Scripture as Spiritual Reading

One of the great illusions about prayer is that you have to abstract yourself on your own from everything that really matters to you, light up a few tea lights, engage a soapy “spiritual” gear and hope for the best. Many would like to enrich their praying lives, in a way, but suspect they’ll never manage.

What we all need is a bit of encouragement and a few pointers that engage us where we are.

Fr William Mills is rector of an Orthodox parish in Charlotte, NC. His 30 Day Retreat, billed as “a personal guide to spiritual renewal” is a tool to get you going on Lectio Divina using a few minutes each day spread over a month. He takes well known Bible passages from the gospels and Paul, and invites the reader to slow down, chew over them and reflect. Each section ends with some practical questions and follow up Bible reading. This book could work very well for a group that read daily, whose members kept some personal notebooks, and met weekly like a book club.

Fr Mills’ approach is practical rather than narrowly academic, but its author does happen also to be an a professor of philosophy of religon. His experience with students gives extra resonance to his rather homsepun comment. Written by an Orthodox priest, published by a Roman Catholic publishing house, this book is broad guage classic Christianity rather than anything narrowly denominational. As a get-you-going guide for groups or individuals who want to explore well-known Scriptures as a Spiritual resource, what you see is very much what you get. There are some helpfully surprising questions, though, for a book aimed foursquare at Christian believers — “what irritates you about Jesus?” for example. The book should prove a significant help for those suffering from what the author calls Dusty Bible Syndrome, as well as people who’ve not engaged with Scripture as spiritual reading as much as they would like.

The Beatitude of letting go

This has been a rather intense week catching up with the results of being away, largely taken up with visitations (2 down, 3 to go). So, in haste, I’m running right now on a very interesting take on the Beatitudes by my much-loved and quietly canny boss, John Pritchard:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven —

Letting go of our need to be somebody

Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted —

Letting go of our pain

Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth —

Letting go of our need to be right

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled —

Letting go of our concern for ourselves

Blessed are the merciful,
for they will receive mercy —

Letting go of our need for revenge

Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they shall see God —

Letting go of our need to look good

Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called the children of God —

Letting go of our need to win

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven —

Letting go of our “safety first” approach to life

Six Days in Lent

Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat. As Lent goes on, feedback is beginning to emerge about Archdeacon Karen’s and my idea about clergy taking six days in Lent to feed their souls.

I feel faintly compromised in mentioning this, since this week’s day off has just got eaten up (in a good cause) leaving me only the London art day planned for tomorrow. I’m sure the same sort of thing is happening to clergy colleagues much better than me, but at least the Lent day gave me some recharging time this week, and it’s the spirit not the letter that gives life.

So, thanks to Lesley Fellows for describing here how trying to do this has been impacting her work as a parish priest:

On the one hand I have been dropping balls.. people have not been visited who I used to visit, I have had reminder emails to do stuff I promised to do and haven't got around to, and I feel mildly out of control as I forlornly move tasks to do from one day to the next, my desk is untidy, my emails unanswered and my in tray is too full. Moreover when my friends ring me to go out for lunch I can't find a single slot in Lent. So why do it to myself?

Well the other side of the story is that I was getting more stressed than I would like to admit. I was getting stroppy with the kids, feeling vulnerable to dark moods and generally not thriving. I now feel happy. I feel better about the world, I laugh more, God is a good guy, I even love the church at the moment, I am more optimistic, I even think I am more effective in some ways.

I seriously don't want Lent to end until I get this in balance. It is now clear to me that my markers of success were in terms of getting the work done, the do list ticked and not letting anyone down. I am not even sure that the solution is a case of stopping some activities, perhaps it is worth me taking a hatchet to my diary in general, prioritising restorative time, and then accepting that the rest of the work may or may not fit.

But a special Big Wet Sloppy Digital Mars Bar goes to David Harris. He would probably get one anyway, as a lay person who heard the clergy call and decided to give it a whirl himself. David has been trying out a few of our starter ideas every week: follow his adventures here.

The story I liked, however was here, about David going all the way to France to visit the Antony Caro Chapel of Light, finding it closed, explaining to the caretaker that he had been asked by his diocese to visit as a Lenten exercise, and getting red carpet treatment.

