 These last few months have been a time of renewal in my silent prayer, for which thanks be to God. I first learnt to be silent in the meditation classes of the Western Buddhist Order, and the practice of mindfulness stayed with me for many years. After I became a Christian, nearly twenty years later, I soon discovered that Christianity has a great depth of riches in the vein of silent prayer, and I found John Main’s guidance and “method” very helpful. Since then, I’ve found it useful to use a mantra or prayer word as I sit towards silence. For me, it’s the best way of gently pushing mental chatter to one side, and a good way to re-focus when I lose attentiveness.
At first, I used a favourite verse from the psalms, or a BCP collect I love and had memorised in the early days of my faith, but both of these were too wordy, with too many concepts to distract me. Then I learned about the Jesus prayer, and have found that very helpful. But recently, I found myself worrying about my technique while I was trying to be silent, and my prayer was going nowhere.
This Lent, I had a chance to spend a few days in retreat at Alton Abbey, and I was able to reflect on my first two terms as a new curate in London, and the difficulties of my transition into that new role. Lent’s themes helped me to frame those experiences into another shedding of skin, or as we Christians call it, a dying to self. It’s happened before, it will happen again, it’s painful, but it’s a relief to realise that’s what’s going on, and it’s an occasion for joy and hope that new life is coming. This kind of experience is what fires my firm belief that what we are offered in Jesus Christ is resurrection now. As much as we are able and willing to surrender our selves (that we have constructed to survive of our own means) and to allow Him to abide in us, so much will we know the joy of new life. It may be little by little, for we surely struggle against our own deaths, but it is there, and it is a foretaste of the life to come. Continue reading The Theophilia Prayer …
One of the things that interests me most is the nature of truth, and therefore also the nature of lies. A long time ago, I read somewhere that “Jesus did not simply come to give us truths – He came to make us true. More than simply giving us truths to live by, I think He came to live out those truths in us.” I’ve just checked back and that was written in a great post on a great blog – The Uprising. Those words have been helpful for me through a few years of discipleship and theological education; an education which is rooted in The Academy, not The Church, and which therefore struggles when it comes to talking about truth. Continue reading Truth and Lies …
 The interior of Trier Cathedral, where it was pointed out to me how much I'd learnt about the faith by learning about the architecture... I’ve just “discovered” Joan Osborne’s music. Or rather, I’ve caught up with her since my first and only exposure to her in the 90s with her hit “One of Us*.” It happened because I saw and heard her singing in one of the Transatlantic Sessions and I’ve written about the wonderful song she sang, “Holy Waters.”
Since then, I’ve bought a couple of her albums, and I’ve been listening a lot to her song “Cathedrals” from the album Little Wild One. In the verses she paints wonderful word-pictures of what it’s like to visit cathedrals which function as tourist attractions as well as places of worship – “Marble statues and glass dividers / Someone is watching all of the outsiders / The line moves slowly through the numbered gate / Past the mosaic of the head of state…” There’s an electric fence in there somewhere, too. All these incongruencies and disjunctions between the place, its accessories, its past and its present, point to its divided loyalties, a symbol for the state of the Church in the West.
Continue reading Joan Osborne, and the mission of church architecture. …
I have been reading a lot about contemplative prayer recently, and making time to sit still in silent prayer. As often happens, when our ears and eyes are attuned to something, we start noticing more of the same, attending to those things around us that are in tune with where and who we are. So today I sat at my desk in church (I’m lucky to be able to spend some of my working week in our House of Prayer), and read something that has been looking at me for months, a cutting that we used as a conversation-piece in a church council meeting last year.
It’s a quote from Henri Nouwen’s book The Genesee Diary: Report from a Trappist Monastery*; Continue reading We are the glory of God …
I’m a big fan of Transatlantic Sessions, a series of music sessions recorded for DVD and TV broadcast to which the BBC must have bought the rights because they kindly keep showing them on the excellent BBC4. I love Celtic music, and I love much of what has come out of America in the last twenty years or so under the heading of roots music or “Americana” – in other words, european folk music (in the broadest sense) filtered through American poular culture and sent back to Europe. This is the kind of music I love to play, as a drummer and percussionist.
