Tuesday, January 27, 2009: Midweek Eucharist and Centering Prayer

The guest preacher at today's midweek Eucharist was the Right Reverend Michael Lewis, Bishop of the Anglican Archdiocese of Cyprus and the Gulf, a large province that includes Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and Iraq. Bishop Lewis spoke of Jonah, the obstinate, angry, fearful prophet who fled from the summons of God, whom sailors tossed into the sea in order to quiet a storm, who spent three days and three nights in the belly of a fish, and who, upon his deliverance, was charged by God to go to Nineveh and proclaim its imminent destruction.

This Jonah promptly did. Yet an unexpected thing happened. In an age when bearers of such gloomy tidings were regularly ignored, scorned, persecuted, and even killed, the people of Nineveh listened to Jonah and repented of their wickedness. Seeing this, God changed his mind about destroying the city, and instead spared it and its 120,000 inhabitants. Amazingly, this sign of mercy enraged the prophet, who huffed off into the wilderness, grousing about his ill use by his Lord and asserting, like some sulky teenager, that he wished he were dead.

In his sermon, Bishop Lewis spoke of this story as a cautionary tale for all of us who resist a divine leading, then relent and follow it, only to complain when it doesn't lead us where we expected. He said that Jonah's mistake was to cast God in his own image, and then to get upset when that image failed to comport with the reality of God's love. The story of Jonah, according to Bishop Lewis, is an illustration of God's capacity to change his mind, time and time again, because he can't help but love us.

It was an affecting sermon, especially since ancient Nineveh lay just across the river from what is now Mosul, in the country that we know as Iraq. I got the sense that Bishop Lewis identified to some degree with the truculent Hebrew prophet who was called to preach in a troubled land.

Following the celebration of the Eucharist, a few of us gathered, as we do every Tuesday, for centering prayer. Bishop Sutton talked about what St. Teresa of Avila called the "consolations" of prayer, those experiences in which the contemplative feels herself particularly close to God, when everything seems charged with the divine mystery. Yet even these positive experiences, she warned, can prove dangerous and unproductive if we cling to them, if having them is the reason that we engage in contemplative prayer.

Someone asked, what is the point of meditative practice, if not to have these experiences? Bishop Sutton replied that the point of prayer is not having an experience or receiving a reward, but entering into a relationship. He compared to an adult child who visits his mother; the son doesn't expect his mother to give him anything, necessarily, but visits her out of love, simply to be in a relationship with her. If we cling to specific types of experiences in prayer, he explained, then when we stop having them, we think that God has abandoned us, or that we're doing something wrong.

As the Quakers say, that spoke to my condition. One of the biggest impediments to my meditative practice over the years has been a desire to return to "peak experiences" of the kind described by Maslow. When they've eluded me, as they so often do, it's easy for me to let the practice fall away. But Bishop Sutton compared a regular practice to a marriage, in which the euphoric highs of the honeymoon period invariably fade, but can, in the best of circumstances, be replaced by something deeper, richer, and more enduring.

Like Bishop Lewis' message about Jonah, Bishop Sutton's remarks about centering prayer were, in the end, about love.

Love is hard.