross of Jesus that, as Helen Waddell shows in her novel Peter Abelard, goes on and on throughout all history, like a ring in the trunk of a tree; Calvary being only the visible bit, the saw-cut that reveals the ring. The cross, in all of its pain and desolation, continues through all time, the pain itself by which Christ's mercy is present always as redemption and grace.

Whatever technical interpretation we place on the theology of crucifixion and atonement, the direct spiritual experience of "an entire universe of horrifying anguish" (Rebecca Tope) is, to me at least, the most fundamental call to prayer, and the reason why for me only a contemplative practice can come anywhere near answering that call. Not for the first time I am reminded of this passage from Praying the Jesus Prayer by Br Ramon SSF:

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

The Christian is well aware of the fact that the world is also evil. There is a falseness and alienation which has distracted and infected the world, and men and women of prayer, by the power of the Name of Jesus, stand against the cosmic darkness, and enter into conflict with dark powers... The power of the Jesus Prayer is the armour against the wiles of the devil, taking heed of the apostle's word, 'Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayers and supplications...' [Ephesians 6.18]

Saturday, March 09, 2024

Small and quiet...

The longer I keep on with the way of prayer, and especially since returning to it as I have, the more convinced I am of the necessity of remaining small and quiet. John Gill writes of Sophrony Sakharov that, "[h]e taught that humility and repentance are paramount and through experiencing the ebb and flow of God’s grace we learn the need to be poor in spirit."

The only way to approach the Jesus Prayer - and this is all the more urgent if, like most of us in the West, we lack the help of an experienced guide in person - is as a beginner. Oddly, this seems to have little to do with experience. Many years of practice don't make one an expert; rather they just make one more aware of one's littleness and emptiness (Psalm 131; Luke 18:13-14).

It is as impossible to turn off the mind as it is to still the heartbeat and remain alive, and so the practitioner of a lifetime is in just the same position as the practitioner of a few weeks, subject to distractions and fantasies with every breath. Gill (ibid.) quotes John Climacus:

Do not lose heart when your thoughts are stolen away. Just remain calm, and constantly call your mind back... Let the remembrance of Jesus be present with your every breath. Then indeed you will appreciate the value of stillness... Make the effort to raise up, or rather, to enclose your mind within the words of your prayer; and if like a child, it gets tired and falters, raise it up again.


[O]f course we get distracted many, many, many times. That doesn't matter. We're not perfect. We don't have to be perfect meditators because we're not perfect disciples yet, so we don't expect to be perfect meditators. That doesn't matter. You don’t have to be perfect. The best meditators will say, 'I meditate. It's very, very important to me. I miss it so much if I don't do it, but I'm a very bad meditator.' That's OK. What matters is not being successful, it's about being faithful.

These distractions, whether mental, physical, emotional or whatever, shouldn't discourage us. Looked at in the right way, they can be a great help, like Paul's thorn (2 Corinthians 12:7), to keep us from thinking we are becoming good at this prayer business. But in order to see this, we shall have to remember the smallness and quietness; like the child in John Climacus' example, it doesn't take much to tire us out.




Monday, March 04, 2024

Faith in Practice

One of the things that has always appealed to me about the Jesus Prayer is its simplicity, and, for want of a better word, its modesty. It is not in any way a practice reserved for religious professionals, nor one that requires training or qualifications; it doesn't even need much remembering, being only twelve words long. All it requires is perseverance, and a place to sit.

Some writers (Cynthia Bourgeault, for instance) regard the Jesus Prayer as a mantra. I am not sure this is the way I look at it. The word maranatha, used in the practice known as Christian Mediation, is avowedly a mantra, "a word or short phrase of sacred origin and intent, used to collect the mind and invoke the divine presence" (Bourgeault, op.cit.). But the Jesus Prayer has content; it is a prayer, addressed to Jesus by name, and bringing with it its own peculiar attitude - a kind of surrender, or repentant trust, like that of the tax collector in Luke 18:9-14, "For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted" (Luke 18:14 NIV).

John Climacus, as quoted by John Gill, advised: "Make the effort to raise up, or rather, to enclose your mind within the words of your prayer..." That is more like my own experience. Paradoxically, so enclosed, the mind is freed from its incessant stream of thinking, and sinks into a living silence open to the bright ground of God. This, I think, is perhaps something similar to the immersion of the "mind in the heart" described by Seraphim of Sarov - a surrender of the restless intellect to that which is before all things (Colossians 1:15-17).


Thursday, February 29, 2024

Faith in Mercy

It seems to me that faith is only possible in that emptiness of heart that comes from surrendering what we believe into pure trust. "Faith is not about certainty, but about trust. If we could prove it we would not need faith." (Jennifer Kavanagh) And mercy? "Mercy is the length and breadth and height and depth of what we know of God - and the light by which we know it. You might even think of it as the Being of God insofar as we can possibly penetrate into it in this life, so that it is impossible to encounter God apart from the dimension of mercy." (Cynthia Bourgeault

We can only seek God, surely, insofar as we acknowledge our own emptiness, our own unknowing. It is this existential lack that is at the heart of the Jesus Prayer, and the reason that for many years I have tended to use the longer form of the Prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." 

Psalm 119:176 (NIV) reads,  "I have strayed like a lost sheep. Seek your servant, for I have not forgotten your commands." Perhaps this is closer to the mark. Mercy is perhaps not so much about our seeking God as it is about him seeking us.

