Bring forth what is within you

It has been quite something to be a Priest, to hold God before others and others before God. Many have done it before, many will do it after. But as the gospels say, I have other sheep, not of this pen. They too listen to my voice.  What is this voice?   

 

This is the intuitive thought in you, Christians call the Holy Spirit.  Others call it something else. A rose by any name is as sweet. This week I was wandering around wondering what was happening in my life when I heard this intuitive voice say very clearly inside me, you, are, not, lost.  How very reassuring. 

 

The gospel readings after Easter feature resurrection appearances. I don’t know if you have ever met someone after they have died but I have met many people who say they have, particularly bereaved people, and there are two responses to this.  

 

The first is to regard it as a hallucination, a wish fulfilment by someone who is so desperate to see the dead they have lost, they imagine them to compensate for the pain.  

 

The second is to regard consciousness itself as primary, not physical matter, and therefore to allow consciousness to do whatever it wants, including revealing dead people. 

 

I take the second view, but in my therapeutic work with the bereaved I generally don’t take any view, I just normalise the appearances, which are common, and allow the bereaved person to own their truth without shame or fear, however out of the ordinary.  Because what is true for someone, is true for someone, and what isn’t, well, it isn’t.  

 

Nor is there anything wrong with questioning what is true or not true for you. Apostle Thomas,  known as doubting Thomas, founded Churches all over the Kerala region of Southern India, which are there today.  Questioning didn’t make him ineffective.

 

But maybe belief in resurrection defended people who were being threatened by martyrdom, as the apostles were.  If they knew death was the beginning of a new body for Jesus, it wasn’t such a threat that someone was trying to take their own body, as the Roman Empire was in those days. 

 

So there were many rival Christianities which never made it into the canon, the rule of books officially allowed, and they didn’t contain resurrection appearances, and maybe that’s why, despite their spiritual power.

 

They never became official because a resurrection belief supports the persecuted, and the early Church was certainly that. There are stories of people being offered their lives and citizenship if they would renounce resurrection, they chose torture instead. 

 

One of those spiritual books not included is a gospel attributed to the Apostle Thomas, buried for centuries before being dug up in the Egyptian desert at Nag Hamadi in 1945. Whether or not it was written by Thomas, the gospel contains no narrative of death and resurrection, but it does contain 114 wisdom sayings of Jesus, and about 76 of them can also be found in the canonical gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  

 

And one saying I find intriguing is this one.  Jesus said; if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you, but if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.  If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you, but if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.  

 

If you are concerned that I am quoting you something non-canonical Anglican Ecclesiology is guided by scripture tradition and reason, and I am reasoning with you. If you are still concerned that I am quoting you something non-canonical Luke 17:21 already says The Kingdom of God is within you.  But if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you, and if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you, adds this point.

 

Yes the Kingdom of God is within you, but if you allow it to be buried by everything else in your consciousness that won’t help.  If you bring it out from everything else in your consciousness, and this is elsewhere in New Testament, it will.  Don’t waste a human life. 

 

2 Peter 1:4 says because of his glory and excellence, he has given us very great and precious promises to enable you to share in his divine nature and escape the world’s corruption caused by human desires. 

 

So in the resurrection appearances, it is clear that Jesus’ apparently post death body is not the same as our everyday physical body. Yes, it can eat a bit of fish but it can also appear to different people at the same time and disappear and walk through walls. 

 

With all this in mind, what might if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you, and if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you, be saying to us.  All religious and philosophical traditions make the point -there is a divine nature as well as a human nature, it is within us to bring it out.

 

There are different layers of body, physical body, mental body, breath body, energy body, bliss body. I am not saying all religions are the same, they are different. I am asking if the differences need to make a difference, or are there sheep from other pens, many shores from which humans sail out to consciousness of the divine? And if we can bring that out, it can save us. Save us from what?   

 

I am not talking about a post death place called Hell, Jesus didn’t, he spoke of Gehenna, a literal place where Kings of Judah burnt their children, so Gehenna, which was translated Hell, became associated with wickedness, a waste of life. Bring forth the divine, don’t waste your life. If we look inside ourselves, we find memory, imagination that re-uses memory and gets stuck in it, intellect, emotion and sensation, painful and pleasant. But none of them last.  Look and see.  Do they last?

