Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bernardino de laredo, franciscans, francisco de osuna, glasshampton, jean vanier, John of the Cross, Lent, lenten journey, pilgrimage, prayer, retreats, spanish mystics, teresa of avila
I’ve been away on retreat for the past week at Glasshampton Monastery, giving me a much needed space for prayer and reflection in the build up to Holy Week and Easter. Thanks to Br Nicholas Alan, I’ve discovered the sixteenth century Spanish Franciscan mystical writers Francisco de Osuna and Bernardino de Laredo who in many ways paved the way for Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. I’ve been slowly reading and praying Osuna’s Third Spiritual Alphabetwith it’s teaching on the prayer of recollection. Maybe some quotes from this once I’ve pondered and read more.
In the meantime, this from Jean Vanier:
In L’Arche and in Faith and Light, we are beginning to see the truth of St Paul’s words about the choice of God – that God chooses the weak, the foolish, the lowly and the despised. This does not mean that God has not chosen others who are wise and strong. It means that Jesus, the God of love, came to give himself to those who feel lonely and pushed aside, and who cry out for love, who are open and vulnerable to love, who let themselves be led by love. Jesus cannot give himself to those who are closed in on themselves and only want ideas about God. The wise and rich must leave their securities, and their need for temporal and spiritual power and wealth, in order to discover Jesus, the lover. They must recognise their needs and poverty enough to open the doors of their hearts to receive him, to be led and taught by him.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: carmelite prayer, John of the Cross, Lent, lenten journey, pilgrimage, prayer, ruth burrows
Lent starts on Wednesday. As I have time over the next days, I want to publish a short series of posts that I hope give food for the greater openness to love that the season of penitence allows. They need to be read together to articulate the sort of life that I believe we are called to live, the sort of life that is human.
We begin with Ruth Burrows on prayer:
“The essential act of prayer is to stand unprotected before God. What will God do? He will take possession of us. That he should do this is the whole purpose of life. We know we belong to God; we know too, if we are honest, that almost despite ourselves, we keep a deathly hold on our own autonomy. We are willing, in fact very ready, to pay God lip-service (just as we are ready to talk about prayer rather than to pray), because waving God as a banner keeps our conscience quiet. But really to belong to God is another matter. It means having nothing left for ourselves, always bound to the will of another, no sense of interior success to comfort us, living in the painful acknowledgement of being ‘unprofitable servants’. It is a terrible thing to be a fallen creature, and for most of the time we busily push this truth out of our awareness. But prayer places us helpless before the living God and we taste the full bitterness of what we are.
“Ask yourself: What do I really want when I pray? Do you want to be possessed by God? Or to put the same question more honestly, do you want to want it? Then you have it. The one point Jesus stressed and repeated and brought up again is that: ‘Whatever you ask the Father he will grant it to you.’ his insistence on faith and perseverance are surely other ways of saying the same thing: you must really want, it must engross you. When you set yourself down to pray, what do you want? If you want God to take possession of you, then you are praying. That is all prayer is. There are no secrets, no shortcuts, no methods. Prayer is the utter ruthless test of your sincerity. It is the one place in the world in which there is nowhere to hide. That is its utter bliss – and its torment.
“If you desire to stand surrendered before God, then you are standing there. It needs absolutely nothing else. Prayer is the last thing we should feel discouraged about. It concerns nobody except God – always longing to give himself in love – and my own decision. And that too is God’s ‘who works in us to will and effect’. In a very true sense there is nothing more to say about prayer – ‘the simplest thing out’. However two practical comments. The first is that prayer must have time … Nobody goes through a day without the odd patch, a five minute break, a ten minute pause. If you do truly want to pray, well then pray … The other practical point is: what shall I do during prayer? (How eagerly people long to be told the answer! For that would make me safe against God, well protected. I would know what to do!) But the answer is of the usual appalling simplicity: stand before God unprotected and you will know yourself what to do.”
- Ruth Burrows Ascent to Love: the spiritual teaching of St John of the Cross
What we need most in order to make progress is to be silent before this great God with our appetite and with our tongue, for the language God hears best is silent love.
- John of the Cross
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: John of the Cross, la noche oscura. poetry
John of the Cross’ La Noche Oscura through the lens of wordle:
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Camino de Levante, John of the Cross, peter stanford, pilgrimage, prayer, the extra mile, walsingham
I’ve been reading Peter Stanford’s book on pilgrimage in modern Britain The Extra Mile. I’ll post some thoughts about it soon (I think it is worth reading, although I have some questions about it).
Today is the Feast of St John of the Cross, the Spanish Carmelite reformer and mystic, whose traces I enjoyed following and encountering so much on the Camino de Levante last year.
