The Only Thing We Understand

O Eternal Wisdom, between you and your Father that was enough; that was how you prayed in the garden. You expressed your desire and fear but surrendered yourself to his will. But as for us, my Lord, you know that we are less submissive to the will of your Father and need to mention each thing separately in order to stop and think whether it would be good for us, and otherwise not ask for it. You see, the gift our Lord intends for us may be by far the best, but if it is not what we wanted we are quite capable of flinging it back in his face. This is the kind of people we are; ready cash is the only wealth we understand. — St. Teresa of Avila

I found it amazingly difficult to concentrate on my studies my last year of university.  My experiences of the previous summer overwhelmed the mundane tasks of studying.  And of course when I eventually did graduate I vowed to never go back to school again…but of course that vow got broken…three times over by the end!

I went to work on a research farm.  And I did it so that I could gain practical experience in research methods that I could take with me back to Southeast Asia and put into practice there.  The local extension agent also had a test plot on this farm and once we began to work together and he saw my drive to learn and observe he regularly took me with him into the field and taught me there.  And my last advisor at university was largely in charge of the research on this farm and so we continued to foster our relationship whenever he came there to make his observations.  And both men were urging me to go back for my Master’s degree because of my bent.  But I had other plans.

I also became the target of every church in the area: Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Catholics, Independents.  Our love for God seemed to transfer equally well among them all, and we were not only invited to church events, but visited in our home – a remote and old farm house that we were renting – by members of each of these denominations.  And they each gave their schpeal – and to be honest, I don’t think that there was a person who came that we did not like.  Nor was there an invitation that we turned down.  And we became well-known throughout our rural community.  And even the banker in town grew to love us and treated us like one of his own children and had us over to eat often, and then a month after moving there he came to visit us and told us that he’s like to see us buy a farm in the area and would be willing to finance us 100%!  My wife was teaching in the local high school and was well-accepted.  And the community wanted us to settle there.  And that was a really tough decision.  Tough because in many ways I desperately wanted to farm, and here was my opportunity.  Tough because I was trying to work my way through the spiritual convictions of diverse communities that had developed over the course of centuries, and as a layman the best I could be was confused, which I recognized and named.

In so many ways it turned out to be a great year.  But something down deep inside of me told me that it would not last.  And it did not.

 

You Are Not Your Own; You Were Bought With A Great Price. I Cor. 6:20

During this, my last year in university it was difficult for me to imagine anything more delightful than serving God.  There were so many things that drew me to love God.  Prayer bubbled in me; especially simple prayers.  Sometimes I wondered if I was taking immoderate delight in these, or whether it was an extravagance that God was permitting me?  I shared these things with my wife.  And I marveled at how others could live a life devoid of God’s consolation and guidance.

Toward the end of the fall semester my university advisor, the head of the department of Animal Husbandry, called me into his office.  He had taken a liking to me when I had first come to university and had secured summer employment for me on two occasions.  But my third summer spent overseas had not pleased him, although he had said little, other than to say a couple of general derisive remarks about religion.  On this day he told me that he had good news for me.  He had spoken to a very close friend of his who was an important person on the Chicago Board of Trade.  My advisor was confident that I would do very well there…that it was an influential position and that my interview was the next week and that my trip was already paid for.  I was floored.  I thanked him for his confidence in me, as well as for the effort that he had made on my behalf, but said that I was not interested in the position.  At this he launched into a tirade against both myself and then religion.  He told me how foolish I was for turning down this employment, that I would never make anything of myself, and that he would help me no longer.  Then he kicked me out of his office.  This experience weighed upon me for several days.  I met him in the halls on a couple of occasions and was treated rudely.  I realized that I had better change advisers.  The department secretary refused to give me the appropriate forms to do so.  Walking across campus later that day I passed by the dean’s office of the college of agriculture and thought to myself to stop and to simply inquire whether what I was experiencing was normal?  Much to my surprise I was passed on by two secretaries right into the dean’s office!  I related to him what I was experiencing.  I could see him becoming agitated at my question, but then when he began inquiring into who I was and asking me more about my experience overseas that summer, and then when he inquired whether I had been made aware by my adviser that I could have received independent-study university credit for what I had accomplished there, I came to see that he, too, was a person of faith.  In the end I was assigned a new adviser – a wonderful man.  And when the spring semester opened I was contacted by the department that supervised university research farms at the behest of the dean and asked if I would work for them upon my graduation?  By this time I realized that this was exactly what I wanted to do, for by then I felt a call to return to SE Asia to work.  I knew that I wanted additional training in research before I did so, and was pursuing other avenues to that end.

At the initial time of the ordeal it seemed to me that I was on the verge of shipwreck several times.  But as it progressed it seemed that something far greater was at play, and certainly the initial tragedy proved more of a joy to behold in the end than anything that I could have contrived on my own…and was something that even those who most positively came to my assistance could not fully understand how it would serve God’s ends in the future.

 

Not A Very Difficult Matter

It is more necessary to learn to call on the name of God than it is to breathe – at all times, in every place, and in every occupation.  The apostle writes pray unceasingly; that is, he teaches us to have the remembrance of God at all times, in every place, and in every kind of circumstance.  If you are doing anything you must have in your memory the Creator of all things; if you see light, remember the One who has bestowed this on you; if you see the sky, the sea, and all things that are found in them, marvel and glorify the One who created them; if you put some article of clothing on yourself, recall whose gift this is and thank the One who provides for your life.  To say it briefly, let every action be for you a reason for remembering and glorifying God.  In this way you will be praying unceasingly, and because of this your soul will be glad!     — Peter of Damaskos, The Philokalia, Pt. 3

My awareness of God in all things had grown exponentially over this time away.  I returned with a glad heart…reshaped, and deeply satisfied.  But just stepping off the plane brought with it a conflict, a conundrum that rode on my shoulders for decades.  And it all came with the asking of a simple question which seemingly everyone asked, but which no one wanted to hear the answer to: Tell us all about it.

As I began to speak with others I was puzzled as to why they could not more fully apprehend what I was saying.  It seemed so simple to me.  That by investing my life in the lives of others in a physical, ongoing, daily manner, things had changed for the better…for them…for me.  And I experienced many reactions to my stories.  Most people’s eyes glazed over within a brief period; they wanted to talk about their prize-winning tomatoes or their dog’s recent trip to the vet.  Most people became confused putting SE Asian lives in a North American context; they made inappropriate value judgements and became authorities from afar.  Most were clearly more intent on their own goals and prosperity; not a few of these called me a meddler and a dreamer.  This became extremely frustrating and isolating, which I now, as a mature person believe that it was designed to do (read Cassian’s Institutes on the causes and function of avarice).  And one man who I met who had recently fought in Vietnam outright condemned me for having gone there in the first place, that all the people of that region were no better than animals and deserved no special consideration.

