For those seeking to respond to this heart-wrenching week through your presence and action—both good and necessary work—please begin with a time of contemplation, prayer, and stillness in the presence of God. For all of us, let’s nurture that spring of water in our own souls by remaining connected to Jesus and praying for peace. This is the only way hope and joy will be found in our world: true and lasting peace begins in our own hearts and the ways in which we treat our neighbors. Phil LaBelle, Bishop of Olympia (The full statement)
I’m with Bishop Phil.
I have disagreed with some clergy and strongly agreed with others about how we approach Christian action. To oversimplify it — some seem to think that we know what is right and we just need to take action. Prayer is a support for the action we want to take. I know what’s true and right about immigration, assisted suicide, ICE, drug addiction, Israel, Venezuela, Minneapolis, and above all the President.
Christians have done this in the past around war. FDR’s prayer on June 6, 1944 included, “With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies.” I don’t necessarily object. When that president offered the prayer I was in my mother’s womb and I think I heard her say “Amen.” I joined the “Amen” - I knew what kind of world I wanted to be born into. I’m also sure there were Germans offering a similar prayer for the success of the Nazi forces. It’s a very human instinct to believe your side in a conflict has God on its side, or in non-religious terms to be on the right-side-of-history. I’m sure there were such ideological offerings being made in the Kremlin during those years.
What I hear in Bishop Phil’s message is an emphasis on the kind of prayer that comes prior to deciding I’m right and you’re wrong. Maybe it’s even the kind of worship that helps us take action while also stepping aside from the arrogance and certainty that we are right.
This is day three of my commenting on the shooting in Minneapolis and the Christian spiritual life. Wednesday was Lent and a death in Minneapolis, ““It is basic to the Christian life that our action flows from our prayer. Evelyn Underhill taught that for our action, our service, to be much good it needed to flow from adoration and awe.” Yesterday was Forming our conscience and “the informing of our conscience is an active endeavor. It’s done in our prayerful engaging of scripture, tradition, and reason. We are seeking as close as is humanly possible moral and ethical truth rather than mere subjective feelings.”
To remain pure and in the way of Jesus
However, Bishop Phil goes on and adds stress to another aspect of the prayer-action relationship. He wrote about being on retreat with a number of other bishops. The retreat leader drew their attention to a Thomas Merton quote: “Action is the stream. Contemplation is the spring.”
Contemplation and prayer feed the spring of water in our inner life, which then feeds the stream of action and how we engage the world. This contemplative work must be done first and with regularity if our actions are to remain pure and in the way of Jesus. If we disregard tending to our souls, we run the risk of making our desires to do good solely about ourselves and potentially being harmful, both to ourselves and to others.
“If our actions are to remain pure and in the way of Jesus” we must begin with contemplation and prayer. That was Underhill’s point
One’s first duty is adoration, and one’s second duty is awe and only one’s third duty is service. And that for those three things and nothing else, addressed to God and no one else, you and I and all other countless human creatures evolved upon the surface of this planet were created. We observe then that two of the three things for which our souls were made are matters of attitude, of relation: adoration and awe. Unless these two are right, the last of the triad, service, won’t be right. Unless the whole of your...life is a movement of praise and adoration, unless it is instinct with awe, the work which the life produces won’t be much good.
In his The Vision of God, Kenneth Kirk had the same viewpoint that was grounded in the understanding that worship was the key to our ethical problems
the doctrine…has throughout been interpreted by Christian thought at its best as implying in practice that the highest prerogative of the Christian, in this life and the next, is worship; and that nowhere except in this activity will he find the key to his ethical problems.” Kirk wrote, “The first practical question for Christian ethics is, therefore, how is this interestedness, unselfishness, to be attained? Once grant that moralism, or formalism, cannot bring the soul nearer to it, and there remains only one way – the way of worship. Worship lifts the soul out of its preoccupation with itself and its activities and centers its aspirations on God.
D. Stephen Long wrote Christian Ethics: A Very Short Introduction. It was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. In the middle of the book, he offers a few paragraphs on the various ethical stances found in the church—Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed, and so on. In “Anglican Ethics” he draws on Kenneth Kirk’s work.
Kirk “suggested Christian ethics best proceeds by avoiding both formalism and rigorism. Formalism seeks to bring all of life under kind of a codification, the setting out of codes and laws that proscribe what is not to be done in advance, but actually demands very little; for all it asks is that we avoid violating some formal code. … Rigorism reacts against this formalism and demands a higher standard.”
Kirk goes on to suggest that both are lacking because they miss that the true purpose of life is the vision of God. Kirk uses the whole of Irenaeus’ quote,
The glory of God is a living man; and the life of man is the vision of God
Long goes on to explain Kirk’s notion that worship is the key to humanity’s ethical problems. The way of worship is the alternative to a moralism “that becomes so preoccupied with one’s own virtue or morality that it turns into a self-preoccupation; a ‘vision of self’ supplants the ‘vision of God’. Worship re-directs us from self to God.”
Kirk has a good bit more to offer. The book presses toward 600 pages. I’ll highlight one additional point he makes. The end of all our praying and worship is contemplation or the prayer of union. He’s not writing about a set of contemplative practices as we think of today but a state of being. He seems to be saying much what Martin Thornton means by habitual recollection. A state or stance, the “constant recollection of Christ’s presence” or “a continuous, even subconscious, awareness of the divine presence everywhere.” It accords with George Herbert’s
Teach me, my God and King,
In all things thee to see,
And what I do in any thing,
To do it as for thee
In Pastoral Theology, Martin Thornton makes use of Kirk. “Against Pelagius and all extreme humanism the contention is that we do not embrace religion primarily to improve our morals, but rather undertake the moral struggle in order to improve our prayer. However interdependent the two may become, the end of man is not purity of heart but the vision of God. The best way to attain the former is by aiming purposefully at the latter.”
“It is true that the existence of human free-will implies a direct fight against sin, but this without ascetic is not only Pelagian but notoriously inadequate. The position here stated is shut out by Dr. Kirk: ‘… among the principal rules of life advocated by Christian ethics are some which have no place in other systems -- rules directed towards obtaining, preserving and developing that grace without which the normal rules of conduct cannot be observed. It is true no doubt that this grace can be gained by no mere human effort; it is something the wholly from without; but man can so rule and order his life as to open it out to divine influence, and to give that influence the fullest possible scope when once it has been received. It is in the supreme emphasis laid upon this principle that Christian ethics differs from every other system.’ The principal to which Dr. Kirk is paying tribute is that although we are to make volitional battle against sins, our most potent weapon is the Rule of the Church.”
For the Anglican Christian the starting point for ethical, and therefore political and moral clarity is worship as known in the Sunday Eucharist, the daily prayers of the church, and holy reflection. This Threefold Rule of Prayer, in its richness and depth is the most effective and efficient pathway, and can over the years orient our hearts and minds to the heart and mind of Christ. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to align us, nudge us toward the vision of God.
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners (From Isaiah 6, today’s Evening Prayer)
This abides,
Brother Robert, OA