Available Light

An address at 3 in 1, the Sunday evening contemplative group,  which meets from 5.30-7.00 pm at St Michael's Church, Dunedin.  9 July 2023. Tonight I want to talk about one of the most significant, beautiful and profound stories in the Bible: the story of Moses and the burning bush.  I'm sure most of you know it, having, like me, heard it a thousand times since we first came across it in childhood.  You know the preamble to it: how Joseph went to Egypt and rose from obscurity to become prime minister; of how he brought his whole family from Israel to Egypt to protect them from drought and how his family multiplied and filled the land; of how, after Pharoah's and Joseph's deaths, Joseph's people lost their favoured status and fell into bondage and oppression; of how the Egyptians feared this numerous bulk of foreigners in their midst and in an effort to contain them ordered the midwives to kill all Hebrew boys as soon as they were born.   Moses' story begins at t...

On Tuesday afternoon I talked with a group of staff at Woodford House, in Havelock North, about the possibilities of Christian Meditation. There has been a concerted effort by the Department of Education to introduce Mindfulness to New Zealand schools, and some of our Anglican schools have experimented with it. The government's motivation is the well attested success of mindfulness programs in positively impacting the academic, behavioural and social life of schools. Of the various methods used to introduce Mindfulness I have not heard of any which have been entirely successful, and most seem to have foundered early on several intractable problems: Training. Mindfulness is simple but not easy. It can be learned in a half hour, but sustaining it in one's own life and teaching it with the integrity which only  comes from committed personal practice is another matter entirely. The training programs are bought by schools so the providers must be seen to be giving their ...

There is nothing simpler than meditation, but that doesn't mean that it's easy. Also, it is a bit fruitless discussing meditation and learning about it in an academic sort of way. In order to really know anything about it you have to do it. More than that, you have to do it regularly and often and in a disciplined fashion and for a reasonable length of time before you can understand much about it, because meditation is about will and consciousness. Of course people dabble with it, which is perfectly OK and in truth, almost all meditators start as dabblers, but as part of the benefit of meditation lies in the discipline of it, dabbling won't get you very far in the long run. If you are serious, you will need someone to help and encourage you. A meditation group is a good idea, and the World Community of Christian Meditators has groups in many areas of the world, maybe even yours. You can get a fair way with a meditation practice by using a good book. An excellent prime...

The following audio file is an address from Knox Church, Dunedin, given on Sunday Evening, June 18 2017. If you cannot see the audio controls, your browser does not support the audio element Synopsis: Like many of my generation I entered the Christian faith by way of the Charismatic renewal in the 1970s. In the early 1990s the renewal and I were beginning to part company, and, while I was Vicar of All Saints Sumner, responding to the works of Gerard Hughes and Morton Kelsey, I began to walk the path of Contemplative Spirituality, which I have been following ever since. There is a common perception that the Contemplative path is some sort of modern add on to the Christian faith, but this is inaccurate. Modern contemplatives, such as Thomas Keating and Laurence Freeman trace their lineage back through Thomas Merton to the medieval work, The Cloud of Unknowing , and then, even further back to the great medieval mystics and the desert fathers. In fact, the Contemplative tradit...

My daughter Catherine gave me a late birthday present today: a sensory deprivation session at FloatFix . It's not something I would have chosen myself, but she knows I practice meditation, and she is prone to thinking outside the square... WAY outside the square... so the little gift voucher arrived a month or so ago, and today I used it. The idea is to float, in the dark, wearing earplugs, in a tank of water that is saturated with epsom salts and heated to body temperature. In that environment you are almost weightless and, without any sensory input, able to relax in a way not possible anywhere else. And after a week of General Synod, well, this morning relaxing seemed a pretty good idea. FloatFix is at the very bottom of Hanover St., nearly next door to Anglican Family Care. I arrived on time at 9.30, and was pleased to see that it all looked modern and clean and well laid out. A helpful bloke showed me to a  smallish room in which there was a shower and a sci-fi looking ...

Here's a secret. I learned it this past Lent. If you want to change your life, meditate for an hour a day. The changes won't happen immediately but they will happen. Sit still. Stop trying. Don't just do something, sit there . Be quiet for a change. The psychologist Carl Rogers coined a phrase, Unconditional Positive Regard , to express the attitude required of a counsellor towards the one who comes for counsel. By it he meant that no matter what was said or done, the counsellor offers support and acceptance. The extension of this regard gives an environment in which the vast resources within the client can be mobilised for their own healing. I don't know where the humanist Carl Rogers got his phrase from, but it seems that great minds think alike, for this is the attitude God extends towards us. Jesus said, Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life .  I think he meant this: get out...

