THINKING IT THROUGH (2): ADORATION

This is something we aren’t used to. Prayer, most of us instinctively believe, is asking for something: either simple petition (for ourselves) or intercession (for someone else). But adoration? It conjures up images of people from another age kneeling for hours before a monstrance, a crucifix, or an icon, with a kind of rapt attention that could not be further from our own tendency to the quick coffee-break tweet or text. There seems to be a huge distance between them and us. 

In what way is it accessible to us? If we are contemplative monks or nuns, it is part of our world quite naturally – though it may still be hard to achieve. If we are among the very devout – I know a woman who was a Carmelite novice for 6 years, and even after that went to Mass daily for at least 5 more – the liturgical and devotional rhythm of the Church will at the least suggest it on certain occasions, such as the Feast of the Sacred Heart, and somewhere in our ecclesiastical world there will be introductions to it .

But for the rest of us, devout without always inhaling, stumbling along what is often a rocky path, busy with countless details of what a friend of mine calls the Humdrumlies – what of us? The Prayer of Adoration seems almost like an unattainable luxury. “If we had time….” we murmur. And even those of us who have learnt from time to time to take an hour for Francis de Sales’ meditation find the thought of Adoration as a form of prayer, well, extreme. 

Perhaps one way in is the prayer of thanksgiving. This at least releases us from the asking mode, and is still something we intuitively understand. The other day I – well into my seventies, far from willowy and reasonably arthritic – slipped and fell in the shower. As I got up with no more than a slightly bruised feeling, I instinctively said, “Wow, thank you, Lord – this is how many of us wrinklies die.” Whatever we intelligently believe about the way God does or does not micromanage the world, when we have a narrow escape or win the lottery or find that someone we have adored from afar actually returns our feelings, it is a common human reaction to give thanks. 

If we think about this, and go beyond the immediate, we feel thankful about so many things; and going to a level deeper than that, we can relate our thanksgiving to the fact that we have faith, that we believe, that we have been baptised, that we feel fulfilled about going to church; and if our discernment is very sharpened, we can give thanks for the gift given to us on the Cross. 

Now think of the Eucharist. It moves from penitence (housecleaning, as our priest says: wiping the mud off your shoes as you come in) to glorifying the God that pardons us, to learning Scripture in readings, to being helped to understand what we’ve learnt, in a homily, to summing it up in a Creed. Then it moves on to prayer. First the prayer of intercession, moving us out of ourselves in asking God’s mercy on the world; then the prayer of consecration.

And it is within that – at the moment of consecration, when one can at least imagine (as a Zwinglian might) and at most know (as a Catholic does) that the Son of God (and thus the Trinity) is truly, really and actually present here in front of us – that we can perhaps glimpse the Prayer of Adoration. As the priest lifts up the consecrated Elements, we kneel (or some of us do) and fix them with our gaze, and feel in a new and very specific and present way the Presence of Christ – and thus the here-and-now reality of the gift of God’s love. And so, for a brief moment (because modern Eucharists are much too fast), we sense something beyond thanksgiving: the Prayer of Adoration. Just being there and worshipping that Presence, that cosmic Glory which makes itself small enough to fit into the palm of my crossed hands. 

After that, there are further stages, other elements to Adore. If you were brought up Protestant, the Sacred Heart is harder; but when you learn to think in symbols, not to translate them but to let their physicality continue to be even as you understand and feel the inward meaning (which is, after all, what you do with the Eucharist: a sacrament is “the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace” but the point is, it’s both) – well, then you’ve at least set a wobbly foot on the path of Adoration. A long road, but we know where it ends: read Revelations.

THINKING IT THROUGH

This is a long post on prayer – a subject that gets more mysterious and more fascinating the longer you study and practice it. The nature of its power is what interested me here, as well as the extent and nature of its denial.

In the first place, what is the “power” of prayer? It is a form of spiritual energy. As energy, it has potential power but it also has laws: you cannot, for example, usefully power a computer with coal. For those who accept its laws, it is as accessible as wind-power to a sailboat; more, in fact, because unlike the wind, the energy prayer taps into is there 24/7. Much depends on the person praying, just as much depends on the person sailing the boat. 

