DESERT STORM?

Another meditation I found true and helpful in my mid-week e-mail from St Matthias in Somerset N.J.

"Lent has for the most part been understood as a time for us ... spend forty days in the desert like Jesus, unprotected by normal nourishment so as to have to face "Satan" and the "wild animals" and see whether the "angels" will indeed come and look after us when we reach that point where we can no longer look after ourselves.
For us, Satan and wild animals refer particularly to the chaos inside of us that normally we either deny or simply refuse to face: our paranoia, our anger, our jealousies, our unresolved hurts, our sexual complexity, our incapacity to really pray, our faith doubts, and our dark secrets.
The normal "food" that we eat (distractions, busyness, entertainment, ordinary life) works to shield us from the deeper chaos that lurks beneath the surface of our lives. Lent invites us to stop eating, so to speak, whatever protects us from having to face the desert that is inside of us. It invites us to feel our smallness, to feel our vulnerability, to feel our fears, and to open ourselves to the chaos of the desert so that we can finally give the angels a chance to feed us.
Lent. It is a season to slowly prepare our souls. It is a time to open ourselves to the presence of God in our lives and let the angels feed us."

Source: Ronald Rolheiser, taken from God For Us

EYE-OPENER

I found the following passage in a weekly e-mail I get from the Church of St Matthias in Somerset, N.J., and found it inspiring enough to reproduce here. I hope people agree.

"Prayer is one of those words that needs revisioning. We tend to think of it as something we do, but it is much more something we are. When we live in union we are a prayer, and everything we do becomes conscious, willing, and free....To pray is to live consciously inside of God. That's all. Sanctity does not mean being pious or perfect, but doing for God's sake what you used to do for your own sake. That makes all the difference. It is the still point of the turning world and creates a different kind of human being whose centre is outside of himself or herself. These are the only people who are really free because they are free from themselves.
When we stop confusing holiness with morality and recognize that it has to do with transformed identity and a new centre point, we will have gone a long way toward understanding what is happening in prayer and what the true goal of spirituality actually is. Morality -- and transformed and mature responses -- will then follow as certainly as night from day."

Source: Richard Rohr, O.F.M., Radical Grace, July - September, 2002

SWEPT AND GARNISHED

 This morning, Lent III, I had the joy of a liturgy that combines the best of two worlds: the pomp and circumstance, the glorious theatre, of a Tridentine Mass with the immortal texts of Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer; as well as the Kyrie, the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei from Tomas Luis da Victoria's Mass Trahe me post te, sung by a superb choir of 8 voices; and, of course, Communion in both kinds. (I weekly curse the Council of Constance which forbade that in 1417.)

 The only fly in the ointment was the sermon -- unusually so, for the Rector of this church is usually superb as a preacher. But he frankly admitted that he hadn't a clue as to the meaning of this morning's Gospel (Luke 11:14-28), that the commentaries he had read didn't seem to either, that something seemed to have got lost in translation; and so he confined himself to helpful if platitudinous hints for a "good Lent".

So, walking back through a gloriously sunny if cool Upper East Side of Manhattan, I pondered that thorny passage. As you will remember, it starts with Jesus driving out demons. Some magically inclined bystanders mutter that he must be doing this through the King of demons, Beel-Zebub, the Lord of the Flies. To which he crisply replies that for the king of demons to drive out demons would be like a civil war in the Nation of Evil: "a house divided against itself cannot stand". No: the only way a strong individual (man or demon) can be driven out is by a stronger one; after which he concludes, superbly: "If I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the Kingdom of God is come upon you." You can meditate on just that last phrase for days: the Kingdom is not to come, it is come. It is come in him. The Meshiach does not just announce the Kingdom -- the reign -- of God, he is the Kingdom, the kingship.

 But then comes the passage that is both gripping, unforgegttable, and difficult. First: "He that is not with me is against me." Then, and I think as an illustration: "When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh unto him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first." Ouch.

