Sister Rosemary – Mr G's Ponderings

I *trace the Rainbow through the rain (George Matheson) photo taken by Gill Henwood of a rainbow*
*arching* *over the Lakeland fells – a sign of God’s Glory.*

My Lord & My God

Much prayer is often confined to asking God for things or seeking to change his mind about things – this of course assumes that we actually know God’s mind.

Louis Evely in his wonderfully challenging book, Teach us how to pray, says that too often people march into church, notify God what they want and leave without bothering to listen to him; without consulting him or taking him into account. They leave without giving God time to act in the way he needs to act which may be to answer our prayer by changing us who pray.
Praying for others and casting our anxiety about people onto God is not a bad thing. It is a very good thing but it isn’t the heart of prayer.
My understanding is that to travel to the heart of prayer we need to develop a personal relationship with God. In this praying we seek to place ourselves before God in quietness as we travel into a still centre of our very being where we find God waiting to meet and greet us. It is prayer which develops into a sense of God’s nearness as well as otherness and which finds expression in praise, thanksgiving and love for God Himself.

This kind of prayer is what we find at the centre of today’s Gospel (John 20: 22-29)– the prayer of Thomas, whose feast day we keep today, July 3^rd.

My Lord
And my God!

This is sheer prayer.
It asks for nothing and it gives everything.
It is a confession of faith;
it is total devotion;
it is absolutely God-centred.
It also recognizes the Divinity of Jesus – He is our Lord and our God.

My Lord and My God.
There’s a wealth of theology in those five words and to pray them and mean what we pray could take a lifetime. It would be a lifetime’s work worth doing for it is a prayer which contains the love, devotion and absolute and pure worship as this prayer does.
I do wonder if God prevented Thomas from being with the other disciples on Easter Day just so that he could have this intimate moment with this loyal and utterly devoted disciple.
It wasn’t just because Thomas needed the reassurance (which he did), nor that he was a natural sceptic. He really, really wanted to believe!

But this incident is bigger than what we see at face value.
In the prayer of Thomas we have the picture of where our lives, our witness, our deeds, our words, our very action, and – our souls – are being led – right to the heart of God – and this prayer takes us there and only there.

There is nothing about us or our concerns in this prayer. It is totally centred on God.
There are no superfluous babblings here. No manipulation. No bargaining or pleading – if you do this God, I’ll do that. Just simply and profoundly, My Lord and My God!
Blessed Thomas, so-called doubter, shows us the way of sheer faith.
However we have to make time for God if we are to become close and in the kind of loving, self-giving relationship whereby our hearts and not just our mouths proclaim the prayer of Thomas.

Last month, my Soul Friend, Sister Rosemary of the Sisters of the Love of God, gave me some advice. It was in response to a question she posed about when I just sat down to be still with God. Because she knows that I am a keen gardener, she suggested that I sit quietly in the garden. I was to engage in a sitting which had no agenda save being in God’s Presence.

On one hand, a Garden is quite a good place for quiet contemplation and stillness though, if you are a keen gardener, it may be a distraction.
I was reading in the current Royal Horticultural Society Garden Magazine an article by Rachel de Thame, one of the regular contributors. She was writing about time spent just being in the garden She confessed to finding it “impossible to just sit in my garden.” For her, as for many active gardeners, it is a place to be doing – “and the doing is what we enjoy most.”
She came to the conclusion that real gardeners simply couldn’t just sit without jumping up immediately to do things.
So she decided to find a better balance between “activity and admiration.” She perches on some stone steps which aren’t too comfortable that she might be tempted to linger. Short pauses, she says are just perfect. “for a short time, resting and looking is lovely.” But spotting a stray tendril, she’s off!

