Silence in the Church from a tract at Durham Cathedral

~Fr. Michael

As a child I was taught always to whisper or speak quietly in church, except when joining in acts of public worship, and only to speak at all other times when absolutely necessary. The church building was a holy place, where people came to pray and to wait upon God in silence, and to engage in chatter was to show both a lack of respect for God and a lack of consideration for other worshippers.

St. Basil, one of the great preachers of the early church, lamented people who “hurry to church, but when they arrive pay no heed to the word of God, but smiling and shaking hands with each other they turn the house of prayer into a place of endless gossiping. They miss the sacred opportunity to speak God's glory in his temple, and they are a distraction to their neighbors by turning their attention away from God to themselves.”

What is our purpose in coming to worship. We do come to enjoy fellowship with other members of the congregation, but that isn’t why we gather; rather, we come together to worship God. Basil puts his finger on the point when he draws attention to the two directions of worship. We come to listen to what God has to say to us, and to offer him thanks and praise for what he has done for us. True fellowship springs out of our common experience of worship. When, however, we focus our attention primarily on our meeting with one another, it tends to become more a meeting with like-minded individuals or friends than with fellow-worshippers, with all the dangers of exclusive groups within the wider congregation.  There is wisdom in the old adage: “Before the service talk to God; during the service let God talk to you; after the service talk with one another.”

 Most of us are so caught up with the multitudinous activities of daily life that we find we have to make some effort to “tune in” to God in church. A good way to begin is to respect the attempt of others to do so, and not put impediments in their way.

Common Life and Personal Prayer
-Fr. Michael

What would you think if you were watching a baseball game on TV, and in the interviews after the game, the manager said, “my strategy worked out well, didn’t it?” or a player said, ‘I pushed myself hard, and it paid off when I hit that home run, those other guys that I batted in would do well to watch how I do it.” You’d think, ‘where’s the teamwork? Where’s the sportsmanship?’ At the very least, you’d think some-thing was strange, because in real life, no sports team that ever talked only about ‘I’ and ‘me’ would ever win a game. What about a choir where after a performance, everyone said, “Well, I was singing at the right tempo and pitch, everyone else was slow and flat.” You probably wouldn’t waste your time going to the next concert, would you? In families, a man who is focused only on career and goals and personal gratification will be a disaster as a father and a husband. In every circumstance, a healthier, happier, more productive stance is to talk about ‘us’ and ‘we’, rather than ‘I’ and ‘me.’

When we think to ourselves about God, we tend to think about ‘I’ most of the time. We talk about ‘my faith’ or ‘my beliefs’, or we say, ‘I can’t get anywhere when I pray.’ No one would dare to say, ‘we don’t get anywhere when we pray.’ It sounds presumptuous to us. But look at how Jesus taught us to pray: Jesus didn’t teach us to say “My Father…give me today my daily bread…and forgive me my trespasses.” He teaches us to say ‘our’ and ‘us’ not ‘my’ and ‘me’ when we pray. As a result, when we pray in terms of ‘I’ and ‘me’, we can feel very alone and unsatisfied; the words seem inadequate, or unreal. This loneliness and isolation is part of what Jesus was teaching against when He taught us how to pray, and it doesn’t just happen when we talk to God when we’re alone. Often, we can be in a church full of people, and still we imagine ourselves all alone, talking to an almighty, all-powerful God who is also alone.

How did we get from Jesus teaching us to pray together into this bad habit of thinking about our-selves as isolated and separate? There’s no short answer, except to say that it goes back a long way, into our history, into what our parents and grandparents passed on to us. We humans have a tendency to isolate and alienate ourselves, which is just as strong now as it was two-thousand years ago. But the words of Jesus are just as clear and alive now as they were when He first spoke them—we are to pray ‘our Father’ before we pray ‘my Father.’ There is a sense in which there is no such thing as ‘private’ prayer for us Christians. In baptism, we were made members of One Family, One Body. So part of the challenge given to us in our baptism is to learn to say ‘we’ as well as ‘I.’ When I pray, as a Christian, I have to pray the way a baseball team plays baseball, or the way a singer sings in a choir, or the way a healthy, functional family behaves—never thinking just of ‘me’ alone. Even in solitude, even in moments of great desolation, we Christians pray as members of a worldwide community, a timeless and eternal community, The Church.

Does that mean that you shouldn’t pray on your own? Far from it! Prayer on our own, is important and necessary. In a sports team, sometimes a play will be worked out between only two team-mates; in a choir, there are solos and duets; in a family, there are special moments between brothers and sisters, husbands and wives. All of them are important and necessary, but during those special moments we shouldn’t lose sight of the bigger picture. We are part of a team, a family, and we need to know that we are never alone. That knowledge transforms us, it changes us, it gives us a sense of belonging.

