Counsels on the spiritual life

St. Ignatius of Loyola loved it so much that he read a chapter a day and Christians from a wide variety of backgrounds considered it one of the great spiritual classics of all time. We are talking about “The Imitation of Christ” by Thomas a Kempis. In the introduction of the edition I have the writer to the introduction makes this claim: “After the Bible itself, no other work can compare with its profound wisdom, clarity of thought, and converting power.” That’s quite a claim but one which I can certainly vouch for having read it off and on - though sadly more off than on - for the past 26 years. Here is Chapter 1 from Book one called “Counsels on the spiritual life.”

‘He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness,’ says Our Lord. (John 8:12). In these words Christ counsels us to follow His life and way if we desire true enlightenment and freedom from all blindness of heart. (Mark 3:5) Let the life of Jesus Christ, then, be our first consideration..

The teaching of Jesus far transcends al the teachings of the Saints, and whosoever has His spirit will discover concealed in it heavenly manna. (Rev 2:17) But many people, although they often hear the Gospel, feel little desire to follow it, because they lack the spirit of Christ. (Romans 8:9) Whoever desires to understand and take delight in the words of Christ must strive to conform his whole life to Him.

Of what use is it to discourse learnedly on the Trinity, if you lack humility and therefore displease the Trinity? Lofty words do not make a man just or holy; but a good life makes him dear to God. I would far rather feel contrition than be able to define it. If you knew the whole Bible by heart, and all the teachings of the philosophers, how would this help you without the grace and love of God? ‘Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity,’ (Ecclesiastes 1verse two) except to love God and serve Him alone. (Deuteronomy 6:13) And this is supreme wisdom - to despise the world, and draw daily nearer the kingdom of heaven.

It is vanity to solicit honours, or to raise oneself to high station. It is vanity to be a slave to bodily desires, (Galatians 5:16) and to crave for things which bring certain retribution. It is vanity to wish for long life, if you care little for a good life. It is vanity to give thought only to this present life, and to care nothing for the life to come. It is vanity to love things that so swiftly pass away, and not to hasten onwards to that place where everlasting joy abides.

Keep constantly in mind the saying, ‘The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.’ (Ecclesiastes 1:8) Strive to withdraw your heart from the love of visible things, and direct your affections to things invisible. For those who follow only their natural inclinations defile their conscience, and lose the grace of God.”

Ancient Wisdom

Amongst my current reading material - I have several books on the boil - is a little book called “The Wisdom of Saint Isaac the Syrian” translated by Sebastian Brock. Its a distillation of the wise sayings of a seventh century hermit of the Assyrian Church (he is also known as St.Isaac of Ninevah) who is undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment. This book is just a kind of taster for those wanting to dip their toes in the clear water of his teachings (excuse the mixed metaphors) and a recommended read. Here are a few of his sayings to whet your appetite:

“If God is slow in answering your request, or if you ask but do not promptly receive anything, do not be upset, for you are not wiser than God.”

“The ladder to the Kingdom is hidden within you, and within your soul. Dive down into your self, away from sin, and there you will find the steps by which you can ascend.”

“Make sure you see to small things, lest otherwise you may push aside important ones.”

And one of my favourites - because it challenges me:

“The knowledge of God does not reside in a body that loves comfort.”

Ouch!

The book is a mere 20 pages long but it is subject indexed and if you go through Amazon you can get it second hand next to nothing.

Praying with heart and mind

The Jews said that the first requirement of prayer was ‘kavvanah’. The Hebrew word referred to the way in which the mind and heart should be fixed on God. It is highly likely that when Jesus prayed he was absorbed in this form of self forgetful contemplation. In other words, he paid sustained and loving attention to the Father who loved him in such an incomprehensible manner that it couldn’t be expressed in words. Jesus basked in the light of that love and poured out his daily concerns in a trusting way to the Lord.”
Fr Pat Collins: Prayer in Practice

Practising the Presence

Re-reading Brother Lawrence again (see yesterday) excites me because it is all so do-able. He brings spirituality down to ground level when for many it is is so often perceived as something so beyond us that only the Saints seem able to attain it. There is something very symbolic in the way St. Simeon Stylites (A.D. 390-459) attains sainthood by spending 37 years on top of a 15 metre high pillar because wonderful as it is, and saintly as Simeon is, he sets sainthood out of the reach of the ordinary man and woman. Yet surely this is what the incarnation is meant to set within our reach - sainthood - and people like Brother Lawrence bring us, and it, back to earth. Here is what Joyce Huggett writes about practicing the presence of God, no doubt inspired by Brother Lawrence:

