We asked the question, what makes prayer contemplative? And now we want to speak a little more about how to go about it. But I have a feeling that some of you might have felt this morning that what we were really talking about was what makes life contemplative rather than what makes prayer contemplative. Well, behind this stands the tacit assumption that life and prayer are not two different compartments, that we will really be men and women of prayer only if our whole life simply becomes prayer. And this is not a far-fetched notion, but that is just straight out of the New Testament, where St. Paul repeatedly tells us to pray without ceasing and to pray at all times and so forth. So all of our life ought to become prayer, but that means that we must make a distinction between prayer, in that full sense, and prayers.

[01:12]

Prayer is that drawing near to God, as one of you put it on that slip there beautifully. Drawing near to God, or as the Baltimore Catechism puts it, a lifting up of heart and mind to God. That whole idea of lifting up, of going up onto the peak, of drawing near to God, that is very close to us. It means prayer is an attitude. Now, prayers are a particular time set apart or particular exercises that cultivate and foster and strengthen that attitude of prayer. But prayers are not an attitude. Prayers are an activity. And everything in the spiritual life depends on learning to imbue every activity with that attitude of prayer, not only that particular activity which we call prayers.

[02:15]

And actually we will probably find that it is easier for us to accomplish other activities prayerfully before we learn to even say prayers prayerfully. It is easier for us to do with mindfulness, with a heart lifted up to God, other things than saying prayers. We should not jump to the conclusion that we know what it is like to pray because that's what we do when we say our prayers. We should look somewhere else. and see what it is like to pray and then say, and that's what we should even do when we are saying our prayers. And that's exactly what we did this morning. We looked at the one experience which we can be pretty sure that everybody has had and which is the epitome of prayer and which is very rarely connected with prayers directly, which very rarely happens to you while you are saying prayers, but usually happens to you in the most unlikely moments that you don't connect at all with church and religion and so forth, when you are swimming or when you

[03:29]

praying with the children, and when you're climbing a tree, and when you're drinking something that you like, or something like that, and that's the peak experience. But that is, by any definition, the epitome of prayer. That is the mystical experience that all of us have, as those mystics that Jeechuvon is, because, by definition, the mystical experience is nothing else but the experience of communion with ultimate reality. And that's almost the definition of the peak experience. It's the moment in which we experience communion with ultimate reality, whichever way we want to put that. And so that's what tells us what prayer is like. And now if we want to know to what extent our prayers, contemplative or otherwise, our prayer, we have to see to what extent is that which characterizes the peak experience, also present in our prayer.

[04:30]

To what extent is that attitude of prayer, of which the big experience is most typical, a characteristic of our other activities, all other activities, including saying prayers, or setting time aside for nothing but prayer. And this morning we pulled out somewhat maybe artificially, somewhat arbitrarily, as those things always are, but helpful in a way, I hope, three paradoxes that characterize those peak experiences. And therefore, those paradoxes should also characterize those activities all our activities and so make them prayer. That's the reason why I pulled out those paradoxes. And just to refresh your memory, the paradoxes that we found were, first, that in the peak experience we know, simply know, what it means to lose yourself and so to find yourself.

[05:46]

We just know that. We have experienced that. When we most lose ourselves, we are most truly ourselves. that we simply know that when we drop the question, the answer is there. Or, as we put it, the answer to why is simply yes, which makes no sense on the logical level, but a great sense on the heart level. or another paradox, that when we are most truly alone, genuinely alone, solitary in a good sense, and you might have to distinguish later on in the discussion that good aloneness, which we call solitude, from a destructive and corroding aloneness, which we call loneliness. But anyway, that good aloneness is also the moment when we are most truly one with all. And when we are really one with all, we find that we are really together with ourselves and alone.

[06:46]

Now, from these paradoxes, we can come to the application of those attitudes which characterize them in our daily living. And that will be the projecting of the vision on the mountain onto what happens in the valley, the projection of the vision in the realm of the heavenly temple so that the earthly temple will be built. That is the process which we call contemplatio, on earth as it is in heaven. So, peak experiences are moments in heaven, and therefore we know what it's like, and then that, or what the attitude is like, and then we project that attitude, or rather live with that attitude, on Earth. And that, supposedly, is a contemplative living, or life as contemplative prayer. Now, I'd like to read you a rather different

[07:51]

a little description of a peak experience because it will lead us into the obstacles that we encounter. And since we usually come to a meeting like that not because it's so easy, but because we encounter obstacles, it might be a good point to start with the obstacles as we are talking about contemplative prayer. We are quite well familiar with some of those obstacles. Now this while the one I read this morning came from a play, it was fiction, this one comes from a book on Rolfing about things, and Don Johnson who writes this book, it just happens to tell this experience. I walked out onto a dock in the Gulf of Mexico. I ceased to exist. I experienced being a part of the sea breeze, the movement of the water and the fish, the light rays cast by the sun, the colors of the palms and tropical flowers.

[09:06]

I had no sense of past or future. It was not a particularly blissful experience. It was terrifying. It was the kind of ecstatic experience I had invested a lot of energy in avoiding. Does that sound familiar? Now, that is precisely what I mean by the obstacles. And he picks that up a few lines later when he says, the psychotic quality of this experience came from my fear, which itself was rooted deep in my flesh. Over the years, as my body has become more integrated, the same kind of experience is available without the terror. In other words, we may have these peak experiences, which I call heavenly experiences, but they're anything but blissful. And they're anything but blissful because we set up obstacles. And the first obstacle that we encounter here is fear.