This quote from The Extra Mile, about the Chapel of the Spirit in Walsingham, reminds me of pilgrimage, of John, of so many pastoral encounters, and of the current struggles in this country:
One of the hardest aspects of grief is that feeling of being so powerless in the face of death. Raised in a world that celebrates, even lionizes humanity’s ability to make things happen, to change, correct or cure what we don’t like or want, even within ourselves, we are brought up short by the death of loved ones and reminded quite how impotent we are. It may be a tiny, futile gesture, but lighting a candle for them, and placing it alongside the candles of so many others, is a comforting act of solidarity. I am not alone in mourning or in struggling to find an explanation, and they are not alone in death. As a ritual, it offers none of the answers so readily available [in some religious circles], but it effortlessly gets to the core of the questions that underpin religion – questions of life, suffering and death that have no straightforward answers. In this Chapel of the Spirit, that word – Spirit – so often heard at Walsingham but so seldom defined – finally acquires a weight.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: camino, John of the Cross, Oseira Monastery, pilgrimage, prayer, St Clare, St Francis, the Cross
This is the mantlepiece in my study, one of the places I look when I am praying. Here is the late afternoon sun.
Contemplating the picture, I am struck by how much this speaks of pilgrimage and of how, at the same time, it is so rooted in my being at home in ways that are about physical stillness. There is the large photograph of the Portico of Glory. I was given several of the icons and pictures while on the Camino, including one of the paintings of Christ Fray Luis at Oseira Monastery gives to all the pilgrims who stay there.
Perhaps this question around what it means to be a pilgrim – while not being on pilgrimage (and not going on a walking pilgrimage for a while) – is something that can be become more explicit and be pondered in the summer holidays.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: John of the Cross, justice, Ken Leech, pilgrimage, prayer
Thanks to Karen for her comment on my last post. You are very right to point out that we need to be in community with and in relationship with others. The quote spoke to me as I reflect on the Camino, particularly the long silent and solitary days walking through the hot empty flatness of La Mancha. In this solitude I learned a good deal about my dependence on God and about my need for other people. And much of this is clearly to do with love and justice.
Ken Leech writes of this in relation to John of the Cross in The Eye of the Storm:
The way of faith, John insists, is necessarily obscure. We drive by night, only seeing a little way ahead. We make progress precisely by not understanding, by darkness. I was coming to see how important this truth is in pastoral work and in political struggle. We need to act on the basis of faith, of an insight which is nourished in darkness, a conviction which has its roots in silence, a vision which is not clear but is firmly based in that mysterious reality which is the darkness of God. If social and political action is not to decay into fanaticism, it needs those deep roots.
The night comes upon us. We are never prepared for it, for the essence of the night is the sense of being out of control, of being bound and controlled by the mysterious working of the Spirit of God. Only later do we identify what has been going on, and are we able to express it. I believe that the effectiveness of our work for justice in the world is directly related to our encounter with this central core of darkness. For truthful and just action can only grow out of deep roots in truth and justice.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Holy Week, John of the Cross, pilgrimage, prayer
If you wish to be sure of the road you are travelling,
close your eyes and walk in the dark.
- John of the Cross
Not much time, but to catch his day here is a photo of his famous pencil drawing of Christ which I took in the Museum at the Convent of the Incarnation in Avila:
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Camino de Levante, John of the Cross, pilgrimage, prayer, teresa of avila
I spent a day and a half in Avila with Roy and Karen. Today we´ve been in Segovia. Tomorrow I get the train to Zamora and will start walking again (I make it about 280 miles to Santiago, which will mean that I will have walked about 600 miles or a thousand kilometres, which is a good round number and enough).
It was strange travelling by car. After all that flat La Mancha (and it is easy, trudging through it, to see why he became deluded) we drove over hills and mountains. Most of it severely tempted me to say stop the car and walk, although passing one pilgrim who was walking along a very busy main road and then crossing hills through cloud made me glad for modern transportation.
I think my time in Avila was a real highlight of the Pilgrimage for me. I´m a Priest Associate of the Sisters of the Love of God, and through them I´ve come to absorb and be very influenced by the Carmelite Mystics. This was one of the reasons I choose the Camino de Levante. It will take me a long time to absorb what this all means, but visiting the Monasterio de la Encarnacion in Avila where Teresa spent so many years and John the last years of his life was extrememly meaningful for me. I got a sello (stamp) for my Pilgrim´s Passport here which is more important to me than any of the others. To get it, I spoke through an old-fashioned revolve and sent the passport through.
And then when I came out into the courtyard the Discalced Carmelites were having a delivery of shoes!
Today I have visited John´s tomd at the monastery in Segovia and prayed before a beautiful modern icon of him.
There will be much for me to ponder in the days ahead. How does their life, teaching and prayer influence and lead me (and it is St Therese´s day today)? How do I begin to live it, let alone live up to it? What does this attachment to sanctity of person and place, which of course is at the heart of pilgrimage, mean?
I have really enjoyed this non-walking part of my Pilgrimage. I look forward to the next chapter.
