With baggage
The default state of the human person is that we are laden with baggage. We come with all our baggage and lay it before God. This baggage consists of relationships, commitments,ties, links, worries, projects, problems, past history, guilt – a whole load of stuff. Much of it good. It is what goes towards making us what we are now. Some of it bad, or unwholesome. We would like to unload it onto God because it is heavy and burdensome. Both the good and the bad. We ask him to take it, or at least, to share the load, because it is weighing us down. Some of it we can bear, are happy to bear, but most of it, the older we get, we would like to let go. We have had enough and we no longer have the energy and the strength of our younger days. For many, this is enough. It is enough to present themselves before God and ask him to share the load. Eventually, though, we are going to have to let go because we soon discover that we cannot enter the inner room of the heart encumbered with it all. It is not just that there isn’t room for us and our baggage as well. The trouble is all this baggage gets in the way. It clutters up the mind. We need to let it go.
Without baggage
There is a play by Jean Anouilh called ‘The Traveller without Luggage.’ It is about a man who loses his memory as a result of a wound during the First World War and is incarcerated in a mental hospital for 17 years. No one knows who he is. His family eventually discover him and bring him home. He recognises no one. The first thing his family does is to remind him of what he was like and the shame he has caused them. Three years of war, a wound which took away his memory and then, after twenty years, his return home and all they can do is to festoon him with his old self. There was not a single fault, bad behaviour, stupid incident that he wasn’t reminded of. All his relations were relentless in putting away the twenty odd years of his absence when here he was – a new person. But no – that wasn’t allowed. He was put back into his former unhappy life. “Have you never been happy with me?’ he asked his mother once when she was bitterly reminding him of his past. “No, never.’ she said. What he must have done for his family to refuse to give him credit or allow him a new start! His past, his old self had nothing to offer him. The only thing for him to do now was to leave, to look for some tenderness and affection in someone who had need of him and who didn’t care about his past.
So often we are to ourselves what that man’s family was to him. We will not allow ourselves to begin again. We are encumbered with a whole load of stuff and we can’t let it go. We will not allow ourselves to come out of the darkness of the past into a new day. One of the stories in the NT which sticks in my mind is the story of Nicodemus in John’s Gospel in chapter 3. He came to Jesus at night. In other words – out of darkness. There follows a dialogue in which Jesus explains that it is necessary to be born again. The Catholic Church, no doubt as a result of the references to water and spirit, understands being born again as referring to Baptism and Confirmation. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians understand it in terms of a conversion experience. In the context of today’s talk on prayer I would like to understand it as getting back to the simple, uncomplicated, letting-go prayer of childhood at bedtime.
There is a story of two Buddhist monks, one older, one younger, on a journey. They come to a ford in a river and there encounter an old woman too timid to cross by herself. They help her across and continue with their journey. After about an hour the younger says, ‘You know, our rule says we should never touch a woman.’
‘Are you still carrying her,’ replies the older one. ‘I left her back by the river an hour ago.’
The problem is letting go. It is not possible to dump all your baggage onto some conveyor belt and have it carted off to some black hole where it will never be seen again. You have to let go of each piece, individually, one by one. Sometimes you have to let go of it many times before it’s gone. Even then it’s not gone. But if you can get it gone enough to close the door of your inner room for a while you are doing well.
When we lived in Colchester we were quite near to a Greek Orthodox monastery in Tolleshunt D’Arcy. They have a little chapel which, I think, is one of the holiest places I have ever been. It is quite small, almost, but not completely, dark, a few icons barely seen in the light of the sanctuary lamp. The strange thing is that when one goes in and sits down you disappear in the darkness. You disappear to yourself, conscious only of this holy space, the flickering light of the lamp, the barely distinguishable icons, and a presence.
Which brings us to God, who has only been mentioned in passing as it were. God – we use the word too glibly as though there was a general and uncontested agreement as to what it means. But of course there isn’t. When I was doing theology we used to laugh about the Athanasian Creed, which used to be said on Trinity Sunday. It makes a series of statements about God and immediately contradicts each statement. St. Augustine gives us a flavour of this when he describes God as
most hidden and most present;
most beautiful and most strong,
standing firm and elusive,
unchangeable a
nd all-changing;
never new, never old;
ever working, ever at rest;
In fact God is indescribable and very often paradoxes are the only appropriate way of saying anything at all about him. Eckhart said,
All that you think and say about your God is more you than him; you blaspheme him, for all those wise masters of Paris cannot say what he really is. If I had a God whom I could understand, I would never want to recognise him as my God.
The God of philosophers and descriptive terms is a conceptual God and not the God of reality. After Pascal’s death a piece of paper was found sown up in his coat and on it was written an account of an experience so profound that it marked him for life.