[10:12]

And that is, of course, the opposite of that aspect of God's life within us, which tradition calls faith. The opposite of faith in Christian tradition, Biblical tradition as a whole, is not heresy or disbelief or anything of that sort, but is fear, or rather, more specifically, fearfulness, an existential fearfulness. That is the opposite of faith. Because faith is not primarily believing something, faith is primarily trust. Now exegetes tell us that in all the passages, in the Gospels for instance, in which the word for faith occurs, this is the Greek word, there is not a single one in which it could be correctly translated as belief. It is always trust.

[11:15]

And there are other passages in the New Testament where it can be translated as belief, in the sense of creed, but not in the Gospels. And one reason is that at the time of the Gospels, there was nothing yet really that could have been believed or spelled out. There was not much content to the faith in Jesus. It was just a trust in the person of Christ. And that's very significant, and that is very typical for the biblical faith throughout the whole Old and New Testament, that primarily it always means trust, courageous trust, because it takes a great deal of courage to trust in someone. And then, secondarily, it also means belief, often, because if you trust in someone, then you will also believe what that person says. But that's quite secondary and is not the primary notion of faith. The primary notion is trust.

[12:17]

Now, that ties in with the whole message of Christ. Sometimes we get that quite wrong when we put too much emphasis on the creeds and on the beliefs, because it almost is presented sometimes as if Jesus came to tell us something brand new to believe. and you better believe it, and if you can't believe it, you're in trouble, or something like that, and this was the whole question of faith. Nothing ever suggests that when we really read the New Testament with open eyes and ears, how Jesus spells out His message and His coming in His own words is, I have come that they may have life and have it in fullness. Nothing at all about you better believe this or better believe that. But they have life and have life in fullness. Now, how is that connected with faith, with trust?

[13:24]

Life is giving and taking. And fear, far from giving and taking, clings. Fear clings. That is the most typical attitude of fear. It is something that is deeply ingrained in all of us and needs to be ingrained in all of us. When a baby is born within the first few minutes already, if it's a healthy baby, it has to have a very specific reflex towards fear or anything that engenders fear, and that is clinging. Sometimes the midwife or the doctor will shake the table or bang on the table or make a loud noise to check whether the baby is really healthy, and if it's healthy, it should reach up with arms and legs and grab for something. And that something is phylogenetically our monkey mother that was at that time leaping from branch to branch, and we better hang on for dear life. It goes that far back in our history.

[14:29]

It's ingrained in us. It goes back so far. And we never lose that. It stays with us all throughout our life, even physically. When we get scared, if there were an earthquake, now we would all either hang on to our chairs or to one another or something like that and cling immediately. Or we cling to our mother's apron strings or we cling to somebody's skirt tails or something like that when we get fearful. But of course this is not restricted to our physiological responses and reflexes, but that is a deep instinct and so much more What's dangerous is that when we get fearful, we will cling to ideas, to preconceived notions, to creed, to dogmas, to all sorts of things which in themselves may be very good. Nothing wrong with dogmas, but there's everything wrong with clinging, and that is the danger. Why do we cling?

[15:30]

Because we are afraid. We are afraid precisely of that give and take which is life. We are precisely afraid of that experience which can be so blissful if we have the courage for it, of losing ourselves and so finding ourselves. Maslow precisely again quotes someone, I think it's not his own statement, he quotes someone else saying, that most people are afraid of death, but there's one thing that still more people are afraid, and that's life. Everyone is afraid of life. Why? Because it is unpredictable, and we want to have everything nicely settled and have it in hand. Life is something to which we have to give ourselves, and we have tremendous resistance towards giving. Please note that I am by no means playing off giving versus taking. It's not a versus taking.

[16:33]

Life is not a giving versus a taking. It doesn't make really much difference whether you only give a breath and there stop or whether only take a breath and there stop. In either case you will suffocate unless you give and take and give and take and your heart does that and your breathing does that and your Your whole life is that give and take. The reason why I'm stressing the giving so much is that the taking takes care of itself. It's all ingrained in us and inbred in us in our particular culture. If you want to see how ingrained it is, you just need to check the language we use. And we have just countless expressions in which we keep repeating, I take, I take, I take. And we have not a single idiomatic expression in English in which we say, I give myself to something. We say, I take a course, I take an exam, I take a ride, I take a trip, I take a bath, I take a I take a drink, I take a lap, I take a ride.

[17:37]

You go on. I mean, you can just name them, scores of them. But you will never say, I give myself to this or that. Or if you do, people will think you're a little kooky. If you say, I'm going to take a drink, everything's fine. If you say, I'm not going to give myself to a drink, everybody will watch, well, gee, really, that sounds a little It's a little bit like debauchery. Unless you also give yourself to the drink that you take, it'll never go down. It'll just stay up there. It's a give and take. We say of many things that we take them, which you can't really take. I take a seat. That's correct, but unless you also give yourself the seat and let the seat take you, it'd be very uncomfortable. And we say, I take a nap. And that's quite wrong, because unless you allow the nap to take you, you won't even fall asleep. And some people are so set on taking everything, including that nap,

[18:38]

that they cannot give themselves, and so they get insomnia. And they have to knock themselves out by some sleeping pills, and only when they are really knocked out, then the nap has a chance to take them. But up to that point, they are just so accustomed to taking everything that they cannot give themselves. And so it goes with many things in our life, actually throughout our whole life. One of the great tasks is to learn to give ourselves, because otherwise we'll eventually come up against something which no one can take, and that is death. We say, I can't take it. That means it's going to kill me. And that's correct. It's going to kill you, but you won't be able to die unless you have learned to give yourself. Whatever it is going to be, whether it's an outside force or just old age or sickness or an accident, whatever it is, it's going to kill us sooner or later.

