Prayer and Failure

How should I pray? What does it mean to pray? And who is this God who I pray to? In taking up a practice of meditation, I’ve come to a certain understanding of prayer. It does not have to do with holding anything intensely in thought or trying to say the right words in a prayer. Instead, it can only be described as a movement towards trust, while at the same time a reminder of how difficult it is to trust a God who we follow into an unknown and difficult future over which we have such little control.

The practice of meditation which I have adopted is largely influenced by John Main, a Catholic priest who founded a Christian community in Quebec. This meditation is very simple. It involves sitting upright, ensuring a relatively straight spine. The whole of the meditation then consists of repeating a mantra, attempting to do so over and over again through the whole period of meditation. Common mantras are “maranatha” or “shalom”. Father John suggests between 20 minutes and half an hour set aside for meditation.

The goal of the mantra is to empty our minds for the awareness and presence of God to emerge from within. But this is not a forceful or violent forcing of our regular thoughts out of our overly-active minds. It is rather gentle, trusting, and patient. And this is how it becomes prayer: when thoughts arise, as they inevitably do, in the midst of our meditation, we simply imagine our repeated mantra as “touching” or gentling “pushing” those thoughts. So often when we sit in silence those things about which we are anxious or afraid come swimming to the surface. We begin thinking about our own flaws, about people who frustrate us, about those things in our lives which deserve attention like world disasters, human conflict, and all sorts of things. But by “touching” those thoughts with the mantra, we then create the space for God, for love, for peace to overcome such thoughts. Whatever our thoughts, be they joyful, shameful, angry, or even peaceful, we set them in the context of the love of God. But we let them all go, even those positive feels of peace and love, because so quickly anything can become an idol, especially God’s good gifts. By letting it all go in the repetition of our mantra we move further and further towards trust in God, a God who we don’t know, but a God in whom we trust. Just as the psalmist says in psalm 73: ^“25 Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. ²⁶ My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”

In fact, we even let go of our own ideas of God as love and our hope for peace and love to emerge in meditation. It all must be relinquished in the name of trust, trust which is the only way into the fullness of life which we witness in the life of Jesus. Of course, the goal is not to eliminate one’s self, but to really let one’s true self emerge, to let God emerge, and which both emerge, in fact, simultaneously. And the beauty of this is found in that we are supposed to let it all go in meditation; even our frustration at ourselves when we can’t let our thoughts, anxieties and worries go! It is all a movement of gentleness and love, even in the inevitable failure that even the most practiced and holy meditators undergo.

Jesus himself, in the garden of Gethsemane, failed to fully keep every anxious thought from him; he was just as terrified and scared of death as anyone. But that failure to empty himself did not become cause for anger and frustration at himself, but instead became just another opportunity for trust. And so Jesus, through failure to fully trust God, used that very failure as the ideal place to trust God, the very place in which he was able to truly empty himself and allow the union of God and human to make its full manifestation.

So we need not let our failures or discouragements in meditation, or even in life, be cause for absolute despair and anger with ourselves. By following Jesus we can see failure as the very place in which we have the opportunity for the union of God and self to take place. This, I think, is the beauty of prayer and the beauty of failure.  

A Friday Evening Reflection, given in Iona Abbey

1 John 2:28-3:3

I have spent these past seven weeks as a volunteer with the Iona community, most of my time spent in the kitchen preparing food for the community guests. The whole experience of working, attending worship services, making real friends, reading spiritual writers, and soaking in the beauty of the Island itself has left me changed in encouraging and challenging ways. I hope to briefly share my experience of God here on Iona.

The passage from 1^st John which we just heard captures the truth that I have continually heard, often shared, but here on Iona have experienced in a deeply real way. This is the message: “We are children of God. And that’s only the beginning. Who knows how we’ll end up! We’ll see Christ and become like him”. The unity of human and divine that took place in Jesus of Nazareth is opened up to each one of us. Every part of creation, every atom and molecule that makes up our bodies and the world in which we live, every thing that exists is charged with the grandeur of God. Everything is, in its deepest self, identifiable or maybe even identical with God, just as Jesus recognized and fully, completely, and wholly embraced. I want to read now a short passage from a book that I’ve read here in the past weeks, Immortal Diamond, by Richard Rohr.