What are the laws? First, no fishhooks. Praying for things is on the whole useless: not because God deliberately refuses them, but because the energy doesn’t normally work that way. Second, prayer is always answered, but the time-lapse and the modality of the response are to us unpredictable. God answers in His own time and manner, which are by definition mysterious to us. Third, prayer is a spiritual energy that works on, and in, a spiritual dimension.  This is where it gets difficult, not to understand but, for many, to accept. God does not micromanage the world. He sees, it is true, every sparrow that falls, but He does not stop it falling. Deists got it half right: God created the world and set it going, and He does not normally interfere with the process. Only half, though: because He is present in the world at every moment, He does care for his human creatures, and He does try to guide them toward Him and toward His love. 

This leaves two problems: catastrophes and hatred. Why does God not stop an earthquake that will kill 500 people? Answer: because it is part of the physical creation, and that creation’s processes He does not interfere with. Why does God not stop massacres and other loathsome deeds? Answer: because God’s nature is love, and the one limit to His omnipotence is that He cannot be untrue to His own nature. Since that is love, He is bound by love’s law, which holds that one cannot command reciprocity: if one could, it would kill love instantly. The nature of love is that it can only be returned freely or not at all. And when it is not, when it is trodden in the dirt, the lover may weep, but he cannot command. There are times when one feels the earth must be drenched in the tears of God. 

How does the power of prayer, this extraordinary energy, work? Much of it, it must be said, remains mysterious. The eighteenth century was skilled in the ways, and in the use, of wind for locomotion, but its understanding of the physics was more rudimentary than ours. One thing that can be said is that casual prayer is no more effective than renting a sophisticated sailboat for an afternoon without even the minimum knowledge of its operation: the inevitable failure may even have a negative effect. 

Further, prayer for specifically spiritual goals is likely to be more effective. If I pray to be enabled to give up smoking, it may or may not be granted: the objective is still very much anchored to the physical world. But if I pray, long and steadfastly, for the power to become a more generous person, this may well, gradually and over time, be granted. 

Moreover, experience has found that petitionary prayer of that kind is augmented in its power if it is liberally combined with the other kind of prayer: thanksgiving. One cannot always be asking. Cultivating a keen sense for things that are gifts to be thankful for is in itself a form of healing. 

All prayer is subject to God’s Will. In fact, one might say that the one purpose and effect of all good prayer is to align our being with His will, so that the former may become the unresisting instrument of the latter. As Dante put it, in la sua volantade e nostra pace: in His will is our peace.

Much of this is illustrated by Christ’s Passion. As it looms, in Gethsemane, Jesus prays for this cup (understood: this bitter cup, this cup of hemlock) to be taken from him: he is human enough to quail at the prospect. Yet at once he continues: “But not as I will, but as Thou wilt.” But, we say, did God will this? Does God will – intend, want, and cause – the nailing of an innocent to a cross? If so, He would be a malignant God, a God who could will the extermination of millions of Jews and of Russian farmers, the massacre of thousands of Syrians, and the torture of prisoners everywhere. If, in the face of catastrophe or atrocity, we say “Thy will be done” what we mean is that we pray for the strength and the grace to undergo such things in the manner that His will intends us to and hopes we will. His will is not that we be nailed to a cross; His will is that if we are we will undergo it as Jesus did. 

All prayer for ourselves is contained in the Lord’s Prayer. What about prayer for others? This is an area much more difficult to understand than prayer for ourselves, if only because prayer for others is always already by definition generous and altruistic; this being so, we cannot understand why it is so often not (or not in any obvious way) granted. If my beloved, or my child, has cancer, or Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s, or motor neurone disease, and I pray eight hours a day for that person to be healed, and that person is not healed, it is understandable if I feel rebellious. What, I ask myself, or God, is the point?

This problem is made worse, in some ways, by what appear to be occasional exceptions that look like miraculous healings. My own belief is that these are probably “sports”: oddities in the process which are sometimes enabled by a particularly powerful spirit. We cannot, and should not, expect these to occur and be offended or cast down when they do not. 

Prayer for others, I believe, is a way of adding to their store of spiritual energy, the energy that emerges in their own prayer. If it is directed to a specific situation, it augments their own prayer energy for undergoing, or dealing with, such a situation. True to the laws of prayer energy, we may pray for their increase in discernment, in wisdom, in charity, in patience, in love. A multitude of such prayers may, and probably does, create an energy field of great force that the beneficiary may tap into. 