“…practising the presence of God simply means to be attentive, however momentarily, or the truth of Acts 17:27-28, that God is never far away from any of us. ….it is an awareness and an in-tune-ness with his loving presence. God..transmits message at all times - messages of unending love. To connect ourselves to this love, we need only fine-tune our hearts and minds to be aware of it.”
Joyce Hugget: Finding God in the Fast Lane

Brother Lawrence

Brother Lawrence was a lay brother in a Carmelite monastery who is today most commonly remembered for the closeness of his relationship to God as recorded in the classic Christian text “The Practice of the Presence of God.” It’s a wonderful and deceptively simple approach to Christian discipleship and below is an outline of his Way of following Jesus
1. Always be aware of God’s presence by talking with him throughout the day.
2. Give yourself totally to God in both temporal and spiritual affairs. Our only happiness should come from doing God’s will.
3. Be faithful, even in dry periods. It is in those dry spells that God tests our love for him.
4. Always be guided by love. Be content doing even the smallest chore if you can do it for the love of God.
5. Form the habit of continually conversing with God, telling Him everything that is happening.
6. Whenever considering doing some good deed, always consult God e.g. “Lord, I will never be able to do this/that if you don’t help me.
7. Whenever you confess it to God tell him: “I can do nothing better without you. Please keep me from falling and correct the mistakes I make.”

Henry Vaughan

Wales is known as the Land of Song. It is also a land of poetry and the land of Henry Vaughan (1621-1695). Vaughan was born in 1621 to Thomas Vaughan and Denise Morgan in Newton-upon-Usk in Breconshire, Wales. In 1638, it is assumed, he entered Oxford University with his twin brother Thomas who gained fame as a hermetic philosopher and alchemist. In 1640 Vaughan left Oxford to study law in London for two years. His studies were interrupted by the Civil War in which Vaughan briefly took the King’s side. He is thought to have served on the Royalist side in South Wales sometime around 1645. Vaughan returned to Breconshire in 1642 as secretary to Judge Lloyd, and later began to practice medicine. By 1646 he had probably married Catherine Wise with whom he was to have a son and three daughters. He is considered one of the major Metaphysical Poets whose works ponder one’s personal relationship to God. After the death of his first wife, Vaughan married her sister Elizabeth possibly in 1655. Vaughan had another son, and three more daughters by his second wife. He died on April 23, 1695, and was buried in Llansantffraed churchyard. One of my favourite poems is Peace and I find it hard to read aloud without tears coming to my eyes. Here it is.

My soul, there is a country,
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a wingèd sentry,
All skillful in the wars.
There, above noise and danger,
Sweet Peace sits crowned with smiles,
And One born in a manger
Commands the beauteous files.
He is thy gracious Friend
And (O my soul, awake!)
Did in pure love descend,
To die here for thy sake.
If thou canst get but thither,
There grows the flower of peace,
The rose that cannot wither,
Thy fortress, and thy ease.
Leave, then, thy foolish ranges;
For none can thee secure
But One, who never changes,
Thy God, thy Life, thy Cure.

Singing to remember

I have a terrible memory, and so for me to remember bible verses or poems is nothing short of a miracle. But I have discovered that if I can sing it then I will remember it. This was true of some of the early Fisherfolk songs (anybody possessing a Fresh Sounds or Sounds of Living Waters song book will know who I am talking about). One of the earliest verses was “Have no anxiety about anything etc..” (Phil 4:6,7) followed by “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.” (Matthew 6:33 etc with music by Karen Lafferty). Singing these lovely songs helped me enormously and all the verses I have learned have since been used by the Holy Spirit at various times to face the different challenges the Christian life has thrown up. It underlines for me how essential scripture memorization is as a spiritual discipline and also poses the question as to how we memorize scripture today, especially the psalms. In years gone by Christians have chanted the psalms whether using plainsong, or later Anglican chant or latterly responsorial psalms. Some writers have tried to turn the psalms into hymns, most notably the Scottish Metrical Psalter and its famous setting of Psalm 23 and some modern writers have tried their hands too (see “As the deer pants” a setting of psalm 42 by Martin Nystrom). But wonderful as these songs are they only approximate the words and are no substitute for the ‘real thing’. What we need is a recovery of chant of some sort so that the words can be sung and memorized in their entirety. I appreciate that those with a low boredom threshold will at this point let out a moan, but unless our modern writers can come up with a better alternative to chant - whether Orthodox or plainchant etc - I don’t really see any other alternative if we are to continue to memorize large chunks of scripture.

