Whenever I find it possible, I listen to Krista Tippett ’s weekly hour-long NPR program, Speaking of Faith. Each week Tippett interviews someone whose life and witness is a testimony to faith, ecumenically defined. Yesterday Tippett interviewed geophysicist and spiritual thinker Xavier Le Pichon during a program entitled "Fragility and the Evolution of Our Humanity — A Geophysicist's View." Here’s the beginning of the interview:

Ms. Tippett: Xavier Le Pichon is a pioneer on the field of plate tectonics. He was a formative figure at one of those junctures where science not only radically revises its own assumptions but changes the way all of us see the world. When he began his life as a scientist in 1959, the prevailing view among geologists is what we know call "fixist." There was no knowledge of tectonic plates beneath the ocean with fault lines and constant motion that across time had configured and reconfigured the earth's crust and entire continents.

Mr. Le Pichon: The earth was considered a place where everything was static. You know, things were moving up and down but never laterally. Actually, the earth is an extraordinary living being with the motions of the oceans and continents continuously changing, evolving, and this was a tremendous shock.

Ms. Tippett: Still a practicing scientist, Xavier Le Pichon is also a lifelong Catholic. Since 2003, he has lived in an intentional community he and family helped found to provide retreat for families caring for a loved one with mental illness. Before that, for nearly three decades, he and his wife raised their family of six children at the original French L'Arche community, centered around people with mental disabilities. This aspect of his life was foreshadowed by his previous adventures at great universities and exploring the depths of the world's oceans in submersibles.

Near the conclusion of the interview, Le Pichon spoke briefly about his prayer life:

Mr. Le Pichon: And I then discovered later on the love of the suffering people, which I found could not be separated from the love of God. Actually, I could not go to God unless I went through these people. And all this is, in a sense, incompatible. Somebody once asked me, "How do you maintain unity in your life? Aren't you schizophrenic?" And my answer was, "It's through prayer. I spend a lot of time in prayer." I pray at least one or two hours a day. And it is through the prayer of God that has taken people into this extremely different field. I think it's the power of God that when you ask him he lets you unify things that apparently cannot be unified.
As I listened, it stroke me as quite remarkable that Le Pichon, a world-reknown geophysicist, should openly say that he prays “at least one or two hours a day,” that in his prayers God has taken him to love suffering people, and that in prayer God lets him “unify things that apparently cannot be unified.”

Le Pichon prays an hour or so every day. While I don’t know how he prays, I suspect that a good portion of his daily prayers is taken up with the Church’s traditional Morning and Evening Prayers. As a Roman Catholic he may well call his prayers The Liturgy of the Hours. If my intimations are correct, Le Pichon surely uses the Psalms as the foundation of his prayers. By building his prayer life on the Psalms, Le Pichon is called to remember the poor, the weak, and suffering again and again as he daily murmurs or perhaps quietly sings the Psalms in his home. Remembering the weak and suffering in this way has led him, as he says, into an “extremely different field,” that of living within an intentional community whose vocation is to serve the mentally ill.

As a Christian Le Pichon finds God’s creative love for an evolving world a reason for awe and wonder. Again, while I don’t know exactly how Le Pichon prays, I suspect that sitting in Silence before such a mystery plays a considerable role in an appreciation for his True Self and his understanding as to how we humans have evolved under God’s care.

A world-famous geophysicist who has introduced us to the study of plate techtonics intentionally lives with those who suffer from mental illness. Remarkable! Through prayer God has given Le Pichon the desire and ability to unify two supposedly different ways of thinking and living: scientific examination and prayerful listening. Le Pichon is a witness to what a radically expanded understanding of prayer can do.

If you’d like to read the transcript of the entire interview, visit http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/fragility/transcript.shtml.

I'd rather be cleaned first.

Although C. S. Lewis is much loved by all Christians (and deservedly so!), it's not well known that Lewis came to believe that prayers for the dead and purgatory were, after all, commonsensical Christian realities in the Grand Scheme of Things; that is, they made a good bit of Christian common sense to those who trust and love God. Here's what Lewis says in Letters To Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer:

Of course I pray for the dead. The action is so spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against it would deter me. And I hardly know how the rest of my prayers would survive if those for the dead were forbidden. At our age, the majority of those we love best are dead. What sort of intercourse with God could I have if what I love best were unmentionable to him?

I believe in Purgatory.

Mind you, the Reformers had good reasons for throwing doubt on the "Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory" as that Romish doctrine had then become . . . . The right view returns magnificently in Newman's DREAM. There, if I remember it rightly, the saved soul, at the very foot of the throne, begs to be taken away and cleansed. It cannot bear for a moment longer "with its darkness to affront that light." Religion has claimed Purgatory.

Our souls demand Purgatory, don't they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, "It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy"? Should we not reply, "With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I'd rather be cleaned first." It may hurt, you know." -"Even so, sir."

I assume that the process of purification will normally involve suffering. Partly from tradition; partly because most real good that has been done me in this life has involved it. But I don't think the suffering is the purpose of the purgation. I can well believe that people neither much worse nor much better than I will suffer less than I or more. . . . The treatment given will be the one required, whether it hurts little or much.

