Somewhere around the age of sixty-five, many people decide it’s time to stop working and start just enjoying life. The trouble, of course, is that they’re apt to discover that with nothing much to do except play golf, travel, catch up on their reading, watch TV, and so on, life isn’t all that enjoyable. They need something to give themselves to the way they once gave themselves to their jobs. The question is, give themselves to what? Maybe they could do worse than give themselves to the world that needs them as much as they need the world.
This may involve things like volunteer work at the hospital or delivering meals on wheels or heading the library-fund drive, but the place where giving yourself to the world starts is simply paying attention to the world—to the people you’ve been saying hello to for years without really knowing them, to the elementary-school kids hanging upside down on the jungle gym, to the woman taxi driver with the face of a Boston bull and no teeth to speak of who waits for fares at the bus stop, to the old vets marching down Main Street on Memorial Day.
From “Retirement” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABCs of Faith by Frederick Buechner (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004).
Vocation comes from the Latin vocare, “to call,” and means the work a person is called to by God. There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of society, say, or the superego, or self-interest.
By and large a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need to do and (b) that the world needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing cigarette ads, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a), but probably aren’t helping your patients much either.
Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
From “Vocation” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABCs of Faith by Frederick Buechner (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004).
Jobs are what people do for a living, many of them for eight hours a day, five days a week, minus vacations, for most of their lives. It is tragic to think how few of them have their hearts in it. They work mainly for the purpose of making money enough to enjoy their moments of not working.
If not working is the chief pleasure they have, you wonder if they wouldn’t do better just to devote themselves to that from the start. They would probably end up in breadlines or begging, but, even so, the chances are they would be happier than they would be pulling down a good salary as a bank teller or a dental technician or a supermarket bagger and hating every minute of it.
“What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?” asks the Preacher (Ecclesiastes 1:3). If people are in it only for the money, the money is all they gain, and when they finally retire, they may well ask themselves if it was worth giving most of their lives for. If they’re doing it for its own sake—if they enjoy doing it and the world needs it done—it may very possibly help to gain them their own souls.
From “Jobs” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABCs of Faith by Frederick Buechner (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004).
When you remember me, it means you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.
For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost. When I’m feeling most ghostlike, it’s your remembering me that helps remind me that I actually exist. When I’m feeling sad, it’s my consolation. When I’m feeling happy, it’s part of why I feel that way.
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” the good thief said from his cross. There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well.
From “Remember” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABCs of Faith by Frederick Buechner (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004).
If you lose yourself in your work, you find who you are. If you express the best you have in you in your work, it is more than just the best you have in you that you are expressing.
From “Work” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABCs of Faith by Frederick Buechner (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004).
The morning after [September 11, 2001], very early, I was stopped in the street in New York by a youngish man who turned out to be an airline pilot and a Catholic. He wanted to know what the hell God was doing when the planes hit the towers. What do you say? The usual fumbling about how God doesn’t intervene, which sounds like a lame apology for some kind of ‘policy’ on God’s part, a policy exposed as heartless in the face of such suffering? Something about how God is there in the sacrificial work of the rescuers, in the risks they take? I tried saying bits of this, but there was no clearer answer than there ever is. Any really outrageous human action tests to the limit our careful theological principles about God’s refusal to interfere with created freedom. That God has made a world into which he doesn’t casually step in to solve problems is fairly central to a lot of Christian faith. He has made the world so that evil choices can’t just be frustrated or aborted (where would he stop, for goodness sake? he’d have to be intervening every instant of human history) but have to be confronted, suffered, taken forward, healed in the complex process of human history, always in collaboration with what we do and say and pray.
I do believe that; but I don’t think you can say it with much conviction outside the context of people actually doing the action and the prayer. In the street that morning, all I had was words. I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t help. He was a lifelong Christian believer, but for the first time it came home to him that he might be committed to a God who could seem useless in a crisis.
Perhaps it’s when we try to make God useful in crises, though, that we take the first steps towards the great lie of religion: the god who fits our agenda. There is a breathing space: then just breathe for a moment. Perhaps the words of faith will rise again slowly in that space (perhaps not). But don’t try to tie it up quickly.
From Writing in the Dust: After September 11 by Rowan Williams (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).
Above all else, the Teacher of peace and the Master of unity does not wish us to pray individualistically or selfishly as if we are concerned only about ourselves. We do not say: ‘My Father in heaven’, or ‘Give me today my daily bread.’ Nor does anyone pray simply for their own sins to be forgiven, or request that he or she alone be not led into temptation or be delivered from evil. Christian prayer is public and offered for all. When we pray it is not as an individual but as a united people, for we are indeed all one. God, who is the Teacher of prayer and peace, taught us peace. He wishes each of us to pray for all, just as he carries us all in himself.
From the treatise “On the Lord’s Prayer” by Cyprian of Carthage, quoted in Spiritual Classics from the Early Church, compiled and introduced by Robert Atwell OSB (London: National Society/Church House Publishing, 1995).
We are celebrating the feast of the cross which drove away darkness and brought in the light. As we keep this feast, we are lifted up with the crucified Christ, leaving behind us earth and sin so that we may gain the things above. So great and outstanding a possession is the cross that whoever wins it has won a treasure. Rightly could I call this treasure the fairest of all fair things and the costliest, in fact as well as in name, for on it and through it and for its sake the riches of salvation that had been lost were restored to us.
A reading from a sermon of Andrew of Crete, Bishop and Hymnographer [740], in Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, edited by J. Robert Wright. Copyright © 1991. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org
Faithful cross! above all other,
one and only noble tree!
None in foliage, none in blossom,
none in fruit thy peer may be:
sweetest wood and sweetest iron!
sweetest weight is hung on thee.
Bend thy boughs, O tree of glory!
Thy relaxing sinews bend;
for awhile the ancient rigor
that thy birth bestowed, suspend;
and the King of heavenly beauty
gently on thine arms extend.
Words by Venantius Honorius Fortunatus (540?–600?). Hymn 165 in The Hymnal 1982 (New York: Church Hymnal, 1985).
In the year of our Lord 565, when Justin, the younger, the successor of Justinian, had the government of the Roman empire, there came into Britain a famous priest and abbot, a monk by habit and life, whose name was Columba, to preach the word of God to the provinces of the northern Picts, who are separated from the southern parts by steep and rugged mountains; for the southern Picts, who dwell on this side of those mountains, had long before, as is reported, forsaken the errors of idolatry, and embraced the truth, by the preaching of Ninias, a most reverend bishop and holy man of the British nation, who had been regularly instructed at Rome, in the faith and mysteries of the truth; whose episcopal see, named after St. Martin the bishop, and famous for a stately church (wherein he and many other saints rest in the body), is still in existence among the English nation. The place belongs to the province of the Bernicians, and is generally called the White House, because he there built a church of stone, which was not usual among the Britons.
From Chapter IV, “When the Nation of the Picts Received the Faith [A.D. 565]” of the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation.
O praise be to you, Holy Trinity
resounding jubilation and life of all that is.
To our Mother
Great Creator of all things living and of life itself.
O angelic chorus sounding forth in joyful praise!
O the wonderful silent splendor of the holy mys’tries
Trinity shining brilliance unknown to women or to men.
O quickening sparkle dwelling in all!
Life-giving Life!
Life of all things gloriously created!
Words from the hymn Laus Trinitati by Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), translated by Lisa Neufeld Thomas, © 2001. In Voices Found: Women in the Church’s Song, © 2003 by Church Publishing, Inc. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org
Until Lawrence of Arabia I had never actually seen a camel. Of course I’ve seen plenty of them processing across Christmas cards, standing around on cigarette packages, sulking in zoos despising their surroundings. The way they look is both laughable and unsympathetic, and suggests that they don’t know how to enjoy themselves. And I’ve read about them. They are morose, disagreeable, and unloving. They bite their masters. They have neither the generosity to make the best of their lot nor the spirit to put up a really good fight against it. Spiritually speaking, the camel is a total loss.
He is, in fact, a disconcerting reminder of that chilling old theory that God made the world and everything in it for the use of man, and for nothing else whatever. Could God have done such an awful thing? Could he have breathed life into even one creature who is—in himself, for himself—just nothing at all? Created a conscious being to live a life of joyless utility, to be a tool, a convenience, an object? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
But to really see the camel, you have to see him running. When he walks, lurching and swaying, rolling and pitching, you would think each muscle was headed in a different direction. When he begins to run he’s like one of those heavy, ungainly birds who can hardly get off the ground—but when they do, they own the whole wide sky.
Given time enough and desert enough, he manages to get his ramshackle collection of bones all moving together, he picks up speed, stretches out longer and longer, and then…now, there is a camel! At full gallop, his neck way out ahead of him, his whole fantastic shape a bewilderment of undulations, fast, powerful, free as a desert storm, he’s wild and weird and gorgeous beyond belief, an authentic aboriginal marvel. The whole wide ocean of sand is his; he owns it.
Compared to the camel, the horse is an oversimplification. Who would ask of such a lord of life that he also cultivate an amiable personality? From The Quantity of a Hazelnut by Fae Malania. © 2005. A Seabury Book published by Church Publishing, Inc. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org
I don’t know much about music, but I know what I like. Why can’t I say even that much about people? The attention I pay to the Brahms Violin Concerto far surpasses in quality what I give to any human being whomsoever, friend or foe. The concerto is easier, true. But a certain real effort is required, and I do make it—not always, but fairly often.
I settle myself quietly; empty myself of all extraneous thoughts, impressions, emotions; withdraw my attention from all outside sights, sounds, and concepts; and I listen. I turn my whole self to the music like radar; I become a receiver, percipient, minutely alive. I follow in busy quietude the shape of the music as its structure builds in my mind. I say nothing about it to myself, I am for this little space of time a pure act of listening.
