Silent Retreat Day - The Cross

Jack Reacher, the hero of many Lee Child novels, facing a suicide bomber on a train, recognising that he is not a hostage negotiator, had this to say about himself - “Mostly I’m a very silent person.  It would be statistically very unlikely for me to die halfway through a sentence.”  Jack would probably do very nicely at a Quiet Day Retreat. 

I had no worries about the silent part of the Quiet Retreat Day at Kilravock Castle yesterday.  Having said that, I have an inner chatterbox and although I might not say much, there is a conversation going on in my head – not so much a conversation as an unspoken monologue.  I like to think that God joins in the conversation when the inner me pauses.

My worries were that despite being there the whole day, with ample opportunities to connect with God, I would not really connect at all.  Everyone else, I imagined, would be having life changing encounters and I would be frittering away the day pleading with God to say something.  It didn’t happen that way at all.

The day began with a few short notices and a tour of the castle.  It was essential to point out where the toilets were.  Perhaps the one worse thing that not being able to ask for the toilet is not being able to tell someone where they are.  There were a couple of sitting rooms and a couple of bedrooms for our use as well as the castle chapel.  Silence descended.

On the lawn at the front of the building is a huge cross.  It seemed fitting to begin at the cross.  It also seemed fitting to do something more than just stand beside it.  Sometimes when the spirit is not sure how to begin, the body can show the way.  I think if I had been watching me I would have muttered that I was taking it too far – I knelt down.  I also sat down and at one point lay down.  A man from reception very kindly brought me a rug as the grass was just ever so slightly damp.  What was intended to be a swift bow and acknowledgement turned out to be a much longer linger.

There’s no denying that the cross at Kilvarock will never be put to crucifixion use.  It is a very neat and tidy cross in the gentle surroundings of woodland walks and daffodils on the lawn.  There were no noisy crowds hurling insults, no soldiers with hammers and nails and no weeping mothers.  I could run my fingers up and down the wood and get no splinters.  There was no blood.  Crosses and crucifixions are so alien to our lives.  It’s all very clean and sanitised and it is almost beyond our imaginations to picture the reality of it.

I don’t know how long I had sat making all the usual connections one makes about crosses.  Had it not been a silent day I might have sung a hymn or a chorus.  I was aware that my mind was doing a lot of the work – I was thinking, rather than allowing God to speak.  I thought good stuff – but not God stuff.  Maybe that’s why I stayed so long.  My feet might have been ready to walk away, but my spirit wasn’t.

Imaginative contemplation is about reading a gospel story and imagining the scene as though it is happening at this moment and we are active participants in it.  It’s not everyone’s cup of tea but as a writer it goes with the territory.

I tried to put myself in the scene.  It was a case of closing my eyes and re-writing the sounds and smells around me to something closer to that day.  Did the birds stop singing the day Jesus died? I know the sun stopped shining.  My imagination introduced the shouts and the calls of the crowd and the soldiers.  I heard the rattle of dice or whatever it was they were using to gamble for the robes. 

I pictured the scene after everyone had left.  There has to come a time when you have had enough.  If you were a teacher of the law, you would have used up all your anger and vented your spleen.  There was a sense of anti-climax perhaps.  The feeling of satisfaction you hoped to feel with Jesus disposed of is absent.  Jesus’ death hasn’t brought closure.  There’s a sense somehow that it’s not really over.

I stood beside the cross.  The only part of Jesus I could reach was his feet.  I’d perhaps heard about the woman washing Jesus feet with her tears, wiping them with her hair and pouring out perfume.  It was too late for anything like that.  I wanted to touch him, but I didn’t want to embrace the blood.  If I kissed him, I could only kiss his feet, not washed with water, but stained with blood.  Did I want to do that?  Was it safe? I mean there were still soldiers around.  Did I want to align myself with someone so utterly cursed and rejected by God?

Sometimes when the spirit is not sure how to begin, the body can show the way.  I moved as close as I could to the cross, picturing myself cradling his feet.  I too washed Jesus’ feet with my tears. 

I know the end of the story.  I can’t un-know it.  I know about the resurrection.  It didn’t stop me at that moment feeling a little bereft.

God touched my heart

I connected.e already had i

Horeb

I’ve taken off the prophet

I’m dressed as just a man

Carmel’s lightning

Scorched stones and

The smell of smoke

Were yesterday

The courage I had then

Has abandoned me

The steel has melted

Only fragile glass remains

Fear strips away faith

And I run

I find the rock

That is higher than I

And I wait for the Lord

He speaks not in the wind or the earthquake

Not in fire where we last spoke

But in a gentle whisper

I, only I am left, I say

As if imparting a truth He doesn’t comprehend

He tells me a greater truth

That I am never alone

Seven thousand men

and an army of angels are on my side

He restores the prophet

And repairs the man

The courage and the steel,

His, not mine, are bestowed

He opens my eyes to see

He is always enough

Not a Sparrow or a Glutton

^“If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbour, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat.”  Exodus 12:4

It was the eve of the exodus from Egypt.  God was about to loose the Angel of Death on the Egyptian households.  Pharaoh’s continued hard heart had led to this moment.   Most people are familiar with what happens next.

My husband and I qualify as a small household, which means that if we were part of the Israelite nation at the time we would have been sharing a lamb with our nearest neighbour.  I confess that even with living where we do for the last twenty years we know very little about our nearest neighbour. 

