The Contemplative Crisis

We need a way of living with the fact, we are exiles. What do I mean by this exactly? Here in Australia, unless you are an Aborigine, we have come from somewhere else, and even they came from our north originally, thousands of years ago. To make matters worse, many of us have moved from the town, city or state in which we were raised, to somewhere within the country where we now reside.  As a result, some feel dislocated, others are at home.  We are all, when it is considered, boat people, immigrants or the children of immigrants who have come on the great sailing ships or ocean liners or as refugees in rickety fishing boats from south-east Asia. We live with our backs to the hot, desert interior of the country, facing out towards the sea. (Roughly eighty per cent of the Australian population lives in four regional cities in the east and south east, on coast line. They are Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane with their respective surrounding satellite cities. Perth is the exception in that it is located in Western Australia, but it too, is on the seaboard.)

Some have travelled overseas or interstate and discovered that the new place is more exotic and stimulating than back home, or that the landscape and culture resonate with something deep within them. It is in part intangible, both nevertheless palpable. They feel as if they have arrived home. This other location is where they feel most authentic, but they must return to their first home and live as an exile, away from their first love.  Some have expressed their feeling of missing what has been left behind as a yearning.

The experience many migrants was frequently like this, but eventually they resigned themselves to the fact that they would not be going home. They pass through the period of grief and become reconciled to this fact and build a new life. Before the advent of cheap overseas flights, this was a common experience. Even with the opportunity to return periodically, they live with the ambivalence and knowledge, that deep down, there will always be a bit of the old country left in them, but here is home now.

The way of looking at this disconnection between where we are and where we would like to be is one which occupied Israel after it was sent into exile in 587 BC. Their capital Jerusalem was destroyed by the new world empire, the Babylonians. The remnants of the nobility, artisans and farmers were shipped off to their capital, Babylon, but God promised to bring them back after seventy years. While there, they had to come to grips with a new way of worshipping without the central focus of the temple. They moved their attention away from temple and it’s sacrifices, to the book, the words of the Law and Prophets.  They became the first people of the Book. The role of the Prophets like Jeremiah, Zechariah etc were to comfort and explain why this disaster had occurred. They interpreted their experience.  The remnant of Israel were forced to confront the uncomfortable fact they had misunderstood God and their covenant relationship; they did not really know the God who had created the world and redeemed them from Egypt and who had now unleased those same create powers to punish them for their faithless disobedience. They did not understand themselves.  They had to learn to be a minority in a foreign culture. Understandably, it seemed like the end of the world had come.  It was difficult to sing the songs of home (Ps 137). They felt lost and abandoned by God (see the book of Lamentations which comes after the book of Jeremiah).

This theme of exile is also found in the early Church. The Christians are described as aliens and sojourners by Peter in 1 Peter 1:1 & 2:11. The unknown author of the book of Hebrews encourages his readers to consider the heroes of their faith and how they did not have a lasting city here, but were exiles, not receiving what they had hoped for before they died (Heb 11:13-16) He asks them to cast their sight on the city which is to come (Heb 13:14). They have, like their predecessors,  a ‘better country’ (Heb 11:16). The theme of deep longing for what is not realised is strong throughout the letter.  The Christian is a citizen of a kingdom whose signs are already seen at work, in the activity of the church, the preaching of the gospel, the administration of the sacraments, when people come to faith, when the kingdom of darkness is pushed back and the demons leave their host.  But this kingdom is still not realised.  We pray, ‘your kingdom come.’ We wait for it with anticipation, with the Spirit as a guarantee that it’s coming (2 Cor 5:5; Eph 1:13-14). Meanwhile, we await the glory which is to be revealed in this ‘tent’, our body.  We are like the traveller who has entered a foreign country to discover that this is unexpectedly, their home and had to return to the gritty reality of responsibilities, work and family.

There is a yearning within the hearts of many, not only for the place here, on earth, which they call home, but for heaven itself. It is not as if we are to be like the Fundamentalist of the 1950’s, when we speak of this yearning for heaven,  who rejected this world in an off- hand way. It is just that we are torn between this world and our love for all its  goodness, and the world to come. It is, as Paul said it, that we desire to be with Christ, which is greater than the pull of this world, but we must be responsible with what we have been given (Phil 1:23-24). Some must live as an exile of the country they would prefer to call home, because of family responsibilities and work commitments. They cannot simply go. Nor can we, the Christian as we would wish.  What are we to do as we wait in this ‘in between place’ with its ambiguity?

We must practice the spiritual disciplines of withdrawal, so that standing as a solitary person, we can take stock of our situation, disengage from the prevailing culture and remember where our heart feels drawn to. We emerge from our time of silence to carry within our hearts the burden and sometimes, secret of where we are truly at home. The spiritual disciplines of prayer, meditation and withdrawal strengthen us so that we might live in this present moment, without being overwhelmed by this culture and the now.  We must also join with those who carry within their hearts, this knowledge that they too are exiles and comfort each other as we wait for what is to surely come. It is in the practice of times alone that we do not so much discover our identity, but recover it and remind ourselves why we must consciously claim it or else others will define us on their own terms. If we ever forget that we are exiles and that we carry within our hearts the call of another land, we will have surrendered our citizenship. We will be no bodies. We will be without hope, or anything distinctive about us. We will have nothing to say and nothing to offer those caught up in this world.  We must recover the theology (viz: teaching), that the Christian is an exile, and that our yearning and deep longing is the heart singing a song with words we have forgotten. When we are silent and alone through the practice of our disciplines, we can hear this song again.