This is surely the clue to the kind of attention I owe to people. I must empty my mind of other claims and, in interior silence, let them tell me who they are. I must remain in watchful, active quiet as the basic architecture of a personality presents itself to my mind. I must learn to hear a slight variation on a theme, a modulation to another key, an inner melody, a discord, an individual beauty of tone.
If love isn’t this, it can’t be much.
But the minute the note of another human being begins to sound, my self leaps up in clamant alarm and yells: “What about me? I’m here too!” In the ensuing din, I can’t hear a thing.
I have a great deal to learn about the virtue of silence. I wish I could be quiet long enough to figure out how to begin. From The Quantity of a Hazelnut by Fae Malania. © 2005. A Seabury Book published by Church Publishing, Inc. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org
So that is one way of intercession: substitution of our suffering for others’, bearing the burden, feeling the pain. Not just sympathy, and a thousand miles from pity. Coinherence, living within. Filling up in our flesh that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ.
But we are too weak for much of it. Sometimes we can just touch a finger to the cross, sometimes not even that. Even the saints, probably, are shackled to a limited imagination.
That is why the daily office of the church matters so much. This is a prayer we can offer for the merest stranger, for someone we dislike, for a sorrow we haven’t encompassed, a problem we haven’t understood. We can offer it for a world of hungry children our hearts are too small to hold, for the unknown victim of a sin we’ve never even thought of, for peace in a world that fills us with a scared surprise.
We can offer it, over and over again, for people we love, and needs we know.
Saying the formal psalms and prayers, following in obedience the rich and ordered prayer of the entire church, adding my small voice to its perfect harmony, I turn the whole river of grace toward those for whom I pray. Not I pray for them. Adam, all Man, prays. The whole church prays. The whole Christ prays.
Let me remember to find a little time for this, even if it means taking a little trouble. From The Quantity of a Hazelnut by Fae Malania. © 2005. A Seabury Book published by Church Publishing, Inc. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org
Most of us, in spite of pleasant circumstances and fun and games, lead lives of quiet desperation. Sometimes we hardly even notice it, supported as we are by a thick web of human relationships, shored up by a multiplicity of small pleasures. Other times it’s all we can do to scratch together a few emotional odds and ends to try to draw a decent veil over the face of reality.
We’d do better to turn and go after it, instead.
To begin with, never mind pleasure. Search out joy. Pleasure is its shadow, with no more substance than a shadow. But joy is real, a secret splendor running through all creation.
Like gold, it doesn’t lie about the streets waiting to be picked up. It has to be dug for, with diligence and passion. It’s in people, to be found through the practice of love. It’s in work, in the rigorous exercise of powers of mind or body or spirit. It’s a gift the created world is perpetually offering; the price of it is untiring attention to the present moment. It is to be found always and only in the contemplation of reality.
Hunt it down, pursue it, track it to its lair where it dwells. Not in pleasures and pastimes, distractions, piled-up satisfactions, and busyness. It dwells in truth, and nowhere else.
That’s why it matters. It will show you moment by moment where truth is for you. And when you know that, cleave to it, turn not aside, be given up to that. That, if you will, is a way of life worth living.
But I haven’t really said what I wanted to. There’s more than that to joy. Hidden in its glowing heart, light beyond light....How my blind eyes search the dazzling darkness to find out him whom I have loved, whom I have sought, whom I have always desired.
From The Quantity of a Hazelnut by Fae Malania. © 2005. A Seabury Book published by Church Publishing, Inc. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org
When a girl is accepted to enter the community of our Anglican Poor Clares, she puts on her postulant’s dress in the Guest House and then, bare hands and empty pockets, just like that—cold turkey—walks across the lawn to the convent and through the cloister door. No handbag or overnight case; no handkerchief, car keys, library card, aspirin, tranquilizer, Kleenex, comb, toothbrush, driver’s license, nail file, postage stamps, pencil, or pen; no bow or brooch, braid or brace, lace, latch, catch, or key to keep back the pure, wild exhilaration of perfect freedom.
But among us ordinary mortals, poverty takes a different turn. I recently began to live a life of relative poverty (well, anyway, low-incomeness) for the love of God and his church. And I was ready for it, glad about it, yes indeed! From now on, I told myself lyrically, accept whatever comes from the hand of God with gratitude. Ask for nothing, refuse nothing. Use it up, wear it out, make it do. Rejoice in the good, simple, plain beauty of bare necessities. Love them. Cherish them. Yes indeed.
But what is this? Brown figured wallpaper where I had thought of cool, white-washed walls? Squares of brown linoleum where I was expecting bare, polished floorboards?
Betrayed into a panic of worldliness, I rush out and buy as much wall-to-wall carpeting as possible to cover as much brown linoleum as possible. Then I settle down to the pious enjoyment of the Holy Poverty of my own choice.
The Christian life is full of these little traps.
From The Quantity of a Hazelnut by Fae Malania. © 2005. A Seabury Book published by Church Publishing, Inc. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org
A spiritual writer I’ve been reading lately informs me that I ought to love God because it is only due to his great goodness that he does not annihilate me right this minute. This gives me a rather vivid insight into the emotions of the downtrodden who are urged to love all their good, kind benefactors. I don’t think the comparison is quite so unapt as it may seem, either. I will stick my neck out and say that the question of justice does exist between creator and creature, as well as between man and man.
He also says that, if it is the sacred duty of the child to love its father, how much more are we obliged, etc., etc. Not a word about the duty of the father to love the child.
This is the sort of thing that gives religion a bad name. If we are going to be anthropomorphic (and, as far as I am concerned, we are), why can’t we choose the more likable aspects of our human nature to measure God by? Why not assume that he is, at the very least, as good as we would like to be if only we had a little better control over our impulses. We would not, for instance, think about annihilating our child and then decide, graciously and capriciously, not to. We would give him, if we knew how, an oceanic love, joyous, without limit or regret, without afterthoughts or recriminations; and at the same time, a watchful, caring discipline, individually tailored to the child—not to scare him out of his dear little wits but to equip him with a clearsighted knowledge of the things that belong to his peace, and the moral force and freedom to live by them.
We would not announce that it was his duty to love us. We would say, as a simple matter of fact, that he loves us because we first loved him.
I’m not sure, wicked as I am, that gratitude is the most reliable motive for love. But if God gives us grace to be grateful, let us be grateful not just because he lets us live. So does the government. Let us be grateful for the free, uncost-counting, inalienable, lavish, glorious gift of love. From The Quantity of a Hazelnut by Fae Malania. © 2005. A Seabury Book published by Church Publishing, Inc. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org
There is never a time when we do not “stand in need of God’s particular assistance”, nor a place in which we cannot pray. For Andrewes prayer should be ceaseless; it was like the burning of incense ever arising to the court of heaven. “‘Let our prayer go up to Him that His grace may come down to us,’ so to lighten us in our ways and works that we may in the end come to dwell with Him, in the light ‘whereof there is no even-tide.’” And ‘prayer goeth up, pity cometh down.’
These quotations also reveal another aspect of Andrewes’ teaching on prayer. It is the channel by which we experience the generosity of the blessed Trinity. By this Andrewes not only meant that it is through prayer that we come to know God better, but also that it is only by the Holy Spirit working within us that we can prayer at all. Prayer is thus a gift of grace. So if we find ourselves not being able to pray, we must humbly ask for grace to be able to pray. Without prayer we sin, and so one of this divine’s terse remarks was that ‘prayer is good as it keeps us from sin.’
From “Lancelot Andrewes and Prayer” by Dr. Marianne Dorman (Michaelmas, 1998), found at http://justus.anglican.org/resources/pc/essays/dorman1.html.
For many, their introduction to Lancelot Andrewes has been through his Preces Privatæ. For those who are familiar with this collection will know that his prayers are like a piece of tapestry as he weaves strands from the Bible, especially the psalms, the Hours, the Prayer Book and quotations from the Fathers. However this weaving is not tight but loose enough to allow for spontaneous prayer arising from daily life. The structure of his prayers follow the ancient five-fold pattern: confession, praise, thanksgiving, intercession and petition.
Prayer for Andrewes is essentially ecclesial and sacramental, and thus the Preces cannot be separated from Andrewes’ theology. It reveals his consciousness of continuing in the line of the Fathers, or indeed further back to antiquity when man first set up his altar to God, and therefore there was always an awareness of praying as part of that whole Church of God, the saints and sinners; the living and the dead. This is evident by what can be termed an anamnesis approach to his praying where he constantly recalled the various gifts God has given through creation, redemption and sanctification. He also firmly believed that Christ and the Church’s teaching spoke as “one person”, and that outside of the Church no Christian could receive Christ’s blessings and grace which in time will bring them to “the glory, the joys, [and] the crown of Heaven”.
From “Lancelot Andrewes and Prayer” by Dr. Marianne Dorman (Michaelmas, 1998), found at http://justus.anglican.org/resources/pc/essays/dorman1.html.
Lancelot Andrewes’ praying as a member of Christ’s universal church was manifested as he embraced the whole cosmos, ranging from nature with all its wondrous details to the needs of those around him. Everything must be offered to God either in praise and thanksgiving for the whole universe or a confession of penitence for soiling it. He prayed “for all commonwealths of the world” and for all peoples, whether they worked in mines or courts. More particularly his prayers included all those who had been associated with him in any way during his life. So he prayed for his old school and master, college, parishes and cathedrals.
Furthermore his bidding prayers supported his ecclesial teaching. In the fragility of the “whole Militant Church, scattred farre and wide over the face of the whole earth”, he prayed for the preserving in it “those trueths that it hath recovered from the sundrie grose and superstitious errors of the former age”. He also prayed for its unity which it daily seems to lose “through the unchristian and unhappy contentions of these dayes of ours”. In praying for the whole church he never forgot that the Church militant was part of the wider Church with its saints, especially the Mother of God and all heavenly beings. Thus in a prayer for the whole Church which is collated from the liturgies of James and Chrysostom it concluded:
Neither are we unmindful to bless Thee,
for the most holy, pure, highly blessed, the Mother of God,
Mary the eternal Virgin, with all the Saints:
Recommending ourselves and our whole life to Thee,
O Lord, our Christ and God:
For to Thee belongeth glory, honour, and worship.
