Still Thinking – the Gift of Opportunity

Two weeks ago I attended the St Catherine’s School Valedictory Ceremony in my capacity as the board member representing Toorak Uniting Church. It was a bright and inspiring event.  The graduating girls received prizes for their achievements in academic, social and community activities.  The speaker for the night was Tamara Cannon who was an old girl of St Cath’s and had ten years ago established the Lille Fro Foundation* to sponsor Tibetan children and give them the opportunity to go to school. Tamara up to that point had been a corporate lawyer having graduated from St Cath’s in 1991. In promoting Tamara’s visit, the school’s newsletter gave some background:

Up to this point, Tamara’s career had been very successful, but mostly conventional, until she was sent on assignment in Asia. Tamara took a side trip to climb to Everest Base Camp in Nepal, and when travelling through Himalayan, Ladakh India, she met a little girl living in destitute circumstances. Like many children in her village, this child had never been to school. Tamara decided to pay for her education, board and expenses.

On the night of the ceremony, Tamara spoke to the girls and their parents, about her conviction of how important it is to demonstrate care and compassion to those in need and the difference that a relatively small amount of money can make in the lives of these children, their families and the villages they live in.  The foundation sponsors over 100 children and has also built five green houses in remote areas of Tibet, helping to feed whole villages.  As part of our Toorak OP Shop Distribution for 2011, TUC will give $5,000 to Tamara’s Lille Fro Foundation and St John’s Anglican will also give $5,000.

It was Albert Einstein who said, “All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual.”  I don’t think we can ever underestimate the gift of an opportunity and its impact on a person.  In my life I can think of at least six people who didn’t give me money or advice, but gave me an opportunity to learn and even to fail; to lead or share something of myself with others and that made all the difference in my life. 

I don’t think it is true that opportunity only knocks once. What the saying means of course is that we should take advantage of the opportunities that come to us and not be too timid or cowardly about embracing new opportunities.  However, they do keep coming and while we may regret missing a good opportunity, a positive and open outlook on life means we will recognize the next possibility that comes into our lives.

Opportunity Shops are places where people can find a bargain.  They are important places where clothing and other items are recycled and reused and where the price of purchases can be kept low through generous donations and the hard work of volunteers.  TUC makes a strong contribution to our Op Shop in Toorak and can be proud of the fact that the money raised is providing opportunities for people with needs in Melbourne and in the world beyond. 

*http://www.lillefro.com.au/home

Christopher

Still Thinking –Self Love

When I was in grade seven at the Upper Mt Gravatt primary school I ran for the position of Class Captain. If I remember correctly there were at least two others in the class who were competing for the top job. I recall a conversation I had with our teacher just before the election.  Somehow we got to talking about who I would vote for, “I’m voting for Marjorie Fleming, “I said.  “So why Christopher,” said the teacher, “would anyone want to vote for you, if you are not willing to vote for yourself?”  It was an early lesson in the dangers of false humility and the courage to value and trust one’s self.

I think we in the Christian tradition have had an uneasy relationship with the notion of self-love or even self-esteem.  I recall someone saying that they were taught in Sunday School that you could remember what the word JOY meant by memorizing; Jesus first, Others second and You last.  While the intent was to develop respect for God and humility towards others, it can create in many people a devaluing of themselves and the inability to really embrace the gift of their life which is precious and unique.

Jesus is asked by a religious lawyer, reported in Matthew 22:36-39, “Teacher which commandment in the law is the greatest?”  His answer moved them away from the legalism of the Ten Commandments and the religious and ceremonial laws, to the heart of faith and life.  He replied, “You shall love the Lord your God will all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the greatest and first commandment.  And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”  Much has been made of this passage and what it says about loving one’s self.  It’s clear from the context that it is not about egoism, arrogance or self-aggrandizement.  In fact, it is quite the opposite. The passage reminds us that the measure of how we treat our neighbour is drawn for the way we see and treat ourselves.

It is more about having a right perspective on my life and using that as the base from which I relate to others.  The love of self in this passage and generally throughout the ministry of Jesus is not about self-pandering or indulgence, it is as we often have heard, a commitment to treasure and value the other person, the presence of God and the gift of life within us.  You don’t need to be a psychologist to see that when you devalue your own life, you treat with less value the lives of those around you. I have found the writings of Donald Winnicot the paediatrician and psychoanalyst who developed the Object Relation Theory helpful is this context.  He wrote:

Only the true self can be creative and only the true self can feel real….the true self is a sense of being alive and real in one's mind and body, having feelings that are spontaneous and unforced. This experience of aliveness is what allows people to be genuinely close to others, and to be creative.