Nevertheless, the laws of prayer hold. My friend with motor neurone disease will not be healed by my prayers, i.e. his disease will not go away. The prayers of Mary and John and the others present did not make the Cross go away or allow Jesus to come down from it. But their power very certainly helped him, in this most human of his hours, to bear what had to be borne. 

Another law of prayer appears to be that the prayers of a community are more powerful and effective than those of an individual. I can see that this might be so: six generators connected in sequence will produce more energy that one solitary one. Moreover, it means that a whole community with its energy is advancing God’s hope and plan for the world. This should not, however, prevent the individual from praying, and the longer and deeper the better. 

Given all this, I find it very curious to see how many people who do not deny climate change and its roots in human activity are quite comfortable with denying the power, the efficacy, and even the interest, of prayer. Climate-change denial is rightfully decried; God-denial is accepted without a blink. It must, one feels, come from a fundamental misprision as to the nature of the energy. It is not electricity: you cannot get a bunch of experts to produce it in a form that lets a small child press a switch and light a room. It is more like the power of the wind to a sailboat, or the power of growth to a farmer: it has its own laws and rhythms that must be attended to and cannot be forced. Yet why that should call into question its existence is peculiar. Perhaps it is because many do not want it to be true. Why? Do they think it would limit their liberty? Ten thousand things already do so, from traffic regulations to polio. You can get from London to Athens quickly, by spending a great deal of money, using vast amounts of petroleum, and causing a fair mount of pollution, by taking an aeroplane. Or you can get from London to Athens by using a skill you have patiently learned, working with the wind (which, we know, bloweth where it listeth), in silence and cleanly, by taking a sailboat. 

Finally, what are the rewards of prayer? If it does not normally change the physical progress of things; if it does not bring Huckleberry Finn his fish-hooks; if it does not make my friend’s cancer go away; what does it bring me? You can read the answer in a hundred books written by experts. Experts such as Augustine of Hippo, Juliana of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Juan de la Cruz, George Herbert, John Donne, Thérèse of Lisieux, Thomas Merton. Very simply: it brings you (into) the company of God. The God who is Love.  The lone sailor crossing the Pacific had to spend many years learning the ways of the wind and the water; but he would tell you that it was all worth it. Prayer also takes time to learn; to adapt a proverb, God’s will often moves slowly, but it moves exceeding well.   

DIFFICULT QUESTIONS. PRAY FOR DISCERNMENT . . .

I have been reading the second volume of Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth, on Holy Week, the Passion and the Resurrection, and find it staggering in its intelligence and understanding. I will be putting up a few quotations here from time to time,  but for now I’m just trying to come to terms with what it has made me understand, or understand better.

For example, the Last Supper. While Mark, Matthew and Luke see it as a Passover meal, John does not. Benedict, I think intelligently, agrees with John, as the Jewish authorities themselves at one point say, “We can’t arrest and kill him on the feast” (of Passover) as they were afraid it would cause riots and might in any case be seen as blasphemous. However, as one scholar B cites puts it, Jesus knows he is going to die, and as he is now himself both priest and sacrificial victim, he institutes a new Passover on the night before the old official one. The Last Supper is the institution of the new Passover. And the early Church understood the intense link between the Last Supper and the Resurrection in instituting the “breaking of bread”, i.e. the first Eucharist, on the morning of the Resurrection, i.e. the “first day of the week”, Sunday.

Jesus as “priest and victim both” of a new Passover leads to another thought. Our local parish priest Jean-Kamel regularly insists on the fact that "at your baptism you were made a priest, a prophet, and a king!” He is referring, of course, to 1 Peter 2:9, as well as  Exodus 19:5–6, First Peter 2:4–8, Book of Revelation 1:4–6, 5:6–10, and the Epistle to the Hebrews. He uses this mainly to encourage the congregation to witness and evangelisation (as I said earlier, he is a convert, and an enthusiastic and somewhat charismatic one). It does, though, raise the old question, more urgent in and since Luther, of the “priesthood of all believers”. This is mainly a Protestant concept, yet the Catholic church accepts it also – as long as it doesn’t interfere with the ordained priesthood.

