Tag Archives: Holy Spirit

Compline at St Mary’s Church, North Marden

Posted on October 9, 2012 | 2 Comments

For many of us the richness and depth we have found in our relationship with Christ through the intentional practice of contemplative spirituality has been like setting a fire in our hearts. I know for me my journey with God would have come to a stagnation had The Holy Spirit not graciously and mercifully blown me gently in a direction I would never have thought to travel in, left of my own charismatic proclivity.

There are many markers I could reference from the last 5 years that demonstrate Gods consistent faithfulness to me, even when I have been too slow and thick to realise. Prayer walking, the discovery of bird song as the chorus of heavenly worship, moving beyond buildings and discovering that creation is the cathedral of my worship, stillness and silence and the practice of learning scripture, so one is carried by the words formed in you, rather than recited in front of you, are just some of the markers on my journey. Indeed discovering that life itself is a journey and peregrination on the road that leads us home, has been a great source of comfort to me, given my continual sense of disaffection for the world and its pretenses to power and its claims of ownership over my soul. All these discoveries and more have had a profound personal impact upon me and how I see myself in the world. But they have been personal and although I am sure if I ask my wife she would say I am basically a nicer person to live with as a result, the primary beneficiary of this process has been me.

But over the last few months something has been stirring in the City of Chichester where I live. I have started to meet with other journey men and women who have been on a similar path. This pilgrimage has led all of us to discover a desire to explore a more collective approach to prayer and contemplation.

So on St Francis Day (4 October) eight of us gathered for the first time to celebrate Compline (night prayer) in a tiny 11th century chapel nestled in the South Downs. St Marys is not used for public services any more, given that the hamlet it is based in only has a few houses these days.

St Mary's North Marden West Sussex

Although none of us really understand the nature of the journey we are on, like all travellers, we can tell you were we have come from and are sure of where we want to end up, but are often unclear as to which path to take to link the beginning and the end.We have found that our individual paths have connected and as we sat in the silence of the candle lit church, beyond the reach of roads and the general white noise of suburbia, we sensed a connection with the undertow of the Holy Spirit pulling us forward into a fresh encounter from an ancient day.

None of us know where this will lead, also none of us are interested in new models of Church or building ‘a new thing’ that can be commodified. What we do know is that as we grow in our personal rhythms of contemplative prayer, worship and allow this to impact the world around us, and the Spirit will in time find a way of pluralising the veracity of what is happening.

I am glad that I am on a journey and that I can find comfort in the fact that others are walking with me.

Greg Valerio

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Posted in Personal Journal, Pilgrimage

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The Spiritual Essense of Contemplative Activism

Posted on June 22, 2012 | 2 Comments

Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing

Contemplative Activism is a simple idea. An idea rooted in the belief that Jesus calls us to live in him. ‘Abide in me’, is the divine invitation to spend intentional time with Jesus. To make the point of living in the now moment. Jesus, in John 15 speaks of the vine, of being grafted in and an organic joining of being. I recollect my grandfathers, often failed attempts, at grafting new strains of peach onto his beloved peach tree. The surgical incision, the well trimmed branch, the careful insertion of the branch onto the main trunk of the tree and the binding of that grafted branch into position in the main tree. The sap from the principle tree would join to the open wood of the grafted branch and if the grafting took, would feed the new branch and in time the new branch would become one with the tree and eventually bear its unique fruit.

What is important to retain in this image is that the grafted branch does not change its DNA or its uniqueness, it merely draws its life from the mother tree and in doing so continues to live and bear fruit. The branch does not strive to fulfill its purpose, it is totally reliant on the mother tree to give of its goodness, allowing the new branch to survive and thrive.

I believe Contemplative Activism is born from the same dynamic. We abide in Christ, we are fed by Gods life giving Spirit. As we give ourselves to be grafted into the life of Christ, who is the True Vine, we know that we will bear good fruit. Our activity, so to speak, will flow organically from a place of Gods creative nature and dynamic activity in life and the world.

Many can see this as folly, passivity, or an abdication of responsibility for the world around us. This is especially true of social activists, who can often fall into the trap of thinking that their pursuit of justice and social transformation is only legitimate when they are fighting the good fight, expending all their energy in being busy (for the right reasons of course) and reshaping the world in the image of Gods justice. This identity can so easily become a false identity. For all the right intentions, the social activist can take on the strategies of the world, to change the world and in doing so, is changed into the likeness of the world.

Jesus is clear, Abide in me, be intentional with me, focus on me. I am the true Vine, make sure you are a part of me first, before anything else. For the activist this intentional step away from the distractions of changing the world and focusing on dwelling in the true vine, causes the life giving, explosive creative energy of the Spirit to work itself through our lives and into all we touch. I often think of this as taking a swim in a river. I am in the water, I am staying afloat through prayer, the current of Gods Spirit is taking me towards my destination. I am in motion, I am in the powerful flow of the water, yet I am doing very little apart from allowing the water to do its work.

This is the heart of Contemplative Activism.

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Posted in Personal Journal, The Contemplative Network

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The Borderlands of the Soul and Violet Sunbirds.