It‘s why it is so important for each of us to be on a journey toward wholeness because it is out of our own lives, out of our true selves, that we act toward God and others. It is not selfish to nurture the gift of life God has given us it is in fact, the most important thing we do each day.

Christopher

Still Thinking – God and Grapes

Last week I spent a few days at Tarrawarra Abbey in the Yarra Valley.  I can’t remember exactly how long I have been going to the Abbey, I think for about 16 years ever since I returned from Canada in the nineties. I was introduced to the monastery by Rev Peter Wiltshire the Chaplain at Wesley College.  He had been attending Tarrawarra for some time and invited me to come with him on a three day retreat. I fell in love with the place almost instantly.  

The monks who run the monastery are Cistercians sometimes called Trappists.  They have owned the property since the 1950s when the house (now the guest house for retreants like me) and the land were bought by the Catholic Church.  Presently, the thousand acres is used to run 400 head of Charolais and Red Angus cattle, their main financial support.  But running cattle is not the main game.

The brothers follow a practice of the daily office which means that they pray together using chanted psalms, readings, prayers and hymns seven times a day from 4am until 8pm in the evening, seven days a week. In between these times they do the many jobs associated with running a farm and living a communal life.

Over the years I have got to know several of the brothers. While as a guest I don’t eat or share in the brother’s lives, nevertheless, the guest master often spends the evening meal with the retreatants and shares with us his views of life, faith and topics of interest.  The monastery is in the centre of the Yarra Valley wine growing region and next to Tarrawarra Winery and Museum of Contemporary Art – there is no connection between the winery and the monastery.  However, when I mention to friends that I am going to Tarrawarra for a spiritual retreat there is often the response, “Oh yeah, that’s a place I would like to go for a retreat!” Perhaps we all feel that spiritual retreats should be in austere places and not among the vineyards.

Tarrawarra Abbey offers people a place where the “memory of God” is kept alive. I am often comforted by the idea that while I am about my work back in Melbourne, the brothers of Tarrawarra carry on their daily prayer without my help or my presence. Theirs is a commitment to a particular form of the Christian faith that while it may not be mine, I can appreciate its value and am grateful for the opportunity to drop into that life from time to time.

I am sure there are many different places that can draw us into deeper and more reflective ways of living our lives.  And while just getting away for a few days can be restorative, I think it is important for all of us to find a place where we are intentional about nurturing our inner life. I know that it is not popular to talk about disciplines in the modern world.  That’s not quite true we are obsessed with physical disciplines, but spiritual disciples seem to be too restrictive for our contemporary lifestyles. Perhaps it is preferable to talk of spiritual practices rather than disciplines.  Regardless of what we call it, I need the beauty and agony of life to be shaped, formed and reformed around the practices of the Christian faith.  Practicing celebration, communal prayer, meditation, study, reflection, silence contemplation, compassion and action provides us with a structure and purpose to our lives.

There is an old Buddhist story that goes like this:

A novice asks, “Master why must I mediate every day when you have told us that enlightenment does not come through our effort or hard work?” “Ah” says the Master, “We meditate so that we will be awake when enlightenment comes.”

For me the practice of a spiritual retreat is a way of staying awake so that I will recognize the true values in life and so that in the “everyday” world I am not lulled into sleep by the seductive voices of the crowd.

Christopher

Evolution: Armstrong vs Dawkins

Karen Armstrong is a prolific writer of history, religion, and theology.  Her books include; The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2000); Faith After September 11 (2002); The Spiral Staircase (2004); Muhammad: A Prophet For Our Time (2006); The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (2006); The Bible: A Biography (2007); The Case for God (2009) just to name a few.

In the Australia Newspaper several months ago, there were two articles addressing the question, “where does evolution leave God?”  The first was written by Karen Armstrong and second by Richard Dawkins.  Dawkins is a celebrated atheist whose book the God Delusion has become a bestseller.  Dawkins has also written several books on human biology the most noted being, The Selfish Gene, where he concluded that the genes that survive in human evolution are those that have the capacity to copy themselves, hence selfish.

 

The two articles are written from very different perspectives.  And in this context Dawkins is no match for Armstrong.  To put it simply Dawkins says that evolution has made God redundant.  God is out of a job, with nothing to do.  While Armstrong argues that what we call God is not simply a supernatural being that single-handedly created the world – what we name god is in fact that which is beyond naming.  And while that maybe not be satisfying for the scientists in Dawkins, it is what has moved poets, story-tellers, musicians and a myriad of other artists to insight and inspiration over the centuries.   