It leads me to two questions. First: if Jesus is priest and victim in his Passover, i.e. his crucifixion and resurrection, is the “priest” that I am also priest and victim in my own little Passover? After all, I shall die, and as a believer I am promised a resurrection. Is that process my own Passover, and part of my imitatio Christi? If so, to be true my Passover, like his, must be in some way and measure for others. Second, if I am by my baptism a priest, does that allow me – for example, in an extreme situation where no ordained priest is present – to consecrate bread and wine and forgive sins? If so, my faith has just taken on a huge new dimension of seriousness and responsibility.

But if the answer to both those questions is No, then what Jean-Kamel tells us is simply a figure of speech, an edifying image. A priest? Well, no. A prophet? Not really. A king? You’re kidding.

This links up with all sorts of other difficult questions, like the ones developed in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory; but those will have to wait for another time.

USEFUL ADVICE FROM THE 4TH CENTURY

"He who only prays when he is on his knees, prays little. But he who, on his knees, yields to every distraction, does not pray at all. So, before prayer, we must enter into the frame of mind we wish to have during prayer; for it is an inescapable law that the dispositions of the soul depend on the state that preceded it; and we will see it either rise to the heights of heaven or sink to the earth, following its previous thoughts."

St John Cassian, quoted in The Wound of Love (Leominster: Gracewing, 2006), 209.

YONGE HAELETH, OR, A YOUNG HERO

In a further pondering on the Passion, I was suddenly struck by a curious doubleness. On the one hand, of course, Yeshua suffers: he undergoes, he is the victim. Yet on the other hand, I’m fascinated by the way he commands the situation. At every point, the initiative, the essential action, is his. Admittedly, it doesn’t, at first, seem so; yet once you regard the whole event as something he had foreseen, and foreseen as necessary, the whole perspective changes.

First of all, he initiates the event himself. He knows that in declaring himself to be the new Temple (which, if destroyed, he will rebuild in three days), and in declaring himself to be (the son of) God, he will push the Jewish authorities over the edge. So we have to assume that when he does this, he has chosen his moment, in full consciousness of the consequences. He acts: they re-act.

Next, he stands before Pilate. the Roman governor, doubtless with some irony, asks him if he is the King of the Jews. He stands there, silent. Finally, he replies, also with some irony, “It’s you who says it.”

Next, he is crucified. Apart from the excruciating pain, it’s demeaning: the death penalty for runaway slaves. Yet no slave he. ‘He nothing common did or mean/Upon that memorable scene [i.e. stage].’ He utters two quotations from the Psalms, his lifelong prayer-book. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Ps. 22) is a cry of grief and pain, but not one of despair: the Psalm ends in praise, and in trust that future generations will serve the Lord. ‘Into your hands I commit my spirit’ (Ps. 31) moves beyond the pain and grief to the completion of what his whole life has been: a returning of the Father’s gift into the Father’s hands. And finally: ‘It is finished’: in the Gospel’s Greek tetelestai, which was used in accounting to mean ‘complete, paid in full’.

Throughout, in spite of the pain, he is command of the situation. This is what he knew had to be done, and he is doing it. He is the Meshiach, in the Isaian sense: he is saving Israel and the world by being the Paschal sacrifice.

It is not just courage: it’s authority.

Looked at this way, the Passion becomes even more awesome. Yes, the Dream of the Rood was right: he is the ‘young hero’, and in the deepest sense: the hero is one whose acts go well beyond what the ordinary person is capable of, and whose acts, moreover, are always done for the sake of, for the delivery of, ordinary people.   

FOR ALL YOU DOUBTING THOMASES

Worcester College

On this First Sunday After Easter, alias Mercy Sunday, I can do no better than repost, with her permission and my gratitude, today's sermon by my priestly daughter, now Chaplain of Worcester College, Oxford. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.

Thomas

TESS KUIN LAWTON·SUNDAY, 8 APRIL 2018

On this Sunday after Easter, we are offered some remarkable stories about discipleship and it seems like a good opportunity to use them to reflect on our own journeys of faith.

