Category: Christian Spirituality

How to Pray the Cursing Psalms during Holy Week

Dame Maria Boulding OSB wrote out of deep scholarship, alert self-awareness, and perceptive compassion about human hopes and failings, and all this informed by a lifetime of obedience within a Benedictine community. I treasure her books. During Lent I've made my way slowly through her last book, written as she endured painful terminal illness, within the loving support of her community.

Gateway to Resurrection is a gentle reaffirmation of fundamental Christian beliefs centred on God's coming in Jesus, and the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As a world class scholar and translator of Augustine, and as one who has reflected and practised the Rule of Benedict for a lifetime, she offers us a rich weaving together of her own experience, Benedictine spirituality, the biblical riches of Augustine's Expositions of the Psalms and the psychological narrative of his Confessions. But this is spiritual writing that is humble yet assured, accessible but utterly unpatronising, full of faith without for a moment encouraging uncritical piety or unthinking assertion in the face of disturbing questions – doubt too, has its place in our journey to God.

She is spiritually shrewd on the vexed question of what we do with some of the cursing Psalms – for example, how does a Christian pray, 'O God break the teeth in their mouths'. (Mind you I guess some of us, some of the time, know perfectly well how to pray a line like that!). But to pray for the extermination of our enemies children, and to wish those we hate dead and their children orphans – hard to reconcile prayers like that with the Sermon on the Mount. Her answer is profoundly theological, based on taking the humanity and divinity of Jesus with equal and utmost seriousness:

When the Word of God, the Son of God, became man, he was not man in some abstract sense, but a man of a particular race, culture and time. What the instinctive Jewish response to injustice, cruelty or hatred were like, we hear in many of the cursing Psalms. Jesus was personally sinless, and his response sprang from love, but because he came in the loikeness of sinful flesh and to deal with sin (Rom 8.3), he took up all our passionate responses into the raw material of his prayer, as he also took the flesh of Israel as the raw material of his sacrifice. We may find it possible as we pray these psalms simply to be with Christ in his Passion, as he assumes all these shouts of rage and despair, all these raw demands for vengeance, and transforms them: 'Father forgive them, for they know not what they do'.

At least we can be sure of two things about these psalms: first, that the sweet singers of Israel were rithlessly honest before God, and never thought that anything that was important to them was unsuitable to mention in his presence; second, that there are pre-Christian and non-Christian elements in ourselves that may benefot from exposure to God in prayer.

Over the years I've read so many commentaries and theologies that wrestle with the imprecatory psalms. Here at last is a suggestion that is profoundly Christian because deeply rooted in a full and practised Christology. That our worst thoughts can become our most honest prayers, and be redeemed by being caught up into the Passion of God in Christ, and our darkest places flooded with resurrection light, and that these our most destructive responses are drawn into the eternal life-giving love of the Triune God – that's a thought worth pondering, and a way worth trying to walk, starting this Holy Week.

4 April 2012
Buechner Week I – One of my Literary Angels

Frederick Buechner is one of the angels in my life. I don't read him all the time, months can go by without me taking one of his books from the shelf behind my study chair at College.

In my life as in most lives, there have been moments of annunciation when I've been told I'm blessed whether I like it or not, times when good tidings of great joy have lit up my life around me, encounters when I've wrestled with my own struggles and found somewhere in the wrestling that I had a grip on God but God had a stronger grip on me, times too when I've sensed a guardian angel when walking through valleys of deep darkness. Most times those angels are people sent by God to be a friend and companion, and to voice in their actions the love of God. But now and again that angel comes in the holy words that speak heart to heart, and come from the writer to the reader through conduits laid by the Holy Spirit.

Not many writers do that, and just as well. But when I turn one of those scary corners on my journey, find the wind constantly in my face and trying to push me back the way I came, or begin to find the upward road just far too upward, Buechner comes from the shelf, and time and again speaks the kind of sense I'd hear from very few others whom I read. Buechner's sense is uncommon sense, because he is unafraid of pragmatism so long as it's laced with grace, celebrates each precious moment of life not because they are all extraordinary but because they are possible at all because I am alive, shows me again and again that the most important gift is the gift of seeing and embracing the grace that is already there, of perceiving the goodness and mercy that dogs my steps, of discovering in the friendship of those closest to me the faithfulness of God, and in the company of strangers the friendship of God.