Five days after arriving home I drove through the night to my fiance’s home.  We both wept at our reunion.  And in her I found a pearl of great price as she asked and listened and asked and listened.  Five days later we joined one another at the front of a church – a simple ceremony she had wonderfully planned – and we were married.  And together we started to look to the future…what was God asking us to do together.  Indeed, she saw profound changes in me, and experienced my frustration.  But rather than dismissing them, or fleeing from them, or making them her own, she began to ask where God would have her serve in her own way and in her own time.

To reason and talk with people sensibly is not a very difficult matter, and it is possible for anyone because the mind and heart precede human learning and wisdom.  If there is a mind, it is possible to refine it, either by study or some skill, but if there is no intellect, then no kind of wise teaching and no form of training will help.  The fact of the matter is that we are distant from ourselves and have little desire to near to ourselves.  We all run away so as not to meet ourselves; we exchange truth for trinkets and we  think: ‘I would gladly devote myself to spiritual things or prayer, but there is no time.  The troubles and cares of life leave no time for such an undertaking.’  Yet what is more important and necessary?  The salvation and eternal life of the soul or the transitory life of the body on which we spend so much effort, more than cattle on perishable food?  It is this that I spoke about, and it leads people either to prudence or foolishness.  – The Pilgrim’s Tale, Fourth Meeting

 

Maelstrom

…because Albert Schwetzer is there in the jungle, we are firmly convinced that we are all benevolent, all brave, all self-sacrificing…    Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p.31

Returning homeward I took a photograph of the coastline of my homeland from my seat in the airplane, and then quite unexpectedly I broke down and began to weep.

Businessmen making sales in hotels, Buddhist abbots in their monasteries, a neighbour child who died of lockjaw, expatriate CIA who owned local restaurants, USN sailors lined up at brothels, a man executed along a deserted road.  Assisting a doctor in a refugee camp, watching exuberant village church worship (including indigenous dance), dipping sticky-rice into common kettles at church pot-lucks, the giving and receiving of innumerable gifts, national church conferences.  Digging fish ponds, new hog cross-breeding, determining local feed sources and rations, ducks, snakes-scorpions-centipedes, construction.  Books by conservative evangelicals, befriended by the local Catholic bishop.  Riding a motorcycle while most people walked, working with great energy to improve others’ lives.  Driving through a mountain pass only hours before a Thai military convoy was later ambushed there.

I had the sense that I had woken up from a culturally-induced coma.

When a myth becomes a daydream it is judged, found wanting, and must be discarded.  To cling to it when it has lost its creative function is to condemn oneslf to menal illness.  I do not say we must learn to live without myths…but we must at least get along without evasions.  A daydream is an evasion.  Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 33.

 

Without Being Personally Threatened

We drove through Chinatown with its clutter of shops and wild, dirty streets. Crowds. Motorbikes. Taxis. Buses. Trucks fixed up to look like dragons, glittering with red and chrome.  Dirt.  Camp.  Madness.  Enormous nightmare movie ads.  And lovely people.  Beautiful, gentle people…  The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, Merton, p. 13.

There was nothing familiar about Thailand.  From the moment the plane started its descent everything changed.  The humidity became oppressive in the fuselage.  The rush of taxi drivers vying for your business into Bangkok was overwhelming.  An arm reached out and grabbed me…my western contact (Thais would never touch you in such a manner), negotiated a driver in fluent Thai, and whisked me away to a hotel where I felt like I was in a detox program, recovering from jet lag.  While he was running errands I slept and made small forays down the streets and alleys nearby.  The smells were overwhelming and the dirt was dirty.  Men urinated in public places where they were not so noticeable.  The art was to my thinking gaudy and over-done.  But the people were beautiful, gentle people.  Even as I would find out that this was, like America, a carefully constructed ego, I experienced it as delightful…a reprieve from the shoot-from-the-hip culture in which I had been raised.  More thoughtful.  Less driven to success and results.  But I could not let go of how I had been raised and worked like a fool in the most atrocious heat that summer, following my western leader’s model.  He was driven.  As was his wife.  And it showed.  I stayed in their home in my own bedroom, which was not a good idea.  By the time I had been there for a few weeks I got the distinct impression that my presence itself was not allowing the space needed for his wife to decompress after work each day.  I felt badly and suggested that I move out, but in keeping with his driven nature my boss assured me that there was nothing wrong.  A few days later while seated at their table for supper his wife simply not wanting to hear any conversation at all exploded, stood up and accused me of wrecking her life, and promptly took a large block of cheese and literally hurled it with all her strength at the middle of the table, sending food flying and me diving for cover!  Then she stormed out and hid in her room for the entire next day. I found out later that my boss thought that it was great having someone with whom to visit who could talk technically about the agriculture development plans that he had, and bring much to fruition.  But his wife only experienced me as someone who took her husband away from her very lonely life in a foreign and isolating culture.  With them unwilling to find a new place for me to stay I wound up enduring my time with them for the last month and doing my best to accomplish everything that he asked, spending great amounts of time at work and in villages.

I wondered down deep how these two worldviews meshed?  Much of Thai culture was condemned by my boss as lazy.  The Thais on staff were driven people as well and did not seem to match with the rest of their culture and I began to wonder how much of what we were doing was not a cultural infringement…whether there was not a more natural way to go about offering development assistance?  I spent virtually all of my time in the rural areas of the Issan region, and came to see that I did not understand a lick about this culture.  But in this admission I also understood that the culture of my origin was particularized to only one society…and that to only a certain segment of that society.  I ran across and began to read Tambiah’s work on the spirit cults of northeast Thailand and how they were integrated with Buddhist religion and the Hindu understandings of the cycle of the seasons and fertility there.  I began to see the world through the eyes of others who made sense of the world in a vastly different way than the manner in which I did.  And by the time I left I had begun to think in new categories about the world.  I was changed forever by this experience.  I applied this insight to my spiritual life as well.  There was no doubt in my mind that I was Christian, even though I was gaining a functional understanding of Buddhism.  But I felt that I had discovered a key to reconciling my reading of Merton to my own Protestant upbringing, namely, that I could put my life on hold, not need to force everything through my own relative understanding, see the world through someone else’s eyes, appreciate and celebrate the life-giving qualities that I encountered, without being personally threatened or needing to be right.  This was at variance with my hosts who were quite convinced of the need for Thai culture to come into line with the drivenness of the west.  Needless to say, after realizing how much different my hosts and I were, I stayed quiet about my emerging cultural orientation…no more cheese incidents, please!  When I returned to my home that fall I changed my course load for my final year at school and selected an elective in cultural anthropology, thinking that it would help me to further process what I had encountered that summer.