[19:40]

But, unless we give ourselves, it won't be dying, because you can be killed, but you can't be died. Our language doesn't allow us to say that. I'm being died, yes, but that means I come out green and blue and red, but not dead. In order to come out dead, which after all we should eventually achieve, we have to give ourselves to it, to that which takes us. That's the clemency task. And we learn this gradually throughout our spiritual life, throughout our whole life. There's nothing morbid at all. It's not morbid at all because we know from experience that whenever we come upon something of which we say, that's going to kill me, and we manage to die to it, we come out on the other side more alive. We know that from our experience. When we only get killed in the process and never give ourselves to it and never die, we are half dead.

[20:49]

and then a little more half-dead and a little more half-dead as we go on. But those things in our life which killed us, which we couldn't take, there are many things we can't take, to which we didn't give ourselves eventually, like so many dead branches on this tree as we look back. But those to which we gave ourselves as they took us, we're in the end life giving, to our great surprise. And the courage to do that, the courage to die into life, is precisely faith. That's exactly faith, to lose our life and so find it. And it's something with which we are very well familiar. We have done it many times, and it is on that basis, on an experiential basis, not because any book tells us that, not even the Bible. not even because the Bible tells us that, but because we know it from our own experience, that we know that when death comes, which we absolutely can't take, namely our final dying, if we give ourselves to it, it will also mean final life, fullness of life.

[22:00]

We know it from little training sessions that we have had all along. perfectly plausible to project our experience that far ahead. So it is a matter of learning to live, and that has very much to do with prayer and with contemplative prayer, because if we said that all things ought to become prayer, we could ask ourselves, well, really, all things, like eating and sleeping and walking, as everything. What's the difference then between, say, a walk, which is just a walk, and a walk that is a prayer? Precisely this giving and taking. If we only take a walk, as we say, that's what we took, and that's what we got, and there it ends, and it was a walk, and no more, not prayer or anything else. If we give ourselves to the walk as we take the walk, it'll be prayer, it'll be a give and take, it'll be life, it'll be risky, and that's where it takes faith.

[23:08]

Because if we really give ourselves to that walk which we take, the walk will take us where we didn't know before, it will take us where it comes from, and that is God. And so everything, the meal that you take, If you don't do more than take the meal, that's all you got. If you give yourself to the meal that you take, it'll take you, namely where it comes from, and that is God. And so with all of life, if we give ourselves to life, it takes us where it comes from, and that is the source of life, and that is God. And if we give ourselves to death, it will take us where it comes from, and even that is God, and it will be life-giving again. That's the great challenge of faith. And that characterizes the ambiguous relationship between faith and beliefs. We have already said that if you really have faith in someone, particularly if you have faith in life, if you have faith in the one who says, I am life, and truth,

[24:12]

then you will also believe and you will have beliefs. So faith does bring forth beliefs. But beliefs have a way of getting in the way of faith after they are there. And that is the danger, because beliefs are now something that we can cling to. And the whole trick of the spiritual life, the whole trick of a life of faith is to hold our beliefs lightly, to really give ourselves to them and to take them seriously, but that means also taking them very lightly so that we don't cling to them, we don't get stuck in them. We always know that this is the best I understood it. but it is certainly not the best that God understands these beliefs. And so we always leave a lot of margin in our faith. Our faith is always greater than our beliefs. It is the trust that God knows better what I believe.

[25:16]

God knows better. There's a similar relationship, similar to that between faith and beliefs, and that's the relationship between hope and hopes, and that brings us to our second obstacle, the first one being fear, the obstacle against God, life within us, as experienced as faith. There's another obstacle against hope. Now, let's look at hope and hopes. Hope is that inner attitude which brings forth hopes. If you think of a person that's really characterized by hope, that person will also have plenty of hopes. And when one hope is shattered, that person is still truly a person of hope, will bring forth a new hope, and a new hope, and a new hope. When all the hopes go down, that person's hope will still not be shattered, because the hope that supports and nourishes all those hopes is something that is greater than all the hopes taken together.

[26:29]

Hopes, like beliefs, have a way of getting in the way of hope, just as beliefs have a way of getting in the way of faith. Hope is that great openness We spoke about it in the context of the unconditional yes. And hopes have a way of being conditions that we pose. Yes, I have hope if such-and-such happens. Unconditioned that such-and-such happens, then I have hope. But the real hope is unconditional. unconditional over against restrictive preconceptions. And this is the second obstacle. Fear is the obstacle against true faith, and preconceptions are the obstacle against hope. preconception, that is a wonderful word, particularly if you consider that hope is that virginal attitude, that virginal openness, that virginal fruitfulness of the soil that brings forth one hope after the other.

[27:51]

It conceives, always on the spur of the moment, hope conceives, but Preconceived means not virginal, means having already conceived, means being already preoccupied, no longer preoccupied. The way in which our preconceptions express themselves are prejudice, again, prejudging, not judging at the moment, but prejudging, having already made the judgment, not being open, like a judge that comes into the chamber and has already made up his or her mind. Now, that's pretty obvious, but it's not so obvious that Optimism and pessimism are also preconceptions. We sometimes think that Christian hope is kind of the ultimate in optimism, but that is not correct, because optimism is the attitude of someone who has already made up his or her mind

[29:04]

to adopt a particular attitude, namely the optimistic attitude, regardless of what reality is like. The optimist doesn't really ask what reality is like. The optimist just uses reality to take a stance, to strike a pose, namely the optimistic pose. And how unrealistic it is, every pessimist will be able to tell you that. Because the pessimist will say that a pessimist is only an optimist with better information. But since there are 50% optimists in the world and 50% pessimists, we can just allow them to cancel one another out and then start from scratch. But if we have to have one of these poses, it may be almost better to start out with pessimism than with optimism. Because if you start out with optimism and you're stupid enough, you can go on for a pretty long time before you notice that there's something wrong. When you start out with pessimism, you get so fed up with the world and yourself that sooner or later you see that something has to be done about that.