What does that mean for us, here and now, as we try to pray? Part of prayer is learning that we are not alone. When we are seeking God, or looking for help, or for guidance, or for patience, or for wisdom, people from all over the world, millions of them, are praying for the same thing, encountering similar obstacles and hardships, and reaching out to God in the same way. It has been figured that if you simply say the ‘Our Father’, at any given moment, more than a million people will be saying it at the same time as you. Some will be saying it in church, some as part of a personal prayer of devotion, some be-cause it’s the only prayer they know by heart. Some will be praying it in English, some in Chinese, some in Maori, some in Shona, some in Italian—but all will be uttering the same prayer at the same time. If you think of them when you say the Lord’s Prayer, the shocking reality is that some of them (there are a million of them, after all) will be thinking of you. There is an open door in prayer that allows us to join together with countless others, the ‘silent multitude of souls at prayer’ as a friend of mine calls it. We are not alone—no matter what. In solitude, in silence, in sleep, in suffering, in birth, in death, in despair, in evil, and in good, there is always the peace of prayer available to us. All we need to do is reach out to God, and we have entered the ‘Church of Souls.’ All of creation is constantly reaching out to God—it is the great song that we are all invited to sing.

What would you do at a party if someone said, “Stand up and sing us a song!” If you’re anything like me, you’d shy away, and try to go unnoticed until the request had been forgotten. What if everyone at the party were singing the same song? That changes things, doesn’t it? It’s easier to sing when you’re part of a company of voices—in a good crowd you might belt out a song so loud it makes you hoarse, but sing-ing alone would make you self-conscious and quiet. Together, it comes naturally—alone, it takes practice and skill. Prayer is the same way—it comes most naturally when we have a sense of doing it together.

So, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for us Christians to talk about ‘my’ prayers; we can’t just say ‘I praise you’ or ‘I ask’ for whatever. But that doesn’t mean that we stop being ourselves, it doesn’t mean that we get swallowed up in some anonymous crowd. In fact, it means the exact opposite. It means we are set free to be ourselves. We are no longer responsible for doing everything—we are part of a community, and we do things together. And that means the world. It means that when we are feeling overwhelmed, it’s not all on us to fix the situation, we have a community that will help to keep us afloat; it means that when we have our doubts, we don’t need to wait for faith or believing to hit us on the head before we join in with the rest of the church, we have a community that will help to carry us through, and our faith will be nourished through them; it also means that we’re not responsible for fixing what’s wrong with the world all by ourselves, we are part of a family, and when we genuinely love each other and listen to each other and help each other, we open the door for God’s grace to heal, nourish, strengthen, and build.

"Sono Contente?"

 ~Fr. Michael

Our recent visit to a few monastic communities in Italy taught me some valuable lessons about life.  I always find monastic devotion and dedication rather remarkable, but seeing how it intersected with a different language and culture made it more so. 

The first question all of our monastic hosts asked as soon as people were settled in was, “Tutto sono contente?—Is everybody content?” Contente, I discovered, was a complicated word, with many possible translations: satisfied, comfortable, contained, settled.  It represented a lot about their philosophy of hospitality.  There was hope in their hospitality that we would have enough to be content, not that we should have every momentary whim catered to.  It is the way they live their life, and they freely share it with visitors.

Surrounded by a world of touristy materialism, and lavish opulence, these handful of monastics have found that freedom to be fully alive is found in the context of limitation.  Less is more. The grace of contentment presumes that what one has, is enough. This contentment isn’t passively ‘not caring’, instead it’s an active engagement with life now. It encourages you not to be seduced into believing you must stretch yourself to see everything, do everything, and have everything possible in order to be complete. Rather, contentment comes in growing your roots deeper, into the ground of your being.

Contentment is an active living into the depths of life as you can, right now. And you don’t need much to do that.  In fact, having too much can distract you from being able to do that.  We are invited to live into the provision and revelation of what is already around us.  In contentment we are invited to savor our lives in every way we can, right now.

Monks and nuns often say that this grace of contentment is particularly helpful when you limit your choice, when life is defined or confined in ways which you may never have imagined or desired. This certainly doesn’t mean staying put in an environment that is diminishing or abusive; but rather about trusting others in your family or community with certain choices that can add up to be a burden on you alone.  One monk I know talks about how glad he is that the burden of having to choose whether or not to go and say his prayers is removed from him.  He simply knows where he needs to be and when, he doesn’t have to check in with his mood or his ego or with the circumstances of the day.  And that is hugely liberating.

This way of living means that you must also learn to be content with waiting. This is difficult, as it radically challenges our culture’s false promises of instant gratification. But learning to wait, and to be content with waiting, reveals it to have its own power.  Waiting is a wonder, which piques your attentiveness, and which will cure or clarify your desires. Rather than expending endless energy in worrying about the unknown or wondering, you wait expectantly, and if you can, contentedly.

To be content, to live in the grace of contentment, you must give consent. God is intent on forming you (or reforming you) into the beauty God created you to be, but first you must give God your consent, your co-operation. You might say, “Oh, that would be so difficult, to be so trusting of God.” Maybe so, but it’s not as difficult as not trusting God. You otherwise have to pretend to carry the burden of authoring and managing your whole life completely on your own shoulders. To be content you must surrender trying to be your own god.