My favourite image on this matter comes from the dentist's chair. I hope that when the tooth of life is drawn and I am 'coming round',' a voice will say, 'Rinse your mouth out with this.' This will be Purgatory. The rinsing may take longer than I can now imagine. The taste of this may be more fiery and astringent than my present sensibility could endure. But . . . it will [not] be disgusting and unhallowed." (Chapter 20, paragraphs 7-10)

Lewis had no doubt that God in his infinite love will welcome us into his Presence with open arms. But he also had reason to believe that we Christians will quite naturally like to polish our shoes, mend the tears in our shirts, and brush our teeth before we step into the Throne Room. Of course, if may be something of Lewis' British appreciation for politeness that prompts him to want to "clean up a bit" and comb his hair that teases him into an appreciation for purgatory. Be that as it may, such a Christian impulse reflects no desire to improve ourselves morally or engage in some form of salvation by works. The conviction that purgatory may be an appropriate vestibule for the Throne Room simply reflects a Christian's redeemed desire to "get ready for worship," making sure he or she knows well how to step into the Royal Presence. As I understand Lewis, a willingness to be in purgatory is simply living out one's desire to learn how to express a fully an appreciative life of Christian courtesy before God; perhaps we might well take a final lesson or two on how to sit, stand, and sing (or learn to play an instrument) before the Royal Family, the Most Holy Trinity.

The reason I mention Lewis' conviction that purgatorial training of some sort belongs in the Grand Scheme of Things is to suggest that our prayer life--especially if it takes the form in Centering Prayer--may also be a kind of purgatory as Thomas Keating suggests:

Contemplative prayer is a kind of purgatory. Purgatory in Catholic theology is a state in which we complete the journey to divine union in the next life if we have not quite finished it here. Every bit of progress means an enormous benefit for us and for everyone else in the human race. To be on this journey is really the greatest contribution one can make tothe human family. This journey does not just involve what happens in prayer; rather, what happens in prayer enables us to live daily life as a continuation of the purification process. The ups and downs of daily life, including its very everydayness, are the arena in which the Christian journey takes place. God is in solidarity with our lives and deaths, just as they are. Perfection does not consist in feeling perfect or being perfect, but in doing what we are supposed to do without noticing it: loving people without taking any credit. Just doing it. (Intimacy with God (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996, 63-64.)

Prayerful Clarity

In Further Along the Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck makes this observation:

When Jesus gave his big sermon, the first words out of his mouth were: "Blessed
are the poor in spirit." There are a number of ways to translate "poor in spirit," but on an intellectual level, the best translation is "confused." Blessed are the confused. If you ask why Jesus might have said that, then I must point out to you that confusion leads to a search for clarification and with that search comes a great deal of learning. For an old idea to die and a new and better idea to take place, we have to go through periods of confusion. It is uncomfortable, sometimes painful to be in such periods. Nonetheless it is blessed because when we are in them, we are open to the new, we are looking, we are growing. And so it is that Jesus said, "Blessed are the confused." Virtually all of the evil in this world is committed by people who are absolutely certain they know what they're doing. It is not committed by people who think of themselves as confused. It is not committed by the poor in spirit.

Peck is on to something, and if you're like me I suspect there's a good bit of confusion in your life as there in mine. Here I'm thinking not only about the numerous befuddlements we experience daily (Where the dickens did I put those pliers?), but more importantly my confusions have to do with genuine perplexities about complex moral issues (What about assisted suicides for those who suffer painfully terminal diseases?), family issues (Is it all right to counsel my son to obtain a divorce?), and matters of national importance (Can I be a Democrat while opposing abortion?). Sometimes, depending on whom I've recently heard, I find myself changing "sides" on issues for which other make seemingly persuasive observations. In short, it's not unusual for me to find myself in the middle of things--confused.

In prayer, that is, in the distillation of interior silence and listening, God, as Jesus promises, blesses those of us who are confused . As we read Scriptures (especially the psalms), meditate on the Gospels, say our Morning and Evening Prayers, attend to frequent Holy Communions, practice some form of centering prayer, and allow the mind of Christ to shape our vision and actions, entering daily silence gives the Holy Spirit opportunities to clarify what's possible, what's right, and perhaps where ambiguity about somethings is all right. After all, even our opinions and decisions, as good as they may be, are nonetheless always in need of more thorough saving and forgiveness. Lest we think we've "got it," there's always the possibility that God will give us not only the right decision, but also a good way to express it with love and compassion. And confusion about that is often the tough part.

