Prayer - Lesson 15

Professor James Houston

Prayer

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Freedom from Self

Lesson Transcript

A third aspect of asceticism that the Early Fathers realised is having truly a disposition to engender loving service of God by inner unselfishness. In other words, it's be unselfed. And to be unselfed means to be free from oneself. This of course is one of the traits of humility, that it's not my consciousness, it's having God consciousness within me. And one of the things that we find about being unselfed is that it leads to a far richer individuation than we could ever imagine. In other words, Christ is able to give me a much more robust sense of self than I can give myself. It's not acting as one's own redeemer, but realise that He wants us to have a uniqueness that we can't achieve. He can give us that density of being a self in Christ, which enables us then to be free from ourself, to love the neighbour as myself. And so the fourth thing that this asceticism gives us is it then makes prayer a much richer, more effective, realisable experience because I get out of the way. Sometimes we find that fasting helps us to get out of the way because no longer are we thinking about food all the time. And also a fifth aspect is that true asceticism does therefore foster spiritual maturity. It has fostered inner freedom. It has fostered so much more in our life.

These are wonderful things that we can meditate upon as we think of the significance of it, but as I've already warned us, we can have excessive asceticism. So let's now observe some of the things that we can be excessive about. First of all, true asceticism is not for the sake of being an ascetic. It's to be relational. It's seeking to be disciplined in Christ for the presence of Christ, for the sake of Christ, for the sake of others. Secondly, asceticism should seek to engender a strong sense of personal discipline for stewardship that my body is not mine. It's a temple of the Holy Spirit. That therefore, in every aspect of life, physical, emotional and spiritual, it's all accountable to God. We’re doing it all for His sake. We’re all accountable in His presence and we know therefore that our desire is to be presented body, soul and spirit blameless before the coming of our Lord.

And of course, as we've already seen, Christian asceticism implies personal freedom. It means that we can make a variety of choices, of values, and the values that we choose are in the light of our own narrative, but they're all choices which are for the sake of the kingdom of God. It's the exchange of lesser values to purchase the pearl that is without price. So the process really of asceticism is exchanging things of lesser value, like any good merchant, in order to purchase something that is much more valuable. So true asceticism is looking for that pearl and exchanging for that pearl. So the disciple that came to Jesus in Mark 8:34 when Jesus is saying if anyone would come after me, let him take up his cross and follow me, he is indicating that that's the pursuit. Or as James 5:11 reminds us, godliness requires self-discipline. It requires effort. It seeks patience and fortitude. These are all the marks of those who seek godliness.

So the flight from the city to go into the desert, which the Desert Fathers did, was not so much a flight into celibacy, but an embrace of chastity. And chastity was that the love of Christ, the love of God, transcends the love of a human partner in life. This is why there was this remarkable phenomenal development of celibacy that became a phenomenon of the early Church. It was like saying if we’re not going to be martyrs then we become celibate. If we’re not going to be mortal martyrs then at least we'll be sexual martyrs because His love comes first. And as I was saying to one of you that in the Dark Ages that follows, which is not dark at all, there were wonderful virgins, like a virgin that resisted the embrace of the sultan in his harem, although she was part of the harem because she was a captive. And in resisting his embrace because she was in embrace of the Lord and therefore she wanted to be a virgin, her life so electrified all the harems of the sultans of the Yemen that she became the patron saint of the early Christian Church of the Yemen. You'd have probably never realised that Yemen was Christian before it ever became Islamic.

And another virgin that became the patron saint of Georgia was the same. She resisted all the sultanate culture of that day. She was radically counter-cultural. She gave her life and again it transformed the people of Georgia. And the people of Armenia, another of these Caucasian states, was also converted in this way. So God used celibacy in an amazing way and He probably used it far more effectively among women than among men. Why? Because they were so much weaker. How impossible it is to live in the harem without being killed if you resist. And so we thank God that millions of people that we know nothing about were so transformed by the witness of what we might call white martyrs.

The danger is when it became institutionalised like everything else. And so there was sometimes therefore the need for reform to keep things more in balance. And so one of the reforms that sometimes took place was to then take flight from the desert and the hermitage or the cave in order to be a monastic community. And so appropriately in the Nile Valley, where there was agriculture, where there were many peasants that needed to have the Gospel then villages of monastic communities, even as big as 5,000, went to the other extremity, but they did this, again, for the sake of Christ. Now we have experiments in large-scale organisations. We have schools that went into the desert as a kind of miniature college of theology. So all these different experiments were taking place and they were all necessary because they were all concerned with different drives, different concerns, different desires, to communicate the Gospel.