 

The contents of consciousness are always changing and are doomed to change, and nor is there is any unchanging thing called you that is holding them all together. So, if we do look inside and feel it all fully and without defending ourselves from any of it, but also don’t identify with any of it either, we don’t get attached to it, and who are we now?  We are free, content free consciousness, or the divine. 

 

A human doesn’t need to waste life worrying about birth or death, as consciousness doesn’t need to survive, it is eternal.  A human doesn’t need to waste life worrying about the past or future, as they only exist now in memory and imagination, and consciousness is always present, here and now.

A human doesn’t need to waste life on being a productive consumer, as consciousness doesn’t need to accumulate status or wealth. 

 

A human doesn’t need to worry about controlling others, as consciousness knows it can only control itself.  A human who does this can trust the universe will bring what that human needs, the divine kind of freedom that can save us. Save us for what?  

 

If we speak to people who have clinically died but been resuscitated we find that they have shed bitterness or hatred or delusion about what life is for.  They understand hatred is a waste of energy.  They are no longer so identified with a temporary name and form.  They don’t need to survive. They are set free from clinging to suffering.  They find, now, the life independent of the death of the body. 

 

For people who have not clinically died and been resuscitated, it might take a bit of effort, getting in touch with your pain and letting it go.  But if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. 

 

You are here to manifest God, truth, divinity, content free consciousness.  That’s not a belief, but an experience.  God is not an object of belief outside you, but if you can bring this forth from within you, God is the subject of all experience everywhere.  

 

That may be a challenge, so I end with the Celtic idea that you were born with certain challenges set for you to take to heart, and to remember. These challenges will certainly stretch you, but, in doing so, will make you grow into who you were born to be.  

 

Because you are not here to waste your life, you are here to heal and to grow. Suffering is part of the human condition.  If we simply try to avoid confronting painful experiences, there is no way to begin the healing process.  In fact, this denial and clinging creates the very conditions that promote and prolong unnecessary suffering. 

 

If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.  But if you do bring forth what is within you, what you do bring forth will save you.  So, if you want to take this challenge up and grow, rather than seek an easy life and shrink, here is a Celtic blessing by John O' Donaghue to end with, it is called Beannacht, which means blessing, in Gaelic. 

 

On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you. 

 

And when your eyes freeze behind the grey window and the ghost of loss gets into you, may a flock of colours, indigo, red, green and azure blue, come to awaken in you a meadow of delight.

 

When the canvas frays in the currach of thought and a stain of ocean blackens beneath you, may there come across the waters a path of yellow moonlight to bring you safely home.

 

May the nourishment of the earth be yours, may the clarity of light be yours, may the fluency of the ocean be yours, may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

 

And so, may a slow wind work these words of love around you, an invisible cloak, to mind your life.

 

FSHS +

You - the eye of the storm

Human is from humus, the soil, so to be human is eat from soil, to be going back to soil. But there is a longing in every human to know more, and if the only thing that you know is your body, you seek this more in more food, or sex, or stuff, or conquest, which are all trying to make something that is not you, you. It doesn’t last long, and if the only thing that you know is your body you might as well be dead, as St Paul wrote to the Romans; “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” As a Jew he knew Adam was called Adam because Adamah is Hebrew for mud. And so it is for all humans. Do we settle for just being mud?

 

But St Paul described something else called being ‘In Christ’. His first letter to Corinth, Chapter 15, verse 22, says “for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.” He doesn’t mean the historical human Palestinian Jew called Jesus, but the boundlessly aware being that he embodied, and we embody. So boundless the New Testament tells us that the whole universe is in Christ. So what if we are not a human body, or even a human mind?

 

 Modern science has shown us everything physical is energy and nothing is the essence of energy, so Paul says; ‘Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will bear the image of the man of heaven.’ The language doesn’t matter, so Paul calls it mystery. ‘Listen, I will tell you a mystery’.

 

If you abandon your personality, the physical emotional mental boundary you are used to, but now, rather than at physical death, the source of the universe is the mystery you already are. I am not a sensory thing but one boundless consciousness, no longer identified with a human body or even a human mind. We humans seek this.

