6 posts tagged “prayer”
One of the great things about February is that it is the month when you finish the books that came at Christmas. For me, this has meant coming to the end of Sara Maitland's wonderful 'A Book of Silence'. Maitland is a Catholic, a novelist and short-story writer and a committed feminist. She also went to Oxford with Bill Clinton, which has no relevance to her book but since she manages to mention it, I don't see why I shouldn't.
I wrote this piece for a book Chrissie and I are doing together on prayer (Walk, Work, Watch - Authentic, UK, Spring 2009)...
WALK
In the end, we just had to give up and head home. Some of the others were hanging on in the City, hoping for some change, some news of the impossible: but we couldn’t stay with them. We both had work to do on Monday morning and besides, the corporate misery was getting somewhat heavy. It’s all every well to come together to mourn the loss of a friend, but after even the greatest tragedy, life has to move on at some point. There comes a moment when all the reminiscing and remembering becomes sadder than the loss itself. Someone had to break the atmosphere, to make a move.
It was mid afternoon when we left the sad city behind us. Just getting out into the county air; the familiar road; the contours of rocks we had passed a hundred times, was some kind of comfort. He was lost to us, but the ground had not swallowed us; the world had not ended; the Romans weren’t murdering our babies again. And, mercy of mercies, we had at least been allowed to bury him. No such privilege had been afforded to the poor souls arrested as scapegoats of last year’s rebellion: their bodies had been left in the sun to rot. By the time they were taken down there was little left to bury. How can you say goodbye to a brother or a son when you pass his disfigured and dehydrated body for weeks every time you come and go from the city? There was no ‘rest in peace’ for those poor families: three of them from our own village. Be thankful for small mercies – just the kind of thing my recently deceased friend would have said. Even in his desperation, he must have had some powerful friends for his body to be taken down so soon.
We walked more or less in silence. So much had been said already: what more was there to say? There hadn’t been time to eat much today, we were hot and hungry: each focused on the relatively difficult task of getting one foot to move in front of the other, and repeating the action a few thousand times to reach the threshold of home.
We stopped to rest awhile and take a drink at the olive grove near Seth’s farm. There were others gathered there: most, like us, on their way out from the city. The talk was all of the weekend’s events. Some knew more than others. All knew something important had taken place. Crucifixions were not uncommon: but this one was ordered by Pilate himself, quite publicly. Alexander, an inn-keeper we knew well from our village, had been in the courtyard when Pilate pronounced sentence. “I’m not sure what our leaders thought they were doing”, he said to all who would listen in the grove, “didn’t look like they had much of a will to save his neck. They’re as bad as the Romans, that lot.” Quite a crowd had gathered for the flogging, many of them following all the way to the hill. Across the City the Romans were on some kind of alert, like the hairs of a fox standing on end. There was trouble in the air, though by today it had seemed that things were calming. A man I didn’t know said he had heard that the troops in the villages around had been called into Jerusalem – he was convinced that the Romans were expecting another rebellion. Someone else I hadn’t seen before asked if anyone knew why they had killed this man Jesus, but there were so many different answers piling on top of each other that nothing clear was really said, and most took the opportunity to get back to their journey.
We moved off from the grove in clusters, but these soon broke up as different ones fund their pace. My brother and I found ourselves walking with just one other traveler, the one who had asked about the reason for Jesus’ death. He was definitely not from our village, though it seemed he had business there. He said nothing for a while, settling into his own step alongside us. But then he asked us the strangest of questions.
“What were they all talking about, back there at the grove?”
“Who do you mean?” I asked, unsure quite what he was asking
“Pretty much everyone”, he said, “Talking about this crucifixion; the fear of rebellion.. there seems to have been quite some events these past days.”
I couldn’t quite believe he didn’t know what had been happening. Where had he been the whole weekend? You’d have to have been drunk or drugged to have missed the talk in the City since Friday.
“You must be the only one who doesn’t know”, my brother said, perhaps a little too abruptly. My brother was not known for the subtlety of his conversation.
“Tell me”, he said. And so we did – the whole story. Once we started we couldn’t really stop. It all came out: the hopes we had had of our Messiah; the strange things we had allowed ourselves to believe; the way it had all ended in such bloody dismay on Friday. Oddly, it was therapeutic to talk to someone who knew nothing of the story, and he seemed to know this. He let us talk, on and on, encouraging us with the occasional nod, asking questions when something we were saying wasn’t quite clear. By the time our story got to Sunday morning I had begun to feel lighter in my Spirit than I had for days – just talking it out in this way had been a help to me.
The last part of the story was little more than an afterthought. Some of the women had gone to the tomb at sunrise to anoint the body, and came running to say that it was gone. Peter and one or two others went to see, and they, too, said that the body was gone: but we didn’t know what to make of it. By that time there had been so many rumours and counter-rumours, I just couldn’t take anymore on board. I half wondered if they had gone to the wrong tomb: it had all been arranged in such a rush on Friday, with the Sabbath just moments away. I wondered if the women had mistaken the spot, and had run in their grief to a different, empty tomb this morning. In the confusion of the past few days, I wouldn’t put it past any of us to make such a mistake.