 

The Roots Of Reality

I would never had known the depth of the depravity of my sin, nor the height of the love that God has for me if I had not read scripture.  And of course it is not simply the act of reading itself that produced this.  No.  It was as I came to see myself through the eyes of God – the writers of the Christian tradition – that I understood what life could be and the particulars of the ways that I had chosen that either fostered or denied these things.  Without opening myself up to seeing myself through another’s eyes I would have remained enslaved to my own ignorance, conceit, and opinions.  Education is never the mere acquisition of knowledge.  There are many people who carry with them vast amounts of information, but who are by all rights still uneducated; boorish and brutish in body, mind, and soul.  The same is true when it comes to culture.

Some time in July 1978 I was surveying land in a remote region of northeast Thailand.  We were going to be bulldozing fish ponds in several places in response to community requests for developing agricultural cooperatives in the area, the poorest economy in Southeast Asia.  These sites were so remote that only motorcycles could access them along miles upon miles of footpaths.  These paths, like the secondary roads we had used in order to get to the paths, were made of fine, red talcum-like dirt.  Temperatures exceeded 100 F, we were sweating profusely, and by the end of the day we all looked like we had been tarred-and-feathered in red flour with the exception of where our motorcycle goggles covered our eyes.  On several occasions my shirt had been caught on thorn bushes and was badly ripped.  We had forded innumerable streams, ditches, and potholes.  My lower pants and boots were caked in red clay.  For all practical purposes I was a poor student a long way from home who had had to raise money to get me there and would receive no salary for having done so during this, my third summer of university.  It was the end of the day and an elderly man had made his way out to us from a local village, a kilometer away.  As we were packing up he approached us and waied us – a sign of greeting and veneration – and then he humbly said in a quiet voice, I am glad that you rich younger brothers have come to help us.  I was stunned.  From my perspective I was as poor as they…no bank account…not my own transportation…covered in dirt…not able to feed myself.  So I asked him, Excuse me, father, why do you say that I am rich?  And he replied, Because you are here, aren’t you?

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…[if] you sin out of habit even when you do not want to, show humility like the Publican (Luke 18:13): this is enough to ensure your salvation.  — St. Peter of Damaskos, A Treasury of Divine Knowledge

Very often the inertia and repugnance which characterize the so-called ‘spiritual life’ of many Christians could perhaps be cured by a simple respect for the concrete realities of every-day life, for nature, for the body, for one’s work, one’s friends, one surroundings, etc. A false supernaturalism which imagines that ‘the supernatural’ is a kind of Platonic realm of abstract essences totally apart from and opposed to the concrete world of nature, offers no real support to a genuine life of meditation and prayer. Meditation has no point and no reality unless it is firmly rooted in life. Without such roots, it can produce nothing but the ashen fruits of disgust, acedia, and even morbid and degenerate introversion, masochism, dolorism, negation. Nietzsche pitilessly exposed the hopeless mess which results from this caricature of Christianity!  —Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer

 

The Opportunity To Be In Prayer

The great joy of my spiritual life became the opportunity to be in prayer.  It was a daily occurrence for me to seek out a corner in an unoccupied classroom or secluded stairwell and open myself to the silence – true silence.  As I allowed these snippets of silence to have more and more of a place in my life, more and more of my daily distractions fell away.

 

My life also itself began to take on a deeper appreciation for living simply.  A few pieces of bread, some dried fruit, a piece of jerky, some water, and the Bible; these things made a feast for me for an afternoon alone.

 

During my times in the woods my attention began to turn more and more to the sacraments.  In particular to the Lord’s Supper.  It served as a concrete touchstone, something suspended half way between heaven and earth, between God and myself.  And long before I ever heard about Eucharistic adoration I sat in the woods with a piece of bread in my hands in an attitude of joy, not thinking anything in particular…just happy at the prospects.  Others whom I later came to know found that everything inside of them rebelled at the notion of sitting quietly in the presence of Christ’s body.  But I found doing so to be beautiful precisely because it was so stark.  After all, what a wondrous thing to claim that Christ is present, living, and true.  But it was in renouncing my self-interests that other awareness became heightened.  Most of all, if I thought that my spiritual life was only fulfilled when and where I wanted it to be, then it was starting to become clear that it would forever be hallmarked by fits and starts.  And this is not to say that on most days the fits and starts did not have the upper hand.  Most often they did.  But it was becoming clear that I did not have to live that way.  I was learning to de-intellectualize my prayers…to place myself in front of Christ as a poor man.  I was reaching out in love.

 

At this point I made two great commitments.  The first was to seek Christ regardless of the cost.  And the second was to ask my girlfriend to marry me.  She, too, shared a deep faith in Christ.  There had been few people with whom I had opened my life of prayer.  And while she did not share many of its particulars, she repeatedly provided great insight, encouragement, and affirmation to me.  In a way, we each negotiated our way into marriage, insisting that we would first and foremost understand and then safeguard the other’s spiritual life, sacrificing all other aspects to this end.  This simple pact would serve to set the stage for my life even today with a vastly important insight, namely, that in the midst of a world (and even a church!) of other people who are seeking their own ends, I would have to intentionally carve out and then safeguard a place that is set aside to live a life that is attentive to God. 

 

I also decided that fall to accept the position as a short-term agricultural consultant in Southeast Asia.   I was feeling that I would never know the precise manner in which God was laying claim to my life if I did not actively step out in some direction.

 

…Have You Been At Prayer Over This?