 

If we give up seeking it physically we try emotionally. If you are romantically in love this will widen your boundary with a very strong force. But emotions can and do turn negative, and they recede before the intellect too. Beyond the intellect is the boundaryless we call God, and stories of Jesus show he rarely respects natural boundaries everyone is so used to.  There is something scary about that, but liberating, so Peter’s desire to join Jesus on the water expresses our own desire to transcend nature from within the mud and water.

 

To have faith is to be willing to throw oneself into a disorderly world and to expect to encounter God and transcend the normal, wander into unfamiliar but wonderful terrain. In Matthew’s gospel, the story of Jesus walking on disorderly water becomes a story of Peter sinking into the same water.  Peter tells Jesus to call him, and over the centuries this has fed Christian reflections on what it means to have faith in difficult circumstances. As my favourite football song says it; ‘When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high.’

 

Peace is not the lack of a storm, it is the eye in the storm. The eye of calm at the centre of a hurricane of severely raging and tearing winds is God in us, breaking the natural boundary of sense emotion or intellect. None of this is about removing the storm.

 

In their search for the boundaryless in the storm Peter and his companions struggle as the storm batters their boat. The sea, in a Hebrew worldview, is unknowable chaos and danger. They hallucinate a ghost, terror is on them. Psychiatrist Carl Jung said the year of my birth “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure however is disagreeable and unpopular”  We humans do contain a lot of stuff that is very unpleasant to look at, but these natural storms are not just natural storms, they are God’s means of transportation, to reveal who I am. The Greek translation of the Bible understands God as the fullness of Being, our Being, all Being. This spiritual process is to go beyond boundaries we draw for ourselves to know the immensity we are. 

 

So when Peter steps out of the boat, of course he enters a tumult. His motive isn’t to escape threat, but to go to where Jesus defies and reorders the assumed boundaries. Incredibly turbulent places are thin places, to use a Celtic phrase, where God is seen to break through, and we appreciate how the energies of the universe have their source in an essence which is all of us. This participation in the divine nature the Orthodox Church calls Theosis, becoming God. But science has also shown everything is energy and nothing is energy’s essence. God isn’t a thing, but unlimited potential. 

 

Jesus in the storm is the first passage I preached, and if I had known then what I know now, I would have opted for safety instead. But boundaries are redrawn when chaos seems to get an upper hand.

 

It is only in the storm we see I am the boundaryless. I am not the body, I am not even the mind, I am who I am, as God tells Moses in Exodus. “Tell people I am has sent you.” People have expectations, so things rarely go as we want. But this boundaryless I am in each and everyone of us, this uncreated consciousness, this inner Christ, isn’t believing miracles, it is being one.  

 

Modern science has shown us everything physical is energy and nothing is the essence of energy, as Psalm 46 says, ‘Be Still, and know that I am God’. In the little boat of bodily experience, as waves and spray of emotion rise and fall, which they do, and the physical creaks and rolls, which it does, so all feels lost, which it will, the I am which cannot be experienced, but is still real, is in you and in your neighbour, in the wind and sea. Jesus said; ‘I am with you always, until the end of the world.’ 

 

So in scripture none of this requires the absence of the storm, it is not identifying with the storm. You are the eye of the storm. Isaiah 54:10 says; ‘the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my loving kindness and covenant of peace will not’. John 16:33 says; ‘In the world you will have trouble, but cheer up, I have overcome the world.’ John 14:27 says; ‘I give you not as the world gives you so do not let your heart be troubled or afraid’  

 

Biblically speaking then the heart isn’t a fleshy beating pump that dies, a collection of human emotions to eulogise even as they go wrong, but who you really are. Truth, consciousness, bliss, the Experiencer, the experience of God in creation, or as St Gregory of Nyssa described, a trinity of being, knowledge, and love. This is not about the love of someone else, that is still so full of our expectations. It is Love itself, yourself. Be still, and know that I am. 

 

FSHS +

Contemplating Covid

Ours is an extraordinary time, and it isn’t over. Over the last few months I have experienced a sense of unity with harassed Doctors surrounded by death, who stop me in the corridor and half seriously ask if I am busy, admitting apologetically there is nothing they can do for Covid patients but put them on oxygen and wait for the inevitable.   