Image: Fra Angeica (1387-1455), The Sermon on the Mount

Chipping Away

In The Orthodox Way (St. Vladimir's Seminary P, Crestwood, NY: 1979), Bishop Kallistos Ware enters a sculptor's workshop to find a wonderful metaphor clarifying what happens when in contemplative prayer we strip away all the predicates of our descriptive selves (for example, "I'm a professor; my name is Andrew; I'm a Lutheran; I go to church; I'm the father of many children; I pray; I'm married; I like beer, and so on!") and release ourselves from notions of importance (or insignificance), success (or failure), current happiness (or sadness), intellectural abilities (or lack thereof), and so on. When we practice "letting go" of such illusive notions about who we really are and arrive at our innermost heart--where God is always intimately one with us--then we down-dwell with Him (or Her, as some come to know the Presence) and we realize and enjoy our True Self Jesus, who/Who we are:

The apophatic method, whether in our theological discourse or in our life of prayer, is seemingly negative in character, but in its final aim it issupremely positive. The laying-aside of thoughts and images leads not to vacuity but to a plenitude surpassing all that the human mind can conceiveor express. The way of negation resembles not so much the peeling of an onion as the carving of a statue. When we peel an onion, we remove one skin after another, until finally there is no more onion left: we end up with nothing at all. But the sculptor, when chipping away at a block of marble, negates to a positive effect. He does not reduce the block to a heap of random fragments but, through the apparently destructive action of breaking the stone in pieces, he ends up by unveiling an intelligible shape. (124)

Many ways to enter prayerful contemplative living

For those of us who live in the Bluegrass of central Kentucky, it' s almost always a pleasure to drive by a horse farm and enjoy the fencing.

Sometimes in the spring when the foals can be seen, I stop my car to say hello to mom and her newborn. Last year Moonstone Farm on Grimes Mill Road (a lovely part of the horse country south of the Lexington) let me walk around its paddocks, taking pictures of the horses, barns, and fencing.

A lover of such fencing, I often think of them as reminders of how I spend my time "fence-walking" or pilgrimaging through life. Just as the placement of well-grounded fence posts provides solid anchorage for the railings of horse-farm fencing, so praying the Daily Offices and setting aside time for centering prayer serve as "fenceposts" for contemplative living. Between the posts, between our morning and evenings, there's a good bit of "railing," that is, our time during the day. Assuming that one's "fenceposts" (prayer in the morning, prayer in the evening) are well in the ground, we are fairly ready to put the railings in place and walk along their timbered bars, the hours between sunrise and sunset.

What is that "railing" walk for those of us who have the fenceposts in place? How do we pass our "day hours" as we go from post of post? Here, by way of encouragement, Merton suggests how one might live prayerfully and contemplatively as the day passes, inbetween the fence posts:

Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train. Above, all, enter into the Church's liturgy and make the liturgical cycle part of your life-let its rhythm work its way into your body and soul. (New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions Press, 1961), 216.

What Merton is suggesting is that we allow our more or less concentrated contemplative times of prayer to extend themselves into every facet of living. With a contemplative heart, we say hello to the cashier at WalMart; with a contemplative mindset, we answer the phone to find out who's calling and why; with a contemplative attitude, we wash the dishes, do the laundry, grade student papers, mow the lawn, work on the budget, and work as an attorney, a salesclerk, a pastor, a custodian, or a retired professor. Just so, all of life becomes a contemplative journey.

Image: A picture of the paddock fencing I took at Moonstone Farm on Grimes Mill Road.

The Fruit of the Holy Spirit

This morning Harry came over to share some coffee and chat about things. After we said Morning Prayer together, we managed to talk about Quaker Elton Trueblood and then our conversation turned to St. Paul’s listing of the “fruit of the Holy Spirit” in Galations 5:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law.

How, we asked ourselves, does one come to produce or enjoy such fruit? Harry suggested that the Spirit’s fruit isn’t “produced” by anything we do. I nodded in agreement: the fruit of the Spirit is simply the outward evidence of an inward indwelling or abiding in Christ.

After Harry left to distribute a carload of noontime “Meals on Wheels,” I had occasion to read again in my dog-eared copy of George Maloney’s Inward Stillness. And wouldn’t you know it! In Chapter 2, “A Silenced Heart,” Maloney makes this observation:

This [silent indwelling of God] is a gift from God’s Spirit. It flows as fruit from deep union with God outwardly to effect not only a deeper silence of the mind but a silence that affects also the very way we look at others, smile, the way we walk and talk. St. Paul described the fruit of such silence of the heart as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self-control.” . . . When the heart is silent and the whole [person] is integrated, then she enters into the Kingdom of Heaven that is within. (31-32)

Those who practice contemplative living, prayerful listening, and frequent restful quietness within God’s presence, know from experience that Maloney speaks truthfully. When in Great Silence we quietly say goodbye to our self-nurturing egos and self-flattering illusions of importance, something wonderful happens. Quietly, often slowly but surely, the Holy Spirit begins the reshaping of our interior selves. Transformation takes place.

As we move through our days within this awareness of the Spirit’s creative use of silence—sometimes intense, sometimes not—we learn, as Maloney says, “to stand before God in honesty, humility, silent to our own need to tell God what we have been doing for Him” (33). In other words, any sense that we are doing something important simply goes by the bye. Instead, we become aware that God is doing something quite remarkable within us. Our actions—when done in love, joy, peace, and patience--are really the fruit of the Spirit.

Literally doing nothing, we center “upon God as the Source of all our energies,” as Maloney puts it. The point is this: we really don’t have to work real hard to bear fruit. Rather, it’s through “abiding” in God that we are set free to release the fruit of Spirit.

Isn’t that right, Harry?