We now live in an ambiguous place, an unsettling place, a place which we would prefer to forget, but we are here, to call others to join us on the journey. We live with a vision of a time and place where we will have unfettered access to God, the angels, the saints and all the glory of God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. The regular practice of the spiritual disciplines are our only way of protecting ourselves from this memory from fading.  So regular participation in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, prayers, fellowship, Scripture reading, serving and giving and retreats, are all means to strengthening and reminding us of the song whose words we once knew, which still sings in our hearts.  

It’s winter here and almost the shortest day of the year.  This season is associated with a mixtures of responses. I asked a group today on a ‘quiet day’ retreat what feelings and thoughts they associated with winter. Some said it reminded them of being rugged up in bed with a doona wrapped around them. (A doona is a feather quilt bearing this eponymous proprietary name.) Others thought of woollen jumpers, the open fires, the shorter days and longer nights; of cosy food. Yesterday I asked the secretary at the church where I am a minister what she associated with winter as a test run to the questions for the group today. Her response was quite different and unexpected. She spoke of the cold, of miserable weather, colds, of being shut inside. Her tone of voice reinforced the sadness she associated with this time of year.

I wrote the following poem in July 2007. I think it includes both the sadness and the joy which can be experienced at this time of year. It also suggests that winter can be a time of transformation, from a place of death, to life.

Winter has us in its icy grip;
It’s frozen fingers clasped firmly around our day.
The earth sleeps silently dreaming of the coming spring
when this globe will round the corner
on its way
toward the warming sun.

It is a time,
of colds which cause cancellations and inconvenience,
with scratchy children and their snuffly sleepless nights,
the smell of Vicks Vapor Rub and the sound of coughs.
But we are grateful for wintertime,
its fresh cold wind, woollen jumpers, swollen rivers - even floods;
the golden gift of low slung setting sun
so great our hearts almost burst with joy.

The earth sleeps silently,
in wintertime,
and your work O Lord is quietly going on
hidden from our eye.
But we are waiting, longing for our Springtime,
when like a gardener you will come to repair your ground.
Send forth your Spirit to renew our tired earth,
our worn down farmers, our anxious towns looking at the sky.
Bring forth the daffodils, the wattle’s yellow and the blossom;
signs of your resurrection work
and of a life to come when this living death will die.
© Rob Culhane 21 July 07

The winters in Tasmania are much colder than here in Melbourne where I now live. When I lived in Tasmania, I was working as a carpenter and I’d often go out into the countryside to work on a farmer’s house. I noticed that during winter time, there is not much for them to do. The days are shortened; frequently it is too cold to get motivated to be outside and not much is otherwise happening around the farm.  Often it’s too boggy to be heading out into the paddocks. Once they have fed their cattle or sheep in the morning with hay cut from the summer, that was pretty much it for the day. In late winter, lambing season starts, but until then, it’s pretty quiet. Just the sound of the wind in the windbreaks of pine trees and the mournful sound of the crows or currawongs crying in the distance. In between not having much to do, I noticed they would repair their fences, especially when a storm had sent a tree branch crashing down on them. The wire fences were re-strained taunt again and fences made of the stones piled up so they look regular and not bedraggled with stones strewn around the fence’s base like a child’s Lego in the lounge room. Farm gates were rehung and welded and the farm machinery fixed or serviced. It was a time to tend to the overlooked jobs which have been deferred in the busier, warmer months.

Winter is like our mid-life. Not much is happening; we feel lost, dead almost. We are frequently mourning the loss of summer’s power and are aware of the silence and death detected in the winter’s approaching footsteps. It is an in between time, as we wait for spring. It is a place where there seems to be little going on, of darkened days. It’s silent, but it can also be a time for quiet transformation, of preparation for the spring. It is a good time to tend to the little disciplines and re-build the prayerful practices we have overlooked or deferred in the busier summer months. And winter provides us with a quiet time to listen again for the voice of God’s invitation to be converted and to accept his invitation to come, and move into a place of new life, the life of spring.

We have all been given two ears to listen with.
In one ear, we have heard the voice of those who criticise us and say,
‘You’ll never be any good’,
or that, ‘You messed that up’,
or ‘You’ll never learn’,
or ‘You’re not able to be a leader’.
It might have been our family which has told us this,
with sometimes just a look,
sometimes at the top of their voice,
the message we hear is loud and clear.
It might have been a boss,
a leader who is stressed and frustrated and tired
and has taken their anger out on you.
But we must turn down the volume of that voice in our ear
and listen with our other ear to God’s voice which
we hear in Scripture
we hear in the voice of encouragement by friends
we hear from those who walk beside us at our pace
we hear from strangers who comment on our abilities which we shyly deny
although God has impressed them into us from our birth.
We must listen to the voice of God in our other ear which says
‘You are deeply loved by me.’
‘You have been chosen by me and are precious in my sight.’  (Is 43:4)
‘You are the apple of my eye.’  (Ps 17:8)
‘Your days are written by me before anyone of them has come to pass.’  (139:16)
and
‘I have appointed you to go and bear fruit which will last.’ (Jn 15:16)
We must do this everyday
in the morning
before we turn on the radio
before we read the newspaper
before we use the internet
before we watch the television
before we forget to listen to God’s voice
in the silence, in solitude and in our prayer
because it is in this place that we find our renewal.