The unseen condition of faith

On a... profound level we can think of faith as an existential condition that brings us closer to God in an experiential way. Faith, on this level, is not an answer to a question (such as the question, "Does God exist?"); rather, faith is the establishment of a living relationship with God that renders abstract questions meaningless in the face of living faith. However, a life of faith as an existential condition, if one begins with the question of God’s existence, needs to be nourished by an experiential connection with God. This does not mean a solitary, mystical experience. What the desert Fathers called the ascent towards God may not be found only in the life of the ascetic, but also in the life of any person who lives in faith. The sign of the cross... [for instance], has the same significance of spiritual introspection for any believer as it did for the desert monks of the fourth century.

The spiritual realm is not experienced in the solitude of the desert only. Ordinary people experience it in community. Although Scripture and the history of the church have shown several saints and prophets in direct personal encounters with God (as direct as an encounter between God and humans could be), the way God meets with most people is often subtle: A life in Christ is a sacramental life. This life radiates to the people with which it is shared. This sharing makes evident the presence of Jesus in the church and makes evident the image of God in all of us.

Andreas Andreopoulos, The Sign of the Cross

One of the essential functions of contemplative Prayer of whatever kind, it seems to me, is to maintain that stream of nourishment flowing from "an experiential connection with God". Now, it's important to make what might seem a rather subtle distinction here: an experiential connection is not the same thing as a succession of experiences. A contemplative practice is not a means to peak experiences or exalted states of mind - or it shouldn't be - so much as an often unconscious connectivity. From the practitioner's point of view, it may look as though nothing is going on, and our long-repeated and regular times of prayer are achieving little - but under the surface the Spirit may imperceptibly be bringing about profound changes, and one's prayer may be achieving, out of sight, things undreamed-of in terms of everyday causality. A long and gentle rain will heal and renew the land as a torrential downpour never could, and beneath the all too obvious helplessness and sorrow of the world strange and holy things may be taking shape.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

More things are wrought by prayer

Than this world dreams of…

For so the whole round earth is every way

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God… 

(Morte d’Arthur)

Homewards

Most of us in the West have not grown up with the Jesus Prayer as part of our spiritual landscape, as so many seem to in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Consequently we have difficulty in finding examplars, let alone teachers (staretsy) of the way of the Prayer. And yet we are often advised to "always seek to find an experienced spiritual guide for our practice of the Jesus Prayer. Such a person is important in providing support, encouragement, insight and help on the spiritual path and in managing difficulties that arise in our prayer practice."

Many of the readers of the blog, I imagine, will find themselves in this predicament. Somewhere along the path we have encountered the Jesus Prayer, and something in our hearts has resonated to its simple words. We pick up a book, or visit a website, to find out more - only to meet with this impossible requirement. 

Or is it a requirement? Frederica Matthews Green:

Look for a spiritual mother or father. Many Orthodox Christians turn to their parish priest for this, while others seek one at a men’s or women’s monastery. If you can’t find one, embark on the Jesus Prayer with whatever resources you can gather, but retain an extra measure of caution about your own capacity for spiritual pride. You’re still bound to make some mistakes, but at least you won’t be surprised when you do. Attend worship; be part of a worshiping community. Receive the sacraments (in Orthodoxy, called “Holy Mysteries”). Go to confession, if that is part of your spiritual heritage.

Kallistos Ware went further: 

Yet today, in this present epoch of restless curiosity and ecclesiastical disintegration, there are in fact many who use the Jesus Prayer without belonging to any Church, possibly without having a clear faith either in the Lord Jesus or in anything else. Are we to condemn them? Are we to forbid them the use of the Prayer? Surely not, so long as they are sincerely searching for the Fountain of Life. Jesus condemned no one except hypocrites...

I've found, over the years since I was first introduced to the Jesus Prayer at the end of the 1970s, that there is that in the Prayer which is profoundly healing and, for want of a better phrase, inwardly stabilising. Even when I have been thoroughly lost and without bearings the Prayer has found me and brought me back; not only to its practice, but to the fellowship of the Church, and to the Eucharistic community itself. For me it has been the safest of havens, and a beacon in the shadows where I have found no other light.

Not everyone of course, will share this call - there are many paths up the Mountain, and none is better of itself. But I don't think, if you are one who finds the Prayer tugs at something in you far deeper than words or ideas, an inexplicable yearning when you read Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me... that you need fear slipping out on the running tide of those words. There is there, to repurpose Hopkins' words, "the dearest freshness deep down things", like the scent of the sea wind that will lead you home.

A calling

Not for the first time it has been borne in upon me that the life of prayer is not a choice but a calling. Time and again I have tried, over the course of my life, to sidestep this; and time and again I have been brought back by an infinite patience and grace to a path that seems to have been traced for me.

In Quaker faith & practice we read:

Those of you who are kept by age or sickness from more active work, who are living retired lives, may in your very separation have the opportunity of liberating power for others. Your prayers and thoughts go out further than you think, and as you wait in patience and in communion with God, you may be made ministers of peace and healing and be kept young in soul. 