The year of grace 1654,
Monday, 23 November, feast of St. Clement,.From about half past ten at night until about half past midnight,
FIRE.
GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacobnot the god of philosophers and of the learned.Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
But in the end this sort of experience, or Augustine’s experience of God within, is paradoxical because God is as far beyond experience as he is beyond words. There is a story in the Old Testament about Elijha which, to me at least, says more about God than any of these.
Elijah walked forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb.
There he came to a cave, where he took shelter. But the word of the LORD came to him, “Why are you here, Elijah?”
He answered: “I have been most zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts, but the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to the sword. I alone am left, and they seek to take my life.”
Then the LORD said, “Go outside and stand on the mountain before the LORD; the LORD will be passing by.” A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the LORD–but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake–but the LORD was not in the earthquake.
After the earthquake there was fire–but the LORD was not in the fire. After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak
The Hebrew is not easy to translate and there are various alternatives to ‘a tiny whispering sound’. The traditional translation is ‘a still small voice’, but the one I prefer is ‘a sound of gentle silence’. Ignatius of Antioch described God as “the silence out of which the word comes forth.” In the inner room we enter that silence. Sometimes in that dark silence we achieve the simple trust of childlike prayer and know that all shall be well. And sometimes, as R. S. Thomas puts it
There are times
When a black frost is upon
One’s whole being, and the heart
In its bone belfry hangs and is dumb.
John Hick, the philosopher talking about prayer asserts that ‘we are all linked at deep unconscious levels in a universal network in which our thoughts, and even our emotions, are all the time affecting others as others are in turn affecting us.’ This is simply an assertion, an article of faith, and he admits that there is no evidence to support it. He gives the impression that the good wrought by prayer is simply the result of this human solidarity, unconscious and unfelt. No mention is made of God. Perhaps this last is an oversight and he does not intend to exclude divine influence.
Prayer is very mysterious and I think it does work in something like the way Hick describes. Although there is no empirical evidence for it, there does appear to be a network linking, not only we sentient humans, but also everything in the cosmos. Rupert Sheldrake, describes morphic fields, and to me at least is quite convincing. There is also a wealth of anecdotal evidence of a bond between people, usually where there is an intimate relationship, such that when something significant or tragic happens to one the other is immediately aware that something has happened to the other even though they may be widely separated. This is the sort of thing to which Hick is referring. But prayer goes much deeper than what may simply be a natural bonding.
There is, first of all, the urge to pray. This is universal and has always been a factor in our religious behaviour. This is so deep rooted that, as I have already said, even those who have never previously shown any religious commitment or belief often turn to prayer in life threatening situations. The cynic might say that here is an example of someone making Pascal’s wager. But I do not think so. This is no calculated gesture based on a rational assessment of the odds but a deep-seated emotional response to a limit situation. Prayer springs from the deepest roots of the self, from that zone in the affective system which straddles the conscious and the unconscious mind. Here situations, events and actions initiate emotions, feelings and moods, which are evaluated as meaningful and significant. Here we touch the foundations of our being. None of this is in the rational mind. It is not something we can conceptualise or argue with. It is a given, with the numinous quality of an ancient memory.
Here we sense not just the interlinking network which binds us all, although that is sensed. Here, obscurely and tentatively, we sense the Presence within. This is what prayer does. It brings this Presence to the surface of our minds. It opens the channels which link us and which have been narrowed and constricted by egotism and self-interest. God is active, not as a puppet master manipulating the strings of cause and effect. God acts in and through us. This I believe to be true, though I am not aware of it in any concrete sense, nor is there any empirical evidence of it. I will never forget one day when I was in the Little Brothers. Dominic Voillaume had come to make his annual retreat and had spent a week in a hermitage on San Capracio, the mountain above the village. I walked into the room where he was bent over a table reading the paper. He turned to greet me and his face was – transfigured, is the only word for it. There was joy, peace, beauty – impossible to describe. It was almost embarrassing to look him in the eye his face was so naked. The story of Moses coming down from Mount Sinai and having to hide his face behind a veil came to mind. Dominic had just come down from the mountain and his face reflected what he had experienced.
I think when people talk about prayer they concentrate too much on the knowing and rational activity and not enough on the emotive and feeling side. When meditating it is relatively easy to come quite quickly to the existential limit of the senses and to sit simply aware that one is sitting. If there are thoughts and images they run in the background like an unattended television screen. Emotionally one feels calm and at peace. There may have been emotional turbulence but that, like the thoughts, has been put to one side. One still has not reached the limits of being; knowing – yes, perhaps, being – no. Like the child at bedtime we put all our trust in God. As R S Thomas puts it
Young
I pronounced you. Older
I still do, but seldomer
now, leaning far out
over an immense depth, letting
your name go and waiting,
somewhere between faith and doubt,
for echoes of its arrival.