I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. (Ezekiel 36: 26)

Many of us look at ourselves and feel that our hearts have grown cold: we do not see ourselves as kind or compassionate and sometimes we feel that we are less loving than we once were.   Quite often we feel that although we have been committed to our Church over long years our faith has grown dull. We may know much more than we did but we do not feel that love has grown alongside the knowledge. God is there but distant and we have grown cold.

Life hurts and the wounds multiply as the years pass. We look out at a world in pain and we feel helpless. We look at ourselves sometimes and feel pretty helpless, too – as the collect says, Oh, Lord, you know that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.

I have on the prayer desk in my office a large stone heart. It is heavy and cold. It symbolises my heart of stone which I wish to become a heart of flesh. But how is it to become this? The first thing I have to do is to take it into my hands. As I hold it in my warm hands of flesh the stone becomes warm. Our hearts have to be held by the Incarnate Christ. At this special time of Passiontide we need again to approach not some vague, abstract God ‘out there’ but the man, Jesus, who became flesh for us to be with us; the one God sent, because he loved the world so much. This human being who goes for us, touches us as no other can do.

In our gospel for Passion Sunday we read of the Greeks who came to the disciple, Philip, because they wanted to see Jesus. We are reminded of the first chapter of John’s gospel where the two disciples of John the Baptist, one of whom is Andrew, follow Jesus. He asks,

What are you looking for?

They answer, Rabbi, where are you staying?

And he answers them, Come and see.

In our deepest selves most of us who call ourselves Christian long to see Jesus; not through an intermediary, not second-hand, but for ourselves. We long to see Jesus. We know that if we see him for ourselves our hearts will burn within us as did the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. We know we will feel his love and that our love will be enflamed in response. But wonderful as this experience might be we need to be alert to what we are actually asking for. Are we asking to love God through Jesus simply for what we get out of it? If we want our hearts of stone to be turned into hearts of flesh, we have to realise that along with that comes exposure to pain, shame, humiliation, rejection and deep, deep sorrow. As John 12: 26 says, Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Our hearts became stone for self-protection. Now in this Passiontide we are reminded of what it costs to receive a new heart. Jesus asked his disciples if they were willing to drink the cup he drank, and they, not understanding, said they were willing. Are we?

Every morning at Launde Abbey we, like so many Christians, intercede for the world in all its suffering and for individuals who are sick in body, mind or spirit or bereaved. Sometimes it all seems so dreary and repetitive, so hopeless. As we pray we are reminded of suffering we would sooner turn from – other peoples’ pain and grief, and so often, our own selfish response. It is not at all a comfortable place to be but the call is to remain in that sort of prayer, however, hopeless it sometimes feels.

What was it like for Jesus on the cross, to hang there shamed and humiliated, scoffed at and in terrible agony for a world that did not seem to want, let alone understand what he had tried to give them? Can we see him there? Can we stay with him throughout the next 12 days? Can we look with the eyes of our heart and mind at Jesus, flesh of our flesh, and see his loving response to all who come in need and his commitment to his friends, to the very end. Held by another our hearts are warmed, flesh holding flesh. Held by Jesus, our God made flesh for our sakes, we are warmed more deeply than any other human being can warm us. If we are willing to suffer the cost of opening our hearts to the way God loves, our hearts will become hearts of flesh instead of the hearts of stone.

Mary and Martha are alive and well and both living inside all of us!

It is an interesting observation that if you ever do a workshop with people about Mary and Martha, most will say that they are more Martha than Mary.  And they will admit it as if they are somehow failures for being like that.  But the truth is we need to be both these people.  Martha is the hands and feet of Christ, the active Christian.  Mary is the contemplative, sitting at the feet of Jesus and learning from him what actions to take.

So we need to be both Mary and Martha to be fully rounded Christians – but not necessarily both at the same time!  In the story of Jesus’ visit to the home of the two women (Luke 10: 38-42) we know that Martha was banging around in the background, whilst Jesus was talking to Mary.  Martha was determined to make her presence and her irritation known.  She made it impossible for Jesus and Mary simply to be quiet together.

Only lately have I realised that Martha is alive and kicking often when I want to pray.  Part of my mind behaves exactly like her.  As soon as the Mary in me tries to settle down to listen to God, Martha starts muttering about all we have to do.  What about that email?  What about that visit you promised to make?  What about the phone call to a bereaved friend?  What about the ‘to do’ list?  Then there is the voice of accusation about all the things I have failed to do, and a rising sense of anxiety as I begin to feel, I must make up for lost time now; I haven’t got time for prayer!  Of course, the Martha in me longs to settle down with Jesus, too, but she is “worried and upset by many things” and can’t help but nag Mary and complain to Jesus.