I have experienced a sense of unity with exhausted nurses weeping when I lay hands on them half way through a gruelling shift of dying Covid patients, or put on prayer meetings for nurses facing the anxiety of caring. I’ve seen those broken up by nervous staff for being gatherings of more than two. 

I have felt seen and heard the palpable anxiety of the pandemic alongside the dying and their relatives refused permission to be with them, and those who are with them called heroes. I have wondered if heroes really means they can be expected to die in service, rather than do a job protected by adequate PPE.

I have felt the anxiety of coming home and showering and hanging my clothes on the line and going for a three-hour walk so as not to infect my family. I have not been allowed to visit parishioners or conduct full funerals.  You will have your own stories of alienation anxiety isolation and strangeness. And it is not over. 
 
Christ said "Come unto me all who carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest, for my yoke is gentle and my burden is light." Yoke means union.  A yoke makes two things one, it connects a strong cow to a plough, or a nervous human to God. Yoke is related to Yoga, an experience of unity, realising there are not two but one, breaking the boundaries you draw between yourself and God, experiencing the immensity that you are, in any experience, any. To become an inclusive intelligence, that does not distort the intelligence which is the source of creation within you and in everything else.

Mother Julian knew this. She was an English anchoress, like a hermit or a female monk who shut herself away near St Julian’s Church in Norwich to contemplate, to be silent, to meditate, and to be one with the One. She wrote the earliest surviving English book by a woman, Revelations of Divine Love.

Julian lived from 1342 to 1416; surviving the bubonic plague which arrived in Europe in 1347 on ships and ravaged England from 1348 to1350. It was known as the Black Death, the most fatal pandemic in history. It killed up to 200 million, covering them in black boils that oozed blood and pus, and Julian became gravely ill and felt she was about to die. She was passed a crucifix and given last rites, but began to see wonderful things.

“God is our clothing, that wraps, clasps and encloses us so as to never leave us,” she wrote. She saw something very small, about the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of her hand. “What can this be?” she asked. “It is all that is made,” was the answer God gave to her.
 
Julian worried that because it was so small, might the hazelnut, like the creation, disappear or be obliterated? Again came an answer: “It lasts, and ever shall last, because God loves it.” Her sense of smallness in sickness became a sense of wholeness in God. She reports Jesus say, “I may take all things well; I can make all things well, and I will make all things well; and you shall see for yourself that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” 
 
Julian used the phrase one’ing a lot.  A contemplative, she thought one’ing was the purpose of life, one’ing with God, the one in whom we live move and have our Being, as the book of Acts says, or as our gospel says, take my yoke on you, my union, my yoga, my one’ing.

So, remember her words. Julian wrote this; “Faith is nothing else but a right understanding of our being… trusting and allowing things to be. We are in God and God who we do not see is in us. Just as every ray of the sun is the sun, every child of God is God.”
 
The poster on my hospital office wall says; "Contemplation. If today was perfect there would be no need for tomorrow." And they say it will all be alright in the end, so if it not alright, it’s not the end. It’s not over yet.  But that’s OK. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. fshs +

Two letters, to a friend

Jesus was born of a virgin. If we take this literally, Joseph must have felt pretty useless, like in the cartoon above. But if we take it deeply, virgin birth applies to us too. Do we dare accept this?

As many as receive him, he gives power to become children of God, born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God (Jn 1:12).

Born of a virgin means a spiritual Self contains a body/mind, even if it makes you feel physically useless. There is a healing power in uselessness. We should be, in a certain sense, useless, to return to the joy which is our true nature, where we do not need to struggle with the world, or try to force happiness to occur.

None of us see this with our physical eyes, hear it with our ears, feel it with our hands, taste it with our tongue, yet here it is, in the depths of the atomic structure prior to all our sense impressions, at the heart of the universe. That is Jesus’ nature, and ours.

Jesus 'born of a virgin' also means not belligerent or defensive or anxious for power. You may or may not know, many in his time were said to have been born of a virgin. Alexander the great, who lived 300 years before him, and the man who was emperor of Rome at the time of Jesus, Augustus, were said to have had a virgin birth.

Modern people don’t realise it, but Jesus born of a virgin is a political claim – he is our leader, not someone who needs to dominate. Not one full of pride and purpose, but peace and healing. Not one born to divide conquer and rule, but born to unify human and divine.

