The Pentecostal church used the local parish church for its services on a Sunday afternoon. The local vicar used to see the husband and wife ministry team come out after their service, often three hours long, looking bright and happy.  Often she would say to him,

“We have seen the glory today, vicar.  We have seen the glory!”

Sometimes the wife said, “Have you ever seen the glory, vicar?”

To which the vicar would reply, in a typically understated English and Anglican manner, “Well…yes…um…good for you…”  (I heard this story from the vicar so I am neither maligning him nor the Church of England.)

One day the vicar happened to see the lady minister before the service began.  It was a grey and miserable day, the sort of day when the dampness gets into your bones and into your spirits; yet she looked as content and ever.  The vicar couldn’t help asking her why she was so cheerful on such a grey and miserable day; after all she hadn’t yet had the tonic which her worship was to her.  She hadn’t seen the glory.

“Ah, yes, Vicar,” was her reply, “But I am going to see the glory.  I see the glory every day.”

Every day this woman got up and went out into the world expecting to see and looking for the glory of God, and because she was expectant and because she looked, she saw it.  Yesterday we had the story of the Transfiguration as our gospel reading.  We also had part of Peter’s second letter in which he says,

You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.  (2 Peter 1:19b)

The disciples gazed on Jesus in his glory and Peter, remembering this invites us to do the same in our daily life.  We are invited to gaze at Jesus in scripture, and the glory of God in creation, through poetry, music, art – whatever brings us into a state where we are attending to that which gives life in all its fullness.  In time the day will dawn in us, too, and the morning star of love and delight will rise in our hearts.

We can all see the glory with practice.  We can all see the glory because it is there.  We just have to expect it.

Anyone who is a fan of the Narnia stories by C S Lewis, knows that the central character, Aslan, is a lion – but he is not “a tame lion.”  I don’t know what a tame lion might look like but as a child I saw caged lions in zoos and others in a circus trained to do tricks that go against their nature.

Perhaps our history as Christians shows us over and over again as people who have tried to “tame” our faith so that we could live comfortably with it or cage it in order to control it and thus not face its reality.  All that has happened is that we have made it look insipid.  People fall away from the Christian faith and turn elsewhere to find something that will take them to the heart of their need, acknowledged but not always understood.  So we get young men (and women), some of whom have grown up in Christian families, choosing to become terrorists.

A quotation was given to us this week by one of our retreat conductors at Launde Abbey.  I am paraphrasing but he said, “The destruction of the Twin Towers in 9-11 was as evil a things as you could get, but it was breath-taking in its imagination.  The only way to overcome such evil is not to go to war against it but to try to out-imagine it.”

Lately, after having been a life-long Christian, I am really beginning to “get” just how radical is the message of Jesus Christ, when it comes to “out-imagining.”  Turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, doing good to those who hurt you may sound like the first lesson in how to be a doormat.  But history shows that when people have done this, i.e. practiced passive resistance, as in the Salt Marches in India under Gandhi or the work of the African American Civil Rights Movement under Martin Luther King, the world has been changed.  The most powerful witness to this is the very man who inspired Gandhi and King, Jesus Christ, who sought forgiveness for those who were executing him even as they drove the nails into his hands and feet.  He changed the whole world and the course of history forever.

For this radical change to happen however, there has to be a double journey.  That of the individual on the inside and that of the community coming together with the same vision.  It has all gone horribly wrong in history when the work of forgiveness has not gone on inside individuals first.  If I do not turn to God in prayer first and face my old nagging wounds, my bitterness and my resentment that come up again and again; if I do not strive against my own darkness and find the light of Christ and his compassion and forgiveness, I will not be able to be part of God’s solution, his radical re-imagining of the world.  If I take a shortcut and just act out these things with others on the outside without the inner work of prayer, I may end up doing what has so often been done in the past with good intentions, become part of a movement that sets out to change the world for the good but ends up enslaving and destroying everything that gets in the way of my faith, my ideas.

Christ is our model.  He stated that he could do nothing without his Father and often went off alone to be with him in prayer.  Why would we imagine that we could be Christian people without the same practice?

The gospel reading on Sunday was Matthew 5:21-37, part of the much beloved Sermon on the Mount.  Only this bit is not so loved.  It is the part where Jesus quotes the Jewish law and then adds “but I say to you.”  What he then goes on to say seems even tougher than the original law!   For those people who want their Jesus to be a lovely, anything goes, throwback to the 1960s hippy era or a modern individualist claiming the right to do anything he wants, this reading can be a bit of a shock.  The instinct is to bypass it.

