Heaven in Ordinary

As Paul went on and on, a young man called Eutychus who was sitting on the window-sill grew drowsy and was overcome by sleep and fell to the ground three floors below.

Acts 20:9

If Eutychus isn't the patron saint of ordinary churchgoers then perhaps he should be. On days when the sky is blue, the sun is warm, the sermon is dull and a tall glass of something cool is waiting for you outside then who is the one whose attention would not waver at least a little? I don’t think that this is a cautionary tale (spoiler alert: it has a happy ending) its more an observation that even in the presence of the famous Apostle to the Gentiles human flesh is weak. If it were not there would have been no need for the Incarnation.

There are many positive arguments that can be made in favour of churchgoing but Eutychus I think points us towards a negative one. Church services can be dull or worse than dull. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. The temptation to think that the Church can pretend to be a part of the entertainment industry is something that should be firmly resisted. However well put together a service is, however many guitars or flashing lights that it has there will always be something much, much better to watch on TV or YouTube. If the demand of churchgoers is ‘entertain me’ then they need to be challenged but I don't think that that is what they/we do demand whatever worried pastors with declining congregations might think. Lively, inspiring and enlightening homilies are always welcome. Worthily celebrated sacraments are gratefully received. But even when these are not present there is still a reason to turn up week after week and if necessary do a Eutychus.

Our daily lives are filled with dull moments, with mediocrity, with routine. The thousand and one necessary things which we have to do, go to the shops, buy petrol for the car, endure a long commute, listen to boring anecdotes you've heard a dozen times before. Their dullness is as real as their necessity and we cannot dispense with either, they are part of what it means to live a human life. If an hour in church resembles an hundred other hours we have already spent in the previous week that doesn't represent a failure on the part of the pastor. It means that churchgoing is woven naturally into the fabric of our lives. It has this one difference though. At any moment from a phrase of scripture, the verse of a hymn, a sentence in the homily or the elevation of a Host or even a sunbeam dancing on the sanctuary at any moment I say we can suddenly be transpierced by the love of Christ. We can be moved from time to eternity. Transcendence should be a regular visitor to the Sunday service, coming and going as He pleases.

There is a need for Sacred Space and Sacred Time where we can concentrate on what is holy. More than that though there needs to be the possibility of interpenetration between the two. Where we are aware that ordinariness is a part of the church experience then we will also be aware that the sacred can invade and be a part of the ordinary experience too. Our dull days and routine activities, our falling asleep through boredom, are not exempt from an infusion of the divine. Eutychus points us towards this mingling of the two realms. The title of this piece is from the poem Prayer by the Anglican vicar George Herbert it ends with these words, the ‘something understood’ is the subject of this article-

   

Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,

         The land of spices; something understood.

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The painting is St Paul by Pompeo Girolamo Batoni

Waking from Sleep

                                                 Christ Giving His Blessing- Memling

Awake, O sleeper,
    and arise from the dead,
and Christ will give you light
(Ephesians 5:14)

Missionary religions have the task of persuading people to totally transform their lives. In pursuit of this objective there is a temptation to over-egg the pudding. The old life is painted in vivid language as being one of unrelieved misery totally immersed in wicked sin. By way of contrast the new life of the convert is portrayed in glowing terms full of happiness, joy and general goodness. Unless the person being evangelised is in a particularly vulnerable emotional state or has the wisdom to see a core truth concealed within the apparent hyperbole they will not be convinced. They will seldom think of their own lives in such bleak terms or of themselves as being such moral reprobates. If, moreover, they know many religious believers they will but rarely observe them to be significantly more happy or more virtuous than their unbelieving neighbours.

A fiery Christian preacher might argue that what they are saying constitutes an objective truth and that only a false consciousness (to borrow an expression from Marxism) prevents their unredeemed listeners from accepting it. This may be so but a personally experienced subjective reality has more power to convince than the truest of objective truths not directly felt. Most lives, I suspect are lived in a neutral zone, islands of misery or of happiness occasionally loom out of the fog and then are more or less swiftly left behind. In this context I think that the paired opposites offered by St Paul to the Ephesians constitute a more effective evangelical tool. They are also slightly surprising, wakefulness and sleep we might expect but death and light rather less so.

Within Buddhism and Vedanta Hinduism the notion that the unrealised or unenlightened person is inhabiting a word of illusion (Maya) out of which they can escape only when they grasp the essence of the Real is a commonplace. It cannot be understood in the same sense within Christianity because not only is the material universe real it has also in a sense become divinized through the Incarnation and will be a part of eternity in the physical resurrection of believers. We can however say that perceiving the material cosmos to be the only reality is an illusion and that a life premised on that perception has a dream like quality by comparison with one based on the dual truths of the physical and spiritual realms. Therefore the missionary should be nudging her audience to consider the question 'Is this it?' when they consider their personal lives and the collective life of the society and the world which they inhabit. This does not need them to presuppose their own misery and wickedness but simply to acknowledge the divine discontent which their hearts will, at least from time to time, experience when they live as if the answer to the question is 'Yes.' To begin, even if hesitantly, to answer 'No' and to live in accordance with that answer is to wake the spiritual self from that slumber into which materialism has put it.

The notion that we are dead though apparently alive is parallel to that of being asleep though apparently awake. Where 'Christ will give you light' differs from 'Awake' is that it introduces the idea of personal relationship. It is not simply that we realise a truth, spiritual life is a reality, but that we encounter that truth in the form of a person. The light is given to us personally by Him personally. Nor is it a simple transaction, it is a process, He does not give us a fixed amount of light and then go about His business. It is always in the future tense He 'will give' light. The more alive we become the more light He shall give us, the more light He gives us the more alive we shall become. So here the threefold task of the missionary is to relate the divine discontent of her listeners to their perception of the reality of a spiritual realm to the person of Jesus Christ. The necessity for conversion is great but one strategy for overcoming the false consciousness or false sense of security of the unbeliever is not confrontation or condemnation but a leading of them to a personal encounter with our Lord.