World News This Week

While I'm not entirely sure, I think it was Reinhold Niebuhr who recommended that we pray with Scriptures in one hand and a newspaper in the other hand. That's good advice whether or not my memory of its ascription to Niebuhr is correct.

Several months ago Louise Heiss, a friend at Faith Lutheran Church, recommended that I subscribe to World News This Week, and I have found this ministry of the Episcopal Church of St. John the Baptist
Lodi, California, USA, both a source of valuable information and a profoundly helpful resource for my prayer life. Here's how it works. Each week a volunteer scours through newspapers and news reports to learn where and how people are suffering from hunger, war, injustice, natural disasters, torture, false imprionment, economic stress, and environmental damage. Then that person writes a prayer and shares it with all of us who subscribe to World News This Week.

When I receive my weekly notice, I print myself a copy and place it in my prayerbook. Then, when its time for various "other prayers" (confessions, intercessions, thanksgivings, praises) in Morning and Evening Prayer, I pray one or more of the petitions, adding them to my prayers for family and friends. I pray these peitions slowly so that I keep their intent memorably in tact during the day. Admittedly, sometimes I don't know the circumstances surrounding some petitions and therefore find it necesary to do some research, usually right after my World News This We prayer incentives arrive.

You may want to look into subscribing to this service. Here, for example, is what I received this morning, what is now printed and placed in my prayerbook:

We pray for a commitment to life so full that we will not accept the ways of death. We pray to be led more fully by the Spirit. We pray to accept ourselves, and others, as children of God. Not enslaved by fear, but joyfully adopted into a family dedicated to witnessing the reality of life as it ought to be, we pray to live by the realization that Cornel West worded this way: “Indifference to injustice is more insidious than the injustice itself.”

Deliver us from indifference to the prevalence of slavery in the world. Let us not just pray for, but also devote our attention and contribute our resources to, the work of initiatives that combat child prostitution, that pursue liberation for individuals, that advocate for cultural and political change, and that break our hearts. Some say there is more slavery in the world now than at any time in its past. Deliver us from apathy.

Deliver us from indifference to the abuses of imprisonment. As we recall a fifth casualty of suicide among the detainees in Guantánamo, Cuba, let us not forget to mourn the death of a real person, a man from Yemen, a man with a name, Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, held since February 2002, untried, allegedly a Taliban fighter. Let us not forget his fellow detainees, the Uighurs, and let us not accept the way journalists were denied information and access both to the suicide and to the protests of the Uighurs.

Deliver us from indifference to the efforts to suppress discussion of the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China 20 years ago this week. All the old-fashioned forms of censorship are being supplemented with new efforts to make social networking unavailable. Let us celebrate the creativity, not to mention the courage, of those who would keep the images available. We pray especially for civic organizations in Hong Kong holding a vigil and otherwise noting the anniversary.

Deliver us from indifference to the circumstances of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi and her country, Burma. Arouse effective response to the conscription of child soldiers, sexual violence, forced displacement and other violations of international law.

Correct our unwillingness to acknowledge the connection between prosperity and peace. Redouble our efforts to mitigate the damage that economic problems cause, not just for the sake of those who are most badly affected by also for all of us, who eventually suffer the consequences of a poorer world that becomes a more violent world.

Dismantle our preoccupation with simplicity. Grant us grace to understand and to work with the realities of no prevailing power group in Somalia, of no certain path for the swine flu virus, and of ills where we can find no one source of blame.

Finally, we pray you deliver us from indifference to evidence that some lessons are being learned. Brazil is set to show the lowest rate of Amazon deforestation in 20 years. Companies in the U.S. are responding to consumers, federal regulators, employees and environmental watchdogs with better monitoring of carbon emissions and with projects to reduce emissions. We can learn to expect better results when we make better efforts. Too often we come to you in childish ways, but always you respond to us with a wise love. We know that it is a human obligation to care for the world, and, we thank you for your abiding companionship in the effort.

Amen.

Image: Pray for the World

The Quiet Place

On a regular basis, a good many of us find it difficult to place ourselves both physically and spiritually in a "quiet place” where by desire and desert solitude we can simply “be” in the presence of God. I know that we're told that we can do so even in a busy airport where in some corner, amid all the announcements and distractions, we can enter an oxymoronic "terminal tranquility." But most of us beginning contemplatives naturally prefer the stillness of a garden, a room part, an empty chapel to the hurley-burley of a chair in WalMart. Somewhere deep inside of us there’s a nagging realization that Tom Merton has a good part of it right with this comment, made late in his life:

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. (The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. ed. William H. Shannon. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003, 131)

Speaking for myself, I don’t really have a country life, my days cultivating the land; nor do I spend my hours in a “broad and serious literary culture” even though I’m a retired English professor. I wake up, sit in centering prayer for a while, have breakfast with June, do the traditional prayer office with her, and then try to make some headway in accomplishing the day’s obligations. Today, for example, I’ve got to “clean out” the debris (logs, old torn-away decks, hunks of styrofoam, and so on) from the lake cove. Jackson Lake is feed by three rivers; and when the rains come long and hard, upstream trash comes pouring into the lake. Since we live on the east side in a cove, the westerly winds blow the stuff up against the shore line. Right now it’s awful. So this week, my neighbors and I will load up a Georgia Power trash barge , and five or six times we’ll transport the head-high piles of river junk five miles down to the dam where we’ll unload it for recycling. That work will take four or five us three or four days. Some contemplative life, eh?

