Post-mortem reflections

June 12th, 2009

Gwen’s funeral recently. On the whole a happy event. She was almost 90 and had suffered a long decline into Alzheimer’s disease. It brought the extended family together and that was the happy part. There was much reminiscing by four first cousins sitting at the same table afterwards, all in their 70’s. Only at weddings and funerals, it seems, do we all manage to get together.

It struck me during the mass that it is a pity the deceased does not get a chance to say anything to the congregation. Much is said about him, or her. Much is remembered, but it is all one sided. So I thought that when it comes to my turn I would prepare something to be read out. There are many references to ‘eternal rest’, ‘at peace’ and ‘resurrection’ etc., but all these are stale metaphors and convey nothing of the death event itself, what it might have meant to the individual (and surprisingly, what it must mean to the family). Nor, not surprisingly, apart from the conventional metaphors, is anything said about the post-mortem reality. So here goes.

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Palm Sunday

April 5th, 2009

I have written nothing for a long time. I have been able to write nothing. My thought processes seem to have reduced to preoccupation with the immediate here and now and any kind of intellectual exploration, any kind of sustained thinking has become an impossibility. Prayer, after a few brief moments initially, is a battle with drowsiness. There is no fervour, no longing to be fully engaged, no élan. Nothing. I wonder if I am drifting into the apathetic quietude of senility.

From time to time I am seized with a sort of anguish at this unresisting slippage into a mental twilight. Questions arise, recurring again and again, seeking and not finding answers. ‘Of what value is this human life, me?’ ‘What significance has this moment?’ ‘Do these thoughts, hopes, wishes, prayers mean anything at all, or are they simply mental fluff stirred up by the cold winds of reality?’

Against this, never has human life seemed more precious. I exult in the energy and joyfulness of young people. I am full of admiration for those whose generous commitment and willingness to go beyond the mere requirements of the job leads them to help others. And yet, never has the human biosphere been more raw and bleeding. There is the calculated and unapologetic abuse and exploitation of ordinary people by governments, financial and business institutions. There is the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by the Israelis – the mindset which led to the ethnic cleansing and extermination of the Canaanites thousands of years ago still flourishes in Israel. There are large sections of the Old Testament I can no longer read and I wonder how formerly I was ever able to consider them the word of God and accept the horrors they describe so uncritically.

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Ash Wednesday

February 24th, 2009

It is customary during Lent to read a spiritual book, something to encourage introspection and a more consistent attitude to prayer, etc. I seem to have gone off anything to do with spirituality, theology or prayer. I find them impossible to read now. They do not speak to me. They have nothing to say that has any meaning. Once I devoured them, searching for knowledge. All that is gone. The knowledge they imparted seemed to make sense in a former life. I have gone beyond that. I no longer live there, or anywhere, really. I am a visitor constantly revisiting where I used to live and be. No longer belonging, yet not a stranger either. So, instead of scuffing through the sawdust of yet another book I will write my own, commenting on the only literature that seems to have any meaning for me now – poetry and in particular, that of R. S. Thomas.

Young and Old

Cold sea, cold sky;
This is how age looks
At a thing. The people natter,
The wind blows. Nothing they do
is of worth. The great problems
Remain, stubborn, unsolved.
Man leaves his footprints
Momentarily on a vast shore.

And the tide comes,
That the children play with.
Ours are the first questions
They shelve. The wind is the blood
In their veins. Above them the aircraft
Domesticate the huge sky.

Age does alienate. We find ourselves strangers in a familiar land. The vast universe of former times, then so full of promise, of adventure, of opportunity, of unknown marvels – has been domesticated. The crises, the struggles and challenges are ours no longer. Another generation has taken over.

And so I sit at the edge, out of play, observing the to-ing and fro-ing, my remarks lost in the gusts of general conversation. Meanwhile the children play, oblivious in the immediacy of their experience. All this is behind me. Before me the cliff falls sheer in the darkness.

This is the reality that conventional books on prayer and spirituality never seem to touch. This is life at the edge when there is no way back into the centre of things. The world has not lost its beauty. On the contrary, but never was one more aware of how ephemeral and fragile this beauty is. A beautiful face is more poignant than ever because like old photographs it no longer belongs to my reality. At the edge a fissure begins to open in even the most intimate of relationships.

