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Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the path that leads to life, and only a … Continue reading
‘Let your vigils be constant from eve to eve, under the direction of another person’
The Rule of Columba
This year I have begun exploring the practice of vigils. For clarity’s sake my efforts have been a toe in the water, yet as I have continued to explore Columban spirituality and the broader Celtic spirituality in which St. Columba was a leading figure, I have not been able to ignore his expectation that those who seek the heart and mystery of God will take part in vigils.
A vigil is a conscious journey towards GOD set within a specific time frame. It usually takes place at night when people would normally be sleeping. Just as fasting is a deliberate deprivation of food in order to suppress the natural appetite and focus on one’s dependency upon God for sustenance. So a vigil is a deliberate denial of sleep in order to be nourished by God through prayer and mediation.
On 9 June three of us gathered at my tipi retreat space on the South Downs to explore a half night vigil and to explore two practices that were used as disciplines by the early British and Irish church.
Our setting was outside, within the cradle of creation. John Scottus Eriugena contends ‘Creation is the theophany of God’. Here, exposed to the elements of our landscape, where we can hear the evening birdsong, feel the breath of the wind, the dance of the trees, the warmth of fire, we are drawn into the natural rhythm of creations conversation with the Creator. And to this we can add our voice, our name and our prayerful imagination.
What is your mystical name?
Your name in God is both hidden and revealed. For Columba he had a name Colum cille that means ‘The Dove of the Church’. Yet his name hidden in the spirit was ‘Cul ri Erin’, meaning ‘back turned to Ireland’ as recorded in the poem Columcille fecit. For Columba, a spiritual exile for Christ from his homeland of Ireland, this was his daily reality as a peregrinus. Equally Elijah, which means ‘Yahweh is my God’ was also known as ‘the troubler of Israel’ (1 Kings 18 v18) a mandate he carried exceptional well.
Your mystical name is the name you hold that describes your identity in God. It is the name that best describes you in the intersection between heaven and earth. A name that you carry in your hidden prayers and draws you closest to your intimate relationship with God. Meditating on this fact allowed us to begin the journey towards understanding our true selves, a journey that takes a lifetime that can for those who stop to listen be caught in name.
The Prophets Bed
The Prophets Bed is a derivative of an ancient practice undertaken by Celtic bards and poets to ‘find their poem or story’. Here we used it to listen for our prayer. Prayer takes shape in words, sound, physical motion, posture and expression that facilitate you to be open and transparent before the Creator. This prayer can linked to your name and takes the shape of a blessings, a Lorica or protection prayer; the most famous being Patrick’s Breastplate, and is rooted in your authentic voice before God. God always hears our authentic voice.
If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish and it will be done for you (John 15 v7).
In the darkness we allowed our minds to focus on God alone. By relaxing in the arms of creation, you are relaxing in the arms of the Father creator. Doing this in the darkness is important as God dwells in original darkness , the uncreated light of God, and from this darkness the great conversation of creation and Word of Light emerged (Gen 1 v1-2). In the stillness we allowed our prayer to emerge in feeling, expectation and the presence of God. It is here we begin to travel along the edges of time. It is here the eternal voice of the Father and our voice find unity in prayer and conversation. As this conversation emerged we wrote it down or acted it out. We did this in isolation, with no pressure to feedback or explain the encounter. These moments are sacred prophetic times and need maturing and distillation, not instant regurgitation.
The Bards and Poets of Ireland would often lie down and fast during this time. To avoid falling asleep they would place a stone under their heads or on their chest. Columba was trained as a bard by the aged Master Bard Gemman from Leinster. Indeed it seems Columba kept this practice up throughout his life as he reputedly slept on a stone pillow throughout his life.
I finish with a quote from one of us,
“The isolated location was great and certainly helped. In addition I
was surprised at how helpful the darkness and isolation was to the
second meditation, connecting with the environment and Gods essence
within. I did have to fight falling asleep, but that I guess is part
of the process”.
Take not food until you are hungry
The Rule of Columba
Elitism is a destructive force and I am mindful of it as I write on fasting. The early British monk and historian St Gildas writing in the early 6th century was openly critical of what he saw as elitist monks who spent more time fasting than working and in doing so had made fasting and aestheticism an idol, rather than a practice through which to draw close to God.