"Jesus full accepted and enjoyed his divine-human status. “I and the Father are one,”, he said, which was shocking to his Jewish contemporaries, for he looked just like them, and apparently they did not like themselves. No wonder they called it blasphemy and picked up stones to kill him. You do know, I hope, that it is formally wrong for Christians to simply say, “Jesus is God.” It misses the major point and goal of the whole incarnation. Jesus does not equal God per se, which is for us the Trinity. Jesus, much better and more correctly, is the union between God and the human. That is a third something- which in fact we are invited to share in. Once we made Jesus only divine, we ended up being only human, and the whole process of human transformation ground to a half.

When we tried to understand Jesus outside the dynamism of the Trinity, we did not to him or ourselves any favour. Jesus never knew himself or operated as an independent “I” but only as a thou in relationship to his Father through the Holy Spirit, which he says in a hundred different ways. The “Father” and the “Holy Spirit” are a relationship to Jesus. God is a verb more than a noun. God is love, which means relationship itself.

Christianity lost its natural movement and momentum- out from that relationship and back into that relationship- when it pulled Jesus out of the Trinity. It killed what is the exciting inner experience and marginalized the mystics who really should be center stage. Jesus is the model and metaphor for all of creation that is all being drawn into this flow of love, and thus he always says, “Follow me!” and, “I shall return to take you with me, so that where I am, you may be also”. The concrete, historical body of Jesus represents the universal Body of Christ that “God has loved before the foundation of the world. He is the stand-in for all of us. The Jesus story in the universe story, in other words. His union with God that Jesus never doubts, he hands to us- to never doubt. Quite simply, this is what it means to ‘believe’ in Jesus.

The spiritual wisdom of divine-human union is first beautifully expressed in writing in the Vedas (the oldest source of humanism, around three thousand years old). The phrase in Sanskrit is Tat Tvam Asi, which is a though so condensed that I am going to list all likely translations.

-          YOU are That!

-          You ARE what you seek!

-          THOU art that!

-          THAT you are!

-          YOU are IT!

The meaning of this saying is that the True Self, in its original, pure, primordial sate, is wholly or partially identifiable or even identical with God, the Ultimate Reality that is the ground and origin of all phenomena. That which you long for, you also are. In fact, that is where the longing comes from.

Longing for God and longing for our True Self are the same longing. And the mystics would say that it is God who is even doing the longing in us and through us through the divine indwelling of the Holy Spirit. God implanted a natural affinity and allurement between God’s self and all of God’s creatures, all of God’s creation."

Everything that I have just read from the wisdom of Father Richard has become more and more evident to me here on Iona. God is so close to the world, so inseparably united with the true self of every created thing. And as humans we have the ultimate gift of perceiving and experiencing such truth!

The truth of triune love at the centre of all created things is the most real, the most radically real truth in the universe because it is the circumference, centre, and enabling energy of the universe itself. And nothing can shake or move it. The divine core is invincible, the peace and love of the trinity is unsurpassable. Even in the face of anything: even personal sin that we can’t escape, or huge wars which rage and costs millions of lives, or painful shame and guilt in our pasts, or the hurt that comes from broken relationships, or even the fact that we experience that God will one day die and be buried and our bodies disintegrate into the earth, all of that can do nothing; it is an insignificant blip in the face of the divine love which calls us children and makes us like Christ.

I’m know failing to articulate this properly or fully due both to my own limitations of expression and all the inexpressibility of what I am trying to express, but my experience of God on this island runs deeper than any language, and I am ok with that. I have encountered God around me, beside me, and within me, despite the many possible things that would prevent such an encounter. This encounter with God is not something that I discovered or earned so much as realized and accepted as always and already around me and within me. And so I look forward to my life, and your lives, and the life of this world in hope, the hope that, as John says, “when Christ is openly revealed we shall see him- and in seeing him, become like him”.