The good side of everything is that I get to work outside, away from the incessant noise of the TV. And while the lake trash sometimes smells awful (rotting leaves in the water), I do get to feel the sun’s warmth inbetween the showers, hear the screams of a hawk now and then, and see the rhododendrons in full bloom.

I take encouragement that Merton concludes his environmental remarks concerning the contemplative life when he says, “These things [“the exercise of arts and skills”] 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.” Well, I suppose, like you, I too am getting “the type of exercise that is needed.” You do your office work, mow the grass, and feed the kids. I know that Merton himself was also frequently frustrated by his lack of time for solitude and quiet. After all, his monastery was nothing less than a huge bread factory, and he often complained about its noise and commercial preoccupations. The grind of the tractors in the fields were particularly bothersome (as were the roar of the bombers flying over from Fort Campbell.) All of which is to say that none of us has a so-called perfect place, neither inside or outside ourselves, wherein we may be always fully at rest in God. That will come only in death and life thereafter. But we should all take encouragement by the desire we have within us. That desire comes by the prompting of Holy Spirit. Keeping our eyes and ears open for beauty and loveliness, we can practice pausing often—and sometimes for quite a while—to enter the Quiet we seek. For me, sometimes the beginning of a contemplative turn comes just sitting to catch my breath. I know the same goes for you too.

There is in the heart "the peace of God that passeth all understanding," a quietness and confidence which is the source of all strength, a sweet peace, which nothing can offend, a deep rest which the world can neither give nortake away. There is in the center of the soul a chamber of peace where God dwells, and where, if we will only enter and hush every other sound, we will hear His still small voice. (The Fire of Silence and Stillness: An Anthology of Quotations for theSpiritual Journey. Ed, Paul Harris. Templegate Publishers, Springfield, Illinois. 1995) , 15.

The Interior Air

Thirty-three years George Maloney published his little book, Inward Stillness (Denville, NJ: Dimension, 1976); from my dog-eared copy I share this lightly edited (for more inclusive language) notice:

Silence is the interior air that the spirit of man needs in order to grow spiritually. Such silence leads us into the inner recess and there his Heavenly Father will recompense him (Matt.6:6). This recompensing comes to us in the healing of psychic disturbances, the chaotic meaninglessness of so many past experiences that hang like dried skeletons within our memories, the anxieties that force man into an isolation of deadly loneliness. We become consoled, loved by God in an experience that is beyond concepts. We know that we know God loves us! This being-loved-by-God experience at the deepest level of our consciousness restores our strength, pushes us to new self-giving and creativity. (30)

This is what happens during morning and evening prayer, within centering prayer, during the open intervals of our day, while awakening to night's dark silence, and when pausing long in the slow, quiet reading of Scripture. During such times we open ourselves to the mind of Christ. During such times, we breathe deeply "the interior air."

Image: Samantha Lamb, Breathing Deeply

Praying Selflessly

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together reminds us that we practice selfless prayer when we pray the psalms:

The psalms teach us to pray as a fellowship. The Body of Christ is praying, and as an individual one acknowledges that his prayer is only a minute fragment of the whole prayer of the Church. He learns to pray the prayer of the Body of Christ. And that lifts him above his personal concerns and allows him to pray selflessly.

To pray selflessly means that we practice a letting-go of many seemingly important personal needs. In the psalms we let the egocentric desires of the self recede into the background and eventually learn to let them go entirely. We enter the lives of other people, especially the poor. As we practice letting go of ourselves, we learn learn that our emptiness is filled with the suffering of others and the active Presence of God. We enter the place and space where "no things" weigh us down and we are lifted up with and for the world in Christ's Body to God the Father. This is the work of a lifetime, but it may surely begin and continue whenever we enter God's gift of the psalms.

_____

Image: Dean Mitchell, Rowena

On Thursday, The National Day of Prayer, June and I stopped by Faith Lutheran Church’s twelve-hour (9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.) Prayer Vigil. While in prayer for about a half-hour at noon, in addition to there were several readings: one from Wendell Berry, two from Pastor Luckey, and this one by Jim Wallis:

This world of ours is not working. Even while we cling to the illusion that everything is all right, we know in our hearts that it is not. In our society the gap between the rich and the poor is larger than any time in our whole history. The threats to our environment seem to grow every day and the middle classes are afflicted with an anxiety, a loneliness and a fear that we know too well.

On a world scale, the poor are dying in enormous numbers now -- forty thousand children each and every day. The world is gasping for breath, pleading for mercy for us to stop. The credo of the affluent comes to us from bumper stickers which read, "I shop, therefore, I am." This is a faith statement, a theological affirmation of a culture that is in danger of losing its own soul. Now we are on the edge of war in the Middle East. We face a horrible catastrophe to protect our access to cheap oil. The President says the oil symbolizes our way of life, but it is really our national addiction to an over consumption that is killing the poor, killing the earth and denying us our own humanity. The questions we must ask are "Where have we gone wrong and how do we find the resources to move into a different future?" Where do we turn?