(London Yearly Meeting, 1923)

I would want to add the word “calling” to the first sentence here: “kept by age, sickness or calling…” Throughout history, even in times of great social need or unrest, the calling to a retired life of prayer and contemplation has been recognised by those to whom it has come.

Simon Barrington-Ward writes of St. Silouan:

…he began to recognise that [his sense of darkness and isolation] was in part the oppression of the absence of the sense of God and the alienation from his love over the whole face of the globe. He had been called to undergo this travail himself not on account of his own sin any more, but that he might enter into the darkness of separated humanity and tormented nature and, through his ceaseless prayer, be made by God’s grace alone into a means of bringing that grace to bear on the tragic circumstances of his time. He was praying and living through the time of World War I and the rise of Hitler and the beginnings of all that led to the Holocaust [not to mention the Russian Revolution, and at the very end of his life, Stalin’s Great Purge]. And with all this awareness of pain and sorrow, he was also given a great serenity and peacefulness and goodness about his, which profoundly impressed those who know him. 

For all of us in our lesser ways, the Jesus Prayer, as well as bringing us into something of this kind of alternation which St. Silouan so strikingly experienced, also leads us on with him into an ever-deepening peace. You can understand how those who first taught and practised this kind of prayer were first called “hesychasts”: people of hesychia or stillness.

Of course all this is by grace, entirely by grace; God’s life and presence given to us freely in Christ. We are called into this. I honestly don’t think we could choose these things for ourselves. Even if we could, they would fall into disuse by our own inertia. We would become bored with the Prayer, terrified by the darkness and the identification with the pain and alienation of the world, as I have all too often been myself. This "travail" of prayer, as much as its consolation, has for me often led to attempts to find another way - but to no avail!

Why would anyone choose such a path, hidden as it is too, mute and inglorious? My only answer must be that I didn't choose it. I have tried, so often, to choose anything but this way; but I have found myself driven back by a kind of interior necessity not of my own making.

Barrington-Ward again:

After all, the whole prayer becomes an intercession. Soon I find that I am on longer praying just for myself, but when I say “on me, a sinner” all the situations of grief and terror, of pain and suffering begin to be drawn into me and I into them. I begin to pray as a fragment of this wounded creation longing for its release into fulfilment… I am in those for whom I would pray and they are in me, as is the whole universe. Every petition of the prayer becomes a bringing of all into the presence and love of God…

What seems to be required here has to be a life marked largely by prayer and silence.  In my own case, calling and sickness, or at least weakness from old injuries, seem to work together in a kind of synergism to reinforce this calling to a retired life. Why is it that I find it so difficult to settle down to accepting it?

Of course, how this will work out in the life of each of us called to such a life is a kind of small mystery of our own. It will have to be worked out, sometimes literally with fear and trembling, in the mercy of the Prayer itself.

I think we have, when we find ourselves called to the Jesus Prayer - or indeed any other contemplative practice - and the life that is lived within that practice, to be prepared to walk into the dark, as it were, unknowing, and see how things turn out. The path may be quite straightforward; or it may be quite scandalously tangled and broken. That doesn't seem to be for us to choose - what we are given is that unknowing, and a scrap of faith, like a dusty pilgrim's shell, to hold on to. Or perhaps it holds onto us. In my own case, it seems to be the latter.

[Parts of this post are, inevitably, revisions of things written here earlier. They seem to need repeating from time to time.]

The promise of presence

The call, the promise of blessings, and our willing response inevitably lead to a journey—a journey away from all that is safe and familiar, toward the unknown and very often, towards danger. There is great mental and emotional cost in such a journey, whether it be a physical journey to a strange land, a foreign culture, and an unknown people; or a journey inward, deep into the turbulent, uncharted territory of the mind and heart... The divine call is not always easy to discern and the mysterious promise often takes a long time to make itself manifest. God never promises us success. What God does promise is presence...

(Veronica Mary Rolf, Suddenly There is God: The Story of Our Lives in Sacred Scripture)

I think a statement like this must apply especially to the calling to a life of prayer. Anything we could imagine as "success" is very far from the experience of one praying: what could it mean, even? And yet this call is entirely real, concrete, almost. My own experience of the Jesus Prayer is precisely this, "a journey inward" and yet a journey into inescapable presence. Like many others, in Scripture and elsewhere, I'm not sure that my response could be characterised as "willing"; the best I can come up with is listening. Obedience is another matter...

And yet that presence is infinitely patient; and the call, once given, only grows stronger, despite the lengthening shadows. John Gill:

[The Jesus Prayer] is a direct invocation to the person of Jesus, expressing faith in his divinity and a plea for his mercy. It does not just rely upon mechanical technique and is not in the nature of a magical incantation. Its efficacy is the result of God’s grace, freely given. It is not an impersonal instrument but a prayer replete with meaning, expressing sentiments of humility, repentance, compunction and love.

Perhaps I might be forgiven for adding to Gill's four sentiments that of attention. Not so much the attention of will that any repeated prayer or formula involves, but attention to the presence of God in Jesus, like the beloved apostle's off the shore of Galilee: "It is the Lord!" (John 21:7)

Love and attention - maybe the only response possible or necessary to that inescapable presence - are all in the end we have to offer; and yet they are nothing more than faith expressed; and faith is given (Ephesians 2:8), just as the call is, and its promise.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

The glory of the risen Christ broke through the darkness on this morning, long ago, and is with us now, forever...