God does not exist at the edge. He is not there in the centre of things. He is certainly not there beyond the sheer cliff fall. He was present once. You felt his touch… surely that was not your imagination. But now you stand alone before the cold sea, buffeted by a cold wind. You hear its sound. You certainly do not know where it comes from or where it goes. But you suspect that that is the way it is meant to be.

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God

February 2nd, 2009

Thinking about God as I was going to sleep last night… The death of a cousin the other day had the effect of turning the mind towards attitudes to mortality and in Ireland death is not a secular event. I really do not like much religiosity. Most of it is false – both in the sense that it does not reflect the true nature of things, and false in the sense that a lot of it is a pose adopted because it is felt to be appropriate. Funerals are occasions where religiosity is much in evidence. I am not referring to the grieving family and friends now. Their grief is sincere and belief in God and the next life a great comfort. I am referring to those who otherwise never venture near a church and to those who thrive on rituals and ceremonies, gestures and incense. Ireland still loves its rosaries and medals, statues and holy water. These pious social rituals make me feel very uncomfortable and it is difficult to explain why because to do so would involve a discussion of the nature of God.

The problem with God is that he does not exist. This, of course needs to be explained. I am not an atheist. God is, but he does not exist. I suppose if you are not comfortable in dealing with paradoxes there is no point in embarking on this sort of conversation. To exist, literally, means to stand out, to appear over and against other beings. God is not a being like other beings. He is not even the greatest of all beings, the greatest being that could possibly be imagined, as St. Anselm would have it. God, literally, is nothing, no-thing.

And if He [God] is neither goodness nor being nor truth, what is He then? He is nothing [nihtes niht]. He is neither this or that. Any thought you still might have of what He might be – He is not such at all.  (Eckhart: German Sermon 23)

There is nothing new in any of this. It is negative, or apophatic theology, as opposed to positive, or cataphatic theology and it was all thrashed out hundreds of years ago by Maximus the Confessor and Dionysius the Areopagite among others. They were addressing the problem – how does one talk about the transcendent God? Their solution was first to approach the discussion of God in a positive way, piling superlative upon superlative until you realised that nothing you said, or could possibly say, bore any relation to God. Words, thoughts, concepts are all utterly inadequate and seen to be so. The only thing to do then is point out everything that God is not. God is not anything that could be thought, said or imagined. We are left with a vast emptiness, an emptiness filled with mystery. It is only then that we begin to approach God as he really is.

God is transcendent in the sense that he is totally other, beyond any reality that we could know or understand. Which means that he does not exist in the terms of our material existence, in terms of our cosmos. And yet he relates to us. He is, as Augustine puts it, intimior intimo meo, more intimate to me than I am to myself. This is the ultimate paradox. How can there be a relationship between the utterly transcendent God, the beyond the beyond, and this ephemeral, contingent ‘me’? This is not something that can be explained logically or by any metaphysical system. And yet there are times when it is a fact of experience. I can hear the sceptic saying, ‘What you think you experience cannot possibly be the transcendent God. It must be the result of your imagination, or some chemical imbalance in the brain. You cannot experience what is not there and by definition God cannot be there, or anywhere.’

My common sense self cannot refute the logic of this argument. And yet there have been the experiences, so real, so absorbing, so unlike anything anything hitherto experienced. And these experiences fit in with what I believe and with what others down the centuries have experienced and believed. So real are these experiences that one is left with the conviction that it is logic and philosophy which  are inadequate. And that would be OK if one’s daily life was filled with the experience of God but this is rarely, if ever, the case. There may have been just one, or two, a few such moments and then nothing. And not just nothing. Just as after a flash of brilliant light the darkness seems more impenetrable than before, so too now with regard to the possibility of God. For a while the darkness was luminous, numinous in its attractive yet terrifying intensity and then that faded to a sort of grey, foggy obscurity which deadens the feelings and dulls the mind.