It was with all this background that I read one day of the need for a short-term agricultural consultant at a mission in Southeast Asia.  It was a mission sponsored by the denomination in which I had been raised.  It was to include the establishment of a swine-raising facility for seed-stock, educating villagers in swine raising, and a subsequent pig-bank loan system where they would receive animals to raise and then to pay back in kind once they had reached a certain rate of production.  And it was to function as an effort with seven families in concert with one another.  It would cost participants nothing other than their time.  It seemed like an ideal match for me and immediately caught my attention.  But with what I had already been through in regard to discerning my spiritual journey I now found myself raising questions in regard to my attraction to this opportunity.  St. John of the Cross points out the need to do this:

 The more spiritual a thing is the more wearisome they find it, for as they seek to go about spiritual matters with complete freedom and according to the inclination of their will, it causes them sorrow and repugnance to enter upon the narrow way, which, says Christ, is the way of life.[1]

 At the time it was easy for me to become discursive about this prospect.  And most others with whom I spoke about this opportunity would set forth complex logical reasoning as to why this was obviously God’s leading for me.  But over time others spoke with me less and less of their own active imaginings, which I was coming to see is the way of people in general, namely, that with a new opportunity people rise from familiar routines and misinterpret something that excites their imagination as God’s intervention in their lives.  But as St. John of the Cross correctly points out, there is a contradiction between what is authentically spiritual and what appears to be spiritual because it is psychologically appealing.

Genuine prayer leads us into an attitude of rest and silence.  It is from this attitude that we learn to experience the power of God.  And it is because of this that it is in simple acts and many times with few or no words, that God’s presence and leading are discerned.  It was clear to me that even well-intentioned people around me did not understand this. Ammonas, a disciple of St. Anthony himself, plainly wrote about this dynamic:

 Behold, my beloved, I have shown you the power of silence, how thoroughly it heals and how fully pleasing it is to God.  Wherefore I have written to you to show yourselves strong in this work you have undertaken, so that you may know that it is by silence that the saints grew, that it was because of silence that he power of God dwelt in them, because of silence that the mysteries of God were known to them.

After a month of considering this possibility I made an appointment with the appropriate church leadership in order to inquire more deeply into this possibility.  I thought it best to let the man who had expressed the need to speak for himself.  I had never met him before, but I immediately liked his quiet demeanour.  There was a depth to him that I had only rarely encountered in clergy.  And following introductions the first thing he asked was whether I had been in prayer over this?

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[1] Dark Night, I, vii, 4.

 

The Sabbath Was Made For People, Not People For The Sabbath

To what end was my religious life serving me?  If I listened to the dominant influences around me it would be to serve others in the name of Christ.  And from my Protestant background this could be exclusively the only end of my life…to offer it back in service to the church and the world.  This meant an active life deeply involved in transforming the culture around me, churchly and otherwise.  And I could certainly see the logic in this.  It made sense.  And I wanted to care for others as much as I had been cared for.  Some of my friends, including more and more friends that I was making among clergy raised important points in this regard, such as the wisdom of being married when giving oneself to serving others.  And over time I came to see that this talk boiled down to a debate about attachment to the world and serving God.  And I think that the word that most stood out to me as I entered my third year of university was ‘affections‘ in this regard. 

That I had affections was quite clear to me.  That some of these attachments were inordinate was equally clear.  But that I was deeply connected to life by the mere fact of being alive, made it equally plain that life itself and the things of this world were gifts from God as well.  And so a debate began in my mind.  On one side were people who, if I believed them, advocated for the extinguishing of affections, as things that distracted us from God.  I found Catholic ascetics as well as promoters of the Protestant work-ethic to be very much in line on this…the base principle of deferred gratification being a primary motivator in each.  And there was within many of the people who wrote and taught on the extinguishing of affections a very grim view of life and self-worth.  I began to (rightly) wonder about the psychological instability and self-hatred of people who spoke in these ways, and I still do so today.  I was discovering that there has always been a fine line between devotion and lunacy…and there still is today.

What was more immediately at stake in my devotional life was that I found that talk about the extinguishing of passion to be a highly damaging affront to my prayer life.  In and of itself it made me self-counscious in prayer.  It was as if someone would criticize a child for wanting to be loving of their parents!   Nevertheless, I found myself listening to all voices, eager to learn.  These people had the effect of pulling my eyes off of God.  I had already experienced and understood the damage of undue attachments in my life, attachments that build my ego and disregarded my true self (id).  This was not the issue.  The issue was that if the denial of things (food, pride, lethargy) brought me closer to God, my experience of God nevertheless occurred through the influence of things…tangible, physical things.  Things were not the issue, nor was my affection toward them.  But balance was.  Seeing God in and through the right use of things around me began to come into greater focus.  And it also seemed to me that many people who were promoting the extinguishing of attachment were themselves people who had the most difficulty doing so and who found great pride in promoting this among others. 

With these greater understandings I began to tell people that rather than studying animal science, that I was getting my degree in animal husbandry.

__________

This will give us some idea of the proper preparation that the contemplative life requires. A life that is quiet, lived in the country, in touch with the rhythm of nature and the seasons. A life in which there is manual work, the exercise of arts and skills, not in a spirit of dilettantism, but with genuine reference to the needs of one’s existence. The cultivation of the land, the care of farm animals, gardening. A broad and serious literary culture, music, art, again not in the spirit of Time and Life-(a chatty introduction to Titian, Prexiteles, and Jackson Pollock)-but a genuine and creative appreciation of the way poems, pictures, etc., are made. A life in which there is such a thing as serious conversation, and little or no TV. These things are mentioned not with the insistence that only life in the country can prepare a [person] for contemplation, but to show the type of exercise that is needed.[1]

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[1] The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation, Merton. William H. Shannon, editor (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), p. 131.

 

Removing The Threat

My God, I love you.  My God, I love you.[1]

There is a tension in the serious Christian life.  Namely, how do you find your way in and through the maze of churches and practices that make up Christianity today?

At the time, one group of people with whom I would worship coached me on how to evangelize another group.  And this later group would give me reading material on how the former group were heretics.  Catholic priests I met tried to convert me to Catholicism.  Each Protestant worked on refining me from their own angles.  And Orthodox friends fed me their literature.  This was extremely confusing.  Even disheartening.  In my mind it was simple…I just wanted to offer up my life to God.

