Knowing me, knowing you.

To judge from media articles, interest in meditation appears to be exploding. This week the Guardian has a series of podcasts about it. Earlier this month New Scientist published an article on research into its measurable benefits. If all this translates into individuals’ established regular practice of meditation we should have a totally transformed planet in a few years time. The snag is that, in my experience, the interest is largely confined to white, middle class people. That’s not a bad place to start, of course, but let’s not get too excited just yet.

Meanwhile the meditation group that I run at St. John's Waterloo in London has just started a new series of meetings. Again, to judge from media interest, you might suppose that only Buddhists know how to practice meditation. Somehow the 2,000 year Christian tradition of it has got lost. Strip away the mythology in which both the Buddhist and the Christian approach is encoded and you have basically the same techniques and practices. Perhaps Christian mythology is too close to many of us western Europeans and we can’t see the wood for the trees.

At this week’s meeting I used a phrase from a Psalm as a sort of mantra (known as a prayer word in the Christian tradition): “Be still and know that I am God.” In Hebrew scriptures the word ‘know’ has some unexpected uses. For example, when Adam ‘knows’ Eve it means he had sexual intercourse with her. The Psalm is not advocating sex with God (Bernini's statue of Teresa's ecstacy notwithstanding): just that there are different ways of knowing.

The Jewish philosopher/poet, Martin Buber, was exploring the rich implications of the Biblical word ‘know’ when he wrote (In I And Thou) that there are two ways of expressing it. One he called I-It. Without this sense of knowing we cannot live. We must, observe, analyse, distinguish one thing from another, categorise, list, calculate and so on. The second way of knowing Buber called I-Thou. It is possible to have sex in the I-It sense but it is tawdry and manipulative and any sensible man or woman will not have much to do with that kind of relationship. In an I-Thou relationship each gives themselves to the other in unconditional vulnerability, without calculation. We can enter into that kind of relationship in any situation, not just sexual ones and not just with other human beings but with any aspect of our life on this planet. Buber sums it all up (in the non-inclusive language of the 1920s): “Without I-It a man cannot live; without I-Thou he is not a man.”

Then yesterday a friend showed me her i-Phone. With suitable ‘apps’ she can find almost any piece of information she likes – instantly. Her capacity for I-It is vastly increased. The internet is a wondrous thing. Here you are using it to read this and perhaps to click on the links provided in this blog. Our capacity for I-It increases exponentially every year. We know a hell of a lot.

Thank goodness more and more people are also discovering that other way of knowing through meditation.

Crucifixion

The new term begins at Morley College and I resume rehearsing Stainer’s The Crucifixion with our choir. I am profoundly disturbed by it.

“O come unto me, this awful price, Redemption’s tremendous sacrifice, is paid for you...”

“Yet in the midst of the torture and shame, Jesus the crucified, breathes my name.”

Both of these quotations are from hymns which Stainer stipulates should be sung by the choir and (significantly) the ‘congregation’.

Most classical composers of Christian religious music have managed to produce something which manages to transcend the specifics of Christianity. Byrd, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven have all written ‘Masses’ which a Japanese, and even a Muslim, choir could sing without too much offense. But Stainer’s is a piece of nineteenth century evangelicalism that proclaims a substitutionary version of the atonement, glorying in a Scorcese-like focus on the physical details of the process aimed at producing guilt and repentance in the listener. I will continue with the rehearsals because of the friendships I have developed with choir members but I cannot participate in a public performance.

