(December 24th  2Sm 7:1-5,8b-12,14a-16; Rom 16:25-27; Lk 1:26-28) – READ HERE

At its worst, which happens a lot, religion controls and patronises God. Rather than removing the human blocks and setting the spirit free in human affairs it can easily exclude the divine. Religious leaders often speak for God, telling others what God wants and doesn’t want, without ever exposing themselves to the risk of meeting God directly.

This is what David does in the first reading. He has won his battles and settled into his kingdom and then thinks ‘Oh, I should build a nice big house for God to live in which will be the Temple. What a good idea’. But God – more gently than he deserves – puts him down. ‘Do you think you can put me in a house? I bless you, not you me. But you will find me pervading everywhere in your life. That’s where I am and will always be. In you and in life.’

Paul, the former religious bigot, understood this after his transformative bout of blindness and a nervous breakdown. The truth is wider, deeper, broader and longer than can ever be expressed. The best we can do is try to express our growing wonder. And that is simply what ‘praising God’ means.

Today’s gospel of the Annunciation shows how the homeless presence of God, on earth and in the cosmos, saturates into the particular. There is a plaque in Nazareth, marking the supposed spot where Mary received her angelic visitor. It reads, ‘Et Verbum Caro Factum Est’: Here on this tiny piece of earth the infinite and eternal Word of God became flesh. The messenger explained to her her destiny. She, young and obscure, would be the house in which God dwells. She is frightened and confused. But she was conscious and responsive. She thought about it and then asked a question – how can this happen to me who am still a virgin?

It sounds like a simple fairy-tale and it is seen as such in nativity plays acted by little children around the world. The tale, however, is not only simple but profound and mysterious. How deeply it touches us, depends on whether we can suspend our scepticism and allow ourselves to be swept beyond the reserved mythical-literal dichotomy into a revelation that enters us and dwells in us for ever after.

‘Experience is the best proof’ of this and of everything else. If we can listen, be conscious and then say yes to what is beyond ordinary (dualistic) knowledge, we don’t have an experience. We become the experience.

The full celebration of Christmas depends on this surrender that is not a rejection of intelligence but an opening of the mind to the mystery dwelling in the heart. Mary doesn’t know what it all means and maybe she never did. But she teaches us the contemplative way when she simply assents to what is and knows what she doesn’t know – as we do in meditation. Her fiat, ‘may it be done to me according to your word’ allows the cosmos, materially, to become the temple that God soaks into by becoming, not only God but also human. No thing will ever be the same again.

 

 

 

(December 17th  Is 61:1-2A,10-11; 1Thess 5:16-24; Jn 1: 6-8,19-28) – READ HERE

We have to burrow deep down through disappointment and even despair to find the source of hope. Only at the place where it bubbles up from the bowels of the earth is hope more than wishful thinking, crossing your fingers, keeping up morale. This may be why prophets (and we all have a bit of the prophet in us) seem often to oscillate from the dark to the light.

Today Isaiah is all light. You would have to have a professionally hardened heart not to be moved by his vision of an event, a coming – that brings glad news to the poor, heals the broken-hearted, gives liberty to those held in bonds of fear or fantasy and sets prisoners free. At Christmas many people remember this hope, and feel connected to its pure, fresh and simple source. That is why Christmas is about a birth and children and Christmas go together so well.

This hopeful vision of the human theatre is usually buried deep in the noise and glitter and excessive indulgence of the festivities. Inevitably, we will hear about the economic impact of Christmas spending on the economy; much less about the special shelters for the homeless run by volunteers, the people who will search out and comfort those who with their families have lost home and livelihood because of war and are looked at by their new hosts with suspicion and hostility.

How do we dig down to find this spring of hope that can face the inhumanities of humanity and still not give up trying to make the world a kinder and more just place? After all, many who start off idealistically become cynical. Politics smothers purpose. And many more perhaps burn out in the process, giving themselves generously but imprudently in ways that break the mind or the body.

