• 2 Samuel 11:26–12:10, 13–15
• Galatians 2:15–21
• Luke 7:36–8:3

Nathan the prophet is a good story-teller and a brave man. Though he obviously knows the character of his king well enough to guess David’s reaction to his story, yet this is, after all, the king he is talking to.

David has done the most appalling thing. He has taken Uriah’s wife, and had Uriah killed. Yet somehow, he has managed to persuade himself that this is a private foible that concerns only himself, and that it has no bearing on the precious relationship between himself and God, on which the whole of his life and his monarchy are built.

Nathan’s story rips away the fabric of that deceit, and shows David’s actions for what they really are. What is more, it is David who condemns himself, by his outraged reaction to the story. He hears of the rich man who has everything he could possibly want, and who yet takes the poor man’s one beloved lamb to feed a traveller, rather than give up one of his own huge flock. He assumes that because he is rich and powerful, he is real in a way that the poor man is not. His needs and desires must be taken seriously, while the poor man can be ignored.

David responds to the story with the righteous anger of a good man who has always fought for justice and for the underdog. He responds as a powerful man, who can ensure that his concept of justice is enforced. But then Nathan says, ‘You are the man!’ David does not try for one moment to deny it or bluster it out. ‘I have sinned against the Lord,’ he says.

The reaction of the Pharisee in Luke’s story is rather different. Like Nathan, Jesus tells a story to make his listeners see things from a different perspective. But while David is struck to the heart, Simon sees the parallels grudgingly, and he and his guests mutter, trying to find ways of undermining Jesus, so that they don’t have to be challenged by what he has said. ‘Who does he think he is?’ they ask. The rich man, in the story told to David, has discounted the poor man, has decided, no doubt unconsciously, that his poverty makes him in some sense less than human, a being whose feelings need not be taken into account. Simon has done the same for the woman with the ointment. She is merely ‘a sinner’, not a woman with a history and a desire to change. She has no right, in Simon’s estimation, to be a player in the story at all, let alone the central character, the heroine, that Jesus is making her. We don’t know if she became one of the group of women who travelled with Jesus and supported him and his followers, but we do know that she recognized her sin and her need, without a prophet to point it out to her, and that she turned to the source of forgiveness.

In Galatians, Paul has internalized these two stories, the one told to David and the one told to Simon, and come up with his own version. He and his fellow Jews are like David and Simon. They believe that they are so central to the story that all other characters are unreal. They believe that their actions, though perhaps not perfect, are nevertheless not too bad. But Paul, like David, has suddenly seen himself in the mirror, in Paul’s case, the one held up to him on the road to Damascus. He has realized that all the façade of righteousness and following God’s way has been empty.

This is Paul in strikingly humble mode. He makes no attempt to boast about what he has achieved since his conversion, but goes on and on about how believing in Christ is the only good thing he has ever done. Even his attempts to preach the gospel he once persecuted just show how wrong he was when left to his own devices. He just cannot seem to find the words to put strongly enough his conviction that righteousness is not something we are capable of by our own efforts. It is only in giving up his rights in his own life, in being ‘crucified with Christ’ and so allowing Christ’s life to take over in him that he has any hope of being justified, of staying close to God.

If all of today’s readings are about forgiveness, God’s great and irresistible love reaching out for us, they are also about repentance. Perhaps Paul provides the key. He is prepared to step down from the starring role in his own life, and leave the centre stage for the one who really knows the part, Jesus Christ.

Let your life speak: your spiritual autobiography as a tool for deepening your life in the Spirit

A well-lived spiritual life is of greater importance to practicing Quakers than any worldly success. How can we reflect on our journey? First and foremost, we can directly go into stillness to seek insight and direction. Additionally, every Friend has readily at hand our Advices and Queries, to help examine the spiritual life, both in specific aspects of each day, and in the patterns of a lifetime. Less well known, the insights posed by Howard Brinton (1884-1973) in his Quaker Journals can help us reflect on consistent patterns in one’s lifelong spiritual encounters with the Truth. This article is a reminder of these resources, with a particular encouragement to Friends to embark on writing a spiritual autobiography – as a contribution to your own process of discernment, as well as enrichment for others.

The invitation to review in Advices and Queries

Our Advices and Queries invite us to the conscious patterning of our daily life as well as our life journey. Let your life speak! (A&Q 29) More specifically, we are asked to bring the whole of our life into the ordering of the spirit of Christ (A&Q 2), and learn from Jesus’ life (A&Q 3), suggesting that there is some template available to us. We are also encouraged to the cherishing of one another’s life in marriage (A&Q 25), and living in the virtue of that life and power taking away the occasion of all wars (A&Q 33). We are called to consider the life and witness of other communities of faith (A&Q 6), and avoid prejudiced judgments about the life journeys of others (A&Q 24). We are recommended to exercise our own spiritual learning throughout life (A&Q 7). From these advices and queries, it seems one’s spiritual life over time is as worth attending to and reflecting upon as it might be on any single day.

Discerning Steps in Religious Experience over a lifetime

In Quaker Journals: Varieties of Religious Experience among Friends (Pendle Hill Publications, 1972), Brinton turns to three hundred spiritual autobiographies, (usually called “Journals”) dating from the beginnings of Friends to the twentieth century. Allowing for differences, Brinton details a common spiritual path amongst Friends, through the writing of Quaker women as well as men:

• Initial encounter with the inward light in childhood
• Self-indulgence in youth
• Struggle of a divided life
• Ultimate unification of that division through silence and insight
• Later conversion or acceptance of the light
• Adopting the plain style of life
• Speaking in meeting
• Restricting business activities
• Concern with testimonies/social action
• Working with dreams

Brinton finds a common consistency in Quaker encounters with spirit. Do you find steps in your own Quaker journey in his list?
 
What your Spiritual Autobiography is, and isn’t

Reviewing our life through writing a spiritual autobiography can be a unique opportunity to reflect on the workings of the Spirit in your own life, and help pose constructive questions how to best attend to spiritual opportunities ahead.

This worth has nothing to do with whether you believe you have done little in the world worth recording. This is not about your profile in the world: it is an invitation to a spiritual autobiography. It is a review of your relationship with the transcendent and immanent, not a record of your worldly achievement.

The focus on your spiritual path may often not correspond with any milestones in your passing worldly fame, fortune or notability. A spiritual autobiography might pass wordlessly pass over these details, much as analytical psychologist Carl Jung failed to note in his autobiography a meeting with Doctor Goebbels when he is supposed to have vehemently denounced the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. If an episode doesn’t add to your review of your spiritual development, best leave it out.

You might start out thinking you know what belongs in your spiritual autobiography – but there could be surprises along the way!

Getting Started on your Spiritual Autobiography

Begin the task each session with mind and heart prepared. Writing like this requires sustained practice, a set time per week, for example, with enough space for the spirit to work through and with you, and time for you to mull over what is raised. Allow for a walk before or after writing – you will soon learn what works best.

These questions may help to get you started.

• Journal Entry 1: As a child, how did I experience the inward light? In what circumstances was I more or less likely to experience the inward light? (Give details of how you felt closer to or further away from this inward light)
• Journal Entry 2: In what ways did I lose this connection? (Note specific occasions. Try and be specific about what happened)
• Journal Entry 3: In what ways did I experience a divided life? (Again, think of particular times and places.)
• Journal Entry 4: What happened to help unite body and soul (the temporal) with the Spirit (eternal)? What role has silence and stillness had in this?
• Journal Entry 5: Am I converted? From “what” to “what”? Is this “acceptance of the light”?
• Journal Entry 6. How has this acceptance become manifest? (Be specific about the ways this feels divinely guided, rather than worldly directed)
• Journal Entry 7. In what ways does a plain style of life work in you?
• Journal Entry 8. Describe times when you have spoken in meeting? What has been your experience of this, before, during and after? If you have never, or rarely, spoken, what forces have been at work both in favour of and against speaking in meeting?
• Journal Entry 9. How has life in the Spirit affected your perceptions and practice of working in the world? What ways in business (practices and occupational categories) are now closed to you? In what ways do success in worldly affairs bring you closer to or further away from God?
• Journal Entry 10. How has the presence of love and truth in your hearts led you into action in the world, through particular testimonies?
• Journal Exercise 11: Keep a dream journal as part of your spiritual biography. Are there are recurrent dreams that visit you? Do you regard it as “an accessible channel” to the divine? In what ways are you open to as well as cautious in interpreting your dreams as offerings of leadings or directions to your life?
• Journal Entry 12: Is there anything you sense is coming towards you, in early formation?

Conclusion

At each Yearly Meeting, we gear testimonies to the grace of God in lives now passed. With each Friend gone, we remember the richness that has been amongst us, and is now lost, sometimes feeling the raw regret at conversations and learning now impossible. Spiritual autobiographies can partially remedy this loss. Encourage Friends to write – investigate – their own lives through this practice. Help their lives speak. And consider your own spiritual autobiography, a chance not just to hear your own life speak, but to listen to the way the spirit may have been speaking to you all along.

Support on the journey

The Anam Cara Community’s ministry is to be a support to those who are on the inner journey into God. Each person’s journey is different, and we recognise that there are some for whom the Christian tradition is difficult or not supportive. We’re committed to finding ways to hear the needs of each Associate, and support them as we can.