I am not suggesting that Christians should ever stop preaching in season and out upon the wrongness of sin and upon the profound sinfulness of each person, nor upon the misery of life without God. I am suggesting that we follow the example of the Apostle- 'To those outside the law I became like one outside the law—though I am not outside God’s law but within the law of Christ—to win over those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, to win over the weak. I have become all things to all, to save at least some.' (1 Corinthians 9;21-22)

It is also worth bearing in mind the second reason for the failure to convince which I mentioned earlier. Christians are not noticeably happier or more virtuous than their neighbours. Leaving aside the question of Christians-in-name-only I would argue that there is no particular reason to expect that the outward aspect of believers will be markedly different from that of non-believers, in most cases they are at best 'work in progress.' It is the inward aspect that should be forever altered. The islands of misery and happiness are still encountered (although in a transformed way) but the neutral zone should be a thing of the past. No day spent in the company of Jesus, no hour spent with the Holy Spirit, no time spent in the hand of the Father is neutral time. The light which is shed upon the Christian life and within the Christian heart makes all time kairos- the right moment.


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Praying to Saints?

                                                            Venerable Margaret Sinclair

When the centurion heard about Jesus, he sent to him elders of the Jews, asking him to come and heal his servant
Luke 7:3

Enemies of Catholicism suppose (or affect to suppose) that Catholics pray to Saints instead of praying to God. Those who are merely uninformed think that Catholics pray to Saints as well as praying to God. So what is the situation? The idea, briefly, is that Christians on earth ask Christians in heaven to join with them in praying for this or that petition. The two challenges to that proposition which I have encountered most frequently are-

• Why not just pray directly yourself since Jesus is the sole mediator between Man and God?
• How do we know that Saints can hear our prayers?

As far as the first point goes there are several possible answers. One Christian asking another Christian to pray for them has been standard practice since New Testament times. The Apostle St Paul wrote You also must help us by prayer (2 Corinthians 1:11) We know that the Apostle prayed directly to Jesus so clearly he did not see intercession by others as detracting from that but rather strengthening it. As he put it to the Philippians  for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance (Philippians 1:19) Why this kind of intercession might be helpful is something that St James addresses The effective prayer of a righteous person has great power (James 5:16) Which, by the way, raises the suggestion that in the eyes of God some people appear more righteous than others something which more hardline Protestants would deny absolutely. But I digress, the point is that asking others to pray for you is not a sign of your lack of faith in Jesus it is a frank recognition of your own failings. Because I suspect most of us reading this and myself writing it are very far from being righteous it is more than helpful to us to invoke the aid of those whom we know or suspect of being nearer to virtue than we ourselves are.

Does it somehow offend Jesus if we thus ask others to present our petitions to Him? The episode of the Centurion's Servant (or slave) in Luke (Chapter 7:1-10) indicates that far from being offended He is absolutely delighted. The story is that a Centurion has a servant (or slave) whom he loves and who is gravely ill. It is worth noting that as a Roman the Centurion is not only not Jewish but is actively involved in perpetuating the hated occupation of Palestine by a foreign power. So he sends Jewish leaders to Jesus to act as his advocates. They commend his petition for these reasons He is worthy to have you do this for him,  for he loves our nation, and he is the one who built us our synagogue  (vv4-5) That is both his charity and his works are presented to Jesus as being sufficiently meritorious to earn our Lord's goodwill. The argument seems persuasive enough insofar as our Lord and his entourage then set off to the Centurion's house. However the Roman then sends out a further bunch of advocates, his friends, who say to Jesus Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. (v6) And he makes the point that our Lord can simply command that the servant (or slave) be healed and that would suffice to make it happen, which of course it did. Did Jesus get het up because the Centurion chose to appeal to Him in this fashion? What He said was turning to the crowd that followed him,[He] said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” (v9) 

I think that much of the confusion surrounding this issue stems from a misunderstanding that equates the role of mediator with that of advocate. Jesus is the sole mediator between Man and God in the sense that all reconciliation proceeds through Him and only through Him. Yet although this reconciliation is freely available to all not all will finally avail themselves of it. Some are estranged from God through lack of explicit or implicit faith in the Saviour. Others are estranged through sin which presents a barrier to grace though they may formally acknowledge the importance of Christ. Seeking to overcome these barriers through the assistance provided by the prayers of those who are in a state of grace is not replacing the mediatorship of Christ with that of the Saints it is a seeking by those with an imperfect faith to enter fully into the inheritance promised to those with perfect faith. That is, they certainly place their hopes in Christ, which is wise, but not in their own merits, which is also wise, thus they ask those whose merits are known to Christ to add to the sum of their own prayers and as it were tip the balance from justice to mercy a kind of accountancy that Jesus always smiles upon.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that the equivalent episode in the Gospel According to St Matthew (8:5-13) presents the story as if the Centurion and our Lord had actually met and engaged in a dialogue. I think that this can be explained by the different purposes underlying each Evangelists narrative. St Matthew was writing in the first instance for a primarily Jewish audience, his priorities were to emphasise that Jesus was a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies and that these transformed the religious mission of the Jews from a national project to an international one with the renewed Israel becoming a beacon to the world-

“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
    to raise up the tribes of Jacob
    and to bring back the preserved of Israel;
I will make you as a light for the nations,
    that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

(Isaiah 49:6)

St Matthew then, as it were, bigs up the encounter between the heir of King David and the gentile in order to emphatically put Jesus' imprimatur on the mission to the gentiles which is why he includes this passage which is absent from St Luke's account

" I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

(vv11-12)

St Luke had different purposes and his account of our Lord's mission is often called "the Gospel of Prayer" (don't believe me? Google it.) Therefore he describes the episode with the Centurion in the way that he does precisely because it bigs up the prayer aspect, that is to say, the intercessory prayer aspect. One can easily reconcile the two accounts by considering that the words spoken by the advocates really were the words first spoken by the Centurion which is precisely what you would expect when Saints intercede for you with the addition, as St Luke notes, of extra material highlighting whatever merits you may possess.