The first, and most obvious story is that of Thomas. There is a method of spiritual reading of the Bible which encourages us to imagine ourselves as one of the characters in the narrative and really live the event from their point of view. During Holy Week and Easter, it is almost impossible not to do this. The characters are so full of life and the narrative is so vivid that we are drawn inexorably into the way of the cross as we tread the path with Jesus. Sometimes we are Mary, watching and waiting as the event unfolds. Sometimes Peter, denying we are followers of Jesus at all. Sometimes the accuser, sometimes the soldiers, sometimes the women laying his precious body to rest.

The beauty of the narrative is that it invites this kind of reading. The author of the Gospel of John is explicit when he says that he has written everything ‘so that we might believe.’ There is a profound interplay here between the written word and the way it speaks to our faith in God. John is writing the Gospel so that everyone who reads it and hears it might believe that Jesus is the Son of God. If you believe that this is the case, John is convinced of two things: that you will have found a way to have, as Jesus puts it ‘life in all its fullness’ and that this abundance of life will not end with death. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.’ (John 3.16)

When I was a school Chaplain, I was lucky enough to meet a man from the Gideons who told me about his mission to prisoners. He would take the small red New Testaments into prison and distribute them with words of encouragement. One day a man came to tell him that the thin pages were the perfect size for cigarette paper and he had indeed smoked his way through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. By the time he got to Acts, he felt that perhaps he should read the pages before smoking them. He was converted by Peter’s speech on the resurrection of Jesus and had come to ask my friend for a new copy of the Bible.

These words on cigarette-thin paper were written ‘so that you might believe’. They are words to comfort and to heal. Words to challenge and to inspire. Words which echo across centuries and reach into your heart today.

The story of doubting Thomas plays its part in this conversation between us and God. The resurrected Jesus meets his friends for the first time and knowing exactly the level of their fear and anxiety, his first words to them are ‘peace be with you.’ He says it twice. He understands.

Peace. We know what it feels like. The sunshine reminds us of it. A feeling of calm. Of beauty. Of ease. Those times in life when we are aligned with the world, in tune with the basso continuo of life. No worries to niggle us. No stress to unsettle us. No sadness to drag us down.

Imagine how deeply sad the disciples must have been. Imagine the weight of their grief. Not only their beloved friend, but their longest running snap-chat streak, the one they spoke to every day and who settled them and made sense of life; not only this but also the leader of their community, their purpose, their reason to live. All this died in them when he died. The locked doors are not only factual in John’s story. They are symbolic. In the face of grief, we lock down.

And into this, the risen life of Christ walks. Through the locked doors, breathing peace into the fear. ‘Peace be with you.’

Thomas was not part of it and the disciples are not good at explaining. They don’t really know what has happened and they are not making a lot of sense to Thomas. He needs to see, feel, hold, touch the man who made sense of his life.

And Jesus gets this. He holds out his hands and he invites Thomas to touch. This is no ghost, no apparition or wish fulfilment. This is real. Thomas gets it.

‘My Lord and My God.’

Our readings today have important things to teach us about the practical life of a follower of Jesus. John’s Gospel reminds us that we have the power of forgiveness, each one of us and there is enough in a single verse of the Gospel to give us food for prayer for the rest of the week as we reflect on our own ability to forgive. Jesus considers forgiveness to be the gift of the Holy Spirit, and it is so central to his message about how we should live that it has a central role in the prayer we say every day: ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’

The book of Acts, the one which converted our smoking friend in prison, gives us a really remarkable reading in chapter 4 about how we should live as a community: sharing and giving up our own wealth so that our neighbours in Christ might be cared for, ‘there was not a needy person among them.’ (4.34) This earliest group of Christians were characterised by two things, we are told. Verse 32 says ‘now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul.’ And the following verse tells us that ‘great grace was upon them all.’

This is a powerful image of the possibilities of living the resurrection life and the church should hold on to it with joy and hope. But today’s readings highlight the contrast between this and the immediate aftermath of the crucifixion. This transformed, grace-filled life begins behind the locked doors of the upper room. And it takes doubt as its starting point.

It is not hard to inhabit the character of Thomas, because doubt is part of the journey of faith: particularly in the empiricist world in which we now live. And what our readings tell us this morning is that God knows. God knows that doubt is part of the human condition and God responds to it at the level we need: ‘reach our your hand and put it into my wounds’ (John 20.27).

God does not love us less, if we doubt. God is always reaching out to us. Continually. But at some point, we have to reach back towards God and we must trust that it is true. ‘My Lord and My God.’