The Community can offer support in a number of ways:

• 1 Kings 17:17–24
• Galatians 1:11–24
• Luke 7:11–17

We do not always notice the simple compassion of Jesus. We are often so busy looking for the deeper meaning, or finding the application for ourselves that we barely notice the actual motivation in the context of the real situation. Yet compassion is clearly one of the hallmarks of Jesus’ personality. Over and over again, the Gospels tell us that Jesus goes out of his way to help the outsider. Jesus lived in a society with, by and large, quite a capacious net for rescuing those in need. Certain things were laid down for Jews through proper observance of the law, and the family operated in a way that we alternately dream of and run from, depending whether we would like to be on the receiving end or the giving end. But even if their net was better mended than ours, still some people fell through it, either because of their race, or because they had no family to care for them. And these people called forth from Jesus unerring love and compassion.

The widow in today’s story is one such. She has no husband, and now she has lost her son. We are not told if there was any other family, but we are left with the distinct impression that without her son, the woman will be defenceless. The large crowd following the funeral procession have no intention of taking the son’s place. They are here to do the decent thing, and then they intend to fade into the background.

Luke tells us that Jesus looks at the woman and feels sorry for her. What did her face show? Perhaps there was rather more than anxiety about her material future on the woman’s face. Perhaps there was the despair of someone who faces not just poverty and poor treatment, but who also faces it alone with no one to love. Whatever it is that Jesus sees, it is enough to make him act.

And what action! The crowds recognize it instantly as the mighty and scary activity of God. They know at once that they are seeing the kind of things their ancestors saw in the prophets. They have been well trained in the Scriptures, and they recognize the signs of God’s presence. It cheers them up immensely. Not only do they not have to worry about the widow any more, but they also have a wonderful story to tell, and they can be sure that they—would you believe it—are living in the days when God shows his favour to his people, just like in the stories.

Perhaps some of them, better read, or with better memories, went home and thought further about what they had seen. Perhaps they even remembered the story of the prophet Elijah who also raised a widow’s son from the dead. If so, did they notice the differences, as well as the similarities? Elijah’s miracle is not noticeably performed out of compassion. He sounds quite cross with God, who is asking all kinds of hard things of him, and is now apparently even making trouble for the very people he has sent to help Elijah. So when Elijah calls upon God, what follows is, in his mind, about the relationship between him, God’s prophet, and the wild, hard, exciting God who will not let him go. What God’s motives are, of course, we are not told.

But Jesus does not call upon God, and demand, almost petulantly, that the very least God can do, given all that he is asking of Jesus, is to perform a miracle when Jesus tells him to. Instead, Jesus acts out of his own compassion and power, which are, after all, the compassion and power of God. Jesus does not have to wait to see if God is feeling the way he is about the situation. Instead, he acts directly, on his own authority, to give the woman back what she loves and needs most in all the world. This is not about Jesus and God, but about God and the world he made and loves. But the people make the right connection; Jesus may not be doing this to demonstrate how close he is to God, but that is certainly the end result.

And what of Paul? Does God act in love and compassion in calling Paul out of his community and into a life of uncertainty, persecution and glory? Paul certainly seems to think so. When he says that God set him apart before he was born, he is expressing, as deeply and fully as he can, his sense that in meeting Jesus he is coming home. ‘This is what I was born for,’ he says. Paul responds to the compassion of God with the passion of his life of service.

Always in a hurry

Haste is our enemy. It puts us under stress, raises our blood pressure, makes us impatient, renders us more vulnerable to accidents and, most seriously of all, blinds us to the needs of others. Haste is normally not a virtue, irrespective of the goodness of the thing towards which we are hurrying.

In 1970, Princeton University did some research with seminary students to determine whether being committed to helping others in fact made a real difference in a practical situation. They set up this scenario: They would interview a seminarian in an office and, as the interview was ending, ask that seminarian to immediately walk over to a designated classroom across the campus to give a talk. But they always put a tight timeline between when the interview ended and when the seminarian was supposed to appear in the classroom, forcing the seminarian to hurry. On the way to the talk, each seminarian encountered an actor playing a distressed person (akin to the Good Samaritan scene in the gospels). The test was to see whether or not the seminarian would stop and help. What was the result?

One would guess that, being seminarians committed to service, these individuals might be more likely to stop than most other people. But that wasn't the case. Being seminarians seemed to have no effect on their behavior in this situation. Only one thing did: They were prone to stop and help or to not stop and help mostly on the basis of whether they were in a hurry or not. If they were pressured for time, they didn't stop; if they were not pressured for time, they were more likely to stop.

From this experiment its authors drew several conclusions: First, that morality becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases; and, second, that because of time pressures we tend not to see a given situation as a moral one.  In essence, the more in a hurry we are, the less likely we are to stop and help someone else in need. Haste and hurry, perhaps more than anything else, prevent us from being good Samaritans.

We know this from our own experience. Our struggle to give proper time to family, prayer, and helping others has mainly to do with time. We're invariably too busy, too pressured, too hurried, too-driven, to stop and help. A writer that I know confesses that when she comes to die what she will regret most about her life is not the times she broke a commandment, but the many times she stepped over her own children on her way to her den to write. Along similar lines, we tend to blame secular ideology for so much of the breakdown of the family in our society today when, in fact, perhaps the biggest strain of all on the family is the pressure that comes from the workplace that has us under constant pressure, forever in a hurry, and daily stepping over our children because of the pressures of work.

I know this all too well, of course, from my own experience.  I am forever pressured, forever in a hurry, forever over-extended, and forever stepping over all kinds of things that call for my attention on my way to work. As a priest, I can rationalize this by pointing to the importance of the ministry. Ministry is meant to conscript us beyond our own agenda, but deeper down, I know that much of this is a rationalization.  Sometimes too I rationalize my busyness and hurry by taking consolation in the fact that I came to be this way legitimately. It's in my genes. Both my father and my mother exhibited a similar struggle. They were wonderful, moral, and loving parents, but they were often over-extended. Responding to too many demands is a mixed virtue.

It's no accident that virtually all of the classical spiritual writers, writing without the benefit of the Princeton study, warn about the dangers of overwork.  Indeed, the dangers of haste and hurry are already written into the very first page of scripture where God invites us to make sure to keep proper Sabbath. When we are in a hurry we see little beyond our own agenda.

The positive side to haste and hurry is that they are, perhaps, the opposite of acedia. The driven-person who is always in a hurry at least isn't constantly struggling to get through the morning to the lunch hour. She always has a purpose. As well, haste and hurry can help make for a productive individual who is affirmed and admired for what he does, even as he is stepping over his own children to get to his workplace.  I know this too: I get a lot of affirmation for my work, even as I have to admit that pressure and hurry prevent me much of the time from being a Good Samaritan.

Haste makes waste, so goes the saying. It also makes for a spiritual and a human blindness that can severely limit our compassion.

Support on the journey

The Anam Cara Community’s ministry is to be a support to those who are on the inner journey into God. Each person’s journey is different, and we recognise that there are some for whom the Christian tradition is difficult or not supportive. We’re committed to finding ways to hear the needs of each Associate, and support them as we can.

The Community can offer support in a number of ways:

• 1 Kings 18:22–3, 41–3
• Galatians 1:1–12
• Luke 7:1–10

This opening section of Galatians has Paul in a very combative frame of mind. Even his formal greetings at the beginning are perfunctory and pointed. Something very dear to Paul is under threat here, and he is riding to its defence. Part of what he is defending is, of course, his own calling and mission. So within the first sentence of the letter, he is hammering home the fact that he is doing only what God has asked him to do. He has no agenda of his own to pursue, nor does he take orders from any ‘party’ in the church. His sending is directly from ‘Jesus Christ and God the Father’. There is also a faint undertone of personal hurt when he says, in verse 6, ‘I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you.’ These are people whom Paul himself has brought to faith in Christ, and he had believed that they would trust him and build on what he had taught them.

But that natural human defensiveness is incidental to Paul’s main argument. Much more worrying to him than his own status is the fact that he believes the Galatians are now in danger of losing sight of the gospel, in the confusion of choices that they are presented with. You remember the background story behind the letter to the Galatians? It marks a point in the life of the new church when they have reached a crossroads. They have assumed, with good reason, that to be a good Christian you also have to follow the Jewish law. They cannot deny that God is calling them to preach the good news of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, but their missionary strategy seems to have been to administer both baptism and circumcision as necessary doorways into the new Christian family.

But Paul is convinced that his mission is primarily to the Gentiles, and that this will have an effect not just on the Gentiles whom he converts, but also on the whole concept of Christianity that his contemporaries have. This enlarged vision of the gospel cannot be contained in the old pots; it requires a radical rethinking of priorities.

One of the many intriguing but unanswered questions that remains about Paul is how he came to this absolute conviction that God does not have entrance requirements to his family; Paul of all people, brought up knowing and loving the law. Just outside the passage set for today, in verse 16, Paul voices his certainty that God’s whole purpose in calling him is ‘that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles’, but he does not tell us if that was his immediate conviction, as he met Jesus on the Damascus road, or a growing understanding of why God is allowing him to be driven out of the synagogues everywhere he goes, out among the others, the outsiders. Paul comes to join the Christian community at a time when this issue of Gentile membership is rife. (You might like to have a look at Acts 9–10, which puts Paul’s conversion in context, next to Peter’s dream, which appears to speak of the equality of those inside and outside the old covenant rules.) It is hard to remember, now that we know the outcome, how divisive this issue was at the time, but both Acts and Galatians bear witness to the fact. And if the strand in the Bible that talks about the universality of God’s love seems to us clearly to predominate, that is because we read it in the light of subsequent history. Galatians suggests that Peter, even with the benefit of his dream, is still uncertain about how widely the principle of inclusion should apply.