As you probably assumed I come down on Armstrong’s side of the argument but I hope because of the eloquence and content of her evidence.  Armstrong incorporates into her discussion both the history and the world of religion.   She doesn’t collapse her argument into the proofs for the existence of God popular with some religious writers.  Instead, she tells the story of the history of human descriptions of the encounter with the sacred with what we have named God while rejecting the 18^th and 19^th century views of God as the great architect and designer of the cosmos as  not relevant for the 21^st century.  For Armstrong the heart of religion is the heart.  She writes:

The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry.  Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and which cannot easily be put into words.  At its best, it holds us in an attitude of wonder, which is, perhaps not unlike the awe that Dawkins experiences – and has helped me to appreciate – when he contemplates the marvels of natural selection.

We can be grateful to Richard Dawkins for putting religion and Darwinian evolution back onto the theological landscape.  The more I read about the process of evolution and particularly the evolution of the human brain and human consciousness, the more my notion of a God as a remote being, recedes, and is replaced with the God of wonder, awe, surprise, amazement and mystery.  And most importantly, the sense that I am in God and God is in me; that God is present in every moment and no longer needs to be beckoned to come. 

Perhaps that was the thing that frightened the religious people of Jesus’ day.  Jesus’ God was beyond the codifying and controlling methods of institutional religion.  Jesus also saw “religion” as dynamic and not static.  I think that fits well with modern evolutionary views.  Evolution shows us that nothing is static, everything is dynamic and changing.  Our bodies, our minds, our culture, our universe and what we call God, all is pulsating with life and new life.

Christopher

The Beauty of Imperfection

While I was studying at the University of Toronto in the late 1980’s there was a Professor of Philosophy who was fond of saying, “If something is worth doing, than it is worth doing poorly.”  He wanted to unshackle his students from the tyranny of perfection.  In his view the aphorism, “If some is worth doing, it is worth doing well,” meant that many never tried to do it at all; they were oppressed by either the fear of failure or the burden of the task.  The quest for perfection can mutate into perfectionism which robs a person not only of the joy and pleasure in what they do but can even stop them from making an attempt at it.

Instead it is often better if the quest is to discover the beauty in imperfection. The commentator Linda Johnson said:

We are bombarded daily with images of 'perfection' - the perfect body, the perfect relationship, the perfect car, house, job, health, bank balance, family and so on. We are led to believe that once we reach these ideals we will be fulfilled, so we aspire to things outside of ourselves to make us happy.

And yet when we look inside ourselves we are often confronted and taunted by our imperfections.  Our failure to rise to even our own best intentions can cause us to lose hope and stop trying.  Beauty is a very difficult concept to define.  In the same sentence I can say that my grand-daughter, my daughter and my wife are beautiful and yet I know that the beauty I find in each of them is experienced differently.

I mentioned recently that some years ago I was on a five day retreat at the Anglican retreat house in Cheltenham (which no longer exists).  Through the window of the dining room I could see an enormous oak tree in the courtyard.  The tree was gnarled and scared from a hundred years of pruning.  I remarked to one of the other people on retreat what a beautiful tree it was; that the scars seemed to be a thing of beauty showing the long and fruitful life this tree had lived.  The other retreatant looked at the tree and said, “Um, pretty old thing, maybe they should cut it down.”  The response surprised me but it reinforced in me the notion that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

The Song of Songs is a book that introduces the reader to an intimate relationship between two people.  It speaks of the physical beauty of both the Bride and the Bridegroom.  Chapter 4:1 states:

How beautiful you are, my dearest, how beautiful!

Your eyes are like doves behind your veil,

your hair like  a flock of goats streaming down Mount Gilead.

Your teeth like a flock of ewes newly shorn,

freshly come up from dipping; all of them have twins and

none has lost a lamb.

Now these are not the images that we might choose to speak of a woman’s beauty, but in the nomadic culture of ancient Israel, doves, flocks of goats, ewes and lambs were the most valuable things they had and so they are pressed into service to describe this woman’s beauty. For all we know she may have been a very average person, but through the eyes of her beloved she is transformed into the essence of beauty.

Beauty is not an absolute, nor is there such a thing as perfection.  The love of beauty teaches us that beauty is something we appreciate with the heart, rather than the eye and the heart is always accepting of life’s imperfections.

Christopher

My Grandmother’s Wisdom

My grandmother died twenty years ago last week. As a small boy, it always seemed to me that my grandmother was wiser than my parents.  I had no objective facts to prove that, but intuitively I believed it.  I knew that my grandmother wasn’t as educated as my parents.  She had finished her formal schooling at grade four.  But that didn’t matter there was something in the way she treated me that seemed to communicate that she was a very wise woman.