What can we do about the noise of Martha when we are trying to listen to God?  To have both Mary and Martha in us at the time of prayer is perfectly normal and to have both sitting quietly at Jesus’ feet is ideal – the contemplative needs to be active and the active contemplative.  Some days Martha is very quiet.  But some days she makes such a racket that Mary cannot hear herself think.  It doesn’t matter how long you have prayed or even how disciplined you are about your practice, this is the experience of most of us. But I have found that if I imagine simply sitting at the feet of Jesus and looking at him, and allowing him to gaze at me, my thoughts and emotions are calmed.  Sometimes I simply share with him the thing that is most bothering Martha and then I just wait.  In the silence filled and the pause the anxiety subsides and Martha no longer dominates the conversation.

“Who do you say I am?”

This question in Mark 8:29 (and also in Matthew and Luke) is a pivotal moment in the gospels but also a pivotal moment in the journey of every Christian, not just once but over and over again.  Jesus asks this question of his disciples having taken them on a kind of retreat to Caesarea Philippi, away from the demanding crowds and workload.  Challenged at last to articulate who this man, Jesus, is whom they are following, Peter makes the great leap in discernment and says, “You are the Messiah.”

I vividly remember the first time I was challenged with the question, “Who do you think Jesus is?”  It was as if Jesus was asking me directly, “Who do you say I am?”  I had been going to church for quite some time and would have called myself a believer, but I had never been directly confronted in such a personal, direct and unembellished way with the question of who it was that I was following.  It was a turning point for me as it has been for so many people.  I named Jesus as my Saviour, God’s Son.  It was a step into deeper faith and commitment.

In the story as we know, Peter recognises Jesus as the Messiah but a few moments later is arguing with Jesus because Peter’s idea of Messiah and Jesus’ are quite different.  This is one of the reasons, according to scholars, as to why Mark’s Jesus is always telling people whom he has healed not to tell anyone.  Mark’s “messianic secret” as this is called, is a reflection of Jesus’ desire not to be misunderstood.  Jesus’ Messiah was to be the saviour of all people by going the way of the cross.  The Jews had their own interpretation of what the Messiah would be like: powerful, a wonder worker and healer, and the one who would drive out the Romans and re-establish the glory of the days of King David.  Peter argues with Jesus as he begins to teach his disciples the hard lessons to come of the Passion, because Jesus doesn’t fit in with his idea, the commonly held idea, of what the Messiah would be.

“Who do you say I am?”

The reason we have to keep asking ourselves that question as we journey through our Christian lives is that we, like Peter and the other disciples, have images of God that we have to shed and outgrow, over and over again.  We also have to imbue deeply, take into ourselves (shades of body / bread and blood / wine here) the profound meaning of the love expressed on the cross.  Our journey in faith leads to “metanoia,” the Greek word for a complete change of mind, a make-over, so to speak, of our whole vision of the world.   Hopefully, across a lifetime we undergo a paradigm shift from a self-centred and imprisoned view of the world to a God-centred vision, which sets us free and brings fulfilment and peace.  This journey cannot be hurried: it has to unfurl in its own time and each stage of our earthly lives gives food for thought and nourishment.  But it can be a journey that we refuse to take.  Peter, in the end, did not.

If Jesus asks you the question today what will you answer?  How does it differ in thought and feeling from times past?  What difference does it make now?

“Who do you say I am?

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.                            John 1: 5

In a week in which there was so much bad news, particularly of man’s inhumanity to man, one story has stood out for me as a beacon of light.  It is a story with a sad, possibly tragic ending but in itself I believe the story is one of hope because at its centre is a human being, a young woman, who has shown wisdom, courage, commitment to others and a maturity which far outstrips her age of 26.

Aid worker Kayla Jean Mueller, is a young American woman, taken hostage by Islamic State in 2013, whom they reported killed by a US air strike this week.  Like several of the hostages before her, Kayla was working in Syria for an aid agency, trying to relieve in some small way, the suffering of others.  Much of her work was with Syrian children, visiting refugee camps where she played and painted with them.

