A quick recap of the first two sessions, before we carry on. Christian contemplation is the practice of bringing what is going on inside us into the presence of God, so that it becomes part of our relationship with Him, and so that we are changed in the process – until Christ is born in us, as St Paul might say. Part of that is cultivating what the Fathers called apatheia, which is a state that we are in when we no longer react with either greed – a grasping hand – or fear – a closed fist, but rather we are in a position of basic trust, without anxiety as to our identity or our safety. Last week I spoke a little about a rule of thumb which I think is extremely helpful, that God is not in the drama. God is the author of our stories, we are not the centre of the story. We are because God is.
Which leads nicely into the subject of this week's talk, which is pride. If healthy contemplation is us attending to God, letting God be the author and centre of the story, then we can understand pride as the insistence that we, the self, the ego, the great “I” is the centre of the story. Rowan uses an excellent image, of an upset child holding their breath in order to get their own way, as a way of understanding spiritually what happens when we get caught up in pride. Pride is the deadliest sin, it is the one that most cuts us off from our capacity to relate, to each other and to God. Augustine has a good description of it: curvatus in se, to be curved in upon oneself. I think of this as like a flower, where a normal flower will open itself up towards the sunshine, spreading the petals so as to absorb all the light. Pride is the opposite of that opening up, it is a flower that is closing all its petals in.
There is a moment in the gospels when the disciples are bickering on the way about who is the greatest, and as part of his rebuke Jesus sets a small child amongst them, saying that unless we become like a little child we cannot enter the Kingdom. Now I don't think he had in mind a small child holding their breath! Rather I suspect there are two related things going on here, and both are about how the child does not act from pride. The first is that the child has an innocence, specifically an innocence about understanding all the issues to do with social approval. They are simply themselves. They have not yet learned how to create an armour to deal with all the ways in which we hurt each other through our social connections. This is the ego, the armour, the camouflage that we put up in order to navigate our way in the world. One way to think about pride is to think of that social construct, that ego, as the sum total of who we are, to not recognise the distinction between the ego and the soul. The second way in which we are to become like a child, though, is to do with the sense of wonder. Remember that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. This fear is not terror, as we might feel if we are being chased by a tiger through the jungle. No, the fear of the Lord is our sense of awe. One of the most spiritually significant moments in my life was when I took a year out before going to university and spent several months with a friend wandering across the United States and Canada. I remember visiting the Grand Canyon and at first thinking, ah yes, big hole, very nice – and then the actual scale hit me, and I had an authentic 'whoa!' moment. I see that moment as a key step in relieving me of my teenage atheism.
So a sense of wonder, a sense of how amazing the cosmos is, which at the same time makes us feel both incredibly small and incredibly content, humble in the best way, that I believe is what Jesus is driving at when he tells the disciples to become like a little child.
Rowan does something surprising at this point. He links the sense of pride to the sense of mourning; blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. The truth is that in the end it will all be taken away. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord. Part of the demon of pride is a refusal to mourn, a refusal to accept that this life involves suffering, it is a refusal to buy the ticket. None of us live lives that go the way that we hoped; we are not in control, as I said at the beginning, we are not the authors of our lives. We are dependent. So we need to learn how to breathe, and we need to attend to our breathing. We do not possess the air, yet we are completely dependent upon it. To recognise this, to recognise that at some point we shall stop breathing is, when we are spiritually well, to recognise that is is all a gift. And the proper response to a gift is to say thank you.
To learn to see our lives as a gift; to cultivate a sense of gratitude; and to look out at the world with a sense of wonder – this is how we are to be in the world, and this is what the path of contemplation can help us to discover. We can simply say thank you each morning for the gift of life and say, “what do you have in store for me today Lord?”
“Pride is the refusal to breathe in and let God be what God is – which is the heart and focus of energy of our being. So when Cassian talks about the first angel who fell as illustrating the perils of self-reliance, that's what he has in mind. The angel who fell, the archangel Lucifer, looks at God and says, 'God is great and beautiful and wonderful, and I want to be greater, more wonderful, more beautiful than God'. But when you see God as a rival – out there threatening you just be being God – what you don't see is that God cannot be a rival: God is already your life, and there's nothing you can do about it. God is always, already your life. You are because God is...”
A good illustration there is so much more to Christianity than assent to doctrine (as important as that is).