Yet fasting has never been optional extra for those that follow Christ, it is clearly an expectation,
‘When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full‘ (Matthew vi, 15).
As my exploration of Columban spirituality has developed, I have been mindful and challenged by the simply put ‘take not food until you are hungry‘. Although not an explicit reference to fasting, it is pertinent challenge to the overweight consumption of our fast food culture. A direct addressing of our relationship with food of which every living creature naturally has a vested interest in. For many in the monastic churches of Britain and Ireland, food was taken only as required.
“When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting” St Jerome (340?-420)
Equally it has begun to sensitize me to the issue of appetite and the role food plays in suppressing and controlling the development of personality and culture. If I agree with the basic supposition that my life is dysfunctional, my character out of alignment with Gods, then I, like others am faced with stark choices as to how to respond. Food has become, I would suggest, more than meal, a shared table of hospitality, a means by which we are able to demonstrate Gods compassion for the hungry, or our daily link to the health and inherent goodness and provision of creation. The cult of food and the fulfilling of immediate appetites has become a curse to great to bear for the west, as the obesity epidemic gripping our societies indicates, as the food miles of the supermarkets cripples the environment and impoverishes poor farmers through unfair terms of trade on supply contracts and commodity exchanges. The unequal distribution of food and the millions globally malnourished as a result, is the disgrace of our scandalous selfishness that we seemingly wear with pride as we tuck into a 99 cent plastic burger in the name of ‘good value’. Are the golden arches the gateway to spiritual oblivion? These external manifestations of greed linked to appetite only exist because the internal world of the souls goodness, mingled with the grace of God has become polluted and the self substitutes this with an idol; in our case a wrong relationship with food.
As I prepare for what has become for me an annual fast leading up to the celebration of the Celtic Easter date of 15 April, one of my aims this year will be to explore fasting in a more proactive intentional way of calling out the ‘Monastic Churches of Britain and Ireland’ (as I will blog separately on this over the next few weeks of Lent I won’t explore this further in this post) This may sound counter-intuitive given that fasting is an intentional activity by definition, but I do believe for many fasting, especially in the protestant tradition has become something we do, a bit like a sanctified diet, if at all, and to a minimal impact. I hear of television fasts, chocolate fasts, my favorite computer game, Indian take away (one my wife consistently encourages). My fasting becomes the removal of a small part of the edge of my lifestyle, which may act as a reminder of Christ, but will not radically alter that trajectory of my lifestyle that may in turn move the very ground on which my relationship with God is built.
Another aspect of fasting, alongside the external political implications it can have on publicly standing against over consumption, is that it actively addresses the internal imbalance and our over reliance on sustenance that does not reflect the incarnation of God. It is only in Christ that the moral paradox of the incarnation of God as a poor man born into poverty and simplicity whom we are called to imitate, as opposed to what Julius Nyerere the first President of Tanzania once said in regards to the plight of his nation, ‘that God created humanity in his own image. I refuse to believe in a God who is poor, starving and illiterate’ can be reconciled. Fasting therefore catapults us towards being rooted in a symbolic re-imagining and imitation of the life of Christ. That life rooted in truth and the search for veracity in the earth and dust of my life.
I know Jesus fasted, and I am always drawn to the relationship between fasting and the desert. The desert a place of being alone with self, stripped of all props that crowd our life and distract us from our core being. The desert a silent place where only the cries of wildlife act as partners in our prayers. The desert a place were you are alone to battle the demons of your own self and the phantoms of your own perverted appetites. Fasting and the desert are Gods chosen partners in stripping us down to bare essentials and testing our resolve to put God before everything.
My personal practice, and one I have been developing since 2008, is to eat one meal a day after sundown. As I have repeated this each year I have built in new facets, like no alcohol, no take away food, or eating out. Each year growing in confidence that I can take another step in exploring the benefits of fasting. Last year I made the fatal mistake of externalising my fast to include greater levels of transparency and honesty in the gold trade. By the end of this fast the Christian company I was working with had defaulted on a project in Sierra Leone, been exposed as deceitful in intent, spiritually manipulative in saying because this was in the name of the Kingdom it was ok not to pay bills and left my household without an income for most of the year. This month I discover they have gone down for $2.8 million, leaving thousands without hope in the DRC and elsewhere in Africa. God honoured my fast last year, and I was totally unprepared for the consequences. A salient lesson in be careful what you ask for.