And so, here I am in my dull everyday reality, a reality which, if you think about it, excludes the possibility of God, where some people perform their pious words, gestures and prayers – anachronistic behaviour, tolerated but not really understood by the majority, or perhaps even by themselves. A comforting blanket wrapped tight to keep out doubt. I do not doubt. I do not understand but I have no doubt. God is, but I am at a loss to explain why I find these pious rituals so distasteful, so unGodlike. I keep silent therefore. I acknowledge my ignorance, my inability to understand. Let R. S. Thomas say what I cannot.

Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left.

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Pharisaism alive and well

January 12th, 2009

I came across this just yesterday in Thomas Merton‘s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Although written in the early sixties and referring to America it seems very appropriate today given the situation in Gaza.

In politics, as in everything else, pharisaism is not self-righteousness only, but the conviction that, in order to be right, it is sufficient to prove that somebody else is wrong. As long as there is one sinner left for you to condemn, then you are justified! Once you can point to a wrongdoer, you become justified in doing anything you like, however dishonest, however evil.  *

It would seem that in Israel, even after two thousand years, pharisaism flourishes.

* Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,  Sheldon Press, London, 1977, p. 74

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Glimpses of Reality

November 25th, 2008

I am coming to love silence and I find noise excruciating – and there is so much noise now wherever you go (I don’t count natural sounds, like the wind, as noise). That’s not too strong a word. It tears into the mind, shreds thought and mangles feelings. But silence is like looking into a deep, still pool, cool and mysterious. There are depths and depths and the silence draws you in, immersing you. Silence is the baptismal font of the Spirit and if only we could immerse ourselves in it fully, eventually, when we emerged, we would be transformed. That too is beyond me. I dip into the silence like a tentative swimmer hesitant to leave the shore of the familiar – which I long to leave, but I don’t know how.

An interesting sentence from Meins Coetsier’s book on Etty Hillesum.[1]  He comments on the fact that her writing and silent meditation helped her to “tap into an area within herself that in society had mainly vanished.” Voegelin believed that the disappearance of meditation as a ‘cultural factor’ resulted in the practical ignorance of those aspects of reality touched on by myth, philosophy and mysticism. In other words the secularisation of society has deprived people, or most people perhaps, of an awareness of the depth of reality, of the spiritual dimension. He goes on to talk about a ‘perverse closure of consciousness against reality’ (p. 129).

I wonder about the ‘perverse’. For some, perhaps, yes. They make a conscious decision to ignore any spiritual promptings. But for many, I think, socialisation into a secular and materialist culture has simply obscured any such awareness. The occasions when they might perhaps suspect that there is more to reality than the material surface of things are when they encounter a limit situation. Though it is also the case, as David Hay found in his Nottingham survey,[2] that many people feel that there is ‘something there’, that there is more to reality than surface appearances. But ‘a feeling’ is about as far as it goes. This is not something people generally feel they can talk about with others. Spirituality, religion, mysticism are all taboo subjects. We all have capax dei and in some exceptional people, like Etty Hillesum, awareness of it develops in spite, or maybe because of external circumstances. But in most of us it needs to be nurtured and guided.

There are similarities between the the life of the foetus in the womb prior to birth and our lives prior to death. The foetus does not have the reflexive consciousness of self which develops in the child towards the end of the first year of life, but if it had there are many indications that there is more to existence than the inner confines of the womb. Not least of these is the sound of its mother’s voice and other sounds. If the foetus was able to reflect it could deduce that there was another world beyond the walls of the womb. But it could never be brought to understand, if per impossibile it possessed language, the nature of this world. It could have no idea of colour, or Spring with blossom on the trees, a sunset, or falling in love. Without experience there can be no understanding.

Similarly with us. There is more to our existence than positivism or materialism would give us to understand. All religions postulate a spiritual dimension to reality. There is also a wealth of evidence gathered by bodies such as The Religious Experience Research Centre at Lampeter, and the various organisations which research the Near Death Experience, that there is more to life than the physical existence of the body. Unlike the foetus, we are in a position to reflect on our experience. When Sir Alister Hardy set up the Religious Experience Research Unit (as it then was) at Oxford in 1969 he initiated a national survey based on a fundamental question:

‘Have you ever had an awareness of a power or presence different from every day life?’