There is a way of approaching scripture that I have found very helpful.  There are four stages:

You ask, “How did the original audience understand this?”  This is important because the culture in which Jesus lived was hugely different to ours and we need to comprehend when Jesus is speaking to the cultural wrongs of the day (like the treatment of women) and when he is speaking to a spiritual understanding we all share.

Then we ask, “How do we hear this now?”  Again this is very important because otherwise we may go for a fundamentalist reading of scripture.  A good example of this is v.31 when Jesus speaks against divorce.  In Jesus’ time a man could divorce a woman simply by giving her a bill of divorcement.  The woman had no legal rights in law and no property.  Any husband could turn his wife out and she would be destitute.  Jesus, as always, is speaking for justice and mercy for those who were powerless in his society.  I would not read v. 31 as a blanket rule against divorce except for adultery.  In our culture we accept that there are various situations in which it is really damaging for a couple to go on living together.

The third stage of reading is to ask yourself, “Is there any metaphorical reading of this passage?”  Of course, there often is in Jesus’ teaching.  Last week Jesus talked of his followers as being “salt” and “yeast” in the world.  But there may also be other metaphorical readings that are more subtle: for example, St John’s use of “dark” and “light” in his gospel.

The fourth stage is to ask, “What is this passage saying to me today?”  This is very important because scripture is God’s love letter to us.  The word of God speaks to us directly in our daily needs and anxieties, in our longings and desires, in our life-long journey.  This question can lead you directly into prayer.

Matthew 5: 21-37 is a very important passage because it reminds us to look behind the law that God gave to the Jewish people to ask, what was the reason for the law in the first place?  It was that the people be blest in the land that God was giving them (Deut 30:16).  It was to help them live well in community.  Jesus reminds his original audience and us as well that keeping the law of God is not just a tick-box exercise but about really caring for others.  We do this when keeping the law is not just about our actions on the outside but about the purity of our intentions on the inside.  That is why Jesus says we must try not even to be angry with one another or call a person a fool; why we must not have erotic fantasies about another person’s spouse even if we think we have no intention of doing anything about it – it demeans the object of the fantasy, undermines relationships and is potentially dangerous.

Earlier in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matt 5:6).  Think of what it is to be really hungry and thirsty.  This is what Jesus is calling us to be, people who care that much for others. Of course we fail – we all fail to live up to such high standards – but when we fail we simply pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start all over again!

 

A little while ago I bought a holiday read at an airport.  It was called “The Time Keeper” and was by Mitch Albom, who also wrote the bestseller, “Tuesdays with Morey.”  In my opinion it was a fairly lightweight book until it got to the final chapters where it posed a frightening scenario of the future.  I do not want to give the whole plot away except to say that the people of the future had so lost touch with their feelings that they watched ‘films’ of memories of past people to put them in touch with something – anything –  to do with feeling.

Is this ‘out of touch-ness’ with our feelings a new phenomenon?  I do not think so.  But I do think it may be getting worse.  We live in the most distracted culture and distracted time in our history.  The distraction is self-chosen to a certain extent, but also addictive.  The distraction is created by the busyness and complexity of our lives which we counter-balance and get relief from through entertainment.  So we play with ipod and ipads on journeys, when out for a walk or exercising.  Listen to radios when driving.  Walk into our houses and switch on our large flat-screen television, stream our film or chosen programme or play computer games.  There is constant entertainment, constant noise and constant avoidance.  And I know how tempting it is.  If I have had a tiring and demanding day all I want to do is collapse on the sofa and watch mindless television – like moving wallpaper.

The problem with living our lives like this is that we know, all of us know on a certain level, that our lives lack meaning.  We may not voice this to ourselves in words but the shallowness and emptiness that we feel is articulated in other ways which may lead to even more damaging distraction and avoidance.  But as I have insinuated earlier, I think this has always been a problem we humans have had: if not as badly as we have it now.

Socrates famously said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.”  St Ignatius took this a stage further when he gave us the prayer exercise called the Examin or Examen.  Some call it the Examin of Conscience but I prefer the other title, Examen of Consciousness.  For St Ignatius, the creator of the famous Spiritual Exercises, the Examen was the most important form of prayer you could and should do.