Finally:  Contentment is not one more thing to do. The way to contentment is found in surrender to God, in embracing the life God has entrusted to you. You need not go far off to discover the grace of contentment. What does travelling teach us best?  How to come home. Contentment is within your reach, waiting to be claimed.

Our Complex Minds and Our Everyday Life with God
-Fr. Michael Greene

“How’s it going with you?” “What are you up to?” “What’s that all about?”—Most of us get asked these questions pretty much every day. What’s the answer? Well, we usually answer with simple dismissive phrases like, “fine,” “nothin’,” or “dunno.” But in every case, a more
truthful answer would sound like: “You know, I’m really not sure.” Each of us has an understanding of who we are and what we’re doing, but we are far from understanding everything. There are lots of thoughts and motivations and emotions that we live through that we don’t and
can’t fully comprehend with our conscious minds. Maybe you meet someone and you don’t like them, and you just can’t put your finger on a good reason; maybe you go to a concert, and the music is so exhilarating that you feel spectacular for a day or two; maybe you put down a
crossword puzzle you’re making no headway on only to pick it up the next morning to breeze right through it. What makes that difference? No one really knows.

Our minds are layered and complex. A good example is to think of learning something new, like a language, or a musical instrument, or to drive a car. At the beginning, you have to focus and concentrate on every step: with a new language, you have to map your sentences out before you try to say them; with music every movement of your fingers requires concentration; with driving, you grind gears and kill engines dozens of times before getting it. Eventually, though, the actions become automatic, and you don’t have to think about them so much. Some deeper layer of the mind seems to take over and ‘do’ those things that used to take so much focus. After a long time driving, every once in a while you realize you’ve just driven the last 20 miles sort of automatically, while your mind was miles away. A good musician can focus on tone quality and nuance because things like fingering and rhythm are automatic; just as there comes a time in a foreign country when you don’t have to worry about where the preposition goes, you just say what’s on your mind and the people around you understand.

There are all kinds of hidden layers that are constantly at work in our minds. They can seriously affect what we’re doing, like when you suddenly get crabby and irritable for no apparent reason. Family members and close friends can often sense things about us without anything being said, and they usually act accordingly, instead of waiting for us to articulate what is going on upstairs. We love and care for one another without needing to ask for it, or explain it. The love, and the responsibility that we share, just lives down there in one of our deeper layers.

We tend to forget all of that when we pray, or think about our relationship with God. We think that when we’re praying we should feel something, or our consciousness should change. Our relationship with God is more like one with a family member or close friend. The reward in prayer comes in that day-in, day-out communication, that speaks to our deeper layers, that doesn’t require huge amounts of concentration and focus, that comes when we are faithful and persevere in our relationship with God. Some people pray as if there’s a need to squeeze every drop of experience out of every second, so prayer and relationship with God are stressful things. What would your family relationships be like if you felt like that? They’d probably be stressful. Some people pray only when they are anxious or something has gone wrong, so prayer and relationship with God are fraught with negative connotations. What would your relationship with family and friends be like if you only talked with them about the things that had gone wrong? They’d probably be pretty negative. If we can relax about our relationship with God, and live in it daily, then fear and negativity tend not to be the dominant characteristics, it becomes more real, more human. God, in fact, seems to work best on our hidden layers, rather than with dazzling signs or rigorous discipline that demand our full focus and attention.

If that’s true of the way we speak to God, which is through prayer, then it is true of the way we hear God, which is through scripture and our worship together. There are a lot of words. They usually seem like too many. Our minds can’t take all the words in, especially Bible readings and sermons. But if we think that worship is something that we need to have complete focus on at all times, well, we’re still learning it. The reward in worship comes from letting some of our deeper layers do the work, letting God speak to our whole selves, not just our conscious minds. One of the most important ways to experience liturgy and Bible readings is simply to let them wash over us. When we let that happen, we find, over time, that we are steeped in the mind of God—as one of my spiritual fathers put it: “we are marinated in Divine Love.” The reason we gather together daily for prayer and weekly for our Sunday Eucharist is so that the Word and Spirit that God gives to us as gifts can soak into our very bones.

If any of this is to happen, then there are bound to be times when we ‘don’t feel like it,’ or it all seems complicated, or tedious, or unnecessary. Musicians know that playing like a virtuoso means lots of scales and repetition; athletes know that touchdowns and home-runs are backed up by lots of laps and calisthenics; diagramming sentences is part of learning a language; studying the rules of the road is more a part of learning to drive than seeing if you can hit 100 mph in a new car. We can’t leave out parts of our prayer and worship, we can’t omit the parts of the Bible that we don’t happen to agree with at the moment—all of it is part of this process of immersing ourselves into the life of God that we have been called to share.

Talking to God and listening to God should be like any other normal, everyday experience. We don’t need to keep feeling some ‘special something’—that just isn’t natural. But if we just let it be part of our day-to-day life, then it affects us and touches us in deeper and more profound ways than we can imagine. God prefers to be hidden, rather than to be showy, and He works in ways that we cannot see, in ways that we wouldn’t expect. We simply need to carry on in faith—the rest is up to God. Jump in and soak it up!