Fasting I have found creates the space both internally and externally for God to move more freely. It creates an environment of light in our lives that reveals the content of who we are and what surrounds us and hopefully will move us in such a way that as we emerge on the other side, we are more conscious of our need of grace so we may not only dream of truth, but may find the will to live with it.
Posted in Celtic Christianity, Celtic Easter, St Columba, The Rule of Columba
Tagged Celtic Easter, Columba, fasting, food culture, Rule of Columba, st gildas
St Columbanus referred to life as ‘the great peregrinatio‘, yet what strikes me as so powerful about the Celtic saints, such as Columbanus, was that their story was not just about extraordinary travels and exploits and their mastery of the seas and the mountains, but also their rigorous personal spiritual disciplines that measured the quality of the internal journey. This axis of internal and external journey, although in no way unique to Celtic Spirituality, did manifest itself in a quite remarkable fashion through those who were indigenous to the British Isles.
In my personal journey with and towards Christ, this very axis has become the biggest point of contention and opportunity in my walk with God. There is no doubt in my mind that the current state of Christianity in the British Isles is out of sync with the heartbeat of God. The heart of the British church is beating certainly, but not in its natural rhythm. I also recognise that in my own life I suffer from an irregular spiritual heartbeat, my condition a perplexing mix of my own shortcomings as a person and the pollution that exists in the atmosphere around me. How does a fish define water?
With so little attention paid in modern life to the internal journey, the feeding of the soul and the formation of Christ in the internal world has become a priority for me. The words of St Paul, ‘I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate’ (Romans vii, 16) has taken on new meaning as I explore the question ‘what is a regular healthy spiritual heartbeat?’
This question disturbs me as I find myself engaging in a process of ‘apophatic thinking‘, or ‘negative thinking’ to find my way forward. I know what I do not want to do, I know how I do not want to behave, I know what in society I do not like, yet I remain at the mercy of the very atmosphere I despise. I know for example that the pervasive religion of ‘material capitalism’ impregnates every aspect of our lives and its destructive and ungodly forces shape our behaviour and are being felt across the world, creating untold misery for millions on every continent, yet I also know I am not free of the disease and the problem is internal as well as external. Therefore Christs’ salvation in my life is incomplete.
It is to the Celtic saints and their spiritual practices, I find myself turning more and more as I seek a daily rhythm, perhaps cure is a better word, for my liberation. More specifically to the Rule of Columba, and an exploration of his contemporary meaning and application. This is for me no mere intellectual exercise. If it was I would have failed at the first hurdle on the journey, as intellectual rationalism and the disconnect it creates between thought and practice is one of the very foundation stones of the amorality that exists within the very fabric of our society.
The ascetic disciplines and practices of the Celts are very foreign to our modern culture, yet I believe they offer us a route towards a new future. The current rise of ‘post-modern monastic’ expressions of lifestyle and community give testimony to the fact that the ancient ways are no longer ancient, but are in fact timeless and eternal and are attempting to find a way of breaking into our prison cells of individualism and materialism and setting us free.
Having settled in the indigenous British spirituality of the Celtic Church, I discover a vast panorama of potential right outside my doorstep and the challenge before me now is to allow The Holy Trinity – the perfect community – to harness me to that potential and help me move away from ‘negative thinking’ towards positive practice.
The Columban rule outlines a daily rhythm of ‘prayers, work and reading’ (rule 15), of ‘regular vigils from eve to eve’ (rule 14), offers direction on silence and solitude (rules 1, 5, 21), in fact covers a multitude of disciplines that engage not only the internal world of devotion and intimacy with Christ, but also the external world of ‘alms giving & work’ (rule 18 & 16) and how in simple ways to interact with others (rules 5, 6, 21). In the few years I have been working with this rule I have found its true wisdom rests in its power to re-orientate the inner life in a direction that is contrary to the course of the world. It echoes St Paul again when he cries;
all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are Children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ (Romans viii, 14-17a)
These rules act as guide to lifestyle and behaviour that in turn assist in attuning me to the course of the flow of the Spirit in life. Rather like a river that flows through the landscape of our lives. If the virtue of following an external rule is building those rules into your life and this very act in turn builds discipline that brings stillness and receptivity to the presence of God, then the building of the river banks is a sacred pursuit. On reflection the only form that the Spirit of Christ desires to dwell in and upon is the natural one that was created by God in the first place. The skin I am in and the land I walk on is the only home I have that God can dwell in naturally so I must become the vessel we journey together in.