It was not just sharing the lamb with them, but taking into account the number of people there and how much lamb was needed in “accordance with what each person will eat”.  I can just about deal with the numbers.  I know how many children there are having taught more than a few of them.  It is the appetite of each family member that would have me flummoxed.   That kind of knowledge is beyond me.  If it was my neighbour who was providing the lamb it is unlikely they would know how much I or my husband would eat.

God assumed when he gave that instruction to Moses and Aaron that it would present no problems.  The community was close knit.  They lived together in the ghetto that was Goshen.  They had a shared experience of suffering and a shared experience of joy.  They shared the same faith, bruised as it was. They knew exactly how much each person would eat.

Today many of us do not enjoy that kind of close community.  There are some people that make it their business to know everyone else’s business – but I am not one of them.

Take it into the church setting – would that be any better?  I suppose I am lucky that being a part of a small fellowship I have the opportunity to discover my neighbour’s appetites.  Some people I know better than others.  There are some people I more naturally move towards than others.  Others require a little more work to find the things we have in common, or create something on which we can build a relationship.

It requires honesty and openness.  I have begun to think about what people think about me that isn’t true.  And not just what people think about me – but what I think about myself that isn’t true either.  If I think about myself as a victim, for example, I live my life that way and other people see that and see me as a victim too.  If I pick at my food, like a sparrow, in public, but gorge myself in my own home – people see the sparrow, not the glutton.  When the neighbour finds the lamb to share with my household, he provides for the sparrow he sees, not the glutton I hide from him.  He is not able to meet my needs because he doesn’t know what they are.

There have been too many occasions lately where I have not been the “me” I really am.  The “me” I am is not really that quiet and silent.  I am not aloof and unfriendly.  I am shy and take a while to feel at home enough to unlock myself.  I am worth getting to know.  There is wisdom in me that doesn’t always lie on the surface.

If you are buying a lamb to share with me – I am not the sparrow or the glutton but somewhere between.

The Un-Persecuted Church

It might have been just a week ago, maybe a little longer than that, when I was invited to join a day’s fast for the persecuted church in Asia.  There were other issues heavy on my heart at the time, and it seemed the ideal opportunity to bring them before God.

There was a Facebook page with lots of encouraging Bible verses.  People were also posting their prayers.

The only verse that came instantly to mind was Matthew 5:10-12 - “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

What a privilege the church is Asia was being given!  What an opportunity to deliver a powerful testimony!  As much as I could say Amen to all the prayers people posted about God’s hand being on the believers there – what caught my spirit was “How blessed!”

Where did the church lose its courage?  We seem to put a very strong emphasis on safety and comfort.  We want people to like us.  We want them to bow to our superior knowledge about God and allow us unhindered freedom to demonstrate our faith.  When someone is sacked because they wear a cross, or because they pray for a patient in hospital – they don’t feel blessed but hard done by.  When we read news items that mock and ridicule our faith, we write a letter of complaint and seek to silence the dissenter.  We feel ourselves to be victims but we don’t feel blessed.

I was reading an article on the internet this morning about a mega church in the USA.  Apparently it was common knowledge that a worship leader was having an affair with someone else in the church.  It was only a worship leader, so no one expected anyone to kick up a real fuss about it.  Chances are it might have been more serious if it had been an elder.  Indiscretions were often swept under the carpet rather than acknowledged and dealt with. 

The article went on to talk about how stagnant some of this church had become.  They had started life as something new and original and people flocked to them but now something newer and more original had come along.  There was an exodus of people leaving to join the new movement. If they wanted to halt the exodus they needed to do what the newer churches were doing and let go of out-dated ways of doing things.

If I was God I would be very disappointed in a church like that.

What they really need is a healthy dose of persecution!

I remember being weaned as a baby Christian on testimony books like Nicky Cruz and “Run Baby Run”.  One of the books I read might have been entitled “Sergei”.  It’s a long time ago.  The story was about an underground church in the Soviet Union as it was then.  One of the soldiers was Sergei.  He had the job of tracking down the church’s hiding places, arresting the believers and “persuading” them that being a Christian was a bad thing.  One church member, a girl, was arrested on three different occasions and severely beaten by Sergei.  The fourth time she was arrested, another soldier was about to lay into her with fists flying when Sergei stepped in to stop it.  He couldn’t understand why she was still a believer despite the beatings.  He became a believer himself through her testimony.

Isn’t it possible that the reason why the church in some places like the UK has a hard time attracting people is because it appears to have nothing people are looking for?   Make no mistake, people are looking for something – and it’s not something new and original in terms of worship, sermons or whatever latest fad is being offered up to draw people near.  The church has become so like the world to appeal to the world that what made it distinct from the world has been lost.  I’m not even sure the church has realised it has gone.

I am not praying that we become a persecuted church – although maybe I should.

I pray that our witness to the world would stop being so pale and insipid.

Our lives luke-warm no power or clout
So God in Heaven spits us out

How to Pray

For those who keep asking God to teach them how to pray - here's my answer!

How to Pray

Begin your prayer with silence

Resist the urge to speak

Too many words can hamper as

The Father’s face you seek

You need no holy phrases

Or hallowed thees and thous

The spirit stirs the tongue to speak

The words your heart allows

Don’t wait for days of sunshine

Or days of storm and cloud

Your presence is His throne room

Is every day allowed

Remove the masks and make-up

The things you hide behind

God sees the heart within you

Your naked frame designed

Prayer must not be one-sided

For God has things to say

Concerning how you live your life

Before the world each day

Seek out that quiet refuge

Where spirit bows undressed

In sharing joys and sorrows

Your soul finds needful rest