Our friend didn’t seem too taken with this explanation: but he was deep in thought. Then he turned to me and asked the second strange question of the day.
“Can’t you see?” he asked, “It all makes perfect sense” And before I could answer he explained that Jesus could indeed have been the Messiah we were waiting for, because our scriptures had always told us that the Messiah would suffer and die.
This was news to me, but he backed it up with scriptures from Moses and Job, and the Psalms: even the Psalm Jesus himself was said to have recited with his dying breath. It was incredible. For a moment it was like having Jesus back with us – I had never heard the Scriptures talked about this way by anyone else. The stories came alive – not like the dry pronouncements we hear week by week in the Synagogue. By the time we were within sight of home, he had me believing that Jesus might indeed still be our Messiah. Something I had never dreamed possible – that the chosen one of God would suffer death – turned out to be the very thing our Scriptures had been speaking of for centuries. When he quoted from the prophet Isaiah – the song of the sufferings of Israel – I could hardly believe my ears. I had known these words from my earliest years. My mother had recited them to me time and again, and yet I had never seen that they could mean what I now saw for certain that they must mean. Why had not these words come to my mind when I had watched Jesus die? Now, on the road home, hearing them recited by this stranger was like re-living Friday. I could see Jesus in my mind – those terrible images that will never leave me as long as I live – and the words fit. It was as if they were partners separated for years – the words and images – but now brought together again: and as soon as they were re-united it was undeniable that they belonged together. But if that was so, if God had spoken centuries ago in a way that so directly and perfectly described Jesus, then perhaps it was not all so unintended… perhaps God had meant all along…
It was almost too much to think about. The miles from the orange grove to home had been eaten up in the intensity of our conversation. Surely the strangest walk I have ever taken. But the light was failing as we drew near to the village, and it didn’t seem that our remarkable friend had anywhere to stay. My brother insisted he come to us. I would have said the same, but my brother is usually first in such offers – and he is not easy to refuse. Before our companion had even begun to say that he wouldn’t want to trouble us, it had been made clear that it was no trouble, and that ‘no’ was not an acceptable response.
“I insist”, my brother said emphatically, “It has been a long day and a long walk, and none of us has eaten, and I have many more questions to ask you. There is shelter and a room to spare with us – you will be an honored guest in our home. Come and break bread with us….”
We were able to spend this past week in Copenhagen, working with leaders from the International Baptist Convention. This is a network of around 70 churches, all working with the English language in international communities across Western, Central and Eastern Europe. It was good to spend time with 'fellow-travellers' - people engaged in church-building in the multi-national setting of Europe's cities (see posting 'towards a metanational church'). But it was also good to spend time in Copenhagen, and to discover some of the cafes offered by this great capital, where coffee and conversation really matter. We found three cafes of particular note. The pictures are 1.2mp phone shots, so please forgive the quality.
The Cafe Royal is new and attached to the exhibition shop of Royal Copenhagen porcelain, one of the city's oldest and most noted companies. The Royal has been widely described as the most beautiful cafe in Europe. It is bright and white, and lovely in that fine and elegant way that the Danes do so well. http://www.visitcopenhagen.com/press/latest_news/royal_copenhagen_opens_the_royal_cafe
A second great discovery was the Paludan Bogcafe (Book Cafe). Floor-to-ceiling in books second-hand and new, this combination of old wood, old paper, old ink and good coffee was almost perfect. Even without the Hammer-and-Sickle flag hung up to mark a particular promotion this month, you could easily imagine students gathering here not only to study but to plot and plan revolutions. I picked up a collection of the poetry of Gerard Manley-Hopkins - appropriate somehow to this timeless environment. http://www.paludan-bog.dk/
Our third, slightly less serious discovery was a cafe that was so proud of its quality that it proclaimed the words 'good coffee' on its awning. Except in Danish this comes out as god kaffee. We re-named this the God-cafe, and it raises a very intriguing question. Why has cafe culture become so important to the culture and spirituality of Europe's contemporary urban landscapes? Why do we so easily sense God's presence in 'third place' gatherings? What is it that good cafes offer to us that is so vital to our health and growth?
The answer, I believe, is that these cafes bring together two aspects of life that are crucial to us, and that offer open windows to the divine presence: they offer a place to pause, and they offer conversation. Pressing the pause button; engaging in human interaction - these are activities essential to life and growth; activities immortally summed up by Sri Lankan Ajith Fernando as 'lingering and thinking'. What might our church life look like if we made more space for cafe-conversations? If lingering and thinking were as important to us as 'planning and doing'? What are the 'third places' that God is waiting to meet you in?
