THE PRAYER OF THE HEART - CONTINUED

In my last post I ended with the Carthusian saying that, in the Prayer of the Heart, the heart itself is eventually transfigured by the Crucifixion and Resurrection: a saying that if it is not simplistic is extremely profound, complex and difficult. So I have been giving it some thought, and prayer, and I think that there is perhaps a way to understand it.

            Let’s begin with that word “transfigured”. it has dictionary meanings, but in the discourse of a contemplative monk it should be taken, surely, in a Biblical, Gospel sense. There is, in the Gospel, that moment when Yeshua goes up on a mountain – traditionally Mount Tabor, on the summit of which my daughter was married – with Peter, James and John. There, all of a sudden, he is “transfigured before them; his face shining as the sun, and his garments became white as the light." Moses and Elijah appear, talking with him (according to Luke, about his fatal journey to Jerusalem); the voice of God is heard, saying “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: listen to him.” When the terrified disciples eventually look up, Moses and Elijah have gone, and Yeshua is there looking normal and telling them not to be afraid.

            So “transfigured” implies a change not only of appearance but of nature: in the Gospel story, Yeshua’s brief and flaming change from human to divine and back again. In what way can our heart, then, be “transfigured” by the Crucifixion and Resurrection? Coming as it does after an astonishingly profound and beautiful chapter on the Prayer of the Heart and the silence that we must learn, not to create but to accept, I think this transfiguration is in a sense a reminder. The prayer of silence, it tells us, is not a cruise. It is not a peaceful, meditative, lengthy polishing of an ideal or higher self we are growing into (as it might be in Buddhism). As we are learning the prayer of the heart, the prayer of silence, the Crucifixion and Resurrection are there to add a necessary dimension of verticality, and a vivid reminder of suffering.

            I have thought a lot recently about the gradual transformation of Yeshua bar Yosef, teknon (builder) of Nazareth, into Yeshua the Meschiach, the Anointed (i.e. crowned) Saviour. Toward the middle or end of this process I seem to see something like a rage of compassion. As he looks around him with new, or gradually renewing, eyes what he sees is an ocean of suffering: I imagine him feeling like the only physician in Aleppo after weeks of bombing. It is of course a suffering he is destined wholly and entirely to share in what is perhaps the acme of his humanity.

            For us, that sharing is a message we cannot and must not evade. Yet in this context that message is not simple: it is not simply telling us to stop being Mary and become Martha. It is telling us that we must, in the midst of pursuing the prayer of the heart, let that very heart be transfigured, first by the Cross and then by Easter. The Cross will enrich our search by the hugeness of its suffering, by the enormity of its sacrifice, by the price of its blood. It will remind us that we are not embarked on a development of our self to greater heights and/or depths. We are embarked on a relationship that will lead us to places unknown and barely guessed at. And Easter, the Resurrection, will remind us that that relationship and the voyage it entails is one of our salvation, and thus of a scarcely imaginable joy.

            Coda:

           So many of these words have become counters in discourse. “Salvation”: what does it mean, really? Literally: to be safe, to end up safe, home free, saved from danger on every side, from the bullet that flies in the noonday, from the bomb that kills in the night, from the cancer that stalks us everywhere, from the inferno to which we consign ourselves daily in our great and small refusals of love. To be plucked from the jaws of peril and set down in a garden of pure raindrop love. But like Yeshua, we can only be resurrected if we go through death ourselves. That it is not eternal, not definitive, we proclaim in every recitation of the Creed. Learning the prayer of the heart may help us actually to believe this incredible promise.

GETTING THERE?

    This year, the Fourth Sunday in Advent is also the first day of shortening nights. It’s as if the fourth candle had an infinitesimal but enormous effect: infinitesimal in time (a few minutes), enormous in space (all over the hemisphere). We are approaching Christmas. Are we getting there? Depends where There is, of course. Getting to the end of shopping; getting to the end of decorating; getting (for a few) to the end of fasting and penitence; getting closer to the Nativity; getting closer to New Year’s Eve; getting closer to 2014; getting closer to Epiphany. But is there a There there? What is the fourth candle’s effect on us? 

    There are moments – insomniacs, monks and those on guard duty know them – when dawn has not quite begun, when there is no real light in the East, but when the night no longer smells like night, when there is a strange sense of impending alteration. It is perhaps that sense that our four candles convey. We still need them, to see by, to warm our hands at, to help keep our faith alive and watchful until the Dawn; but the night no longer smells like night, and here and there there is a rustling as of a homeward badger or a waking bird. And so we nod our heads wisely, like the old campaigners we are (or imagine we might be), and murmur, “Getting there”.

And for those for whom Advent, consciously or not, has been a battle on a storm-tossed sea, and who are looking forward to Christmas, or what follows it, or the meaning of it, as a long-desired safe harbour, I’ll add a hymn I wrote last year, to the tune of “Melcombe” (hear it here):

Receive us, Lord, just as we are:

Our wandering feet have led us far

In deserts of the daily round –

Lonely and lost, we would be found.

The songs we sang our lips have lost:

We stand surrounded by a host

Of ghostly troops whose panoplies

Are powdered ash and prancing lies.

Our traitor hearts, each trudging day,

Thoughtlessly throw thy gifts away:

The gifts that meant us only good,

Humble and priceless: paid in blood.

We cannot fight our way to thee

With arms undone by treachery;

Helpless, our torn and ragged soul

Only by thee can be made whole.

Thy love is all we have to trust,

Thy heart more merciful than just

We cling to: we have wandered far –

Receive and free us as we are.