Posted on November 27, 2011 | 2 Comments

Borderlands define movement and place. They act as signposts and landmarks that help the pilgrim who is journeying to locate where in their journey they are. The ancients understood borders as places of change, as moments of transition, places of great instability and in many cases areas of warfare and contesting.

A borderland is a point of crossing that is marked not only in the geography of the land, such as a river crossing, a mountain range or a forest, they can for the ‘peregrinus‘ also be defined by moments and movements of the soul. Moments where God breaks in or out and we find ourselves crossing over from one landscape to another.

This is certainly my testimony. For some months I have been sensing that my time in the fair trade jewellery world I have predominantly inhabited these last 15 years has been drawing to a conclusion. Equally since 2008 I have been smelling fresh pastures and my walk with God has been increasingly defined by hunting out the smell and following the scent. To mix my metaphors I have felt I was on a railway track, one of the twin tracks of my journey being Fair Trade jewellery and the other being ‘contemplative spirituality’ and investment into what I have given the loose working title ‘Celtic Spirituality’. I found myself in the delusional notion that I had to hop from one track to another in order to maintain momentum. The tragedy being that as in the case of twin parallel tracks, they may always point in the same direction, but will never converge. I was living in the curse of dualism and justifying it through the hubris of apparent success.

This dynamic journey towards the Trinity is often authenticated in locations. My great fortune has been the wonderful opportunity God has afforded me to travel in different lands and cultures. On my recent trip to Kenya I found myself in the heart of what I believed to be a routine exploration in Fairtrade Gold that turned out to be anything but.

As I sat in the front room of my friends in Mwanza Tanzania, having had to get out of Kenya for security reasons (the Asian gold mafia were unhappy that we were wanting to introduce a fair trade transparent and traceable system to the local gold market), I suddenly realised I was at another borderland in my journey with God and in fact had now reached the crossing point. In my journal I had written the following extract prior to my trip.

My journey with God is a ‘peregrination’ through different landscapes and the transition that is now upon me is more like coming to the end of one landscape ‘Fair Trade Jewellery’ and moving into a new landscape called ____________ (name unknown at the present time). I still walk in the landscape of FT Jewellery. As I write this in Migori Kenya, the suffering of the poor is acute and obvious and it seems on one level such a futile exercise to offer hope without the certainty of change. This journey of mine has been tempestuous, full of battles fought, many of them won, some lost, but I am weary and I bear the scars of the battles I have been through. Yet as I walk I can smell the fresh air of change blowing from the landscape that is before me. I have not reached it yet and the challenge I see now is to identify the final rivers I must cross before I enter the new land. Equally as the the new horizon comes into clearer view, what are the markers that will signal the border crossing?

Confused and deflated I was rethinking my course of action and going over in my mind what my next steps might be, now the purpose of the trip to Kenya had fallen through. I was mindful of the twin tracks in my life. I felt I had come to the end of the track. I had indeed reached the borderlands of my soul. But the confusion over my next step was intense.

As I rested in the safety of an armchair with a cup of decent tea, in through the door flew an Eastern violet backed Sunbird. My little friend flew over to my armchair and perched upon the end of my middle finger and remained there staring at me intently. His curiosity got the better of him after 30 seconds or so and he flew down on to the side table and inspected the tea lights. His seeming curiosity sated, he returned to the end of my finger, changed his vantage point again by sitting on top of my head, then the curtain rail, before returning to the end of my finger and watched me for what seemed like an age.

Eastern violet-backed Sunbird

Eastern violet-backed Sunbird.

My friend was the prefect message from my Creator at the time. No words, no heavy intense prayer, no noise or alter-states of consciousness, just the simple kiss of creation and the tender voice of the Creator saying ‘look its alright’. I thanked the little bird and blessed him for his sensitivity to Gods call, and away he flew, through the open door and into the sunshine of the Son.

It seems to me that one of the most important aspects of the Christian experience is that it should take place primarily in the context of a journey and not the experience of altered states of consciousness. This was an understandable misconception I believed in my early charismatic Christian days, as I moved from one altered state of consciousness to another, defining God’s presence as a mind or emotionally altering moment. The domestication of the Church of God in the houses of institutional religion has in my opinion caged our ability to enter into the wildness of the Spirit and diminished our encounter with God to altered states of being and behaviour we call ‘manifestations of the Spirit’ or the intellectual boxes we create and arrogantly call orthodoxy. The Holy Spirit has always been the Spirit of freedom and creation the cathedral of the Divine presence.

In the opening chapters of Genesis, creations journey begins with a defining of horizons; light and darkness, earth, sea and air. The Creator moves from boundaries and horizons to populating this with relationships; plants, animals of the land, sea and air and of course human beings. Humanity becomes the unique blend of the soil and the Spirit and the living being/soul is born (Genesis ii v 7). Can it be that my very being is the borderland of heaven and earth? This heady mix of dirt and Spirit is crucial to my understanding of the creation I live in. My very soul and being is the fruit of the breath of God on the dirt of my origination.

My little Sunbird is made of the same dirt I am. We share a common desire, to walk, or fly in his case, faithfully with the Creator. The in breaking of creation into the borderland of my soul, was the sign I needed to know I had now reached the new landscape I had been smelling for some months. The journey is not twin tracks that never meet, it is the continual and faithful walk through the landscape of God’s creation.

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Posted in Celtic Christianity

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