The Contemplative Crisis

A divorced friend of mine sent an email to me following a recent conversation. She had one additional thing which she forgot to mention at the time. It was: “. . . don’t you ever try anything so stupid .. or I will lose faith in men completely. (Her emphasis, not mine.) The ‘anything so stupid’ would be for me to leave my wife. Although it has been 3 years since her husband left her, the disappointment is still raw and the ongoing issues with her former spouse continue.

She raises a point however, which I take seriously: how my own lifestyle and values help or hinder others in their own walk with God. For me, and I think for many other Christians, the culture of this society and its values are ones which erode our commitments and tempt us with materialism, hedonism and self-centeredness. We are called to live as a disciple of Christ and this will mean our lifestyles will by necessity, have a prophetic edge to them; they will be out of sync with the ‘world’, our society’s values. Daily we are bombarded with images on billboards, magazines and in newspapers which attempt to lure us to purchase a particular product. Many are made more eye catching by the addition of a beautiful female to gain our attention. Advertisements on the television, ‘girlie’ magazines at the petrol station and magazine racks at the newsagent offer a tantalizing alternative to either celibacy or fidelity to our spouse. The sexualisation of our culture may appear ‘cute’ and fairly innocuous when its Kyle (Minogue) dancing, but its abusive and one which steals the innocence 12 and 13 year old girls when they are dressed in skimpy and provocative clothing.

For those in the USA I have never understood why it is appropriate to have lithe women in brief and tight fitting clothing parading their natural attributes while dancing. I speak of the basketball or gridiron cheer squad. It appears to this distant outsider of American culture that it is never questioned by Christians there. Perhaps American culture has become so sexualized and ingrained that the Church is now oblivious to its ongoing impact. The excuse that the dancing cheer leaders are only ‘eye candy’ is at its best, disingenuous, and at its worst, avoiding the fact that it feeds the male fantasy for sex without relationship and responsibility. The general sexual permissiveness in our (Western) society is such that to voice an opinion which is critical of these prevailing values and lifestyles is looked upon as being prudish or politically incorrect and insensitive.

But returning to my original concern: what can I do so that I will not become like my friend’s husband and many other men who have left their wives and more often than not, the church as well? This is where the tradition of contemplation has something worthwhile listening to. Paul writing to his protégé Timothy said: ‘Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.” (1 Timothy 4:16, NIV) Our private decisions influence the general public, often far more than we realize until it’s too late. Who we are, our lifestyle, counts as much and more than what we say as a church leader. So watching our life and doctrine (what we hold to) on a daily basis is the daily imperative. We cannot relax for one moment because we are engaged in a war: the flesh, the devil and the world. Older seasoned saints know this and that’s why they are still pressing on, but those who treat this view with scorn are no longer with us. They have been taken prisoner when they succumbed to the propaganda spread by the enemy that its ok to compromise in this area.

It’s not easy living in this culture driven by images, messages and moral permissiveness. It should not surprise us that many do fall and it’s easy to become discouraged. After a few days in a silent retreat with sustained periods to pray, think and ruminate on life, I am often struck as I drive back into the city by the crass materialism of the large lifestyle shops on the main highway. I am tempted to turn around and head to the hills. But this will not in itself be the solution. Being a monk will not necessarily solve the problem. The following illustration will highlight this.

A Benedictine monk was asked by a curious outsider what monks do all day.

He replied: ‘We fall down and then we get up again.’

And what do you do the next day?”, the enquirer asked.

‘Oh, the next day, we fall down and we get up again.’

Being a monk does not remove you from temptation, crazy thoughts or the human condition to be imperfect or to sin. They are realists in a refreshing way about what goes on in our heads. But they are also practical. They know the value of living together in community so that each can support the other. The individual is not left alone to try and transform themselves or figure it out themselves. The community itself provides the means that God uses to help transform the individual monk. That is why they are called to be ‘in stability’ with the community and not to move on to greener pastures (as so many in our churches do).

For me, here’s what I do so that my life doesn’t fall apart and so I don’t succumb to the temptation to give it all away. First, I try and consciously live day by day, re committing myself to the task of engaging in meaningful communication with those who are nearest and dearest. This is to fulfill the second commandment of loving my neighbour. This is dependent on being open with my communication with God – fulfilling the first commandment.

