Prayer in the City

Prayer in the Concrete Jungle
St George's Hanover Square, Lent 3

“Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear.” Psalm 40.6

Two priests decide to get away from the concrete jungle. They’re determined to make this a real holiday by not wearing anything that would identify them as clergy. As soon as the plane lands, they buy some outrageous shorts, shirts, sandals & sunglasses.

The next morning sitting on the beach, enjoying a drink, a gorgeous blond in an imaginative bikini walks by. She smiles at them and says, "Good morning, Father, Good morning, Father."

They were both stunned. How in the world could she have known?

The next day, they bought even more outrageous outfits - so loud, you could hear them before you saw them. They even got rid of their Oxfords and black socks in favour of flip-flops. Well after a while, the same gorgeous blonde walks along the beach, turning heads as she passes.

As she approaches the two of them she nods and says "Good morning, Father, Good morning, Father."

Astonished one of the priests shouts out “How do you know we’re priests?”

The blonde turns with a puzzled look and says, "Father, it's me, Sister Monica!"

This is the third in the series of sermons looking at The Spiritual Life and Prayer. You have already reflected on With God in the Garden; and With God in the Wilderness; and now, With God in the Concrete Jungle.

And like those two priests, one way of nurturing our spiritual lives in the City, is to get out of it; to retreat to our country houses to recharge our spiritual batteries; or at the very least to find a quiet park or a quiet city church.

But that’s evading the issue. Is it possible to be nurtured in our spiritual life with God, while spending much of our life in the hurly burly of London surrounded on every side by the concrete, granite and glass jungle?

The Bible always has a slightly ambiguous attitude towards cities. They were seen as places where evil would thrive – what in the Epistle today Paul calls ‘the unfruitful works of darkness.’

Babel, where men built a tower up to reach up to heaven, is the archetype of assertive, thrusting, independent humanity, usurping for itself, the place of God. And so Babylon, both at the beginning and the end of the Bible, becomes the symbolic City of Satan.

Yet there is also in Scripture a love for Jerusalem, the City of God.

And the last book of the Bible, Revelation, looks forward to peace and light in the heavenly City, the New Jerusalem.

This morning I want us to think for a few moments about our attitude to prayer and our spiritual lives in general, because that is the key to our being with God in the concrete jungle.

So let us go back to our text.

“Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear.” Psalm 40.6

The Hebrew word at the end of this text is rather difficult to translate. When I had my mid-life crisis, rather precociously at the age of 38, I started sporting a couple of earrings.

I was teaching theology at that time, and one of my students wrote our text on the board when I arrived to deliver my next lecture, but he translated it literally from the Hebrew:

“Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but my ear you have pierced.” Some translations use the more earthy image, ‘my ear you have dug’.

Most of the commentators agree that it carries the sense: ‘you have made me obedient’.

The word ‘obedience’ has a rather bad contemporary press. It smacks of subservience and blindly following rules and regulations.

The origins of the Latin word are to ‘listen towards’ or better, ‘to listen deeply’.

“Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear – you have allowed me to listen deeply.”

One of the chief disciplines of Lent, is listening deeply. Many of the other spiritual disciplines are designed to facilitate this.

As the weeks go by, and the services become more meditative with more silences and longer readings, we should be opening our ears to God. This is more valuable than any amount of self-sacrifice or lent offerings – good as they are.

For as we listen to God, through worship and study and listening deeply to each other; then true obedience follows – the ability to live a life pleasing to God and a life which releases our true potential in Christ.

But how is this affected by our daily context: the busy and noisy city in which we live? Is it possible to listen deeply without being in a still, quiet and beautiful place?

Well, you know the answer as soon as we have posed the question. Of course it is possible, but it requires a different way of listening deeply.

In 2000, Wilkie Au wrote a book called The Enduring Heart: spirituality for the Long Haul. And in it he talks of 'crabgrass contemplation'. He’s a fascinating Roman Catholic writer and draws on the works of William Callahan, a former Jesuit, who describes this kind of contemplation as “noisy contemplation”.

It is a way of building habits of contemplative prayer that can flourish in the ordinary surroundings of our day, including situations of tension and conflict.