I am only going to write of the first half of the exercise now.  Briefly, in the Examen, we sit quietly and go back over our day in our minds to see where we have “been.”  We ask where have been the positive moments in my day, when we felt suddenly alive to something, close to someone or something, moments of joy, moments of surprise, moments where we turned to God – all those times of waking up and feeling connection.  As we recall these moments we are often surprised by seeing something consciously for the first time.  At one level we must have been aware but it had not risen to our consciousness.  The result during this time of “recollection in tranquillity” is that we often see and feel things more deeply.  Our hearts are warmed and we feel gratitude.  Praise and thanksgiving rise spontaneously in our hearts.

Sometimes a whole experience from the day can be turned upside down.  Something that had at the time appeared mundane and tedious suddenly shows itself to have been acutely important, life giving and affirming.

In order to experience our real feelings, to see our days and to feel a life-giving response to all that each moment brings, we have to give ourselves these moments of recollection.  The most important thing I have noticed is that when I do this exercise, even if I have been tired and hard-pressed beforehand, I am no longer weary and usually I feel at peace.  It is not only important, it is essential that we examine our lives.

 

“Lord Jesus Christ, Your light shines within us.

Let not my doubts or my darkness speak to me.

Lord Jesus Christ, your light shines within us.

Let my heart always welcome your love.”

Dread; there are mornings for many people when the first emotion they become aware of on waking is dread; a sense of darkness.  Those who know this feeling find it hard to ‘get their head round’, for want of a better expression.  It is difficult to understand where the feeling comes from or to describe it.  It is harder still to find a concrete reason for it; it is just present.  For people used to the language of faith it can feel like guilt and separation from God.  Others might go so far as to call it depression, but it is not that, at least not medically speaking.

This feeling of dread is very common and often alluded to by the great spiritual writers of the distant and not so distant past.  Thomas Merton writes of it, for example, often.  It is commonly experienced as people grow older and the things that used to give their lives meaning and purpose either fall away or shift in character.  It is also experienced when we dare to be truly on our own without our usual protective scaffolding of business and entertainment.  No one who has been on an 8 Day Individual Guided Silent Retreat will have escaped the experience of dread, if they have done it properly (i.e. without trying to escape themselves.)  Sometimes people will feel that they have lost God and therefore lost their faith, particularly if they have no wise person to talk things through with.  Sometimes people will blame the Church for letting them down in some way.

We do not need to be afraid of this experience of “dread”.  It is very well documented in Christian writing and rather than being something which is taking us away from God or is a sign of a breakdown of faith, it can be a sign of movement towards God.  It can be part of the Dark Night of the Soul which happens when we undergo change in our lives and the old way of seeing God and walking with him no longer works.  This is a sign that God is moving us along.  Dread can be the very real awareness that although I am not actually purposefully missing the mark with God, I am resistant to him, feel myself as separate to him even though part of me wants just the opposite.  We are divided people – divided against ourselves in our longing for and resistance to God.

What can we do when dread hits us?  First, know that it is normal (unless it persists as a great blackness and then perhaps we need to go to the doctor – but the feeling of spiritual dread passes).  We come to Christ in prayer acknowledging ourselves as the weak and divided people we are, wanting him and not wanting him, and we just wait on him.  And we find someone to talk to who understands the Christian journey.

Finally, try singing; it always lifts the heart.  The words of the Taizé song at the top of this page say it all.

What am I? I am a word spoken by God. Can God speak a word that does not have meaning?” Thomas Merton

When I read these words for the first time the other day they thrilled me. In our daily prayer, we were in the midst of the creation stories in Genesis in which God “spoke” and things came into being. To think of myself as a word that God had spoken, called forth and created, put me in a new place. But Thomas Merton, in his book “Contemplative Prayer” from which the above quotation comes, soon challenged my reaction. He goes on to say,

Yet am I sure that the meaning of my life is the meaning God intends for it? Does God impose a meaning for my life from the outside, through event, custom, routine, law, system, impact with others in society? Or am I called to create from within, with Him, with His Grace, a meaning which reflects His truth and makes me His ‘word’ spoken freely in my personal situation.

This brought me up short. I know that for most of my life I have acted from the outside; that I have cared too much what certain people thought of me and tried above everything to please and impress them. I know that I have not lived freely and courageously out of God’s law but often with fear and anxiety lest I do something that exposes my vulnerability and inadequacy. I know that I have tried to be what my culture tells me is a successful human being.