From “Lancelot Andrewes and Prayer” by Dr. Marianne Dorman (Michaelmas, 1998), found at http://justus.anglican.org/resources/pc/essays/dorman1.html.
Job has long clung to his “integrity” (27:5), by which he meant being responsible within his own social sphere. But now that God has given this guided tour of the creation, the whole project of human integrity looks different. It means fitting into a design vastly bigger and more complex than Job ever imagined. What God says, in effect, is this: “Look away from yourself, Job; look around you. For a moment see the world with my eyes, in all its intricacy and wild beauty. The beauty is in the wildness, Job; you cannot tame all that frightens you without losing the beauty.” God calls this man of integrity to take his place in a ravishing but dangerous world where only those who relinquish their personal expectations can live in peace. The price of peace is the surrender of our personal expectations, which are always too small for the huge freedom built into the system.
From “The Sufferer’s Wisdom: The Book of Job” in Getting Involved With God: Rediscovering the Old Testament by Ellen F. Davis (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2001).
The great question that God’s speech out of the whirlwind poses for Job and every other person of integrity is this: Can you love what you do not control? That implied question is only another form of the one that the Satan put to God at the very beginning: “Is it for no good reason that Job serves God?” The shocking revelation out of the whirlwind is that God gets a kick out of doing things for no good reason at all—making it rain on the desert, for instance, with no one there. The truth that Job never suspected is that gratuitousness is one of the hidden values of creation.
Job’s answer to that revelation is a deepening of silence. He now acknowledges the insufficiency of all his words. If Job now has little to say, then this is the silence not of self-disgust, but of desire fulfilled. Job has gotten what he most wanted: he has seen God. And as a result he takes a new view of the human condition and of his own place in the world. Job’s silence at the end of the book bespeaks his spiritual transformation. It is not only his theology that is renewed; it is his whole mind.
From “The Sufferer’s Wisdom: The Book of Job” in Getting Involved With God: Rediscovering the Old Testament by Ellen F. Davis (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2001).
In fact, the clearest expression of the renewal of Job’s mind is not anything he says. It is his willingness to have more children. The note at the end of the book that Job had seven sons and three daughters is often considered to be a cheap parting shot—as though God could make it all up by giving Job another set of children to replace the ones who were lost. But this book is not about justifying God’s actions; it is about Job’s transformation. It is useless to ask how much (or how little) it costs God to give more children. The real question is how much it costs Job to become a father again. How can he open himself again to the terrible vulnerability of loving those whom he cannot protect against suffering and untimely death?
Of course, we never get a direct answer to that question. But here is a hint that tells us something about what kind of father Job becomes, after all his grief. It is in the strange detail about him naming his daughters: “He called the name of the one Yemima (Dove) and the name of the second Ketsia (Cinnamon) and the name of the third Keren-haPuch (Horn of Eye-Shadow)” (42:14). Sensuous names are not the biblical norm, and naming a daughter for a cosmetic is way over the top. Job, this man of integrity who was once so careful, fearful of God and of the possible sins of his children, becomes at the last freewheeling, breaking with custom to honor daughters alongside sons, bestowing inheritances and snappy names. The inspiration and model for this wild style of parenting is, of course, God the Creator. Job learned about it when God spoke out of the whirlwind. And now Job loves with the abandon characteristic of God’s love—revolutionary in seeking our freedom, reveling in the untamed beauty of every child.
From “The Sufferer’s Wisdom: The Book of Job” in Getting Involved With God: Rediscovering the Old Testament by Ellen F. Davis (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2001).
Coming to know some of our suffering sisters and brothers in the Third World and in the ghettoes of Washington has made all the difference in the way we view the earth. The unemployment statistics are made up of faces that we know. We behold the plight of the poor not only with fresh eyes, but with the awareness that our faithfulness in the past gave God one way of performing veritable miracles.
As we become exposed to the poor and their needs, the rich young ruler and the widow and her mite lose the storybook quality of our childhood faith, and become figures in the counter-culture literature of a revolutionary leader—the very one whom we call Saviour. Some of us have looked into the face of our idols and found that one of them is money. Like the ancients with their molten calf we have endowed money with our own psychic energy, given it arms and legs, and have told ourselves that it can work for us. More than this we enshrine it in a secret place, give it a heart and a mind and the power to grant us peace and mercy.
From Letters to Scattered Pilgrims by Elizabeth O’Connor (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), letters to the six faith communities of the Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C.
While Francis gazed and marveled at the multitude of birds in the field, the Spirit of God came over him and he said to his companions: “Wait for me here on the road. I am going to preach to our sisters, the birds.”
The substance of St. Francis’ sermon to those birds was this: “My little bird sisters, you owe much to God your Creator, and you must always and everywhere praise him, because he has given you a double and triple covering, and your colorful and pretty clothing, and your food is ready without your working for it, and your singing was taught to you by the Creator, and your numbers that have been multiplied by the blessing of God. And you are also indebted to him for the realm of the air which he assigned to you. Moreover, you neither sow nor reap, yet God nourishes you, and he gives you the rivers and springs to drink from. He gives you high mountains and hills, rocks and crags as refuges, and lofty trees in which to make your nests. So the Creator loves you very much since he gives you so many good things. Therefore, my little bird sisters, be careful not to be ungrateful, but strive always to praise God.”
From The Little Flowers of St. Francis by Brother Ugolino di Monte Santa Maria (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958).
“Filthy lucre,” as money is sometimes called, has been a favorite topic of conversation for us since the early days of The Church of the Saviour. We talk about it probably as much as Jesus did. When the founding members, young and poor, were forming themselves into a properly incorporated community of faith, they struggled for a discipline of membership that would help them and future church members to deal concretely with at least some aspects of the handling of money. In its first writing the discipline read, “We commit ourselves to giving 10 percent of our gross income to the work of the Church.”
While there was some precedence in biblical history for the 10 percent figure, our first members felt that this kind of giving would enable them to begin to tackle the injustices of society in a way that would be meaningful to themselves, as well as to others. Their proposed disciplines were submitted to Reinhold Niebuhr, who had agreed to read them and comment. His only suggestion concerned the discipline on money. “I would suggest,” Niebuhr said, “that you commit yourselves not to tithing but to proportionate giving, with tithing as an economic floor beneath which you will not go unless there are come compelling reasons.” The discipline was rewritten and stands today in each of the six new faith communities: “We covenant with Christ and one another to give proportionately beginning with a tithe of our incomes.”
From Letters to Scattered Pilgrims by Elizabeth O’Connor (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), letters to the six faith communities of the Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C.
None of us has to be an accountant to know what 10 percent of a gross income is, but each of us has to be a person on his knees before God if we are to understand our commitment to proportionate giving.
Proportionate to what? Proportionate to the accumulated wealth of one’s family? Proportionate to one’s income and the demands upon it, which vary from family to family? Proportionate to one’s sense of security and the degree of anxiety with which one lives? Proportionate to the keenness of our awareness of those who suffer? Proportionate to our sense of justice and of God’s ownership of all wealth? Proportionate to our sense of stewardship for those who follow after us? The answer, of course, is in proportion to all of these things.
Proportionate giving has kept us from mistaking our churchgoing for Christianity, and from looking at our neighbor to see what we should be doing. In our better moments we desire that each member and intern member work under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to determine what proportionate giving means in his or her individual situation. We have, of course, hoped for ourselves and for others that the proportion of giving would increase as we identified with the oppressed and learned to trust God at deeper levels for our own future.
From Letters to Scattered Pilgrims by Elizabeth O’Connor (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), letters to the six faith communities of the Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C.
In a recent sermon on money Gordon Cosby said as forcefully as ever that to give away money is to win a victory over the dark powers that oppress us. He talked about reclaiming for ourselves the energy with which we have endowed money: “Money is a hang-up for many of us. We will not be able to advance in the Christian faith until we have dealt at another level with the material. It is a matter of understanding what it means to be faithful to Jesus Christ.” He went on to say that the poor suffer because they are not able to give.
We still wrestle with fear when we consider abandoned giving. Our wills, with rare exceptions, look like the wills of those who have never been committed to the building of a faith community, or who have never had the poor in mind. This may indicate that, in the face of the threat caused by consideration of our deaths, we regress to old definitions of family and narrower spheres of identity. In any case, most of us would probably say that we are not as free as we would like to be where the material things of life are concerned.
From Letters to Scattered Pilgrims by Elizabeth O’Connor (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), letters to the six faith communities of the Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C.
Do we believe that money and possessions have a way of coming between people who want to be in community with each other? Do we really believe that every life has resources more priceless than gold, and that our hearts, minds and labor are adequate for any task? What if the world is right and there are things that only money can buy, gifts of the spirit that only money can unlock, and blocks that only money can push aside?
The questions continue to be raised, and we continue to struggle for the answers that in the end have to be individual answers, for we are each at a different place in our spiritual trek with different understandings of what the Gospel has to say to us about what we do with our money.
From Letters to Scattered Pilgrims by Elizabeth O’Connor (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), letters to the six faith communities of the Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C.
Week of October 9, 2005
21 Pentecost
The contemplative life should liberate and purify the imagination which passively absorbs all kinds of things without our realizing it; liberate and purify it from the influence of so much violence done by the bombardment of social images. The training of the imagination implies a certain freedom and this freedom implies a certain capacity to choose and to find its own appropriate nourishment. Thus in the interior life there should be moments of relaxation, freedom and “browsing.” Perhaps the best way to do this is in the midst of nature, but also in literature. Perhaps also a certain amount of art is necessary and music.