It was the latest in a whole list of caring roles she had taken on from the start of her university days.  She had worked at an HIV/AIDS clinic in the US and helped at an orphanage in India. She volunteered for aid organisations in both Israel and the West Bank and she began working with the victims of the conflict in Syria.

A report in Kayla’s local Arizona newspaper, The Daily Courier, quoted her as saying the following,

She found that she “couldn’t do enough” to help Syrian families, “When Syrians hear I’m an American, they ask, ‘Where is the world?’ All I can do is cry with them, because I don’t know,” she told the newspaper.  She heard stories of children being hurt by unexploded bombs, women being forced into early marriages, and children being forced to fight for both sides.  “Syrians are dying by the thousands, and they’re fighting just to talk about the rights we have,” Kayla told the newspaper.  “For as long as I live, I will not let this suffering be normal. (I will not let this be) something we just accept,” she said.

Reading about Kayla this week, I discovered a young woman who appears to have had a thirst for justice, particularly for the victims of war and the disenfranchised; a woman who turned her caring into action.  But what made everything that she has done so special to me was this final comment.

“When asked what kept her going in her mission, she said: ‘I find God in the suffering eyes reflected in mine. If this is how you are revealed to me, this is how I will forever seek you.'”

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.  Frederick Buechner

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Albert Einstein

My son gave me the autobiography of the actor, writer and film director Alan Alda, for Christmas. If you are old enough you will remember Alan Alda as the central character, Hawkeye, in the long-running television serial, “M.A.S.H.” He is a very able actor and his autobiography is honest, funny and rather unusual as such things go.

Alda describes how, over time, he learnt to be an actor and how he learnt the difference between acting and performing. There was a moment when he named for himself what was necessary to bring a scene to life. The word he used was ‘compassion.’

Alda realised that in a scene he had to be aware, all in the same moment, of himself in character and his feelings and of the other actor / actors and their feelings. He had to be aware of their reality as well as his own. Up to this point he had only been trying to get right his character in the scene.

Compassion comes from the Latin. ‘Com’ means ‘with’ and the nearest meaning of ‘passion’ in this case is ‘patient.’ Thus compassion strictly interpreted means being alongside someone in their suffering. This is exactly what compassion is when practiced in everyday life. It is recognising that the other has a real and actual life, even if I know little about it. And that in this life they experience similarly the fragility, vulnerability, joy, delight, desire and woundedness that I experience. We need to treat each other with care. We are susceptible to pain and hurt.

We experience ourselves as separate creatures, as Einstein states in the quotation at the top of this blog, but this is a delusion – and it makes us prisoners walled in by a one-dimensional life made up of our own limited experience and emotions. In order to break out of this prison we have to get enough distance from our own emotions (practice what is called ‘dispassion’) to be able to see the other person. Then, with imagination and a heart that longs to reach out to the other, we consciously try to see them in their own reality.

“Jesus, Thou art all compassion, pure, unbounded love Thou art.” Thus go the words from the much loved hymn. Truly, this is the Jesus we meet in the gospels. Jesus sees people, always has time for people. You never get the feeling that he discounts anyone: doesn’t acknowledge them. Yes, he gets impatient on a few occasions, usually with his disciples because they are so slow in understanding. But having expressed his frustration he goes on working with them, bearing with them, teaching them and loving them to the end.

“God became man, so that man might become God.” (Athanasius) This is real compassion – getting into our humanity utterly and seeing life from our point of view.

We want to create a context of dignity for suffering people. To do so, it is essential to put our fingers on the pulse of our own hearts and make sure our own context of dignity is intact.

Roshi Joan Halifax

We are very mixed up kids.  So much in the news points to how mixed up we are.  The other day a photograph was put out on a television programme of an American teenage girl aged about 16 or 17, posing with a rifle in one hand and a bible in the other.  After we had had a moment to take that in another picture was placed beside the first one, of a young Jihadist girl in exactly the same pose as the American girl held and of about the same age, holding a rifle in one hand and a copy of the Koran in the other.  There didn’t need to be any commentary.  The pictures were better than a thousand words.

I lived in the USA for a year from 1966 to 1967 and loved it although in some ways it was a fearsome time.  My father was teaching at an American college.  Although it was in the east, in Pennsylvania, tensions between some of the black and white students were so heightened that there was a curfew in the town every night from 11pm onwards.  It was the middle of the Vietnam War.  I met a student who went off to the war and came back in a wheelchair.  Both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated in those twelve months.  And, as usual, the reaction to the shootings was that something needed to be done about the ease with which people could buy a gun in the US, whilst those against gun control shouted as loudly from the opposite corner.  There was a bumper sticker that was very popular on cars at this time.  It said,

God and guns made this country great.  Let’s keep it that way.