The answer from many, many people was, yes, and subsequent research suggests that more than 50 per cent of us, at some time or other in our lives, have some experience of the transcendent. Hardy, and those after him who took up his research, tapped into a rich seam dating back into pre-history. He concluded that it is as natural for us to be religious as it is to be self-conscious. We have an innate awareness which transcends the concrete and empirical here and now. This awareness is not within our control. These experiences occur suddenly and are unanticipated. They cannot be produced at will.  As William James pointed out,[3]  they are ineffable, transient, they have a noetic quality and they are passive. Most importantly, they are not trivial. More often than not they convey so much meaning and are of such significance that they are never forgotten. They can be so real that everyday reality pales in comparison. They can be life-changing. They can be as simple as a sense of loving presence; as profound as union with Reality transcending time and space.

Death involves an even more radical transition than that of birth. Some would argue that it is not a transition but an extinction and in a sense this is true. The body dies, decomposes and eventually ceases to exist. But these experiences suggest that the mind, the person, can and does transcend the purely physical and that death is not the end. Just as the unborn foetus could never grasp what it is like to be born, to see, to run and play, sing and love, so too with us. In these profound experiences we get only the briefest, crudest glimpses of what lies beyond the grave.

[1]   Coetsier, Meins, Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence: A Voegelinian Analysis, U. of Missouri Press, 2008 p. 127

[2]   Hay, David. Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit. Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd, 2006.

[3] The varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture XVI

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Growing older

November 16th, 2008

L’exil n’est pas un acte anodin, et nécessite une réflexion et une maturation, souvent problématiques. Pour le poète, partir, signifie avant tout quitter un sol, une terre maternelle, et donc, physiquement se déraciner. Il faut rompre en un sens avec le passé proche ou lointain, mais aussi avec une forme de pensée qui appartient à ce sol désormais obsolète…

[Sylvène Guery, Rilke, la poésie comme seul bagage

http://www.brown.edu/Research/Equinoxes/journal/Issue%2010/eqx10_guery.html]

Growing older is like a slow journey into exile. Gradually, and one by one, the roots which bound one so closely to the terre maternelle of one’s physical self relax, loosen and let go. The mind lags behind, still irresistibly attached to younger dreams and emotions. The face in the morning mirror evokes a disbelieving, “Is that how I am?” But no, that is the aging exterior. There is more, much more, than what appears on the surface. It is time now to let go and focus on what Rilke called Weltinnenraum. The uprooting caused by the ageing process has freed you to seek that inner space which n’est ni celui du monde, ni celui de l’âme, ni non plus l’espace en trompe-l’œil d’un miroir que le monde tendrait à l’âme, mais un lieu d’échange.

The last expression is the key. That ‘inner space’ is not solitary space.  Weltinnenraum is not synonymous with sunyata. It is not the néant, or the void of Buddhist contemplation. Neither is it a solipsist retreat into some inner world detached from reality. It is that state where the distinctions me-and-not-me, this-and-not-that, disappear and everything is simply itself, completely open. This is how Rilke puts it:

‘Through all beings spreads the one space:

the world’s inner space. Silently fly the birds

all through us. O I who want to grow,

I look outside, and it is in me that the tree grows!’

I came across this story in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. His experience in the concentration camp focused his mind on the fundamental existential questions to do with life as nothing else could have.

This young woman knew she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through the window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,: she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes,” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here – I am here – I am life, eternal life’”

Weltinnenraum is the experience that all life springs from the same source and is one. It is the experience of the connectedness, not only of life, but of the sky and the sea shore, the wind in the trees and the flowers in spring.

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Silence

September 20th, 2008

Je suis de plus en plus frappé par le vide des mots, des discours, des livres où l’auteur, où les auditeurs, où les lecteurs demandent à une ferveur qui ne leur coûte rien et qui ne les engage pas, une dispense de vivre. C’est pourquoi je ne suis sensible, au fond, qu’à la grandeur de vie que le silence, presque toujours, exprime le mieux.