The most subtle temptation, however, has been to try to live a “successful” Christian life; to be the sort of person others look at and are impressed with – to give into, as T S Eliot says,

“The last, the greatest treason,

to do the right thing for the wrong reason.” (Murder in the Cathedral)

Wrong, in my case, because it is all still about ego and pride, humankinds’ lifelong adversaries. And, of course, in trying to live like this, I have tried to live this ‘good’ life on my own and left God out of it. I have not lived ‘inside out’ but ‘outside in.’

One of the great gifts that comes with age is that you get tired of trying to impress. It ceases to have the allure it once had and becomes empty and meaningless. This can be a crisis if you don’t know who to live for now. But it can be the greatest opportunity if you can see that the call is to own up to your vanity and its hollow promise and to turn to the source of real life, Christ. We have to learn yet again to start again. Back to the beginning, to what some of us were taught kneeling by our bedsides. But not as we once were: not saying our prayers by rote. Now we are called to rest entirely on God in prayer, to hear again his voice calling us into life, his life. We move with him from the inside to action on his behalf out there.

As many of us will know who were in church on Sunday and heard John’s gospel, the first words Jesus speaks in that gospel are to the two disciples who follow him after John the Baptist has pointed him out.  Jesus turns to them and says,

“What are you looking for?”

Sitting in the darkness of Launde chapel early on Sunday morning with only the Pascal Candle for light, I asked myself that question.

“What are you looking for, Alison?”

It is a question I have asked before, obviously, but it is worth doing so again every so often because it helps one to stand back and to look afresh at where one is and what one needs spiritually.  My response on this occasion was that I wanted peace.  I was dealing with some thorny problems personally and like many other people, I imagine, I am also cast down by the news of so much war and its devastating effect on millions of lives.

As soon as I gave the response, “Peace,” I felt, I cannot have personal peace as long as there is so little peace in the world.  But here I was wrong.  I found myself imagining Jesus asking me again,

“What are you looking for, Alison?”

Having shared what was uppermost in my thoughts and feelings I was able to go much deeper and name what I always want, and I realised after a time that I now had a deep sense of personal peace.  I had after all approached the God who gives peace beyond human understanding.  My personal problems were no longer thorny and the things I have no power over in the world were no longer over-powering me.  Don’t ask me why.  I had shifted so their power over me had shifted, too.

Throughout the bible we find that God asks questions.  These questions are invariably asked to help the hearers stand back and look at their situation and their relationship with God afresh.  They are sometimes repeated until the recipient is able to hear.  They are questions that bring healing, freedom, clarity and confidence.  They are question that enable us to journey on with God.

We are not promised an easy ride in this world but we are promised that we will not have to do it on our own and that there is always one with whom we can share our burden.

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

“Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back.”

John O’Donohue

On the evening of the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6th) we met at Launde as usual for Evening Prayer. But on this night we did something different. We did a sort of “Examen,” not of our day, but of those turning points in our lives when we had encountered God in some special way and experienced our own epiphanies.

St Ignatius wrote that if we prayed any prayer in our day it should be the Examen, which is usually a time of reflection on the day or week we have just had. In the Examen we ask various questions of ourselves like, where was I present and awake to God today; what gave me life and energy; where did I connect with others? Then the reverse question is asked; where did I turn away from God today? What deadened me? Where did I harden my heart?

The power of the Examen is that you see, often for the first time, those moments that have really touched you in your day; those moments of encounter with another person – sometimes just in a smile or a kind word ; those moments of creativity; those moments when you felt more fully alive. You become more aware of creation in all its beauty. It is amazing that very often you have taken these things in on one level but not fully into your consciousness so there is surprise and joy as you see what you have received. Alongside this seeing you engage with the feelings that are stirred up, the most important of which is gratitude, which generally leads in turn to thankfulness to God, for life and for the richness that it offers. The reverse question of where you turned away from God is not supposed to lead to a sense of failure or guilt, but to sorrow, self-knowledge and ultimately repentance.