[30:13]

And that means becoming more realistic, and that means get rid of these preoccupations and preconceptions and face reality. Christian hope is not what happens when you climb to the ultimate pinnacle of your optimism and then wave the little flag of Christian hope up there, but rather what happens when the bottom drops out of your pessimism and you have absolutely nothing to fall into except the hands of the living God. And that's that openness, you see. Nothing, just open. No preoccupations, no preconceptions, just openness. We can see, I think, that this hope is really a beautifully womanly attitude. It is, of the life of God within us, it's the most womanly expression. It is the attitude of the virgin, completely open, not preconceived, has not preconceived anything, but is open.

[31:21]

It's the attitude of the mother, who, after everything's lost and shattered, never gives up hope. You can always come back to the Mother when everything looks absolutely hopeless. And the Mother, yes, has no hopes left but hope, lots of hope, of complete openness, to bring forth the new, that seed-ground attitude. Actually, it's the Virgin Mother's attitude, hope. And it is the attitude that is completed and comes into its own when all the hopes are shattered. If you want to test your own hope, imagine that your most cherished hopes are shattered. And then what's left of your hope, that is real hope, without hopes. That is why we sing now in Passion Times, coming soon, O Crux Ave Spes Unica, Hail Holy Cross, our only hope.

[32:30]

Why is the cross our only hope? The cross doesn't look like something so hopeful. Yes, it is the only hope because the cross is that point where for Christ all the hopes were shattered. If you imagine anything that Jesus could have hoped for on the cross, it was shattered. But there remained, therefore, that ultimate openness of hope which was necessary to be filled with something that no hope could have foreseen, with the ultimate surprise of the resurrection. No one could have expected that. It takes that absolute openness, that dropping of all the questions, so that the great answer of God can pour in. And that answer surpasses all our expectations. And in that sense, openness is the great... Hope is the great openness for surprise. Openness for surprise.

[33:34]

just as faith is the courage to give thanks. It's an awful lot of courage to give thanks. We do not normally adhere to that. When somebody gives you a package, it doesn't seem to take so much courage to say thank you. Well, it looks maybe the size that could be a little gift-wrapped time bomb, but you know the giver, and you know that nobody's going to give you for Christmas a little time bomb that's going to go off. But still, your thank you is an expression of trust in the person who gives you the gift, not an expression of appreciating what's inside because you haven't looked at it yet. And if you first unwrap your gift and then say thank you, people might call you very discriminating, but they won't say that you're very thankful. The really thankful person says, ìThank you,î and then looks whatís inside.

[34:35]

And that takes a lot of courage. The expression of the trust in the giver takes an enormous amount of courage when it comes to God, because God does give us gift-wrapped time bombs, and we should know it by now from experience. And they do blow us to pieces, you see. And then the next time to say again, thank you in trust that was just exactly what I needed at the time. It may be exactly what I need this time because I trust that the giver knows best. That takes a lot of faith. And that is why faith is the courage to say thank you, just as hope is the openness for surprise. And that leads us to a third attitude that's implied in gratefulness, namely Thanksgiving, in the sense of what the Latin calls gratiarum actio, a very active thing. Thanksgiving is a very active thing, and it is doing thanks, as we may say.

[35:37]

Unless a person does thanks, saying thanks makes no difference at all. If you lend somebody a book, or give somebody a book as a present, and that person thanks you profusely, but never reads the book, you will not say that she was very thankful for the book. If that person never says thank you, but comes back tomorrow and tells you, oh, I devoured this book from cover to cover, that was a very important book for me, and still doesn't say thank you, you will certainly say, oh, she was really grateful that I gave her that book. Saying thanks is not the decisive thing. Doing something with the gift. And that's precisely what love does. Love acts. And sometimes the gift is something that you don't just accept when it's God's gift, but God gives you an opportunity to protest, and God gives you an opportunity to demonstrate, and God gives you an opportunity to do something about the situation which should not be there.

[36:42]

And then you show your thankfulness not by sitting back and saying, oh, thank you, Lord, but by doing something, like Jesus driving out the buyers and the sellers from the temple, which was religious protest, political protest, which eventually cost him his life, and yet it was an expression of gratefulness. I thank you, Father, for having put me into this situation in which I can do something about it. The obstacle against this kind of love as acting gratefully is indifference. The opposite of love is not hate. We should know this by now. However, we really love with a good chance that we also hate. Our love-hate relationships, we say. But what is that? We're talking about something very real here. We're talking about something that we have really experienced. When you hate someone, you belong to that person.

[37:44]

What is evil or life, and is very, can be very life-affirming, what is life-denying in hatred is precisely indifference, alienation from the other person. We have to make a fine distinction there. It's like cutting something with a very fine knife, because normally when we say hate, we mean something very confused, and it isn't clear to us at all whether we mean indifference, or belonging in a way that's quite comparable to loving. The cat loves the mouse so much it could eat her up, and belongs, therefore, to the mouse. And the mouse belongs to the cat. And there are many relationships in our lives in which we belong to one another, like cat and mice, or dogs and cats, and so forth. It's a real belonging to one another. And belonging is the essence of this, being one with all when you are most alone and being most alone when you are most one with all, exactly what we saw as a paradox in the peak experience.