....to fall into the hands of the Living God. You make these Lenten promises and don't think too much about what they mean. So, at the start of Lent I thought I would discipline myself to blog everyday,  which has got me into a habit of regular reflection and communication, and, as an unexpected and very satisfying side effect, led to an approximately 500% increase in my audience. I also stopped, as far as I could manage it, using plastic which had as one of its main results a drop off in my coffee consumption, which has got to be good for me, but you'll need to ask the planet if there were any other benefits. Almost as an afterthought I also looked at my daily meditation schedule. I sit quietly every morning for about 30 minutes. I usually do this before breakfast when there are few phone calls and even fewer visitors so it has been easy, over the years, to make this a habit. I also try, and usually fail, to meditate every afternoon. My timetable is so erratic that this...

It was an early start as I needed to leave for Queenstown by 7.00 am . This morning's readings included a verse I was force fed when a new young Christian in a Church which believed that learning Bible verses by heart was the best way for people to become what God intended them to be. I have been crucified with Christ;  and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:19b-20). I am amazed the difference 40 years makes to how I read the verse, even as it still conjures in me a deep recognition of truth. But it is some words from Jean Malcolm's Facebook page which stay with me through the day. The great Anglican spiritual teacher Evelyn Underhill once defined mysticism as the art of bringing the self into union with reality. The mystic—the truly spiritual person—is one who embraces that challenge. And that means facing realit...

1. At 4.15 the sunrise is still a couple of hours away. The sky is black and the familiar constellations are scattered across it in unfamiliar patterns. The moon is half gone but its light still shines off the snow, stretching to the mountains in every direction around me, with such brightness I could read by it. My breath freezes. The frozen snow crunches under my boots as I walk this most beautiful quarter hour of the day along the dirt road to the monastery chapel. The coyotes call to each other from valley to valley. Is it really only half a dozen times I have done this? 2. The only illumination comes from the moonlight in the tall stained glass window depicting the Madonna and child. How can a space so simple and bare be so holy, so beautiful? The monks gather on the steps. The old one, whose name I do not know, begins the plainsong, his face aglow with the seriousness of these words he has repeated every morning for, what? Decades? "Whoever drinks the water that I g...

The view from our deck about a week ago, 7 am Tomorrow I fly to Aspen Colorado, and, after a few days wait will go just out of town to Snowmass, and St. Benedict's Monsastery where I'm taking part in a ten day post intensive Centering Prayer retreat. It's silent, not even any eye contact, and involves many hours a day in concentrated meditation. Am I looking forward to it? Well, actually, no. There will be no escape, nothing that must urgently need attending to, no knock at the door or phone call to save me from facing myself. But I know that's where I need to be. And I know I will be in good hands. There's no internet and no cellphone coverage, so I'll be out of touch. Clemency and Debbie will have a phone number where I can be reached but I'm not expecting either of them to use it.

The second question new meditators ask (after what do I do?) is how long do I do it for? And there is no set answer to that. Five minutes would be pretty good if you are not currently doing any time at all, but really, to have an effect it's got to be a reasonable length of time. Twenty or thirty minutes is a good start: long enough to require some discipline but not impossibly long. It takes most people a few minutes to get settled, and to get into the inner routine required. Then you will need some time to go about your particular discipline, and then to rejoin the world again. Thomas Keating says, and I think he is right, that the body seems to have a sort of rhythm that goes in 20 minute cycles, so blocks of 20 minutes - 20, 40, 60 - works well. It's a good idea to decide on the length of time you are going to commit before you sit down. Deciding to finish "when it feels right" is an invitation to distraction and impatience. Which then raises the question, how wi...

The common wisdom is that once you have settled on a particular spiritual practice you shouldn't go chopping and changing it. By all means add to it from time to time, or experiment with other practices occasionally, but your main discipline should remain constant and regular. Think of spiritual practice in the same way you might think of music practice: it might be fun to have a whole range of instruments to become proficient at but, for true mastery, at some stage you will have to settle on one of them and devote yourself to it. True, from time to time you might pick up another instrument, and even become quite good at playing it, but your main musical discipline remains and the more often you practice it the better. Spiritual practice is ultimately about dethroning the self. If I have a range of things that I am choosing between as the mood takes me, the self is firmly in charge of my spirituality and my whole regime will be limited. The aim is to conform the self to the shap...

It's Holy Week, and today I drive to Riverton to renew my ordination vows in company with the clergy of Southland. As part of my Holy Week discipline, I have been going back to the future, revisiting the basic concepts of Centering Prayer. The first of these is to choose a symbol, a word or gesture or action or thought which will act as a non verbal reminder of what CP holds at its core: giving assent to the action of God in my life. This is what I was told to do when I was first converted: "give my life to Jesus", but of course it took about 24 hours for me to discover that this is something more easily said than done. I give my life to Jesus and then immediately try and take back the bits I think would be better under my own management, i.e. all those bits which don't fill an hour or two on Sunday and a few other daily minutes of wrestling with the Bible.  The Christian life is really an exercise in trying to live up to a promise I once made and finding myself ...

