Sit down alone and in silence.
—St. Symeon the New Theologian
In Turning to the Mystics, CAC teacher James Finley focuses on the instructions of St. Symeon the New Theologian (d. 1022) for praying the Jesus Prayer:
First, St. Symeon says, “Sit down.” The prayer is in our bodily presence sitting in the presence of God. Sensing that we cannot settle into the prayer if we keep fidgeting, we discover that in learning to sit still, we can learn to be still. In this way, we are graced with an experiential understanding of God revealing to us in the Psalms, “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). When you’re sitting this way, it’s like the still point of the turning world is this deep axis of your own body.
Next, St. Symeon urges us “to sit down alone.” We’re alone in a mystical sense: God alone is God, and … you alone are you…. It isn’t that each of us has a relationship with God, it’s that each of us is an utterly unique relationship with God. We’re trying to awaken and surrender to that aloneness in which we are all—living and dead—alone together as siblings in this love in whom we’re one and subsist as one. We start to see all people with love, because everybody is walking around created by God in the image of God.
St. Symeon also says, “Sit down alone, and in silence.”
In silence we are learning how to listen. If we’re not silent, we can’t listen, and it’s in listening that we can learn to hear. This ties into a mystical understanding of creation. In God’s “Let it be,” God is speaking all things into being: “Let there be light, let there be stones, and trees, and stars.” It isn’t as if God speaks everything into being and then goes off to leave the universe to run on its own. Rather, creation is absolute and perpetual. Right now, we’re being created by God in this self-donating act by which God is giving God’s very presence to us in our nothingness without God. Our body embodies the presence of God in our nothingness without God. God is speaking all things into being right now, and if God would cease this speaking, we’d all disappear. So we’re trying to become so silent that we can hear God speaking us into being. How can I become so silent that I can hear God speaking the sun into being as it moves across the sky, over the trees and fields rendered sacred in being created by God in their nothingness without God? And so the silence of our prayer embodies the deep, vast silence in which we learn from God how to listen to the living word of God, embodying itself as the reality of all things in their nothingness without God.
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| The Kingdom is Not the Church |
 Among causal readers of the Bible, there has been a long tradition of confusing the kingdom of God with the church. This was especially common during the era of Christendom in Europe where the church and state powers were enmeshed, and it persists today where people assume the organizational structures of the church and the power wielded by church leaders is synonymous with God’s kingdom. Unfortunately, this has led to a dangerous misreading of Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds.In the story, Jesus compares “the kingdom of heaven” to a man who sowed good seed in a field while his enemy secretly sowed weeds. In order to protect the wheat from being uprooted prematurely, the weeds are allowed to grow alongside the wheat until the harvest. Those who equate the kingdom with the church have understood this parable to mean that wicked, harmful people should be tolerated within the church alongside those seeking righteousness. In other words, it is not appropriate to exercise church discipline or expel anyone for any reason. Such actions, they say, are reserved for God alone at the final judgment. This view, however, is a complete misreading of Jesus’ parable and requires one to ignore many other passages within the New Testament—and the words of Jesus himself—that call upon church leaders to exercise discernment and discipline in order to protect the church from harm and guide everyone toward godliness. In its worst application, this read of the parable has been an excuse for not removing corrupt or abusive church leaders. The story of the wheat and the weeds is not about the church. It is about the world. We occupy an age in which the kingdom of God and its righteousness has taken root. It is growing and expanding. But its presence is not without resistance. Alongside God’s kingdom is also the evil of the world. Until the harvest, we must expect the goodness of God’s kingdom and the evil of the world to coexist in tension with each other. But the fact that evil persists in the world is never an excuse for the church to ignore it within its own community or to silence those who have been wounded by its agents. DAILY SCRIPTURE MATTHEW 13:24-30 MATTHEW 13:36-43 1 CORINTHIANS 5:6-13 WEEKLY PRAYERC. Eric Lincoln (1924 – 2000) Lord, let me love, though love may be the losing of every earthly treasure I possess. Lord, make your love the pattern of my choosing. And let your will dictate my happiness. I have no wish to wield the sword of power, and I want no man to leap at my command; nor let my critics feel constrained to cower for fear of some reprisal at my hand. Lord, let me love the lowly and the humble, forgetting not the mighty and the strong; and give me grace to love those who may stumble, nor let me seek to judge of right or wrong. Lord, let my parish be the world unbounded, let love of race and clan be at an end. Let every hateful doctrine be confounded that interdicts the love of friend for friend. Amen. |