                                                            St Margaret of Scotland

Granting that asking people to pray for you is not displaying a lack of faith in Christ but is actually being obedient to the plain sense of the Scriptures people still doubt whether it is legitimate to add Christians in heaven to our list of people that we ask. The question is do they hear our prayers. One school of thought is that when people die they enter into a 'soul sleep' which is to say that they literally snooze their way from death to the final judgement without any sort of awareness of their surroundings. The basis for this idea is the frequent references to people who die 'falling asleep.' But this, I think, only refers to the physical half of the equation, a dead person resembles a sleeping person when we look at them. There are, by contrast, numerous scriptural references to post-mortality people being very much alive to the eyes of God. Here are some-

• And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:43) Said to the 'good thief' on the Cross.
• "Have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living.” (Matthew 22:31-32) 
• The Parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19-31 which portrays Abraham, Lazarus and the rich man as all being spiritually alive and aware after their mortal death. It might be argued 'its just a parable' but it would be an extraordinarily misleading one for Jesus to use if there is no spiritual life and awareness among those who have passed on.
• The Transfiguration (Mark 9:2-8) which includes- there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus. (v4) Now, Elijah had been assumed into heaven but Moses had unequivocally died and been buried. If Moses could hold a conversation with Jesus clearly he was both spiritually alive and aware of what was going on. I have heard it argued that 'it was just a vision' and not the real Moses but, again, it seems an extraordinarily misleading one if the scriptures want us to believe in 'soul sleep.'

So granting that intercessory prayer is scriptural and A Good Thing and granting that Christians after death are spiritually alive to God and aware what warrant do we have for assuming that they can hear our requests? Sacred Scripture offers no explicit guidance on this subject, asking Saints to add their prayers to ours is certainly not contrary to Scripture but neither is it affirmed by it. What we can say is that it is an ancient practice of the Church. It began with invoking the aid of martyrs whom the faithful have excellent grounds for believing to be in heaven. Protestant critics of Catholicism offer various competing dates for the time when the Church supposedly fell into apostasy. What we can say about praying to Saints is that it predates all of them. The Church which defined the Nicene Creed was a Church that prayed to Saints. Therefore anyone who accepts the one has no logical grounds not to accept the other and practically every Christian denomination does accept the Creed. It cannot surely be the case that the Holy Spirit guided the Church to be so profoundly right in these central matters of the faith but was entirely laissez faire about the prayer life of Christians. The practice then is not contrary to Scripture and is entirely consonant with the beliefs and practices of the Church from practically the get go. Individual Christians may not feel the need to invoke Saints, thats up to them, but they have no grounds to criticise others for doing so nor to suggest that it is somehow non-Christian or displaying a lack of faith in Christ our Lord and Saviour.

Finally, as with faith itself, the greatest proof is experimental. If you ask the Saints to join their prayers to yours then you will yourself discover the wonderful benefits which flow from the practice. Above all invoke the aid of Mary, Mother of Jesus, Mother of Christians, Mother of the Church and you will find that where, perhaps, grace once abounded now it will abound all the more. Going to Jesus through Mary shows no lack of faith in Jesus but at once is an affirmation of your own littleness and of that indescribably huge reservoir of love that flows between Jesus and His mother. There is nothing that He will refuse her and there is nothing containing virtue, charity or hope that she is not bold enough to ask from Him.

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Independence for Scotland?

                                       Tuscan School, The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew
For we have not here a lasting city, but we seek one that is to come.
Hebrews 13:14

For we ha'e faith
in Scotland's hidden poo'ers
The present's theirs
but a' the past and future's oors.
Hugh MacDiarmid 

This is a spiritual blog not a political one, forbye which most of the people who read it will never come within a thousand miles of Scotland. So what for am I writing a post anent the Scottish Independence referendum of September 2014? Firstly, because I'm Scottish about which more later. Secondly, because it seems like a good test case for considering the relationship between spirituality and patriotism or nationalism. After all if, for example, Christians hold that the 'one thing necessary'(Luke 10:42) is to 'seek first the Kingdom of God' (Matthew 6:33) then you would think that they would look with a lofty disdain on merely earthly kingdoms.

In the New Testament we frequently find suggestions that in our personal hierarchy of values we should put mundane considerations such as income, family or country low down on our list of priorities. For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul (Matthew 16:26) If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26) And within the historical context of the first century Holy Land the very actions of Jesus bear witness against the nationalism of many of his compatriots. Early in His mission we see Jesus therefore, when he knew that they would come to take him by force, and make him king, fled again into the mountain himself alone (John 6:15)

From the perspective of the Roman authorities the territory was full of Palestinian terrorist like Barabbas (Mark 15:7) who concealed themselves in the civilian population and used them as human shields while committing 'sedition and murder.' From the point of view of many Jews though groups like the Zealots were heroes who fought valiantly against a regional superpower. The fact that they had no chance of success did not matter much so long as they struck a blow on behalf of a people who had been beaten and dispossessed by a powerful foreign foe.There was an expectation that a figure anointed by God, Messiah or Christ means the anointed one, would be able to unify the Jews and turn the disparate groups of Jewish jihadis into a force capable of driving the occupying power into the sea. Many thought that Jesus would be such a figure. He, however, repudiated such nationalism. My kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36) He told the Roman governor Pilate.