[38:51]

The only thing that cuts that to pieces is indifference, alienation, sin. Sin, the word sin in English, is related to the word asanda, S-U-N, cutting something asanda. That is precisely from the same root as sin. Sin is that which cuts us off, which alienates us from others. And the opposite of that is belonging, being together. And therefore, that love, of which we are speaking here, the Christian virtue of love, is the acting out of ultimate belonging, of that belonging which for a moment we glimpse in our peak experience. And the center of that belonging is the heart. Our heart, we speak about centering into the heart, and this is a terminology that's very

[39:59]

traditional in biblical tradition, the heart as the center, the heart as the realm of belonging. The heart is simply that realm of our being where we are totally together. That means together with ourselves, which we are not most of the time. It's rare that we're really together with ourselves, but when we are responding from the heart, then we are together with ourselves, together with all others, and together with God. Whenever I'm really together with myself, I don't have to make a particular effort not to be also together with all others. Together means together. That's why this beautiful word has come into usage in the last 10 years in the English language. And I think one could date the threshold of the age of Aquarius with the time in which together became an adjective. And you say now, yeah, she's really together. Don't say together with this or together with that.

[41:01]

Together. That means exactly that person lives from the heart, responds from the heart. from that realm where we are together with ourselves, together with all others, together with God, because God was already together with us before we got it all together there. Like Saint Augustine says, where was I, O Lord, when you were closer to me than I am to myself? I was alienated like the prodigal son. I was out there somewhere. And then at the turning point in the story of the prodigal son, it says, and he came to himself. And from that moment on, everything goes fine. Everything just rolls off smoothly. But the important thing was that he came to himself, and then he was already there, and everything else was just an acting out. This is so important because our heart is also the organ of meaning. And we spoke about the peak experience as the moment in which meaning is discovered, so to say, is the experience that gives us a standard of what meaning really means.

[42:09]

Our whole religious search is a quest for meaning. Just as the eye perceives light and the ear perceives sound, so it is the heart, that whole person, that taproot of our person, where we are together, centered at the core of our being, where we perceive meaning. And the peak experience is precisely a heart experience. It's the experience of that ultimate togetherness. But now we mentioned gratefulness in connection with faith, hope, and love, and that is the great key, that is the great clue to contemplative living, because there's one thing which we can do only wholeheartedly, and that is to be grateful. And therefore, this simplifies matters in the spiritual life enormously. We can scrap all the rest of our vocabulary and only be concerned with living gratefully. And the moment we live gratefully, we have entered into that heart reality, we have entered into faith as the courage to be grateful, we have entered into hope as the openness for surprise, we have entered into

[43:22]

love as the acting out of that gratefulness, the gratia romantio, and that is the key also to the meaning of a given world, because we speak of it as a given world, we speak of it as a given reality confronting us, and we speak of it mostly when we don't like it. We say, well, it's just a given situation we have to deal with. It's just a given world in which we live. When everything goes fine, you will never hear people saying, well, it's just a given world, it's a given situation. We call it given almost to remind ourselves, well, it's given. So the only appropriate response is thanksgiving. And the moment we can get ourselves to giving thanks, We have adopted a position in which we can make sense of it, in which it becomes meaningful to us. Before we do that, it may be given, but we are not adopting the right position to it.

[44:25]

And that thanksgiving, as I said, implying faith, hope, and love, employing God's life within us is now mindful living. To live gratefully means to live mindfully, means to live considerately, and you remember what we say about considering, means living contemplatively in that full sense, because that gratefulness is precisely the lifeline which we have to ultimate reality. It's that umbilical cord that connects us with God, gratefulness, fullness out of that heart in which God is closer to us than we to ourselves. It's what T.S. Eliot calls a condition of complete simplicity. That's why it is so simple, that's why it simplifies our spiritual life so much. But, it goes on to say, a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.

[45:30]

And that's why it is so difficult. Okay, maybe that's enough for input for how to go about it, because it leaves many, many practical questions open. And that's exactly what we'd like to get our teeth into now and toss around. And again, I would suggest we maybe have a little coffee break. Take a coffee break and give ourselves a little coffee. But before we do that, if there's some immediate question that you need for clarification, yes. Right. How do we show ourselves grateful to adversity? The keyword is opportunity, but the gift is not the adversity.

[46:40]

The gift is the opportunity. God gives us an opportunity, if there is something that we see that's wrong with the world, to set it right, even sometimes at the cost of our lives. How about cancer? would apply, of course, not just to cancer, but to any similar situation, something which is given us as a task. If you speak about some other disease, like appendicitis or something like that, then obviously doing something about it with this opportunity is more applicable. When it is something about which we cannot do anything directly, To listen so carefully to what it is telling us, to be obedient in that sense, will channel meaning into it.

[47:49]

And listen carefully because absurd, the word absurd means literally absolutely deaf. Surdus means deaf. in Latin, and absurdus means thoroughly deaf, absolutely deaf. So when I call it something absurd, I think I'm saying something about reality out there, but what I'm really saying is something about myself. I'm saying I'm absolutely deaf to what it's telling me. And therefore, the only alternative is to become obedient, and obedience is, again, the absolute opposite of absurd. It means thoroughly listening, thoroughly listening. And so, if we are confronted with something which, at first sight, appears absurd to us, the alternative is to listen so carefully to what God is saying at this present moment. I will definitely pick this up tomorrow much more extensively because we will speak about the one great dimension of prayer, of contemplative prayer, which the Bible knows as living by the Word of God, being nourished by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

[49:08]

And that's where it fits in. But for the moment, maybe this is a sufficient answer. I'm not quite sure. It's impossible to be grateful for anything without talking about the other things. It's impossible to be grateful without letting that go. Absolutely. Sending something back, maybe. I'm not going to say that, but that's a thought. I would even go one step further and say, in an ultimate sense, it is always healing. It's just a question of what is more important to be healed, that wholeness, you see, that wholeness into which we enter in through love, or just a particular bodily wholeness.