I am still stunned even today that with all the opportunity for greater travel, and contact, and dialogue, at how parochial Christians remain.  One key element in helping me to understand the exclusiveness of these perspectives came in my discovery and then studies in the field of cultural anthropology at the time.  The impact of culture on shaping religious perspective became a point of discussion for me with my Christian friends.  Many of them did not appreciate it.  And people in the small communities in which I worked certainly disagreed with it…of course they were right!  It had nothing to do with the broader social context in which they found themselves; why they consdiered that to even open oneself up to this possibility was tantamount to losing faith.  It is as if by doing this that everything would have become relative…and then why would anyone need God?  On another note I was also beginning to recognize the manner in which people’s individual personalities worked within their larger cultural contexts.  Within groups of people who claimed the exclusiveness of certain religious practices as valid for everyone were a cross-section of personalities who exhibited a range of practices and opinions within that particular tradition itself.  On the other hand, the last thing that I wanted was to invent my own individualized Christianity.  But I was also getting very tired of being told that I was wrong by others who simply seemed intent on finding out I was different from them, and then leading me become their dsiciple.

I continued to hold my course of prayer.  Some told me that in doing so that I was selfish.  Others told me that I would wreck as a result of not being in community…which universally meant not a member of their persuasion.  But perhaps more than anything else, I was starting to wrestle with the nature of abuse…what it means to inflict oneself on others.  The question that loomed for me was whether I would become such a person?  What stop-gaps would I build into my life to alert me to when I was doing so?  If I was to love my enemies, then it was clear that I needed to treat others in a manner in which I myself wanted to be treated…with respect, and love.  Solitude, rather than being a withdrawal from such a responsibility, seemed to be a resource for me, although I could see how it could become exclusive as well.  Years later I would hear the admonition that in counsel an initial triage required that people who were in dangerous situations need to be removed from that situation before any greater understanding and counsel can be given, or accepted, or applied.  Now.  Years later.  I know. There is no doubt.  Solitude can serve as a safe haven in an abusive environment.

Blessed Macarius told this story about himself, saying: When I was young and lived alone int my cell, they took me against my will and made me a cleric in the village.  And since I did not want to remain there, but fled to another village where a pious layman helped me out by selling my work, it happened that a certain young girl got herself in trouble and became pregnant.  And when her parens asked her who was responsible for it, she said: That hermit of yours committed this crime.  So out came her parents and seized me and hung pots around my neck and led me about along all the roads, beating me and insulting me, saying: This monk has raped our daughter.  And when they had just about killed me with their sticks, one of the old men said to them: How long are you going to beat this foreign monk?  But as he followed and tried to take care of me blushing with shame they snsulted him also, saying: Whathas he done this man whom you are trying to defend?  And the parents of the girl asserted: We will on no condition let him go unless the livelihood of the girl lis provided for and unless someone will vouch for this man in case he abswconds.  So when I made a sign to the old man to do this, he offered a guarantee and took me away.  So, returning to my cell, I gave him all the baskets I found, to sell and provide for myself and my wife.  And I said: Well, Marcarius, now you’ve got yourself a wife, you will have to work harder in order to be able to feed her.  So I workded day and night in order to make her a living.  But when the poor thing’s time was up, for several days she was tormented by labour pains and could not bring forth her child.  And when she was asked about it she said: I pinned the crime on that hermit when he was innocent.  Fot it was the young man next door who got me in this condition.  Then he who had helped me, hearing this, was filled with joy and came to tell me all about it and to ask me to pardon them all.  Hearing this, and fearing that people whould come and bother me, I quickly made off and came to this place.  Such was the cause of my coming to this part of the world.

__________

[1] Letters From The Desert, Carretto, p. 17.

[2] Wisdom of the Desert, Merton, pp. 79-81.

 

Praying For The World, One Person At A Time

The man for whom I worked during the summer in which I broke my hip (Paul) was a fine father and employer.  He loved his children.  He treated me fairly and kindly.  But like so many other of my former employers, his commitment to religion was nominal and perfunctory.  And he had been a military veteran.  Any mention of national interests overseas, and in particular of the area of the world where he had seen combat, his personality would instantaneously change and he would speak of how the people there were sub-human and deserved no assistance or respect by the rest of the world.  To the best of my knowledge, I had never encountered someone who had spoken or acted like this before.  Actually, growing up I knew a very kind man (Carl), a German immigrant who as a machinist had fled the growing nationalism of Germany of the mid-1930’s and who had been severely tormented mentally by his fellow-workers in North America during WWII because of his ancestry.  It took very little to upset him over certain things as well – triggers.  Later in my life I would learn to name and work professionally with many men who experienced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  And I myself would experience its devastating effects.  But coming back into my third year of university I was developing a deep sense of the need to pray for others, especially when I did not know, at least in my own mind, how to adequately respond.  Unlike others who were intent on praying for particular things for others, I found myself acquiescing to the image of simply holding others, even as I felt whole as I was held by God.

In spite of the temptation all around me to build my ego, as my fellow students were busy doing, I found myself increasingly aware of simply my identity as someone loved by my parents and God.  The model of compassion and care with which my parents had raised me was becoming increasingly a source of deep-seated contentment.  The awareness of how much others operated out of fabricated egos and not their true, base identities was becoming egregiously evident as I worked on farms and lived with people over my summers: one man I regularly found passed out in his pickup from drinking, one married woman offered herself sexually to me, one teen constantly asserted her perception that she was favoured in her family, one church I attended split from one viable congregation into three non-viable ones…

The model of Christ in he responded to the people around him was to not judge…was to look for opportunities to redeem.  And I found myself simply holding these people before God and often weeping for them.

St. Gregory the Great was one of the first Benedictines who saw contemplative prayer as a potential source of confict within Christian community.  His Dialogues had presented Benedict as the very model of prayer.  Benedict’s death, standing supported by his disciples in church after receiving the sacraments is more than the recording of physical fact, but is a model of the power of the love of community, compassion, and care in Christ.  But the model also works itself out in reverse, in the middle of the night when Benedict, hours before the others arose to pray the Psalms, prayed in solitude, simply holding others up before God.

Anyone who would pray must nurture both solitary contemplation on behalf of others (Christ at prayer alone on the mountain at night) and the support and sustenance given to them by the church.  This was becoming more and more of a reality for me.  But the more I became involved with the brokenness of people, the more I recognized it for what it was…genuinely hard work…much harder than any physical work I had ever done.

 

Good Work

In early Christianity there was no distinction between private and public prayer…not at least in the same manner in which we understand it today. 

Chapter 20 of the Rule of St. Benedict focuses on prayer when the person is off on their own.  It does mention a collective prayer – oratio – that is practiced with others.  But this is to be kept short.  When it comes to supplication, says Chapter 52, purity of heart and tears are more of an indication of the character of the prayer in which one participates than whether it is done in the presence of others or not.