What I am enjoying about the exploration of the Rule of Columba, is it takes place in the land from which it was born. In this world of homogenous global culture, of which Britain, as a historical empire and an eminent financial and military power has helped to shape, I am rediscovering the indigenous Spirit of the Creator in the beauty of this land that is being liberated into a new and emerging story. I know it to be a story that began with the ‘believing diaspora’ who fled the Roman Caesar’s persecution of the ‘followers of the way’ as they landed on these shores seeking safety. A story that blended and filled out the native culture that in the words of the Welsh bard Taliessin ‘we always new Christ as Creator, but never knew his name’.
It will again be a story that in the pagan barbarianism of unfettered materialism that is now the dominant culture, can find its voice, a discipline and a power to connect the Christ of all creation ‘to all who would receive him‘ (John i, v12).
Over the last decade I have been making a local pilgrimage to a wonderful location in the West Sussex South Downs called St Michael’s and All Angels in Up Marden. There are many reasons why I migrate weekly to visit Michael but the principle one has been the ‘quality of the conversation’.
As an aspirant of the Rule of Columba, the primary requirement is;
‘To be alone in a separate place’
This old Celtic rule, so rooted in the pastoral and rural life of 6th century Iona, recognises the primacy of solitude before activity. This aloneness with Christ before the busyness of the day, or the business of God, requires a location that can embody, nurture and externally express the deepest yearning of the disciple to ‘abide in Christ’.
St Michael's and All Angels Church.
St Micheal’s and All Angels is such a location. It has over the years become the cradle and the wide embrace of the invitation to encounter the Divine. It is what I have come to know as a ‘thin place‘. Here the air is very thin and the veil that clouds my perception of the work of the Spirit is drawn back to enable heaven and earth to truly become friends again.
The stillness is alive, Heaven’s presence punctures the worlds pugnacious self and the logic to make myself present in the early morning kiss of the sun of the Son, is to be washed by the Holy Spirit in meaning and fulfillment.
This stillness is fullness, the fullness of friends. Over the years I have found the voice of John the Baptist, the light and truth of The Apostle John and the courage and strength of Michael himself. I have found my voice joining their voices in worship of Christ the Creator ‘through whom all things were made’ (John 1v3).
Basil the Great said;
‘All of life is a season of prayer’
St Michael’s has become a harbour where the life of prayer is amplified and magnified beyond chit-chat. The deep silence becomes deafening as the random voices in my head reluctantly retreat to the scrap heap of irrelevancy and the song birds become the chorus of heaven. The chill of winter breath, the incense of life.
These moments of divine conversation are a reminder to me of the purpose of life. The quality of the encounter is the core, the heat, the fire of my soul. Perhaps it is this very act of being ‘alone with Christ’, that we in the western tradition have forgotten, yet our world so desperately craves we rediscover. And perhaps it in this rediscovery that such locations as St Michael’s fulfill their true purpose. They capture the centuries of prayer and enfold them in the moment of our openness to God.
St Michael’s is a portal to the Company of the Saints where true conversation can take place. It is not a forgotten place, it is alive with the hospitality of Heaven.
Posted in Celtic Christianity, The Rule of Columba
Here I came to the very edge, where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken, by the crash of a wave
and everyday on the balcony of the sea, wings open, fire is born
and everything is blue again like morning.
Pablo Neruda.
Perhaps it is a fit of nationalist nostalgia that sweeps through me as my plane crosses the coastline of the British Isles. It is hard to tell as I have no love of monarchy, imperialism, empire or wars engaged in the name of ‘national security’. However I cannot deny my soul sings as I view the deep green islands that I live on when returning from an overseas trip. These tiny islands on the furthest edge of Europe, the subject of so much political interpretation, have for centuries captivated the hearts and minds of some of the finest poets, social reformers, Churchmen and women and spiritual journeyman our world has produced. I guess I am very much a product of their collective legacy. That heady mixture of idealism, mysticism and pragmatism rooted in the righteousness of God. A quality I believe that is at the heart of the prophetic tradition.