...I'll learn ya!" Brer Rabbit yelled. He took a swing at the cute little Tar Baby and his paw got stuck in the tar. "Lemme go or I'll hit you again," shouted Brer Rabbit. The Tar Baby, she said nothing. "Fine! Be that way," said Brer Rabbit, swinging at the Tar Baby with his free paw. Now both his paws were stuck in the tar, and Brer Fox danced with glee behind the bushes. "I'm gonna kick the stuffin' out of you," Brer Rabbit said and pounced on the Tar Baby with both feet. They sank deep into the Tar Baby. Brer Rabbit was so furious he head-butted the cute little creature until he was completely covered with tar and unable to move. We form an attachment when we develop the belief that our happiness depends on a particular person or a particular thing. Once the attachment is formed we are subject to two powerful emotional tangles. On the one hand there is a temporary buzz of pleasure whenever the object of our attachmen...

I set out this morning to try and define attachment. Rather than use my own words, I've borrowed the following from Anthony De Mello. "Now if you look carefully, you will see that there is one thing and only one thing that causes unhappiness. And that is attachment. What is attachment? An emotional state of clinging caused by the belief that without some particular thing or some person you cannot be happy. " "Has it ever struck you that you have been programmed to be unhappy and so no matter what you do to become happy you are bound to fail?" "Everywhere people have actually built their lives on the unquestioned belief that without certain things - money, power, success, approval, a good reputation, love, friendship, spirituality, God - they cannot be happy.... once you swallowed your belief you naturally developed an attachment to this person." "Who is responsible for the programming? Not you. It isn't really you who decided even...

Today I started a new blog, about Christian meditation, and you can find it here

This weekend was like most of my weekends. Busy. Clemency and I were on the road before 8 am on Saturday, opened some new flats at the Parata home in Gore, spoke at a Dinner in Gladstone, took part in a service on Sunday morning and then drove back to a service and dinner at All Saints Dunedin. In between events, time was filled by pastoral visits and by driving. I got home a little after 10 pm on Sunday, fell into bed and didn't wake until nearly 9 am which was the first great thing about today. The second was Paul Dyer ringing soon after I woke up to see if I wanted to go sailing. The sky was blue, the breeze was steady and the sea was calm. Did I want to go sailing? Is the Pope a conservative German? There is something meditative about sailing. There is the whole ritual of preparing the boat and then launching it, and at the end of the day, the ritual of taking it from the water and washing and derigging it. In between is a journey that is, essentially, pointless: we sailed u...

This video is "Simon's Cat". there are three episodes on Youtube, all worth a look. I thought of this today when meditating, although I was trying hard not to think of anything. My good resolve was shattered because Haku, the cat we have somehow inherited by a process I won't bore you with now, decided to join me. I was the only one in the house and she was lonely. But more, than that, she is fascinated by meditation and prayer. She knows what to do when people are asleep or when they are sitting quietly with a vacant lap. When they are in this other state, she is intrigued and tries to investgate. She pokes. She sniffs. She bats. She sharpens claws on my woollen cloak. She tries to get a response: any response, and in so doing acts (very well might I add) the part of the Zen master testing his students' resolve by stalking among them with a big whacking stick. And then, she purrs and settles down still beside me; not asleep but still. The meditating cat. I think...

Christian books on meditation do not lie thick on the ground. There's Anthony De Mello, of course and John Main and Laurence Freeman. There's a wealth of classic material if you can find it and if you can come to terms with the archaic language. Morton Kelsey has a couple of titles which include some reference to meditation, but after that my own knowledge of the literature is starting to wear a bit thin. Which is why I was very pleased to be lent this book a week or two ago. As far as practical advice on beginning and continuing meditation goes it's the best I've come across. There are some useful chapters on the theory of meditation and some advice on what is likely to happen as you settle down to a committed practice. Kim Nataraja has had a varied spiritual journey which began in Christianity and took the scenic route through various world faiths before arriving back where she started. She is now a leading member of the World Community For Christian Meditation. She ...

No one should take up meditation unless they are prepared to deal with the consequences and nobody warns you before you start what is likely to happen. At least, no-one warned me. You sit in the quiet and get the chattering machine to be still for a while. Sometimes you succeed, admittedly not as often as you'd like to be able to boast about in a blog post, but sometimes. And sometimes is often enough, especially when you are diligent about getting in some practice every day over a lengthy period of time. Every time the stillness comes, unknown to you, a small drill starts and a tiny well is sunk down into the dark bits of your mind: the bits that lie forty fathoms deep beneath the moving, shallow surface. And when there is enough of the tiny wells, the flow from them becomes steady and continues even in the parts of your day when you are not meditating. Especially in the parts of the day when you are not meditating. Life changes happen. Old issues are raised. Light is cast into pr...