"Noisy contemplation is prayer that resembles crabgrass, which ordinary people can grow in the noisy lowlands and hard-scrabble soil of their experiences. In our concrete jungle of urban streets, crabgrass springs up wherever a pavement crack offers the tiniest space.

And so in the same way, crabgrass contemplation is sustainable because it can take place anywhere there is the tiniest space along our daily path.

Being contemplative in the City is standing in wonder and awe at the routine miracles that keep our universe and our bodies functioning harmoniously.

Being contemplative in the City involves a constant willingness to be taken by surprise; it is not being jaded and cynical.

Being contemplative in the City requires being wide awake and fresh in our perceptions of people and things; it is not being distracted and filled with preoccupations and prejudices.

Being contemplative in the City is facing life in a genuinely undefended and open-eyed way.

Being contemplative in the City is being vulnerable, letting events and people impact us with their full resonance; it is not being controlling and manipulative."

With this attitude, and a conscious sense of God’s presence with us, we can listen deeply to God in the noisiest places.

I used to go clubbing a lot, and some of my most spiritual moments were when I was surrounded by hundreds of people with industrial techno ringing in my ears.

Even in the clamour and sometimes oppressiveness of the concrete jungle, God is with us, and when we learn to listen deeply and live openly, we can hear his still, small voice.

In a few minutes the choir will sing Psalm 42: “Like as the hart desireth the waterbrook, so longeth my soul after thee, O God.”

Where there is a desire for God, and a vulnerable openness in contemplating the City in which we live, then we will hear the voice of God, even in the concrete jungle.

“Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear.” Psalm 40.6

Consciousness, prayer & the Holy Spirit

Consciousness, prayer and the Holy Spirit

Let me read you a part of a letter:

“I venture to put before the conference the following practical recommendations: (1) Education of Ordinands--- That the bishops shall emphasize the need and importance of a far more thorough, varied, interesting and expert devotional training in our theological colleges which, with a few striking exceptions, seem to me to give insufficient attention to this vital part of their work. (2) The Clergy--- That they should call upon every ordained clergyman, as an essential part of his pastoral duty and not merely for his own sake: (a) To adopt a rule of life which shall include a fixed daily period of prayer and reading of a type that feeds, pacifies and expands his soul, and deepens his communion with God; b) To make an annual retreat; (c) To use every endeavour to make his church into a real home of prayer and teach his people, both by exhortation and example so to use it.”

A letter from Evelyn Underhill to Archbishop Lang of Canterbury for the 1930 Lambeth Conference.

I used to tell my students that Christians were permanently guilty about two things: prayer and sex. Too much of one and not enough of the other. And which way round that is depends on whether you are an evangelical or a catholic!

This evening I want to ease our guilt about prayerlessness - a little.
I want to agree with what Evelyn Underhill expresses as her hopes for ordinands and clergy, but to widen it a little. To remind ourselves, in Michelle Quoist’s phrase, that all of life becomes a prayer. To reflect on human consciousness, as Underhill does in some of her own mystical writings.

“The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.” (Romans 8.16)

Hyenas don’t really laugh. Rather, like the chimpanzees in the tea adverts, we are anthropomorphizing animals and giving them what are uniquely human characteristics. Dogs, if they look as though they are giving you a toothy grin, are usually about to bite you.

Human beings alone (as far as we know) in the universe, laugh. Only humans can blush or be embarrassed. Only humans need to feel embarrassed.

All this is part of our self-consciousness. The fact, that unlike any other creatures, to our present knowledge, we can reflect on what we are. This is the joy and pain of being a human animal: homo sapiens.

Julian Jaynes puts it this way in the opening of his fascinating book with the snappy title, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Penguin 1990): (cf Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash)

“O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! … A secret theatre of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries… A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do… This consciousness…”

But where did self-awareness come from in our evolutionary history?

Well, we don’t really know. About 3 million years ago - a mere nothing in comparison to the age of the earth. (If the 4 billion years of the earth’s existence are represented by a clock, then we are looking at just over half a minute ago.) About 3 million years ago, Neanderthal humans appeared with brains the size of the planet; brains bigger than any other animal on earth. And they used only a tiny proportion of that massive brain.