With these reflections come a mental note that blogs help improve the quality of unsolicited feedback I can be aware of from around the archdeaconry, and solicitation to anyone else to let me know of how they're getting on this Lent with the quest to sustain the Sacred Centre...

Images h/t Plattenspieler Design Blog

Sustaining the Sacred Centre 2

Reflecting on our Area Deans and Lay Chairs residential, the thought was that we could go away and talk in the abstract about how to sustain the sacred centre. Alternatively, we could instead go and sustain our sacred centre, with three creative spiritual guides to accompany our group and catalyse thoughts and prayers in ways that would deepen our awareness of God in our lives. I reccomend this approach highly for tired churches and groups.

Our Second guide was Dani Muñoz-Treviño, a wondrfully gifted, creative and reflective priest. Dani has done a curacy at Hazlemere, and is just coming to the end of a time in Marlow, during which he has built an emergent congregation and led a number of arts projects and activities involving hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people. He’s off soon to create a new project in Andalusia, Los Olivos — a two hundred year old hacienda, set in thirteen acres of national park. This will be Spain’s first Christian Art and Spirituality Retreat Centre, opening in the autumn of 2010.

Dani took us through a journey together around the ways people engage with God in a time of change, accompanied by movie clips and community art. His presentation built, very much, on Ernesto’s in which we entered an Old Testament narrative at depth, connected with the soundtrack of our lives in Christ, then crystallised th learning into an image. There’s a sense in which this is an area where the first are last and the last first. Some well established churchgoers have real difficulty engaging with God through art and creativity, where people everyone might think of as being complete outsiders sometimes get it instinctively.

I was also struck by the way that high energy arts projects such as Dani has been encouraging in Marlow seem to generate the energy to sustain themselves in new ways, sometimes by the seat of their pants, but well enough to survive. This said something powerful to me about the possibiities if we think we are short of resources; one response is to go round weeping need until someone feels sorry for us and shells out. Another is to kindle more energy at the heart of the project, so that a kind of mutual firestorm develops between people who understand and feel passionate about it. If nobody’s passionate about it, this could be divine guidance to give it your best shot, then try another project. If people get passionate about it, energy and all kinds of resources seem to flow from that shared commitment.

That’s the theory, and the gubbins of getting Los Olivos up and running will certainly test the theory. If Art is many people’s route to spiritual awareness, what matters is to unlock that potential in everybody, churchgoer or not. Gospel, good news, in an age where so much popular imagiation is locked down by sterile rationalism and superficial manipulation, is partly about refreshing the whole culture by releasing imagination. The Church’s role is not primarily to dogmatise at people from its own little bubble, but to celebrate and share images and experiences that create openings to God for hearts and minds and free the Spirit...

Sustaining the Sacred Centre 1

What kind of business do we think we’re in? The Church’s business is as much to know God and enjoy him for ever, delighting in Scripture and prayer, as it is to undertake organisational and administrative indoor games. The latter matter too, but only in relation to the former, because if all we ever do in Church business meetings is secular Church business, we lose our capacity to do anything after a while.

Our first diocesan prioirity for next year is what we call “sustaining the sacred centre” — nourishing our roots of faith, cultivating our imagination and openness to God, using poetry, song and and art, and releasing creative energy that can only come from deep encounter. Therefore, recently, inspired and organised by Archdeacon Karen Gorham, we replaced a regular area deans/lay chairs business meeting with a day enneagram workshop together.

This revealed the extent to which we have gotten into the habit of trying to transact complex business together with a less than adequate understanding of each person’s God-given humanity to sustain our process. Getting to recognise, articulate and enjoy our differences and particularities has helped us forward immensely. Suddenly we found we could frame and reframe our business questions in appropriate personal as well as theoretical terms. Thus more productive gets done.

Building on Karen’s brilliant idea, therefore, we have just been away with 22 area deans and lay chairs to Glenfall House, Cheltenham, for a 24 hour residential. We took with us some resource clergy — Ernesto Lozada-Uzuriaga Steele, Dani Muñoz-Treviño, and Ian Adams. All content was fantastically rich, and I’ll try and get to blog all three, but I’ve just got space for one today. Twenty Four hours seemed like a much longer time (in a good way!), and we all left feeling energised and revitalised spiritually.