Second, a degree of self awareness of the stuff which works its way around in my head is required and this takes some time of each day. So I spend some time each day reflecting on it (prayer of exam for example), meditating on Scripture, drawing near to God. But it is this stuff, which the Desert Fathers called: the thoughts of one’s heart, that I am trying to pay attention to. They are the temptations which quickly lodge in our hearts and sprout as thorns and thistles. Benedict gives guidance here by saying: “As soon as thoughts spring up in your heart, dash them against Christ.’ (Rule, ch 4) Occasionally I need to air them with my spiritual director and this has the element of confession. When I am seeing my spiritual director I try to remain open to him so that I hide nothing. Fortunately his love for me is greater than my shame. This commitment to remain open and not hiding my thoughts is also expressed in my relationship with my wife and children. The opposite is deceit. (See John Cassian, Conferences, Section 18-20 for example on dealing with thoughts and temptations.) The key word is transparency – before God, before my director, to my wife, to myself. By ventilating these thoughts, temptations and little fantasies, their power over me when they are brought out into the open is broken. This was called the ‘manifestation of thoughts’ in the early period of monastic development when the disciple would share his inner thought life with his master in the desert.

Third, the only way I can stay on track is by regularly making a conscious commitment to hang out with healthy men (mostly Christian) who are not sucked into the deceit of materialism. They are not competitive or bragging about their achievements but simply humble people getting on with life and trying their best to be a disciple of our Lord. They are on the other side of youthful excess and passion. They are no longer following some dream which is powered by their selfishness. To some extent, this is the role a healthy Christian community has in reinforcing and shaping our commitments. It is similar to the role the monastic community has in keeping an eye on the individual and being the collective conscience to the individual.

Fourth, the church’s culture can itself become one which is influenced by our wider sexualised culture. The culture of power also has a way concealing itsself too and for this reason, we need to be vigilant to its penetration and then collaboration with the sexualized culture to create a potent mixture of excitement. Signs of its work are when pastors present themselves like presidents of a new kingdom or confuse God’s authority with their own. Other signs are when some of the women who attend church are dressed provocatively with plunging necklines and bare shoulders. My antennae begin to twitch that something is amiss. Some (women) even come in short shorts. The music team and song leaders also reinforce the power and sexualised culture of the church. When they dress in cool clothing in order to look hip I am a little disturbed. This is not too bad, but when the worship time is “orgasmic” I am heading to the exit. Growing up in the shadow of the Nazi propaganda machine and then the Cold War with prophets like Orwell and Huxley calling us to stand outside the culture and look at the way our society was being massaged by various political ideologies, I am disturbed when an attractive woman begins to demand my participation and to suspend my critical faculties. The cd covers of young Christian woman dressed in revealing clothing meet my eyes with seductive looks. A heady mix of music, lighting, suggestion by the pastor, power dressing and unbeknown to us, we are being massaged into a place where we are open to the suggestion of many things, one of which is that feelings, with a sense of empowerment and intimate contact with God are combined to provide a powerful experience. This emphasis on experience helps promote the culture that my feelings are more important than my responsibilities or my covenants, or even the need for an accurate understanding of Scripture. I try to keep away from such places and the experiences they conjure up. This is one of the reasons why I’m in a cooler (emotionally) church called Anglicanism which has a tradition and liturgy that acts as a buffer to the sexualisation and power worship of the independent churches. The prayer book and liturgy help to keep ministers confined from projecting their own psychological and sexualized power, but even this dike can be breached when determination takes place to indulge in Baal worship.

I think I’m right in saying, that men when they hit mid life, they often suffer a malaise of disaffection with themselves, their spouse and life itself. The causes are many, but they then begin secretly entertaining thoughts about how much better it would be if . . . They are unaware of their passions, their desires and their deepest needs which have led them into this place. The problem is not in what we see, but what the heart does with what we see. The solution is to ‘guard your heart’ as the Desert Fathers taught.