So this week is Buechner week. He is now 86 years old, and the wisdom of those years has been generously and prodigally shared in novels, essays, sermons and autobiography. A very good friend introduced me to Buechner's work in 1985 – that was one of the annunciations I referred to above, and the friend, one of the angels.

"Listen to your life.

See it for the fathomless mystery it is.

In the boredom and pain of it

no less than in the excitement and gladness:

touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it

because in the last analysis all moments are key moments,

and life itself is grace."

Now and Then

"The world is full of dark shadows,

to be sure both the world without and the world within …

But praise and trust him too

for the knowledge that what's lost is nothing to what's found,

and that all the dark there ever was,

set next to light,

would scarcely fill a cup."

Commencement Address at Union Seminary, Richmond.

20 March 2012
The Cloud of Unknowing and the Clouds We See Every Day.

"I've never seen an ugly cloud."

Driving home last night with a friend I haven't seen for 15 years, we were admiring the evening sky and sunset over Aberdeenshire. Blue pink occasionally smudged by dark gray as if a Chinese brush artist had randomly played with tinted paper to include a few contrasting shadows, long, thin one-stroke lines - not too dark, but warm gray and feathered at both ends as the brush was flicked up. The finished sky looked like a delicate watercolour, which would have been spoilt if it had been framed.

At which point he said, "I've never seen an ugly cloud." What strikes me about that quite spontaneous observation was the affirmative worldview it revealed. That my friend is travelling a hard road just now made the words even more poignantly positive. There are moments of meaning when a chance remark gathers to itself a significance made up of coincidence of circumstances, emotional preparedness, shared memories and that profound mystery of heart reaching out to heart in agreement and thankfulness. That was such a moment.

Since last night I've let those words dwell in those deep places where meaning slowly forms and understanding is never more than humble recognition that somehow love and life and laughter are definitive of human fellowship. I've thought often and sometimes thought long, about clouds. And I don't mean in the sentimental and fluffy sense of silver linings, and naive denials that clouds are somtimes harbingers of storm and can be ominous and well as beneficent. Yet William Cowper, that gentle 18th Century rural poet, whose courageous battle with depression and an oppressive predestinarian theology brought him often to breakdown, could still write words that were first penned for his own encouragement:

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,

The clouds ye so much dread,

Are big with mercy and will break

with blessings on thy head.

At the other end of the spectrum of Christian spirituality the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, urged the Christian that you can apprehend God through the cloud of unknowing by love, but by thought, never. That cloud of unknowing represents the mystery and beauty of God, like Moses in Exodus, who drew near to the cloud of darkness, where God dwells. So much in our self-explanatory, information sated, google shaped omniscient culture makes it hard to appreciate, long for, be content with, contemplate with a proper sense of our own smallness, the mystery that lies at the heart of all existence.

Perhaps the clouds are there to help us recognise the obscurity that limits our knowing, and to make us respectful of those opaque experiences and thoughts that tease and trouble, lure and disturb, attract and pull our minds and hearts towards that which is infinitely greater than even our most inspired imaginings. Out of such attentiveness and receptiveness, perhaps we will discover also, there are no ugly clouds.

Or as another wise man wrote, "May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. ~Edward Abbey

29 January 2012
Why the word mystical shouldn’t be used as a synonym for woolly thinking.

Now here's an interesting way of thinking, of looking at the world, at the self, and at others.

"I can survive only by trying to build bridges, both affirming and also denying most of my own ideas and those of others. Most people tend to see me as highly progressive, yet I would say I am, in fact, a values conservative and a process liberal.

I believe in justice, truth, follow-through, honesty, personal and financial responsibility, faithful love, and humility – all deeply traditional values.

Yet in my view, you need to be imaginative, radical, dialogical, and even countercultural to live these values at any depth.

Whether in church life or politics, neither conservatives nor liberals are doing this very well. Both are too dualistic…they do not think or see like the mystics"

Richard Rohr, The Naked Now (New York: Crossroad), page 10

16 January 2012
The Unwise Impatience with the Contemplative Mission of the Church,

When E M Forster in A Passage to India sniffed with the disdain of the omniscient narrator at 'poor little talkative Christianity' he was doing what the best novelists do so well, exposing pretension and presumption and daring to name what is ridiculous. Of course not all Christianity is talkative in that embarrassing way when much speaking disguises insecurity, or pretends maturity, or silences other viewpoints by not shutting up about itself.