Ernesto serves in Milton Keynes, and is an artist and priest. He has developed a knack for leading others into biblical stories, especially from the Old Testament, to explore them and enjoy them, then open themselves to creative possibilities in them. We took two stories — Jacob’s Ladder and Jacob wrestling an angel. Interacting individually and together with the text, themes of Solidarity and Struggle began to emerge, and really got us humming as we began to recognise resonances in our own stories from which we identified songs from the backing track of our lives. Using this we tried to identify, personally, symbolic objects and experiences that seemed to capture what God was saying to us about faith as solidarity and struggle. Tim Norwood’s doodle, here, captured some of the images that were spelled out around the room b y the end of our time together.

This may sound slightly weird, but it really opened a lot of spiritual doors for our group. You just explore the text in its own terms, suspending the question “what does it mean?” until you have really interacted with the story at a deep level in its own terms, and played with it and entered into it emotionally and imaginatively. Then you identify a song from the backing track of your own life and experience, and see what images God opens in your mind in response.

For anyone wanting to try this kind of thing in the privacy of their own home, Ernesto has a new book out, Five Stones and a burnt Stick. This takes the reader imaginatively into the Moses story, exploring his intimacy God against the counterpoint of his relationship with his wife. It made me realise how rich the Biblical tradition is, especially once we release it from the tyranny of being rationalised off into abstract ideas, and just let the narrative work on us, like the people did who originally told these stories around iron age campfires...

Man and Superman with Richard Rohr

Thursday begun with an excellent Bible Study on Gensis 3 by Bishop Wolfgang Hüber, (Ratsvorsitzender EKD, Berlin). The afternoon was taken up with some rather extraordinary learning about the meaning of gender and life with Richard Rohr, Franciscan and all round good guy from Albuquerque, USA. In addition to establishing a reputation as a weltberühmt Enneagram Wonk, he has done some serious thinking about the meaning of being male. I listened up and I learned this, I think.

As a priest, the young Fr Rohr noticed around him, inside and outside Church, men with a desperate need for father figures, and a sense of spiritual hunger and disconnectedness.

A rather listless and irresponsible, shallow sense of maleness pervaded the US tribe. Responding to that as a Catholic priest and a Franciscan, he has developed a way of understanding what this is about, and what to do about it.

So here’s the deal. We all have to grow up, as mind, body and emotions learn from reality — experience that yields increasing wisdom. Women have the same learning to do as men, but it helps instill realism within them that physical processes, menstruation, child-bearing, and menopause, entail regular inescapable engagement with corporeal reality. It’s harder for women to kid themselves they are superman. This doesn’t mean all women get it all the time, but it makes it easier for most of them to get it, most of the time. Men have to learn the hard way what their lives are about, and who they are, and how to live in a way that is understanding, confident, truthful and fruitful.

The meaning of men’s lives falls into two necessary phases, a survival dance to establish themselves and a sacred dance, to express fulfil the purpose for which God created them. In basic societies challenges are all around to enable young men to show off whilst becoming increasingly aware of how to handle the business of life as men. Male role models at hand show the way. The process is often expressed, sealed and celebrated by rites of passage in which the young man is wounded or humiliated, and has to show he can handle it — forgive me, Richard Rohr, for putting it this way, but a kind of Lion King process is how people learn to accept responsibility and move from survival dance to sacred dance.

The effect of living in Western societies, with their high levels of detachment from nature, easy availability of information, spiritual immaturity and fantasy, with material abundance and ease, is to prolong male adolescence. Average ages for achieving its goals are rising fast, currently to a mid thirties average. A few are forced there early by traumatic experiences like loss of a parent, chronic illness, or poverty. Some never make it.

Most sail on, playing the games of the survival dance, posing for anyone silly enough to be impressed, sometimes until their fifties and beyond, as though the one with the most toys at the end of the game wins. Life is consumed in emotionally immature, driven, acquisitive, and ultimately irresponsible behaviour. Hearts and minds are not connected up right, if at all, and men become anxious and withdrawn from life — vain and shallow, incapable of being what God created them to be. A young man who cannot cry is a savage, an old man who cannot laugh is a fool. We have plenty of both out there. Often the transition from survival dance to sacred dance comes from a mid-life experience, and is sealed by an experience of loss, such as career collapse, first marriage failure or bereavement — some place where the game breaks down, and men become aware of their limitations, capacity to feel and humanity.

