In my church I’m leading a Lent course introducing the Great Tradition of Christian contemplation - mainly sparking from Rowan Williams’ latest book. I’ll put each talk up here, with the text below the video (one a week).
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Introduction to Christian contemplation (1) – it's about love
Dear friends,
Today is the introduction to the introduction to the great tradition of Christian contemplation...
One of my favourite works of Christian teaching, called the Origins of Christian Mysticism, begins by commenting that 'it is not often remarked upon that Christianity is an Eastern religion, and it is a mystical religion'. This series is about giving you a flavour of what that means. If people are interested then I will do more; in particular I would love to move into looking at the English tradition on this. Let me know.
So this morning I want to make three brief points – what the tradition is, what it isn't, and then what is is again.
The tradition is about prayer, and prayer is fundamentally about our relationship. That relationship is with God, of course, but it is also about our relationship with reality, our relationship with the world and finding our place in it. To put that in another way – reality is one of the names of God, which means that the more we attend to God the better our understanding of reality becomes, and the better our understanding of reality becomes the more we understand that reality is relational all the way down. There is no understanding of reality that doesn't, in the end, involve a relationship of some sort. I may come back to that.
A good image to ponder for this point is Rublev's famous icon of the Trinity, where the three angels who visit with Abram at Mamre are on three sides of the table – the fourth side is empty, for that is the side at which we are invited to sit.
So if the tradition is about prayer, what is it not about? It is not about seeking a particular type of experience, a 'religious experience', a road to Damascus, falling on your knees, bright white light overwhelming sense of the presence of God. The tradition is not a recipe for generating such experiences. Such experiences do happen, and they can be of immense religious importance and a means of growth, but St Theresa has the healthiest understanding of them. To paraphrase somewhat she gets to a point when she asks God to release her from such experiences so that she can concentrate upon the washing up. The particular experience is not the point of the tradition, that is a corruption that has crept in alongside our culture's worship of science, so let us put it to one side.
So what, in the end, is this great tradition about? It is about growth: growth in faith, growth in self-knowledge, growth in our capacity to love each other, to bear each other's burdens, to manifest the fruits of the spirit and so on. It is, put simply, how we grow as disciples of Christ and come into our inheritance as the children of God. It is the most important thing that we can do.
Which brings me to my last point for this morning, which is the link between contemplation and action, and the way in which we are obedient to Christ's commands. Jesus is very clear that the first commandment comes first, that we are to love the lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength. The great tradition is how we give effect to that first command.
When we prioritise the second command and neglect the first, which I think our Church of England does, when we prioritise the second command to love our neighbours as ourselves then we run the risk of missing what is most important, we are the Marthas not the Marys, we are the Peters trying to set up a booth for Moses and Elijah rather than being a witness to the Transfiguration. We also run the risk of running out of fuel and burning ourselves out. Worst of all we run the risk of serving in the wrong way, serving without love, serving without an awareness of the reality of whom we are trying to love, and why.
So the great tradition is indispensable. This is the way.
Let me finish today with a taster of what is to come. As mentioned I'm going to be using Rowan Williams' latest book 'Passions of the Soul' as a dialogue partner, and I warmly recommend it, it's one of his generally readable books, not a high-powered academic one. He talks about the Greek word apatheia – it's the word from which we get our word apathy, but the meaning of our word is very different to the meaning of the original Greek word, for originally, in the Tradition, the condition of apatheia was something much to be desired, for it is the precondition for love. Rowan discusses two appetites in the human heart, which both distort our capacity to love – one is fear, the fight or flight mechanism, which leads to a closed fist. The other is greed, the lust or hunger for gain, which leads to a grasping fist. Apatheia is when we have learned to let go of those two appetites, which leaves room for love to grow in the heart. Rowan says this:
“This is why apatheia is connected – so surprisingly for the modern reader – with love. Love is what happens when you stop being aggressive and greedy, and stop to look at your whole self, from the centre of who you are. It's as simple and as alarming as that. Love has room to flower when you stop either pushing reality away or making reality serve your purpose. In that space, love grows. God, remember, whose life is the ultimate definition of love, has neither aggression nor craving in the divine nature. God is not afraid, and God is not greedy. It sounds blindingly obvious, perhaps, put like that; but if we say that the love of God is, in the divine life, the same thing as the absence of aggression and greed, this ought to make us think that perhaps it tells us something of how love works – and fails to work – in us too.”
Helping you to understand what that means is my aim in this sequence of talks.
No clinging, no aversion, no un-awareness. Just flow. Apathiea.