The Key to Prayer

“Why pray?” is a huge question and one which can’t be answered in a simple blog. However a common and honest response would be “because I need something.” If we read the teachings of Jesus this seems to be the general direction of what he is saying and encouraging in the gospels. For example in Luke: “Ask, and it will be given to you” (Luke chapter 11 verse 9), and similarly in John chapter 15 verse 7: “Ask whatever you wish, and it will be given to you.” Such teachings , read in isolation from their surrounding contexts, were responsible for galvanizing my early attempts at prayer after my conversion to Christ in August 1981. And, if my rather selective memory serves me right, there were lots of answers to prayer along the way. But as I read more of Jesus’ teachings and look at them not as a cache full of promises but as a means of deepening my understanding of God and growing into relationship with Him, I see things differently. The aim of prayer is not a means of getting things from God - although He graciously answers so many ill-intentioned and misdirected prayers nonetheless - but rather a means of getting to know Him better, of somehow climbing into His mind and seeing things - me, the world, God etc- from a wholly new perspective. I think it was Richard Foster (again) who said: “The key to prayer is to get hold of God not the answer.”

This comes across as we start to read the surrounding passages containing Jesus’ above promises. So in the Luke passage Jesus talks about the need to pray to God as our Father (verses 2 and 13), and in John about prayers being made in the context of a relationship with Jesus whose closeness is that of a vine with a branch.

Asking God for things, for help etc. therefore takes on a different dimension. God has a face, so to speak, and is a real person (the most real of persons) rather than a slot machine or an anonymous servant. Moreover in relating to Him as such we find that it no longer becomes just a case of asking Him for something we need, but wondering if He has a take on what we are requesting. This is why Jesus interposes the notion of God’s will being done, and His Kingdom coming as in the Lord’s prayer. Both are meant as necessary reminders that there is a bigger picture and our praying is a means of involving us in it’s painting.

The Importance of Prayer

“All too often…our churches are places of everything and anything except prayer… True we need to have our business meetings and our committee meetings and our Bible studies and our self-help groups and our worship services, but if the fire is not hot at the centre, these things are only ashes in our hands.” Richard Foster: Prayer

The Flow of Time

Already its January 10th and time is skimming away from under me! As I contemplate where the last eight days have gone I am reminded of what I used to hear my parents say as they complained about how busy their lives were, “I don’t know where the time has gone?” It’s as if someone has sneeked in behind them when their backs were turned and pick-pocketed a few hours without their knowledge.

Another thing I remember them saying was how time went faster as they grew older. Certainly that seems to square with my experience as January 2nd has jumped to January 10th in no time. But that can’t be literally true. Time is constant for everyone and down to age, otherwise a parent would be preparing dinner for their child only to find out that they were expecting breakfast two days ago!

It is not time, it is busyness, or preoccupation with life and living that gives the impression that time is flying by. Time proceeds at an even pace but what we DO with it and IN it is the determining factor as to whether it goes slow or fast. When we were youngsters we had less worries, less responsibilities and therefore less things to think about. Time therefore appeared slow because there was less to preoccupy our thinking. As we got older and started work, courting, getting married, having children, buying a house etc. then the number of things we had to deal with multiplied and time, accordingly, picked up pace. It accelerated because we did. And so this surprise I feel at ‘losing’ eight days is really down to me being overly busy. At this rate I will be retired before I know it, and wondering where the time went!

But the point of this reflection is not to explain galloping time or bemoan the fact that it seems to be slipping away at a rate of knots, it is to ask the very important question, “have I wasted any?” Or “was it used well?” The Bible has some interesting things to say about time, but the one that strikes me is what St. Paul has to say in his Letter to the Ephesians, Chapter 5 verse 15-16. “Look carefully then how you walk”, he writes, “not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of time, because the days are evil.” (E.S.V) The New King James Version translates the same passage: “See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. “

I like them both. The first because it tells me to take care how I live and use my time. It’s the difference between being someone who is wise and someone who is foolish. So it prompts me to stop once in a while and ask myself if I am being responsible, under God, in the way I use the time He has given me. In the context it almost seems to suggest that evil has a close association with rush.

I remember something from Richard Foster’s marvelous book “Celebration of Discipline” in the chapter on meditation. He quotes from Jung who once wrote: “Hurry is not of the devil, it is the devil.” The point he is making is that rush and hurry are prime tools of the devil with which he can work evil, making us waste our time, causing us to crowd God out, because we have no time for Him.

But I also like the other translation because there is this suggestion that we can somehow reclaim time, that with God’s help we can redeem it. “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten.” God promises his people in Joel 2:25. There is a sense in which God can almost turn back the clock and give you back what you have lost.

So losing time or wasting time or helplessly watching it flow like a rushing river past your eyes may well be our experience as we get older and more busy, but it doesn’t have to continue like that. We can, with God’s help, slow things down, redeem the time lost and make better use of what He has given us.