Most men engaged in the survival dance are disdainful or disconnected from religion; they get by in life pragmatically on limited wisdom. Their lives exhibit spiritual emptiness, insensitivity, and an occasional will to acquire (as fast as possible) secular or sacred ideologies in shallow ways that shore up the ego temporarily but are ultimately silly, meaningless and unreal. Men with a streak of cruelty know how to acquire power, but not how to use it. This is the way to gross abuse. All great spirituality tells you what to do with your pain. If you cannot transform it, you will transmit it to your wife, children and others around you; and you'll be the last to know what you're really doing. If anything disturbs you, you cover up and lie.

Religion can articulate and enable people to access human and spiritual reality — a supreme expression of the sacred dance. Unfortunately it also provides games and routines which are easy to take as the metier for survival dances. Rather than engaging with reality, religion can be made an insulation against reality. People can enter into religions and use them to shore up personal insecurity, in a passionate but immature way. This is desperation and paranoia, more than connection with God or creation.

In this state, Devotion becomes immature, driven and even paranoid; this is the world of parade ‘n trophy religion with its manifold opinionated fundamentalisms. Most men shun such religion, but a few embrace one of its many forms in absolutist ways. You can tell this process is going on, not by the content of their belief systems, but by the unreflective, obsessional and immature ways in which young men follow such faiths. One tell tale sign that this is going on is a disconnect between religion and spirituality.

Men who make it through the survival dance to the sacred dance have met their fears and fantasies and achieved, in the main, a state of realism where they mostly know their strengths and know themselves. From that unfolds deeper knowledge of God. Men engaged on the sacred dance become increasingly open to wisdom, and do not have to prove their validity to themselves all the time, because it is real enough to them to be able to own it joyfully and truthfully. Faith which integrates spirituality and religion is an articulation of this sense of belonging, and a framework to support real living.

I find Rohr’s hypothesis fascinating. Is he right, or is he right?!

Acedia: Are we bovvered?

Why is everything crap? Why is life itself so damn boring? As we travel on life’s great highway, the cry goes up ‘Are we there, yet?’ Then Maggi Dawn’s blog tips me off about Kathleen Norrris’ fabulous new book on Acedia. This was the old Desert Fathers’ Noonday Demon. The best monks sometimes wasted days in the sun, clockwatching and bored, when they should have been getting on with the job. Call it Sloth if you like, but Ms Norris points out that in our century its most common form is the blue-arse-fly version, our own particular way of being there whilst not being there. Acedia kills off deep thought, relationships, religion and all kinds of other worthwhile activities that involve completer finishing. It kindles impatience, frustration, and superficiality. Get down on the street, and everybody’s doing it. In a great review of this book, Denis Ockholm writes:

We urgently need such reminders amid the “restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair” of contemporary life, particularly in the context of a marriage such as the one that unfolds in this book. In a society where acedia results in relationships that are recycled more often than aluminum cans, Norris insists that what is most likely to maintain a marriage is not giddy romance but discipline, martyrdom, and obedience (which, at its etymological root, refers to hearing): “The very nature of marriage means saying yes before you know what it will cost. You may say the 'I do' of the wedding ritual in all sincerity, but it is the testing of that vow over time that makes you married.” Good advice in a culture where that "five-o'clock somewhere" mirage always beckons.

This all points us to the ancient wisdom of our holy father Benedict, whose Rule was not conceived as legalism on speed, but a toolbox for sticking with discipleship through the dead zone, so that it can bear real fruit. Confronting the futility of our own lives, we can wallow ’n bitch, or engage the mid-day demon more closely, and grow a few better habits to promote stability...
Stop Press: Comment by Prodigal Kiwi (Paul Fromont)

Another way of seeing — icons

The World is full of Icons — buildings, people, and moments:
Icons are a powerful part of everyday reality — our desktops are covered with them.

When people who don’t often go to galleries see a painting, the first question they ask is “What is that supposed to be?” The only answer for any half decent work of art is “a load of stuff.” Things stand for other things, tell stories and enrich the whole picture. You can, of course, always do a Dawkins and say “it's only canvas, wood and paint. There’s nothing else to it ultimately.” Doing that’s stupid, but it explains everything to its own satisfaction, and it's always an option.