It’s like the computers some of us have at home or in our office. They are capable of rocket science, and all we use them for is as a glorified typewriter & late night solitaire.

So late Neanderthals or maybe Cro-Magnon man began to use this spare brain capacity for inventing language and tools and weapons; and then art and music; religion and laws; and eventually political parties and Brylcreem…

At some point, and the experts differ as to when, these humans started to reflect upon themselves. They realised they would die, like the animals which they killed to eat.

They realised they were conscious - they were self-conscious. Julian Jaynes reckons that self-consciousness as we know it appeared less than 4 thousand years ago. Most scientists think it was much earlier.

Well what has all this got to do with our text?

Human beings are the only animals that consciously worship. Our God-consciousness emerged as part of our self-consciousness.

Non-realist theologians like Don Cuppit and the Sea of Faith group, and many philosophers of other faiths and none, assert that God-consciousness is only an extension of our inward monologue.

In other words, it cannot be an awareness of a Mind that is ‘other’ and somehow separate from our own minds. It is a defence mechanism that religion provides to make sense of our existence. It is talking to ourselves.

This argument runs, that the elaborate development of religions is an internal trick that has served human evolution quite well.

It has socialised us and, for quite long periods, stopped us living like the beasts we are, red in tooth and claw.

Rather like the self-deception which equates joining a gym with actually going to the gym…

But there is another explanation which our Christian faith provides and which many of us prefer to believe.

The Garden of Eden describes humanity coming to self-consciousness; and asserts that, that self-consciousness is a reflection of God’s self-consciousness. We are indeed made in imago Dei, in the image of God, knowing, and self-knowing. And so part of the human condition is bound up with knowledge of God: who is self-conscious within the Holy Trinity.

Adam is separate from the other animals, and to show his self-consciousness, he names them: they are tiger and horse; they are other; they are not flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone.

Unlike the other creatures, Adam and Eve know good from evil, and know that they are capable of choosing evil. The tiger and the horse can know no shame, but Adam and Eve hide from God, full of remorse and embarrassment.

Cain slays Abel, not for food nor for evolutionary superiority; but because of jealousy and on account of religious convictions.

Self-consciousness leads to self-doubt and to strong convictions. I remember hearing Peter Ustinov remind us again on the radio just before his death that “It is our doubts that unite us. Our convictions divide us.”

Indeed. But we can have no doubts without convictions and it is those convictions which determine what we do with our convictions; and how we handle our doubt.

The Christian story unfolds through the centuries until the second Adam comes: Christ, who as he matures as a man and grows into self-consciousness; grows also into that unique and aweful destiny that is his alone - that unspeakable agony of inner thought - God-consciousness: the horror of realisation that he is God.

For us, the realisation is that we are loved and that we will never be alone. In St Paul’s words: “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.”

But for Christ, the Spirit testified to his spirit that he was the only-begotten of the Father.

One of the roles of the Holy Spirit is to direct our inner consciousness – to work alongside it, if you will. And he does this whether we are hectically busy, or whether we are in retreat: the Holy Ghost working alongside the ‘ghost in the machine’.

Maybe the human soul is a virtual reality created by the world’s most complex computer, the human brain. But that does not invalidate the belief that there is a Divine Consciousness, before all things, incarnate in Christ, and interacting with us by way of the Holy Spirit.

We believe that there is an internal dialogue - not monologue. We believe that our Divine Lover is literally, always in our thoughts.

Put another way, this is the testimony of the saints and the men and women of God down through the centuries: that they have tasted and seen that the Lord is good. The Spirit has enabled them, sometimes with faltering conviction, to cry ‘Abba’, Father.”

This understanding of human self-consciousness, certainly encourages us to make time each day when with conscious effort we open ourselves to the Divine Consciousness. It encourages us to make space in our lives in retreat to let our Older Brother heal and remould us in his image.

But it also encourages us to believe even through the guilt of prayerlessness and overbusyness, that even then God’s Spirit is at work in us: we are still useful servants.

We must not be robbed of that joyful conviction that

“The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.” (Romans 8.16)