So what is it that makes Paul so certain that this is a make-or-break issue for the Church? He tells us in verse 12 that his gospel is based on ‘a revelation’, and all of his letters bear witness to the fact that he went on testing that revelation against Scripture and through mission, over and over again. He also tests it against his own knowledge that if God can love and save him, the persecutor of the Church, then he can certainly love and save the Gentiles, whose only fault is to be born to the wrong family.

In the light of Paul’s work, we can read the story from Luke and the saying from Kings as the clear voice of God, calling us to trust him, reminding us that we do not need to hedge the gospel around with rules and regulations of our own invention. The gospel is God’s, and he will give it any protection it might need. Our job is simply to receive it and preach it with gladness.

Resting in God – an interview with Thomas Keating

Interview: The increasingly popular contemplative practice of centering prayer can bring about profound spiritual and psychological growth, says Father Thomas Keating.

More than 50 years ago, despite strong parental objections, Thomas Keating joined an austere monastic community in order to develop a personal relationship with God. Today, through the centering prayer movement, which he co-founded in the early 1970s, he is helping non-monastics achieve that same goal.

Keating defines centering prayer as a contemplative practice, "a very simple method in which one opens oneself to God and consents to His presence in us and to His actions with us." When Keating uses the word "contemplation," however, he is not referring to rumination or reflection. He is using the term in its classical sense: being with God. Thus, through centering prayer one moves beyond images, emotions, and thoughts. According to Keating, it is like "two friends sitting in silence, being in each other's presence."

As a student at Yale in the early 1940s, Keating, the scion of a wealthy but not particularly religious Park Avenue family, found his Roman Catholic worldview sufficiently challenged by a freshman philosophy class to seriously investigate the roots of his faith. While in the library reading Thomas Aquinas's Catena Aurea, a line-by-line exposition of the four Gospels by the great Church fathers, he experienced a profound conversion: He deeply grasped the fact that Christianity was a contemplative religion. He realized that the spiritual sense of the Scripture was much more important than the literal and that union with the Divine was not only possible but available to all. "That insight," says the 74-year-old Trappist monk, 'was the seed that has continued to grow all through my life. What I am doing now is trying to share that insight."

Specifically, Keating has become a kind of Johnny Appleseed of the soul who, along with a cadre of clergy and lay people, is sowing the seeds of centering prayer and spreading Christian contemplation across the country. Well read in both philosophy and psychology, Keating has, since the early 1980s, been devising a system that attempts to detail the journey catalyzed by the practice of centering prayer. Centering prayer is akin to other meditative methods, although most, like Buddhist Vipassana meditation or Christian Meditation as developed by Benedictine monk John Main, use a point of focus such as concentration on breath or repetition of a mantra.

Centering prayer relies more on intention than attention. The practitioner lets go of emotions, thoughts, and sensations, and consents-or intends-to be in God's presence. (See box, page 31.) The daily discipline of setting aside two 20-minute periods of prayer involves both receptivity and active participation. On the one hand, one is "waiting for God" – or as Gregory the Great put it, "resting in God." On the other hand, surrendering in this manner sets in motion a profoundly transformative process, what Keating refers to as "divine therapy."

In his taped lectures and his books Open Mind, Open Heart; Intimacy with God; and others, he describes the inner changes that occur, including the process of letting go of the false self (a self-image that impedes one's relationship with God) in favor of expressing one's true self (our "basic core of goodness"). Keating is so convinced that a spiritual life involves ever-deepening levels of growth and awareness that he often startles those raised in a traditional Catholic setting with his definition of sin as "the refusal to grow, to choose to stay as we are."

Tall, lanky, and bespectacled, with unruly wisps of fine hair atop his near-bald pate, Keating has a gentle demeanor that belies his insatiable curiosity and strong will – qualities that propelled him to join the monastery right after graduation from Fordham University in 1943. He rose through the Trappist ranks from novice master to superior for three years at the then-embryonic community in Snowmass, Colorado, to a 20-year stint as the progressive abbot at St. Joseph's Abbey, the Trappist motherhouse, in Spencer, Massachusetts. Finally he became a major figure in the centering-prayer movement, or as Gustave Reininger – a Los Angeles film producer, writer, and co-founder and trustee of the organization Contemplative Outreach puts it, he took on a second career as "abbot of a monastery without walls."

The contemporary form of centering prayer was discovered, initially taught, and developed during Keating's tenure as abbot at St. Joseph's. He had been involved in reforms resulting from the Second Vatican Council's call for spiritual renewal in the Catholic Church, and he had also observed that young Catholics were leaving the Church in droves to join Hindu ashrams and Buddhist sanghas. In 1971 he attended a meeting of Trappist superiors in Rome, where, addressing the monks, the late Pope Paul VI invoked the spirit of Vatican II. The Pontiff declared that unless the Church rediscovered the contemplative tradition, renewal couldn't take place. He specifically called upon the monastics, because they lived the contemplative life, to help the laity and those in other religious orders bring that dimension into their lives as well.

Keating came away from the meeting determined to make a contribution. He asked the monks at St. Joseph's to search for a method rooted in Christian tradition that would make contemplative prayer more accessible to those outside the monastery. The novice master at St. Joseph's, William Meninger, found a simple technique in the 14th-century Anglican classic The Cloud of Unknowing. Meninger called the method "The Prayer of the Cloud" and began teaching it to retreatants at the abbey guesthouse. Another St. Joseph's monk, Basil Pennington, began teaching it to religious men and women. At the first workshop given to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, Pennington frequently quoted his friend and correspondent Thomas Merton, who often when writing abut this type of prayer, would use the term "center." For example, in Contemplative Prayer Merton says, "We rarely pray with the 'mind' alone, Monastic meditation . . . involve[s] the whole man, and proceed[s] from the center of man's being." By the end of the workshop, participants were referring to the technique as "centering prayer."

Today centering prayer draws thousands of Catholics as well as Episcopalians, Methodists, and others to workshops and retreats. At one 1997 workshop alone, led by Keating and Gustave Reininger, 550 people squeezed into a San Francisco Episcopal church. Ten-day retreats at St. Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, where Keating now resides, are filled a year in advance; the New York Open Center offered a four-month program of prayer days and workshops on the method last spring; and the Boulder-based audio-cassette company Sounds True recently released a 24-cassette series of lectures by Keating on "The Contemplative Journey." The movement has also spawned two organizations, Contemplative Outreach, which Keating co-founded and leads, and the Mastery Foundation, with which Pennington is associated. They are dedicated to teaching the method among the laity and those active in the church ministries, respectively.

Although Keating deserves much credit for developing the format of centering-prayer retreats and a paradigm of the psychological and spiritual changes that occur as a result of practicing the method, others have been instrumental in developing and disseminating the teaching. Nonetheless, much to his and others' chagrin, Keating has emerged as a centering prayer guru. As Reininger explains, "There are needy people who want to make more of him than he is. Thomas's whole point is, 'Don't identify with me, identify with what you deeply, deeply are.'" One way to discourage such projections is to give teaching opportunities to others and to lessen one's visibility. Unfortunately, health problems have forced Keating to do both. He suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome, and although he seems vital when delivering lectures and sermons, associates say he is still "fragile" and needs to conserve his energy. He does so by limiting travel and giving only one lecture or workshop a month.

Beyond the organizational focus on creating a structure to survive the retirement or death of its leader and the training of teachers to handle increasing calls for workshops and retreats, there is another, perhaps more important legacy for the movement to consider: the fruits of the practice. In this regard, Reininger attests to the transformation he's seen in Keating since they began their collaboration 14 years ago. "The guy I met changed before my eyes. As the material passed through him, it restructured him. Doing [centering prayer] changed not just his attitude but who he was. He stopped being this 'Marine Corps colonel,' this abbot. He was always gentle, but the guy had a will and a half. I saw him become as gentle as a baby's love."

Keating himself shies away from touting his spiritual development or professional accomplishments. When asked about the symmetry of his desire as a young man to know God and his current work feeding that desire in others, the monk responds simply, 'The only way to preserve any gift of God is to give it away."

Common Boundary: I hear people using the word "hunger" a lot in relation to values, ethics, and a meaningful life. Do you see a hunger for spirituality in our culture today?

Thomas Keating: Definitely. It was that hunger that originally prompted us in the 1970s to see if we couldn't develop a method in which to express the Christian contemplative heritage. The movement to the East was very strong among Roman Catholics. So I asked myself, 'Why is this? Why don't they go to Christian monasteries?"

CB: What do you think was the reason?

TK: They had never heard of Christian contemplative practices. Nor did most cloistered communities think of themselves as having an obligation to share monastic prayer. The mystique of the cloister had gotten thoroughly embedded in people's minds, so much so that if you said grace twice a day or said morning and evening prayers, your spiritual director thought that you had a contemplative vocation and would urge you to enter a cloister. I don't know whether that was a way of getting rid of contemplatives or whether it was just ignorance.
We at St.. Joseph's Abbey asked ourselves if there wasn't a more methodical way that we could present the contemplative Christian tradition. Centering prayer was first taught to Roman Catholic religious and clergy as a point of renewal, following the Second Vatican Council. Our thinking was that they would in turn teach the method to lay persons. But our plans were changed by the Holy Spirit. Through experience we saw that not only were lay persons taking possession of their contemplative heritage, but little by little more and more persons from other denominations took part. When I retired and came to Snowmass, I had no intention of teaching centering prayer. But then I was asked to offer a centering prayer workshop in the local parish. About 80 people, who were very involved in a wide variety of Christian and other faiths, came to that event. It didn't take long to realize that this was an ecumenical movement. The Spirit was calling people.

