Weekly Meditations

He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.  He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”                           Mark 4:39-40

The apostle Paul tells us that we are to be transformed by the renewing of our mind (Rom 12:2).  This is the invitation of the gospel—to be converted, in mind and spirit, from what we once were to that which we can only become through faith in Christ.  To the Catholic theologian Robert Barron, this conversion represents a transformation from a mindset of fear to one of faith.  In his book And Now I See, he explains how this exchange more properly defines the word “repentance.”

The word so often used and so misleadingly translated as “repent” is metanoite. The English word “repent” has a moralizing overtone, suggesting a change in behaviour or action, whereas Jesus’ term speaks of change at a far more fundamental level of one’s being. This Greek term, metanoite, that we translate as “repent” is based on two words, meta (beyond) and nous (mind or spirit).  In its most basic form it means to “go beyond the mind that you have.”

For Barron, to go “beyond the mind that you have” is to exchange an orientation of fear for one more rooted in faith.  He describes some of the conditions of fear that we shed as part of this conversion.

When the trials and anxieties of life confront the ego, the first reaction is fear, since the ego is fundamentally persuaded that there is nothing “under” it or “behind” it, no power beyond itself upon which it can rely.  Fear is a function of our lives at the surface level. When we fear, we cling to who we are and what we have; when we are afraid, we see ourselves as the threatened center of a hostile universe, and thus we strive to defend ourselves as we lash out at potential adversaries, real or imagined.

The opposite of fear, of course, is faith—the disposition that we assume only as we align ourselves more securely to the fact that it is God who undergirds life.  Barron writes,

At the foundation of our existence, we are one with the divine power which continually creates and sustains the universe, held and cherished by the infinite love of God.  When we rest in this center and realize its power, we know that, in an ultimate sense, we are safe, or in a more theological term, we are “saved.”  And therefore we can let go of fear and begin to live in radical trust.  But when we lose sight of this rootedness in God, our lives are more dominated by fear and we live more exclusively on the tiny island of the ego.

Jesus’ promise of abundant life is directly related to His command for us to exercise faith.  Faith expands our sense of freedom and therefore our experience of life.  Barron comments on this increase when he writes,

To overcome fear is to move from the pusilla anima (the small soul) to the magna anima (the great soul).  When we are dominated by our egos, we live in a very narrow space of fear.  But when we surrender in faith to God our souls become great, roomy and expansive.

The story of Jesus calming the storm contrasts the fact that the Lord is “asleep on a cushion” while the disciples are panicking in fear.  To Barron, this disposition of rest symbolizes faith, unaffected by the fear-storms that would otherwise dictate our experience of life.  Faith turns the tables on our fears.  It calms the waves and stills the storms that otherwise cause us to shrink back to our smaller state of soul.  Instead, we get to approach all things with the more expansive soul of faith.

God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance.                   Rom. 2:4

It’s often been said that God accepts you just the way you are, but loves you too much to leave you there.  Because of such love, we are constantly inspired to make changes in our lives.  Through the Holy Spirit, the Lord also sustains our hope that change is actually possible for us.  And this is good news as there is nothing more discouraging than to feel you are stuck where, or with who, you are.

Everybody wants to change.  It is one of the primary themes of our Christian hope—that  change is not only possible, but that it is God-ordained and God-empowered.  A sustained desire for change expresses the living hope that we can actually become the people we feel called to be.   And our participation with such change is one of the ways we honour God—by submitting to the transforming action of His love in our lives.

Change, for any of us, begins with a deep and honest desire for renewal, which the Bible calls repentance.  It is the spirit by which we recognize that what we are is less than we should be, and by which we welcome the transformation that God invites us to.  One of the truths that motivates us in our desire to change is, of course, God’s goodness.  We recognize the gracious gift of salvation that God has given us through Jesus, and we respond by consecrating our lives out of love, worship, and gratitude for what He has done.

We are also motivated to change by a growing awareness of our need for healing.  As we recognize the many ways we are trapped and hindered by habitual behaviours and addictions, we find ourselves desperately seeking alternatives.  We come to God in the hope of being freed from whatever keeps us captive to life.  Recognizing the disorder within, we welcome the ministry of the Great Physician in faith that He not only has the power, but also the desire to heal us.  The confidence by which we embrace such faith is evidence of the Holy Spirit within us, actively drawing us to Jesus for healing.