Take a look at this fascinating review of an American book, 'Celebrating the Third Place':
http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/books/books.php?id=3882
My son Jake asked me to help him find some pictures on the web from the village of Arley - our home in the UK for the 18 months before we came to the Netherlands in 2005. There weren't many posted - but we were overjoyed to find this one: because the van in the car park is our Mazda Bongo. Doubtless we were in our house (directly in front of the van's position) when this picture was taken...
Arley was a significant place of peace for us in that period, and more importantly a place of prayer. I was reminded of it today when I mentioned to a friend that I have not yet located, in the Netherlands, a place that so immediately or compellingly 'calls me' to prayer.
I've always known that certain places feel more sacred than others - the Celts called them 'thin places', where the veil between heaven and earth is at its thinnest - but have never known whether this an an actual feature of their geography and history or a personal response to their atmosphere. Probably both: Arley certainly 'called to us' in both ways. In the end it doesn't matter which is true: If a physical place helps me to pray more fluently and committedly, then it becomes the place where God speaks to me, whether He pre-planned it that way or not. Was it because Peniel was a 'thin place' that Jacob dreamed there - or was it because Jacob dreamed there that it became sacred? Either way, Earth met Heaven and a ladder bridged the two. And either way, it does us not harm to find places that seem to do the same, and spend time in them! 'Take off your shoes', God says to Moses, for the ground on which you stand (the ground you have come to; this place you have found; this here and now of where you are) is holy.
September's TIME magazine carries a fascinating article on the late Mother Theresa, triggered by the recent publication of a collection of her private letters, Come Be My Light.
You can find the article online at
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415-1,00.html
And the book itself at:
http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Teresa-Come-Be-Light/dp/0385520379
The letters reveal the deepest threads of Theresa's own spiritual journey - they are drawn from correspondence with her spiritual superiors and chosen 'spiritual directors' from the very beginning of her minstry amongst the poor in 1946 to her death in 1997. What is startling about the letters is that they reveal a 50-year crisis in faith. Almost from the moment Mother Theresa began to work amongst the poorest of the poor, she experienced a silence in her own life with God. God seemed absent and prayer empty. Her heart, she said, was 'as cold as an iceberg'. Apart from a brief 5 week period in 1959 after the death of Pope Pius XII, this 'dark night of the soul' followed Mother Thersa to her grave.
The TIMES article, by David Van Biema, probes the meaning of this half-century of doubt for the world's most respected Christian. Alongside the predictable 'hurrah!' of the radical atheists (Christopher Hitchen, author of God is Not Great and as fundementalist an atheist as you can be without having to become a fundementalist, comments that Theresa 'was no more exempt from the realisation that religion is a human fabrication than any other person...') there are interesting questions raised about a faith that continues to love and serve the poor even when its own soul-needs are not met.
For me the miracle revealed in these letters can be captured in 3 words: she carried on. Even when this little woman of faith was so wracked with doubt and dryness that she wondered if God had rejected her completely, she continued to live out the love of Christ for the poor. In her willingness to give up everything for love, you might say, she was even willing to give up her own faith... A very challenging stance for those of us (and I include myself here) who insist that every act of sacrifice and love we perform is rewarded, within days if not hours, with depth and texture in our own experience of God.
Many years ago Grahame Greene wrote a stage play called ThePotting Shed about an agnostic family that refused to accept that one of their sons had been raised from the dead by prayer. Central to the story was the Priest, the boy's uncle, who had prayed for him. "If you will let this boy live", the desperate man had prayed, "I will give you the thing I value most. I will surrender my faith." It is a strange bargain, and illustrates Greene's own struggle with faith and dogma, but it raised, in 1957, a question to which the letters of Mother Theresa take us once again: is there a place in faith for a love for others that is so strong that I am willing to sacrifice even my own satisfaction in experiencing God? In a world in which feelings are the measure of all things and we seek, even in loving others, to feel our reward, it is a question worth pondering for a while...
A gang of us spent the night of Friday 25th praying at the Crossroads Ministry Centre. There is something very stimulating about praying through the night hours, and we had a greatnight together. As dawn broke over Amstelveen, we asked God to speak to us clearly about our faith community and its place in the world. Several people felt strongly drawn to the image of a deeply-rooted tree, and we were encouraged by the words of Jeremiah 17:7-8. We felt that the call of Crossroads was to have deep roots and then to spread wide, offering shelter to many: enjoying 'fruitfulness' by pursuing 'rootfulness'.
7 “But blessed are those who trust in the Lord
and have made the Lord their hope and confidence.
8 They are like trees planted along a riverbank,
with roots that reach deep into the water.
Such trees are not bothered by the heat
or worried by long months of drought.
Their leaves stay green,
and they never stop producing fruit."
To celebrate our embrace of this great image, we got the whole team (at least all those who had made it through to breakfast time) to surround the tree immediately outside our office window and take a picture (above). There were other joys through the night, but this image was the final 'fruit' of our time together.