From Contemplation in a World of Action by Thomas Merton (New York: Doubleday, 1971).
In meditation we should not look for a “method” or a “system,” but cultivate an “attitude,” an “outlook”: faith, openness, attention, reverence, expectation, supplication, trust, joy. All these finally permeate our being with love in so far as our living faith tells us we are in the presence of God, that we live in Christ, that in the Spirit of God we “see” God our Father without “seeing.” We know him in “unknowing.” Faith is the bond that unites us to him in the Spirit who gives us light and love.
From Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton (New York: Doubleday, 1969).
Some people may doubtless have a spontaneous gift for meditative prayer. This is unusual today. Most people have to learn to meditate. There are ways of meditation. But we should not expect to find magical methods, systems which will make all difficulties and obstacles dissolve into thin air.
Meditation is sometimes quite difficult. If we bear with hardship in prayer and wait patiently for the time of grace, we may well discover that meditation and prayer are very joyful experiences. We should not, however, judge the value of our meditation by “how we feel.” A hard and apparently fruitless meditation may in fact be much more valuable than one that is easy, happy, enlightened, and apparently a big success. Sometimes prayer, meditation, and contemplation are “death”—a kind of descent into our own nothingness, a recognition of helplessness, frustration, infidelity, confusion, ignorance.
Any effort and sacrifice should be made in order to enter the kingdom of God. Such sacrifices are amply compensated for by the results even when the results are not clear and evident to us. But effort is necessary, enlightened, well-directed, and sustained.
From Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton (New York: Doubleday, 1969).
Sometimes God allows us to fall in order to reveal to us our sinfulness and to show us what harm comes as a result of sin. Our sins can have the effect of leading us back to God and striving all the more. Let us, therefore, place our trust in God and not in ourselves, relying heavily on his mercy and not fighting the battle alone. When you feel the beginning of temptation, do not fight back with strenuous efforts, but rather, gently begin a time of prayer and recollection. At first it will be difficult, but after a while you will be able to do it easily, and for long periods of time.
From The Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila (New York: Paulist Press, 1979).
Do not think that you must stop doing your work in order to pray. The Lord will turn all of our work time into profit as long as we continue in a spirit of prayer. There is no remedy for the temptations that we face except to start at the beginning, and the beginning is prayer. The only way to lose is to turn back.
From The Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila (New York: Paulist Press, 1979).
God appeals to us through other good people, through sermons, or through the reading of good books. Sometimes he calls through our sicknesses and our trials as he bids us to pray. However feeble such prayers may be, God values them highly. God looks into our souls and perceives our desires. If our desires are good, we cannot fail.
That is why it is very important for us to associate with others who are walking in the right way—not only those who are where we are in the journey, but also those who have gone farther. Those who have drawn close to God have the ability to bring us closer to him, for in a sense they take us with them.
From The Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila (New York: Paulist Press, 1979).
Week of October 16, 2005
22 Pentecost
The handicaps of some are more visible; for others they are hidden. Recently I went to a Canadian hospital. In the first rooms, I met people who were preparing to return to “normal” society. They looked at me and I said “Good morning” and they smiled slightly. Then I went to see the “very defective”, the “chronic cases”, who were further away. They came and took my hand and said, “My name is Robert, what is your name?” “My name is Jean, and you, what do you do?” We talked and it felt good to be with them, but I was rather sickened, because of the intolerable conditions in which they live. What can I do? I was drawn to these men who are wounded and simple. I felt this immense sadness in the depths of their hearts, and yet no barriers. Even more, by their call and their surrender, they brought down the walls in my own heart. Their sufferings, their solitude, were an invitation which made me want to stay with them, to share their lot, to be close to them, a source of liberation and peace.
Then I left them and passed again through the rooms of the “nearly normal”, who gave me a pale smile. Finally, beyond the hospital fence, I went into the “normal” world, where people don’t talk to me and don’t smile with me; into the world where there is no compassion, no community, only people who run and don’t stop for the sufferings of their brothers, for they are in a hurry, they have their business, their money to earn, and their style of life to defend.
From Be Not Afraid by Jean Vanier (New York: Paulist Press, 1975).
We must accept that the growth from egoism to love, from community for myself to myself for community, is a long and sometimes a hard road, paved with joys and sufferings. It begins simply.
It begins by accepting our differences, and by beginning to know one another. What brings this member of the community peace? What hurts him? What brings him out of or plunges him into depression? What calms him, what irritates him? All this is important when you are living with someone. You must know what will help him to be at peace and to live in the spirit of love.
It takes time to know their needs, their call, their thirst. Some people who come to visit us at L’Arche have the knack of saying the wrong thing, of wounding through their lack of sensitivity. They don’t realize that every word can either bring peace and call forth, or can wound and throw up barriers. And if we do not spend more time in listening than in talking to begin with, if we do not watch people’s faces to see what is bringing peace and what is bringing anguish, it is certain that we will hurt others.
From Be Not Afraid by Jean Vanier (New York: Paulist Press, 1975).
The love of God is a universal love which despises no man, for Jesus died for all people, all are his brothers. If we refuse to open ourselves up to a group of people because of their colour, because of their background, because of their education, because of sickness at birth, then the love of God does not abide in us.
Those who go forth to wounded ones in a spirit of welcome, whatever religious label is round their necks, will have hearts that gradually open to this love of God. As long as we are going out to people of other cultures, we must do not to do good, but to listen, to touch, to admire, to watch them grow into the beauty of their being, to see them flower in their own language, to discover the diversity of mankind.
This means that in many ways we must forget ourselves. It does not mean that we must renounce our own culture. We must put aside certain aspects of our being which make us think that our culture is the best and should be imposed on all. Gradually it will be through the meeting of peoples that the salvation of mankind will come, as the west begins to understand the culture of the east and the east the culture of the west.
From Be Not Afraid by Jean Vanier (New York: Paulist Press, 1975).
Many people today feel their bones are dried up. There is nothing that flows inside, just a void or confusion and darkness. There seems to be no hope, no way out of the political, economic and religious structures, no way to close the divisions of humanity. This form of spiritual death is very common.
How quickly the life of the Spirit can become dried up inside us. We become hard, we begin to judge and condemn. We lose our openness and fluidity, we reject new ideas, we become cynical. We want to kill anything that seems alive, because the seeds of death have been planted in us and are beginning to grow.
The Spirit can only let us discover this darkness of our being when light is close by. As the seed of the Spirit is planted, there is a very quiet moment of peace. When we begin to sense this transformation of the Spirit, this quiet, this stillness, this hope, this peace, then we begin to realise that the possessions we have valued are a weight that we need to throw off. Things being to mean less because now we have something else—peace and liberty, a stillness, a richness of heart.
From Be Not Afraid by Jean Vanier (New York: Paulist Press, 1975).
There are a lot of people who weep when it rains and then find the sun too hot when it comes out. In winter they long for summer, in summer for autumn. Small people pretend to be big, and old people dress themselves up to look young. We always want to appear other than we are, instead of discovering the beauty of youth and of age as they come.
We should learn to rejoice in the gift that is today. So many of us live either in the past or in the future. Young people think it will be wonderful when they get out of school; but it isn’t, for they enter the world of work. So they say it will be wonderful when they marry; and so it may be, for the first weeks, until the frustrations creep in. So they say it will be wonderful once the babies arrive; but then there is screaming in the night. So they look to the time when the children grow up, and how wonderful it will be to be alone. But when the children do grow up, they hang onto them. And then finally they get old and start to reminisce about how wonderful it was in the old days, when they were young. This is how we can pass through life without living.
From Be Not Afraid by Jean Vanier (New York: Paulist Press, 1975).
One of the best qualities of the men and women I live with is that they live for the present. They have sufferings in their past and they have aspirations for the future, but because they are people whose hearts are more developed than their minds, they have the capacity to live in the reality of the present.
In all things, wherever we may be, we must learn to welcome the reality and the people the moment brings us. If ever the central heating breaks down, if ever a man comes to mend a lock in your house, be vigilant: he might not be the best at his job, but he might be sent by God to hear the message. These are the people we are living with at this particular moment; these are the ones God has sent for a meeting. This is the now, and this is where we must learn to live.
When the future becomes the now we must learn to be able to modify our plans in the light of the new information we have, in the light of the present needs of the people involved. We must be prepared to change our plans and to listen to the call of the moment. Wisdom begins when we stop wanting to fight the reality of the present as if it should not exist, and start to accept it as it is.
From Be Not Afraid by Jean Vanier (New York: Paulist Press, 1975).
Week of October 23, 2005
23 Pentecost
This state of prayer within us is something we always carry about, like a hidden treasure of which we are not consciously aware—or hardly so. Somewhere our heart is going full pelt, but we do not feel it. We are deaf to our praying heart, love’s savor escapes us, we fail to see the light in which we live.
Prayer, then, is nothing other than that unconscious state of prayer which in the course of time has become completely conscious. Prayer is a heart that overflows with joy, thanksgiving, gratitude and praise. It is the abundance of a heart that is truly awake.
From Teach Us to Pray by André Louf (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1992).
The heart of man was made to receive the Word, and the Word adapts itself to the dimensions of our human heart. The one is there for the other. The Word only reaches the baptized person via the living band of brothers and sisters who have been born of this same Word before him. This may be the role of a priest; but a lay person too, can be for us the spiritual father or mother through whom the Word comes to us and by whom the new life is brought to birth in our heart. This is the normal way of attaining to an awakened heart and the practice of prayer. You do not learn this on your own. You learn it from someone else. You may learn it from the look on another’s face or catch the sound of it in his heart—in a heart that lives, that radiates life and awakens others to life.
From Teach Us to Pray by André Louf (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1992).
Is praying difficult?