I was a seminary student in Chicago many years ago. We decided to try an experiment. We made a study of every single reference in the whole Bible to the poor, to God's love for the poor, to God being the deliverer of the oppressed. We found thousands of verses on the subject. The Bible is full of the poor.

In the Hebrew scriptures, for example, it is the second most prominent theme. The first is idolatry and the two are most often connected. In the New Testament, we find that one of every sixteen verses is about poor people; in the gospels, one of every ten; in Luke, one of every seven. We find the poor everywhere in the Bible.

One member of our group was a very zealous young seminary student and he thought he would try something just to see what might happen. He took an old Bible and a pair of scissors. He cut every single reference to the poor out of the Bible. It took him a very long time.

When he was through, the Bible was very different, because when he came to Amos and read the words, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream," he just cut it out. When he got to Isaiah and heard the prophet say, "Is not this the fast that I choose: to bring the homeless poor into your home, to break the yoke and let the oppressed go free?" he just cut it right out. All those Psalms that see God as a deliverer of the oppressed, they disappeared.

In the gospels, he came to Mary's wonderful song where she says, "The mighty will be put down from their thrones, the lowly exalted, the poor filled with good things and the rich sent empty away." Of course, you can guess what happened to that. In Matthew 25, the section about the least of these, that was gone. Luke 4, Jesus' very first sermon, what I call his Nazareth manifesto, where he said, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to poor people" -- that was gone, too. "Blessed are the poor," that was gone.

So much of the Bible was cut out; so much so that when he was through, that old Bible literally was in shreds. It wouldn't hold together. I held it in my hand and it was falling apart. It was a Bible full of holes. I would often take that Bible out with me to preach. I would hold it high in the air above American congregations and say, "Brothers and sister, this is the American Bible, full of holes from all we have cut out." We might as well have taken that pair of scissors and just cut out all that we have ignored for such a long time. In America the Bible that we read is full of holes.

In the silence after this reading, I can assure you that some of us were praying for the poor. We were asking God to help us respect, feed, clothe, educate, and house the poor--the beloved of God.

Why we pray the psalms

We pray the psalms for many reasons. Here is an important one: we pray the psalms to express our solidarity with people who are suffering and in pain. As privileged “first-world” people, most of us have little personal experience with genuine poverty or communal misery. Our first-world culture urges us to purchase happiness, and so we buy memberships into book clubs, golf clubs, health clubs, camera and country clubs, associations and organizations of all sorts to make sure we’re on the road to satisfaction and pleasure. Life is a cruise.

The psalms point us in another direction so that we learn the preoccupations of God. In The Promise of Paradox Parker Palmer reminds us that we may bend our lives into God’s beloved poor:

It is the suffering already present in the world which we can either ignore or identify with. If pain were not real, if it were not the lot of so many, the way of the cross would be pathological. But in our world with its hungry and homeless and hopeless, it is pathological to live as if pain did not exist. The way of the cross means letting pain carve one's life into a channel through which the healing stream of the spirit can flow to a world in need.

The psalms, so often written by people “down under,” help us create and form an alliance with those who suffer affliction, anguish, discomfort, and hardship. In the psalms we hear the voices of alcoholics (it's much like going to an AA meeting), drug addicts, prisoners orphans, and widows. In the psalms we sing the songs of the unemployed, the tormented, the disfigured, and the mentally ill. These are the songs of those immigrants trapped in homelessness. These are the whisperings of the poor and suffering.

When we pray, say, sing, or chant the psalms we are taken away from our self-preoccupations and in solidarity join hands with the dispossessed, discouraged, and discomforted.

We pray the psalms because often it's a first step toward action. Here, like the Samaritan Jesus called “good,” we allow ourselves to look down into life’s ditches and find the wounded, bruised, and bleeding. In the psalms we take our eyes off the highway signs promoting self-success and find ourselves climbing down the highways' shoulder banks where most of the world’s people live, work, love, and die.

Yes, the psalms often express our personal emotional feelings. But they also articulate the distress of our brothers and sisters in the third-world, those who live across the tracks, and those who are largely unseen by most of us. In the psalms we listen for their voices, learn to sing their sobbings and lamentations, and eventually embrace, as best with the Spirit's help, their pain and suffering. We pray the psalms to enter the mind of Christ.

Image: Finding Grace

The Kingdom of God is within you

"The kingdom of God is within you'"corresponds to the sense of taste. This spiritual sense perceives that God is not just close to us, but that weare rooted in him. The food we eat is taken inside of us and becomes us through its transformation into cells in our body. In a sense, we become what we eat. In the transcendent relationship, we become cells in the Body of Christ, the new humanity whose eyes and ears are opening to reality at its deepest level.

Keating, Thomas, Awakenings (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 39.

