Anyone who is a fan of the Narnia stories by C S Lewis, knows that the central character, Aslan, is a lion – but he is not “a tame lion.”  I don’t know what a tame lion might look like but as a child I saw caged lions in zoos and others in a circus trained to do tricks that go against their nature.

Perhaps our history as Christians shows us over and over again as people who have tried to “tame” our faith so that we could live comfortably with it or cage it in order to control it and thus not face its reality.  All that has happened is that we have made it look insipid.  People fall away from the Christian faith and turn elsewhere to find something that will take them to the heart of their need, acknowledged but not always understood.  So we get young men (and women), some of whom have grown up in Christian families, choosing to become terrorists.

A quotation was given to us this week by one of our retreat conductors at Launde Abbey.  I am paraphrasing but he said, “The destruction of the Twin Towers in 9-11 was as evil a things as you could get, but it was breath-taking in its imagination.  The only way to overcome such evil is not to go to war against it but to try to out-imagine it.”

Lately, after having been a life-long Christian, I am really beginning to “get” just how radical is the message of Jesus Christ, when it comes to “out-imagining.”  Turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, doing good to those who hurt you may sound like the first lesson in how to be a doormat.  But history shows that when people have done this, i.e. practiced passive resistance, as in the Salt Marches in India under Gandhi or the work of the African American Civil Rights Movement under Martin Luther King, the world has been changed.  The most powerful witness to this is the very man who inspired Gandhi and King, Jesus Christ, who sought forgiveness for those who were executing him even as they drove the nails into his hands and feet.  He changed the whole world and the course of history forever.

For this radical change to happen however, there has to be a double journey.  That of the individual on the inside and that of the community coming together with the same vision.  It has all gone horribly wrong in history when the work of forgiveness has not gone on inside individuals first.  If I do not turn to God in prayer first and face my old nagging wounds, my bitterness and my resentment that come up again and again; if I do not strive against my own darkness and find the light of Christ and his compassion and forgiveness, I will not be able to be part of God’s solution, his radical re-imagining of the world.  If I take a shortcut and just act out these things with others on the outside without the inner work of prayer, I may end up doing what has so often been done in the past with good intentions, become part of a movement that sets out to change the world for the good but ends up enslaving and destroying everything that gets in the way of my faith, my ideas.

Christ is our model.  He stated that he could do nothing without his Father and often went off alone to be with him in prayer.  Why would we imagine that we could be Christian people without the same practice?

The gospel reading on Sunday was Matthew 5:21-37, part of the much beloved Sermon on the Mount.  Only this bit is not so loved.  It is the part where Jesus quotes the Jewish law and then adds “but I say to you.”  What he then goes on to say seems even tougher than the original law!   For those people who want their Jesus to be a lovely, anything goes, throwback to the 1960s hippy era or a modern individualist claiming the right to do anything he wants, this reading can be a bit of a shock.  The instinct is to bypass it.

There is a way of approaching scripture that I have found very helpful.  There are four stages:

You ask, “How did the original audience understand this?”  This is important because the culture in which Jesus lived was hugely different to ours and we need to comprehend when Jesus is speaking to the cultural wrongs of the day (like the treatment of women) and when he is speaking to a spiritual understanding we all share.

Then we ask, “How do we hear this now?”  Again this is very important because otherwise we may go for a fundamentalist reading of scripture.  A good example of this is v.31 when Jesus speaks against divorce.  In Jesus’ time a man could divorce a woman simply by giving her a bill of divorcement.  The woman had no legal rights in law and no property.  Any husband could turn his wife out and she would be destitute.  Jesus, as always, is speaking for justice and mercy for those who were powerless in his society.  I would not read v. 31 as a blanket rule against divorce except for adultery.  In our culture we accept that there are various situations in which it is really damaging for a couple to go on living together.

The third stage of reading is to ask yourself, “Is there any metaphorical reading of this passage?”  Of course, there often is in Jesus’ teaching.  Last week Jesus talked of his followers as being “salt” and “yeast” in the world.  But there may also be other metaphorical readings that are more subtle: for example, St John’s use of “dark” and “light” in his gospel.

The fourth stage is to ask, “What is this passage saying to me today?”  This is very important because scripture is God’s love letter to us.  The word of God speaks to us directly in our daily needs and anxieties, in our longings and desires, in our life-long journey.  This question can lead you directly into prayer.

Matthew 5: 21-37 is a very important passage because it reminds us to look behind the law that God gave to the Jewish people to ask, what was the reason for the law in the first place?  It was that the people be blest in the land that God was giving them (Deut 30:16).  It was to help them live well in community.  Jesus reminds his original audience and us as well that keeping the law of God is not just a tick-box exercise but about really caring for others.  We do this when keeping the law is not just about our actions on the outside but about the purity of our intentions on the inside.  That is why Jesus says we must try not even to be angry with one another or call a person a fool; why we must not have erotic fantasies about another person’s spouse even if we think we have no intention of doing anything about it – it demeans the object of the fantasy, undermines relationships and is potentially dangerous.

Earlier in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matt 5:6).  Think of what it is to be really hungry and thirsty.  This is what Jesus is calling us to be, people who care that much for others. Of course we fail – we all fail to live up to such high standards – but when we fail we simply pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start all over again!