Paul says ‘pray without ceasing’. This hardly means spending all day in church, mosque, temple or synagogue. Nor does it mean thinking about heavenly realities all the time. It means unblocking the channel of consciousness that is the continuous pure stream of prayer in us.

I once sat down to meditate with a small group in my meditation room on Bere Island. Then an awful smell and a worrying sound of gurgling came from the nearby toilet. It was overflowing. Bad news, like we read of every day. My cousin, who is an expert in everything, came round and feared it was the septic tank. Big problem. Later as I walked around outside I saw a hole where the pipe led from the toilet to the tank. I looked in the hole and saw a stone lodged there. Hardly believing my luck and beaming with pride that I had solved the problem I plucked out the stone and everything flowed thereafter in the right way.

We don’t have to try to pray continuously. We just have to remove the blockages to enjoy what Paul calls the soundness, wholeness, of body, mind and spirit. This is the biblical understanding of the human – the triple dimension that lifts the duality of body and mind to transcendence. This third and most subtle dimension is clearly present in today’s gospel, as John the Baptist points away from himself to the ‘one who will come after’ him.

We can only say so much and see so much. We can only keep the attention on ourselves for so long. If we don’t clear the blockages in consciousness that foul up ourselves and the world, we will endlessly look and not see and chatter so much that we drown out the healing silences of life. The Baptist says ‘there is one among you whom you do not recognise.’

What a hopeful thing to say.

 

 

(December 10th,  Is 40:1-5,9-11; 2Pet:3:8-14; Mk 1:1-8) – READ HERE

Stillness in meditation is, despite appearances, the fast lane of the spirit. Without knowing it we are covering a lot of ground and we do not become aware of it until we realise there is no going back. People stop meditating for a variety of reasons. One is impatience; another is fear that we are travelling too fast. Advent is an opportunity to readjust our awareness in the strange, fluid dimension of time in which we live and die every day. Tough love can be this wake-up call.

Isaiah today seems captivated by the melting tenderness of God. It is different but not incompatible with last week’s emphasis on the painful estrangement between the human and the divine. Actually nothing is incompatible with God. The greater the difference, the deeper the paradox to be resolved and then the greater the delight in seeing opposites united. But, the divine shepherd? If you have ever met a shepherd close to his sheep you may have been surprised by his manner. On one hand tough, unsentimental, masculine; on the other, gentle, attentive and nurturing to even the weakest runts in his flock.

In today’s gospel we meet another prophet, John the Baptist, the last of the pre-Christian ones, the same age as Jesus. The tradition has imagined him hairy, unwashed and angry, ascetical and denouncing corruption and hypocrisy. Maybe there is more to him than this. Prophets are characteristically hyper-sensitive, lonely, dysfunctional and they rarely get their message over without offending people on all sides.

But their intention (the true prophet’s) is kindly: the health and well-being of others. The call to change our mind and way of seeing things and to adjust our life-style to this new way of being is painfully kind. The people who came out into the desert to hear John asked him ‘what shall we do?’ They were – as we are often are, and more than we realise – quietly desperate.

There is not much that fills us with unconscious dread more than the glimpse of our lives trickling away from us without meaning, without discovering what we were really supposed to do with our lives, trying to keep the accusatory awareness of our mistakes and self-deception from surfacing above the waves of consciousness. Prophets get this out in the open.

But the tension between patience and urgency can resolve as we see in the letter from Peter today: ‘with the Lord one day is like a thousand years’. If we see that, then two meditations a day seem more doable. John Main said (prophetically) this was the minimum. Even if it takes a millennium to understand and comply with this, it is a truth always worth listening to.

The prophet may appear to us this coming week in many guises. In whatever outward form, tough or gentle, the effect should be the same: to make the glimpse of life’s urgency last a little longer until we steadily look the truth about ourselves in the eyes. Hard as that may be, we will not fail to sigh with relief that the truth is finally out and we can stop pretending.