(Boissière, Bernard De, and France-Marie Chauvelot. Maurice Zundel. Presses de la Renaissance, 2004. p. 340)

[I am struck more and more by the emptiness of words, those  discussions, or books where the author, or the readers demand, with a fervour which costs them nothing and which does not engage them, to be dispensed from living. That is why, basically, I am only sensitive to the wonder of life which is, almost always, best expressed by silence.]

I have been struck, for some time now, by the unwillingness, I would almost say the inability, of people to tolerate silence. Everywhere you go people walk about with their ears plugged by their iPods. Even here where I live they walk along the cliffs, or by the shore, with the music of the waves, the wind and the birds obliterated by electronic sounds. In supermarkets and bars, restaurants, hotels and lifts, practically everywhere, you are assailed by recorded sound. Silence, the natural sounds of life and living, the hum of conversation, the voices of children at play are not allowed. Silence, especially, must be filled with something, anything. It is not to be endured.

Why, I wonder, are so many so afraid of silence? I do not suppose the answer is simple or straightforward. There are many factors, not least the urban environment in which most people live, with its incessant noise. On all sides we are assailed by sounds which distract us from ourselves, from thoughts, from thinking. It seems as though we do not like being simply with ourselves, simply being aware – aware of thoughts as they come and go, aware of the lives of others, aware of life unfurling within and without. Silence for so many is like waiting for a bus, a barely tolerable hiatus in the onrush of doing, to be avoided if at all possible. 

Silence, and wonder, and awe, and love all go together. They are sisters inducing an inner stillness which plumbs the depths of being. The initial response may be fear, even terror, caused by a sense of vertigo before empty depths.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.

And, perhaps, this is why so many avoid it if possible, want to be dispensed from simply living in the present now. In the silence there is nothing to distract, nothing to draw the attention away from thoughts and feelings that surge from within. And so, they never discover that when the thoughts and feelings have unfurled, when they have emptied themselves out, there is left a deeper inner silence. This is the hushed silence, the expectant silence, before the mystery that we are to ourselves, the mystery of being.

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Jesus after Jesus

September 2nd, 2008

Reading Frederic Lenoir’s Le Christ philosophe, one of the books I picked up on our recent holiday. The other is Jesus apres Jesus by Mordillat and Prieur. What attracted me to both of these books is that they promised to say something about a Jesus detached from all the trappings loaded on him by subsequent people, by the Church itself, by theologians and exegetes, fundamentalists and liberal Christians. I particularly like the insights of Lenoir. He begins with Dostoyevsky’s story of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. It illustrates very graphically and directly how far the Church has drifted from the teaching and example of its founder – assuming that Jesus did in fact found the Church – so much so that were he to return he would be in danger of being accused of being a heretic. He concludes with a long discussion of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman in Chapter 4 of John’s Gospel. His thesis is that, beginning with Paul, the ecclesia became an institution and an end in itself. Jesus’ very simple message that religion, based on faith and love and stemming from an interior encounter with God, was not about institutions, or cultic activities, or elaborate moral codes and  subtle distinctions. Religion is love – simply that. Loving God, loving one’s fellows, acting always with the knowledge that the Spirit is the unifying force within each of us. The elaborate rules, hierarchic distinctions, procedures and ceremonies of the Church get in the way of religion as Jesus understood it. These were the very things he criticised and condemned the Jewish establishment of the time for.

Reading Jean Sulivan – Le scandale n’est pas la dégradation des mœurs, il est dans l’annexion de Jésus par un système de pensée. The striking thing about Sulivan is that he looks beneath the surface. The clerical scandals have shocked everyone and set everyone talking. Blame is attached to the institution – the way it is organised, its preoccupation with power and control, to the insistence on celibacy, etc. And yet, institutions and their preservation would seem to be the dominant motive force throughout the world today. This applies not just to the Church but to politics and economics as well. You only have to look at the American elections – it matters little which candidate wins, the establishment will still be in charge. Similarly with the mess the financial institutions have caused – yet no one is suggesting that the greed of the relatively few should lead to their being censured. The attitude of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor applies not just to some of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church but to many administrators of major institutions. ‘We, the elite know better. We can handle freedom and the empowerment that goes with it. We will provide you with an economic system, with heroes and role models, with material security and, in return for your obedience, relieve you of the need for decision making. You will be happy… well, relatively content.’ And so in return for acceding to the three temptations of the ‘wise and dread spirit’, material security, celebrity heroes to worship and the miracles of technology*, we choose not to consider that there might be a better way of living, a more sustainable and ecologically beneficial economic system, a value system based on love rather than greed and want.