CB: I understand that centering prayer groups exist not only in Catholic parishes but in Episcopal and Methodist churches, too.

TK: Oh, yes. There is, for example, a Methodist project in the Upper Room in Nashville [an interdenominational Christian organization sponsored by the United Methodist Church]. I should point out that as in Buddhism, Christianity has several contemplative methods. The methods of contemplative prayer are expressed in two traditions: centering prayer, which we represent, and Christian Meditation, designed by John Main, which is now spreading rapidly throughout the world under the charismatic leadership of Father Lawrence Freeman. The John Main approach is a little different than ours, but both go in the same direction: moving beyond dependence on concepts and words to a direct encounter with God on the level of faith and interior silence.

CB: How do the methods differ?

TK: I don't know that I represent the John Main method fully because I haven't done it myself, but it is rooted in the experience John Main had in India. He learned a mantra from a Hindu source and translated that into a Christian context, finding sources in the early Christian tradition that reinforced his understanding. He offered his practitioners the discipline of saying the mantra "maranatha" nonstop for 20 minutes or half an hour. You can also say some other word – there is some flexibility there – but the point is that one never stops saying the word unless it stops saying itself. In that way it resembles the Jesus Prayer of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, in which "Lord Jesus God have mercy on me" is said over and over again both during and outside of prayer periods until it says itself almost independently or arises spontaneously.

CB: Both the John Main method and centering prayer use sacred words, but they each take a different tack with regard to use of this word, don't they?

TK: Centering prayer involves attention, but a general loving attention without particular content. The sacred word is not the object of the attention but rather the expression of the intention of the will.

CB: How do you make a word a symbol of intention?

TK: In the introductory workshop people take a minute or two to think of a word that expresses their intention to consent to God's presence and action. It could be a sacred word, or it could be some other. The sacredness of the word is not in the content of the word but in the intention to be in God's presence that you invest in it.

CB: In my experience, setting an intention has always been extremely powerful, but I usually do that by stating clearly what I intend. How can the repetition of a single word set an intention?

TK: It's very easy when you think of it. When you get married, you say, "I do." That is an expression of intention that has all kinds of consequences in your life. But it's only two words. In centering prayer, we intend to consent, not to do something. It is a receptive attitude that doesn't require any effort. So centering prayer differs from John Main's method, at least as I understand it, in this way: Instead of doing something constantly, you keep saying the sacred word only until you feel that your intention is established in your will. With time you begin to sense when this is the case. You feel a sense of peace when you are not struggling with temptation. Of course, one's psychological experience of centering prayer varies from day to day. It can be very consoling. It can also be Purgatory or worse because when psychological rest occurs-when the body rests, the emotions rest, and the spirit rests-the body, which is the warehouse of undigested emotional material, begins to feel permission to evacuate primitive experiences, especially of early childhood. They take the form of thoughts or emotions that bear no relation to the immediate past. The object of centering prayer is not to get rid of these thoughts; it is to let them come, then to let them go. That is the way the psyche gets rid of undigested material: by bringing it to our awareness. If we just acknowledge the thoughts and feelings, they normally disappear.

CB: Does this evacuation occur only in the time of prayer or afterward? And how do you suggest dealing with this material?

TK: In the introductory workshop, we talk about the experience of evacuation during the time of practicing centering prayer. In that case, the practice is to let go of any thought or perception. The order of priority is to be as silent as possible, and when that is not possible to let the noise of the thoughts be the sacred symbol for a while, without analyzing them. We suggest letting go of thoughts gently, without pushing them away. Now, psychologists will say, "You ought to handle [the emotional material] while it is fresh." Our answer to that is that it is more important to learn interior silence. You will remember the feeling afterward, and you can process it in ordinary daily life. During prayer is not the time to get into it, because you might lose your grounding and confidence in God. Also, a lot of this stuff doesn't need to be processed. Maybe 80 percent of it is just junk. It is passing through your mind on its way out. You can just wave goodbye. On an ongoing basis, however, one does need to raise these questions in one's support group because once the unloading process begins, it can become quite pervasive. The first experience of unloading is usually tears, especially if one does a lot of centering prayer like in our 10-day intensive, where we do the process for four or five hours a day. Beginners-and by beginners I mean those in the first 10 years-have some dramatic unloading. Their dream patterns change dramatically and so on. With some prudent bodily exercises like Thai chi, the energy tends to get balanced. The loss of sleep, the little pains here and there, and other inconveniences tend to dissipate. But what does come are somewhat painful emotions. The psyche seems to remember them just the way you experienced them as a child. If you experienced fear, you are afraid; if you experienced panic, you feel panicky.

CB: So to deal with the evacuation or unloading process during the periods of prayer, you recommend acknowledging the feelings and thoughts and letting them go. But what about afterward? Psychotherapy generally aims for an integration or transformation of such feelings and emotions.

TK: Feelings that are more serious and persistent need to be looked at and perhaps worked with. If it is a serious enough feeling, you may need the help of a therapist or a psychologically knowledgeable spiritual guide. But therapists should grasp the fact that deep meditation releases things in the unconscious that might take years to unload in therapy. Some of these feelings are significant, and some are superficial. I think probably all thoughts in contemplative prayer have a certain element of unloading, even those that don't bother you. That is why we say, "Don't resist thoughts." In contemplative prayer, not thinking is the important thing.

CB: Your work contains a great deal of psychological knowledge. How did you come to articulate psychological processes that go on with regard to one's spiritual practice?

TK: I was deeply imbued with the Christian tradition, which has a lot of psychological insight into how the spiritual journey evolves, including knowledge of the unconscious, although no one called it that. The dark nights of St. John are really the purification of Freud's unconscious but from a wholly different perspective and motivation. In dialoguing with others and in comparing the Christian tradition with developmental psychology, the evolutionary model, the perennial philosophy, and contemporary anthropology, I automatically synthesized them. Psychology is really about spirituality if it is understood rightly. The transpersonal people are on the right road even if they are in the minority in the profession. I saw psychotherapy right away as what God has been secretly doing for centuries by other names; that is, He searches through our personal history and heals what needs to be healed-the wounds of childhood or our own self-inflicted wounds. He preserves whatever was good in each stage of life and brings it to full flowering through the graces of spiritual progress and dine union. If you want to call this higher states of consciousness or if you want to call it advanced stages of faith, hope, and charity, that is up to you.

CB: Although you refer to God as the divine therapist, you do advise people to take advantage of therapy.

TK: Absolutely. Some people whose psyches are very fragile would be well advised not to do centering prayer until they have established another practice that reassures their faculties and their emotions that God is safe, or at least is not as dangerous as they might have thought.

CB: That's a good point. Many people have an internalized image of a harsh, critical, judgmental, or even sadistic God. The whole point of centering prayer is to "rest in God," but if you assume that God is going to punish you, you're not going to be able to relax.

TK: Exactly. This is a problem for many pre-Vatican II Catholics and, I would think, for fundamentalists, given their teachings. Most mainline Christians have a pretty monstrous idea of God that involves hell and punishment. If you feel that God is a judge, then you are ready to bring down the verdict of guilty for your least fault. We didn't know how to teach children religion, so we gave them the Commandments instead of fostering the idea of God as a loving father and protector who is merciful and who loves us. That is the good news of the gospel. I'm afraid we got into the habit in many Christian denominations of teaching the bad news first.

CB: How can one work with this negative, internalized God image?

TK: Throw it in the wastebasket. Learn that it isn't God. One of the values of centering prayer is that you are not thinking about God during the time of centering prayer, so you are giving God a chance to manifest.

CB: And if fear arises?

TK: Let it go, along with every other thing that arises. If one has an obsession or an emotionally charged thought that is diseased, not thinking is one of the best healing methods there is. In centering prayer there are moments of peace that give the psyche a chance to realize that God may not be so bad after all. Centering prayer gradually heals the emotional wound of thinking and feeling about God in a way that is unhealthy and certainly untrue. In the periods of centering prayer, people experience God in a new way. God has a chance to be Himself for a change.

CB: You're well known for participating in the East-West religious dialogue. How did you start this dialogue with Eastern meditation teachers?

TK: A lot of the young people who came to the guest house at St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, were doing Transcendental Meditation or were involved in Hinduism with various swamis, like Satchidananda. I also had a lot of contact with the Tibetan Buddhists, and we lived just down the road from Barre, where the Vipassana people [the Insight Meditation Society] are. I knew some of the great masters that came to teach there, like Achaan Chah and Mahasi Sayadaw. They would come down to Spencer just to see what it was like. I had a chance to talk with them and many other outstanding teachers. I have had wonderful contacts with various Hindu folks. A Zen master, Roshi Sasaki, stopped by on his own initiative to see what we were up to. He was on his way to Europe to see what monasteries over there were doing when he heard about us. He came and gave us a number of sesshin, maybe twice a year for about 8 or 10 years while I was abbot there. Not all the monks went, but those who were interested -a significant number-went.

CB: What is sesshin?

TK: Sesshin is seven or eight days of mostly sitting [in meditation] interspersed with teisho, a presentation by the roshi on a particular text or theme, and dokusan, a private interview with the roshi. The private interview isn't spiritual direction. You don't discuss whether you should eat meat on Friday; it is much more profound. It focuses on a koan, an unanswerable question that frustrate s the intellect so that you have to answer not with reason but with the body, a gesture, or words that show that you have understood the particular experience the koan is designed to awaken. If you don't, the roshi rings the bell and you get out. It is very simple. The question is: How much are you willing to change?