Sharing a beautiful video

A friend sent me this video, and it is too beautiful not to share with others.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy.

http://www.findingjoymovie.com/

Eastertide Hospitality

Yes, it’s been over two weeks since my last posting, but now that I’m back I’ll be posting much more regularly. In the past half-week, my wife and I have traveled from Kentucky to Missouri, specifically to reunite myself with an dear friend whom I’ve not seen for over thirty-five years. What a heart-hugging experience. Somewhat isolated in the Ozark Mountains, farmer Chas Roth and his wife Liza welcomed us with open arms and squeezed us warmly with gracious and wonderful hospitality. And wouldn’t you know it? Last night during Evening Prayer St. Peter said that we are to “practice hospitality ungrudgingly to one another” (I Peter 4). Chas and Liza have taken those words seriously all their lives! Sharing more of our weekend with you later today, I’ll be posting pictures at http://www.yourfamilyblog.blogspot.com/. Right now my point here in Praying Daily is to remind all of us that within every Benedictine Monastery there is always a reminding sign that says, “Welcome Each One as Christ Himself.” That's how Chas welcomed me over the weekend. It was wonderful.

Chas' hugs reminded me of God's great welcome and "Come on in!" As we offer our lives in prayer to God and contemplatively enter the Mystery of His Presence, we do so aware that God is always the Gracious Host, always welcoming us, holding the door open so that He can enjoy our entrance into His “farm.” As the Great Gardener, God likes to show us around, urging us to shake hands with all and everyone in His creation. So walk like a beloved guest today in God’s world. Say “Hi” to the sky, the animals, the fields, gardens, and everyone whom you meet. Say “Hello” and “Good morning” to place where you work, live, and worship. Say, “God bless you” to the ground you walk on and to the cashier who rings up your bill at the grocery store. Say “Thank you!” to every Chas and Liza who welcomes you into their lives and arms. Hug God so close that you can hear His heart beating.

The Easter Vigil

On Holy Saturday evening, June and I participated in the Easter Vigil at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Covington, GA. When it came to light the "new fire" outside the church, Fr. Tim asked me--I was a good Boy Scout sixty years ago--to light the fire so that the Paschal Candle might be lit from its flames. Although it was windy, it took only one match to get the bundle of paper and twigs ablaze. Nevertheless, the Pascal Candle declined its lighting in the stiff breezes, and so we had to go to Plan B, as Fr. Tim explained things: we lit the Pascal Candle with a cigarette lighter, and then made our way into the nave singing "Light of Christ," with incense a'plenty. The Rev. Buddy Crawford, the parish deacon ("deacon" here indicating his being in first of the orders toward becoming a priest) chanted the Excultet, the Easter Proclamation, with a absolutely lovely voice. Here's the text sung by the deacon standing next to the Paschal Candle:

Rejoice, heavenly powers!
Sing, choirs of angels!
Exult, all creation around God's throne!
Jesus Christ, our King, is risen!
Sound the trumpet of salvation!
Rejoice, O earth, in shining splendor,radiant in the brightness of your King!
Christ has conquered! Glory fills you!
Darkness vanishes for ever!
Rejoice, O Mother Church!
Exult in glory!
The risen Savior shines upon you!

Let this place resound with joy,
echoing the mighty song of all God's people!

My dearest friends,standing with me in this holy light,
join me in asking God for mercy, that . . . . (the rest of the Exaltet)

The Eucharist itself was beautifully celebrated, and an infant was baptized during all the happiness. So began our new Eastertide living in the resurrection of Christ. May your Eastertide be as joyous as ours.

Praying with Merton

For my Eastertide gift for anyone who comes along and reads these postings, I'm promising you a new sister blog, Praying with Merton. Here's how it will work: several times a week I will begin by sharing with you my reading of Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation, one of Fr. Louis' most enjoyable books. I'll go chapter by chapter, page by page, quoting Merton and making a few observations on my own. If all goes well, I make my first post on Easter Monday. I hope you enjoy what you see, read, and share.

x

Waiting for Easter (like a Good Ol' Georgia Pine)

Today is a day of waiting, and often waiting for anything, perhaps much more so for Easter, can be a wearisome business. Most likely you, like me, will spend this day of waiting by getting ready, not only for your parish's Holy Saturday Easter Vigil or Easter morning worship, but also for preparing Sunday's dinner, for visiting friends, or for sharing your lives with the world's poor.

When waiting is a big part of my life, I often like to read quietly (out under trees if possible), and in this morning's earliest light, while reading Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation, this came to me:

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying God. It ‘consents’ so to speak, to God’s creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree…. This particular tree will give glory to God by spreading out its roots in the earth and raising its branches into the air and the light in a way that no other tree before or after it ever did or will do. Therefore each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with all its own characteristics and its private qualities and its own inviolable identity, gives glory to God by being precisely what God wants it to be here and now, in the circumstances ordained for it by God’s Love and God’s infinite Art.

As I wait (and later vacuum the house and help June get ready for the family to visit tomorrow), I'll give glory to God this Holy Saturday by simply being Andy. That should be easy enough, just like the trees over my head are now simply being trees.