Evagrius indicates that praying the psalms is a work of the active life; and that contemplative prayer is a flower that blooms out of the liturgy.  The Lord’s Prayer leads all who practice it well to that higher state and brings them at last to the prayer of fire which is known and experienced by few and which is an inexpressibly high degree of prayer.[1]  And Basil, writing on prayer, was not interested in promoting a devotion to contemplative prayer.  For prayer and psalmody every hour is suitable, that while one’s hands are busy with their tasks we may praise God sometimes with the tongue, or if not, with the heart…  Thus in the midst of our work we can fulfill the duty of prayer, giving thanks to him who has granted strength to our hands for performing our tasks and cleverness to our minds for acquiring knowledge… Thus we acquire a recollected spirit, when in every action we beg from God the success of our labours and satisfy our debt of gratitude to him…and when we keep before our minds the aim of pleasing him.[2]

None of these belonged to the Benedictine tradition.  However, they are like springs at its source.  And each of them believed in what I would now call good work.  Good work for each of them does not distract us from being conscious of the presence of God, whether one is alone or with others.  It was with this that I began to wrestle when I returned to my studies and my friends in my third year of university.  What would it mean for me to enter a life of work and be a person of prayer?

__________

[1]Conference 9, Cassian, Ch. 24.

[2] Long Rules, Q. 37 – Ascetical Works, p. 308.

Picture: Tautra monastery ruins, 12th C.

 

Blessed Are The One-Way Ticket Holders On The One-Way Street

If for some reason it were necessary for you to drink a pint of water taken out of the Mississippi River and you could choose where it was to be drawn out of the river – would you take a pint from the source of the river in Minnesota, or from the estuary at New Orleans?  …tradition and spirituality are all the more pure and genuine in proportion as they are in contact with the original sources and retain the same content.[1]

This next summer was a collage.  I broke my hip in a farming accident.  During my recuperation I discovered the writings of several Christian social movements – Sojourners, the Catholic Worker, the Mennonite Central Committee.  In reading these and in conjunction with the compassion I experienced through prayer I began to wonder if I had a call to some form of ordered formal ministry?  The lives of missionaries from a variety of eras, denominations, and cultures also fell into my lap as well.  In the stories of these social movements as well as in the lives of cross-cultural workers I discovered people who were for the most part also compassionate, although I felt that there was a singular lack in mentioning of the extent and character of their spiritual practices.  But I was also starting to become suspicious of people who simply left one non-religious society in order to fit themselves into another religious society;  the exchange of one set of conventional values and concepts for another, equally conventional standard.  This included missionaries and Christian social movements alike.  Yet every once in a while I would come across a piece or a person that was akin to the gospel…something vibrantly original and engaging.  The life of Clarence Jordan and his writings was one such modern-day wellspring that I began reading at that time.  And the effect of sitting by myself and quietly and simply asking for Christ’s mercy was beginning to have a very settling and centering effect that resonated deeply with my character and the wisdom of God’s presence and actions, which had always been unfathomable to me, and which I now found that I did not have to justify…that had been a part of the early church…and in which I could simply rest more and more.  Interestingly enough, I found that all these things were making me less and less concerned with the things that most occupied my fellow students at university, my friends in the church, and my family who surrounded me.  It was a great gift, and attitude that would carry me through some very difficult situations in years to come.

__________ 

[1] Cassian and the Fathers: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition, Merton (ed. O’Connell), Cistercian Publications: Kalamazoo, 2005, p.5.

 

True Spiritual Friendship

Leave everything and come with me into the desert.  It is not your acts and deeds that I want; I want your prayer, your love.[1]

 This is a beautiful expression of the call to prayer.  And Carlo Carretto followed this call into the desert.  I, too, felt called to follow.  And I, too, have followed to this isolated location in northern Canada.  But North American Protestants have no such hook on which to hang their hats. 

I had been wrestling for several years with the notion of marriage.  As a Protestant the only resource that I had been taught was valid for discerning God’s movement in life was scripture.  Even without recognizing the influences of tradition and culture Paul was clear, marriage can compromise our desire to follow God as our lover.

Carretto records the instant when he realized: Marriage is not for you.  You will offer your life to me.  I shall be your Lover forever.[2]  I cannot say how much as a young man, and now as an old man, that I very deeply and very pervasively and very insistently felt the same call to love God.  I found myself wondering if marriage was right for me?  But as much as I heard God calling to me as a lover, so I was also incessantly and simultaneously led to draw closer to Carol.  As a sister in Christ.  As someone who also felt a call to love God completely.  This was a mutual and simultaneous discernment process on both our parts…the same call as Carretto voiced: I (God) shall be your lover forever.  As well as, You will offer your life to me.  But with a decidedly different twist, Marriage is for you.

 Looking back over the past thirty years of my married life there have been people beyond number who have judged me, both in terms of whether what I was doing was actually valid contemplative prayer, as well as whether I could be married and not have in some way compromised my absolute love for Christ?  In part, this is why I now live a simple life of prayer in isolation.  And being in love with a woman who is likewise totally in love with Christ has proven that mariage can…manifest all the virtues by its own charms…assail vices by its own virtue…temper adversity and moderate prosperity.[3]  Over the decades I would encounter people whose cultural background and personal biases in these regards were none other than the guise for coded outworkings at veiled judgmentalism and failures with their own personal psychological maturity and spiritual practices – many times eisegeting my life to justify their own lack of the ability to truly love, both God and others.  And these judgments took a toll on me as I sought to be mentored by people who should not have been mentors – no matter what their official office.  I would discover that the sweetness of my love for Christ was big enough for the appropriate love of a spouse on this earth as well – a compassionate helper…and me to her.  For if you cannot love people who you can see, it is impossible to love God, who you cannot see.[4]

 So…[h]ere we are, you and I, and I hope a third, Christ, is in our midst.[5]

Among the martyrs of Uganda, all one in the witness of their death and of their blood, were several who were not Roman Catholics.  Who is to say these were not canonized along with the others?  A great sign is seen in Africa.[6]

 __________

[1] Letters from the Desert, Carretto, Orbis, 1972, p. xvii.

[2] ibid, p. xvi.

[3] On Spiritual Friendship, Aelred of Rievaulx, Cistercian Publications, 1977, p. 71.

[4] 1 John 4:21

[5]Aelred, ibid, p. 51.

[6] Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton, Image, 1968, p.30.