CB: Did you also participate?

TK: I did because I had great admiration for the roshi's spiritual attainment and wisdom. The teishos were wonderful; [they provided] a whole different perspective on ultimate reality, truth, and the false-self system. I learned a great deal from the roshi, especially how dependent on the intellect we are in the West. Zen really begins where the intellect ends. Not that it despises the intellect, but Zen recognizes its limitations and deliberately works on developing the intuitive faculties and moving to a union with all reality. Certain experiences of that unity can't be expressed in words but only in koans, in poetry, or in symbol.

CB: Did your experience with Zen inform your Christian faith?

TK: Yes, it enriched it. I read the Gospel from a different perspective and saw the truth of Zen in much of the Gospel. Buddhism is a very advanced religion. Roshi Sasaki, who is still functioning at 89 in Mount Baldy in Los Angeles, thought that Zen could help Christians become better Christians. He saw-and I would certainly adhere to his insight-that there is a certain Zen quality in all religions. It is a fundamental religious attitude. Centering prayer is very rich but quite diffuse and tends to put the emphasis on grace in a way that perhaps needs to be balanced by the Zen attitude, which is that we have to do something, too. Actually, St. Ignatius expressed it well when he said, "Act as if everything depended on you, and trust as if everything depended on God." Well, how do you do that? That is a koan. You could spend a lifetime trying to figure out how to do that. What the world religions all have in common is [the fact that] transcendence is the name of the game. This means first having a self and then surrendering it, opening oneself to union with God, which is a gift.

CB: In reading your books, I thought that you saw God as immanent as opposed to transcendent. Did I read that incorrectly, or is this another koan?

TK: That is what it is. [God is] infinitely transcendent and infinitely immanent. That is the extraordinary part: God couldn't be closer, closer even than consciousness. But the Christian articulation of that mystery is a little different from [that of] the East. The Christian would say you are not God, whereas the Vedic tradition says that you become God. I think we may be talking about the same experience of divine union, but our belief system requires us to say that you may be so united to God that you can't distinguish yourself from Him but that He nevertheless remains ontologically-that is, metaphysically-distinct. That theological disagreement could simply be the result of having an experience and trying to articulate the inexplicable according to your particular belief system.
So although it sounds different, it may be the same thing. But we don't have enough experience to say that for sure. We have to have a lot more people in that state and be at a good stage of dialogue to precisely understand each other's terms. We started a little group called the Snowmass Interreligious Conference, where teachers from various spiritual traditions got together and just talked about what helped them the most. This gave us a chance to see a religion through somebody else's eyes, someone who has really been through it and now embodies it.

CB: I've often thought, Wouldn't it be marvelous to have someone who has done centering prayer for 20 years, someone who has practiced Vipassana meditation for 20 years, and someone schooled in kabbalistic practice for 20 years all come together to talk about their experiences?

TK: That is what we do, but the group is only about 15 years old. [It consists of] people who are completely dedicated to their spiritual path and to articulating it. We've come up with an awful lot of things that we agree on completely, and then there are things that are distinctive. We have also become great friends. We even have one person who is nonaligned – he keeps us all honest.

CB: We talked earlier about the psychological processes that occur as a result of centering prayer. What about the spiritual fruits?

TK: In centering prayer, you let go of any perception when it catches hold of your attention. You constantly let go by returning to the sacred word. At some point the will begins to habitually turn to God during the prayer; it doesn't need a sacred word anymore to affirm its intention. It is aware that it is not attracted to the thoughts that continue to go by. Now, the grace of God in Christian spiritual development is capable of touching the will but leaving the other faculties-like imagination or memory-free so they may roam around and persecute you while the will feels a certain peace and union with God. St. Teresa said that if the will doesn't understand its state and tries to chase the thoughts away, it will lose its union with God, which is very delicate. So it needs to put up with the noise. She also gave another example: When grace touches the will, it is like a Pied Piper who blows on a little whistle and all the little ruffians and children who are running around soon settle down and take their seat and become quiet because of the charm of the music, the music of silence. That is the intuitive intellect, which is knowing God but not through a concept. It is knowing Him through love.

CB: Have you ever had an experience like that?

TK: Yes, it is quite common. It is really the first touch of the divine presence within. The first experience of God in mysticism or as contemplative prayer is analogous to perfume. It is analogous not because you smell something but because of the attraction without a mediator. You smell what you smell. If roses are there, you smell them; if God is there, you enjoy it. But if you reflect on the experience, that usually diminishes it. So you let it come and you let it go and don't get attached to it. Unfortunately, attachment is one of the hazards because when the prayer of quiet is flowing, you want to hang on to the experience for dear life as long as you can. The false self, until purified, transfers its idea of happiness to experiences of God, which is an improvement but is still not God. So God has to detach us from the experiences of God in order to give us the experience of intimate union. But the prayer of quiet can expand. This stage is all laid out very beautifully and charmingly in St. Teresa of Avila's The Interior Castle. She distinguishes a level of union in which the imagination is grasped so one is no longer persecuted by thoughts going by. Formerly, those faculties were free to wander. Now the divine action is so strong that it puts them to sleep, leaves them inactive. That's the prayer of union. In full union, then, the intellect and will are grasped and one loses consciousness of the self and is filled with joy. But still this is only the beginning. After that, God has to detach us from our attachment to those gifts, and that is when the dark night of spirit occurs. The divine therapist begins to work on the roots – the false-self system and the value that we put in our emotional programs. Faith has to be purified; hope has to be in God alone and not in anything we have ever done. Love has to be pure so that we are seeking God not for our own satisfaction or reward but just because God is God. One realizes that this is not punishment on God's part, nor is He playing hard to get. It is the nature of reality. You just can't enter into pure love without being completely detached from anything you want for yourself. So the journey takes awhile. It is an incredible project; only God could have thought it up: to bring something so wounded to that kind of freedom. To do God's will all the time and not even think of a reward or what happens to oneself is a marvelous project. I recommend it.

Support on the journey

The Anam Cara Community’s ministry is to be a support to those who are on the inner journey into God. Each person’s journey is different, and we recognise that there are some for whom the Christian tradition is difficult or not supportive. We’re committed to finding ways to hear the needs of each Associate, and support them as we can.

The Community can offer support in a number of ways:

• Proverbs 8:1–4, 22–31
• Romans 5:1–5
• John 16:12–15

From very early on in the life of the Church, Christians read the figure of ‘Wisdom’ in Proverbs as a reference to Jesus. They assumed that God had already shown, in hints, characters and patterns of relating, what he would reveal in full in Jesus. Wisdom, in particular, lent herself as a very good introduction to what Christians were claiming about Jesus. Wisdom is a figure who is present with God before anything else is created, and she teaches people God’s way in the world.

In the context of the theology of Proverbs itself, of course, written long before the time of Jesus, wisdom is a literary device on the part of the author. To follow the way of ‘wisdom’ is to live in the world as you should, as its maker intended. It is not, on the whole, a mystical or even deeply religious-sounding book, but its assumption is that if you try hard to find the right way, day by day, and follow the teaching of the wise, you will actually be doing what you were created to do, and you will make the world a better place for yourself and others.

But when Wisdom is personfied, as she is in today’s passage, the mood changes. This is not the patient, slightly baffled, concentration on doing the best you can, but a sudden insight into the mind of God. Suddenly, instead of the slightly dull and obvious advice of an old gentleman, we are in the presence of God, the source of all wisdom.

At the start of the passage, Wisdom is standing at all the busiest and most noticeable points of the city and shouting. God’s wisdom is not a thing reserved only for the few, the intellectual giants. It is available to anyone who has ears to hear. And yet what Wisdom is calling out is sung to the tune that makes the universe dance. She was present as God created the world, and she saw it all unfolding. She shared God’s joy in it, and it is this joy, this knowledge of the love of the Creator for his world, that she is sharing as she sings. The knowledge of how to live with joy as a child of God in the world that he has made is what Wisdom offers.

No wonder, then, that Christians saw the connections with Jesus. The first few verses of Romans 5 convey something of that same sense of standing in a world that suddenly makes sense, because we are sure of our rightful place in it. Our place is the one that has been won for us by Christ. Just as in Proverbs the wild delight that Wisdom speaks of has to be filtered through into the minutiae of daily life, so in Romans, the almost unbearable relief of knowing that we are reconciled to God has to be the rock on which we stand, whatever happens in life. Paul wants us to feel the seismic shift in our whole perception of the world, now that we are brought back to God and he wants that to colour everything that happens to us. To live in Christ, as to live by Wisdom, is to live in tune with the world, so that everything that happens, good and bad, deepens our understanding of who we are in relation to God.

But, Paul tells us, we have rather more than a system for recognizing the purpose of God. We have the living presence of God’s Holy Spirit, given to us so that we can feel God’s love for the world. We are now doing what Wisdom does in Proverbs 8; we are sharing God’s love for his world, and feeling his joy in what he has made.

Both of these passages are profound insights into God’s Trinitarian nature, but it is the passage from today’s Gospel that spells it out. John’s image of the Trinity is of a circle in which each figure is only illuminated by the light of the torches that the others are holding. Each desperately wants us to see and love the others. What the torches reveal is both how much they love each other and how alike they are, with a deep family resemblance that makes us look from one to the other with a sense of true recognition. But the circle of light does not exclude us. It spills some of its warmth out to us, the audience. It invites us forward, into the light, and the transforming light begins to make us, too, resemble the main players, not by right, but because of the generous light reflected on us, the light of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Our Fundamental Option

Several years ago, at a conference that I was attending the keynote speaker challenged his audience in this way: All of us, he pointed out, are members of various communities: we live in families, are part of church congregations, have colleagues with whom we work, have a circle of friends, and are part of a larger civic community. In every one of these there will come a time when we will get hurt, when we will not be honored, when we will be taken for granted, and treated unfairly. All of us will get hurt. That is a given. However, and this was his challenge, how we handle that hurt, with either bitterness or forgiveness, will color the rest of our lives and determine what kind of person we are going to be.  