What men are aware of in mid-life are their accumulated hurts, their disappointments (in life) and the thirst for something else. There is often an identifiable desperation within to alleviate the malaise that has become their constant companion. A new career, a new marriage or a change in their location are seen as short cut solutions to relieve this malaise, especially when they have experienced travel overseas. Overseas travel is a narcotic which provides immediate relief from the internal pain and malaise. One thing in common amongst several friends who have left their wives has been the considerable amount of time they spent away from their spouses overseas. While travelling, they live in a bubble cocooned from the grittiness of daily life, staying in five star hotels, dining on fine food and the people they rub shoulders with are always dressed immaculately. There are no whinging children with runny noses and no wife asking for help in the kitchen or to take a child to their sporting commitment. The daily chores which breed irritability are being relieved by hotel staff while they are away. Here again, the Benedictine distinctive emphasis on stability speaks into my life to keep time away from wife and family to a minimum. (It is their distinctive emphasis because the monk does not make a threefold vow of poverty, chastity and obedience, but conversion of life, obedience and stability – to remain where God called you.)

The hard work of conversion is not entertained by men who are in this place of discontent because the solution to the problem is seen to be ‘out there’, with the existing wife, work or situation. But we know that the problem really resides within our hearts. It is at this point that our focus must shift to the God who has called us not only to faith in Christ, but calls us daily to allow him to transform us by his Spirit (2 Cor 3:18). But this is also our hope: things need not remain as they are, we can each day start over again, in Christ’s love and freedom. At the point where we recognise that we need to turn away from this growing temptation or malaise within, and seek Christ is real conversion. It’s not something we did in the past, it’s something we are called to do daily.

Going  to church is not something I have much choice in, being a minister of religion. I’m expected to turn up each week as part of the job description, but this is not why I attend worship each week. In fact, it’s the other way around. It’s because I find worship something which is not what I would expect it to be, that I’m a minister in a church. Going to church for me is like the experience of climbing up a terribly high slide as a child and letting go. There is a suppressed squeal of ‘weeeeee’ as I let go (I’m a boy remember). These slides are often found in the local park but the best examples can be seen at the local agricultural show where they are extremely high with cascading polished steel bumps. Going to church and more particularly participating in public worship (which sounds terribly serious, formal and drab), is not something which we expect to be so different, but it is.

In recent years however, going to church has become more casual and for some Christians, an optional extra.  Our lifestyles have changed significantly from the era of the sixties and seventies (as in the last century, the 1960’s and 1970’s), when the husband was the sole bread winner and the shops closed on Saturday morning at midday, leaving the suburbs eerily silent except for the sound of the droning lawnmower or the roar of the crowd at the local football ground.  Saturdays are now taken up with shopping because for two parents working full time, there is little time during the week to do this essential task. But for some, shopping has also become a recreational activity and for others, the need to work on Saturdays has become a reality due to the deregulation of our working conditions and greater liberalisation in the trading hours of shops. As a consequence, Sundays have become the day for traditional family celebrations such as birthday parties or simply to get together.  Even the traditional sporting activities such as football, tennis and basketball which would be attended on Saturday mornings have been shifted into Sunday morning in recognition of this change in our working and consuming lives. What time is left over is given to the church. Going to church has become a discretionary leisure activity which is rated in its  importance alongside of going to the extended family’s birthday for a relative, or time to garden, attend to housing renovations or maintenance or simply rest.  Some choose not to go at all because church and more particularly, their experience of worship, has been disappointing. I notice that there are now many who are ‘post-Christian’, particularly from a younger age range who were once engaged with what I find a life giving experience (going to church), but are now hurt and disillusioned and have left. The causes of their pain and disillusionment are complex and varied. However, this aspect will need to be left to another time and place.

Why do you attend church? I was exploring this question with someone recently and in our conversation it emerged that there were two reasons why they had attended church regularly but no longer do so. The first was when their children were young, they attended so that their children would receive a Christian education. The second reason was due to their feelings of guilt if they failed to. Not so much a guilt about offending God, but a guilt induced by not fulfilling their parents’ expectations.  A third reason many attend church is the uplifting social time they experience.  Apart from the first reason, the other two are not particularly important, although the social dimension is very important in affirming our religious experience.  When this person’s children had grown up (and were now attending church of their own volition), this person’s relationship with God was seriously damaged due to significant trauma in their lives. As a result, the reasons for attending had vanished because God had disappeared.  There is a fourth reason why some attend worship. It provides them with an outlet to give something back to God.  There are so many opportunities offered in the morning worship for service that it’s simply irresistible for the Christian driven by a sense of obligation to pass by the opportunity.  In my conversation with my friend, this emerged as a hidden motivation for my friend to attend church, so in fact, they had a fourth reason. Churches buzz with so much activity that its  members can become addicted to the adrenalin rush of serving.  I too became consumed by the church’s activities and a casualty of the adrenalin it released. Both contributed to may own need to leave ministry for an extended period when I became exhausted.