Image: Ol' Georgia Pines Rising Above Me as I Read by Andy

What the Early Church Taught about Holy Week and Easter

It is long-held Tradition, based on the Biblical texts, that Jesus died on a Friday and rose from the dead on a Sunday, which would place the Last Supper on a Thursday night. Scripture tells us that Jesus rose from the dead "early on the first day of the week" (Mark 16:2, RSV). It was on the same day (the first day of the week) that Jesus met his apostles on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:1). John also confirms that Jesus rose on a Sunday (John 20:1). The early Church Fathers universally held that Jesus rose from the dead on a Sunday, and worshiped on Sunday, "The Lord's Day." The Fathers also testify to the Institution of the Eucharist on a Thursday and a Friday crucifixion of Jesus. Even though Jesus tells us that he was to be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights, in ancient Jewish reckoning, this included partial days. Thus, Jesus was saying that his time in the earth would span three days (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday). Saint Justin Martyr (writing in 150 AD) testifies to both Sunday worship and a Friday crucifixion of Jesus:

But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead. For He was crucified on the day before that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun, having appeared to His apostles and disciples
. . . . (First Apology 67)

The Didache (70-90 AD) also mentions Sunday worship, and fasting on Fridays (likely connected to Jesus' crucifixion that day):

Let not your fasts be with the hypocrites... but fast on the fourth day and the Preparation (Friday)...But every Lord's day gather yourselves together, and break bread, and give thanksgiving after having confessed your transgressions, that your sacrifice may be pure (8, 14).

The Apostolic Constitutions (late 4th century) verifies the same chronology. Note that, based on Scripture, this document provides the rationale for the dates of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday.

And on the fifth day of the week (Thursday), when we had eaten the Passover with Him, and when Judas had dipped his hand into the dish, and received the sop, and was gone out by night, the Lord said to us: "The hour is come that ye shall be
dispersed, and shall leave me alone" (V:3:XIV).

. . . it being the day of the preparation (Friday), they delivered Him to Pilate the Roman governor, accusing Him of many and great things, none of which they could prove . . . . [Jesus] commanded us to fast on the fourth and sixth (Friday) days of the week; the former on account of His being betrayed, and the latter on account of His passion (V:3:XIV, XV).

But when the first day of the week (Sunday) dawned He arose from the dead, and fulfilled those things which before His passion He foretold to us, saying: "The Son of man must continue in the heart of the earth three days and three nights" (V:3:XIV).

Virtually every Church Father who addresses the issue agrees with the traditional dating of a Thursday Last Supper, Friday Crucifixion, and Sunday resurrection. This includes those Church Fathers and writings mentioned above, but also Ignatius (105 AD), Pseudo-Barnabas (120 AD), Clement of Alexandria (195 AD), and many others. This chronology is firmly based on Scripture, and universally verified by Tradition.

Text Source: All About Holy Saturday; Image: The Road to Resurrection

Good Friday

I often don’t know what to do with Good Friday. Somehow this day with Jesus is most profound when I do nothing, allowing Jesus to do everything.

After the stripping of the altar last night, everyone left the church in silence. June and I drove home with little to say. We jotted down the addresses of a few homes for sale in a small corner of McDonough, Georgia, while driving around. Then we headed back to Jackson Lake.

I woke up this morning early. After Prayers I went outside to put a few things away in case of rain. In an hour or so we’ll drive back to McDonough to help the parish at First Baptist Church provide and serve dinners for an anticipated three hundred less fortunate people who surely need and appreciate a decent meal. No doubt there will be preaching and singing of songs. While I will listen, I suspect that mostly I'll simply try to help out as best I can whether serving dinners, doing what's asked, or simply enjoying the faces of people whom I'd like to know.

While I realize that some of us will worship in various churches (the folks at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church in McDonough will do the ten evangelical “Stations of the Cross”), my own Good Friday afternoon will most likely be a walk somewhere as I look for some quiet time, some opening for solitude and silence. During that time (if it comes), I’m not sure what I’ll do, say, think, or whatever. I might well be at a loss for words and thoughts, more of less feeling empty, dried out. It during such times when I may not know how to pray that I remember what Francois de Salignac Fenelon (1651-1715) once said:

MANY are tempted to believe that they no longer pray, when they cease to
enjoy a certain pleasure in the act of prayer. But, if they will reflect that perfect prayer is only another name for love to God, they will be undeceived.

Prayer, then, does not consist in sweet feelings, nor in the charms of an excited imagination, nor in that illumination of the intellect that traces with ease the sublimest truths in God; nor even in a certain consolation in the view of God: all these things are external gifts . . . .

Remember our Lord abandoned by his Father on the cross: all feeling, all reflection withdrawn that his God might be hidden from him; this was indeed the last blow that fell upon the man of sorrows, the consummation of the sacrifice.

Never should we so abandon ourselves to God as when He seems to abandon us. Let us enjoy light and consolation when it is his pleasure to give it to us, but let us not attach ourselves to his gifts, but to Him; and when He plunges us into the night of Pure Faith, let us still press on through the agonizing darkness.

Moments are worth days in this tribulation; the soul is troubled and yet at peace; not only is God hidden from it, but it is hidden from itself, that all may be of faith; it is discouraged, but feels nevertheless an immovable will to bear all that God may choose to inflict; it wills all, accepts all, even the troubles that try its faith, and thus in the very height of the tempest, the waters beneath are secretly calm and at peace, because its Will is one with God's. Blessed be the Lord who performs such great things in us, notwithstanding our unworthiness.

Christian Perfection, VII, On Prayer