Suffering and humiliation find us all, and in full measure, but how we respond to them will determine both the level of our maturity and what kind of person we are. Suffering and humiliation will either soften our hearts or harden our souls. The dynamic works this way:

There is no depth of soul without suffering. Human experience has long ago taught us this. We attain depth primarily through suffering, especially through the kind of suffering that is also humiliating. If anyone of us were to ask ourselves the question: What has given me depth? What has opened me to deeper perception and deeper understanding? Almost invariably the answer would be one of which we would be ashamed to speak: we were bullied as a child, we were abused in some way, something within our physical appearance makes us feel inferior, we speak with an accent, we are always somehow the outsider, we have a weight problem, we are socially awkward, the list goes on, but the truth is always the same: To the extent that we have depth we have also been humiliated, the two are inextricably connected.

But depth is not all of a kind. Humiliation makes us deep, but it can make us deep in very different ways: It can make us deep in understanding, empathy, and forgiveness or it can make us deep in resentment, bitterness, and vengeance. The young men who shot their classmates in Columbine and the young man who indiscriminately gunned down students at Virginia Tech University had, no doubt, suffered more than their share of humiliation in life and that had made them deep. Sadly, in their case, it made them deep in anger, bitterness, and murder. 

We see the opposite in Jesus in how he faces his crucifixion. Crucifixion, as we know, was designed by the Romans as capital punishment; but they had more than mere capital punishment in mind. Crucifixion was also designed to do two other things: to inflict the optimal amount of pain that it was possible for a person to absorb and to utterly and publicly humiliate the one undergoing it.

As Jesus prepares to face his crucifixion and the shameful humiliation within it, he cringes before the challenge and he asks God whether there is another way of getting to the depth of Easter Sunday without having to undergo the humiliation of Good Friday. Eventually, but only after sweating blood, does he accept that there is no other way than to undergo the humiliation of crucifixion. But we get the real lesson only if we really understand what was at stake in Jesus' choice here. The agonizing choice that he is making is not the choice: Do I submit to death or do I invoke divine power and walk free? He was condemned to death and felt as helpless as would any other human in that situation. Invoking divine power or not invoking it as a means of escape was not the issue about which he was anguishing. The issue was not whether to die or not die. It was about how to die. Jesus' choice was this: Do I die in bitterness or in love? Do I die in hardness of heart or softness of soul? Do I die in resentment or in forgiveness?

We know which way he chose. His humiliation drove him to extreme depths, but these were depths of empathy, love, and forgiveness.

That is the issue that is perennially at stake in terms of our own maturity and generativity: In our humiliations, do we give ourselves over to bitterness or love, resentment or forgiveness, hardness of heart or softness of soul? And we have to make that choice daily: Every time we find ourselves shamed, ignored, taken for granted, belittled, unjustly attacked, abused, or slandered we stand between resentment and forgiveness, bitterness and love. Which of these we chose will determine both our maturity and our happiness.

And, ultimately, for all of us, as was the case with Jesus, we will have to face this choice on the ultimate playing field: In the face of our earthly diminishment and death will we choose to let go and die with a cold heart or a warm soul?

Support on the journey

The Anam Cara Community’s ministry is to be a support to those who are on the inner journey into God. Each person’s journey is different, and we recognise that there are some for whom the Christian tradition is difficult or not supportive. We’re committed to finding ways to hear the needs of each Associate, and support them as we can.

The Community can offer support in a number of ways:

• Genesis 11:1–9
• Acts 2:1–21
• John 14:8–17

The story of the Tower of Babel continues the theology of sin that is found in Genesis 2 and 3, in the story of the Fall. Eve and Adam’s desire to seize for themselves a knowledge that properly belongs to God alone is at the heart of their fractured relationship with God. Similarly, here in Genesis 11, the people begin to build their tower so that they can get as near to heaven as possible, and grab a bit of fame and glory for themselves. ‘Let us make a name for ourselves,’ they decide.

But with this impulse to power also goes a nameless and ill-expressed fear. The people persuade themselves that without their tower, they will be ‘scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’. As far as we, the readers, can see, there is absolutely no justification for this fear. Who is threatening them? What force will dissipate them? But their instinct is to build high and huddle together.

And, of course, as a result of their actions, the very thing that they had feared actually happens. They are indeed forced apart and scattered over the whole earth, because they can no longer understand each other or work together. The Lord, we are told, ‘confused their language’. Perhaps that way they might start to make a little more sense. Their earlier statements and actions might have had a kind of mad logic to them, but they were without any basis in truth. After Babel, they can at least no longer pretend that their system makes sense.

The Acts story of the day of Pentecost is a richly satisfying reversal of Babel. The scattered people of God come together; they had been used to being separated by language, but now God’s own words unite them. The messengers of God are people who know they are dependent upon God. The Holy Spirit comes upon Peter and the other apostles in a powerful and supernatural way, and they cannot even begin to pretend that this is their own doing. If the builders of the Tower of Babel are guilty of trying to be like God, the disciples are only too aware that they are nothing without God’s power.

Peter’s Pentecost speech sets out the great paradox of God’s power. Here are the apostles—simple men, not trained linguists—making themselves heard and understood to the great polyglot crowd. Peter reminds his hearers of the great Old Testament promises of the coming of God’s Spirit in power, and claims that this is what they are now witnessing. And in the verses that follow today’s reading, the paradox becomes even more pointed, as Peter goes on to connect the power of God with the crucified Jesus.

So today’s reading from Acts picks up a theme that is dear to St Paul’s heart, as well as much of the Gospels. Over and over again, God chooses as his messengers those who seem inadequate and wholly unsuited for their great task. That’s why the story of the Tower of Babel is so illuminating in this context, because it suggests that nothing divides people more quickly from God than a desire for power, and an arrogant determination to rely on themselves. Those who have no illusions about their own gifts might actually be the only ones who are prepared to turn to God and ask for help.

Perhaps that’s why Jesus tells his disciples in John’s Gospel that the world cannot receive the Spirit of truth (John 14:17). Perhaps the world is too obsessed with its own truth, its own crazily self-authenticating systems, to receive the Spirit whose job it is to unite us with the Father and the Son, to return us to our true dependence upon God.

Jesus does promise his followers a kind of power. Starting from Pentecost, Acts shows us the kind of great works that the disciples are able to do in the name of Jesus. But the point of this power from the Spirit is to point to the Son and, through the Son, to the Father. The Babel-builders wanted power for the sake of self-glorification and self-protection, and it cost them their unity and their ability to relate to each other. The power of God has nothing to do with self-protection and everything to do with restoring unity and communication, which is why the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost is so characteristic. It enables Peter and the apostles to communicate; it enables them to make connections, to see the common threads running throughout the history of God’s dealings with his people; and it makes them missionaries, longing to share a common life in God, the common life of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Accepting our acceptance

"It was not because you are the largest of all nations that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you, for you are really the smallest of all nations" (Deuteronomy 7:7).

God has chosen us. That is simple and clear. But for us to accept that we are chosen or beloved is actually quite difficult, just as it was for Israel. It demands major freedom from self. (Only the "nobodies" seem to be ready for chosenness. Meanwhile God has to lead most of us on long 40-year journeys before we get to that place.)

God chooses each of us—not to "raise us up a notch," but to lead us through necessary and transformative journeys so we can allow ourselves to be beloved, and to relish a mutual relationship. At Pentecost the Spirit is poured out on "all humankind" regardless of status.

The election of the Jews, God's "chosen people," eventually becomes a message for the whole world, and not something to keep them superior, satisfied or apart. It will take the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah and Jonah, Jesus himself, the rest of the Book of Acts and the fierce ministry of Paul to resolve God's universality. Because the implications of "one God who created all things" gradually became clear, they soon called this new religion "catholic." Our attempts to limit this election have often made us more ethnic than catholic. Not only does God end up looking very small and scarce, but we do too.

We are ready for the great outpouring of the Holy Spirit only after 50 days of enjoying the wisdom of the risen Christ. It takes a while to move from Jesus as mine to Jesus as everybody's. Originally only Paul was strong enough to get the point, and his ministry to the gentiles (which is most of us!) was a scandal to James and Peter. He had to argue with Peter about this, and God had to give Peter a vision to prove it to him.

Choosing, Changing

When God makes a choice, it is definitive and irrevocable. The biblical God does not love us if we change, but so that we can change. God has not stopped choosing Israel any more than God stops choosing us because we do not respond (see Romans 11). As our Catholic tradition and recent popes have affirmed, the Jews are still the chosen people.

God's love, it seems, is never determined by the worthiness of the one loved, which is almost impossible for us to comprehend—because that is the only way we know how to love. The biblical God seems to be both extremely patient and extremely humble. This is good news, for where would any of us be if God's choice depended upon our response?

Since God's choice is not determined by the worthiness or even readiness of the chosen, the Bible speaks of God's love as being steadfast, faithful, forever and like a rock! We have never kept our side of the contract, and yet God always rises to the occasion and holds up God's side. You could say that is the very definition of what it means to be God and what it means to be a human being in the Bible: Humanity always fails, God always saves.