This, I have come to believe and trust, is the entire source of our outward action of love and justice in the world. The world, it seems, and all of us, have forgotten our deep and true self, united eternally with triune love. In all our actions we will bring life if we remind the world and ourselves of the eternal goodness which is always within us, even when the whole world or our very self seems unredeemable. What can never be lost in the world or in us is the triune love of God experienced by and perfectly exemplified by Jesus, a love which erupted in the resurrection and even now is bringing us all from the depths of death to the resurrection of new, exhilarating, and everlasting life.

You are now invited to come forward to light a candle to symbolize the eternal flame, the beautiful true centre of triune love within you, within others, and within the entire universe, sustaining and perfecting us as we are invited deeper and deeper into the Christ-like mysterious union of human and divine. As we do so you are invited to sing along quietly with the Alleluia which we learned, praising God who is not only far beyond us, but also God who is deep within us and God who, in an infinitely beautifully mystery, by grace is united with us. 

Farewell to Iona

My time volunteering at, exploring, and experiencing Iona concluded last Wednesday, Sept. 4. It's been almost a month since I posted last in this blog, so this will certainly be an admittedly poor summary of my final weeks on Iona.

The friendships which developed over the course of my seven weeks with the Iona community took on a unpredicted fullness and depth as my time remaining on Iona dwindled. Due to the fact that relationships on Iona come and go within such a short span of time (volunteering for two or three months is really not very long!), I think that our community refused to take any time spent together for granted. However, it was not a case of needing to charge every moment as full of meaning, significance, or fun as possible (something of which I am certainly guilty in much of my life). Instead, the small group of staff members at Iona simply embraced the time and the relationships which we given, neither taking them for granted nor expecting too much out of them. It was a beautiful and simple experienced of simply allowing the moment, the community, and place to be and for us as a community and as individuals to receive the gift of our all-too-brief time together in a beautiful, deeply spiritual place.

On my last Friday with the community I had the chance to lead the evening service. It was a time where I was able to share what I had learned on Iona, particularly through the inspiration of Richard Rohr's wonderful book "Immortal Diamond". Some fascinating insights emerged, and I will include the short reflection I gave in another blog post. In summary, though, Iona revealed to me, through nature, worship, community, and myself, that God is so close to the world. In fact, our deepest selves, when all of our selfish or fearful motivations are stripped away, are so tightly interwoven with the sacred union of divine and human. This is what Jesus was able to fully recognize and fully embrace, enabling him by the Holy Spirit to live with perfect love, wisdom, and justice. And this is what is available to us too! And that is the only way we will be able to give the love that we long to give.

Iona will, I am sure, continue to affect and challenge me. I'm now in Toronto, getting into my first week of classes at The Institute for Christian Studies, and I hope to continue to reflect on what Iona has revealed and continues to reveal to me about myself, the world, and how God is so close to all creation. I don't know how else to put it, at least for now. God is so close. So close. Not identical with. But nothing can separate God from creation either.

I think that spiritual insights will enjoy being prodded by the philosophy and theology which I'm about to dive into here at ICS. I hope to continue this blog and explore those connections. I'll post my final Iona reflection for anyone to read who is interested; let me know what you think.

I'll close this blog with an Iona blessing.

May God, who is present

in sunrise and nightfall,

and in the crossing of the sea,

guide your feet as you go.

May God,

who is with you when you sit

and when you stand,

encompass you with love

and lead you by the hand.

May God, who knows your path

and the places where you rest,

be with you in your waiting

be your good news for sharing,

and lead you in the way

that is everlasting.

- A blessing from Iona

...and heal you of all that harms you.