Human beings create icons all the time from significant events. King Charles II, after the Battle of Worcester, hid in an oak tree. The actual tree probably fell over years ago, but it birthed various realities, intentionally and unintentionally, including hundreds of pubs, a suburb of Detroit, and a World War II Battleship sinking:
The battleship picture is historically telling rather than photographically accurate, from a Belgian fascist comic (honestly!) of 1939.

The glory of Alton Abbey for me, increasingly, is the great contemporary Icon in the Church, of Christ and the patrons (Our Lady, John the Evangelist and Benedict), written by Dom Anselm Shobrook OSB. I've been getting to know it, year by year, over many years. When I first met it, I was amazed to discover that real icon writing is still alive, with its own language. It draws you into a way of praying that books don’t. Some Christians have banned icons because of their fear about turning them into idols. One answer to something abused is to ban it and accept the impoverishment— another is to learn how to use it properly. The majority view has developed among Christians that if Jesus took real flesh in every way, finding him visually can be as authentic as through the printed word.

This icon centres on the Mystery of the Incarnation — Christ born among us and in us. Saint John the beloved disciple proclaims that love is the medium through which the word comes to us and happens in us. Benedict (with his rule) brings a holding framework of order and stability. His staff represents hard pastoral care, engaging with real need without deception or pretending. The whole vision is literally based on the sequence of four panels along the bottom of the icon, expressing the process of the word coming to Our Lady and Saint John, and being worked out in their lives.

What’s distinctive, though, about this or any real icon, is that the more you pray with it, the more doors it opens. A real icon doesn’t reduce what it’s about, it captures something bigger than itself, and expands it. The more time you give it, the more there is to explore...

Riding the Tiger, Climbing the Ladder

Lots of Egos rubbing up against each other usually find ways to screw each other up. Churches, families and whole societies produce fruity horror stories about egomania and its products, from personal resentments to mad dictators. However, God gave us ego for a purpose. It feeds determination, creativity and resilience, even self-respect. Someone who really did not care about any of that would be less than themselves, and do very little creative for any community.

Wise as ever, Benedict sees the dangers and suggests real ways out. He doesn't simply say "Ego Bad" and squash people ("There is no I in Team"). One of the longest chapters in the rule (7) says how to grow humility. Benedict likens the struggle with Ego to Jacob's ladder — the place of work heaven and earth are joined. It begins by the simple awareness that we are never alone:

"Let each take account for ourself that we are noticed and observed at all times by God from heaven — our deeds in every time or place lie open to the divine seeing, and every time are reported by angels..."

From this interesting starting point, Benedict develops a twelve step recovery process (where have we heard of that before?) for recovering the person as they could be from the wreckage of our own egos run wild.

Note: Next time I get a silent retreat (Saint Wandrille in November?) go study RB7. Question: What creative contribution does Ego make to the building of community? How is it put to good work, and how allowed to run wild?

Farther up, and farther in!

Sad news — see NYT Obit from Sarx — that Madeleine L'Engle died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88. See also Maggi Dawn's blog.

Not so well known this side of the pond, L'Engle believed everything hangs together in spiritual unity, and that religion, science and magic are simply different aspects of a single seamless reality. She said of children's writing, "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children"

She produced what Ian MacDonald calls "Spiritual Toffee" — so here are a few nuggets on which to chew:

Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself"

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.

We tend to defend vigorously things that in our deepest hearts we are not quite certain about. If we are certain of something we know, it doesn't need defending.

It is far too easy to take refuge in our little groups, rather than allowing the Creator to change us as he changed Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

agape means "a profound concern for the welfare of another without any desire to control that other, to be thanked by that other, or to enjoy the process." Not easy. But if we can follow it, it will mean that we will never exclude...It teaches me not only about forgiveness but about how to hope to give guidance without manipulation.

Wherever there is unity in diversity, then we are free to be ourselves; it cannot be done in isolation; we need each other.

We have false expectations of our holy days, of our churches, of each other. We have false expectations of our friends. Jesus did not. He had expectations, but they were not false, and when they were not met, he did not fall apart. He was never taken in by golden calves! Friendship not only takes time, it takes a willingness to drop false expectations, of ourselves, of each other. Friends--or lovers--are not always available to each other. Inner turmoils can cause us to be unhearing when someone needs us, to need to receive understanding when we should be giving understanding

Rest in peace... Rise in glory!