Resting, Rejoicing

As humans, we cannot recognize, much less affirm, another person's inherent, God-given goodness until we have rested in that lovely place ourselves. God is inviting us first of all to rest and rejoice in what it means to be God's beloved son or daughter. When we have learned to live and abide in that chosenness, only then can we communicate that same beloved status to anybody else or any situation at any level of depth, joy or freedom.

This is the only wedding feast there is. If we have been there, we can proclaim a true and new alternative to the drudgery and darkness of this world. This is healthy and happy religion, and it is offered to us.

As we say at Mass, "How happy are those who are invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb." 

Support on the journey

The Anam Cara Community’s ministry is to be a support to those who are on the inner journey into God. Each person’s journey is different, and we recognise that there are some for whom the Christian tradition is difficult or not supportive. We’re committed to finding ways to hear the needs of each Associate, and support them as we can.

The Community can offer support in a number of ways:

•  
• Ezekiel 37:1–14
• Acts 16:9–15
• John 14:23–9

The clue to Ezekiel’s famous vision of the dry bones comes in verse 11. What Ezekiel has been hearing from the people all around him is a despair that is like death. ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost,’ they moan. They are incapable of change or growth because they do not believe in the possibility of life.

God agrees with them about their condition. They are lifeless, spiritless, with no home except the shadowy grave. But they need not be without hope. So God takes Ezekiel to the valley full of bones, and makes him prophesy. Just picture it for a moment: the man alone in a valley of dust and death, shouting out, calling upon life and breath and spirit; and seeing the response, as the bones collect themselves, take on flesh and begin to be alive.

It is perfectly clear that this life is not ‘natural’. It does not come from the bones themselves, but from God. And the same is true of the people of Israel. In themselves, they have lost the ability to live, but God is going to give them his own breath, his own spirit, so that the life they live will be God’s. Their total absence of life and hope is to be remedied by God’s gift of his own presence, which is life.

Jesus is talking about absence and presence in the Gospel reading, as well. The whole of the Last Supper is overshadowed by the knowledge that it is the end. The disciples may not quite have taken in what is to happen, and how soon, but they must have picked up the new note in Jesus’ teaching after dinner, as he attempts to prepare them for a time when he will not be there.

In this passage, Jesus is setting out the ways in which, as a matter of fact, he will still be with the disciples, come what may. First of all, he will be with them whenever they remember and try to stay faithful to what he has taught them (John 14:23—‘Those who love me will keep my word’). Next, in trying to continue in love and commitment to Jesus, they will be continuing Jesus’ own work of making God present. So, by their love, they can continue the incarnating work of Jesus, and the Father will be present with them, as he was with Jesus. And, of course, since where the Father is, so is the Son (cf.John 14:10), by being the place of God’s presence, they are also being the place where Jesus is present (v. 23—‘my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them’).

But, lastly, because Jesus is nothing if not realistic about his followers, he does not expect them to manage this task of loving God and making him present on their own. The Holy Spirit is to come, as a constant enabler of the presence of God (v. 26). Their new life, like that of Ezekiel’s dry bones, is not something that they have inside them, waiting to be realized, but is the gift of God.

So, in a kind of circular argument, God is asking them to continue to make him present, as Jesus does, and he is giving them his own life and presence to make that possible. Over and over again, in God’s great and gracious plan, we see that we are asked to do and to give what has already been done and given to us by God. We are given forgiveness and asked to forgive, we are given love and asked to love, we are given God and asked to make him a home with us. Our dry bones don’t have to generate their own life.

We know what happened next. We know that the disciples went straight from listening to this great promise about the continuing presence of God in Christ through the Spirit to total confusion and despair. But we also know that the promised new life did somehow percolate their dry bones, and that they did rise to the task of sharing God’s life and love with the world around them, and that whenever they did, they found that God was there already. For example, in the story of Lydia, as we are told it in Acts 16, we hear that ‘the Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul’ (v. 14). It might have been tempting to think that Paul’s fluency and fervour converted Lydia, but the author of Acts is clear that God was at work on both sides of that conversation, making possible what he was asking for. Dry bones can live, with the life of God.

For 12 May 2013

• Ezekiel 36:24–8
• Acts 16:16–34
• John 17:20–6

The verses chosen from Ezekiel for today are a beautiful and encouraging picture of the restoration of Israel, but they urgently need to be read in the light of the verses immediately before and after them. The concentrated, central picture is one of Israel restored at last to life. God searches for his people, scattered among all the nations, rootless and nationless, and brings them home. He himself performs all the ceremonies necessary to wipe away the taint of having lived for so long among idolaters, and he puts his own life in them, so that they are no longer tempted to return to the wicked ways that led to their downfall in the first place. God reiterates his great covenant promise to Abraham and to Moses, but this time, he himself will keep both sides of the covenant, because it will be God’s own spirit that enables the people to respond to his promise.

What the verses before make clear, however, is that this is not a desperate strategy on God’s part to try to keep his complex plot on course, but a sign of God’s eternal and unchanging purpose, which nothing can deflect. God chooses a people to be his own, as a sign of hope to the nations, and nothing can prevent them from fulfilling their function. Even their unfaithfulness and incomprehension becomes a means for God to demonstrate his loving and renewing power. God is holy and glorious, Ezekiel tells us, and nothing will prevent that colossal majesty from becoming visible to the world.

Jesus’ prayer in John’s Gospel has something of the same force. Again, what is at issue is the glory of God. And, just as in Ezekiel, nothing can compromise the glory of God. The very things that would, logically, deny God’s power and reality become the means of confirming them. Above all, in John, the cross of Christ is the moment at which he is glorified, and in which the unity of Father and Son is made visible. So when, in John 17:22, Jesus says, ‘The glory that you have given me I have given them’, we are bound to conclude that this glory that we share with Jesus is the glory of suffering, and that in obedient suffering, Christians share in the unity of Father, Son and Spirit. This is not to glamorize or spiritualize suffering, but to know, above all, that it cannot ultimately derail the purposes of God. Ezekiel knows that Israel’s suffering is sometimes their own fault, and sometimes falls upon them because of their faithfulness to God. Jesus knows that the suffering of his followers will sometimes be because they are running away from the truth and sometimes because they are witnessing to it. Either way it can and will be used to God’s loving and life-giving purpose.

Acts is very good at bringing complex and abstract theology to life in practical examples. We have here two connected stories, one in which the glory of God seems to be being declared, and one in which it actually takes root in changed lives.

First of all, Paul and his companions are in the middle of a fruitful mission in Philippi, but their success has its downside. It has attracted the attentions of a kind of stalker, who follows them around, shouting what actually sound like rather flattering descriptions of their work. But although she is acknowledging their connection with ‘the Most High God’, and their power to offer salvation, she herself is not converted, and her apparent confirmation of their task does not attract others. There is a kind of mechanical recognition of the presence of the divine, without any real willingness or ability to connect with it. This girl has been forced to use her instinct for the numinous as a commercial commodity and so, paradoxically, it has become utterly worthless.

Her witness does not convert, and neither does Paul’s exorcism. Instead, these mighty displays land Paul in prison and there, in his weakness and helplessness, the power of God is displayed. How does Paul know, so instinctively, that this is not a moment to stand up and boast? He could have shouted, in the rubble of the prison, standing up, with his shackles in tatters, ‘See what my God will do to free me? See how much he values me?’ Instead, he chooses to stay captive, almost passive, and to sit and wait by the open door of his jail.

Somehow, the jailer makes the leap between the force that could have been used and the care that actually was. Instantly, he sees the God who channels all his power into love. The glory of God is displayed in that prison cell, not in the broken chains, but in the newly forged bonds of love.

Time wasting

One of the worst things about prison, he told me, was the time-wasting. We were standing in a huge barren hall, or maybe it was a baseball court, where we had just meditated with a large group of his fellow-prisoners. 

After the profound, shared, sweet silence of the meditation we had a lively discussion about what the inner life on the inside was like and how it could be cultivated. This had graced me with the strange feeling I have often had before in prisons, of being very close to the Kingdom, which Jesus says is always “very close to you” wherever and however you find yourself serving your life-term.

The ugliness and dirtiness of the space we were standing in reminded me of some men’s religious houses I have stayed in which reveal more than anything else how a community can lost hope in the spiritual life and in themselves. It would be hard to keep faith in God or yourself in such an aesthetic inferno. But the prisoners on the whole did not complain about the lack of beauty, maybe because they had discovered that complaining about things you can’t change doesn’t make anything better. Maybe because it didn’t seem the main problem they were facing. They all agreed, however, that the great enemy of prayer in prison is the relentless noise, the continuous sounds of metal gates clanging, loud voices echoing down stone corridors, of the rasping noise of anger or hollow laughter.

It is bad enough to know that many years of your life will be wasted in incarceration. It becomes surreal when you realise that you have become a different and better person than the one who was condemned and excluded from society. Worse still is to fill that wasted time with routines that rob you of what minimal meaning or creativity you might be able to cultivate. Meditation, the prisoner I was talking to told me, had helped him to transform this horrible experience of lost time, as in the hours spent standing in line to be counted. Like monks anywhere he had discovered you could pray anywhere and continuously, even in the worst of conditions, by releasing the prayer already within you. As he stood for his number to be called he let go of his thoughts and his resentment and sadness. Often standing in line, but standing too in his heart, he would fall into the sheer joy of the presence.