Well, it has been a very full few weeks of preparing food, personal insights, continuing to develop friendships, and sadly saying goodbye to a number of those friends who have finished their time on Iona. My past few weeks have developed a regular structure as I have been placed full time on the kitchen staff with a steady schedule. Sometimes I have to wake up at 7 am to do the morning shift (making porridge, making bread for the day, preparing various vegetables for our lunch-time soups and evening meals) but most often I begin at 9 30, work until 2 30, and then return to the kitchen at 5 to heat up the evening meal and wash up afterwards.

Every Tuesday night we hold a service of prayers for healing in the Abbey Church, and this past Tuesday I was blessed to participate as a reader, reading out names of those people and situations for which prayer is requested, and also in the liturgical practice of laying hands on those who sought healing for themselves, for others, or for the world. The prayer which we say the same every week and for every person, while they kneel and we place our hands upon their head, is as follows: “Spirit of the living God, present with us now, enter you, body, mind, and spirit, and heal you of all that harms you. In Jesus name, Amen.” It is powerful in its simplicity which, despite that simplicity, leaves no part of a person untouched; we pray for the whole person, for their mental, physical, and spiritual healing. Also, I find it profound and also an act of great trust that the healing itself is not given specific content; there is nothing but the appeal to the living spirit of God to heal of all that harms, which indicates that though we know we need healing, we are not always sure what it is in us that needs to be healed. It is an important act of trust, then, to say in the prayer that we leave whatever sort of healing takes place in the hands of God, trusting that God offers to us what we need and withholds what we do not.

I experienced what I believe to be genuine meaning as I laid my hands on the heads of dozens of people and said in unison with the whole congregation present the prayer of healing mentioned above. As I reflect now, I think that this ministry of healing also took on great significance because of some reading and listening I have been doing to an influential spiritual writer, Richard Rohr. I have been particularly taken by his emphasis on a created goodness and “True Self” within each and every person, and this means a lot, I think, for spiritual and mental illness, especially when we are disgusted, repulsed, or furious with ourselves. 

“You,” Richard says, “and every other created thing begins with a divine DNA, and inner destiny as It were, an absolute core that knows the truth about you, a blueprint tucked away in the cellar of your being, and imago Dei that begs to be allowed, to be fulfilled, and to show itself. As it says in Romans (5:5), ‘It is the Holy Spirit poured into your heart, and it has been given to you”. 

This is such an enormous hope as so many of us seek mental health and spiritual wholeness because the healing that we stand in need of in not something we have to look for, not the right book (which is part of my poor motivation to reading Richard), not the right doctrine, not the right experience. It is, in fact, right within us in our very embodied and created goodness. And this is the case, I have chosen to trust, even when I am emotionally unstable, judgemental of myself and others, eager to find fault in the world, and somehow resistant to seeing things from any perspective other than depression. We are never separate from the love of God because it is planted so deeply within us. In fact, it’s so deep that we are tempted to miss it or forget about it, kind of like how we take air and breathing for granted; an absolutely necessary sustaining force that we would die without but we so rarely think about. And our True Self, the inner silence, the imago Dei, the peace that surpasses all understanding- it is always within, even in the darkest places of despair.

I have experienced it to be hard (almost impossible) to continue to trust in that darkness. But the healing that I have begun to experience is both completely my choice and free will, since it is within me that God has planted my true self, but also completely not my choice because it is God who has planted himself and my true self and not me at all. I might have to think of another way to say that, but that’s my best shot for now.

So my prayer for you now is that the spirit of the living God, present with us now, enters you, body, mind, and spirit, and heals you of all that harms you. In Jesus name, Amen. 

Guilt, joy, and other thoughts

On Tuesday I will have been on Iona for three weeks total, almost half my time here! It’s amazing how quickly the time has gone. The past two weeks have been full of working in various places in my new job as a general assistant. The Iona community has two main centres on the Island, the Abbey and the MacLeod centre, both of which need lots of help in their kitchens and with housekeeping (cleaning and laundry mostly). As a general assistant I float between the two centres, giving help where it’s needed. However, the MacLeod centre kitchen has recently lost both its head cook and a volunteer, so I will be a full time volunteer at the MacLeod centre kitchen for at least the next two weeks.