But there's still a sharp enough barb in Forster's words to make me uneasy about the contemporary expressions of evangelical spirituality and worship. The urge to talk to the point of overtalking, the impatience with silence as if silence were wasted time, the compulsion to fill every unforgiving minute with maximum information, our praise song factories churning out new stuff at increasing rates of quantity, our uncritical acceptance of prayers that seldom reach the depths of our love or the heights of our aspirations and are often the mere immediate chatter of Facebook exchanges with God.

Add to that our programmatic approaches to mission, activism as the index of discipleship, the concessions made in Christian practices and social attitudes to consumer culture and the radical individualism of personal choice and privatised lifestyles, and there is little time, energy or inclination to stop, shut up, listen, pay attention and let the engines that drive us slow down, quieten down and cool down.

Now all that is overstated, and mostly unfair, and anyway I can much-speak and fast-talk and non-stop with the best of them. But perhaps that enables me to say all this less self-righteously than it might sound. T S Eliot's question (was it wistful, angry or resigned) 'where is the life we have lost in living…' remains one of the most important questions the contemporary church has to ask, and with which the contemporary disciple of Jesus has to grapple.

I know that discipleship is at the centre of current thinking on the nature of the Church's mission, but I'm not persuaded that the way the idea is used to shape and fashion people towards a particular view of mission does justice to the New Testament vision of what it means for each person to follow Jesus. There are other calls of Christ, other ways of being, other paths of following that are equally important to the Kingdom of God, if we take the time to consider and ponder the richness of the people of God and the unsearchable riches of Christ. But the irony is that the more we talk and the faster we live, the harder it is to even see what the important questions are, let alone what kinds of answers there might be.

Which brings me to a question I am considering and pondering myself. What would be the impact on our ways of being the church if we recovered,, in our midst, the contemplative tradition of Christian discipleship? I have in mind certain words that seem to me to offer important theological and spiritual correctives to a church perhaps too fond of unexamined assumptions.

Attentiveness to the way the world is without assuming our quick diagnoses are always accurate. Amos didn't come to the conclusion overnight that worship is a waste of time for those who grind down the poor. His entire collection of prophecies detonates beneath unexamined assumptions.

Attendance – in the sense of waiting before God, just waiting. If we are attending before God our minds can't be in two places at once. Prayer isn't multi-tasking, it is letting God be God, instead of telling God who to be.

Pondering – rumination and turning things over in our minds, may not be the preferred approach to problem solving in our quick as you can solutions culture. Somewhere in Christian spirituality there is a necessity for the long view, the slow maturation of thought, the virtue of patience which is in fact waiting trustfully. Isaiah looked down the long winding road of exile and realised it would eventually be the road that led back to God.

Recollecting – so many fugitive thoughts, fleeting experiences, volume of emotional and mental traffic passing through our inner processors. Time to assimilate, to collect together what is important and taken in, to absorb the significance of things. Where in our life together in Christian community is there the same urgency towards non-urgency, the same valuing of that discernment and sifting that turns experience into wisdom?

Remembering - in the sense of recalling our calling; meaning time to reorient our hearts towards the Love that not only moves the sun and other stars, but moves our hearts; and with a view to being re-membered, joined together, co-ordinated, so that over time our disjointed living recovers co-ordination, and our strained activism gradually gives way to living that is purposeful, creative and balanced in its intake and outflow of energy.

No this is not all a rant. It's a plea for a recovered humanism towards ourselves, a cherishing of our humanity in a way that takes our deepest selves seriously as ones loved by God. It is a recognition that Christians are called not only to do, but to be, and to give time of day to that genuine instinct for stillness and slowness, two dispositions I for one find unfamiliar, but out of which may come the finding of our life's hopes. It is an acknowledgement that the trivialisation of God is an inevitable process of trivialising our own lives. And it is a growing conviction that Isaiah was right to say to a people who had exhausted their capacity to hope, "they that wait upon the Lord shall renew theyr strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint…" Waiting – yet another word with which our culture, and the church, and our own hearts, are impatient.