So, Jesus born of a virgin, and Mary was happy to allow it, because we need to be, in order to know the wisdom of God made flesh, not just in Jesus, not just in the flesh of the universe at the beginning, at the Big Bang, not just in my flesh, but yours, because wherever we touch reality, we touch God, relating to us in the most intimate way.

Here is no needy tyrant demanding a sacrifice, but original goodness through a human body, as helpless as a baby, emptying itself into our human nature and plight, if we are empty enough to receive it.

As St Gregory of Nazianzus said: “The very Son of God, older than the ages, invisible, incomprehensible, incorporeal, beginning of beginning, light of light, fountain of life and immortality … perfect likeness … he it is who comes to his own image, and takes our nature, for the good of our nature, and unites himself to an intelligent soul for the good of my soul, to purify like by like ... he takes on the poverty of my flesh, that I may gain the riches of his divinity. He who is full is made empty … so that I [who am also empty] may share in his fullness".

Rather than have emotional expectations of others, we can embrace what actually is. The reason it is OK to be useless is because it reveals this non-anxious presence. This healing is then picked up by others, despite the life and death pressures of this world. Here is an example, written by a doctor, initially very sceptical about this.

“I was a lifelong atheist, from a family where the parents read their children the shorter essays of Bertrand Russell while others were telling Bible stories. As a medical student, I was inclined to bracket chaplains in the same category as homeopaths – they might make a few people feel better, but we’d get along just fine without them. In other words, useless.

Years of medical practice have done nothing to alter my lack of religious conviction, and the compatibility of a benevolent deity with appalling human suffering is not an issue to address in this short letter, but on the matter of chaplains I am happy to acknowledge I was completely, 100 per cent wrong. I still have no idea what their official duties comprise of or how they spend their time but time and again I have watched them step in and provide a service no one else could offer.

In my foundation year 2, I called the priest at 4am for an older woman who was bleeding to death from her upper GI cancer. The medical team, myself included, were fussing ineffectually about, wondering if there was any point giving a transfusion and whether it was too late to try cryoprecipitate.

The chaplain stayed discreetly in the background while there was any chance that our efforts might succeed but as the futility of our interventions became apparent, he stepped quietly forward and began to recite the prayers for the dying, the patient joining him in a whisper whenever she felt strong enough.
The contrast between our frantic bustle and the calm of those extraordinary words ‘Go forth, Christian soul, from this world…’ has stayed with me ever since. In some hospitals a number of different chaplains, each representing different faiths, can be found.

That was far from the only time I saw chaplains prove their worth. From keeping a lonely old man company during a long admission to reassuring a nervous teenager before surgery, to that most poignant of all sacraments, the emergency baptism for a dying child, I have been impressed by their ability to help where all our efforts are useless.

The most unusual service I ever saw a chaplain provide was on an intensive care unit where a particular consultant tended to get more and more agitated and sharp-tongued whenever we were especially busy, to the considerable discomfort of his team. On the very worst days, when we’d all missed lunch and stress levels were approaching critical, the chaplain would appear as if by magic and discreetly slip him a bar of chocolate.

It never failed to improve matters and everyone on the unit breathed a sigh of relief. We never discovered how the chaplain knew there was a problem or worked out how to fix it. Perhaps that’s what they mean by God working in a mysterious way”.

So, I commend to you the healing power of uselessness, a spiritual Self containing a body/mind, it is true of you, even if it makes you feel useless. You are in God’s image, get behind the light that casts this image into your soul, it is full of healing, potential, and power, to make you, like Mary, a channel of God’s peace, pregnant with bliss, grace, consciousness, and truth.

Before I sign off, one more letter, this time from a Friar, written to a perplexed person in 1513. People in 2019 may not believe in angels, but we do believe in messages, and angels are messengers. (And remember too - “I am” is actually God’s name).

“I am your friend, and my love for you goes deep.  There is nothing I can give you which you have not. But there is very much, that, while I cannot give, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven! No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant. Take peace!

The gloom of the world is a shadow. Behind it, within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see. To see, we have only to look. I beseech you, look! Life is so generous a giver.

We, judging its gifts by their covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering-you will find beneath it a living splendour woven of love by wisdom with power.