Here’s another bit of news that shows how mixed up we are.  Today we heard from an Oxfam report that the richest one percent of all the people in the world will soon own as much as the other ninety-nine percent and that eighty-five people in this world are as wealthy as the poorest half of the world.  This seems absolutely outrageous and almost unbelievable.  But Oxfam tells us it is the case, and of course, along with money goes power.

What would Jesus say?

We in the west and we who are so well heeled are so good at taking the moral high ground, but, as the quotation by Roshi Joan Halifax at the top of this blog says if we (really) want to create a context of dignity for suffering people, we have to look at ourselves first.  It is no use our pointing to the speck of dust in someone else’s eye when we have a log in our own.  It is no use bemoaning the injustice in the world when we are part of that injustice and do not see it and then having seen it, do not speak out against it.  One of the greatest indignities we place on suffering people is to see them as charitable cases rather than human beings who have a right to live decent lives.  We need to look at ourselves and see how in need we are of charity.  Someone needs to help us to face ourselves and learn that we have a lot to learn about being really human, human beings.  Thanks be to God, for Jesus Christ!

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.

Marcus Aurelius  

This year, Advent 2014 to Christ the King 2015, is the year when we study Mark’s gospel. It is strange to go through Advent in the year of Mark because he has, of course, no birth stories: no Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph and Bethlehem, no shepherds “abiding in the field.” Indeed, we only read Mark on the first two Sundays in the season, last week and this. Next week we go on to John the Evangelist’s picture of John the Baptist and the week after we are with Luke.

But Mark is not diminished because of his lack of birth stories. His adult Jesus bursts onto the stage shortly after we are introduced to John the Baptist, whom Mark very much sees as an Elijah figure. From the very first verse Mark tells us exactly what his story is about:

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. (Mark 1:1)

The subject is Jesus Christ who is the Son of God and this is good news. You can’t put it more bluntly or straightforwardly than that!

What I didn’t realise until a week ago is that this seemingly straightforward introductory verse, is really very subversive – or it was when it was written (and perhaps if we really took on board what it says, it would be just as subversive now.)

Augustus Caesar was Roman Emperor from 27BC to 14AD. He had himself made a god and on the Prine monument (so called because it was discovered in Prine, Turkey) the following inscription was found in Greek.

Caesar, [when he was manifest], transcended the expectations of [all who had anticipated the good news], not only by surpassing the benefits conferred by his predecessors but by leaving no expectation of surpassing him to those who would come after him, with the result that the birthday of our God signalled the beginning of Good News for the world because of him

Now the word “evangelion”, Good News or gospel or good tidings in Greek, was rarely used in pre-Christian times and when it was, it was it was employed in the sacred language use in the Imperial Cult. So when Mark choses to open his gospel as he does, using the words “Good News” alongside “Son of God”, he is really throwing down the gauntlet to Roman power, culture and beliefs. He is taking Roman language and making it speak of Christ instead. It is not Augustus Caesar who brings Good News for the world, it is a Jewish preacher and prophet from Nazareth whom the Romans have executed.

Mark probably wrote his gospel after the terrible time for Christians of Emperor Nero’s persecutions but before the fall of Jerusalem in AD70. He probably wrote for a beleaguered community who perhaps foresaw that the writing was on the wall for the destruction of their beloved city and temple. Despite this, Mark is not afraid. In the tradition of the prophets before him, he gives his one verse of introduction and then points to John the Baptist who himself points to Jesus. If you want to know what God looks like, says Mark, read what follows and prepare.

You keep us waiting. You, the God of all time, want us to wait, for the right time in which to discover who we are, where we are to go, who will be with us, and what we must do.  So thank you … for the waiting time.

John Bell, quoted in The Westminster Collection of Christian Prayers, compiled by Dorothy M. Stewart

 

Advent: the time of waiting.  Most of us are not very good at waiting, and I speak as one who is not.  I am a horrible passenger in a motorway traffic jam – you ask my husband.  I am  forever saying that we are in the wrong lane and if only we move into that  lane we will go faster – then we do – and you know what happens: the lane we have been in begins to move and the one we have moved to gets stuck.  I used to get irritable in supermarkets for the same reason.  The queue I was in always seemed to be the slow one.  The more I let my mind dwell on it the more annoying it seemed; it was unjust!  Sometimes, of course, waiting is difficult because we are very busy.  Time is short and will actually run out on us before we have finished doing what we had planned to do if the person in front doesn’t hurry up.