The only witness in favour of nationalism in the New Testament comes from St Paul who writes For I could wish that I myself were accursed and separated from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kin according to the flesh. (Romans 9:3) But even here he acknowledges that 'not all who are of Israel are Israel' meaning that membership of a nation or tribe or clan is secondary to the main business of life which is spiritual. Encountering and responding to the transcendent reality is what matters and anything in the material world which substitutes itself for the deity, such as the Nation, is is to be rejected. What we do in this world, such as loving our neighbours as ourselves, should flow from the divine encounter. Nothing can be put into a separate category where spiritual values do not apply.

Does this mean that Christians in Scotland should ignore the referendum and that they have nothing to contribute to the debate? No, but it means that their contribution needs to come from a distinct angle. There is nothing peculiarly Christian to be said about a common currency or how much oil is left in the North Sea (although there is a Christian angle to the removal of weapons of mass destruction from Scottish soil.) But Christianity does have something to say about community.

There are many things in this world which are both imaginary and real at the same time. Or, more precisely, they are real because they exist in people's imaginations. Money is one such thing. With a coloured piece of paper it is possible to buy haggis and chips but not a bottle of single malt whisky. With a slightly different coloured piece of paper one can buy not only a single malt but also several haggis suppers and a deep fried Mars bar while receiving numerous metal disks in exchange for the paper as well. The intrinsic worth of both bits of paper is identical but the value we ascribe to them is a collective act of the imagination. A country or nation is a similar imaginative creation. If nobody believes that a country exists then it does not exist. If large numbers of people believe that a country exists then that alone will have the power to bring it into being if it is not already established. Nature does not create nations. Geography does not create nations. God does not, in the usual sense of the term, create nations. Contrary to what you might expect economic necessity does not create nations either although it plays a part in forming and sustaining them. And most particularly science does not create nations.
       
A country is an imagined community. It is not real in the sense that no single individual imagines the country to be just precisely, just exactly the way that country actually is. People attribute to the nation a collective sensibility, a shared set of values which it does not possess. They understand it to have a shared history which it has never lived, all historical accounts are highly selective and in any event the past is even more of an act of the imagination than the national community is. Very often a patriot thinks of her country as being mostly composed of people very like herself but no country is very like any one person. Commitment to nation or love of country is an act of faith in an imagined reality. 'Just like Christianity!' the atheists among you will say. However that might be Christianity and Nationalism have this in common they proceed from a notion of Incarnation. Ideas which taken in isolation are mere abstractions take on life when they are clad with flesh. Moreover, from the beginning Christianity was Church, a community. Without Church there is no Christianity. Without community there is no Nation. The Church community is in part a visible, structured thing with rituals and sacraments, it subsists in the Catholic Church, and in part an invisible, spiritual thing, a hermit on a mountain is as much part of the community as a woman at a Papal Mass attended by millions. So too the Nation, whether it has a State of its own or not, exists in both visible and invisible forms. A People without shared rituals and agreed common signs is no People at all.

What the members of a nation agree among themselves to imagine about themselves becomes an incarnated reality. Christians who are called to be the leaven that leavens the whole must play their part in contributing ideas and values to this shared act of imagination. The loyalty which they have may be first and foremost to the person of Jesus Christ but He is not an abstraction. He is a person and He translates His ideas and values into action in the world. In the national conversation Christians must seek to ensure that the collective imagination becomes tinged with the personality of Christ so that the nation as a whole through its agencies, such as the health service or the foreign office, and each member of that collectivity acts more or less consciously under the influence and inspiration of these values. This should not be confused with evangelism or a mingling of Church and State. It is no business of the State or Nation to demand of its members allegiance to a religious confession as a prior condition of membership of that country. Explicitly recruiting to the Church is a task for the Church alone. But it is the business of Christians to diffuse their values in society and it is not the business of State or Nation to prevent them and to insist that religion is a purely private affair.

Leaving that to one side. Do Christians have a duty to love their country even if they are excluded from the national conversation or if their views are not heeded? The philosopher Simone Weil said that "In the soul of a Christian, the presence of the pagan virtue of patriotism acts as a dissolvent"  What she had in mind was specifically the patriotism of Rome (and also of Nazi Germany which was then occupying her native France) It is a pagan virtue if it is directed towards the notion of the State as an agent of power, as an idol to be worshipped. To love your country in the sense of saying 'we are number one' is morally abhorrent in a Christian. It is to identify might with right and your notion of God with the policies of your country. There is no sense in which Christians can justify sin in the name of patriotism. And to the extent that a country is mired in sin a Christian who wilfully either distorts theology to justify evil or pretends that her countries policies are something other than they really are has departed from Christianity and become an idolator. There is a positive duty of resistance laid upon Christians which always and everywhere trumps patriotism. Where a nation embarks upon a path which Christianity condemns Christians are bound to refuse cooperation at the very least.