Laurence Freeman writes

We discover that, in a certain way of seeing, change is the only constant. In that paradox we find a portal of mystery and our search shifts into another perspective. We seek not answers or explanations but God...

From this change of seeing things we develop deeper self-knowledge. This leads to horizons where self-awareness merges with the knowledge of God, even with an at first disturbing sense that it is God’s knowledge of us is that is the starting point of every search...

Truly, as Martin Laird says, "... the sense of separation from God is itself pasted up out of a mass of thoughts and feelings. When the mind comes into its own stillness and enters the silent land, the sense of separation goes."

All this talk of seeking and journeying is, like consciousness itself, a metaphor for the ineffable, for the ground of being itself from which we cannot possibly be separate. It is all a matter of faith; of giving up thinking we know, and finding we are known. 

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

This waste expanse of days

Lent, like Advent, seems in many ways to be a time between times, with the shadow of Good Friday cast back on these forty days by the brilliant light of Easter morning. As I wrote in my last post here, the strangeness of Lent lies largely in its associations with the wilderness, the empty place of dust and restless wind where we are thrown back not on what we might have hoped for, but on the bare substrate of God's ground.

Prayer during Lent is strange too. If ever there was a time of not knowing, of finding our hearts emptied of words in the waste expanse of days, it must be now. And yet,

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

(Romans 8:26-27 NRSV)

This hermit time, far away from celebration and comfortable things, leaves room for little other than prayer, thin though the heart seems in the dry air. But maybe that is all that is needed.

Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life. It is not the foolish sinner like myself, running about the world with reprobates and feeling magnanimous, who comes closest to them and brings them healing; it is the contemplative in her cell who has never set eyes on them, but in whom Christ fasts and prays for them—or it may be a charwoman in whom Christ makes Himself a servant again, or a king whose crown of gold hides a crown of thorns. Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.

Caryll Houselander (quoted in Richard Rohr's The Universal Christ)

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

The desert is not a place...

In today's WCCM Lent Reflection, Laurence Freeman writes, "The desert is not a place but a state or direction of mind."

The desert of the heart is a real place, if not a physical one. Some of us may indeed, like the desert fathers and mothers of the 4th century, find that we need to leave everyday life and move away into actual solitude, but most of us don't. Our desert is inward and inescapable; if we fail to realise what is going on, we will probably experience it as something like depression or derealisation. But just as the Spirit "drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness" (Mark 1:12 NRSV),  so we can find ourselves driven into strange and inhospitable places of the mind for a time, often not knowing quite how we got there. For me, the recovery of prayer led to the recovery of faith (yes, that way around!) but for many it will be something different. Just as the inward desert will vary from one person to another, like some sort of Room 101 of the soul, so I am sure that the gate into the oasis will vary too. But somehow, I think, the Cross will be involved - even though it may not have that name for everyone. Rowan Williams: "The incarnate crucified life is burrowing its way through the lost depths and deserts of human experience to burst out on Easter Sunday, bringing with it the lost and the dead."

Of course such language may not resonate with everyone; this is part of the whole risky experiment of faith, that we need language as a lamp to see (Psalm 119:105); and yet its necessary failure is the silence of the very desert itself, as isaac of Nineveh saw: "Above anything, welcome silence, for it brings fruits that no tongue can speak of, neither can it be explained." But to communicate this even to ourselves we seem to have to stumble among words and images, doing our best with the tools we find to hand. 


Thursday, February 15, 2024

Things are as they are

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place I rejoice that things are as they are...

(TS Eliot, Ash Wednesday)

Lent is a strange period in many ways. We are very used to the idea of Lent, and in or out of a church context we rather superficially associate it with the giving up of all those treats we enjoyed on Shrove Tuesday; but if we miss the sense of its strangeness I think we may have missed the point.

I like Mark's stark account of Jesus' time in the desert: "[T]he Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him." (Mark 1:12-13 NRSV) That's all. No stories of conversations with the tempter, no Scriptural rapiers from our Lord, just the plain facts.

The wilderness is an odd place in itself. There is that very physical wilderness, of course, and no one who has travelled across the Judean Desert will forget its strangeness; at dusk and dawn one could imagine anything, and one's perceptions are stretched thin across the terraced escarpments and the pale dust. Only the ravens seem truly at home there. But the wilderness of the heart is as real a place, and stranger. Hopkins' terrible sonnet, "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed" gives the sense of it. The years of the pandemic gave many of us to spend time there. 

But God's angels patrol the wilderness of the mind as they patrolled the Judean wilderness following Jesus' baptism. We may not see them, but they are there in the pain itself. The words of Psalm 119, "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word... It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees" (Psalm 119:67;71 NIV) are not pious platitudes but unvarnished truth.

Frederica Mathewes-Green, writing on the practice of the Jesus Prayer, has this to say: 

At first the Prayer is just a string of words repeated, perhaps mechanically, in your mind. But with time it may "descend into the heart," and those who experience this will be attentive to maintain it, continually "bringing the mind" (the nous, that is) "into the heart."

There is no place within us, however desolate, that the Prayer will not touch, and its patient reach will hold us firm, even when we think we have lost it altogether. Things are as they are only in the endless ground of God's isness. There is nothing else. The mind descending into the heart encounters not the cold of the interstellar wastes but God's own light, love and endless healing mercy. At the end of Lent there is Easter Day.