 

Too Many Churches And One Christian Friend

With the dissolution of my relationship with the parachurch organization I had been attending, I found myself drawn back to the church itself.  But by now I had attended and experienced a wide array of traditions: Evangelical, Baptist, Pentecostal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic.  One summer I had attended a church that because of infighting had from one viable church split into three unsustainable factions.  Each of these experiences seemed to confirm in me my desire to locate myself within tradition.  But their combined influence was simpy too confusing to my mind at the time and led me off on tangents.  While I certainly learned to understand and relate to a wide variety of Christian practitioners, I also experienced myself as the target of denominational recruitment, which I appreciated no more than my experiences with parachurch organizations.  I certainly felt most comfortable in empty Roman Catholic churches – but the rubrics of Sunday Mass were beyond me, and at no point did Catholic practioners explain to me anything clearly at all.  Merton’s essential writings on the topic of contemplative prayer were readily understandable to me.  But when Catholic pratictioners explained why they were in church it seemed to have little to do with his writing.  And Catholics who I asked to read Merton were just as bewildered as were the people from the parachurch organizations that I had left.  Where was I to find someone who understood?  As much as I wanted to find a mentor and become accountable, I was coming to the realization that there was no one whom I knew who could lead me in the development of these practices.  I eventually came to the conclusion that I would simply have to bide my time while I finished university.

There was also a very pleasant situation that came about at this time as well.  I met the woman who would eventually become my wife.  This all started with a simple conversation at a church.  She, too, talked about the manner in which she experienced God.  And prayer.  And in an academic culture full of young men with agendas, and young women with notions of romance, she spoke very deeply of how she had just returned to school after a year spent caring for her mother’s terminal cancer.  She spoke of her discovery of God in the midst of that.  And we would go and sit and talk for hours.  She was simply a friend…someone who if not sharing my practices, certainly knew more deeply than anyone who I had ever met the care amd compassion of God.  And out of that, our love for one another began to grow.

 

My Growing Awareness Of The Relationship Between Private Prayer and Compassion For Others

Around this time I noticed that the more I withdrew into contemplative prayer the more I  simultaneously became aware of the compassion that I had for people when I was with them. The security and intimacy with which I had been nurtured as a child had psychologically given me a sure footing to see the world through others’ eyes and the desire to respond to their needs on their terms. And I found that as I closed my door in prayer I could even more readily see beyond the barriers that people place between themselves and others…beyond the confines of culture, society, and nation. In the space I was creating for God, space for concern for others was also created. I found that my awareness of the suffering and pain that others were going through was being translated into actual small responses to others, reaching out to them through prayer, and conversation, and gifts. The closer I attempted to become to God by simply resting in God’s presence, the more the suffering of others came to rest in my heart as well.

 __________

The compassion that Jesus felt was obviously quite different from superficial or passing feelings of sorrow or sympathy. Rather, it extended to the most vulnerable part of his being. It is related to the Hebrew word for compassion, rachamim, which refers to the womb of Yahweh. Indeed, compassion is such a deep, central and powerful emotion in Jesus that it can only be described as a movement of the womb of God. There, all the divine tenderness and gentleness lies hidden. There, God is father and mother, brother and sister, son and daughter. There all feelings, emotions, and passions are on in divine love. When Jesus was moved to compassion, the source of all life trembled, the ground of all love burst open, and the abyss of God’s immense, inexhaustible, and unfathomable tenderness revealed itself. [1]

 __________

[1] Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life, Nouwen, McNeill, Morrison (Doubleday, 1982), pp. 16-17.

 

The Road Ahead

.

A brother asked one of the elders: How does fear of the Lord get into a man? And the elder said: If a man have humility and poverty, and judge not another, that is how fear of the Lord gets into him.[1]

Sitting in my dorm room he said that the discipleship program of which I was a part was for men and women who had a passion for Christ. And he wanted to know whether I had such a passion? What he had really come to find out was why I had missed several of our weekly meetings and had become more silent during times of group prayer. It was by no means a cult. There had been no brainwashing. And I sensed that he was genuine and cared for me. But I said that there was another path that I was taking. That I did not see it as being either contradictory or challenging to the bible studies and scripture memorization in which I had been involved. But he wanted to know if I knew to where this new path led? And I said that I did not. He cautioned me about going the spiritual life alone. Then he prayed. And then he left. They were wise, sound, and mature words of caution.

Up until that point I do not think that I had ever felt so alone. There was a certain relief that I felt at not having to join with others in the over-scrutinizing of every foible of my own and others’ personalities and characters…an affirmation with which I nevertheless wrestled for the next four years, until I finally gave myself permission to lay it to rest after reading Krister Stendahl’s, The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West.[2] But that there was my own inner holy ground that had been increasingly disregarded in favour of a more modern corporate model of church management had become increasingly clear beginning upon my return to university in September of 1976 and building through the following spring. It was as if after a year of basic instruction in evangelical discipleship, we were now being shaped into leaders who would disciple others based on the same model with which we had been trained. But as grateful as I was for the grounding I had received, I could not fully take my place as a leader so shaped. In fact, I had genuine questions about the value of this style of leadership. It is a sad fact that no one in my life – even through four years of what I still consider to be good seminary training – would bother to take the time to sit down with me, listen to my story, and then tell me that there was a fifteen hundred year old tradition in which I would find myself most at home…that would not come until fifteen years later in my life in a conference in 1991. All I knew was that the things that I had experienced over two years of discipleship training seemed increasingly mechanical, forced, and more in keeping with select models of modern Western corporate culture than with the life and teachings of Christ. Something was not lining up with either my own previous experience of God in prayer, and increasingly with the freedom I was finding in the writings of Thomas Merton.

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart form that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I many seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.[3]
__________

[1] The Wisdom of the Desert, Merton, p. 27.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krister_Stendahl
[3] Thoughts In Solitude, Merton.

 

Purity Of Heart

‘Obedience’

 And so we should know, then, that we must devote ourselves to the toil of bodily abstinence in order to be able to arrive by this fasting at purity of heart. [1]

Other practices came into play in my life at this time as well, but always practiced in private.  Nor are they being written about here for the sake of exhibitionism, but instead out of a spirit of encouragement, and certainly not out of any notion of mastery or perfection.  For at this time I found myself bereft of sound, daily, practical guidance.  And I often felt self-conscious and a fool for thinking the things that I did at the time, and even more so as one who went ahead and carried them out.  For while many of my fellow students would have understanding for walking into my room and finding me with my head bowed and hands folded in prayer, and while some would have an appreciation if I had told them that I was not eating much that day because I was fasting, I do not think that any would have understood if they found me prostrate on my dorm room floor.  For that was now another practice that I was learning.  But this was strictly private.