Professor Weil, however, joined the Free French resistance out of the love which she bore for France. Patriotism can have many faces. She wrote “One can love France, for the glory which would seem to insure for her a prolonged existence in space and time; or one can love her as something which being earthly, can be destroyed, and is all the more precious on that account. These are two distinct ways of loving" Recognising that a nation is a product of imagination, that at some point it comes into existence and at some point it will cease to be. Recognising too that it is no more and often less than the best of the best people who make it up Christians have a duty to strengthen the good, console the weak and defend the right. Their place in the nation is not as apologist nor as traitor but as bulwark. The great gift a nation can offer is stability. Through its institutions and shared values it can, for a time, allow for the maintenance of what most of its members agree to be good. Families can be safe, children can be taught, one generation can share its imagination with another. Christianity places the family at the centre of its project. Country and Church have a shared stake in stability which does not exclude, for example, one country seceding from another as may happen in Scotland. The argument here being that the shared values which Scots imagine that they have will be lost if the Union with an England possessed of antagonistic values persists.  

                                                        William Hepburn 1940-2011

Which brings me to my Scottishness. Since I live in partibus infidelium, also known as Exeter, and may, after all never return to my native land it is possible that the only practical impact upon me personally of a 'Yes' vote would be my having to acquire a different passport. Yet, if a nation is an incarnated set of ideas (or dreams) a person from that nation is a bearer of those ideas. Accept them or reject them ones life is never entirely free from an interior dialogue with them. It is usually through the family that those values are first transmitted. My late father William Hepburn, God rest his soul, was a Scottish Nationalist for around 50 years of his life. Had he lived few things in that life would have given him more happiness than to answer the question "do you want an independent Scotland?" with a resounding Yes! I can almost hear him saying "if not this time then next time" I never shared his nationalism, I don't share it now. I am sad beyond words that he cannot crown his act of imagination with a triumphal vote but my imagination is not his.

But he did teach me one thing of inestimable value about this debate. He became a Nationalist in the 1960's before oil was discovered in the North Sea. His conviction did not rest upon an argument from material well being. He believed that whether or not Scots were financially better off as a result of independence was not the most important consideration. The current debate among politicians has mostly been about money. The 'No' campaign offers no vision for a better tomorrow, it simply warns against a worse one where voters may be several hundred pounds a year out of pocket. The 'Yes' campaign counter by saying 'no they won't be.' If, however, Scotland does vote for independence it will likely not be about either of these propositions. Scots will be saying that, yes, they know there is a financial risk but, so long as the weak and vulnerable are protected that is not the real point of the thing. They will be voting for a future where the shared values that they imagine that they have will take an assured place as of right in the governance of their country. And they will be rejecting the values which they do not wish to have imposed upon them by distant elites.

Whether they know it or not many Scots who vote 'Yes' will be striking a blow against materialism. Because of the crass nature of the 'No' campaign few Scots will vote for it for other than material reasons. Christian Scots can make hard headed calculations as well as the next voter and there is nothing wrong with voting for the well being of your family and yourself provided it is not at another's expense. But when you vote for money and money alone it is a sign that your horizons are too low. I do not, as I said, share my father's Nationalism but I do share his thrawnness. It is one of the things that we tell ourselves about ourselves that we are a thrawn people. And it is a piece of imagination that to some extent has become a reality. If the 'No' camp thinks so little of Scots that it offers money in place of enduring values then many Scots will say the hell with  them I'm voting 'Yes' whatever the risks may be. Scotland is better than its politicians and it places more emphasis upon things that endure longer than a politician's promises. Independence for Scotland? I say Yes.

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Mindfulness and Identity

                                                    St. Mary Magdalene by Pietro Perugino

I keep the Lord in mind always.
Psalm 16:8

There is not a moment in which God does not present Himself under the cover of some pain to be endured, of some consolation to be enjoyed, or of some duty to be performed. All that takes place within us, around us, or through us, contains and conceals His divine action
Abandonment to Divine Providence by Jean-Pierre de Caussade

#Mindfulness is something that you may well find trending on Twitter from time to time. This is because it has become a fashionable lifestyle accessory for some Western elite groups. The name and to some extent the technique have been borrowed from Buddhism and put to the kind of use that might make actual Buddhists shudder. Hash-tag Mindfulness is a way of making you more effective at what you do, so that a #mindful arms dealer will be able to sell more arms or a #mindful manufacturer of equipment for torture will make more exquisitely painful products than their less #mindful rivals. As a Christian I don't know whether to be sorry that once again our Western elites have bypassed a perfectly good and ancient Christian tradition of mindfulness to seek out an exotic alternative or be glad that we have not experienced such a shameful abuse of a concept that aims at so much more than being the mental equivalent of jogging or going to the gym.

As a business strategy #mindfulness aims at changing how you do what you do, as a Buddhist one it aims at changing how you perceive the nature of reality. The basic idea is to spend time in being still so that you are only aware of the present moment. Brooding over the past, worrying about the future are let go off and you focus only on now, you become aware of your breathing, of your body, of your self as you are and not the self compounded of your imagination and anxieties. Time spent doing this overspills as it were into the rest of your life so that when you undertake a task it is the task alone that absorbs you, distracting concerns about anything outside of the moment are left behind. Business Reporter quotes a CEO on the benefits of this “the ability to concentrate on one thing, and not get distracted. There’s no point in getting stressed about things you can’t control, they key is learning to understand that.” Alternatively-

In mindfulness, we see things as they really are. The Venerable Gunaratana writes that our thoughts have a way of pasting over reality, and concepts and ideas distort what we experience.

 Mindfulness sees the true nature of phenomena. In particular, through mindfulness we directly see the three characteristics or marks of existence -- it is imperfect, temporary and egoless.

#Mindfulness helps to increase profitability but is derived from an approach which suggests that the drive to succeed materially in this material world is a deceitful illusion. A technique has been entirely ripped out of its context and applied to ends which are antagonistic to its beginnings. A Christian Mindfulness will have an effect upon what we do and what we perceive because it aims to fundamentally transform who we are, to change our identity. In this sense it too is antagonistic to #Mindfulness, Buddhist Mindfulness, of course would also have an effect of changing who we are but I will leave its practitioners to argue their case while I advance a Christian one.

The most important part of any moment, and of all our moments, is the relationship which we have with God and the relationship that God has with us. Derived from that the second most important part of any moment, and of all our moments, is the relationship which we have with our neighbours. To be mindful of these things continually is one of the aims of a Christian mindfulness. As I have already identified there is both an external aspect, what we do, and an internal aspect, what we perceive and who we are, to this. The two things are related and, as it were, feed off each other. Part of the relationship has been described in this way by the Buddha-

What we are is the result of what we have thought,
is built by our thoughts, is made up of our thoughts.
If one speaks or acts with an impure thought, 
suffering follows one, 
like the wheel of the cart follows the foot of the ox.
Dhammapada 
And by Jesus like this-
"The things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile. For from the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, unchastity, theft, false witness, blasphemy. These are what defile a person" 
Matthew 15:18-20

By 'thoughts' and 'heart' our Lord and Sakyamuni clearly mean something different from what we normally ascribe to these words. The mind as the seat of the discursive intellect, the heart as the seat of the emotions are both implicated in what we do and so is the rest of the apparatus which we use to respond to the world and to ourselves. We might think of 'ego' or 'psyche' as being words which describe the concepts which are being referred to. In any event there is a further dimension, thought or feeling precedes action but the effect of acting especially a frequently repeated action is to alter the things which we think and the feeling which we feel. A negative feedback loop is set up if we continually do harmful things then we will be ever more inclined to do more of them more often. Or a virtuous spiral is entered into if we do positive things we shall be ever more inclined to do more of them more often and so rise towards ever greater perfection. Aquinas said a habit of virtue cannot be caused by one act, but only by many.

We have more control over our internal environment than over our external one. Although you may think that this is a truism it is worth dwelling over for a moment. A great many people who are aware that they are 'worriers' prone to living in a semi-permanent state of anxiety are resigned to the fact that that is the way they are and that there is nothing they can do about it so they focus almost exclusively on trying to manage their external environment to reduce the number of anxiety producing situations. We do have basic personalities and there is indeed only so much that we can do to change that, although all things are possible to God, but that does not mean that we can do nothing. It is not a sin or a personal failure to be plagued by anxiety nor is there anything wrong with seeking to alter that by medical means such as medication but neither should we abandon all hope that internal changes can be brought about which, at least from time to time can significantly ease the burden that we bear.

In the internal environment which we inhabit we are not alone unless we choose to be, we can kill the presence of the Spirit by mortal sin, and so any practice of mindfulness should begin with our relationship not to our body but to our God. The psalmist words at the top of the page could be more literally rendered as I keep the Lord always before me If you stop everything which you are doing and thinking and simply become aware of the presence of the Lord within you, within your breathing, within every beat of your heart, within your silence and your noise, within your focussed mind and your dispersed one then you enter into a perception of the one thing necessary so that all the other things may exist at all. Your awareness of self becomes a felt, in the heart, and perceived, in the mind, awareness that firstly before all else your self is relational. You exist to be in relationship not to be autonomous. Moreover, since the same God is equally present to all then your relationship with Him necessarily includes the truth that you exist to be in relationship with each person in whom He is to be found ie everyone. The Lord is always before you in the double sense that He is always directly present to you as Himself and indirectly present to you in others. Actually you could extend the principle to include His presence in all that He has created but if I did so it would make this blog absurdly long. It may be easier to get a handle on this double sense if rather than being present to an abstract notion of God you make yourself present to Jesus who is fully human and fully God and who took on His humanness through Mary precisely as a consequence of the Divine Love for those in whom He dwells.

Relationships can begin without words and once begun can pass at times beyond words but communication is essential to any relationship and humans normally use words as an unavoidable part of that process. It therefore follows that to be mindful of the relationship which we have with our Lord and to help its growth and development we need to use words. But if our primary purpose is awareness of the truth of that Divine Presence we cannot achieve that by continually using our discursive mind to work out what to say next. Christian tradition suggests that during periods of contemplative prayer (which is to Christians what mindfulness is to Buddhists) we should use a small number of words frequently repeated. These are not magic formulae which will summon the Divinity or automatically raise our consciousness to new levels. They are ways of expressing essential truths about Him about whom we are becoming increasingly aware. The phrase or word which we use must, then, bring some facet of Him before the eyes of our heart. Every time we use a word or group of words in their train comes the associations which we personally have with those words. This may be an emotional memory or an event or an idea or some combination of these and other things beside. The more we focus on what we say the more associations come with it but even the least attention suffices to introduce these associations however slightly into our heart. And since we are sharing all those associations with our Lord He responds to us at a deep level and so adds new meaning and dimension to the words and associations, He creates in fact new associations. It is a fruitful process because each new encounter adds new associations and/or a deeper level of meaning to existing ones.

Much of the focus of #mindfulness in its business variety is on breathing and posture, in its Buddhist and Hindu original model it is additionally on a mantram. From a Christian point of view there is no harm in associating your prayer with your breathing or paying attention to your posture so long as you recall that these physical acts are strictly secondary considerations to what is primarily a spiritual relationship with God. If they help, thats fine. If they don't help, thats fine too. If sometimes they help and sometimes they don't well, guess what, that's absolutely fine as well. There is a Christian technique, hesychasm, associated with monks in the Orthodox tradition which firmly linked the Jesus Prayer with breathing and posture but never considered these as more than making someone more able to respond to the gifts of Grace which God sends and it is Grace which is the true motor of contemplation not this or that mechanical method.

So far so hypothetical. Of what would a period of Christian mindfulness/contemplation consist? I can only really speak to my own experience. I usually try to do this first thing in the morning (first thing means after ingesting caffeine nothing is possible before this.) I read from the Scriptures, always finishing with something from the Gospel. I then get myself into a comfortable position. I usually remain motionless but I'm not sure how helpful or otherwise that is, its just what I do. I make a bridge from everything else into contemplation usually by saying the Our Father. Then much depends upon the state of my psyche at the time of starting. Sometimes I am aware that I am in a good condition to concentrate well so I restrict myself to two words. I inhale silently saying 'Jesus' and exhale saying 'Mary' (I appreciate some Christians will be shocked at introducing Mary at this point but I will come to that later.) Sometimes if I am more scatter brained I will use a longer form of word such as 'gentle heart of Jesus, I trust in you.' I loosely associate that with my breathing but it really doesn't matter much whether I do or I don't. The benefit of the longer form is that it gives me more aspects to attract my attention too. When my mind wanders, as it often does, I find it easier to draw it back to a group of concepts, gentleness, the heart, Jesus, trust, than to only one or two. As an aside I never worry about my mind wandering, it is more distracting to get annoyed by distractions than it is to just accept that they are going to happen and just patiently re-directing your self back to the words as soon as you realise that you have been mulling over what to have for lunch instead of the gentle heart of Jesus.

There are a couple of physical things which I find to be genuinely helpful. One is not closing my eyes. Your level of consciousness alters depending on whether you are seeing or not seeing and it seems to me that you are more likely to go of into dreamy states which are pleasant but unproductive if you keep your eyes shut. Buddhist and Hindu techniques usually involve half open eyes more or less focussed on the tip of your nose. I find this unhelpful partly because I have a short nose and go cross-eyed trying this at home but more seriously because I am not seeking to look inward as such but to look towards the Lord who certainly inwardly present but is by no means confined to my internal environment. I find then that looking at an Icon while I pray is helpful both to keep bringing me back from wandering and to remind me that its really not all about me.It's not necessary to always use the same selection of words, God has an infinite variety of facets and we have a huge variety of moods and levels of awareness and so on. Using a few words from the Scripture we have just read or one that comes into our mind before we start praying might be good or selecting from the range of short prayers recommended by the Church or constructing one for ourselves that particularly speaks to our own relationship with God might all be suitable. What is important though is not to keep chopping and changing in the middle of a period of prayer because then it is your discursive mind which is dominant not your listening to our Lord. You are adding a conscious distraction to the involuntary ones which anyway assail you.

What has this to do with changing Identity? Well, it can happen in two ways one of which is potentially adaptable to people without faith as being a fruit of technique and one of which flows from the relationship of the lover with their Beloved. When talking about #mindfulness I mentioned the overspill effect of being able to concentrate on one thing. If you were to practice #contemplation then the overspill would relate to the content of your contemplative session. Holding in your mind for about 20 or 30 minutes a series of words or images with associations to them is not something that will remain confined to that part of the day. The more often you do it the more likely your mind is to revert to these words or images throughout the day. The longer you do it the more frequently this is likely to happen. I have held to this practice for some time and find myself reverting to my prayer words hundreds of times a day, when walking, when waiting for a bus, when eating. It doesn't need to be a prolonged thing, I can look up from a book to check the time and between looking up and looking down the words will have run through my mind. They can pop up while I am working or having a conversation without impinging on my ability to concentrate. Writing about the Jesus Prayer the author of The Way of a Pilgrim referred to this as self-acting and continuous prayer. I can't pretend that it is continuous in my case but it is certainly self-acting. Of course I choose to contemplate the objects of faith so by frequently calling into my mind my associations of Jesus (and Mary) I am invoking a set of values to do with love, kindness, gentleness, patience, humility and so on. This in turn has an immediate impact upon my behaviour, I cannot think of Jesus (or Mary) and yell at someone at the same time for example. And as my behaviour is modified many times a day so symbiotically my personality and self image change with it with a cumulative effect as the years go on. It would certainly be possible, of course, to substitute non-faith based words and concepts to contemplate and frequently recur to. The effect on your identity would depend upon the concepts you chose but that it would have an effect is fairly certain, as the Buddha pointed out, you become what you think.

From a Christian point of view this process is an auxiliary benefit. The aim is is not to become a what but to become a whom, you become whom you contemplate. As St Paul put it yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me (Galatians 2:20) and All of us, gazing with unveiled face on the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory (2 Corinthians 3:18) That is, we do not contemplate our Lord (just) because He is a really cool dude.  We enter into a relationship with Him that we might, by Grace, be transformed by Him or more accurately that we might be united to Him so that being one with Him His thoughts are our thoughts, His deeds our deeds, we identify with Him in such sort that our Identity becomes indistinguishable from His. God became Man by nature that Man might become God by participation. The more we are mindful of Him the more we ourselves have the mind of Christ Jesus (cf 1 Corinthians 2:16.)

Finally, a word about Mary, the mother of Jesus. One thing to bear in mind about contemplation, everybody is different. Some people just don't benefit from it at all. Some people find that they have no difficulty focussing on God as an abstract concept. Some find that contemplation comes most easily to them in relation to the Sacraments of the Church and will contemplate best in the presence of the Consecrated Host. Yet others find that the Jesus of the Gospels, the Jesus of the Passion is all that they desire. But that does not exhaust the possibilities. Many remember that our Saviour is also the Just Judge who will condemn unrepentant sinners on the last day. This can set up a barrier to contemplation if, like me, you have a good deal to fear from the Just Judge. Mary, however, is a perfect mirror of the Divine qualities which she has received as a gift from God. Justice and punishment are reserved to Himself but mercy, kindness, gentleness and the tenderness of a mother shine forth in our Lady. In contemplating her who in her turn uninterruptedly contemplates her Son we see those aspects of Him which will most encourage and strengthen us if we are weak. And so having recourse to Mary is the ladder that God extends to the most feeble and inadequate members of His flock of whom I am one. Indeed so keen is He to recruit to His Kingdom such folk He has even established a dedicated form of contemplation, the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin, through which Jesus can be viewed through the eyes of Mary. And for all the success of #mindfulness it is still the Rosary which is far and away the most popular form of meditation practised in the West, long may it remain so.        

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Love Me Too Little

" For my own part, I will gladly spend and be spent on your souls’ behalf, though you should love me too little for loving you too well. "
2 Corinthians 12:15

As I understand it the Catholic argument from Natural Law goes something like this. Each person has, as a given, a conscience, which is where the basic guide to right conduct and right living dwells within their mind and heart. Additionally each person is endowed with reason which enables them to approve the urgings of their consciences as being compatible with rational analysis of situations. Therefore when a person acts in accord with both conscience and reason then they will be living lives which are good, virtuous and productive of moderate levels of happiness. All of this can exist apart from divine revelation, which means that it is theoretically possible to live lives more or less pleasing to God without ever having heard about Jesus or His gospel. The Catholic Church does not hold to the notion that it is a necessary condition of the moral life to be a Christian.

As you might expect this argument is neither atheistic, the intervention of God is required at all points, nor without caveats. The conscience is only a given because God gives it, humans only possess reason because God has endowed them with it. To be willing to listen to one's conscience and then to have the strength to act upon it both require an active gift of the grace of God. Moreover, the wounding effects of Original Sin mean that we are easily tempted to ignore our conscience and pervert our reason in order to pursue a greedy, selfish or lustful agenda all of our own. Conscience Alone and Reason Alone or the two together apart from divine revelation are unreliable guides because they depend upon ourselves understanding them aright and we are unreliable judges in our own cases.

What revelation, especially that contained in the person of Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Mary, gives us is a reliable guide. A standard arrived at through the honest and sincere exercise of conscience and reason is a "good enough" standard. The standard derived from revelation exceeds that infinitely, it is a "good measure, pressed down and shaken up and running over" (Luke 6:38) and it is unfailingly reliable since based not upon ourselves but upon the perfect one.

The Apostle Paul expresses his willingness to spend himself in the service of the Corinthians without expecting much of anything in return. Many might see in this an admirable thing but would note that there is nothing particularly Christian about it. Mothers spend themselves recklessly on behalf of their children if the need arises. Revolutionaries risk everything in the service of a cause whose success they do not expect to see. Nurses and doctors will volunteer to put themselves at risk to being healing and comfort to those in dangerous situations or with highly contagious diseases. Is there anything uniquely Christian about this?

Well, only this, Paul is making himself vulnerable and spending himself on behalf of the souls not the bodies, emotions or feelings of the Corinthians. He is motivated by the desire to help the Christians of Corinth enter into a deep personal relationship with the unseen God in an as yet unexperienced eternity. The Church identifies three particular characteristics which it calls theological virtues, faith, hope and love, and the Apostle displays all three of them here. He is willing to spend himself for the Corinthians regardless of their feeling for him because he loves them. He has hope that, by the grace of God, he will succeed, in bringing himself and others into the kingdom of heaven, he has faith that the means which will bring this about, which he is spending himself in bringing to Corinth, are fully contained in the revelation of God through Jesus Christ.

In short, St Paul is staking everything upon his conviction that Christianity is true and he is doing so exclusively to benefit other people. Again it could be argued that other causes provoke similar types of conduct in other people. Which brings us to the characteristic part of the Apostle's fundamental motivation which is contained in the word 'gladly.' Some may sacrifice themselves grimly or determinedly. Some may do so gladly in the sense of 'freely and without hesitation.' When St Paul use the word he means 'with gladness' 'joyfully.' The sacrifice is not one whereby he gives up his happiness that others may be happy. It is a fundamental condition of his happiness that he act in this fashion and failing to so act is what will make him grim and gloomy. The more fully we resemble Christ then the more fully we enter in His joy. And since the summit and purpose of His mission was to be broken and abandoned on the Cross of Calvary in order to spend and be spent for the sake of sinners then when we do the same we are clothed with Him and He inhabits our hearts, illumining them with the light of eternal love. This is clearly a way of being glad which we can only recognise and desire as a result of revelation and grace. And it is too a higher, better and objectively superior way to anything that conscience and reason apart from revelation can offer.

No human creature ever entered more fully into the life of Christ and so expressed the theological virtues at their furthest limit than Mary, the Mother of God. Standing at the foot of His Cross her total love for Him caused her to feel every agony that He felt such that there were two sinless people crucified on Golgotha that day. But, as if that were not enough, there was more, her love for Jesus extended to those for whom He was dying, ie all of us, so that in love and for love she offered up her sufferings on that dreadful mountain to God as a superabundant sacrifice to be added to the treasuries of God's grace. Even in those dreadful moments of Passion and death for her Son she never lost her faith that the revelation to her from God through Gabriel would come true and that Jesus would yet reign on the throne of David nor her hope that she would be by His side in heaven and on earth. In this Mary is our great role model and if we feel, as we should feel, that we are far from successfully imitating her she is also our most sweet advocate who will entreat her Son on our behalf to send us the graces we require to be conformed to Him through being like her.

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