As volunteers, we work 7 ½ hours per day, with one full day and one half day off per week. When I’m not at work I spend a lot of time reading, wandering around the island, going to the daily worship services (morning and evening), and hanging out with the other volunteers. I was slightly frustrated for a number of weeks with what I perceived to be a lack of spiritual and intellectual stimulation. The community is very busy and very fast paced, always focussing another task to be done and always caring for the weekly guests who arrive on Saturday evening and stay till Friday morning. But I’ve realized in the last few days that I was setting an inner standard and expectation of what “meaningful” relationships will look like, so I continue to try and release my own needs and simply receive what God has given through the people and structure which is set in place.

That doesn’t mean that I still don’t long for silence and solitude (which are often hard to find in this community)! I thoroughly enjoy reading in the abbey atmosphere, particularly in the abbey library, which is often a quiet and stress-free place. I’m currently reading the 4^th book in Ursula K LeGuin’s series of fantasy books, The EarthSea Cycle, and also a book entitled “How (not) to speak of God” by an Irish theologian named Peter Rollins. LeGuin paints pictures of beautiful and harsh landscapes in her writing which I often see reflected in these western Scottish isles; Rollins’ book is about Christian belief in response to the skepticism and suspicion of postmodernism, which is particularly enjoyable to read in an ancient abbey which has long been a centre of deep spiritual and theological reflection.

A volunteer in our community recently pointed out at our volunteer meeting that though the Iona community actively speaks and promotes creation care there are still hundreds of people each year to travel from all corners of the globe to visit Iona, all the while releasing tonnes and tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere due to the nature of plane travel. Nothing is really said or mentioned about the distance between the community’s spoken beliefs and what the community actually practices. This volunteer, Jason, thus proposed that we as volunteers draft a letter to the leader of the Iona community, suggesting that as part of the fee which guests are charged Iona should include a carbon-footprint fee, the proceeds of which would be donated to a climate-change organization. Depending on how far one travels to Iona, this fee would change. I think that this is a brilliant idea and I look forward to reading, supporting, and signing such a letter with such a proposal. This is a great example of the thoughtfulness which is possible to find within the volunteer community here.

It has also got me thinking about the importance of this place, Iona, which the community founder George MacLeod described as “A thin place, with only a tissue paper separating the spiritual from the material”. Do I really have to travel to Iona, costing thousands of dollars and tonnes of carbon dioxide, in order to experience the thinness of a place? It’s not a simple question and I don’t think any answer, simple or not, is readily available. But I want to try to hold my guilt and joy in proper tension, not allowing one primacy over the other. It’s important that I reflect on the cost of my trip, both to my back account and to the earth. It’s equally (though not more important) to reflect on the relationships I’m developing, the beauty of this location, and the spiritual history which leaks out of the abbey walls.  I will continue to trust and hope that God will be revealed in truthful ways, both in my guilt, which motivates me to love people and creation, and in my joy, which I experience as I walk around the abbey cloisters late at night in prayer and meditation.

My heart explodes with more to say and explore, but my books are calling me to receive what they are exploring and exploding with.

The peace of Christ,

Ethan 

One week

Well, I have now been in Scotland for precisely one week, and by the time Tuesday evening comes around my time on Iona will also be one week. What have I experienced so far? What challenges or gifts have I received from God in this thin place?

This first week has been filled with newness for me. Getting used to the rhythms and patterns of a new community can take some time and adjustment and that has certainly been the case for me. In fact, that process of adjustment has led to an interesting turn of events which I’ll try to describe here briefly. I came to Iona intended to be the Music volunteer, that is, the assistant to the full-time, resident musician here at the Abby. This position has far less structure than other position like house-keeping or kitchen staff, and so I spent my first five days trying to figure out exactly what it is I should do. The resident musician is a former professional double-bass player for various orchestras and so his technical musical ability far surpasses mine! I began to realize that the music team of the resident musician and his assistant were basically in charge of only receiving music requests for services and playing them, often hymns and songs which are unfamiliar or even completely unknown. Since there are two services every day, the volume of music which they go through is very high.