A fourteenth-century Byzantine monk answers this question with the illustration of the lute-player. “The lute-player bends over his instrument and listens attentively to the tune, while his fingers manipulate the plectrum and make the strings vibrate in full-toned harmony. The lute has turned into music; and the man who strums upon it is taken out of himself, for the music is soft and entrancing.”
Anyone who prays must set about it in the same way. You need only pick up the plectrum and pluck the strings. To persevere in the Word and in your heart, watching and praying. There is no other way of learning how to pray. You must return to yourself and to your true and deepest nature, to the human-being-in-Jesus that you already are, purely and simply by grace. “Nobody can learn how to see. For seeing is something we can do by nature. So too with prayer. Authentic prayer can never be learnt from someone else. It has its own instructor within it. Prayer is God’s gift to him who prays.”
From Teach Us to Pray by André Louf (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1992).
This calling upon the Name of Jesus is actually a calling-in of Jesus Himself. In this guise the Jesus prayer has been disseminated not only in the Christian East. It turns up just as frequently in the West. Invoking the Name of Jesus very much resembles a spiritual communion. It strengthens and feeds you. It imparts to you Jesus Himself, who obtains an ever firmer footing in your heart. In the end that Name does more than express your own ardent longing for Jesus. It is the very Love of Jesus in you, an uncreated light, a consuming fire. This is the prayer that William of St. Thierry recommended to the first Carthusians: “During the prayer you must go and stand before God, face to face, and examine yourself in the light of His countenance. Then you will call on the Name of the Lord and with that Name strike upon the stone of your heart till fire leaps from it.”
From Teach Us to Pray by André Louf (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1992).
We can only hold ourselves in readiness to let ourselves be disturbed and emotionally moved by God. For a great deal has to happen that lies outside the reach of our good will and our natural generosity. Reversal means, not merely that we will be inwardly wounded, but that we must be shaken to the very foundations. It means that perhaps we will be broken, that something inside us will collapse—something like a concrete bunker on which we have worked perhaps for years with exemplary care but which at a given moment began to function solely as a defense system against our deepest self, against others, with the risk that in the end it would protect us even against God’s grace.
Repentance is never the fruit of good intentions or attentive effort. It is the first step of love, God’s love more than ours. Repentance is our yielding to God’s urgent intervention, our surrender to the first signs of love we sense coming from him. It is surrender in the strong sense of capitulation. We capitulate; we are allowed to give up before God. All our defenses melt away before the consuming fire of his Word and glance.
From Tuning In to Grace: The Quest for God by André Louf (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1992).
A certain poverty or sobriety of thought and desires will free or scoop out within us a deep inner emptiness into which the life of the Spirit within us will bubble up, like an unstoppable spring of water, from the bottom of our heart. Perhaps the idea of the spring is a good image for the silence, one which always has to do with the Spirit.
In order to pray more and better we must often do less, let go of more things, give up numerous good intentions, and be content to yield to the inner pressure of the Spirit the moment he bubbles up in us and tries to win us over and take us in tow. Ultimately all our attempts at prayer and all our methods must come to a dead end and wither away in order that the Spirit of Jesus may facilitate and validate his own prayer in our heart.
From Tuning In to Grace: The Quest for God by André Louf (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1992).
Week of October 30, 2005
24 Pentecost
Our life is meant to be poured out, to be spent. All the great lives we have ever known have been poured out for others. When our Lord said those strange words about the harlots and publicans going into the kingdom of heaven before the Pharisees, His meaning appears to be that it is better to spend badly than not to spend at all.
Here is this woman, who has spent the treasure of her womanhood badly. Now she comes to Jesus, and in the light of His purity she sees the darkness and squalor of her life. But she pours out her treasure on His head, and in that act finds peace, and not only did she get a blessing for herself but the whole house was filled with the odor of her spending. So the whole Church is enriched by every sacrificed and consecrated life.
From A Gift of Life: A Collection of Thoughts from Father Andrew, ed. Harry C. Griffith (New York: Morehouse-Barlow, 1968).
My soul, as soon as it is out of my body, is in Heaven, and does not wait for the possession of Heaven, nor for the fruition of the sight of God, till it ascends through air, and fire, and Moon, and Sun, and Planets, and Firmament, to that place which we conceive to be Heaven, but without the thousandth part of a minutes stop, as soon as it issues, is in a glorious light, which is Heaven (for all the way to Heaven is Heaven).
From ‘The Second Prebend Sermon’, preached by John Donne at St. Paul’s, January 29, 1625. Quoted in Watch and Pray: Christian Teachings on the Practice of Prayer, ed. Lorraine Kisly (New York: Bell Tower, 2002).
Come, all of you: enter into the joy of the Lord. You the first and you the last, receive alike your reward; you rich and you poor, dance together; you who are sober and you who are weak, celebrate the day; you who have kept the fast and you who have not, rejoice today.
Let no one grieve over their poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed; let no one weep over their sins, for pardon has shone from the grave; let no one fear death, for the death of our Savior has set us free. The Lord has destroyed it by enduring it, He has despoiled Hades by going down into its realm, He has angered it by allowing it a taste of His powerful presence.
Hades is indignant because it has been frustrated, it is angry because it has been mocked, it is wrathful because it has been destroyed, it is enraged because it has been reduced to nothing, it is filled with ire because it is now captive. It seized a body, and lo! It discovered God; it seized earth, and, behold! It met up with heaven; it seized the visible, and was overcome by the invisible.
From an Easter sermon of John Chrysostom, quoted in Watch and Pray: Christian Teachings on the Practice of Prayer, ed. Lorraine Kisly (New York: Bell Tower, 2002).
All this is what lay behind my question to Metropolitan Anthony, but before I could begin to speak about it in detail he was already replying: “You ask what in yourself can respond to the sacrifice of God? but this sacrifice, as you call it, is love. What is the proper response to love?”
At first, I thought Metropolitan Anthony was expecting me to answer. I had no answer.
“The proper response to love,” he continued, “is to accept it. There is nothing to do. The response to a gift is to accept it. Why would you wish to do anything?”
From Lost Christianity by Jacob Needleman (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980).
Compassion lies at the heart of our prayer for our fellow human beings. When I pray for the world, I become the world; when I pray for the endless needs of the millions, my soul expands and wants to embrace them all and bring them into the presence of God. But in the midst of that experience I realize that compassion is not mine but God’s gift to me. I cannot embrace the world, but God can. I cannot pray, but God can pray in me. When God became as we are, that is, when God allowed all of us to enter into the intimacy of the divine life, it became possible for us to share in God’s infinite compassion.
In praying for others, I lose myself and become the other, only to be found by the divine love which holds the whole of humanity in a compassionate embrace.
From Henri J. M. Nouwen’s From Genesee Diary: Report from a Trappist Monastery (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1976).
Later I discovered and am still discovering up to this very minute that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, a converted sinner, a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. This is what I mean by worldliness—taking life in one’s stride, with all its duties and problems, its successes and failures, its experiences and helplessness. It is in such a life that we throw ourselves utterly in the arms of God and participate in his sufferings in the world and watch with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith, that is metanoia, and that is what makes a Christian.
From Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quoted in Watch and Pray: Christian Teachings on the Practice of Prayer, ed. Lorraine Kisly (New York: Bell Tower, 2002).
Week of November 6, 2005
25 Pentecost
In Luke’s version of the parable of the great feast (14:15-24) the emphasis is not so much on the invitation being extended to good and bad alike, but on the helpless, those who expect nothing or can take no initiative for themselves. What does it mean to be without the right to a hearing, without access to the currency of the prevailing market? It is to be without words, to be without the ways in which those around you tame and organize the world. Your own language does not count—whether literally, in the case of subject people whose language has no legal status, or more broadly, when the whole shape of the speech of those in power reminds you constantly that your perspective is not included. You cannot speak in a way that will actually make a difference; your coinage is rejected; nothing you say will ‘come out right’, will persuade or succeed.
That is why, in Luke’s account of the trial before the High Priest, Jesus is asked by the council to tell them if he is the Messiah. “If I tell you,” he replied, “you will not believe me, and if I question you, you will not answer.” In other words: I have nothing to say to you that you will be able to hear or to which you will be able to respond. Luke’s Jesus places himself with those whose language cannot be heard.
From Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement by Rowan Williams (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).
All systems, moral and social, begin with the sense that my own understanding of my desires and needs is not the whole story. Yet it seems that all such systems end up by discounting or giving up on certain others. This is woven into so much of our thinking today, in terms of insoluble conflicts of ‘rights’. The convicted killer who has changed and grown radically over the 20 years he has spent in jail has a right, we might say, to a new start. Oh, but then the parents of a murdered child have a right—don’t they?—to know that the outrage that destroyed their lives is not forgotten or absolved. Whatever decision is taken, the effect is to create an outsider, someone who has no leverage, no moral currency, in the new situation. Also, more prosaically and immediately, what are we to say of the unfinished business in our own lives, the people we shall never be able to ‘make it up to’? Those who have never forgiven me, or whom I have never forgiven—they are the outsiders in my biography, the ones whose absence and nonreconciliation spoil the satisfying outline of my life.
From Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement by Rowan Williams (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).
We are faced with someone who cannot speak our language. Do we retreat, perhaps even with impatience and anger at the fact that this someone will not co-operate? Or do we allow ourselves to be taught something about our own incompleteness? To see that my usual mode of coping cannot cope with this experience, this person, is to allow the stranger to go on being the stranger, rather than becoming a failed member of my world or an incompetent speaker of my language. Then to be taught by that stranger is to allow that my world can be enlarged in ways beyond my plan and control—precisely through the recognition that the stranger really is a stranger. To conscript the other into my own frame of reference is to commit one sort of mistake; to refuse to listen or learn because they are ‘strange’ is another.
Recognizing the other as other without the immediate impulse to make them the same involves recognizing the incompleteness of the world I think I can manage and moving into the world which I may not be able to manage so well, but which has more depth of reality. And that must be to move closer to God.
From Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement by Rowan Williams (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).
[Stanley] Hauerwas rightly observes that our culture has become more and more impatient with childhood as a state in itself. We hustle children into pseudo-adult roles and choices as soon as we decently can, or rather sooner than we decently can—especially through the systematic assault on the child as possible consumer which is represented by modern advertising of toys and leisure goods. Although this looks like provision for children’s needs or wants as children, the truth is that it creates habits and expectations that assimilate the child into the most obsessional adult purchaser.
Nonetheless, it will not do for Christians to take too quickly to the moral high ground where children are concerned. Not only is the child in church still an embarrassment and a nuisance for many congregations, but there is also a deeper issue, explored with all his usual depth by the late Donald Nicholl in an essay about the places where theology has been and is carried out. His basic question is, ‘Who is not expected to be around in the places where theology is thought and written?’ Historically, one answer to that has been ‘women’, and Christians are still catching up with the effects of that exclusion. Less obviously and equally importantly, however, we would have to say ‘children’ as well. Given that Jesus had strong comments to make about attending to children and recommended that his followers should imitate children, there is something very odd about a Christian discourse that ignores the child. ‘How can you live in accordance with the teaching about being children if you are for ever hiding yourself away from children?’ asks Nicholl, and he argues that this reinforces the need for theology to be done in the kind of human community ‘where men and women are together, and . . . where children are not hidden away.’
From Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement by Rowan Williams (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).
Once we have started, of course, the list of the excluded swells quite rapidly. Children and the disabled, yes; and what about the nonhuman world? Yet even when we start taking seriously the moral reality of this non-human world, we need to remain aware that it can become another source of moral short-sightedness. It is strange, for example, to find passionate advocates of the rights of animals, among the ranks of those who do not seem to think that abortion is an issue where ‘rights’ conflict. If we are trying to listen to those who are defined out of our normal systems, it must surely be imperative to keep the unborn human in our view.
Confusedly, this principle cuts across the conventional left-right divides in our ethical squabbles. Abortion is often seen as a ‘right wing’ concern, and—for example—homosexual rights as a ‘left wing’ one. But there are parallels, in that those who define themselves as homosexual represent yet again an ‘otherness’ that will not go away and cannot be readily accommodated into the world of the majority. If that is so, then God must be listened to here as well. Elizabeth Templeton has put it starkly, contrasting what she calls the ethics of earth and the ‘ethics or non-ethics’ of heaven: inevitably, we seek order, because order limits pain and fear for most of us, but we must beware of identifying this with the law of God without remainder. ‘We dare not identify God with these norms. For if there is one person on earth who is, by such ethics, devalued, dehumanized, demonized or disqualified from the conversation towards truth, then I believe we lie, and possibly blaspheme.’
From Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement by Rowan Williams (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).
We are most in danger when we deny our own poverty or neediness; the presence of the powerless is painful in large part because they reconnect us with that unwelcome need. They do not live in the world we like to think we live in, the world we can organize, so they tell us that our world is smaller than we thought. At its most extreme, this perception can lead to violence: the poor must be eliminated or at the very least pushed right out of sight, because they make us uncomfortable. For Christians it is therefore extraordinarily important, radically important, to live in a context where we are not protected from the visibility of the powerless.
One of the commonest experiences for anyone bringing up a child is the sense of helplessness and radical failure of control when that child will not go to sleep. For many parents—as I can testify with feeling—this is an experience that helps them understand a little of why truly desperate parents eventually resort to violence against their children. There is absolutely nothing that will reassure you that you are in control, because you are not; perhaps all you can do to convince yourself that you can change the situation is to act violently. This is a terrible situation for anyone and, thank God, for most of us there are all kinds of inhibitions and self-monitorings that come into play. Nevertheless, when we look at the world at large, how very clear it is that there are also countless subtle disguises for this resort to violence, and all because we cannot otherwise persuade ourselves that we are not powerless. When Jesus tells his followers to become like children, one of the things he may be exhorting them (and us) to do is to name and confront our own inner regions of helplessness and speechlessness.
From Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement by Rowan Williams (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).
Week of November 13, 2005
26 Pentecost
The image of God is found essentially and personally in all mankind. Each possesses it whole, entire and undivided, and all together not more than one alone. In this way we are all one, intimately united in our eternal image, which is the image of God and the source in us of all our life.
From The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage by Jan van Ruysbroek, ed. Evelyn Underhill (London: John M. Watkins, 1951).
I was crossing a little stream near Inchy Wood and actually in the middle of a stride from bank to bank, when an emotion never experienced before swept down upon me. I said, “That is what the devout Christian feels, that is how he surrenders his will to the will of God.” I felt an extreme surprise, for my whole imagination was preoccupied with the pagan mythology of ancient Ireland. I was marking in red ink, upon a large map, every sacred mountain. The next morning I awoke near dawn, to hear a voice saying, “The love of God is infinite for every human soul because every human soul is unique, no other can satisfy the same need in God.”
From Autobiographies by W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1955).
There is a root or depth in you, where all these faculties come forth as lines from a center, or as branches form the body of a tree. This depth is called the center, the fund, or bottom, of the soul. This depth is the unity, the eternity, I almost said the infinity of your soul, for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it, or give it any rest, but the infinity of God.
Awake, then, you that sleep, and Christ, who from all eternity has been espoused to your soul, shall give you Light. Begin to search and dig in your own field for this Pearl of eternity that lies hidden in it; it cannot cost you too much, for it is all, and when you have found it you will know that all which you have sold or given away for it is as a mere nothing, as a bubble upon the water.
From The Spirit of Prayer by William Law, quoted in Watch and Pray: Christian Teachings on the Practice of Prayer, ed. Lorraine Kisly (New York: Bell Tower, 2002).
You perceive, by the light of God, in the depth of your conscience, what grace demands of you, but you resist Him. Hence your distress. You begin to say within, it is impossible for me to undertake to do what is required of me; this is a temptation to despair. Despair as much as you please of self, but never of God; He is all good and all powerful, and will grant you according to your faith.
Open, then, your heart. It is now so shut up, that you not only have not the power to do what is required of you, but you do not even desire to have it; you have no wish that your heart should be enlarged, and you fear that it will be. How can grace find room in so straitened a heart? All that I ask of you is, that you will rest in a teachable spirit of faith. Simply acquiesce in everything with lowliness of mind, and receive peace through recollection, and everything will be gradually accomplished for you; those things which, in your hour of temptation, seemed the greatest difficulties, will be insensibly smoothed away.
From Extracts from the Writings of Francis Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, ed. John Kendall (Philadelphia: Kimber, Conrad, and Co., 1804).
To repent is to wake up. Repentance, change of mind, leads to watchfulness. The Greek term used here, nepsis, means literally sobriety and wakefulness—the opposite to a state of drugged or alcoholic stupor; and so in the context of the spiritual life it signifies attentiveness, vigilance, recollection. Watchfulness means, among other things, to be present where we are—at this specific point in space, at this particular moment in time. All too often we are scattered and dispersed; we are living, not with alertness in the present, but with nostalgia in the past, or with misgiving and wishful thinking in the future. While we are indeed required responsibly to plan for the future—we are to think about the future only so far as it depends upon the present moment. Anxiety over remote possibilities which lie altogether beyond our immediate control is sheer waste of our spiritual energies.
The “neptic” man, then, is gathered into the here and the now. He is the one who seizes the kairos, the decisive moment of opportunity. He says to himself, in the words of Paul Evdokimov: “The hour through which you are at present passing, the man whom you meet here and now, the task on which you are engaged at this very moment—these are always the most important in your whole life.”
From The Orthodox Way by Kallistos Ware (London: Mowbrays, 1979).
Our continual mistake is that we do not concentrate upon the present day, the actual hour, of our life; we live in the past or in the future; we are continually expecting the coming of some special hour when our life shall unfold itself in its full significance. And we do not observe that life is flowing like water through our fingers, sifting like precious grain from a loosely fastened bag.
From Alexander Yelchaninov, Russian priest and spiritual guide, quoted in Watch and Pray: Christian Teachings on the Practice of Prayer, ed. Lorraine Kisly (New York: Bell Tower, 2002).
Week of November 20, 2005
Last Sunday after Pentecost
It is not your prayer which moves God to save you. On the contrary, your prayer is a result of the fact that Jesus has knocked at your heart’s door and told you that He desires to gain access to your needs. You think that everything is closed to you because you cannot pray. My friend, your helplessness is the very essence of prayer.
Be not anxious because of your helplessness. Above all, do not let it prevent you from praying. Helplessness is the real secret and the impelling power of prayer. You should therefore rather try to thank God for the feeling of helplessness which He has given you. It is one of the greatest gifts which God can impart to us. For it is only when we are helpless that we open our hearts to Jesus and let Him help us in our distress, according to His grace and mercy.
From Prayer by Ole Hallesby (a Norwegian seminary professor and writer imprisoned for his resistance to the Nazi regime), trans. Clarence J. Carlsen (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994).
My dear Wormwood,
I am very pleased by what you tell me about this man’s relations with his mother. But you must press your advantage. The Enemy will be working from the center outwards, gradually bringing more and more of the patient’s conduct under the new standard, and may reach his behavior to the old lady at any moment. You want to get in first. The following methods are useful.
1. Keep his mind on the inner life. He thinks his conversion is something inside him and his attention is therefore chiefly turned at present to the states of his own mind—or rather to that very expurgated version of them which is all you should allow him to see. Encourage this. Keep his mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in which he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office....
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
From The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis (New York: Macmillan, 1961).
Simon the Pharisee is shocked by the attitude of Jesus to the whore. He receives the answer that the sinners have greater love than the righteous ones because more is forgiven them. It is not the love of the woman that brings her forgiveness, but it is the forgiveness she has received that creates her love.