3 November 2011
Summoned by the Bell, Reverberating from the Touch of God

"Faith is not the clinging to a shrine,

but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.

Audacious longing,

burning songs,

daring thoughts,

an impulse overwhelming the heart,

usurping the mind —

these are all a drive towards serving Him

who rings our hearts like a bell."

Abraham Joshua Heschel is in the prophetic line of Jewish poets.

He chooses metaphors for God with the instinct of Isaiah, an inner sensitivity to the power of an image created by association.

"Him who rings the heart like a bell" is a quite extraordinary way of referring to God, until you begin to think of the rich resonances struck by the image of the bell.

The alarm bell warning of danger, the bell inviting to dinner, the chimes of the bell on a clock reminding of time's transience, the musical notes that ring true from the integrity of the bell and clapper, the ringing of celebration and the ringing of summons to worship; God is each, all and more than these.

And Heschel places that subversive metaphor after listing some of those inner moments of urgency, whether fear or surprise, that sometimes overtake or overwhelm us. And when they do, they strike the heart, and the purity of the note and clarity of the sound are evidence of that integrity by which our whole being resonates in sympathy with the touch of God.

26 October 2011
Seek the Lord while He may be found – Prayer of Bernard of Clairvaux

Omniscience is both a comforting and scary thought. God knows everything there is to know. Which means I can't hide anything – neither my sins nor my worries; my need for forgiveness nor for reassurance.

It also means my motives which to me usually seem sound, but in reality are mixed and complex, are understood and seen with the scrutinising gaze of holy love.

But given God's omnisicience, I'm glad we pray to a God who is not slow on the uptake.

Just as well. Here's one of Bernard of Clairvaux's prayers. The kind of prayer even the Lord might ask should be said twice, just to be sure He got it the first time!

Lord, you are good to the soul that seeks you.

What are you then to the soul that finds?

But this is the most wonderful thing,

that no one can seek you who has not already found you.

You therefore seek to be found so that you might be sought for,

sought so that you may be found. Amen

16 August 2011
Going on retreat, toasted muesli and the Go-Between God.

I was recalling with Ken the other day the time we went on a clergy retreat to Scottish Churches House. The Director was the late Bishop John V Taylor and we looked forward to a rich time of thoughtful and theologically literate reflection. We weren't disappointed. Out of an A5 spiral notebook, with full written notes he spoke of the Christlike God and the ministry as service to the God of Creation, Reconciliation and Communion in the Trinity.

However there was not a little consternation when with episcopal authority of a unilateral kind, he announced it would be a silent retreat, with strictly designated times for talking. That was a problem for two friends who wanted to catch up. It was more of a problem when he said that meal times would be silent – I mean, how do you ask politely for the salt without which chips are incomplete? But problem became difficult to suppress hysteria at the breakfast table when in silence, around 20 people are munching the toasted muesli. My immediate memory was of my boyhood on the farms and heard the munching of bovine jaws in the byre after feeding cattle cake to 40 cows. Unconditional love of the brothers and sisters is stretched painfully when trying to chew muesli, not choke and hold back guffaws of laughter which if they erupt are likely to spray the table with semi-masticated oats much to the spiritual benefit of no one!

Nevertheless, that was a rich encounter with Bishop John. I went on the strength of reading his The Go Between God.

That is a book of seminal importance in my thinking about the presence and work of the Holy Spirit in the created order, in the church, and in my life as it impinges on all the others who are affected by the ripples of influence that emanate from this one life.

Here is one paragraph which says so, so much:

The Holy Spirit is the invisible third party who stands between me and the other, making us mutually aware. Supremely and primarily he opens my eyes to Christ. But he also opens my eyes to the brother ans sister in Christ, or the fellow human being, or the point of need, or the heartbreaking brutality and the equally heartbreaking beauty of the world. He is the giver of that vision without which the people perish. We commonly speak about the Holy Spirit as the source of power. But in fact he enables us not by making us supernaturally strong but by opening our eyes.

11 August 2011
Questions as the oxygen of faith?

All who genuinely seek to learn,

whether atheist or believer,

scientist or mystic,

are united in having not a faith,

but faith itself.

Its token is reverence,

its habit to respect the eloquence of silence.

For God's hand may be a human hand,

if you reach out in lovingkindness,

and God's voice may be your voice,

if you but speak the truth."