My sister and I spent school holidays with my grandmother, while my mother cared for my three younger brothers at home.  I never realized at the time what a privilege it was to have the undivided attention of my grandmother for six weeks each year.  She would do the usual things one does with school aged children - trips to the pictures, visits to the Myer toy department and my favourite, dinner in the Myer cafeteria.  As a child I couldn’t imagine a more mouth watering meal than a meat pie with sauce, mashed potatoes and peas served on a plate with the Myer emblem at the top and accompanied by a strawberry milkshake with double ice cream.

My grandmother would walk everywhere.  She never owned a car and buses were only for long distances.  When my parents insisted that I walk to the local shops rather than being driven, I would complain.  But strangely, walking with my grandmother was not an imposition, but rather an adventure.  Her wisdom was what I would call “kitchen table wisdom.”  She had little time for the sophisticated discussions that happened between my mother and her children.  For my grandmother, the centre of life was care for and service to those she loved. And she was a woman of routine.  The washing was done on Monday, Thursday and Saturday; the carpets vacuumed no more than once a week for fear of wearing them out; Breakfast at seven, lunch at twelve and dinner on the table at five-thirty. 

Meals were times for conversation and stories.  Her stories, as she emptied her second pot of tea, told us who we were and where we had come from.  They were liberally spiced with family faults and failures, but equally they recounted the triumphs and small victories of our forebears and relatives.  Through my grandmother’s stories I heard the deeper voice of identity and integrity.  She never preached, moralized or criticized and yet I knew what she regarded as important in life and what she valued for her grandchildren. I am sure that it was from her that I gained my appreciation of stories, not primarily as entertainment, but as access into the real world - the world of hope and despair and the world of courage and failure.

My grandmother probably wasn’t that much wiser than my parents.  It just seemed to me as a small boy that her simple love for me and her uncomplicated view or the world was a goal that I wanted for my life.  From my innocent perspective she never seemed to be unhappy, angry or sad.  But the truth is she probably was, but she never showed it to me.  Perhaps all of us can seem wise to other people when we only have a little knowledge them.

The wonderful thing about my grandmother was that even in her last years she never tired of telling family stories.  And remarkably she could tell the same story over and over again and never change a word.  We sat, listened and treasured those moments with her - waiting with glee for the often heard punch line and the glorious laughter that followed.

Christopher

The Inarticulate Speech of the Heart

I had very sad news this week.  A good friend told me that her daughter had delivered a still-born baby boy at 26 weeks.  The tears welled up in my eyes as she told me. The words to say at such times never come easily to me and any words that do come seem so ineffectual and inadequate and seem that only the inner and outward sigh is in anyway authentic.  After a time I finished the conversation saying to my friend that in my morning prayer and meditation I would draw her daughter and husband and all the family into my prayer where my longing for them would be comfort and support and that I might be present and aware of their great suffering of which I can be only a friend or perhaps a companion.

For some time now I have found morning meditation an important part of my day.  For years I struggled with forms of personal prayer that I found unhelpful and dare I say, inadequate and inane.  The notion that prayer is about me talking to God was formative in my Christian development, but over the years the words increasingly got in the way of my deepest longings.  Then a couple of years ago I discovered meditation.  Through the careful instruction of a meditation teacher and a monthly gathering with a rather secular Buddhist meditation group, I found a deep stillness and openness with in me.  The simple practice of lighting a candle, breathing slowly and attentively, being aware of my body and the life within, has become a liberating experience.  Nowhere to go, nothing to do and most importantly, nothing to say has become for me the door way to true prayer.

Meditation has brought me back to prayer, but a prayer of the heart, prayer that listens, and practices stillness and wonder, much more the prayer the Apostle Paul speaks of in his letter to the Church at Rome, “we do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” It’s strange that groans and sighs can be more articulate in prayer than a litany of words; words and words and more words.

I think we’ve got prayer wrong in the Christian church today and it is imperative that we start to get to right. This may not be the view of many Christians, but I’d suggest that the deepest longings of the human soul are not expressed in theology, philosophy or doctrines and beliefs; they are expressed in the inarticulate speech of the heart, in sighs and groans too deep for words and in awe-filled silence.

Perhaps the first posture of prayer must always be humility.  Again from the letter to the Roman’s Chapter 8, “those who search their hearts know the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for others in accordance with God’s will.”  When I am confronted with someone’s pain and suffering it is not for me to assume I know what is best for them.  It is presence, my presence and attentiveness that is most needed.  Yes some simple words can be helpful.  But being truly present and opening my soul to the other is the essence of true prayer.  And I believe it’s in this place that we encounter the real presence of the living God.

The next morning after the conversation with my friend, I light a candle, slowly breathed in and out, became aware of my body and my place in this world and I imagine a circle, at its centre was the loving presence God and there in God’s presence I named my friends daughter and her husband and the little one they had lost.

Christopher