Anyway, I realized that I did not feel comfortable or able to participate in the music production at such a level. It was a great blessing, then, to become good friends with a girl who is a music student herself and was very keen to take on a role which I’ve described above. After some thoughtful conversations with her and several staff members, we have now officially switched positions! I am now a General Assistant which has the benefit of do a variety of jobs in a variety of places, though generally house-keeping and kitchen work. I’ll also still be involved in the music, but now it will be at a level which I am comfortable with.

Last night, in fact, I was able to lead a Taize service in the Abby Church with a new friend I’ve made. She is from Germany and plays the violin, and so we shared a beautiful experience of leading contemplative, slow, and reflective worship in a beautifully ancient and holy space. I was thoroughly blessed to be able to lead such a service and I look forward to being involved in music like that, which is a much less rigorous capacity than the official music assistant.

Iona, I have been discovering, is a place which seeks to chart a path between fundamentalist traditionalism and ungrounded postmodernism. There are people from so many walks of life who find a safe community here in which to seek God, to seek faith, to understand the meaning of their lives. The ability to accept those who are seeking and unsure of where their true identity lies while also remaining firmly grounded in the life-giving tradition of Biblical gospel is a real gift of the Iona community.

So what am I discovering then? I’m not sure quite yet. It’s been a week of too much transition and jet-lag and I haven’t had quite the time to reflect or pray with intention. But I am deeply thankful to God for providing me another position here with which I feel much more comfortable and I am also thankful for all the interesting and God-pursuing people who I have encountered here thus far.

God’s peace to you all,

Ethan 

Beginning a new journey

It has been quite a process to arrive here in Glasgow, Scotland, and I’m not even arrived at my final destination yet! Visa troubles, saying goodbye to friends, changing flights, attending (and missing) some weddings, and visiting family who I haven’t seen in years were all part of the exciting and tiring lead up to finally boarding a plane on Sunday night, July 14, and flying across the Atlantic to land in Glasgow. The weather here is cool and the accents are infinitely intriguing.

For those who don’t know or for those who need a brief recap, here’s a short summary of the reason for my seven week visit to Scotland. Christian community and Christian spirituality have long been two interrelated things which have interested me, and so I am always on the lookout for where I can learn and grow in those areas. The Iona Community, on a tiny isle in the far west side of Scotland, is a place which explores both in an ancient and sacred location, a monastery built well over 1000 years ago. Over the past ten years or so I have had lots of interaction with the Iona community from back home in Canada; I’ve sung lots of Iona worship music, I’ve heard one of their community members, John Bell, speak and lead worship many times, my parents went for a weeklong visit, and my Opa was a volunteer there for several months three times. All that immersion continued to catch my interest and so, in preparation for graduating from university and moving on to a new stage of life, I applied to be a volunteer this past winter and I was accepted! So here I am! I’ll be assisting with the music and worship service leading which takes place every night at the Abby. The rest of the day is spent preparing food, cleaning and washing, exploring the Island, and getting to know the pilgrims and visitors who come seeking experiences of relationship with people and with God.

So this is the beginning of my own pilgrimage. I head into this short but immensely intriguing journey with the hope that I will be transformed by the beauty of the location, by the relationships I develop, by the people I meet, by the words I will read/speak, and by the music I will sing, all through the power of God. Not knowing exactly what this experience will lead to is, I hope, a way for me to release control and truly allow the true God to transform me. I’m ready for excitement, joy, worship, and challenge. I am less ready but will accept the more unattractive things we all encounter in life such as boredom, meaninglessness, and doubt. For now I will enjoy the city of Glasgow and pray that I begin to encounter God here in transformative ways that will be a part of me for the rest of my life.

God’s Peace be with you.

Ethan