And so as we close, let us realise that these different forms of asceticism were all related to different contexts of culture and so we get sometimes a rivalry which was again so human. But when Basil the Great created the Basilian Order of monasticism in Asia Minor, it was mild asceticism. It was in the Steppe. It was where there was a lot of people around and consequently it was therefore a much more communal kind of asceticism. Or indeed, as we've said, in Palestine it was a rather more astringent form in the Steppe lands, the more scattering of the population. Again, that was appropriate. Or again in Egypt, it was a very different kind of form of asceticism that was far more rigid, but again it was appropriate to the situation. And likewise, when we read about their homilies on prayer, we realise that their homilies on prayer depend on who you’re addressing, what context you are addressing. And so when you read Evagrius Ponticus in his Praktikos and chapters on prayer, it's appropriate to large centres of seminarians or disciples that needed those kinds of conferences. And when John Cassian was to write his Treatise on Prayer, which he has within his Conferences, he's not addressing any longer Middle East audience, he's addressing an incipient community outside of what is now Marseilles in the South of France. He's dealing with a new exotic import that was to lead to monasticism in Europe. So it was a much more missionary view of asceticism for now entering into Gaulle, into a very different environment. So he's a kind of journalist studying comparatively the different kinds of experimentation that had taken place in he East and now was being viewed in the West.

And as we close on this subject of Hesychia, we realise that all of these forms are appropriate to their culture and to their time. But when we close, as we now do, what is the feature that was so significant about Hesychia that we all can have? Hesychia is for balance, for symmetry of life and symmetry and balance are necessary by us all. Peter had a good heart for the Lord, but he was very unbalanced. He was so impetuous. And other disciples were too biased in one direction, as perhaps Matthew, he's addressing a Jewish congregation, so he's concerned about teaching how Jews should become Christians. Well that’s okay, but again, you need another balance. And so even the Gospels themselves, we see different portraits of discipleship, but each is appropriate for the culture and the community that one's addressing. And so it is with us today that we don’t just simply have a spiritual retreat on Hesychia because this is a new-fangled thing for us to do. But rather, we recognise that we have to deal with all things in moderation. Balance, symmetry. Didn't we get the echo of that in Jonathan Edwards yesterday in our other lecture? That the greatest of the gracious affections that he sees is a balance in our spiritual life. Well, this is precisely what John Cassian is teaching us: balance.

Now as I close, I can't help but think of my dear friend Dr Bockmuehl and he needed balance in his life, like we all do. I used to tease him and call him Corporal Bockmuehl. Why? Because as a German he was always obeying orders and that’s what a corporal does: yes, sir. He obeys the orders of the commanding officer, you see. And so his spiritual life was asking God to give him his orders. And at the end of his life when he was dying and he knew that he would never write and publish is magnum opus on the Ten Commandments, he was terribly frustrated because he had come to the end of his life and he couldn’t communicate what, to him, was his magnum opus. And so we said well, you have to moderate your witness for Christ in terms of your mortality. You don’t have long to live. You'll never get that book written. You'll never have the energy to do it. So he does what a corporal does: he listens. And so we asked him well, as you're listening as a corporal, what's the command that God wants you to give? And so that’s the echo in the title of his great little classic Listening to the God who Speaks.

It's truly a Hesychastic tradition. It's the posture of the listener because the listener is the obedient disciple. He hears God whispering to him. So he listened to the voice of prayer in his own heart and understanding that this voice of prayer is not one's own, but that another is speaking through one. And so he came to the last week of his life: he hadn't finished the last chapter. And so reluctantly, because who wants somebody else to write your book, he asked his wife and myself, because he knew that we knew him well, would we compose his last chapter for him. There's a wonderful sense in which our last will and testimony is not from our voice. It's from the voice of those who know us so well that they can voice it for us. And that’s what we were able to do. We told him on the Tuesday it was done. He looked at it and read it. Yes, he says, it's done. And on the Saturday, he went to be with his Lord.

It's been one of the greatest experiences of ly life, as I've shared on other occasions, to be able to in the Psalm 23 to walk though the valley of the shadow with someone who listened to the God who speaks. I would recommend that if you want to understand a modern application of Hesychia, then read Klaus Bockmuehl's Listening to the God who Speaks.

So we close again in prayer. O Lord, help me to much more a listener than a talker, much more to be aware of Your presence than the presence of others. Help me Lord to always live in that valley of the shadow between my mortality and Your eternal life. And this we ask in Jesus' name, Amen.