St Columba
This is a post about the Rule of St Columba. One of the indigenous apostles and fathers of the British Isles. A towering figure of a man who for many students of Celtic Spirituality will view as one of the archetypes who embodied the essence of what it meant to be a Celtic saint. It is also a post about myself and how I came to discover Columba’s rule and how it transformed my walk with Christ in the light of my personal journey through charismatic protestant Christianity and my vocational calling as a jeweller and activist. My story is still unfolding as I write, or perhaps more accurately I am still unfolding as I learn to yield the illusion of control and peregrinate with the Holy Spirit as the breath of God blows.
I like many in the new churches in the UK during the late 80′s and 90′s lived with a deep sense of disconnect in many areas of life. The dialectic logic and politicised discourse that shapes our modern culture and church life, left me with a sense of being pulled in many directions. One foot in the church, one foot in the world and a profound sense of being out of step with the church as a whole. I never seemed to be on message as the continual pull to serve Christ in the poor led me into confrontation with the conformist culture and theological orthodoxy of British evangelicalism (an important point to note that at the time I was not clear what evangelicalism was). This vocational calling to ‘seek justice for the poor’ led me to start Christian Relief Education & Development (CRED), the creation of a company CRED Jewellery as an economic response to the plight of the poor and then logically into becoming an advocate for Fairtrade, human rights, environmental justice and indigenous rights. Exhaustive travel to some of the worlds most remote locations became common place as the development of partnerships that reflected Gods deep moral passion for righteousness and justice began to emerge in response to the voice of the Spirit.
Yet the outward journey as exotic as it seemed was not mirrored by the internal one. The food of the soul, the true resting place of my humanity, was being severely undernourished. This lack of sustenance I was fully aware of yet ill equipped to respond to. I found the project orientated language and subsequent spirituality draining with seemingly no way of plugging the hole.
Finding the Rule of Columba, I can only describe as moment of being found. As I digested the opening statements I felt as though I had arrived at a destination and point of departure all at the same time.
Rule 1.
Be alone in a separate place, but near a chief city, if your conscious will not permit you to be in common with the crowd.
There is only so long that you can spend wearing your clothes inside out until the stupidity of how you look becomes apparent to yourself. This simple opening was a revolutionary worldview changer for me. I found that the orientation of my walk with God was principally facing in the wrong direction. Be alone became a quest for ‘our space’. Before anything I needed to find my location to encounter the Trinity. Secretly I had always been drawn to the contemplative, the hermit, the isolation of the mystic, the desert. That deep need to be alone with God.
Easter Evening 2010
For the Celtic church (like its earlier influence the near eastern Egyptian and Syrian Monastic fathers) spirituality was set in the location of creation. Creation was the cathedral of worship and Columba opened the way for me to move from the addiction of buildings, to the open space of water and wood. This in and of itself is not especially radical, but as I discovered, it had never been the automatic default of my history with Christ. In being embraced by Columba, it was almost as though permission was given to go native, indigenous. To allow the green grass and the rolling downland to open up and embrace me. Being alone (not lonely) in a separate place, was the normal state expected by God of me now.
But near a chief city, became the remedy for isolationism and irrelevancy. When Christ first called me, the simple words that came to me at Turnham Green Tube Station were ‘Come follow me, I have a specific job for you to do’. I came to understand that stillness in Christ, did not mean inactivity, it meant dynamic creativity. The City became the sphere of influence that God called me to – in my case the world of jewellery and the call for greater levels of transparency and traceability in the most polluting industry in the world, namely Extractions Industries. If I was to rest in God – the dynamic Creator – the Holy Trinity – the source of the eternal river – the ancient fire of righteousness and justice, I could not be inactive. The fire always burns, the river always runs, the Holy Community continues to love eternally. To be still and alone in the Godhead was in fact the most explosive place to reside.
Unless your conscious will permit you to be in common with the crowd. For me this was the voice of the bloody obvious and I kicked myself that I had not seen it before. The natural state for the ‘peregrinus’ is to be alone with God and moving from that place to influence the ‘city’ as directed and called. I was after all in the world, but not of it. In my early impressionable years as a Christian I had been led to believe that the key to effectiveness for the Kingdom was to be ‘culturally relevant’ to ape society but to have a different message. In short immerse yourself in the world and stand against the tide where ever possible. It seemed that Columba was saying, no. To be immersed in the world, to assume the looks, the smells, the noises and postures of society was a specific act of conscious. A dispensation given to some but not everyone, not the norm for the follower of Christ. I began to understand why the British Isles became so populated with radical monks and monastic communities during the post Roman period of British history. Why the deserts of Egypt began to fill up with aesthetics. Their conscious no longer allowed them to draw from the benefits and seductions of a world immersed in power, politics, greed, violence and consumerism. The open plains of God’s love drew them to the margins, where they encountered the truly divine hospitality of Christ.