Repentance, then, is ultimately an act of hope that lies at the heart of spiritual growth.  We welcome with gratitude the desire for transformation that the Holy Spirit inspires in us, as well as the God-given faith that such change is actually possible for us.  We marvel that this hope continually resurrects in us, and that we do not, more naturally, succumb to despair.  We watch ourselves rise, again and again, in the assurance that “He who began a good work in us will carry it on to completion” (Phil. 1:6).

Because we believe in the promise of God, we confidently anticipate the gift of a transformed life. Through the same Spirit who empowers us to seek purity, we celebrate the realistic hope that change is not only possible, but inevitable as long as we remain attached to the vine of Christ.

Wisdom’s instruction is to fear the LORD, and humility comes before honor.
Prov. 15:33

In his book, Heaven Begins Within You, Fr. Anselm Gruen describes the wisdom of the desert fathers as a “spirituality from below.”  It’s a wonderful term that speaks of one of the more counter-intuitive paradoxes of Christian spiritual direction—that in order to rise, we must first descend.  And descent, for the Christian, is always a matter of more fully embracing the humble poverty of our being.

For the desert fathers, the way to God naturally leads to deeper self-knowledge, which will always produce humility in us.  In other words, we ascend to God by descending more honestly into our own reality. To grow in humility then is to have the courage to face this truth, to accept the humus of our humanity.  Only those who fully embrace their earth-bound condition can experience a true relationship with God.  As Gruen writes,

Humility is the test of whether one is truly living with the spirit of God or not.  Without humility we always risk taking over God for our own purposes.  Humility is the prerequisite for letting God be God, for developing a true sense of God as the wholly Other.

A maturing relationship with truth inevitably produces humility in us.  It unveils our false self as God’s light reveals to us the untruths we have otherwise been living under.  As Gruen observes,

Humility is the appropriate human response to a true experience of God. The closer people come to God, the humbler they get.  They recognize how far removed they are from God’s holiness.

Humility, then, is both the path that leads to God as well as the disposition by which the ultimate goal of our faith—unity with God—is arrived at.  It is the means as well as the end of spiritual maturity.  Gruen writes,

The place where we meet our own powerlessness is precisely where we become most open to God.  For it is only when we are stripped of our own sense of sufficiency that we discover what God has in mind for us, and what divine grace can make of us.

Though we are often tempted to believe that poverty of spirit is something that must be overcome on our path to fulfillment, Jesus counters this with the opposite assurance—that our poverty of spirit, far from hindering us, is actually the place where we most directly encounter the blessing of intimate fellowship with God (Mt. 5:3).

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

Mat. 11:29

Be strong and courageous, because you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their ancestors to give them.   Joshua 1:6

Much debate took place among diplomats and political leaders during the 1930s over the type of relationship they should have with Adolph Hitler.  Many spoke of appeasement and counseled a non-confrontational approach.  Others were less sympathetic to what they already saw as a dangerous precedent.  It took a long time to know, with certainty, what type of person and regime they were dealing with.  But once that verdict was reached, their relationship with Hitler changed quickly from one of appeasement to one of active resistance.

The book of Ecclesiastes agrees that there is a time for war and a time for peace (Eccl. 3:8).  There is, similarly, a time to wait as well as a time to fight for what we have been waiting for. And the wisdom to know the difference requires precise and careful discernment, especially when the resulting actions are such opposite ones.  Is it a time to wait further on the Lord, or a time to lay claim to what God has given us?

For many of us, the discipline of waiting on God is the one that we most need to cultivate.  If we are to truly know God’s leading in our lives we need to curtail our propensity for going ahead, too soon, in our own strength.  But people who are practiced at the art of waiting on the Lord must also be careful to not assume that this same recourse applies to all situations.  There is an important distinction that needs to be made between resignation and waiting on God in faith.

Though it often masquerades as faith, resignation is actually a form of spiritual laziness, or worse, of defeatism with regards to hope. The root meaning of this word is to “give up a position.”  Resignation no longer leans forward, but now leans back as it adopts a philosophical stance that is more akin to fatalism than faith.  Though it accepts its predicament it no longer does so in a disposition of hope, but one that actually disempowers that hope.  Its effects serve to weaken rather than strengthen our faith.  Those who opt for resignation neutralize the process of discernment and, because they are afraid to hope, they are no longer in a ready position to act.  In times when we should be mustering the courage to act, the enemy, as it was with Hitler, is quite happy to see us resigned to the side-lines.