Nothing greater can happen to a human being than that he is forgiven. For forgiveness means reconciliation in spite of estrangement; it means reunion in spite of hostility; it means acceptance of those who are unacceptable; and it means reception of those who are rejected.
From a sermon preached by Paul Tillich, quoted in Watch and Pray: Christian Teachings on the Practice of Prayer, ed. Lorraine Kisly (New York: Bell Tower, 2002).
My mother would be asking us to sing our morning song to God down in the back-house, as Mary’s lark was singing it up in the clouds, and as Christ’s mavis was singing it yonder in the tree, giving glory to the God of the creatures for the repose of the night, for the light of the day, and for the joy of life. She would tell us that every creature on the earth below and in the ocean beneath and in the air above was giving glory to the great God of the creatures and the worlds, of the virtues and the blessings, and would we be dumb!
From Catherine Maclennan, an early twentieth-century Scottish crofter, quoted in Watch and Pray: Christian Teachings on the Practice of Prayer, ed. Lorraine Kisly (New York: Bell Tower, 2002).
Reading is the food of prayer. Or perhaps one can say that reading is fuel for the fire. Prayer is the flame, but you won’t have a fire if you don’t have fuel. If the monk is not feeding himself with the word of God, if he is not putting the logs of the word of God into the hearth of his heart, there won’t be prayer. The fire will just die out in one way or another.
From an interview with Hugh Gilbert O.S.B., Benedictine abbot of Pluscarden Abbey, Scotland, quoted in Watch and Pray: Christian Teachings on the Practice of Prayer, ed. Lorraine Kisly (New York: Bell Tower, 2002).
If we believe in a real kingdom of God—an organic fellowship of interrelated lives—prayer should be as effective a force in this interrelated social world of ours as gravitation is in the world of matter. Personal spirits experience spiritual gravitation, soul reaches after soul, hearts draw towards one another. We are no longer in the net of blind fate, in the realm of impersonal force—we are in a love system where the aspiration of one member heightens the entire group, and the need of one—even the least—draws upon the resources of the whole—even the Infinite. We are in actual Divine-human fellowship.
From the American Quaker Rufus Jones, in Rufus Jones Speaks to Our Time: An Anthology, ed. Harry Emerson Fosdick (New York: Macmillan, 1952).
The day after Thanksgiving the New York Times told of a local cab driver who five years ago “prayed to God for guidance on how to help the forgotten people of the streets who exist in life’s shadows.” As he recalls it, God replied, “Make eight pounds of spaghetti, throw it in a pot, give it out on 103rd Street and Broadway with no conditions, and people will come.” He did, they came, and now he goes from door to door giving people food to eat.
He prayed to a God who was there; he listened; he gave the simple gift God asked of him; he gave “with no conditions”; and people responded. Here is your Advent: Make the Christ who has come a reality, a living light, in your life and in some other life. Give of yourself to one dark soul. . . with no conditions.
From Sir, We Would Like to See Jesus by Walter J. Burghardt (Paulist Press, 1982).
Pre-Christian peoples who lived far north and who suffered the archetypal loss of life and light with the disappearance of the sun had a way of wooing back life and hope. As the days grew shorter and colder and the sun threatened to abandon the earth, these ancient people suffered the sort of guilt and separation anxiety which we also know. Their solution was to bring all ordinary action and daily routine to a halt. They gave in to the nature of winter, came away from their fields and put away their tools. They removed the wheels from their carts and wagons, festooned them with greens and lights and brought them indoors to hang in their halls. They brought the wheels indoors as a sign of a different time, a time to stop and turn inward. They engaged the feelings of cold and fear and loss.
Slowly, slowly they wooed the sun-god back. And light followed darkness. Morning came earlier. The festivals announced the return of hope after primal darkness. This kind of success—hauling the very sun back: the recovery of hope—can only be accomplished when we have had the courage to stop and wait and engage fully in the winter of our dark longing.
From To Dance with God by Gertrud Mueller Nelson (Paulist Press, 1986).
Perhaps the symbolic energy of those [ancient wagon] wheels made sacred has escaped us and we wish to relegate our Advent wreaths to the realm of quaint custom or pretty decoration. Imagine what would happen if we were to understand that ancient prescription for this season literally and remove—just one—say just the right front tire from our automobiles and use this for our Advent wreath. Indeed, things would stop. Our daily routines would come to a halt and we would have the leisure to incubate. We could attend to our precarious pregnancy and look after ourselves. Having to stay put, we would lose the opportunity to escape or deny our feelings or becomings because our cars could not bring us away to the circus in town.
From To Dance with God by Gertrud Mueller Nelson (Paulist Press, 1986).
Let not our souls be busy inns
that have no room for thee and thine,
but quiet homes of prayer and praise,
where thou mayest find
fit company,
where the needful cares of life
are wisely ordered and put away,
and wide, sweet spaces kept for thee,
where holy thoughts pass up and down,
and fervent longings watch
and wait thy coming.
A traditional Advent prayer. Author unknown.
The house lights go off and the footlights come on. Even the chattiest stop chattering as they wait in darkness for the curtain to rise. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised the baton.
You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second you catch a whiff in the air of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you’ve never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart.
The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.
The Salvation Army Santa Claus clangs his bell. The sidewalks are so crowded you can hardly move. Everyone is as bundled up against any sense of what all the fuss is really about as they are bundled up against the windchill factor. But if you concentrate just for an instant, far off in the deeps of yourself somewhere you can feel the beating of your heart. For all its madness and lostness, not to mention your own, you can hear the world itself holding its breath.
“Advent,” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith by Frederick Buechner (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004).
Our time is a time of waiting; waiting is its special destiny. And every time is a time of waiting, waiting for the breaking in of eternity. All time runs forward. All time, both history and in personal life, is expectation. Time itself is waiting, waiting not for another time, but for that which is eternal.
From The Shaking of the Foundations by Paul Tillich (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948).
Week of December 4, 2005
Advent 2
What keeps you from giving now? Isn’t the poor person there? Aren’t your own warehouses full? Isn’t the reward promised? The command is clear: the hungry person is dying now, the naked person is freezing now, the person in debt is beaten now—and you want to wait until tomorrow? “I’m not doing any harm,” you say. “I just want to keep what I own, that’s all.” You own! You are like someone who sits down in a theater and keeps everyone else away, saying that what is there for everyone’s use is your own. If everyone took only what they needed and gave the rest to those in need, there would be no such thing as rich and poor. After all, didn’t you come into life naked, and won’t you return naked to the earth?
The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry person; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the person who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the person with no shoes; the money which you put in the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help.
From a sermon by Basil the Great, quoted in An Advent Sourcebook, edited by Thomas J. O’Gorman (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1988).
Delta Air Lines’ Christmas card one year revealed Santa Claus and his reindeer in a line of 747s waiting for takeoff. Every traveler who had experienced long delays in similar circumstances was amused. The anachronism serves to remind us of many wonderful and beautiful things that survive the high-tech world in which we live. The quaint myth of Santa Claus, derived from an historical figure, Saint Nicholas, fits right into our technological landscape.
Religious seasons of the year can be times of increased anxiety and depression. These are the seasons when basic human questions are pushed into consciousness. They are the times when deferred dreams and disappointments have to be dealt with. All our technology and knowledge seems not to be so helpful. Right there, in the midst of the long line of 747s, sits Santa and the reindeer.
The words associated with Christmas are words such as joy, peace, love, friendship, charity, glory, mercy, truth, birth. These are the words that describe our humanity. The Christmas stories embody these words. The contours of the stories form the words into meaningful language. We are at our best or our worst at times like these. At Christmas we come close to believing that the world is really put together the way love intends.
From God is With Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas by F. Thomas Trotter (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 1997).
I’ve learned to pray on the streets and buses and subways of the city of Los Angeles, in the in-between spaces of a crowded life as a parish priest, mother, spouse, activist. I pray with my eyes open, my feet moving on cracked pavement, with the sounds and smells of the city rising up to meet me.
I’ve always known this about myself: that my most alive moments in faith emerge in little spaces in the midst of chaos and action. But in recent years I betrayed this knowledge, spent far too much time trying to crowd my prayer life into proper silence and reverence at designated times. The trouble was that there was no space in my life; the in-between had ceased to exist. Every minute had its purpose, neatly scheduled in a great juggle of child care, pastoral care, physical care of home, church, and body.
So I left my car in the driveway and hit the streets. I vowed to begin taking the time to travel from home to work on foot, to take public transportation to local meetings and appointments. I would learn the streets and the buses of my neighborhood. I began the project of reclaiming the in-between spaces. It’s an imperfect discipline. It’s hot and sweaty, grimy and slow. But I find that God meets me in the in-between spaces, multiplying my simple efforts, and it is more than worth it.
From “Prayer on the Streets” by Anna B. Olson, in In Times Like These: How We Pray, edited by Malcolm Boyd and J. Jon Bruno. Copyright © 2005. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org
One of the sadnesses of my life is that I have gone through so many days, months, and years only half awake. I haven’t shown up for my own life. Now that I am in my midsixties I find that I show up more, and I’ve come to realize that prayer for me is a matter of showing up, being truly present.
One of the things besides getting older that helps me wake up and be present is my having prostate cancer. There’s nothing like learning you have cancer to get your attention! I became part of a scientific study to see if lifestyle change could stabilize and even reverse prostate cancer. As a result I added daily meditation and yoga to the peculiar Anglican mix of my prayer life. My prayers have been given new focus, by affirming that consciousness/spirit is present everywhere, right down to the molecular level. It is a radical affirmation of the Incarnation. Spirit enlivens matter.