Welcome it. Grasp it, and you touch the angel’s hand that brings it to you. Everything we call a trial, a sorrow or a duty, believe me, that angel’s hand is there because the gift is there. The wonder of an overshadowing presence. Your joys, too, be not content with them as mere joys. They, conceal diviner gifts.

Life, beneath its covering, is so full of meaning, purpose, and beauty that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage then to claim it; that is all you need! But courage you have, and the knowledge, knowledge that we are pilgrims together, wending through an unknown country, but on our way home”.
FSHS +

I am the Oneness of God, the soul, and the universe

Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said; “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” Luke 18;1-8

Next week I begin an NHS job on children’s and neo natal wards. There may be children with cancers, terminal illnesses or injury, babies dying, unbearable heartbreak for parents, so life will be experienced as a very unjust judge, just like it was for the widow in the above parable.

In my previous NHS role people also experienced life as an unjust judge, just like the widow. They spent a lifetime, sometimes following traumatic abuse, being forced to take immobilising drugs which hastened an early death.

When I was writing this, I had a quick look at the news and found more examples of life experienced as an unjust judge. War, the UK refusing to take back children trapped in Syria after their parents joined Islamic State and died. Climate change, homeless people being turned away from Typhoon shelters because they do not have an address. I even read a story about the rotting remains of an elderly lady found in her apartment three years after she died. The television was still on. No-one had called. She may as well have not existed.

All these people are the widows in the parable, because all are experiencing life, or death, as an unjust judge. They seek something different, but day after day it is the same, nothing changes. It is not right. They know it, we know it, God knows it. People live this way, and some die this way, and the experience is an unjust judge who neither fears God nor respects people. People may feel small, powerless, and alone, and there is no one to defend or represent us. Like the widow, we may stand by ourself unsure what to believe about life or ourself. Day after day we may cry out, not knowing what else to do. That is the widow, in today’s world and our life. 

But she did not become hardened, or as unjust as the judge, or give up, believing this is all the final reality, or blame and accuse God of being the unjust judge. No.

Day after day, she just showed up, spoke of injustice, held pain, prayed and did not lose heart. Why? Jesus was saying that for her, like for him, the central experience that the time is now, the Kingdom of God is at hand, and we can be converted to the good news here, the news that the transcendent Holy One, the absolute infinite Other, is so intimate with us that we call him Abba, which means Daddy, it has all the emotional charge of Mummy. So Jesus said to pray always and not lose heart, which does not mean giving God a to do list and expecting God to magically fix everything, convincing, cajoling, persuading, or wearing down God so God will do what we ask.  What does it mean?

To pray means that we offer our cry and do what we can to bring the change we seek, trusting God is doing it too, making our case with God, joining God. Maybe we just listen, honour someone’s truth, seek support, feed the hungry, offer compassion, speak against hatred and prejudice, respect the dignity of every human, strive for justice and peace, but whatever, we show up, day after day, and don’t lose heart. This may be some of the most difficult and necessary work, but Jesus does not ask us to go where he has not.  He is the archetypal widow, his life and faith is deep within each of us. We already have all that we need to face the unjust judge of this world. Take the Lord’s prayer, where Jesus calls God Abba, not Father. Abba in Aramaic, means Daddy, intimacy, a familiar nearness, an unconditional love. Not just human love but the love of the infinite source of the universe in matter, like the Dad in the Prodigal Son, who can’t do enough to come to meet us first before we can ever get to him, Abba is more like a Jewish Mummy than a Daddy, the infinite One from whom all reality comes, which makes all humans brothers and sisters. 

If we pray thy Kingdom come, it is this total closeness at hand, even though eternal. This kind of Kingdom is understood in the book of Samuel when David is presented to the people as King, and the people cry this is flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, the same closeness as Eve made of Adam. Hallowed be thy name means we set ourselves apart from the dog eat dog unjust judge world for Abba. For knowing we get our daily bread in the same one household, forgiving not taking offence, acknowledging the endless power and glory we do not lose heart with, even in the face of an unjust judge. 