[50:19]

Sometimes it is necessary to go through that ultimate dying of the body to achieve the ultimate healing. That's easy to say for someone who is not yet directly confronted with it. Sooner or later, we are confronted with it anyway. But it may sound a little gib, and I would be very careful to tell that to someone who tells me that they're just really confronted with terminal cancer. You would have to put it in other words. than I have put it. Yours was fine. But still, ultimately, as long as we are discussing it here, that is all we can do. See, hope is so open for surprises that hope is open to the surprise that if the worst happens, it will still be the best. It's that paradox. And before we've gotten to that openness, that surprise, surprise, what happened was worse than anything I could imagine, but it was the best that could have happened.

[51:21]

This would really be the ultimate surprise. And that might often be the ultimate surprise. We have experienced it on a small scale, I'm sure, throughout our lives. Not easy. Costing not less than everything. Well, maybe we can have a little break now. Would you say just a few minutes and bring your coffee back as soon as everybody has their coffee? I will try to repeat the questions, but there were some very interesting comments that, of course, I can't repeat verbatim, and it would be nice if we had those on tape, too. Now, where shall we pick this up? Your last statement today was that if the worst happens, it is the death of the realization of hope.

[52:32]

How would you then, in an understanding of sin, When I said the worst, it had nothing to do with sin, of course. Well, let me talk about sin. Probably the easiest way of saying something about sin which is faithful to Christian tradition and not to stumble headlong into all sorts of misunderstandings, is today to speak about it under the term of alienation. This word, together, as an adjective, is about as good a word in today's English as any to translate what past times meant when they used a variety of other words for human perfection.

[53:46]

For instance, if the Bible says that Joseph was a just man, if you said today that Joseph was a just man, probably all that you would get across is that he didn't cheat his employees or something like that. If you really wanted to say that Joseph was, what the Bible means when it says that Joseph was a just man, you would say Joseph was really together. And that would get the whole thing across. Together, that's the word. And the opposite of that is alienation. And if you speak today of alienation, you have right exactly what the past called sin, only that you have eliminated most of the misunderstandings. And you zero right in on the decisive thing, because alienation is also of one piece. When you are alienated from yourself, you are, by that same token, alienated from others and alienated from God.

[54:47]

You can't say, well, I'm still alienated from myself, but I'm really together with others, really together with God. It makes no sense at all. Where the rift is there, that cutting asunder that is in the very notion of sin, it goes through all the different realms. I was not talking about sin at all. And how does this rift come into our existence? It isn't that there are certain things which are evil and certain other things which are good, as if this world were composed of a kind of a mixture of good and bad. this world is good and God made it and said it was very good and God saw it and said it was very good. There is no part of this world that we could say is not good because that would be an insult to its maker. What is evil and what tears things asunder

[55:48]

is exclusively an attitude towards it. And one and the same thing that is good for others is evil for others, depending on how they cling. And clinging, grabbing, is what constitutes the sin. Does that help a little bit? I thought you referred to the consecration. inadequate. I don't know why you didn't make it stronger. I think that if I played it this way, would you agree? You asked the question, would cancer also be the best? You just asked me, could it be the best? How would you respond? How can you be grateful for cancer? I would say the same way as you can for a million dollars. It's the givenness, that is, the givenness is a set of events which is tossed out neutrally, neither good nor evil, it's the maker, whatever you call it.

[56:49]

And our response is neither good or evil, except our response makes it so. So the response to cancer is very opportunistic, so gratitude comes in. If you respond to cancer in a creative way, that's how you're grateful to it. Because we will all die, we will all have events that happen to us. And the first thing we come to terms with in my case, we come to terms with the absolute givenness of existence over which we have zero control. The only thing we have control over is our response. I completely agree and also I'm grateful that you brought it up because that is the key to its happiness. What we really all want, the one thing we can presuppose of every human being is to be happy. That's what we are all after in the full deep sense. It means peace of mind, not this happy-go-lucky thing, but deep peace of mind is what we're longing for.

[57:52]

And gratefulness makes us happy. Now, we always think it's the other way around, happiness makes us grateful, but that's wrong. Unless a gratefulness makes us happy, no happiness will ever make us grateful. We all know people who have all the things that you think one needs for happiness, and they are anything but happy or at peace because they are not grateful. They want more, they want something else, and therefore it is all meaningless to them. We know other people who have all sorts of problems, crosses we call them, difficulties, and they are deeply grateful for their problems. And so they are very happy and to perfectly at peace. So this is luck, good luck is not in our power. Sometimes it's given and sometimes it is not given. But gratefulness is completely in our power. I don't question what you just said about being graceful for their problems.

[58:58]

I don't think that there are many people who are graceful for their problems. I think that it's possible to be graceful in the middle of problems. That's better. In the middle of a problem. That's better. I don't discourage somebody to think that they're doing a good thing. No. I can understand you responding to the point that being graceful is because of the opportunities that you have. The key word is, again, opportunity. That's the thing. You're never grateful for something that's difficult. You can't even get yourself to be grateful for something that's very difficult. But you can always be grateful for what it does to you, for the opportunity, or what you can do with it. I just want to say something to that. What would be... ...that comes through our schools. It's a task to prevent it from happening again. But when you talk about gratitude, yeah, then you can think of the strength and the faith and the hope that you are able to prevent it from happening again.

[60:10]

You are pressed further. I don't know. Well, I think it is, of course, but once the subject is broached, then silence about it looks too much like a cobot. So, of course, seeing this, what it should do for us is to It's what we call compunction in the jargon, in spiritual jargon. It should cut us to the quick. We should take it to heart. That's what we should do with it as onlookers. And always carry it with us and always make us alert and aware to what really our destructive possibilities are in each one of us. should make us, for instance, alert to the fact that there are things going on in this country now towards which the citizens of this country take the same attitude the citizens of Germany took.