The relationship between Britain and America is fascinating, I think, and this musical exchange is one aspect that illustrates and points to the ways in which the peoples of the two nations relate culturally, theologically, and philospophically. But that’s something to write about elsewhere. Joan Osborne turned up in one of these programmes singing a song called Holy Waters, and I was captivated by her voice, the song, and the band’s performance. Continue reading “Holy Waters” by Joan Osborne …
I have just read something really important, something which I think will prove to be really valuable. I read it in Martin Laird’s book Into The Silent Land, which I have been re-reading over Christmas into the new year of 2012. The first time I read this book was while I was at theological college, and I will be forever grateful to one of my fellow ordinands for introducing me to it. I had previously practised meditation or contemplative prayer in one form or another since learning to meditate in the Buddhist tradition in the 1980s, in my twenties, but in later life my practice had fallen by the wayside. Since becoming a Christian, I’d come across the work of Laurence Freeman and John Main, and had been inspired and amazed by the success of Silence in The City in London, but had not found a way to comfortably accommodate silent prayer into my life. Into the Silent Land helped me do that in 2009.
Actually, to be honest, the first three chapters of Into The Silent Land did that; the next two chapters were too intense for me at that time; as I renewed my practice, I probably did not need to read a complex description of Laird’s vision of what happens when we pray in this way, rather I needed to experience my own experiences. With the encouragement of others at college who appreciated silent prayer, my own sputtered back into life, but I have never been able to resume silent prayer with the disciplined regularity that I managed in my twenties. I have benefitted enormously from an understanding and an attitude of mindfulness all through my life since then, but any attempts to go deeper into contemplative practice have failed, and I regret that.
I’ve written elsewhere about the difficulties I faced at the end of my first term as a new curate in parish ministry. Just when I thought I was about to lose the plot completely, my desire to spend time in silence came back with an overwhelming force, and I started to sit in silence. Continue reading The value of our wounds …
Into The Silent Land is the title of Martin Laird’s 2006 book on “the practice of contemplation” (his subtitle for the book).  I first read this book while I was at theological college in 2009-10, and I found it very helpful in kick-starting my interest in silent prayer; more importantly, it kick-started my practice, because although I know that reading about prayer is not the same as praying, I am almost capable of convincing myself that reading a book like this is a major contribution to my serenity and spirituality. Usually that feeling lasts until I pick up the next book. Reading books about prayer instead of praying is a bit like buying books and putting them on the shelf instead of reading them. I’m always just a little bit disappointed that the process of buying books and putting them in the right place on my bookshelf doesn’t actually achieve the same as reading the damn’ things. Anyway, I digress.
On first reading, I found Laird’s book encouraging, helpful and hopeful for the first three chapters, and then a bit confusing and discouraging in the sections in which he talks about the problems we encounter in the silence. But something has drawn me back to it, Continue reading Into The Silent Land …
In the summer of 2009 I moved to a small village in Oxfordshire and, with the generous assistance of the Church of England’s Ministry Division and the Diocese of Southwark, began training for ordained ministry in the Church of England. Two years later I returned to London to take up a post as Assistant Curate in a south London inner-city parish. I had moved houses, and jobs, many times previously; much of my previous career in business-computing had been freelance, and often my jobs were only a few months in duration, so I’m used to moving, settling in, being dislocated, being the new face. Rarely, in fact, have I started a new job with as much support as I had when I started this curacy. I’m used to having to sell myself and my own abilities, and then having to rely on my own resources to deliver. This time, I had all sorts of paperwork assuring my new church I was competent, worthy, and of good character. Continue reading What College can’t teach about ministry …
When God was incarnate in the world in the form of his son Jesus, He was both fully divine and fully human. He had the divine power to perform miracles in a way that had never been in this world before, and has not been seen since. Those miracles had to be intelligible to humanity, so they were signs that meant something in themselves (a healing, restoration of sight…) but also had a deeper meaning for those who had eyes to see – a foretaste of the healing to come, and a manifestation in flesh and blood of a wider, more holistic version of healing of the whole person, the relationships that person holds, the whole community and whole society in which that person lived.
Jesus is dead, but Christ is risen, alleluia. He is also ascended and glorified, gone ahead of us, but before he went, he gave us a way of being his body in this world, to continue to show a foretaste of the kingdom. Continue reading We can perform miracles …
Our God is not available through absolute truths, at least not in the sense that the Greeks understood them. We are not Platonists. This is not a shadow of the real, this is creation, made by God, a part of All That Is. The old gods are dead, we saw their death in the Old Testament, and St Paul preached against them in Athens in the New Testament. “Science” will continue to give us things of great value, beauty and truth, but it will not deliver The Answer. We are supposed to have learnt that lesson a long time ago, when the old gods died. Continue reading Absolute truth …
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