There is, of course, another kind of waiting which tastes different.  This is the waiting for the good thing that you know will inevitably come but not yet.  This is the waiting that goes alongside longing and expectancy.  This is the delicious waiting that children (and grown up children) feel when looking forward to Christmas, or a lover feels in anticipation of seeing the beloved.  And then there is the harrowing or painful waiting that we live in when knowing that a loved one is dying or we are waiting for potentially disturbing news or looking forward to something difficult.  Finally there is the waiting of not knowing.  Is he alive or dead?  Will she ring me or ignore me?

Waiting as described above seems to be an “in between time” between the real parts of our lives – something we want to get through (or sometimes not) to reach reality.  But that is not how John Bell sees it as quoted above.  Nor is it as R S Thomas saw it in his poem, Kneeling.  There he tells us, “the meaning is in the waiting.”

We all have to learn to wait but waiting time is still time which we can “waste” or “kill”, or “make” or “fill.”  If we learn to see life as a gift, even the hard bits; if we learn to see time as sacred and give our attention to living not restlessly waiting for what is to come but attuned to what is now, we begin to be able to receive the gift of waiting.  One of the most precious ways of praying, contemplative prayer, is all about waiting on God without knowing most of the time if there is any response from the God we seek, but just waiting, patiently, longingly.

Waiting is something we have to learn how to do.  The mother waits for the baby inside her to grow, at first not even conscious that it is there.  Waiting time which is consciously given to God either in set aside times of prayer or in attentiveness to his presence and the gift of life of each moment, also bears fruit.  It teaches us gratitude, rather than frustration.  It teaches us to listen, to observe, to perceive what is really happening inside and out.  Over time it teaches wisdom.

So may I invite you not to use the time of Advent, simply as a period to be got through so that we can get to Christmas, but as the season it is – the waiting time, longing time, time of expectancy, God’s time, in which he will teach us that the meaning is to be found, actually, in the waiting.

With all the commemorations at this time of year: everything from the celebration of the century since the birth of Dylan Thomas to All Souls and Remembrance Sunday, one is reminded that “time passes.” What, however, really makes me feel that time passes; indeed that time is running out, is when I hear of some future project being discussed in government and realising that I will be dead before it ever comes to fruition.

There is a tipping point in every human life when we realise that our time of greater energy and creativity is behind us, Not that we don’t have energy, creativity and, it is hoped, the wisdom that comes with the passing of the years, but that we just don’t have time; time to see the outcome of a favoured project. What do we do then? Do we simply not bother because “I won’t be around to see it.” No, indeed! This is the moment to realise in depth, if we have never realised it before, that we do not live for ourselves but for every other. We do not create for our time alone but for the future.

I came across a marvellous saying the other day. It was a slogan from the 2008 US presidential election. It said:

“Rosa sat so that Martin could walk. Martin walked so that Obama could be elected.”

Rosa was Rosa Parks, the black woman who in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat in the coloureds’ section of the bus to a white woman when told to do so by the bus driver, and was arrested. Her act of defiance led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott which fuelled the civil rights movement in America, raising its profile and allowing Martin Luther King to make progress. What Martin Luther King did led eventually to the election of the first coloured president of the United States, President Obama. But Rosa did not act on her own. She was the local secretary to the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, a civil rights movement that was formed in 1909! It took 99 years of civil disobedience by many people to come to that place where America could vote for a coloured president.

Earlier this year a dear friend died whom I didn’t meet until after his retirement. What he didn’t know anymore than any of us know was how long he would live – it turned out to be a over thirty years. During that time he gave his energy and commitment to many things: the ordination of women to the priesthood, the Jubilee Debt Campaign, and Africa, which he loved deeply, having worked there for many years. He was thoroughly committed to justice issues. His pre-retirement life was full of incident but for me, who only knew him after his retirement, he seemed to live a lifetime when he stopped working!

Yes, time passes for us as individual souls; but for each one of us who recognises that we are so much more than a particular and exclusive self, growing older gives us the opportunity to let die selfish ambition and to nurture a love for others and for their well being which gives us a part in what is to come. What we do, the choices we make, continue to matter. We continue to make the future.