For having the same Abba as Jesus, knowing God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, and that the whole natural universe, not just this worldly human society, is our household. For being mystics turned social reformers, for knowing prayer, as the philosopher Plotinus said, is flying from the alone to the All One, to Abba, and this allows us, like the widow who won’t give up, to accept ourself as totally alone and yet still limitless, and place ‘aloneness’ in an entirely different light, independent, and free from the world, and for the Kingdom. 

To call God Abba then, is to see all creatures in ourself and ourself in all creatures. To call God Abba is to have the courage to say I am all inclusive, I am the Oneness of God, the soul, and the universe, worship in spirit and truth to set us all free. To call God Abba is to see ‘I’ and the beloved are one. I alone am.  So next time we see someone alone or desperate or in need of company like the widow, or feel we are the widow, perhaps we can remember Abba not just as an act of kindness to pray and act, but an intimate recognition that the beloved ‘neighbour’ presented to us is our own Self, one without a second, in One Kingdom, Abba’s, and not lose heart, there is intimate closeness, despite the unjust judge of this world. 

F, S, H, S. +

Heart Soul Mind Strength Mercy

I wonder if you ever wonder how wonderfully amazing and limitless you are?

Science tells us if we leave hydrogen gas alone for 13 billion years it will become giraffes rose bushes and humans. But to have a human body means before it was even conceived, your body was too tiny for a human to see, but you wanted human life so much, you won a race against 200 - 250 million competitors.

These sperm cells were all flushed down the toilet instead of you because you were too fast, too strong, too agile, too determined, you repeatedly pushed on an egg that chose to open up to become your body. How badly you must have wanted humanity, to be chosen. But do you ever want eternal life that badly? 
That means to die to self and bring forth wings and feathers like an angel, soar higher still, to what no human can imagine, and be that. How badly do you want that? As much as you wanted human life? As much as Jesus, in whom God became human so humans could become God? Becoming human took single mindedness, becoming God takes single minded prayerfulness. Do we bother?

St Paul tells us to in 1 Thessalonians 5:17, 'Pray without ceasing'. Why? What is it? Do you even think God even answers prayer? No, says James, Jesus brother, in chapter 4 verse 3 of his letter,. “When you ask,” he says, “you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives. What is a wrong motive for prayer? 

A childish notion says the harder you squeeze your hands, the tighter you shut your eyes, the better God hears your wish list. Even adults have this idea. Like the student who sits an exam, but the professor requires him to hand in a form saying he has not sought outside help. So the student admits that he prayed, and the professor in turn asks to see his exam paper. On reading it, the professor says no, don’t worry, it’s OK, you definitely did not receive any help.

If the motive for prayer is to pass our exam, fix our problem, our finance, our job, our children, our marriage, our health, make life easier, more comfortable, we are seeking something from God, not seeking God. We are not greeting God at all, we are treating God like a vending machine. So the ancients didn’t say; “How are you?” they said; “How is your prayer?” Prayer was a sign of spiritual life. As the body has breath, so it lives; and if the breathing stops, that body comes to an end, so with a spiritually powered body, a soul. If there is prayer, the soul lives; if not, it doesn’t. No prayer, no soul. No soul, no God, no shifting the centre of life from me consciousness to God surrender. If we are asking for one thing after another, we do the opposite. The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God. And if we are not praying, we are forcing a gap between us and God. To live without prayer is to live without a soul. Therefore, not to pray is not to be fully human. It is to want something else more.

When Jesus says; “Everyone who asks receives, everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door is opened,” he means how badly do you want to be God?  He is not talking about opening the door at the bottom of a vending machine, as if we tell God what we want and expect to get it. 
Vending machines are great until they take your money but give you something you don’t want. Then you start complaining.  The door Jesus wants us to open is not a door below a vending machine, it is the door to God perception within us. Through it isn’t something for us, through it is God. So, prayer is not begging. It is concentration and surrender. If we want to live, we take it seriously, not like someone who came to me in an old persons’ home to ask if I prayed for the lottery numbers. Prayer is not making life more comfortable. 

Jesus prayed for a trial to pass and was crucified the following afternoon.  But don’t be scared either. I will come back to that. God is not an object we relate to through prayer, but the subject of experiencing it. We’re not telling God something God does not know. We are not reminding God we exist, but reminding ourselves who God is, has been, and will be. God does not give us any answers, God is the answer; in our soul. God is presence, love, beauty, generosity, compassion, forgiveness, wisdom, justice, mercy, not I, me, mine. 