For a short time, before Jesus was ‘annexed by the system’, Christians, liberated by belief in Christ and the Resurrection, lived an alternative life style which so impressed their contemporaries that over the space of a couple of hundred years they transformed society. They accepted the freedom that comes with belief in the Resurrection of Christ. They dared to live that freedom, freedom from fear of suffering and death, from fear of opprobrium and being ostracised, from fear of poverty and insecurity, from fear itself. No, that is putting it a bit too strongly – no doubt they felt fear at the prospect of all these, but it was a fear they could deal with. It did not paralyse them, or inhibit them. They could deal with it and face the prospect of suffering because of their faith in the Resurrection. Their values were based not on the immediate material, physical and emotional here and now, but on human relationships – with each other, with the beautiful world in which they lived and, above all, with God. This love transcends the immediate here and now. It transcends the awkwardness and difficulties of personal relationships, the intransigence of others, the ennui of dark, grey days and the bitterness of sickness. It transcends even death itself. 

And so, for a few tens of years the courage of comparatively few Christians shone like a beacon in a world dark with superstition and dread fate. The world of the late Roman Empire was decadent and effete. It  had lost its way and was too tired to cope with crumbing structures and the barbarian invasions from the north and east. The contrast with the vigour and enthusiasm of the local Christian churches, with their concern for the poor, the old and the sick was marked. It made sense for the Emperor Constantine to reverse the restrictions against them and hand over to them many of the administrative functions of the Empire. Overnight being a Christian no longer meant a person was in danger of arrest, torture and death by execution. Overnight being a Christian carried with it political, economic and social advantages and people began to seek baptism for these reasons. Overnight the Church began to change. Bishops acquired power and wealth and as this increased their freedom to live according to the values of Jesus diminished. The Good News became commonplace and clichéd. Too many compromises – no longer were bystanders shocked and challenged by the absolute commitment of ordinary people taking the Gospel seriously. Oh, there were still ‘authentic’ Christians, those prepared to make any sacrifice for Christ crucified, the Christ who continued to be the stumbling bloc, not only for the Jews and Gentiles, but now for these social Christians as well. These men and women in seeking to live the Gospel became the latest voices crying in the wilderness, in the Western Desert, from the Isle of Lerins, and from the caves of Cappadocia.

* cf Matthew 4:1-10 

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Prayer in the context of time III

May 29th, 2008

With baggage

The default state of the human person is that we are laden with baggage. We come with all our baggage and lay it before God. This baggage consists of relationships, commitments,ties, links, worries, projects, problems, past history, guilt – a whole load of stuff. Much of it good. It is what goes towards making us what we are now. Some of it bad, or unwholesome. We would like to unload it onto God because it is heavy and burdensome. Both the good and the bad. We ask him to take it, or at least, to share the load, because it is weighing us down. Some of it we can bear, are happy to bear, but most of it, the older we get, we would like to let go. We have had enough and we no longer have the energy and the strength of our younger days. For many, this is enough. It is enough to present themselves before God and ask him to share the load. Eventually, though, we are going to have to let go because we soon discover that we cannot enter the inner room of the heart encumbered with it all. It is not just that there isn’t room for us and our baggage as well. The trouble is all this baggage gets in the way. It clutters up the mind. We need to let it go. 