 Throughout my time at university I always had a roommate.  These men were also people of faith.  But in spite of that in my reading of scripture I had often come across passages that spoke of bodily prostration before God.  As far as I knew I had never met anyone who had done this.  Gotten down on their knees, yes.  Prostrate on the floor, no.  But something was deeply stirred in my for weeks before I tried this.  Alone.  On my own.  With my door locked.  And my roommate tied up some other place.  And I still remember it.  For it was the first time in my life that I surrendered fully to the authority of God…and that I simply took my place among all things.  And surprisingly this all came with a great sense of relief.  Years later in the Dairy of Etty Hillesum I would read her delightful words: I am a kneeler in training…  And at the end Merton’s autobiography I would discover the scene of him prostrate before the altar taking is vows and laughing at the notion that in some way, without knowing how, he had actually made the right decision.  Yes.  Yes.

But for myself alone in my room, and with a shaky confidence, there was a flood of emotion.  And a great sense of relief.  And then a heart filled with praise.  And it was as if there was a mask that had been taken off.  There on the floor I was simply and most purely just my self to a degree that I had not before experienced.  But what is more, when I arose I felt like I never wanted to put that mask on again.  Never.  Ever.

[1] Institutes, Cassian (tr. Ramsey, 2000, p.131.)
[2] The Diary of Etty Hillesum
[3] The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton

 

Discovering Frugality Of Spirit

And so the question arose: What was I to really expect out of my life as a Christian? In the broadest sense I wondered what was truly possible? By this time I had only the most vague of notions of individuals or communities of faith who intentionally and regularly sought to honour God with their whole life. But now having had contact with such a community I found myself encouraged and open to more. But what concrete actions would I take? At first I simply began to name certain attitudes and pursuits that at that time I thought to be important for my identity. And after serious consideration I found that all of them were no more than distractions, drawing my attention away from God and the world around me. And as I looked forward to my life after university I began to wonder how I would continue to draw closer to God throughout the rest of my life? I found this later question in particular to be vexing.

What did become clear was how inter-related the true Christian life was. I asked others about the purpose of fasting…I who had never gone hungry in my life. It was a practice which I ran across regularly in my reading of scripture. But what was its purpose? Words like obedience were of great importance to Christ and Paul. But no one had ever asked specifically for my obedience with anything that had to do with the church before. But what I experienced was an increasing hunger for a greater awareness of God. Not in some special, mystical way. But in a quiet way…a way that honoured things around me in their most basic identities. I would have to start to strip down. And so on occasion I began to fast. And it seemed to me that these times made more of an impact on me if I merely cut back, than if I abstained altogether.

__________

And we should not believe that mere fasting from visible food can suffice for our perfection of heart and purity of body if a fasting of the soul has not also been joined to it. For it has its own harmful foods by which it is fattened even without excessive eating and as a result of which it tumbles down the precipices of dissolution. Its food is detraction and it is delightful indeed. Its food is anger as well, and even if it is very slight it nonetheless feeds it with this miserable nourishment for a while and at the same time prostrates it with its lethal savour. Envy is the food of the mind, corrupting it with poisonous juices and constantly and ceaselessly torturing the wretch with someone else’s prosperity and success. [V]ainglory is its food, and it pleases it with it delicious taste for a while but afterward it strips it, lays it bare, despoils it of every virtue, and dismisses it barren and bereft of all its spiritual fruits, not only causing it to lose the deserts of its arduous labours but even heaping up greater torments. Every desire and wandering of a feckless heart is a kind of sustenance for the soul, supplying it with harmful foods but thereafter leaving it destitute of heavenly bread and of solid nourishment. If then, by the most sacred fast we abstain from these as much as we are able, we shall well and aptly observe bodily fasting. [1]

[1] Institutes, Cassian (tr. Ramsey, 2000, p, 130)

 

Stumbling Upon The Name Of Christ

There is a most enriching little practice which is ancient in origin.  Its goal is to keep the one praying in God’s presence.  And it consists in merely bringing to mind the name of Christ the Lord.  No more.  No less.

 At this point in my life I was being encouraged to pray.  That was a good thing.  Prayer is, after all, most intimate.  Telling someone else that you love them is an extremely vulnerable action.  And so I was learning to pray.  But I mostly dreaded doing so when I was among others.  I found myself being self-conscious.  Not wanting to be inarticulate I was more aware of the prayer itself than of God.  But when I was alone, it felt much more like prayer should feel…relaxed and at rest with someone who is the best of friends.  Most often I really had nothing to say.  I was content.  I had no need to ask for something.  I simply trusted that God knew better anyway; why bother muddying the waters?  So it came about quite by accident that when I was drawn to prayer, that I would start to pray by addressing God, but that I would just as quickly run out of things to say, aware that I was already content. Over time this became a habit.  Sometimes I would add a word or two: Lord Jesus, have mercy, or God, thank you, depending on the state of my life.  But eventually I came to see that with something  as small as a little whisper that I could come right back to being centred on Christ.  But I never shared any of this.  I never told others because the measure of the stature of one’s spiritual life among those who were formally encouraging me was like I experienced everywhere else…based on one’s ability to be articulate and to promote oneself.  Without anyone to name this ancient practice or to encourage me in it years passed and I often thought to myself that I was simply stupid because I was not more explicit than this.  But at the same time it produced in me so much more than that for which I could all on my own ever devise.  

 If someone would have known to have asked me, if they would have created an environment in which I had felt cared for so that I could have spoken freely, then I could easily have said that it was all that I wanted from God.  And increasingly I was coming to feel that it was all that I needed as well.

 A man is enriched by the faith, and if you will by the hope and humility, with which he calls on the most sweet Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ; and he is enriched also by peace and love.  For these are truly a three-stemmed life-giving tree planted by God.  A man touching it in due time and eating of it, as is fitting, shall gather unending and eternal life, instead of death, like Adam…  Our glorious teachers…in whom liveth the Holy Spirit, wisely teach us all, especially those who have wished to embrace the field of divine silence and consecrate themselves to God, having renounced the world, to practice undaunted hope.  Such men would have, as their constant practice, and occupation, the invoking of his holy and most sweet Name, bearing it always in the mind, in the heart and on the lips… [1]

 

__________

[1] Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart, Kadloubovsky and Palmer, pp. 172 – 173.