Christmas Eve

What a story! What superb story telling! No wonder it has lasted nearly 2000 years and still haunts and inspires the imagination of millions. I am thinking of course of the opening chapters of St. Matthews and St. Luke’s gospels: the story of the nativity of Jesus of Nazareth. How does a story like that come to be written? I think many of us have clues to the answer in our own experience. Something profound happens to us, some flash of inspiration, triggered by a chance meeting, a conversation, or a book, or just out of the blue as we see a familiar sight with fresh eyes. Suddenly something clicks into place for us. “So that’s what he meant!” we think, “now I see, now I understand what she meant!” It happened to me five years ago when, in early December, I read Eckhart Tolle’s ‘The Power of Now’ and it was as if a string had been tugged to which were attached memories of books I had read, poems I remembered, unresolved problems I had laid aside as too difficult to solve, all came to the surface so that I thought, “So that’s what it was all about! Why didn’t I see it before?”
Now imagine the first followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Their minds are stocked with memories of the only literature anyone knew in the Israel of those days: the books of what we now call the Old Testament; nothing else except the scriptures heard every Sabbath. Suddenly, in the light of the encounter with Jesus, life is transformed. “Aha! That’s what it’s all about! All those prophecies and other writings that I have heard and pondered all these years. Now I understand!” Later, perhaps 30 or 40 years later, two people sit down to write gospels and out of that original ‘aha!” experience comes the exquisite narrative that we now know as the Christmas story. Of course we would not, could not, write such a story today. We no longer believe in stars that hover over one place, or magi, or the possibility of virgin birth; nor are our minds saturated with the imagery of one piece of literature to provide us with a rich source of inspiration. What is possible for us a fresh ‘aha!” encounter which opens up a ‘now I understand’ insight.
The writer and spiritual guide Simon Parke says, "It is sad that we have forgotten the true meaninglessness of Christmas. Meaning is about control; Christmas about indefinable delight.' I prefer the secret sort; the secret Christmas which comes to find me quietly and in a manner quite unexpected. I think it might and I wish this experience for you."

When I was a student at Lincoln Theological College in 1959, Trevor Huddleston, then a parish priest in Soweto, came to speak to us. He presented the Afrikaaner point of view so sympathetically that when he reverted back to a criticism of apartheid it was like coming out of a dream. Today I have before me the Times report of Anglican Bishop Wallace Benn's address to Reform in which he compared supporters of the ordination of women Bishops to Nazis (or at least to our situation in 1939 when we were threatened with invasion by the Nazis). Has he not known? Has he not heard? There is nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God. The transformation of human consciousness that Richard Rohr (and many others) is pointing to will overcome the division which Reform wants to perpetuate. Perhaps the South African miracle of Truth and Reconciliation will heal these divisions too.

Healing versus wholeness

Here's what I said at this week's 'Beyond Words' session.

Anything I say should perhaps come with a health warning: “this may damage your spiritual wellbeing!” Why? Because I am not Jesus of Nazareth. I am a fellow traveller with you and we are all pioneers on this path. I bring some reading/specialist knowledge and some practice/experience which you may not have but I also bring my own past with its failings and its pain and its false assumptions. I tell you this because last week’s session (on the parable of the prodigal son) reminded me that there’s a good deal of the elder son in me and trying too hard is one of my default positions.

I quoted Martin Buber: ‘will and grace are two sides of the same coin’ and that is crucial to the whole human (not to say religious) enterprise. What has stuck with me from last week's parable are the father's words to his sulking elder son: “all that I have is yours”. How to realise that profound truth in ways which set me free to work on ‘home farm’. What happens in our regular practice of meditation (backed up by our sharing with others and our study – perhaps as members of a group) is a process of healing and re-ordering of our deepest selves. I now know where my tendency to try too hard comes from – childhood potty training!! My mother’s frequent injunction was ‘try hard’ and my childish word for any product of this effort was ‘try hards’!!

Now meditation is not therapy. It almost certainly has therapeutic effects but if we aim for them, if we make them our reason for meditating, we get into trouble. Our only aim is simply to ‘be there in the Presence’ – to put ourselves in the way of grace and to live it out in our lives.The Presence (of God if we find that word helpful) is unconditional and our aim is simply to be there unconditionally – to keep on coming home like the prodigal.

As we journey on in this life of ‘being there’ in the Presence, it is helpful to learn what our default positions are so that we can be aware when they are holding us back, tripping us up. For some people their default position can be a serious impediment – an addiction, for example, to alcohol, sex, violence, shopping etc. etc. Or there are hidden default positions which lie dormant until suddenly here they are, operating at full volume and devastating us, making us feel a failure or worse. There is what I have called a ‘kick-back’ experience: times when we get out into the world after meditation and everything goes wrong; our default positions seem to dominate the horizon.