Without baggage

There is a play by Jean Anouilh called ‘The Traveller without Luggage.’ It is about a man who loses his memory as a result of a wound during the First World War and is incarcerated in a mental hospital for 17 years. No one knows who he is. His family eventually discover him and bring him home. He recognises no one. The first thing his family does is to remind him of what he was like and the shame he has caused them. Three years of war, a wound which took away his memory and then, after twenty years, his return home and all they can do is to festoon him with his old self. There was not a single fault, bad behaviour, stupid incident that he wasn’t reminded of. All his relations were relentless in putting away the twenty odd years of his absence when here he was – a new person. But no – that wasn’t allowed. He was put back into his former unhappy life. “Have you never been happy with me?’ he asked his mother once when she was bitterly reminding him of his past. “No, never.’ she said. What he must have done for his family to refuse to give him credit or allow him a new start! His past, his old self had nothing to offer him. The only thing for him to do now was to leave, to look for some tenderness and affection in someone who had need of him and who didn’t care about his past.

So often we are to ourselves what that man’s family was to him. We will not allow ourselves to begin again. We are encumbered with a whole load of stuff and we can’t let it go.  We will not allow ourselves to come out of the darkness of the past into a new day. One of the stories in the NT which sticks in my mind is the story of Nicodemus in John’s Gospel in chapter 3. He came to Jesus at night. In other words – out of darkness. There follows a dialogue in which Jesus explains that it is necessary to be born again. The Catholic Church, no doubt as a result of the references to water and spirit, understands being born again as referring to Baptism and Confirmation. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians understand it in terms of a conversion experience. In the context of today’s talk on prayer I would like to understand it as getting back to the simple, uncomplicated, letting-go prayer of childhood at bedtime. 

There is a story of two Buddhist monks, one older, one younger, on a journey. They come to a ford in a river and there encounter an old woman too timid to cross by herself. They help her across and continue with their journey. After about an hour the younger says, ‘You know, our rule says we should never touch a woman.’ 

‘Are you still carrying her,’ replies the older one. ‘I left her back by the river an hour ago.’

The problem is letting go. It is not possible to dump all your baggage onto some conveyor belt and have it carted off to some black hole where it will never be seen again. You have to let go of each piece, individually, one by one. Sometimes you have to let go of it many times before it’s gone. Even then it’s not gone. But if you can get it gone enough to close the door of your inner room for a while you are doing well.

When we lived in Colchester we were quite near to a Greek Orthodox monastery in Tolleshunt D’Arcy. They have a little chapel which, I think, is one of the holiest places I have ever been. It is quite small, almost, but not completely, dark, a few icons barely seen in the light of the sanctuary lamp. The strange thing is that when one goes in and sits down you disappear in the darkness. You disappear to yourself, conscious only of this holy space, the flickering light of the lamp, the barely distinguishable icons, and a presence. 

Which brings us to God, who has only been mentioned in passing as it were. God – we use the word too glibly as though there was a general and uncontested agreement as to what it means. But of course there isn’t. When I was doing theology we used to laugh about the Athanasian Creed, which used to be said on Trinity Sunday. It makes a series of statements about God and immediately contradicts each statement. St. Augustine gives us a flavour of this when he describes God as

most hidden and most present; 

most beautiful and most strong, 

standing firm and elusive, 

unchangeable a
nd all-changing; 

never new, never old; 

ever working, ever at rest; 

In fact God is indescribable and very often paradoxes are the only appropriate way of saying anything at all about him. Eckhart said, 

All that you think and say about your God is more you than him; you blaspheme him, for all those wise masters of Paris cannot say what he really is.  If I had a God whom I could understand, I would never want to recognise him as my God.

The God of philosophers and descriptive terms is a conceptual God and not the God of reality. After Pascal’s death a piece of paper was found sown up in his coat and on it was written an account of an experience so profound that it marked him for life. 

The year of grace 1654,

Monday, 23 November, feast of St. Clement,.From about half past ten at night until about half past midnight,

FIRE.

GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacobnot the god of philosophers and of the learned.Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

But in the end this sort of experience, or Augustine’s experience of God within, is paradoxical because God is as far beyond experience as he is beyond words. There is a story in the Old Testament about Elijha which, to me at least, says more about God than any of these.

Elijah walked forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb.

There he came to a cave, where he took shelter. But the word of the LORD came to him, “Why are you here, Elijah?”

He answered: “I have been most zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts, but the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to the sword. I alone am left, and they seek to take my life.”

Then the LORD said, “Go outside and stand on the mountain before the LORD; the LORD will be passing by.” A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the LORD–but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake–but the LORD was not in the earthquake.