 This is not a parable, and in Jesus' time I think not even an allegory. Jesus did not use Beel-Zebub, but he knew him and all his tribe through and through; so this, I'm convinced, is his story of what actually happens when a demon is cast out. For the demon, the man is a house from which he has been expelled. Like all demons, this one is fundamentally miserable; uprooted, he seeks rest and, like all his ilk, cannot find rest anywhere. So he goes back to his former house and finds it, now "swept and garnished": thoroughly cleaned, and ornamented with bouquets of fresh flowers and sweet-smelling herbs everywhere. BUT. BUT. Not only is it swept and garnished, it is EMPTY. Empty, clean, spacious, and inviting. SO the demon goes and finds seven other demons worse then he, and they all move in. Before, the man was possessed by only one devil; now he has eight, quarrelling (as demons will) inside his head, his heart and soul.

 And the moral of the story? Surely not difficult. Even if it is Jesus himself, the Son of God, who has cast out the demon from you, you do not, ever, leave your house -- your heart, your soul -- empty. Nothing is more dangerous. You put all the power prayer gives you to work to invite the Ruach, the Pneuma, the spiritus sanctus, to come in and dwell in you, to fill your space with His presence.

As I said above, the whole story is an illustration of "he who is not for me is against me". That phrase is one we tend to misunderstand. To many of us, it sounds aggressive and unkind: I (or my brother, my wife, or my teenager) may not be an active disciple, but I'm certainly not against Him. Can't you leave me a neutral space where I can call myself an agnostic (which someone defined as "you're something, but you don't have to go to church")?

As so often, Jesus doesn't prescribe, he describes. He's been telling you not what he and the Father are going to do to you to punish you; he's been telling you a natural consequence, as we do to a child. If you put your hand over a lit gas ring, you'll get burnt and it'll hurt horribly. If, once the police have helped you get rid of the criminal squatters, you clean and redecorate the desirable property that is your spirit and then leave it standing empty with the door unlocked, you will in the nature of things get new squatters, and more, and worse. If, on the other hand, you at once invite the very best of tenants in -- and, moreover those who have said that if invited they will come -- your house's foundations will be rock-solid and its windows will shine for miles around.

 "If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." (John 14:23)

PAX VOBISCUM

We have all heard about the "peace of God, which passeth all understanding", and we are used to hearing "peace be with thee/And with thy spirit" in the Eucharist. But what is this peace the Bible talks about? There is an exhaustive lexical and contextual analysis here: http://biblehub.com/greek/1515.htm, which I won't attempt to reproduce. But it's a huge word, with a range of meaning as wide, but also as coherent, as a rainbow.

First, there is, well, peace. Not war. Those of us old enough to have been born before or during World War II have a visceral feeling about, and for, peace in that sense. In his novel The Empty Room (1942), Charles Morgan shows some people in England talking about the distant past and a hoped-for future. One evening, says one of them, some friends will sit together, talking in a garden, and one of them will say, with wonder and contentment, "A June night, and no war." Perhaps there are people in Syria today who feel the same way. It is eirènè, the fundamental meaning of that lovely Greek word, and the reason that the Dutch princess born during WW II was named Irene. Peace as a public condition, a condition of not-war, is never to be taken for granted. It is huge, a privilege, and should be savoured daily by those fortunate enough to live in it.

Then, there is peace as a condition between people. Here, the meaning is closer to harmony: an absence of strife, of quarrel, of awkwardness, of hostility. It is an emotion elevated to a condition, which means that it is felt by the heart rather than, or prior to, being understood by the mind. It is the peace sometimes seen in very old long-married couples whose love has over the decades been distilled to a fine and almost silent essence. It is the peace between true friends engaged together in some activity long known, long practiced and long loved. And notice that both these examples remind us that peace between individuals often has time as a component element.

There is the peace of science, or of scholarship. This is a peace experienced individually. It is the peace found by someone working tranquilly at some project within one's competence and which, again, requires time to mature and complete. It is a peace I have experienced while working in great research libraries: Duke Humphrey's 15th-century library in Oxford's Bodleian, the 17th-century Manuscript Room of Paris's Bibliothèque nationale. It is a peace composed in part of a going out of one's self, of losing oneself in a subject, in the life of another age, in the patient search for a clue. A similar peace is found, we are told, by writers, novelists for the most part, when they are engaged upon a lengthy task in propitious surroundings. The great Dutch poet Adriaan Roland Holst experienced it during the six long winters, in the1930s, when, in his little thatched cottage behind the North Sea dunes, he worked concentratedly on his masterpiece, the long, dense poem known as A Winter By The Sea.