Yet the aspect of my journey towards embracing Columban Spirituality that I have come to value most has been the new friends I have found. I have discovered Columba, John the Baptist, the captain of heavenly host Michael and The Apostle John in a new way. The great company of heaven on whose shoulders we stand are not dead, but very much alive. There words, their tone, their poetry, their confrontations, their very breath has become a refuge I seek. I knew from my personal reading that the Celts had a close relationship to the two John’s, their words and actions were to be meditated on and imitated. The voice of one crying in the wilderness was a reality for Columba given his location on the very edge of the known world. They have become companions on a road that has not been trodden by many at this time.
Being alone in a separate place is the door through which I have walked, drawn by the warmth of an ancient fire burning in the land I walk on. The sound of the indigenous spirituality of these beautiful islands I have been given time to explore. The place I sit and discover that the light of the sun is the mirror of The Son. That the evening birdsong is the chorus of heavens opera and where the voices of angels and creation are calling us through to our true destiny of being agents of the liberation of our world.
In reviewing my earlier post on forgiveness, I suddenly realised that I had missed out perhaps one of the most important factors in forgiveness. Forgiveness for yourself.
I was praying the other morning the Rune of St Patrick and I was reciting it I got to the point in the prayer when you move from the grandeur of The Trinity (opening verse), Christ saving work (verse two), The expanse of the heavenly realms (verse three), and the engagement of the material creation (verse four) to the fifth verse, where I found myself stumbling over the following highlighted (in bold) words,
This day I call to me, Gods strength to direct me, Gods power to sustain me, Gods wisdom to guide me, Gods vision to light me, Gods ear to my hearing, God’s word to my speaking, Gods hand to uphold me, Gods pathway before me, Gods shield to defend me and Gods legions to save me from the snares of the demons, from evil enticements, from the failings of my nature and from one man or many who would seek to destroy me a near and afar.
It caught my breath that in my arrogance I had assumed that my forgiveness was to be directed externally to a person that had wronged me. Yet in the same breath I was stating that forgiveness is:
Of course I believe this is true but that this was not the complete picture. I had forgotten that I must also forgive myself. My actions, thoughts, words and deeds impact me as much as anyone else. The ego can be such a dangerous companion on the journey towards the Godhead as it can blind you to your true self, by placing me at the centre of my world.
The mystics seemed to be forever in a battle with self, their isolation being haunted by images and assaults upon their beings by both the ancient enemy of the soul and of course their internal weaknesses and vices. I have found myself, as I strive to walk the intentional path of Christ, that I am constantly tripping over the sin of myself. I need to forgive myself daily and in doing so I hurdle another obstacle I have thrown down in front of me.
‘Forgiveness from the heart for everyone’, includes me and to forget this rather obvious truth is to indulge in the deepest from of self-deception that all ills, evils and obstacles in life are placed there by other people. Forgiveness of self is an act of internal humility that without which we will never inherit the earth.
In this series of short reflections on the Rule of Columba my aim is to explore the wisdom of Columba’s life in Christ and creation and to seek to apply this ancient rule, this daily walk to my own personal exploration of the life of the Spirit. In doing so I hope that in some way the principles of the Columban rule can find a newer expression and vitality in the modern era.
It has been awhile since my last posting. Perhaps the reasons for this are a timely indicator of how the intentional practice of spiritual disciplines can carry you through the cycles of disenchantment we all face in our lives. The busyness of working on fairtrade gold, family life, kids holidays and one of my intermittent waves of general apathy towards the point of existence has led to a slumbering in my soul. It is in these phases of life that the wisdom of the daily routine in prayer and meditation that has developed in my recent years of Chasing Columba have come into their own.
I climb out of bed in the morning and move to one of the places I find I can rest in to prayer. The location has become important, reflective of what I wish to say, of how I am. The vast grey clouds that rush through my gaze speak more of my general malaise that a stream of words from my mouth ever could. These times of prayer are often an open assault on myself, by myself. It is strange to think that we fool ourselves into thinking that pray is always a conversation with God. For me over the last few months prayer has been more about conversation with myself in front of God than any form of meaningful dialogue with my maker.