After the earthquake there was fire–but the LORD was not in the fire. After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak

The Hebrew is not easy to translate and there are various alternatives to ‘a tiny whispering sound’. The traditional translation is ‘a still small voice’, but the one I prefer is ‘a sound of gentle silence’. Ignatius of Antioch described God as “the silence out of which the word comes forth.” In the inner room we enter that silence. Sometimes in that dark silence we achieve the simple trust of childlike prayer and know that all shall be well. And sometimes, as R. S. Thomas puts it

 There are times

When a black frost is upon

One’s whole being, and the heart

In its bone belfry hangs and is dumb.

John Hick, the philosopher talking about prayer asserts that ‘we are all linked at deep unconscious levels in a universal network in which our thoughts, and even our emotions, are all the time affecting others as others are in turn affecting us.’ This is simply an assertion, an article of faith, and he admits that there is no evidence to support it. He gives the impression that the good wrought by prayer is simply the result of this human solidarity, unconscious and unfelt. No mention is made of God. Perhaps this last is an oversight and he does not intend to exclude divine influence.

Prayer is very mysterious and I think it does work in something like the way Hick describes. Although there is no empirical evidence for it, there does appear to be a network linking, not only we sentient humans, but also everything in the cosmos. Rupert Sheldrake, describes morphic fields, and to me at least is quite convincing. There is also a wealth of anecdotal evidence of a bond between people, usually where there is an intimate relationship, such that when something significant or tragic happens to one the other is immediately aware that something has happened to the other even though they may be widely separated. This is the sort of thing to which Hick is referring. But prayer goes much deeper than what may simply be a natural bonding.

There is, first of all, the urge to pray. This is universal and has always been a factor in our religious behaviour. This is so deep rooted that, as I have already said, even those who have never previously shown any religious commitment or belief often turn to prayer in life threatening situations. The cynic might say that here is an example of someone making Pascal’s wager. But I do not think so. This is no calculated gesture based on a rational assessment of the odds but a deep-seated emotional response to a limit situation. Prayer springs from the deepest roots of the self, from that zone in the affective system which straddles the conscious and the unconscious mind. Here situations, events and actions initiate emotions, feelings and moods, which are evaluated as meaningful and significant. Here we touch the foundations of our being. None of this is in the rational mind. It is not something we can conceptualise or argue with. It is a given, with the numinous quality of an ancient memory.

Here we sense not just the interlinking network which binds us all, although that is sensed. Here, obscurely and tentatively, we sense the Presence within. This is what prayer does. It brings this Presence to the surface of our minds. It opens the channels which link us and which have been narrowed and constricted by egotism and self-interest. God is active, not as a puppet master manipulating the strings of cause and effect. God acts in and through us. This I believe to be true, though I am not aware of it in any concrete sense, nor is there any empirical evidence of it. I will never forget one day when I was in the Little Brothers. Dominic Voillaume had come to make his annual retreat and had spent a week in a hermitage on San Capracio, the mountain above the village. I walked into the room where he was bent over a table reading the paper. He turned to greet me and his face was – transfigured, is the only word for it. There was joy, peace, beauty – impossible to describe. It was almost embarrassing to look him in the eye his face was so naked. The story of Moses coming down from Mount Sinai and having to hide his face behind a veil came to mind. Dominic had just come down from the mountain and his face reflected what he had experienced.

I think when people talk about prayer they concentrate too much on the knowing and rational activity and not enough on the emotive and feeling side. When meditating it is relatively easy to come quite quickly to the existential limit of the senses and to sit simply aware that one is sitting. If there are thoughts and images they run in the background like an unattended television screen. Emotionally one feels calm and at peace. There may have been emotional turbulence but that, like the thoughts, has been put to one side. One still has not reached the limits of being; knowing – yes, perhaps, being – no. Like the child at bedtime we put all our trust in God. As R S Thomas puts it

Young

I pronounced you. Older

I still do, but seldomer

now, leaning far out

over an immense depth, letting

your name go and waiting,

somewhere between faith and doubt,

for echoes of its arrival.

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