(Paul Ferris, The Whole Shebang).

"Every question asked in reverence

is the start of a journey towards God.

When faith suppresses questions,

it dies.

When it accepts superficial answers,

it begins to wither.

Faith is not opposed to doubt.

What it is opposed to

is the shallow certainty that what we understand

is all there is."

(Jonathan Sacks, Celebrating Life).

25 March 2011
Prayer and the Pursuit of Happiness

Ever since I read Prayer and the Pursuit of Happiness, I have read the work of Richard Harries. Indeed the stained glass window on the front cover became a tapestry project years ago, and it now hangs in my study at the College. What that book did (for me at any rate), was recover a positive view of human happiness as a life goal.

Sure, it's true enough if you set out looking for happiness you'll be disappointed – sometimes. But it does seem odd that those who are followers of one who was accused of too many parties, too much wine, overindulgence in food (glutton he was accused of, though allow some exaggeration for the zealously pious) keeping the wrong company, saying the wrong thing, doing good and helping people on the wrong days, – yes it does seem odd that Christians often seem ambivalent about happiness. Oh we're OK with joy, you know that deep, subterranean sense of emotional well-being "in the Lord", or that nearer the surface stuff that gets sung out in many a praise song many Sunday.

But happiness – uncomplicated, desirable, positive, laughter laced, pleasurable enjoyment of things, surface though not superficial, transient but transformative, the feeling in our bodies and minds that the most important word to say to life is yes! But isn't the pursuit of happiness to chase after chimera, to put personal pleasure first, to rely on emotion, mood and feelings rather than convictions, beliefs and spirituality.

What is a human being's chief end? To glorify God and enjoy God forever. What would be gratitude to the Creator – to enjoy created things as the gifts they are, surely? Suppose a friend gives you a gift of your favourite food, or a ticket for the gig you never thought you'd get to? Better not tell them you binned the food as an act of self-denial and love for God – or that you shredded the tickets as a way of strengthening your spiritual muscles! 🙂

I know. Caricature. But Harries was on to something. The way we are suspicious of sheer pleasure in things; that dominant strand in Christian spirituality that wants us to eliminate personal desires and suppress that part of us from which the words "I want" come. And ambition, love, desire, want, pleasure, leisure, reveling, laughter, – far from diminishing our spirituality, are significant parts of a full humanity without which spirituality impairs rather than enhances, and distorts rather than fulfills.

Thomas Traherne, that Creation-intoxicated mystic, is one of the few Christian writers who writes of happiness and enjoyment with unabashed enthusiasm. Actually, reading him out loud he sounds OTT – but maybe one of the reasons we are on the brink of ecological catastrophe is we no longer look on nature as the creation, and on material things as gift, and on the world as a living jewel entrusted to our care, and we are OTT about all the wrong things.

You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your
veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the
stars: . . . Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are
your jewels; . . . till you love men so as to desire their happiness,
with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own.

Prayer and the Pursuit of Happiness is one of those books that simply and directly questions our worldview. And asks whether this side of the resurrection, assuming the love of a faithful Creator, in a world suffused and enlivened by the Holy Spirit, there might just be reason to be happy, and for our happiness to be a grateful yes to God's gifts.

And sure, there is another kind of world – cruel, unjust, violent and violated, barren of freedom and marred and scarred by greed, waste and misery. But in such a world we are called to live for Jesus Christ, in the power of the Spirit, embodying the reconciling love of God. And surely part of that witness, is also the celebration of that which is good, wholesome, healing, restoring, just, funny, enjoyable – because human happiness, and human desires and human wanting are not wrong.

Inordinate desire, yes; self-interested wanting that robs others, yes; happiness purchased on others' misery, yes; each of these is nearer the greed that looks on the apple and hears that plausible persuasive question, "Did God say no?" But any reading of the Psalms, any reflection on how Jesus lived, and any honest facing up to what goes on in our own hearts, makes it clear that happiness is a good thing! And good things should be pursued, and shared. And maybe that is the best constraint and control of our wanting and our desiring – the sense of other people, of shared humanity and therefore of shared happiness in this great comi-tragic production we call our lives. Read the words of Traherne again – "to love people so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own". Or as Jesus said, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. Satisfied. Fulfilled, and yes, happy.

11 September 2010