The vacumm that God’s silence creates in these moments of my life suck the negative residue of my life and false loves to the surface. The express train of useless thoughts, random arguments with fictional(?) persons, emotions of deep seated resentment, explosion of appetites, fantasies masquerading as prophecy, the dance of the ego on my choices and the idle inane chatter of the heart and mind create tangible turbulence in my soul. How am I to over come these disturbances? It feels like I am staring into the sun, the sun so bright and close that I am blinded by a light I cannot draw my gaze away from, as its warmth is pure pleasure, yet this pure light is as utter darkness to the human soul as I am revealed for who I truly am. The toxins of my life flood out of my history spewing on to the beach in which I must now bathe.
This turbulence then becomes the keen challenge of Christ centred spirituality.
It is in these moments when I discover my disquiet. As I travel these thoughts and turbulence’s to their origins and sources I invariable find that they all begin in my inability to forgive someone for an injustice that has been done to me. I begin to pray as Columba did, ‘forgiveness from the heart for everyone and prayer for those that trouble m’. This way I am learning the root work of the Holy Spirit as the negative narrative in my mind is captured in Christ’s forgiveness and the purifying work of the Holy Spirit exposes my true nature and makes it as it should be.
Forgiveness is an act. An act that primarily benefits me as it releases me from the potential prison of my own self indulgent madness, draws me back to the purpose of real life and readjusts the trajectory that I am on.
Columba I believe understood that the shortest rules have the most powerful impact. It is the echo of Christs prayer, ‘forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us’. Forgiveness is the doorway to true freedom and as I dwell in my greyness and state of being generally pissed off with life as a whole package (which I might add I have no earthly right to do, I confess I am addicted to hypocrisy) I discover that the power of the gospel of freedom is built upon the foundation stone of forgiveness.
Posted in The Rule of Columba
In this series of short reflections on the Rule of Columba my aim is to explore the wisdom of Columba’s life in Christ and creation and to seek to apply this ancient rule, this daily walk to my own personal exploration of the life of the Spirit. In doing so I hope that in some way the principles of the Columban rule can find a newer expression and vitality in the modern era.
Rule 2.
What has continually amazed me the most as I have attempted to understand and practice the rule of Columba has been the natural balance that continually emerges. Not a balance as one would immediately assume between two polarities, but more a movement of harmony amongst a community of relationships. Although I have come to view this as a naturally Trinitarian movement, it has not impacted my life as a reflection on a theological doctrine. It has been more an encounter between creation – creator – my own humanity. An emergent conversation between the three of us as we walk together as experienced in my own life.
“and the evangelists’ draws me out of myself, draws me to focus not just on my relationship with Christ, but links me into world of spirituality that is almost lost to us in the western tradition. Namely that of the embrace of the heavenly host and the company of saints. I am confident that Columba is pushing me to focus on the practice of following through identifying with others.
The evangelists (or apostles) where men and women who gave their all and in most cases their very lives because of this great encounter with Jesus.
The evangelists if embraced as living people, resurrected and eternally in the presence of the Father become an example of ‘how to follow Christ’. Naturally a short blog piece cannot explore this huge idea in detail yet for me their witness has come to mean the following;
The journey of the inner life is not an abdication of responsibility to the world around us, rather it is the purity of purpose and quality of this engagement that is constantly called into question. This purification of purpose and focus is the great challenge. The early followers of Jesus gave of themselves to their last breath. Columba and the men and women like him gave their lives to exile for Christ, to prayer, fasting and teaching and in every way they could, in order to imitate the evangelists in the quality of their dedication to Christ, given that ‘red martyrdom’ as the Celts called it, was not likely given the embrace that the British islands gave to the gospel.
Again I note that the call to imitate Christ and the Evangelists is rooted in a relational way, not primarily in concepts or intellectual ideas.
Finally and with great relief to me, the imitation of the evangelists became for me the opportunity to understand my own failings, as all the evangelists were to some degree or another failures at critical moments in their lives. It is almost as if this failure, most notably their abandonment of Jesus in Gethsemane and their subsequent restoration through the witness of the resurrection and the breath of the Holy Spirit gave them the moral courage to eventually face the ultimate test of martyrdom. John records in one of his letters that ‘if we say we have not sinned, then we make him a liar and his word is not in us’(1 John 1 v10).