But going to church is not what I expected it could be, and that’s what keeps me coming back. They don’t have to be a place where I am expected to give or contribute, but a place where I receive from God. Protestants spoke so much about ‘grace’ in the past, they often forgot how to experience it and shifted from an ongoing experience of God’s grace into one of justifying their worth and status by  their religious works. They then passed this distorted view of grace onto the next generation like my friend.  What is worse is that today’s churches seem to speak little of grace and more about Jesus being my friend which is all very well, but I would like a flesh and blood God rather than a nice Jesus. So why do we go to church then? We go to put ourselves in a place where it’s more likely that God will turn up. It’s the one time in our week when it’s most likely that we will encounter God if we’re there looking, vigil like for him. Or to use another metaphor, coming to church for me is a wayside stop on the pilgrimage of looking for God and seeking God as we pass through a terrain with which we are unfamiliar with.  There I find bread and wine, fellowship and tender care which binds up the wounds and abrasions I have incurred during the week as I have trudged along the road.  There is no sense of coming to church with the overwhelming sense that I need to give something except myself, which is empty in any case whether I can recognise it or not. I come, because for so many like my friend, we have ‘gived out’ and have nothing left to give (to use my friend’s words).

I go because it is the prayers which give voice to the deep and unspoken things which have remained forgotten, hidden or simply neglected. These words provide a bridge for faith, giving shape to what is formless within, our inarticulated longings, expressing what we can’t express as we move between a place of faith and unfaith, because we are damaged, empty and seeking. We do not believe in words as magic; we wish we could, but we are now adults, our eyes are open knowing good and evil, but we believe in their ability to give form to what is formless within and this is the work of God’s Spirit within (Rom 8:26).

The church building itself is another reason I go in preference to trying worship at home. As a former builder, buildings are very important to me, particularly the ability of a building to enhance or detract from our day to day quality of life. The church itself is like a giant lens which acts to focus God’s presence into a focal point. Not all Protestants would agree, preferring to see the church building as either a lecture hall with the sermon the principle means in which we encounter God (in the mind) or the more extreme position, that the building is irrelevant; the people are the most important means by which God is mediated to us. The rented gym or school hall is therefore perfectly acceptable to this group.  For these brave souls in our suburbs, mission is the focus, not church buildings (which imply for them, a static view of God ), and the use of a public space provides the neutral ground for those outside the church to meet God half way. I am not comfortable with this position however, because in declaring everything holy and every place holy, the result is that everything becomes common and there is no singular place left, set aside to be declared holy and wholly for God’s use, and it is in the holy that God turns up, whether they are burning bushes, mountains, crypts, or beside the bed as children are born and parents die.

I often look at the building as being like a boat, as something that holds the congregation for the service of the liturgy. We are all one, even in our doubts, lack of understanding or lack of experience (of God) but this lack of understanding is not an issue because we have a shared liturgy (whatever tradition you use). The liturgy is the work of God’s people performed corporately; it is not just running through a set of empty words. Anglicans it has been noted, do not have so much a creed, but a prayer book which gives shape to their beliefs and a common voice of what they offer in faith to God.  I am just a prompter for their lines. But I digress a little. The congregation are like the rowers in the boat, this building.  And on the one side I stand and dip my oar in the water and pull with the words: ‘The Lord be with you’. And then they respond by dipping their oar in and pulling together with the words: ‘And also with you’. And so we begin to pull the boat forward together, toward God.  And it is in this boat that we are all carried, them and I. We are carried through the service by the songs, hymns, prayers, communion and released with a final blessing.  Going to church for me is an experience of letting go  like the child letting go of the sides on the slide, allowing himself to be carried by the gravity to the end and to land with the urge to do it all again. And at the end of the service just like the slide, we pick ourselves up again and return home. Going to church is to take myself of to a place where I think it likely that God will turn up, to sit in God’s boat in the company of other seekers and pilgrims as we row together with the aid of the liturgy, united by the one Spirit.