Junctures and Crossroads

It is a startling thing to consider how a particular decision, quite insignificant in the hour it takes place, can secretly hide the truth of a spiritual destiny. Without that decision, a completely different life would have been lived. The choice, trivial and optional at the time it occurs, is part of a soul’s destiny. An entire life, in other words, can reside at an unsuspected, secret juncture when a seemingly unimportant impulse is obeyed. Once the decision is made, the hour releases the bolt on a great interlocking network of influences and events that would not take place but for that choice. Perhaps we do not pay sufficient attention to the importance of such junctures and crossroads…

Fr Donald Haggerty, The Contemplative Hunger

For some weeks now I have been living between worlds. Outwardly, I am much the same man I was before, but inwardly something has changed, and the sense of what it might be in only gradually dawning on me. Long ago, as I recalled recently, I stepped onto the contemplative path almost without realising it. But, as Eve Baker notes, “contemplatives… are useless people” and I was brought up always to be useful as an artist, a poet, a musician: always to consider what treasures I might be able to bring back from the land beyond the grey wind to illuminate the lives of others, and to ornament my own in their eyes.

Almost it would seem an instinct of nature, the manner in which contemplatives flee from attention to themselves. But perhaps it is not so much a flight or an escape as a profound inclination that they are following. What we see externally as their tendency to self-effacement and concealment reflects a desire to be released from the concern for self.

Haggerty, ibid.

Over the years, the inclination to solitude and concealment has popped up often enough, as I’ve noted before; but I have been too quick always to dismiss it, to leave its demands as being too extreme, too far beyond the practicalities of the moment, and life has gone on much as before, filled with pleasures and obligations, weariness and some wonder.

Too early in our lives, perhaps most of us are taught to distrust our truest insights and best impulses. We come under such pressure to conform to the imperatives of our culture – and, growing up in the 1950s, I encountered a culture with strong gender demarcations and role models – that even with the most enlightened parenting we grow up doubting the deepest parts of ourselves. Those of us with a calling to the saltmarshes of the spirit are perhaps doubly vulnerable: growing up into our teens and twenties, it is a brave young person who will dare to be more than a certain amount weird.

Gradually, though, I have found this call to give everything for what I am coming to understand is the simple presence of God growing stronger, not less. I cannot defend or justify this, nor advance any arguments for its advantages. It involves no obvious sacrifices, as far as I can see, nor outer heroics or spectacular renunciations. Like the impulse itself, it is an inward thing.

Eight years ago now, I wrote:

All this stuff about prayer boils down to this. What I am really doesn’t matter. There isn’t any holiness in me. Of myself, I really am not, truly, anything more than little, and ordinary; and anything praiseworthy about me only consists in the extent to which I am prepared to acknowledge that, and to live in the shadows, quietly, like the ivy I love so much. All my health and growth depends on accepting that…

It’s time to let go of a lot of things; and yet it isn’t a time for heroic gestures, grand austerities, but for little turnings to that hidden track that leads out between the trees, away from the lights and the music and the excited voices.

Progress in the life of the spirit doesn’t seem to be measurable in the way worldly progress can be measured. It is hard to write honestly of this. But truly to pray is to become a small incarnation, a tiny model of our Lord; this is why to pray is to take up the cross ourselves, since it is the refusal to turn away from the pain that runs inextricably through existence, like a red thread in the bright weave of what is. Easter is not a metaphor, and resurrection lies on the far side of the cross that is absolute surrender, helplessness entirely embraced. The cross means abandoning all that is my will, every last attempt at self-preservation; “For,” as Paul wrote in his letter to the Colossians (3.3), “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…

Easter Day

It’s springtime here. The birds have been nesting for some time, from the portly, libidinous woodpigeons, and the sweetly faithful collared doves, down to the two tiny wrens who spend hours carrying little feathers and bits of moss into the heart of the old ivied cherry-plum tree, dotted with white flowers for a month now.

It seems to me no accident that Easter is celebrated in springtime. However you understand the story of the resurrection, it is a new beginning. Nothing will be the same, now.

It’s like this every spring: the seasons will not turn back, and though there may be unseasonal frosts, and days of wind and hail that strip the flowers, and chill the young birds in their nests, this year is under way, this year that has never been before. Life emerges, new life from the seed of the old, cells fizzing with pattern and change…

Luke records two angels at the empty tomb saying to Mary Magdalen and her companions, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” It is not winter any longer: love has spoken across what is, and its word is life.

Holy Saturday

In many churches today is known as Holy Saturday, the day when Jesus, having died on the cross on Good Friday, lay quiet in the cold rock tomb until the extraordinary events of Sunday morning.

The Benedictine nuns from Holy Trinity Monastery wrote a couple of years ago on their blog, iBenedictines,

There is a quietness and stillness about Holy Saturday – a day out of time – that belies the intense activity of Christ. We do not know what happened in the tomb, but the ancient belief in the harrowing of hell, when Christ descended into the underworld to set free all the righteous who had died before his coming, reminds us that God is at work even when he seems most distant, most unapproachable.

Today we have no sacraments to affirm the bonds between this world and the next, no colour or warmth to assuage our grief, no activity to distract us or give a false sense of security. We are simply waiting, all emotion spent. Most of us live our lives in perpetual Holy Saturday mode, our faith a bit wobbly, our hope a bit frail, but clinging to the cross and Resurrection with an obstinacy wiser than we know. Holy Saturday proclaims to anyone who will listen that when we cannot, God can and does. That is our faith, already tinged with Easter joy and gladness.

As Quakers we normally have no sacraments, no activity to distract us or give a false sense of security. We are all about simply waiting. Perhaps there is something in Quakerism that lives consciously, even deliberately, in perpetual Holy Saturday mode. Our prayer and our worship, are intentionally, rootedly apophatic, despite their occasional intersection with the spoken word in ministry.

Bishop Andy John, writing yesterday in New Daylight, said of Luke’s account of Jesus’ words on the cross with the criminal crucified next to him (Luke 23.39ff)

Luke invites us to see something extraordinary about the boundless love of Jesus. There is no one beyond its reach, none too broken to fix, none too wretched to redeem, none too far gone that they cannot be found and saved. So, we are meant to see the height and depth and breadth of this grace and to marvel at it once more – but not from a distance. Instead we are invited to identify with the dying man, because we too are in need of the very grace he received and the gentle words of assurance that Jesus will bring us home.

…From the lips of Jesus himself, we are told that those who have found in him their hope and joy stand on a promise that will not fail and ground which will not move.

In the words of the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” The nembutsu, the central practice of Pure Land Buddhism, is often translated, “I am seeking a refuge in your infinite mercy, Amitabha Buddha, as I trust in you.”

Mercy seems to be a fundamental property of love, and love entails letting in all the love of God, all that God loves; the broken, the terrified, the pain and the uncanny bitter grieving of that which is, and is loved. And that includes each of us, as seen from the inside. Mercy is not an external, condescending thing: it is the open heart of love, quite simply that.