Jesus tells us that in Luke 11, 1-13, he says if you know how to give your children good things how much more will the heavenly Father give you the Holy Spirit. You are children of the living God.  So when you pray, if you do, say: 'Father, hallowed be your name.’ Meaning what?

Meaning if we hallow God's, we no longer have to hallow our own names, we are free to know God the way Jesus did, as Abba, Daddy – intimate, loving, caring One, who fills divine children, holy sons and daughters, with his own very Self. That’s a given. Before we even have a thought or say a word, our life, our being, comes from One without whom we are as good as dead. 

Jesus says “When you pray, say: Your Kingdom come.’ What does he mean by that? God’s dream in this world, God’s kingdom, comes because if we pray “your kingdom come” it means “my kingdom go.” In letting go of our kingdom we entrust ourselves to God in surrender. That means we naturally and un-self-consciously feed the hungry, clothe the naked, speak justice for the oppressed, and tend the sick because it is no longer about us and what we will get out of it.

Jesus says “When you pray, say: Give us each day our daily bread.’ What does he mean by that? He means we think we are me-sufficient, but if every day me acknowledges God’s sustenance, me sufficiency dies.

Jesus says “When you pray, say: Forgive us our sins, as we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.’ What does he mean by that? He means if we think it is not for us to forgive, we do not allow our own forgiveness, which is our freedom. Our relationship with God is visible in how we relate to others.  If we forgive neighbours, friends, family, enemies, we know they are as much God’s children as we, we mirror each other, forgiveness polishes this mirror.
 
Jesus says “When you pray, say: And do not bring us to the time of trial.’ What does he mean by that? As I said earlier, Jesus prayed for a trial to pass and was crucified the next afternoon.  So, we are to live with our eyes wide open to trial, knowing that apart from God every trial, temptation, or stumbling block is more than we can handle. With God, it is a way for us to know more resurrection greatness, here, now, and here-after, and to be more than conquerers, as the gospel says we really are.
 
So now, how badly do you want God? Perhaps the greatest difficulty with prayer is that we don’t want really want God, we want something from God. That is not prayer according to Jesus' brother James, it is just wanting God to change our circumstances, but God changes us. God’s self-giving sustains, nourishes, strengthens, empowers, emboldens, and enables us to face the circumstances of life. If we only want to offer coins and push a button on a vending machine to have our desires met, 2nd Peter chapter 1 verse 4 says; “God has given us precious and very great promises, so that we may escape the corruption in the world due to desire, and participate in the divine nature.”
 
Divine nature is not about testing God, but like Jesus in the wilderness, seeking God by refusing to use God to satisfy greed or thirst for power, and instead of testing God, as 'the devil' advises him, becoming God. So, when a disciple says to Jesus, “Teach us to pray,” as in Luke 11, 1-13 we can be pretty sure the disciple is asking for more than words. The disciple has seen the effect of prayer, seen Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus, listening, concentrating, heard Jesus say Mary has chosen the better part just by being fully present. That prayer is more than doing a chore like Martha was, or just turning up to a preferred building. 

Childish prayer tries to align God with childish concerns, and Jesus is teaching us to align ourselves with God’s concerns. That does not mean God is unconcerned, but the concerns of our lives work out as we surrender to God’s life. Jesus is calling us to a place of being with God not of taking from God.

To conclude then, life didn’t start with the birth of our physical bodies and it won’t end with the death of the same. Eternal life is having a soul, and it really does have to be wanted cease-less-ley, because your soul in God’s image struggles to be born as much as your tiny body struggled to beat off 250 million competitor sperms. Freedom is the best argument for the struggle of prayer. Pray if you want freedom. If there is prayer, there is freedom.

There is a prayer I say each morning, it starts, One thing I have asked of the Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord, all the days of my life; to behold the beauty of the Lord and to seek Him in His temple. Scripture tells us our body is God’s temple, we come to know the Holy One is born in it. One within and behind the whole universe is you. Do you seek God with all your heart? Do you seek God with all your soul? Do you seek God with all your mind? Do you seek God with all your strength? Amen, Lord have mercy.