So my prayer life is really a matter of showing up at my own life, which means learning to be grateful for every moment and to be present to the One who is always and everywhere present to me, to the world. That’s why everything that happens to me can be turned into prayer—the prayer of gratitude. Prayer for me is practicing the art of being human. It is not so much a matter of pious practices or devotional methods. Prayer is concerned with issues of humanization and dehumanization. Prayer is about being a human being on a full-time basis.
From “The Art of Being Human on a Full-Time Basis” by Alan Jones, in In Times Like These: How We Pray, edited by Malcolm Boyd and J. Jon Bruno. Copyright © 2005. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
From The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952, 1980).
It is commonplace in Iraq to see men carrying their prayer beads with them wherever they go. It is the rule rather than the exception to see Muslim men praying in public not only during prayer time but also throughout the day while fingering their beads. The longer I stayed in Iraq, the more profound an impression men praying made upon me. I was surrounded with a faithful community of Muslim men who were praying continually. It dawned on me that if I were to live as a nonanxious presence in the world, I would have to center my life in prayer. So, I got into the habit of carrying my prayer beads with me wherever I went. I would pray walking down the street. I would pray while traveling in a convoy.
Many years ago, prayer was described to me as a lever able to lift what would otherwise be too heavy for me. My first impression of this metaphor was that prayer could be used as a leverage to move God. Since then, I have, indeed, discovered that prayer is a lever. But it isn’t God who is moved by the lever that is prayer. I am the one who is moved! When my burdens are too heavy or my problems seem overwhelming, prayer is able to lift me. Prayer restores my peace and sanity and serenity. Prayer restores me to calm in the midst of chaos. Prayer permits me to live out my rule of life. And it is as I live out my rule of life that I am at one with myself and with others and reacquainted with God.
From “Prayer Beads in Iraq” by Frank E. Wismer III, a military chaplain, in In Times Like These: How We Pray, edited by Malcolm Boyd and J. Jon Bruno. Copyright © 2005. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org
Week of December 11, 2005
Advent 3
A Pacific cruise ship was passing a small group of desert islands. One passenger pointed excitedly to a ragged, bearded man who was running up and down, waving wildly. “Who on earth is that?” the passenger asked the captain.
“Dunno,” the captain replied. “But he enjoys our visits. He waves and sometimes screams like that every time we pass this way.”
An amusing joke, but a serious parable of our times also. It is difficult for people in stress or need to get attention. Most of us have a reluctance to get involved with such persons. Like the sea captain in the story, many of us lack the imagination to respond to need when it presents itself. An organized and well-ordered life is no small achievement, and we are reluctant to have it interrupted.
The Christmas story is above all a story of an interrupted life. The details of the Christmas story are now so familiar that it takes an act of imagination to put oneself in the story. We are like the sea captain who has grown so used to seeing the desperation of the man on the desert island that he thinks he is witnessing greetings. What the captain lacks is that important human gift, the gift of imagination.
From God is With Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas by F. Thomas Trotter (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 1997).
Putting ourselves in another person’s situation by imagination is the first step in being connected to the world. Imagining what it is like to suffer loss or pain or injustice is to begin to correct the causes of human suffering in the world.
The ethical imagination has been central to all the great religions. The moral act of putting oneself in the place of another to understand and to feel that person’s need is universal. The teachings of Jesus in the New Testament are especially direct. Jesus called on people to put themselves at risk with and for others.
Lately, American politics have had a lot of huffing and puffing going on about moral behavior. A little moral imagination might help lift the whole tone of the political campaigns. Why not put oneself in the place of those left out of the American dream—poor children, unwed mothers, immigrants, prisoners—and by the use of imagination wonder what sort of community we could build.
Christian theology suggests that God’s act of imagination in the Incarnation needs to be answered by risking ourselves in imagining the being of others in need of hope. Think about this as you walk the streets of your town this Christmas season.
From God is With Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas by F. Thomas Trotter (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 1997).
Years ago when I was a law enforcement officer, I killed a man in the line of duty. I was unable to find solitude or comfort afterward. Even though society said I had done a needed thing and I received an award for good conduct and bravery, the very center of my being was disquieted. Anger, frustration, and confusion became watchwords of my life. I gradually found solace in my worship and faith tradition. I learned how to meditate in the presence of the holy. The way of prayer led me toward a life’s journey toward wholeness. A major part of this was relinquishing a search for perfection. Instead, I learned that I required openness, surrender, and centeredness.
Paul Tillich identified the ultimate concern of our life as being the focus of our prayer. Every day I look for that day’s ultimate concern. It becomes the focus of my meditation for the day. This might be the sickness or death of someone. Or a serious social matter. Or a pressing need for reconciliation. I try to focus on this, allowing it room in my mind. I come to a point of clarity about what I need to do.
I realize that my earlier search for perfection led me to block the presence of Jesus. Now I’ve learned that Jesus speaks to me at the center of my being when I am willing to listen in the presence of the holy.
From “Presence of the Holy” by J. Jon Bruno, bishop of Los Angeles, in In Times Like These: How We Pray, edited by Malcolm Boyd and J. Jon Bruno. Copyright © 2005. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org
Every human act, every Christian act, is an act of hope. But you must live this moment—really live it, not just endure it—because this very moment, for all its imperfection and frustration, because of its imperfection and frustration, is pregnant with all sorts of possibilities, is pregnant with the future, is pregnant with love, is pregnant with Christ.
From Sir, We Would Like to See Jesus by Walter J. Burghardt (Paulist Press, 1982).
The beginning [of my mother’s years in the nursing home] was not auspicious. Beatrice reacted against this new experience in her life with its unfamiliarity, harshness, and absence of much personal freedom. Because of her fear and stress, it was necessary to restrain her body both in bed and a wheelchair in order to keep her from falling down. Clearly, she didn’t understand what was happening to her.
Then she moved resolutely toward an attitude of acceptance. Always her faith had been a bulwark. Now it became the central great force in her life. I was deeply affected by this presence, this example. I saw depths of courage in it, levels of patience and an enduring hope that transcended present circumstances. Beatrice remained grace-filled, interiorly calm and peaceful, clearly at peace with the world. She chose to smile instead of frown, seemingly enjoy her endlessly reflective moments instead of rail against them in a frustrated or even bitter way.
I had to enter into the experience of the nursing home, too. It became a central locus of my spiritual life. I couldn’t enter or depart with alacrity or noninvolvement. I had to acknowledge deep roots of my own in that place. I got to know people working there, other patients (and their families and friends), the smell and feel of the place, moods, sadnesses, and tiny points of joy. So my prayer life changed. I had to give up any sense of control, and surrender to the realities of the situation. I couldn’t dictate anything; I could only see, feel—and pray.
From “Mother Broke Her Hip” by Malcolm Boyd, in In Times Like These: How We Pray, edited by Malcolm Boyd and J. Jon Bruno. Copyright © 2005. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org
Since the coming of Christ goes on forever—he is always he who is to come in the world and in the church—there is always an Advent going on.
From The Advent of Salvation by Jean Danielou (Sheed and Ward, 1962).
Week of December 18, 2005
Advent 4
By virtue of the creation and, still more, of the incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.
From The Divine Milieu by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, translated by Bernard Wall (Harper and Row, 1960).
No small part of Mary’s emotional weight for many women is the way in which the church has so often used her as an ideal of passive, submissive femininity. But others claim her as a model of strength. I treasure Mary as a biblical interpreter, one who heard and believed what God told her, and who pondered God’s promise in her heart, even when it pierced her soul like a sword. This is hardly passivity, but the kind of faith that sustains Christian discipleship. Mary’s life is as powerful an evocation of what it can mean to be God’s chosen as the life of Moses, or St. Paul.
Depictions of Mary as a wealthy Renaissance woman far outnumber those that make her look like a woman capable of walking the hill country of Judea and giving birth in a barn. I wonder if, as Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, seek to reclaim the Mary of scripture, we may well require more depictions of her as a robust, and even muscular, woman, in both youth and old age.
From “Virgin Mary, Mother of God,” in Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith by Kathleen Norris (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998).
No one can celebrate a genuine Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who, because they have everything, look down on others, those who have no need even of God—for them there will be no Christmas. Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf, will have that someone. That someone is God, Emmanuel, God-with-us. Without poverty of spirit there can be no abundance of God.
From a Christmas Eve sermon by Oscar Romero, quoted in The Violence of Love: The Pastoral Wisdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero (Harper and Row, 1988).
The young clergyman and his wife do all the things you do on Christmas Eve. They tuck in the children. They lug the presents down out of hiding and pile them under the tree. Just as they’re about to fall exhausted into bed, the husband remembers his neighbor’s sheep. The man asked him to feed them for him while he was away, and in the press of other matters that night he forgot all about them. So down the hill he goes through knee-deep snow. He gets two bales of hay from the barn and carries them to the shed. The sheep huddle in a corner watching as he snaps the baling twine, shakes the squares of hay apart, and starts scattering it. He is reaching to turn off the bulb and leave when suddenly he realizes where he is. The winter darkness. The glimmer of light. The smell of the hay and the sound of the animals eating. Where he is, of course, is the manger.
He only just saw it. He whose business it is above everything else to have an eye for such things is all but blind in that eye. He who on his best days believes that everything that is most precious anywhere comes from that manger might easily have gone home to bed never knowing that he had himself just been in the manger. The world is the manger.
From “Christmas,” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith by Frederick Buechner (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004).
It is both terrible and comforting to dwell in the inconceivable nearness of God, and so to be loved by God that the first and last gift is infinity and inconceivability itself. But we have no choice. God is with us.
From Meditations on Hope and Love by Karl Rahner (New York: Seabury Press, 1977).
For good or ill, every Christmas Eve functions like a kind of time machine for us, taking us back to every other Christmas Eve we have spent on this earth. For some, it is a reminder of the way life used to be, back when we were on the front row of the holiday show and not the stage managers of it. Christmas is the smell of pine boughs and oranges stuck with cloves, the taste of roast turkey and peppermint. It is mom and dad sittin
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