Such peace  touches, and sometimes becomes, a peace of the spirit. This peace is known by some philosophers, by some contemplatives, by those who in one way or another have reached a true wisdom. In some societies such men and women are revered as sages; in others, they live unknown in corners of the world, sometimes with a small group of pupils, sometimes alone, quietly engaged in some trade and encountered by chance. I have known a watchmaker like that; a former paratrooper; a retired journalist who studied mysticism; and a professor of Indian philosophy. In some, this peace of wisdom can be and is expressed in words; in others, it communicates itself intangibly, mysteriously but unmistakeably.

All peace that is not cowardice is good. But it does not really, not truly, not completely pass oour understanding. It is not the peace of God. What, then, is?

Reading the Bible, Old Testament and New, one sees little peace. Humanity seems always at war with itself; Israel with its neighbours; Israel with its God; heroes with other heroes or with bloodthirsty monsters; brothers with brothers, fathers with sons; and the Serpent with everyone. Where, then, is the Peace of that God the Scriptures describe, explain, and adore? We find it, sometimes, in the Psalms. The Psalmist, nominally King David, finds peace in the Law,  which shows him a way through a trackless desert. He finds peace in adoring God, in being, as he says, an olive tree in the house of the Lord. And above all, remember that the term we are seeking occurs in a blessing; may the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7). One translation has guard for keep, which helps us understand. The peace of God, then, is something that keeps us, that guards us, that protects us from harm. It does so in Christ Jesus: which is a whole story unto itself. We are in Christ when we are a part of him; for since the Resurrection he is present wherever those who love God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, are present -- as a congregation especially, in the Eucharist especially, but in prayer, in meditation, in contemplation also. And since he is Love, in the Spirit he not only neighbours us with his presence, but he surrounds us, he enfolds us; and when this happens, each time it happens (because in this mortal life it is never once and for all, not yet), we have come home. That is the peace of God: our homecoming to the relation he always intended, to the hearth of the Father's house.

JOYS OF LENT

I used to think it a painful paradox that gloomy old Lent happened just as the almond trees came into bloom, followed by the forsythias, the daffodils, the plum tree, the daisies, the buttercups and all the whole décor of spring. Just as we were all getting over winter and feeling sort of festive, we were told to repent, spiritually at least to put on sackcloth and ashes, to abstain from anything pleasurable or tasty, for forty bloody long days until Easter. One put up with it, one did one’s best, but it was hard to go along with it with any real enthusiasm.

To my surprise, this year is different. Perhaps because of a change of tone in the Church’s teachings on the subject, perhaps because I’ve gone more deeply into the spiritual aspects of it, and perhaps also because I’ve decided to do for, and in, Lent what I would previously have done separately: take care of Brother Ass, as St Francis called our bothersome physical body, at the same time as increasing reading and prayer. As our local priest put it, a thorough spring cleaning.

And to my surprise, as I said, it has so far made for a different Lent. I feel in no way out of tune with Nature; doing (or omitting) some of the things one should have seen to ages ago is cheering; as every old-fashioned housewife knew and knows, spring cleaning is not only useful, it gives a lift to the spirit. I don’t think I’m up to serious fasting, but doing without alcohol and meat is, for an old whisky-dramming carnivore, a real change of speed. It turns out not be particularly hard, and has some pleasant if in no way spiritual side-effects.

I write this here because it may help someone who still thinks of Lent as a gloomy guilt-trip. I do have to remind myself daily of the Cross, and to make some kind of act of contrition, but that fits in perfectly because it was always already there and makes sense. Meanwhile, I glory in the spring around me, in the Southern French countryside where it is the most perfect season of the year; I give thanks for so much beauty, and I praise God for suggesting a spring cleaning to put me into better harmony with His creation.