 

A little while ago I bought a holiday read at an airport.  It was called “The Time Keeper” and was by Mitch Albom, who also wrote the bestseller, “Tuesdays with Morey.”  In my opinion it was a fairly lightweight book until it got to the final chapters where it posed a frightening scenario of the future.  I do not want to give the whole plot away except to say that the people of the future had so lost touch with their feelings that they watched ‘films’ of memories of past people to put them in touch with something – anything –  to do with feeling.

Is this ‘out of touch-ness’ with our feelings a new phenomenon?  I do not think so.  But I do think it may be getting worse.  We live in the most distracted culture and distracted time in our history.  The distraction is self-chosen to a certain extent, but also addictive.  The distraction is created by the busyness and complexity of our lives which we counter-balance and get relief from through entertainment.  So we play with ipod and ipads on journeys, when out for a walk or exercising.  Listen to radios when driving.  Walk into our houses and switch on our large flat-screen television, stream our film or chosen programme or play computer games.  There is constant entertainment, constant noise and constant avoidance.  And I know how tempting it is.  If I have had a tiring and demanding day all I want to do is collapse on the sofa and watch mindless television – like moving wallpaper.

The problem with living our lives like this is that we know, all of us know on a certain level, that our lives lack meaning.  We may not voice this to ourselves in words but the shallowness and emptiness that we feel is articulated in other ways which may lead to even more damaging distraction and avoidance.  But as I have insinuated earlier, I think this has always been a problem we humans have had: if not as badly as we have it now.

Socrates famously said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.”  St Ignatius took this a stage further when he gave us the prayer exercise called the Examin or Examen.  Some call it the Examin of Conscience but I prefer the other title, Examen of Consciousness.  For St Ignatius, the creator of the famous Spiritual Exercises, the Examen was the most important form of prayer you could and should do.

I am only going to write of the first half of the exercise now.  Briefly, in the Examen, we sit quietly and go back over our day in our minds to see where we have “been.”  We ask where have been the positive moments in my day, when we felt suddenly alive to something, close to someone or something, moments of joy, moments of surprise, moments where we turned to God – all those times of waking up and feeling connection.  As we recall these moments we are often surprised by seeing something consciously for the first time.  At one level we must have been aware but it had not risen to our consciousness.  The result during this time of “recollection in tranquillity” is that we often see and feel things more deeply.  Our hearts are warmed and we feel gratitude.  Praise and thanksgiving rise spontaneously in our hearts.

Sometimes a whole experience from the day can be turned upside down.  Something that had at the time appeared mundane and tedious suddenly shows itself to have been acutely important, life giving and affirming.

In order to experience our real feelings, to see our days and to feel a life-giving response to all that each moment brings, we have to give ourselves these moments of recollection.  The most important thing I have noticed is that when I do this exercise, even if I have been tired and hard-pressed beforehand, I am no longer weary and usually I feel at peace.  It is not only important, it is essential that we examine our lives.

 

“Lord Jesus Christ, Your light shines within us.

Let not my doubts or my darkness speak to me.

Lord Jesus Christ, your light shines within us.

Let my heart always welcome your love.”

Dread; there are mornings for many people when the first emotion they become aware of on waking is dread; a sense of darkness.  Those who know this feeling find it hard to ‘get their head round’, for want of a better expression.  It is difficult to understand where the feeling comes from or to describe it.  It is harder still to find a concrete reason for it; it is just present.  For people used to the language of faith it can feel like guilt and separation from God.  Others might go so far as to call it depression, but it is not that, at least not medically speaking.

This feeling of dread is very common and often alluded to by the great spiritual writers of the distant and not so distant past.  Thomas Merton writes of it, for example, often.  It is commonly experienced as people grow older and the things that used to give their lives meaning and purpose either fall away or shift in character.  It is also experienced when we dare to be truly on our own without our usual protective scaffolding of business and entertainment.  No one who has been on an 8 Day Individual Guided Silent Retreat will have escaped the experience of dread, if they have done it properly (i.e. without trying to escape themselves.)  Sometimes people will feel that they have lost God and therefore lost their faith, particularly if they have no wise person to talk things through with.  Sometimes people will blame the Church for letting them down in some way.

We do not need to be afraid of this experience of “dread”.  It is very well documented in Christian writing and rather than being something which is taking us away from God or is a sign of a breakdown of faith, it can be a sign of movement towards God.  It can be part of the Dark Night of the Soul which happens when we undergo change in our lives and the old way of seeing God and walking with him no longer works.  This is a sign that God is moving us along.  Dread can be the very real awareness that although I am not actually purposefully missing the mark with God, I am resistant to him, feel myself as separate to him even though part of me wants just the opposite.  We are divided people – divided against ourselves in our longing for and resistance to God.

What can we do when dread hits us?  First, know that it is normal (unless it persists as a great blackness and then perhaps we need to go to the doctor – but the feeling of spiritual dread passes).  We come to Christ in prayer acknowledging ourselves as the weak and divided people we are, wanting him and not wanting him, and we just wait on him.  And we find someone to talk to who understands the Christian journey.

Finally, try singing; it always lifts the heart.  The words of the Taizé song at the top of this page say it all.