enlightenment (according to lax)

Robert Lax, Photo by Hartmut Geerken

to be "enlightened" is not to shine; nor to bring multitudes to the hill where one sits cross-legged, to listen.

it is rather to know what one is doing (& even, perhaps, to enjoy it.)

- robert lax, from "love had a compass, journals and poetry", page 209

to be fully human

From Archbishop Rowan Williams' lecture to the Synod in Rome, October 10, 2012.  The full text is HERE.

" ... In his autobiography Thomas Merton describes an experience not long after he had entered the monastery where he was to spend the rest of his life (Elected Silence, p.303). He had contracted flu, and was confined to the infirmary for a few days, and, he says, he felt a ‘secret joy’ at the opportunity this gave him for prayer – and ‘to do everything that I want to do, without having to run all over the place answering bells.’ He is forced to recognise that this attitude reveals that ‘All my bad habits … had sneaked into the monastery with me and had received the religious vesture along with me: spiritual gluttony, spiritual sensuality, spiritual pride.’ In other words, he is trying to live the Christian life with the emotional equipment of someone still deeply wedded to the search for individual satisfaction. It is a powerful warning: we have to be every careful in our evangelisation not simply to persuade people to apply to God and the life of the spirit all the longings for drama, excitement and self-congratulation that we so often indulge in our daily lives. It was expressed even more forcefully some decades ago by the American scholar of religion, Jacob Needleman, in a controversial and challenging book called Lost Christianity: the words of the Gospel, he says, are addressed to human beings who ‘do not yet exist’. That is to say, responding in a life-giving way to what the Gospel requires of us means a transforming of our whole self, our feelings and thoughts and imaginings. To be converted to the faith does not mean simply acquiring a new set of beliefs, but becoming a new person, a person in communion with God and others through Jesus Christ.

"Contemplation is an intrinsic element in this transforming process. To learn to look to God without regard to my own instant satisfaction, to learn to scrutinise and to relativise the cravings and fantasies that arise in me – this is to allow God to be God, and thus to allow the prayer of Christ, God’s own relation to God, to come alive in me. Invoking the Holy Spirit is a matter of asking the third person of the Trinity to enter my spirit and bring the clarity I need to see where I am in slavery to cravings and fantasies and to give me patience and stillness as God’s light and love penetrate my inner life. Only as this begins to happen will I be delivered from treating the gifts of God as yet another set of things I may acquire to make me happy, or to dominate other people. And as this process unfolds, I become more free—to borrow a phrase of St Augustine (Confessions IV.7)—to ‘love human beings in a human way’, to love them not for what they may promise me, to love them not as if they were there to provide me with lasting safety and comfort, but as fragile fellow-creatures held in the love of God. I discover (as we noted earlier) how to see other persons and things for what they are in relation to God, not to me. And it is here that true justice as well as true love has its roots."

what the word "answer" means

Karl Barth

Someone sent this little snippet to me the other day.  It seems to intuit the profoundly intimate and deeply mysterious way in which our own lives are united with, and even mutually dependent, upon God.  (Although I'm sure that there are plenty of theologians who would insist that God does not need us in order to be God.  I'm not so sure.)

Let us approach the subject of prayer from the given fact that God answers.


God is not deaf, but listens; more than that, he acts.


God does not act in the same way whether we pray or not.


Prayer exerts an influence upon God's action, even upon his existence.


This is what the word 'answer' means.

- Karl Barth
From Prayer

seeking nothing at all

Robert Lax, Photo by Hartmut Geerken

sometimes i have conversations with an

imaginary guru, naturally one who lives

inside me.  he used to be a psychiatrist: at least

in the old days a lot of my conversations were

started with, & a lot of my problems heard

out or solved by, an imaginary Viennese who

listened carefully, often accusingly, & showed

me with a few apt technical phrases how far

i had erred in my thinking, or behaviour.

the Viennese fellow has disappeared; comes

back if ever for very short visits, but has been

replaced by chuang tzu (sometimes merton, or

sometimes chuang tzu in merton translation)

who tells me other wisdoms: usually the

wisdom of abstinence & avoidance; of retreat,

prayer & preparation, of non-attachment,

of “sitting quietly doing nothing”, of seeking

smallness, not greatness, of seeking nothing

at all.

Robert Lax, journal C p. 38

lax round poem

Robert Lax

collect

drawing by Thomas Merton

Beloved Spirit, You are all the prudence and the power

That change our dust and nothing into fields and fruits;

Enfold our lives forever in the compass

   of Your peaceful hills.

- Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness, p 68-69

patmos - “as though nothing were happening”

Robert Lax

Lax’s journal entries from Patmos in 1969 tell of the deep feelings of peace that he felt there:

and I felt all today as i did yesterday that

peace, deep feeling of peace is here, that here is

where i should stay at least for a while (& heal

the nerve-ends), that here things would grow,

things would speak (kal, summoned to mind,

seems a wild, wild merry-go-round from

here.) that here the days would go as though

nothing were happening, but something would

be happening, that i would do nothing all

day long, but toward evening of every day

I’d write (& slowly become) more articulate

almost every time i’ve been here the days have

gone that way: i’ve felt as though nothing

were happening: yet at the end of the year

i’ve found that the work i did at patmos was

(often) the work that stood.

- Robert Lax