[61:18]

to Auschwitz and excuse themselves, we didn't know anything about it. Well, the Germans, I lived in Germany at that time, or in what was considered Germany, lived in Austria, they said exactly the same thing. We knew it sort of with not quite looking at it, you know, something like this. So we are not so different and not so much in a different boat. But where it really gets difficult and where where one is even more inclined to be silent is when you speak about the people who suffered that way. And if it weren't that the Jewish people in their own scriptures are given the the clue to it in the story of the Suffering Servant that means the Jewish people in Isaiah, the various songs of the Suffering Servant, then one couldn't see anything about it. But so one can just point towards this that so many hundreds of years ago, two and a half thousand years ago, a Jew already gave the clue to it.

[62:30]

And this is a universal clue that everybody has. I was very deeply impressed. Last year I had the opportunity of meeting the Dalai Lama when he was here in this country and someone asked him a rather slanted question, something like, the Buddhists have such a wonderful doctrine for overcoming suffering. Why is it that those Christians now for 2,000 years have been wallowing in suffering? Something like that. And it would have been very easy for him to just say, well, fine, we are very happy to have this fine doctrine, and that's all, and leave it at that. But he came right back at the questioner rather aggressively saying, wait a moment, so to say, you know, that's not as glib as this.

[63:33]

And he said, suffering is not overcome by leaving pain behind. Suffering is overcome by suffering for others. which is, at the same time, perfectly Buddhist, and perfectly Christian, and perfectly Jewish, and perfectly everything has to do with religion. We talk to the Catholic Church, we talk to the Catholic Confessor, we often think about that anger is one of those views of life threatening, or Well, what we've been talking about is the concept of life, of my life, or my view of the situation, which in fact has expanded my life and is of ultimate importance. And if one sees one's own life as the wholeness or fullness of God, which in fact has been incorporated and fulfilled by Jesus,

[64:44]

Then, what I must admit, I saw a lot of attitude, excuse me, to that kind of discovery of that kind of situation at some time. Because there's meaning in my suffering, there's meaning in my dying, there's meaning in the way that I relate to this. Because I've marked my own fate on life. Yeah, it rings true to me and I'm sure it rings true to many of us at this point, but I'm so careful not to say something now that would sound good, but when I get into the situation, I might not be able to say it. I'd have to eat my own words.

[65:47]

It's a similar situation with talking about nonviolence and violence and the situations in which maybe violence is also a correct response. You have to let those who are in that situation make that decision, particularly if they have been non-violent up to that point, and then make the decision that under certain circumstances violence is correct. You just bow before them and you say, well, when I come into that situation I will. try and do the right thing, too. That's why I'm a little hesitant to say these things before the fact, but as much as one can say before the fact, I completely agree with what you said. That also is related to the Auschwitz question, too, because so much of the Jewish response, I think, to the rounding up of prisoners was a passive one, that this perhaps was

[66:48]

uh... an act of god that we must accept this kind of thing and now i think that the jewish people looking back on this i think the response is how did you let that happen to you and uh... and the feeling is never again will we do that and it was very just interesting article by robert mccaffrey brown in the current issue of christianity and crisis who who goes over them there is this tremendous militancy amongst israeli people this, you know, that we just cannot take this passive attitude, and I think that perhaps is a fine line, and that violence would be indicated to resist in certain things, and the response now seems to be, well, this will not happen again. We will fight. We have an instance of this kind in the Bible, in the Book of Maccabees, where the Maccabees at first celebrate the Sabbath by not defending themselves, and after they have been routed once or twice on the Sabbath, they decide that they will now celebrate the Sabbath by defending themselves.

[68:03]

And I don't know how this whole, but I – possibly the sense of Auschwitz made us aware that there was a cancer, I think one cancer, within the whole Christian covenant in relation to Jews, and that previously maybe our feeling was of indifference, well, and kind of, and very little kind of. and leave the scene. And by this enormous thing, in this particular age, it made us aware that they are part of our body, and they are us. And we have to come to grips with that, even though it's still very messy, when we are trying to come to grips with it. It was a very high price to pay for this learning experience, and besides, we didn't pay the price. Maybe not yet, it might be still in the process of going on. I'm not, not to say it's for the past, but I know I am. What? What? Right.

[69:11]

You think I want to grow people from no matter what? Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, [...] no. The decisive point seems to be that the suffering servant accepts the role freely. And so it isn't the role that is there and this is just handed to you and now you play it, you see, it's not like that. It is a free, obedient response in the given situation. But what the songs of the suffering servant tell us, among other things, that the servant who stands partly at least for Jewish people or for a remnant of the Jewish people can freely accept this suffering for the sake of others and so heal hard by accepting it.

[70:21]

That's very mysterious. Before the Biden administration sent you our response, we have our response to you and the Stafford Service. We have a certain attitude to Stafford, and we have a certain interest to the college. The question is, how do we really relate to the genuine Staffordism of the world? And if we relate, then we have a question to the Stafford Service, and we have passed it on as good as it is. He attempted a new policy, and he undecidedly lost over teaching. What he did, he was a fool, I must say. And historically, I think, he was. He was unseemly, and he wasn't a prophet. On the ground, he had the right to apply it, but he didn't want it. He wanted the concept to be Christian to the people.