In all this, just as in the more mundane distractions of our meditating, the advice is – be gentle with yourself; forgive yourself. How often shall I forgive someone who sins against me – seven times? No, replies Jesus, seventy times seven. And that applies to my forgiveness of myself. Let go and let be. Welcome the bad as well as the good; trust that underneath are the everlasting arms and that healing is going on.

So the quality of our meditation is a matter of our intention not the quality of our attention. It’s never primarily a question of our ability to concentrate (though that may well improve as we persevere in our practice). It is simply a matter of our intention to be there in the Presence.

Interrupting the flow.

Eating is your chance to multi-task - right?

At the very least we talk while doing it; or watch television together; or if we are eating alone we listen to music, or continue our journey on foot or on the tube. While we are chewing our hands are busy preparing the next mouthful on the plate; it’s on its way to the mouth before what’s in there already has been swallowed; or maybe it hovers on the fork, halfway to the mouth, while we make an important point in the conversation. Thank goodness that somewhere beneath all this activity we do manage to notice something of the quality of the food (the avoidance of harmful substances must be programmed pretty deeply in our brains) but the important thing is that we mustn’t let eating absorb our attention - right? Well that, surely, is what an observer from another planet would think about us humans and the way we eat. “Ah!” the visitor might think, “the future is more important than the present for these humans.”

Have you ever tried eating mindfully (to use a Buddhist word) – noticing what’s on the plate: its smell, its colours and textures; noticing this piece of food on the fork as it approaches the mouth; the feel and taste of it as it passes the lips; what happens to it as you chew and finally swallow; allowing a moment between that and returning to the plate for the next portion? It’s extraordinarily difficult in our doing, achieving, multi-tasking world. You might begin with just a single break in the cycle: a tiny pause between each action as you consume food; interrupting the flow. Apparently it’s a really helpful way to eat if you want to lose weight.

Interrupting the flow, however fleetingly, enables our magnetic centre to grow stronger so its pull is more insistent and more recognizable. Magnetic centre? That place of silence, stillness and space which we all carry deep within us: the place of Being, not doing.

Beyond Words.

Going beyond them (words, I mean) is what we are exploring in a group which has just started at St. Andrew’s, Waterloo, in central London (Wednesdays at 6.45pm). We are discovering the ancient Christian monastic tradition of lectio divina: sacred reading or, in other words, reading with the heart rather than the mind. The process takes seriously the belief that scripture (and this applies to the sacred writings of all major religions) is food. Of course it can, and should, be food for the intellect (an unintelligent faith is not worth living) but it must, above all, be food for the soul, for the heart, or we are hardly alive at all.

Traditionally, monks and nuns practiced lectio divina alone, perhaps walking around the cloister. There were four stages with Latin names: lectio (reading a short Bible passage slowly), meditatio (ruminating on the passage, entering into it imaginatively), oratio (prayer in any form which might arise from your ruminating) and finally contemplatio (resting quietly, beyond words, in trustful silence). Recently (well since the 1970s) this monastic practice has been adapted for use by us ordinary folk who go about our daily lives in the world (carrying our cloister within us) and practicing in a group is one of the adaptations.

There are dangers about doing it in a group however. The temptation to turn it into more of an intellectual exercise is greater. Cynthia Bourgeault says, “You’re not there to share or discuss or debate. It’s much more like a group meditation that shares its space with a scriptural text. Speaking happens, but the words are always framed in silence and must never overpower it.” We began with some basic stuff about contemplative prayer (see my blog post on February 27th this year) to get us in touch with the space, silence, stillness at the heart of each one of us.

Then we entered into the story in John’s gospel about Jesus at a well in Samaria asking a Samaritan woman to draw water for him to drink. (Chapter 4 verse 6). I am reminded now of words from Charles Wesley’s famous hymn, “Jesus lover of my soul”

Thou of life the fountain art;
Freely let me take of thee;
Spring thou up within my heart,
Rise to all eternity.

PS I have borrowed the title of this post from a book by my friend and colleague Patrick Woodhouse which sets out passages from the Gospel of Luke with helpful suggestions about using them for lectio divina.