Israel spent years in the desert learning to wait on the Lord.  There, they were tempted with doubt and discouragement with regards to God’s promises.  But after forty years of learning how to walk at the pace of God, there came a moment when it was finally time to act.  They were now called to take possession of the land that had been promised them, and to do battle with whatever opposed them in this.  “Be strong and courageous,” the Lord told Joshua, “because you will lead these people to inherit the land.”  To wait any longer before claiming God’s promise, at this stage of discernment, would be disobedience.

What are the things in your own life that God is calling you to lay claim to?  How are you tempted at times to simply resign yourself to what is?  In what ways would this be tantamount to giving up on hope?  And what would the empowerment of faith look like instead?  These are questions that are well worth exploring with regards to the subtlety of our disposition—whether we are truly exercising faith, or whether we have given up and replaced faith with resignation.

The mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace.  Rom. 8:6b

We learn much about the peace of God through the practice of silent prayer.  We also learn about ourselves and how difficult it is to remain in this peace.  Significant transformation is needed before we truly come to rest in God.  What is your experience of this type of conversion—from a restless heart to one that has become stilled in God’s presence?   Here is how I see it unfold in my own prayer life.

Usually the first ten to twenty minutes of my daily prayer are spent working through the more immediate and pressing issues of my life.  My heart, it seems, still needs to process the residue from recent events.  Since my mind is too active to pray in stillness, I pray instead according to whatever presents itself, including the concerns and petitions I carry for others.  I allow my heart to feel whatever it feels as I consider, in the presence of God, whatever needs to be considered.  Like a massage therapist working out the tension in my muscles, God gently loosens the knots in my heart until these initial issues have all been acknowledged. Eventually, this first agenda exhausts itself and my inner life becomes more settled. I can now begin to negotiate stillness.

Curiously, it is at this point—once the initial flurry of thinking has stopped—that I find myself most challenged.  I am no longer sure where to put my focus.  What am I supposed to do now that I have run out of things to talk about with God?  It feels like the prayer must be over.  In order to proceed I have to now face the challenge of an emptiness that I feel quite anxious to leave.  Where prayer began with the mind, it now continues as an act of the will in which I choose to remain in the disposition of formless prayer as I wait and watch for God.

Silly thoughts now appear out of nowhere.  Anything and everything seems to offer itself as fodder to fill the uncomfortable vacuum left by silence.  Each new thought, though knowingly unimportant, vies for undue attention.  It feels like I am in a room full of children who know they’re being ignored, and I have to make a conscious effort to remain detached from my thinking.  To try to stifle these thoughts would only serve to warrant the attention they seek.  Instead I have to let them be, not allowing them to monopolize my attention.

The focus of my prayer now shifts to the stillness and silence I am being invited to.  At this stage I am more aware of the presence of the Holy Spirit between and below the activity of my thought life.  I have more of a sense that I am participating with God—that I am being led and taught how to pray by the Lord Himself.  My inner life slows down.  At times, it seems to come to a standstill where I get to gaze, if only for a few seconds, at the shimmering nature of my existence in God.  Like Julian of Norwich, who understood God’s creativity in the universe by meditating on a hazelnut, I understand, in the microcosm of my own inner workings, something of God’s intimate ways with all creation.

From this disposition, I am better able to witness the subtle ways of the Holy Spirit.  My attention now turns to how I participate, or not, with this stillness.  Every movement of my own initiative I treat as suspect.  No longer am I seeking myself but I am now seeking God, which I must do at the expense of myself.  As I catch myself wrapped again in the blanket of an attractive thought, I gently break its grip.  I let it dissolve, unrequited by my validation.  Though I grieve the loss of whatever delight these thoughts promise me I must choose, over and over again, the uncertainty of what awaits me in silence over the self-created life I have in hand.  And in the process of such conversion, I am led to a deepening relationship with the stillness of prayer from which I come to better “know that He is God”   (Psalm 46:10).

The desert fathers taught their disciples to  “pray with the mind descended into the heart.”  Perhaps this is also what the apostle Paul means when he speaks of “the mind controlled by the Spirit.”  As our self-generated life becomes more submissive to the life of the Spirit within us, we will experience something of the peace and life that can only come from yielding to God’s ways.

There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his.

Heb. 4:9-10