[71:28]

Well, if you can say that the whole, maybe even self, anti-Slovene approach to the Holocaust has been, has ended up at a wailing mall, really. whereas the kind of things we did in The Hiding Place and in Corrie Ten Boom and that sort of thing. Here's a picture in Hope, in the same kind of situation, and all those Dutch people who escaped and did that sort of thing. It seems to me that in the monastic tradition, instead of gratitude, meaning, the reaction to the experiences of life, has been a large part of our Christian faith. And I think that probably, even among conscientious objectors and people who were taunted and were derided during the war and so forth, Stoicism was probably the kind of reaction that most Christians would have carried.

[72:53]

And I must say, it goes back to Gandhi's vision. When war comes, it's better to fight than to do nothing. Actually, we put there, even in the monastic tradition, the idea that to do nothing is better than to fight. And this is a very different kind of representation of Christian hope. and of the role, the self-accepted role, of the talking power. I'm very grateful to what you're saying here. I haven't thought that out yet, so I'd like to think about it a little more. But offhand, it would seem to me that this Stoicism about which you speak is something like the shadow of the right attitude, you see? It isn't it is the shadow, sort of the vice that goes with the virtue, or into which the virtue easily slides, or something like that.

[74:00]

I'd like to think that out a little more. There seems to be some of the things you're saying are ringing true, but I would not call that monastic tradition. I would call that an aberration, but the line is very fine. The line is very fine. There's one paradigm. That Job and the highest passenger, Isaiah, would be in very great contact with each other. Is that true? So he slain me and kept me alive. Trust in him. Trust in him. Yeah. But there's not much joy in that. Well, no, but first of all, that's not the last word. It's maybe Job's last word, but Job's last word is precisely that he holds his mouth and he doesn't say anything anymore. So he's confronted with the mystery. That's it.

[75:01]

And the last scene is that the mystery, that presence which makes him shut up, is demonstrated before him. And he says, well, I put my hand on my mouth and I don't see anything anymore. That's that silence, that's that great openness. It may look like it on the outside, but it isn't on the inside. It could be anything from watching it on the outside. But it isn't, I think, the way it's presented in the Book of Job. That's what I'm talking about. That's what I'm talking about. I don't know.

[76:12]

I don't know. [...] I don't know You have to describe things in that particular way. You have to explain and approach things in a beautiful way. You have to understand the amity between your father-in-law, who left you, and your mother-in-law, who left you, and your mother-in-law, [...] and your mother This may be a good point for us to conclude because we do have to conclude now.

[77:22]

Don't you? But it also... Well, if it shows one thing, it shows that this is very serious business, that if anybody had the idea that contemplative prayer is something for your pastime, it sure isn't. It's something to be suffered through, and it's a beautiful, but like all beautiful and great things, very painful and serious thing. You can make a comment, but first of all, I'm talking to you, not to my audience.

[78:26]

In going through your chapter, and seeing the things that elicited me, I've often wondered why you don't include scriptures or passages. You know, I know this is a question of thinking a joke. It's quite, I mean, it's in all the Domingo's books, incognito. The joke seems there. And I would say infinitely more meaningful, and it avoids the very thing that, first of all, I'm referring to, because he broadsports it in terms of suffering, you know, a problem in San Jose, everything's beaten down, what do I do now? Then he responds, and he goes beyond the response of stoicism, exactly what I'm talking about, to active love. He says, there's one part of the world I control in my heart, and if I respond to the worst depredation by loving immediately at all. That is what's demanding. It is really the story of growth, which is the question of what to do with suffering, with cancer, with birth to cancer, and what they know, and so on.

[79:28]

But why does it constrict? Why doesn't all that fattens out? It's not fixed. It's a dog-dog update. This is really what it's going to take many parts of the world. We keep, we balance things about forgiveness, which really are such a liberal But scripture was nobody's evening, and I'm not wrong with that stuff. But we keep on referring to difficult passages, which obscure the gospel, whereas I think that in that sense, we would all agree that this illuminates it. I wonder if there's even time for us to reconstruct it better, scripture. Out of modern stories, out of Eliot and William Green, and things which illuminate for us, Well, I think there's much to be said for adding also paraliturgical readings, but you mentioned the Gospels, and of course the Book of Job is never read separated from the Gospels. Are the readings of one piece, and just to stop there... Yeah, yeah, that may be so.

[80:34]

Right, but that's just precisely what one should also do. Besides, I guess, it's a very good idea to add paraliturgical readings, but then see it in the context that it is in the art of one piece, and it's just one of the many books that lead up to the Gospels, and then actually lead further on into the Epistles and into the Apocalypse. Well, if I were just a man born blind, and I were to be blind, I'd be caught in the crossfire. And you think, me, what is this? Is this because your brothers and your parents had been brought out in them because they met this fine person? Is this just to show the variety of God's tenderness just upon them, not to say unjust upon just, all that sort of thing? And that God was glorified by this tragedy of this person's end? Now, is this something that we were counseled by our Lord to rejoice in, or to be grateful for?

[81:52]

Or are we just saying, well, this is the way things are? But they said, why was he born blind? And it wasn't the evening that he passed away. No. That's why he was born that way. Well, in this particular pericope, I think it does mean that God was to be glorified through the miracle. But there were many other blind people around And what were they blind for, if not for the glory of God, if everything's to be for the glory of God? The point in all this is that our faith only starts when we no longer can explain it. because life cannot be explained. And some people say, well, I was really a believer until such and such happened.

[82:53]

Well, that was the moment when God gave you a chance to become a believer, because up to that moment, you were just being sort of prepared for the takeoff. Precisely when we can no longer explain it, then we have to trust, then we have to be open for surprise, then we have to say yes, and so forth. That's why it is so difficult. And I don't think that's a cop-out, because that's just saying something that, quite apart from the Bible, we know all from life, that when you really come to life, when the going gets tough, and you know how to live in difficult situations. Thank you all and tomorrow at 11. At 11, that's correct.

[83:45]

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