Skip to main content

Sunrises


In 1991 I was vicar of a large charismatic parish when a phenomenon called the Toronto Blessing hit town. It was a sort of hyper Pentecostalism which involved people falling over and laughing- the twitch and gibber school of theology. It appealed greatly to some people in my parish but for me, it didn't excite any spiritual enthusiasm at all. Quite the opposite, in fact, when I saw the effects of 'The Blessing' in some people's daily lives. Although I had been a card carrying member of the Charismatic Renewal for a long long time, I was rattled. Is this what Christianity was really all about? Of course a lot of other things were happening in my life at the time, and in the middle of my questioning I took a book off my shelf that someone had given me five or so years before, but which had sat unread and neglected ever since: Gerard Hughes' God of Surprises. The book was a bombshell in my spiritual life. And in one of those odd pieces of synchronicity that happens to us from time to time, I picked up the newspaper on the day I finished the book and saw that Gerard Hughes was in town and giving a lecture the very next day. It was then that the charismatic renewal and I filed for an amicable and, I hope, mutually respectful divorce.

I haven't read God of Surprises in a long time: much has moved on since. But the reason I am remembering that synchronicity is that there has recently been a similar one. Readers of this blog will recall me lamenting and beating my breast over a perceived lack of a modern Christian tradition of meditation. I have been trying to forge my own little tradition out of Meister Eckhart, by way of Anthony DeMello and with not a small amount of Buddhist wisdom stirred into the mix for good measure. Well blow me down, if a week or two ago I don't stumble across a Benedictine called Laurence Freeman, who has written enough books to choke a moderate sized horse, providing of course you didn't cheat and shred the books first. He is a student and interpreter of John Main, also a writer of several books. Freeman, and I assume Main before him, write with great wisdom and practicality about the whole business of Christian meditation which they have been teaching for some decades. There is, apparently a worldwide network of Christian meditators with two (2!) groups meeting in Dunedin! There is a wealth of literature. Laurence Freeman is coming to Dunedin and will hold a workshop here in less than a month's time. Ok. I'm listening. There is a centre for Christian meditation in London where I will be in a few months time. Their catalogue of courses looks really good.

I have been reading Laurence Freeman's The Selfless Self, and finding it, like God of Surprises both a revelation and a homecoming. He teaches a mantra based meditation that is more or less compatible with what I have been doing already, and which I have able to adapt to quite easily.

There is no arrival point on this great inner journey. We set off in search of the one true light and find it revealed to us in a series of sunrises - a sunrise that can only ever happen when we have experienced sunset and night. Of course in the new dawn we realise that what we have left behind at dusk has been the same light that now, again, beckons us forward; and which will no doubt set again. And rise.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Yes!! I am delighted to read this Kelvin.

Much love
Roz
Ricky Spears said…
Kelvin - I just discovered your blog. Excellent stuff here! I've especially enjoyed your articles on Christian mediation, which is what drew me here.

I've been publishing my own guided Christian meditations at Mindful Worship. I'm not a student of any of the books and authors that you mentioned, I've just become aware of how mindlessly so many of us Christians go about our Christian walk and worship. I've added those as suggestions for my reading list though, so thanks! I'd love to hear any thoughts you may have about my site too.

Thank you - Ricky Spears
Anonymous said…
Thanks, thanks - yet again, for what you are sharing. For alerting us to probably the most important thing we need to know, if we want to live and BE as our Creator intended.

Have just been to the WCCM site and listened to John Main and Laurence Freeman explaining so gently, simply, lucidly how to approach this awareness, how to move away from self and let the "Other" be.

Note to other readers of this: I found the FAQ on the above site very helpful, too.

Kelvin, may God continue to give you the energy for this blog, and courage in the challenges of these days as the treatment grinds on.

Love,
Noelene
Alden Smith said…
Interesting, do I take the last paragraph to be a sort of metaphor for reincarnation or am I reading too much into what you are saying here?
Kelvin Wright said…
Noelene: Laurence Freeman is speaking at Holy Cross on the first Sunday in February 4-6 pm. I thought, seeing as it's scheduled to be a contemplative eucharist that night we might just hold fire and all go over to St. Kilda. What do you think?

Alden: That's not what I intended. I was thinking more of the way our lives are divided into phases or periods, each divided by a sort of conversion. Fowler, in Stages of Faith has got these periods neatly described and says they are common to all people; that we all have a faith system which develops in fairly predictable ways - similar to the way Piaget has described the development of cognition. He says the structure of our faith changes at each of these transitions, and sometimes, but not always the content. I think Fowler has a lot to recommend him. I can identify the transition that happened for me in 1991 as the start of my own shift from Fowler's stage 4 faith to stage 5. We often think of these changes as radical shifts: once I was an atheist, now I am Christian or once I was Pentecostal, now I'm contemplative. More and more, I see them not as shifts but as developments, each depending on the one that went before, and in a sense continuous with it. The Sun that leads is through Thursday is actually the same one that led us through Wednesday.

But as to reincarnation, that's another story. I'm less convinced about that than a Christian clergyman is supposed to be.
Kelvin Wright said…
Ricky: your site is very well done, and your meditations look like a very useful resource. They are well produced and nicely paced.It is not quite what I am pursuing myself, but will certainly recommend it to those who I think would benefit from your approach.
Anonymous said…
YES, Kelvin, that would be a great idea. We should make the most of this only visit to a South Island city. And... there is a purpose in this timing, don't you think?
Not sure about venue details in your above comment though. Here's what I found on WCCM site about Laurence Freeman's NZ 2009 visit:

February 1 New-Zealand - Holy Name Church - 420 Great King Street - Dunedin 9030 - 4.00pm-6.00pm - "The Hunger for Depth and Meaning" - Spirituality in a Secular Age"- Fr Michael Dooley, St Peter Chanel Parish, 242B Main South Road, Green Island, Dunedin 9052 ‎ - E-mail: m.dooley@xtra.co.nz
Kelvin Wright said…
You're right, Noelene. Come to think of it, Holy Name does make more sense than Holy Cross. I see there is a charge too: $10.
Ricky Spears said…
Thanks for checking out my site and for the compliments! I've subscribed to your RSS feed and look forward to keeping up with you on this journey. Let me know if I can ever be a resource or help for you.
Anonymous said…
Kelvin & Noelene - I suspect that most of those who attend contemplative service will be happy to attend this seminar - probably need to start advertising it this Sunday though. Great opportunity which it would be a shame to miss.

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old