I am glad that the naked imitation of Christ and the Evangelists means I can fail, it takes the pressure off the next step.
Sources.
In this series of short reflections on the Rule of Columba my aim is to explore the wisdom of Columba’s life in Christ and creation and to seek to apply this ancient rule, this daily walk to my own personal exploration of the life of the Spirit. In doing so I hope that in some way the principles of the Columban rule can find a newer expression and vitality in the modern era.
Rule 2.
Quite a number of years ago I came to an obvious realisation that it is was not enough to believe in Jesus, but I needed to believe in the things that Jesus believed in. I am sure for many people this is a rather obvious statement, but for me it was an important moment. It altered the course of my journey from becoming a word based person, where my relationship with God was defined by the levels of information I took in and what I could regurgitate through intellectual discourse, to a person who was intentionally seeking to understand what Jesus believed in and then trying to outwork that in my life. To be honest I am not convinced I have done a particularly good job of this, but the shift in my way of viewing the life of the Spirit was subtle yet profound for me. It led me to a series of changes that although turbulent at the time, I am now glad I took.
The first was moving away from evangelicalism, not an outright rejection of it. Evangelicalism became for me an interesting form of understanding The Trinity that seemed to be more about Father Son and Holy Bible than a honest encounter with the Triune God. In my simplistic world I could not reconcile the Scriptures claims that Jesus is the Word of God, as John so eloquently writes in the first chapter of his Gospel and the preachers claims that the Bible is the word of God. Are there two words? Is the bible Jesus? Is Jesus a book? Have we reduced Jesus down to a book? The questions however naive were very real to me and I plumped for Jesus being the eternal word and the Scriptures helping me to understand this.
Secondly it caused me to engage the plight of the poor and the Spirits’ cry for justice in the earth as a vocational calling. Justice stopped being the outworking of a law prescribed by God for all people to follow and to be punished if disobeyed, rather it became a doorway through which I could draw close to God and be embraced by the Spirit of Justice. Justice does of course transcend law as God is just and to pursue justice is to pursue God as Gods’ moral characteristic is justice. God can be nothing other than morally consistent and as the creator this moral consistency is what I have come to understand as justice.
Thirdly it caused me to reflect and to try to act upon this idea of Imitating Christ. Not easy and perhaps why Columba links the naked imitation of Christ with the evangelists as well, but more of that in a later post. Once again I found the inner journey more telling than the external one. Yet as with all things in the Divine the internal always has an external outworking. Nakedness is not a theological idea, it is a word that captures heart, spirit and compunction. It is a state of being. Naturally the practice of literal nakedness in the British climate would be an act of ridiculous stupidity and would mean death by exposure and certainly not a pleasant sight in the eye of the beholder. It became for me and what I believe to be the true intent of the rule, an idea of spiritual intent.
Nakedness is raw intimacy - the sense of the immediate, the truly close, beyond the individual. Nakedness in relationship to Christ is a place of total vulnerability and exposure to the power of the Trinity. As I reflected on it, it became not only that child like state of natural innocence and uninhibited freedom, it also became that mature condition in adulthood of passion, climax and connectedness. So many of the relationships recorded in Scripture and mystical history have attempted to capture this full exposure to the immanent and invasive presence of God. Perhaps the pinnacle of this is the Song of Songs; a rich erotic love poem exposing the disarming power of love, the passionate sexual desire it calls out, the physically disabling nature of this when lost and the prudent reminder to everyone to beware arousing this condition if it cannot be fully satisfied.
I began to understand why Columba would order his rule for living in such a way as to ensure the follower of Jesus had secured their location and space to be ‘alone and separate’ first, before engaging in the pursuit of naked imitation of Christ. Once you open your soul to the surging motion of Gods’ creative passion and love, you must be in the place to fully immerse yourself in the relationship without distraction, as there is nothing that can compare to this exposure to the Divine fire and love. The naked imitation of Christ starts with the naked exposure that mirrors the Son with the Father. Alone and withdrawn on the mountain of prayer. Not the liturgical prayer of religious obedience, rather the open, vulnerable, relational union that fulled the core of Jesus and created within the Son of Man the humanity the world finds so divinely attractive.