Compare this with life in another ‘total institution’ of modern life, a hospital. Doctors and nurses complain increasingly about the stress of their professional lives. Substance abuse, depression, breakdown and suicide are growing factors in the medical profession everywhere. As in prisons, medical stress is a product of bad time-management. It breeds the impression of being overwhelmed, powerless to perform properly; persecuted by colleagues or the people you are supposed to be serving.

A hospital where I was speaking recently runs four meditation groups. When it ran a workshop on interpersonal skills for doctors, they were amazed to be told how badly others perceived them to be behaving – interrupting the patients before they had finished describing their problems, avoiding eye contact, harsh with nursing staff and colleagues, cold-hearted in relaying bad news. They were amazed to be told that if they visited a patient and stood sideways to them at a distance, avoiding personal contact, the patient would either remember the visit negatively or erase it from his memory altogether. If the doctor had sat on the edge of the bed for a few moments, present and attentive, the patient would later be convinced she had stayed for a good twenty minutes.

How much time and resources are wasted trying to achieve what a simple spiritual practice makes obvious? In prisons the ethos of punishment and degradation is blatantly counter-productive. In hospitals the depersonalization of medicine makes no one feel better even if it prolongs life, which it often doesn’t. In schools, government policies impose education as a means of training children as an economic resource for reducing the national debt.

One way or another, we are all processed through institutions today. Wastage of time and resources increase with the diminishing of the human factor. And once the humanity of relationships and the quality of personal attention begins to slide it is hard to reverse the trend. The Nazis perversely mastered this process of self-dehumanization that leads, inevitably, to extinction.

Waste will waste us all in time. Finding how to handle time under stressful conditions, how to manage restraint so as to be fully present, is probably one of the greatest spiritual needs of our time. Regardless of any belief system or management theory the simple human art of being present, the lost art of prayer, patiently calls us home to ourselves.

Support on the journey

The Anam Cara Community’s ministry is to be a support to those who are on the inner journey into God. Each person’s journey is different, and we recognise that there are some for whom the Christian tradition is difficult or not supportive. We’re committed to finding ways to hear the needs of each Associate, and support them as we can.

The Community can offer support in a number of ways:

• Genesis 22:1–18
• Acts 11:1–18
• John 13:31–5

The verses from St John’s Gospel come at the turning point of the Last Supper. Judas has just left the room, and there is now no going back. A sense of urgency seems to overtake Jesus after this. The supper is over, and Jesus begins to talk, to explain, as though trying to make the disciples understand at last, to impress upon them some of the things that they should already know. But whenever one of the disciples does speak in the verses that follow today’s reading, it is only to demonstrate how puzzled they are, and how little they understand, even at this late hour.

The two themes of today’s reading from John are related, and are characteristic of all of John’s writing. First of all, now that Judas has gone about his business, and the cross is inescapable, Jesus speaks of glorification. In all of John’s writing, the cross is the moment of illumination, when God is to be seen in Christ and Christ is to be seen in God. Second, Jesus talks about love, the new commandment that he gives to his disciples. The themes are connected because what is revealed in the cross is the love of God in Christ. In the cross we see that love is the whole nature of God in his dealings with us.

The commandment to love is not exactly new. Most of the Old Testament law is designed to make Israel a loving community, that will treat its members and those who come in contact with it with justice and care. But here in John’s Gospel the connection is made explicit and unavoidable. Just as Jesus shows us the nature of God, so we are called to show others that same nature. Just as Israel was designed to be a community that showed the nature of its God, so Jesus’ followers are called to be a community from which the love of God, God’s very nature, shines out.

So what is this love that we are called to receive and transmit? It is, apparently, the love that Jesus has shown to us, his followers. We are to reflect back what we have received and, in doing that, we will be reflecting the God whom we believe in. We will be restoring his image in ourselves, by making ourselves like the Son. We were created in God’s image, and now we are to be restored in that image again, by showing the love of the Father and the Son.

This great ‘new commandment’ can fill us with a great sense of hopelessness and failure, if we do not read John carefully. We know that we are wholly incapable of showing the love of God, but this commandment is given to disciples who don’t seem to understand a word Jesus is saying, and who are shortly going to betray him. Jesus’ love for his disciples is utterly realistic. He knows the kind of people he has chosen, then and now. They are ordinary, fallible. To these people, Jesus entrusted and continues to entrust himself and his message. They are worthy because they are loved. That is the Christian disciple’s only qualification for the great task we are given.

In the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac and in Peter’s attempt to explain why he is admitting Gentiles to fellowship, we see people struggling to understand and show the love of God.

Abraham has learned two very important things that most of us never learn in a lifetime: that God comes first, beyond anything else; and that however much we think we love our family or our friends, God loves them more. Abraham knows that God is to be trusted, even when he cannot understand what God is doing. And he trusts God because God is trusting him. God is making Abraham a part of his great purpose of salvation for the world, and Abraham has come close enough to God to know that you cannot bargain about salvation. You cannot say, ‘Yes, please, I’ll have the salvation, but I won’t give anything in return.’

Peter, too, has learned enough about God to recognize the signs of his presence, however unlikely and unpredicted. And so he becomes the means whereby God’s salvation comes to Cornelius and his household.

Knowing that we are loved and trusted by God is the beginning of fulfilling this new commandment. We do not have to generate this love ourselves, because it is given to us. Christians are, most fundamentally, people who know that God is love, and we know it, not because we are better at loving than anyone else, but because we know that God has loved us and trusted us, even before we were either lovely or trustworthy.

Autopsy of a deceased church

I was their church consultant in 2003. The church’s peak attendance was 750 in 1975. By the time I got there the attendance had fallen to an average of 83. The large sanctuary seemed to swallow the relatively small crowd on Sunday morning.

Support on the journey

The Anam Cara Community’s ministry is to be a support to those who are on the inner journey into God. Each person’s journey is different, and we recognise that there are some for whom the Christian tradition is difficult or not supportive. We’re committed to finding ways to hear the needs of each Associate, and support them as we can.

The Community can offer support in a number of ways:

• Genesis 7:1–5, 11–18; 8:6–18; 9:8–13
• Acts 9:36–43
• John 10:22–30

Today’s passage from St John’s Gospel is part of the escalating conflict between Jesus and ‘the Jews’. From the magnificent opening verses of the Gospel, setting out the cosmic significance of the coming of Jesus, John has hammered home the point that there can be no doubt about who Jesus is. His authoritative personality, his miracles and his teaching all make it clear that Jesus and the Father are one. When, here in verse 25, Jesus says that he has already told them who he is we, the readers, know that he has indeed answered their question in all that he has said and done since his coming.

How is it, then, that the religious authorities, the supposed experts, are still asking the same old question? Over and over again in the preceding chapters, they see Jesus’ miracles, hear his teaching, question those whom he has healed, and still they can’t make up their minds. They are not so completely blinded to the nature of God that they can easily dismiss Jesus, but they have, despite their years of study and devotion, managed to keep God at enough of a distance to make a positive identification difficult. In their heart of hearts, they really do not want Jesus to be telling the truth, and they keep hoping that he will say or do something that will allow them with a clear conscience not to believe.

What is it about Jesus’ presentation of God that they so hate? Is it the reality of it, the inescapable choice that Jesus lays before them? Most religious people, then as now, manage to tame their God to the point where he doesn’t make too much difference to their lives and their choices. They pay him lip-service and carry on regardless. But Jesus won’t let people do that. He is God’s presence, standing face to face with people, and making them (us) decide.

The terrible, painful fact that some people choose not to believe runs throughout John’s Gospel and, indeed, the Bible as a whole. It is particularly poignant in situations, like the one described here by John, where those who reject God are the ones who should know him best, his own people. So much of the interaction between God and his people that the prophets show us, too, suggests that thinking you know God and have got him where you want him is the best possible inoculation against really catching God, the full-blown raging fever of his reality. Any Christian who thinks this is just a warning to ‘the Jews’ is in trouble.

The story of Noah’s ark starts off, in Genesis 6, with the emphasis on those who are about to perish, those who have chosen not to follow God’s way. But the story quickly shifts, in those sections we are reading today, to the preservation of the just. The point of the story is renewal, not destruction. Most retellings of the story tend to dwell on the details of life on board the ark while the waters raged around it. But the editor who brings us the final version we have in Genesis is not so easily distracted. His story moves quickly to the climax, when the covering of the ark is removed, and the passengers can get on with what they were saved for, which is the restoration of the earth to its proper fullness and variety of life, but also to its proper covenant relationship with its maker.

Both the story of Noah and Jesus’ words in John make it clear that God’s purpose is salvation, and that we are created to choose life, though the choice is genuinely ours. But the temptation is to get into a kind of ark mentality and to think that salvation is about getting our people in, into the safety and warmth, and battening down the hatches against the raging world outside. But the point of the ark is the moment where people and animals troop out into the ravaged world to help it start again. The ark is only a good metaphor for the Church if we remember that the point is not to get into the ark, but to let the life of the ark flow out into the world.

The beautiful little story of Tabitha, today’s reading from Acts, reinforces Jesus’ message in John 10:28, ‘I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.’ Tabitha is clearly someone who has chosen Jesus, and helped to share his life and love with all around her. She chooses the living God, and her reward is life. Choose life, all three readings beg. The choice is ours, but let us choose life.

What good was that crisis?

Support on the journey

The Anam Cara Community’s ministry is to be a support to those who are on the inner journey into God. Each person’s journey is different, and we recognise that there are some for whom the Christian tradition is difficult or not supportive. We’re committed to finding ways to hear the needs of each Associate, and support them as we can.

The Community can offer support in a number of ways: