Dark Epiphany

                                         Elijah Fed by the Ravens- Jusepe de Ribera

How long, Lord? Will you utterly forget me?
    How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I carry sorrow in my soul,
    grief in my heart day after day?
Psalm 13:1-2

Want a New Years' Resolution ? Shed the pseudo-comfort of religion and grow into your own humanity.
Rational Minority ‏@MelaninAtheist  Dec 29

The Twelfth day of Christmas, January 6, has traditionally seen the Latin Church celebrate the visit of the Magi to the baby Jesus with His Mother and the Eastern Orthodox Church celebrate the Baptism of our Lord in the Jordan. Both celebrations are referred to as the Feast of the Epiphany because they represent moments of sudden understanding, a realisation that a manifestation of the power and wonder of God was somehow incarnate in the person of Mary's Son. For Orthodox and Catholic Christians such epiphanies are regularly recreated on a miniature scale through the Sacraments and above all through the Eucharist. Nonetheless for most hours out of the 24 the faithful have no such experiences. Conventional wisdom suggests that it is through serving our neighbours, above all the weak and vulnerable ones, or admiring the beauties of nature that we can most clearly perceive the presence of God hidden within that which surrounds us outside of the liturgies of the Church. So conventional indeed is the wisdom that I daresay you could find several thousand homilies, sermons, books, blogs or other media describing it. To this I have nothing to add, or indeed to subtract, the wisdom is a sound one.

There is another way of experiencing God however, a way which the Psalms often vividly express. this is the way of desolation, the experience of abandonment. That it is an authentic variety of religious experience we can see not only from the content of these ancient works themselves but also from the enduring way that generation after generation of believers, Christian and Jewish, have turned to them and made theme their own. If we assume that the @MelaninAtheist hypothesis is that the sole or dominant reason that people hold to a religious faith is because it offers them a form of comfort then this recurring desert experience of abandonment tends to disprove it. That most Christians most of the time experience desolation in their faith lives is not true but neither is it true that most of the time they experience comfort from it either. I would argue that all Christians are likely to feel that God has turned away from them at least some of the time and many of them feel it a great deal of the time.

If @MelaninAtheist is correct and the primary reason to cling to faith is that it gives a warm glow of falsely generated comfort then why continue to hold fast to it when it does no such thing? After all, in the West at least, the thought that God is not present to us because He doesn't exist will not be slow in obtruding itself into our thoughts. To persist in faith when its pulse is feeble, in hope when it seems vain and in loving that which does not respond is surely the opposite of being comforted. Of course, it might be argued that religion attracts masochists but it is a peculiar thing this Christian faith which attracts both the comfort-loving and the pain-loving at one and the same time with one and the same message.

The grim persistence of believers through the Dark Night of the Soul experience can I think be understood in light of the word 'abandonment.' It suggests that a prior relationship existed, that it was valued and nurturing but that it has now seemed to come to an abrupt end as the result of an arbitrary decision of the other party to it. The sense of misery and loss that the Christian feels is a product of the intensity of the relationship now apparently ended. But, it is not a simple bereavement for hope does not fully depart that at some point the relationship will resume and that any amount of suffering is worth enduring if only it will bring about that consummation. The perspective of  @MelaninAtheist is reversed for the person of faith will feel that it would be a pseudo-comfort to tell themselves 'there is no God' and that the affliction of God's absence is preferable to the fairy tale of God's non-existence.

                                             Elijah in the Desert by Washington Allston

What we might call the school of @MelaninAtheist might however be helpful in suggesting why it is that such periods of darkness are experienced by Christians. It is the 'imaginary friend' hypothesis, that is that God does not exist but believers create one to suit their image. This is half true, it is perfectly possible, indeed it is common, for people to believe in the One True God and yet to be idolaters at the same time. For the God they worship is not God as He is in Himself but a God largely of their own fantasy. The philosopher Simone Weil remarked Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. It is not simply in relation to faith that we are dominated by our imaginings but essentially all our relationships are clouded with what we think, but do not know, about others and what we think, but falsely, about ourselves and the same principle extends to our practical view of the world we inhabit. It is rare for reality, the thing in itself, to break through, mostly what the thing or person means to us is what we choose it to mean. Indeed, there is a school of philosophy which argues that there is no 'thing in itself' but that all meanings are subjective, that is, imaginary.

Professor Weil also remarked  Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass. The desert experience of Christians is a time of stripping away. What they have imagined about God is now seen to be false. What they have imagined about themselves, their courage, steadfastness, enthusiasm &c. is also seen to be false. The dark epiphany of the long night is the realisation that beyond imagination, almost beyond hope, the God who really is has never, in truth abandoned them, He has been present as Himself only and not as the believers fantasm of Him and He can only be perceived as such when the believer is present to herself as herself and not as her overblown self-image.

So Christians can make their own the New Year wish of @MelaninAtheist, believers should indeed shed the pseudo-comfort of their religion and grow into their full humanity through the purest of possible relationships between themselves and God the Father through Jesus Christ the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit.

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Advent and the Problem of Suffering

All that I was, is gone, the ambition, the happiness that was mine swept away like clouds before the storm; my heart is dead within me, a prey to long despairs
Book of Job 30:15-16

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death, or mourning, or cries of distress, no more sorrow; those old things have passed away.
Book of Revelation 21:4

Whatever the reality might be the popular image of the pre-Christmas season is that it is a time of happy bustling busy-ness finally crowned with a joyful day of celebration. It may then seems perverse to consider the problem of suffering in the context of this time of the year. Perhaps you will think it less so when I mention that I begin to write this on the 16th anniversary of my mother's sudden and unexpected death on 7 December 1998. Indeed it has been my experience both personal and professional (as a registered nurse) that for a good many people the month of December is associated with either the vivid presence of actual suffering or with memories of it still laden with the power to cause deep pain.

To the extent that Christmas is a secular festival charged with no higher moral purpose than to be a cause of universal jolliness and over-consumption then the mere mention of death, pain, affliction and torment can be seen as a crime against the season. The subliminal message is 'don't rain on our parade, keep your sorrows to yourself.' This can poison Advent and Christmastide for many who feel obliged to hide what they cannot comfortably share. As my father remarked some years after our joint bereavement 'The magic has gone from Christmas now.'

Fortunately the Feast of the Nativity of the Lord is not simply a secular festival and Advent is more than a shopping and partying season. The Church sets aside a time for us to prepare to welcome Jesus. And we can give over a part of this time to considering why it is that we need Him, which of His gifts to us should most fill us with gratitude. As part of the seemingly endless Culture Wars in the USA the slogan 'remember the reason for the season' has gained some traction. To the extent that this is simply a political blunt instrument for political conservatives to hit political liberals over the head with its use is regrettable. To the extent that it reminds people that trying to consider Christmas apart from Jesus doesn't really make much sense it is useful. Nonetheless on both counts it misses a valuable point. Sin, death and suffering are the reasons for the season. Jesus came into the world to combat and defeat these enemies of ours, He is a warrior and a healer because we are wounded and under attack from without and within.

During Advent we can identify our wounds and prepare to present them to our Lord that they may be healed or, since their is no permanent healing in this life, at least bound up. It is always useful when asking for gift to ask ourselves why we want or need it. It is no sin to want a new toy or a little taste of luxury or something beautiful but impractical. The innocent  little pleasures of life in moderation are part of the gift of life itself and God Himself gives of them freely filling the world with unnecessary beauty. But it is in an enduring relationship with the giver of the gifts that we are most enriched whether that giver be a parent, a child, a sibling, a friend, a valued colleague or the Creator of all that is.

There is much truth in the cliché that the mission of the Church is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The temptation which she faces is to overemphasise the first at the expense of the second. A corporate body perceived to be primarily engaged in the business of benevolently consoling the suffering and vulnerable is not apt to become so estranged from the world that it becomes the object of persecution and produce its crop of martyrs. A comforting Church can become a comfortable Church and thus herself in need of being afflicted by prophetic voices which call her back to the task of denouncing the individual, collective and structural sinfulness of the world. The key note for her must be one of balance. She, and we, should recall that very often the comfortable and the suffering are not different groups of people but that both states can exist within the same person. The wife and mother who rejoices in her family may still carry within her the scars of childhood abuse. The father who lights up a room with his ready smile may never forget the brutal torture that forced him to flee his native land.

The theme of balance too applies to those of us who suffer. To endlessly chew over and rehearse in our imagination the same little list of sorrows affords us no benefit, to try to repress and suppress memories of pain does us real harm. Advent and the Christian life in general affords us the opportunity to recall our afflictions in the context of the coming of the one who is our healer. They no longer remain our private property but a become a fully shared experience since the Jesus who was born in poverty and died, abandoned, on a Cross enters into all our anguishes and casts the light of hope upon them. Our hunger will not be assuaged by a six-course Christmas dinner but it will be by the coming into our life of God's Son, Mary's Son, Jesus our Saviour.

We are beset by dangers on every side and for Christians who do constantly recall both their sufferings and their Lord there is a special one. It is a feeling that if they still experience pain, if they are still afflicted then it means that somehow they are not good enough Christians, that if only their faith was deeper the pain would go away. Well, Jesus was a good enough Christian and His pain only ended with death. The Book of Job with which I began this post tells of a man who was so righteous that even God Himself praised Him. Yet Job suffered for reasons neither he nor we can fully understand. Stuff happens. The healing which Jesus brings is real healing but it is not always one that we can fully understand or appreciate in this life and may well leave a residue of physical or emotional affliction that never departs from us. That is not a failure of faith, or a failure of God for that matter, it is a truth which we cannot yet understand but which one day we hope that we shall.

Another thing worth recalling about Job is And cruelly he smote Job; smote him with the foul scab from head to foot,  so that he was fain to sit him down on the dung-hill, and scratch himself with a shard where he itched. (Job 2:7-8)  Job endured what he had to endure but also employed a shard to help deal with the sufferings he was experiencing. So too we should make use of whatever tools are at hand to help us in our need: medicines, therapies, doctors, nurses, counselling, whatever. It is wise to find a way through Christ, with Christ and in Christ to endure what must be endured. It is foolish to endure what we can honourably avoid unless we choose to do so as a voluntary sacrifice.

Don't forget to read my Christmas fable Adoration of the Pangolins for free on Wattpad.

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Christian Meditation- Part Three

When I go into my house, I shall repose myself with her: for her conversation hath no bitterness, nor her company any tediousness, but joy and gladness.
Book of Wisdom 8:16

I also have had empty months, and have numbered to myself wearisome nights. If I lie down to sleep, I shall say: When shall arise? and again I shall look for the evening, and shall be filled with sorrows even till darkness.

Job 7

In Part One and Part Two we looked at going into our heart-house, reposing with Wisdom and entering into conversation with her. Here we look at the two things specifically excluded from the conversation, bitterness and tediousness. Why is it important to look at what is absent? Well, in a sense, these two things are unknown to Wisdom since she has no experience of them herself. They are, however, known to and by us. Since it is a conversation and not a monologue we must leave these things behind  if we would converse with her. That is, meditation is a process which changes us. Wisdom does not come to resemble us we come to resemble her. Therefore the roots of bitterness and tediousness within ourselves must be removed or at least rendered harmless if we would grow close to this most welcome of guests in our heart.

It seems to me that the two principle sources of bitterness are sin and death. It is no coincidence that the further the West has distanced itself from Christianity the more it has repudiated the notion of personal sin and sought to put death out of sight and mind as much as possible. It might, in polite circles, be borderline acceptable to suggest that we experience bitterness because others have sinned against us but not because we ourselves have sinned. The reverse, however, is true. The sins of other people may cause us to suffer, to suffer terribly, but suffering is not bitterness. If the experience of suffering alone caused bitterness then all sufferers would be bitter but not all are. Bitterness is a fruit of sin Thy ways, and thy devices have brought these things upon thee: this is thy wickedness, because it is bitter, because it hath touched thy heart. (Jeremiah 4)  

In the UK at least it has always struck me as a complete waste of time for street evangelists to shout out invitations to passers by to repent of their sins. Mostly because these passers by for the most part only have a vague idea of what it is they are being invited to repent of. We need to understand what this thing is before we can escape from its grasp. Christianity holds that the purpose of our individual existence is to love. Love is not a solitary pursuit, it needs to have an object. Nor is it an abstract notion, it requires to be expressed. We are called upon to love God with all our strength and to love our neighbour as ourself, these are our objects. Love as an active force in the world takes the form of service and self sacrifice, that is its expression. Sin consists of a radical refusal to feel that love or to express it. It is a form of selfishness that sees self-gratification as the primary motivation for any action. As an aside I should say that atheism is not necessarily a sin as such. If one seeks for God honestly and sincerely but cannot discern Him that is not a refusal of love it is a search for it. If, however, atheism comes from a refusal to search born out of a fear of what might be found then it is a sin.

It is a curious thing that the more one dedicates one's life to self-gratification the more bitter and alienated one is likely to become. This is because we are designed better than that and we are acting contrary to our design specifications whenever we sin. Those things which we gratify are our bodies or our emotional whims. They are only parts of ourselves. Yet to be happy we must satisfy the whole of ourselves, mind and body, spirit and soul, and only a life lived in conformity to our true nature can achieve this. It is also important to remember that why we do what we do is as important as what we do. It is common enough for people who live lives of service to feel at least as bitter as those who are self indulgent (hence the Daily Mail) but that is because they resent serving. They do what they do for any number of reasons but not primarily out of a freely given love which neither asks for nor desires anything in return.

What has this to do with meditation? Wisdom whom you encounter is a servant, her service is love. To understand her you too must be a servant. In meditation you bring the whole of yourself, you cannot pose as a loving servant for twenty minutes a day and learn the secrets of Wisdom as if she were fooled by your pose. The further you are from sin the closer you are to God because the more you resemble Him. And the more you resemble Him the more intimately you can be joined with Him.

Another potent source of bitterness is death. Considered as a finality death robs us of those we love and brings to an end all our own hopes and dreams. It gives a futility to all that we do. All things must pass away so time spent doing anything other than eating, drinking and making merry is time wasted. Why sow for another to reap? Why build for another to tear down? Actually, death as such need not have such an impact. Even many people who have little or no belief in an afterlife do not find it a bitter thought that they will die. They invest their hopes for the future in their children or their community or their country or an ideal society which they devote their lives to creating. That is, they serve, out of love, and so rob death of its bitterness. It is only sin which gives death its sting. If self-gratification is everything then death is the end of everything and constitutes nothing but loss. In meditation it is no bad thing to remember that our time is limited and that we would do well to make the most of it. It is an introducing of bitterness into a conversation where it has no part if we seek Wisdom because we wish to avoid death.

The chances are that if you have read my blog thus far then you already have a pretty good idea of what tediousness is. There goes ten minutes of your life that you'll never get back again. And that is the essence of it. Tediousness is a function of time. Any experience unduly prolonged becomes tedious. This applies to meditation considered as an exercise. It does not apply to our dialogue with Wisdom because this is a leaving behind of time and an entering into eternity where Wisdom dwells. In Part Two I referred, by way of a couple of hobbits, to 'living on the heights'. These are the heights which I had in mind. The period of time you set aside for meditation may be twenty or forty or sixty minutes or whatever. Some of that will be 'warming up' and some will be 'warming down', perhaps all of it will be, but at some point the grace of God may reach out and draw you into a dialogue with Himself. That may be for only a moment or maybe for much longer but time ceases to be relevant during that experience because you have left it behind, you have no consciousness of it and little awareness of much else either. There is no tediousness in eternity.

There is a common experience in Christian meditation called the "Dark Night of the Soul." Tediousness is the common lot of our species but the meditator can divide her experience of it into "before the divine encounter" and "after the divine encounter" phases. That before needs little describing, we all know what it is. That after is indescribably dreary and dark and dry. It feels like a desert without end. There can be days, or weeks or years when we enter into our heart-home and repose ourselves and wait for our hidden guest, Wisdom, to appear and she chooses to make absence her mode of being with us. It would seem that our last state is worse than our first. But it is not so. Our encounters have taught us to know Him better and to love Him more, we are assured of His love for us, we have solid memories of all that we have experienced with Him. Deprivation of the light touch of His presence in the form of Wisdom is a period in which we realise that all that we desire is Him and comes from Him alone. Our encounters were not the result of our skill in the techniques of meditation or a reward for our virtues. They were pure gift, wholly unearned by us. The Dark Night is the season where our root of bitterness is burnt out tediously to prepare us for that which Wisdom will give us in her own time, and that unreservedly. In the meantime all we can do is wait and all we have to sustain us are faith, hope and love.

In Part Four I hope to look at joy and gladness.

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Season to be jolly?

In a secular NHS can a Christian nurse, without proselytising, deliver something unique to her or his patients over the Christmas season? At first sight the answer to that would seem to be a clear No. There are no uniquely Christian virtues, anything a bad Christian can do a good Atheist/Jew/Muslim could do better. And even if such virtues did exist they would be for life and not just for Christmas. A virtue only spanning twelve days of the year would be a curious thing indeed.

To answer the question we need to start, as we always should, with the patient and what they need and can rightfully expect from those caring for them. As Christmas approaches the loved ones of patients and NHS staff at all levels make detailed and sometimes quite heroic plans to ensure that people can spend all or part of the big day where they want to be, at home or with those dear to them outside of a clinical setting. Left behind are the very sick, those with unmanageable symptoms, such as nausea or pain, the dying, the very poor who are better off in hospital, those whose nearest and dearest are nearly as frail as themselves and those with no one nearby who cares enough to take them out. The last two categories, in my experience over the last quarter of a century or so, has grown noticeably. It used to be the case often that nurses outnumbered patients on Christmas day. No more.

And here the category difference between those who celebrate "the big day" as a time of family, friends, giving, receiving and jollity and those who mark the birth of the Christ child comes into effect. Christians are not averse to all these convivial things, far from it, but for us the "big day" is Easter. Christmas is the necessary prelude to Passion Week. The shadow of the Cross always lies across the crib. The insight that suffering and death is intrinsic to life is not unique to Christianity, Buddhism has it at least as fully. What Christianity uniquely brings to the feast is that not only is there an inevitable shadow but that it is this very thing which is the sign of hope, of resurrection from affliction. Christians are Easter people and Alleluia is our song, as St Augustine put it.

The philosopher Simone Weil made a distinction between affliction and suffering In the realm of suffering, affliction is something apart, specific, and irreducible. It is quite a different thing from simple suffering. It takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark Those who remain in hospital or hospice on 25 December are almost inevitably bearers of this mark.Be it pain Affliction is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death, made irresistibly present to the soul by the attack or immediate apprehension of physical pain. other symptoms or persistent and inescapable loneliness and the spiritual desolation which it bears. Affliction is a state which only the afflicted inhabits. Not even the most empathetic nurse or carer, not even one marked by affliction themselves, can enter into an individuals own Golgotha. They are in the valley of the shadow of death even, perhaps especially, when they can expect to live for many more years yet.

To the task of caring for such people in the Christmas season nurses bring as many different skills as there are different nurses. The season can be a burden for those who have an expectation that it is a season to be jolly, to be with loved ones, to be happy the livelong day. Expectations which they are unable to meet in any single respect. Christian nurses do not have any special gifts aof sympathy or sensitivity that others do not. At this time of the year though what we can bring, as Easter people is the sense that the outward and visible signs of the celebrating world mask more than they reveal of the Christmas message. One does not fail to mark Christmas rightly if jolliness is beyond our grasp. Christmas, indeed, is one test that no one can fail. In practical terms that means not, as a nurse, feeling the need to console a patient for "missing out". It is a case, perhaps, where doing less can achieve more.

Or, to say the same thing in seventeen syllables-
http://catholicscot.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-real-meaning-of-christmas-haiku.html

Valley of death. Grim
Shadow. Skulking dog in gloom.
Sunlight shaft piercing.