This is the usual work of the Examen, but as I have already said, on the Feast of the Epiphany we looked especially at moments in our lives when God had been disclosed or shown to us in a very special way. To go back and to look again prayerfully at those moments can be a very powerful experience. We can be taken once again to the feelings engendered by those encounters. We can rediscovered our “first love.” More than anything else we can know the truth that prayer is a response to the God who always called us, is already calling us now, praying in us. The moment we turn and see; the moment of revelation, is when our soul awakens to the God who has always been there. Then as John O’Donohue puts it, paradoxically the search begins for what we have already found, and we can never go back to the person we were before. We want more epiphanies.

New Year’s Resolution of 2014

Seven days in to 2014 it might seem a bit late to be talking about New Year’s resolutions but this is the first opportunity I have had so I make no apologies for it.

Some people sneer at New Year resolutions but I think that every now and then we need to take time to stand away from our lives, to look at them and to see what needs to be amended or worked upon. We do it during the Church seasons of Lent and Advent and it seems that as we say goodbye to the old year and hello to the new one we have another useful opportunity.

This year I have been greatly helped in my thinking by this poem of R S Thomas, which I had not come across before.

Resolution

The new year brings the old resolve

To be brave, to be patient,

To suffer the betrayal of birth

Without flinching, without bitter

Words. The way in was hard;

The way out could be made

Easy, but one must not take

It; must await decay perhaps

Of the mind, certainly of the mind’s

Image of itself that it has

Projected. The bone aches, the blood

Limps like a cripple about the ruins

Of one’s body. Yet what are these

But the infirmities we share

with the creatures? It is the memories

That one has, the impenitent bungler

Of love, refusing for too long

To say ‘yes’ to that earlier gesture

Of love that had brought one

Forth; it is these, as they grow

Clearer with the telescoping

of the years, that constitute

for the beholder the true human pain.

This poem deserves to be meditated upon long and hard. It begins by calling forth in us the need for courage and patience as we continue our Christian journey. We have to face the bitterness and resentment we might feel because life hasn’t turned out as we planned or wanted, “the betrayal of birth.” We are invited to acknowledge full on the false self that has had such a grip on our lives (and continues to do so for most of us most of the time), “the certainty of the mind’s image of itself that it has projected.” We know that we have to meet the challenges of aging. But most of all this poem summons us, alongside RS Thomas, to see clearly how we have refused, “for too long to say ‘yes’ to that earlier gesture of love that brought us forth and continues to sustain us.” Longing to be in charge of our own lives, to be perfect (so that we have no need of God) and avoiding all that we cannot bear about ourselves, we have refused to acknowledge our dependence on that love which gave and gives us being, which knows and accepts us as we are.

This is a poem to pray with and to set up as a standard of measurement in this year. Can I be as honest, as brave and patient as this poem invites me to be in 2014? Do I dare to strip away the false self? May this be the year in which I recognise and learn to give thanks with joy to the love that brought me forth? I hope so.

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid,

the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together;

and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.

They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Isaiah 11: 6-9

This is the time of year when we look at the Old Testament prophecies, which, in part, seem to point to the coming of Christ or to the “end times.” The prophecy from Isaiah 11 was one of the readings last Sunday, the 2nd Sunday in Advent. As I read it I thought, but I am seeing this prophecies fulfilled, albeit it only partially, this week.

In the week that saw the death of Nelson Mandela the whole world seemed to rise up to celebrate this extraordinary man as if he were their own – and in a way, Mandela does belong to the whole world, even though South Africa has first claim on him. Like all truly great men, he rose above those things that separate us by working for justice for all people, including care of those who were oppressed by being oppressors. One of the things said about him was that he had integrity. In his wake he created integrity. His “Rainbow People,” have shown to the world that the wolf can live with the lamb and the leopard lie down with the kid. What we do not see and can never know is the internal struggle, courage and perseverance – and above all ability to stand in the other person’s shoes; that it must have taken to become the person he was.

Great people become icons for the whole world. They give us something to live up to. They give us hope because they make us realise it is possible to become truly “human” human beings. Thus we honour Gandi, Martin Luther King, Mandela and others. Their nationality doesn’t matter; their religion doesn’t matter (even though deep faith made each of these men), the colour of their skin doesn’t matter. What matters is that they see beyond the individual and the insular to the community of humankind.

For me Mandela reflects what it is to be a son of God. We know that South Africa has huge problems and that with the passing of time it could go backwards as well as forwards. But for a moment we have seen and watched lived out the kingdom of God and its values of mercy, forgiveness, justice and freedom for all people. The world has come together this week in joy and thanksgiving for the hope Mandela has given us. This is a real Advent message.