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:5 NIV)

Holy Saturday

Divine action is not something material: it is invisible, inaudible, unexpected, unimaginable, and inexplicable by any analogy taken from this world. Its advent and its working within us are a mystery… Little by little, divine action grants to man increased attention and contrition of the heart in prayer… 

The spirit of prayer comes upon man and drives him into the depths of the heart, as if he were taken by the hand and forcibly led from one room to another. The soul is taken captive by an invading force, and is willingly kept within, as long as this overwhelming power of prayer still holds sway over it.

(Theophan the Recluse, quoted in The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology, ed. Timothy Ware & Chariton of Valamo)

This Saturday is a day taken out, like an empty hole in time, anechoic, no-thing.

Prayer is like this very often, a place without a place, emptied out, stripped and somehow inaccessible to memory.

What could have happened in the tomb, between Joseph and Nicodemus leaving, and that dawn of glory? There will never be a way to know: those hours were outside time, and what we are, creatures of days and years, cannot comprehend it.

Again prayer: the clearer our prayer, the more we come to a place forever beyond our comprehension. We meet our Lord as nearly face to face as we could bear in this life, and don't recognise him. We haven't the senses for this, and we cannot record an experience without words. All we can do is listen.

Prayer is listening, listening to the word. Like Mary Magdalene we hear many words, but at rare intervals we hear the really piercing word, the word that affirms us in our beings, the fiat that creates and re-creates us. This word is our own name. It is the secret name written on the white stone that no one knows except him who receives it, the secret truth of our own person that we do not yet fully know ourselves but only glimpse, because it is only potentially true as yet, true to God but not yet fully brought to birth.

(Maria Boulding, Marked for Life: Prayer in the Easter Christ (SPCK Classics))

Hidden even from ourselves...

So far we have been looking at making action more contemplative, finding a contemplative dimension in our actions. But there is a real sense in which prayer is itself an action, an action whose fruit and extent cannot be measured or assessed; its ways are secret, not only secret from others but also secret from ourselves. The greater part of the fruit of our prayer and contemplation remains hidden with Christ in God...

Prayer is opening oneself to the effective, invisible power of God. One can never leave the presence of God without being transformed and renewed in his being, for this is what Christ promised. The thing that can only be granted by prayer belongs to God (Lk 11:13). However such a transformation does not take the form of a sudden leap. It takes time. Whoever persists in surrendering himself to God in prayer receives more than he desires or deserves. Whoever lives by prayer gains an immense trust in God, so powerful and certain, it can almost be touched. He comes to perceive God in a most vivid way. Without ever forgetting our weakness, we become something other than we are.

(Mary David Totah, Deepening Prayer: Life Defined by Prayer)

Sr Mary David touches something here that I keep scratching after at the edge of my understanding. We cannot comprehend or record the "fruit" of our prayer, and yet we are called to pray, sometimes in an undeniably personal way. I am more sure of this call on my life than I ever have been of any calling to work or study, and obviously I am far from alone in this.

The challenge is to live a life given over to praying for others while accepting that one will seldom, if ever, see any results. No one will be able to ascertain how, or even if, their devoted prayers are efficacious for others. It is a terrible kind of poverty - to live dedicated to helping others, yet never know what good one may be doing. All that hermits can do is hope that they are doing no harm. Believers leave all results to the mercy of their God. Others rely on the interconnectedness of all humanity, trusting that what affects one, affects all. This is a form of intercession expressed less by words than by a way of life. A Camaldolese monk once wrote: "Prayer is not only speaking to God on behalf of humanity, it is also 'paying' for humanity." Suffering is part of the hermit's vocation. One of the most acute forms is to never know whether one's chosen lifestyle is worthwhile or has any value for others. Hermits enter into the darkness, the dusky cloud of unknowing, and walk without any light beyond that which is in their own hearts. Often, unbeknownst even to themselves, they have become beacons for others.

(Karen Karper Fredette and Paul A. Fredette, Consider the Ravens: On Contemporary Hermit Life)

We cannot know, and yet somehow we know, not how, or why, but that. In his Lent Reflection for today, Fr Laurence Freeman writes, of our "sense of sheer wonder that the world exists and that we exist as part of it", and our equally powerful wordless sense, in prayer, that as Mother Julian said, "all will be well and every kind of thing will be well":

I trust you will forgive me if this sounds nonsense. When we think or speak about anything on the other side of language and thought we make nonsense. To make sense of it why not call the state of wonder and radical confidence ‘faith’. Belief, with which we usually confuse it, is influenced by faith; but faith itself is independent of belief. Faith is spiritual knowledge.

As we enter into the meaning of Holy Week and allow its central story to read us and show us our place in it, faith is the path we are following. We test and reset our beliefs against the experience of faith. Hiding behind faith is hope and secreted in hope is love. Like the eternal engine of God, these three are one.