I know what that feels like, so on Sister Rosemary’s advice, I have been trying hard to just sit and contemplate the plants and flowers, resisting the temptation to do anything.
It is starting to work, though the physical stray tendrils are so often replaced with inner ones as the mind tries to tidy up my life. It’s all too easy to concentrate on oneself and other preoccupations. Becoming still can be hard. I find having a notebook handy. When I realize that I have forgotten to buy the bread or phone a friend, I write it down. I can then forget it for this short time.

Repeating slowly the short mantra of St Thomas’s prayer helps to keep me focused on God. It’s power lies in this. Other short prayers which are your favourites may work just as well, such as the Jesus Prayer.
For me, My Lord and My God, addressed by Thomas to Jesus is a kind of version of that though it is totally concentrated on God and it is enough to bring us into the presence of God. If, that is, we ignore the roses which need dead-heading. That’s what your notebook is for!

[Mr G]

My friend Gill Henwood sent me a thought to ponder over. It was about how the light of God’s love wraps itself around both the dark places of our world and also the darkness which afflicts most of us from time to time. This is what she wrote:

“Secular leadership techniques and management may have led the churches astray from the pastoral care and self-emptying service of the gospels’ witness to Jesus. The presence of God’s Spirit may have been squeezed out by our institutions – yet is still searching our hearts and calling people to God’s Love given in Jesus.
I wonder if the world’s gathering darkness will be a time of deep testing and eventually renewal – when through hardships we remember God is Love and turn from our human preoccupations with power and competition…
Just a thought, but maybe a recognition that in the darkness Gods light burns clearly, bringing hope, calling us to love and filling us with the Spirit’s power in our human frailty. “

After reading what Gill had written, I was in conversation with another friend, Sister Rosemary SLG . She suggested that when we find difficulty sensing the presence of God because we are in a dark place, that is when, often, God is nearer to us than ever.

This reminded me that, hopefully, this applies to the dark situations in our world at present. It may not be easy to see God’s love at work in the darkness of Ukraine, or Yemen, Afghanistan, the Holy Land and so many other places but it is a truth to which we should cling. That can be hard to do.
I don’t doubt God’s existence but in the face of all the demonic wickedness in our world , it is easy to feel a sense of futility; of powerlessness, darkness, emptiness.
And it hurts because I love God and I am loved by God but I also wonder whether God is letting us down somehow.

Where is God in all this?

It’s a question to which I have found an answer from an unusual source but which is, for me, very helpful.
It comes in a book by Elie Wiesel.
Many know of him and of his story. He managed to survive Auschwitz but not without the marks of the trauma remaining with him all his life. He wrote a book which he named Night. A clear reference to both the outer and inner darkness which the Nazi’s created in everyone held captive by them, not least the Jews, Gays and Gypsies.

In his book, Elie Wiesel told of a day when some prisoners had tried to escape. Though they were recaptured, reprisals took place. A group of men and a boy about Elie’s age, were strung up on Cross-like gallows. All the camp were forced to watch as the men died before them. And the boy? He was too light for the rope to end his agony and he hung there a long time.
The question was murmured around the camp – Where is God? Where is God?

Where was God as this dreadful agony unfolded before them?

Elie Weisel, just a boy himself, then pointed at the child. He said movingly, Where is God? He is there, hanging on the Cross with that boy!

It was a deep and insightful answer. For Christians it has a profound meaning and Elie was a Jew. Francois Mauriac, the French novelist, wrote in his introduction that when Elie came to him with his manuscript, he wanted to draw out the similarity between the child and the young Jew who, as a demonstration and sign of the love of God, died on a cross. But all he could do was to embrace Elie, weeping.
As we try to come to some kind of meaning about all the things that are afflicting our world, it isn’t always easy to see much hope. However, the story Elie Weisel told contains a truth which I want to hold on to. God’s love will never leave us and is embedded in our souls as we struggle, either personally or globally.

Where is God?

He is in each one of us. He suffers with us and yet he also transforms that suffering with costly, self-sacrificial love.

The Lord will light my candle so
That it shall shine full bright;
The Lord for me shall also turn
My darkness into light

[Mr G]