Crowd or Community?

"The more beautiful parts don’t need this special care. But God put the body together and gave more honor to the parts that need it. God did this so that our body would not be divided. God wanted the different parts to care the same for each other. If one part of the body suffers, then all the other parts suffer with it. Or if one part is honored, then all the other parts share its honor." 1 Corinthians 12:24-26 ERV

The Covid 19 outbreak among the foreign workers in packed dormitories in Singapore is a grim reminder of our dependence on another and our need to care for one another. It is a time for reflection to seek the truth so that we will not be blinded by fake news or propaganda and even lies. Truth will set us free but fear will keep us in bondage. It is a time to choose between living as a crowd or as a community.

Crowds are fickle and easily manipulated. It is easier to control crowd behaviour with legislation than to encourage social responsibility through education. It is easier to medicalise death than to journey with the dying. It is easier to commercialise medicine and to profit from illness seeking behaviour than to promote healthy lifestyles. It is easier to institutionalise spirituality which encourages superstitious and superficial religious practices in pseudo-communities than to encourage faith building practices in communities of love. 

And we can see the disastrous effects of politicising the pandemic in the United States of America which has become the Divided States of America when political leaders are motivated by the lust for power instead of being motivated by the power of love. The most effective way to control a crowd is through fear and greed but it is only love that will build community. 

Our human hearts are deceitful and we are easily deceived and swayed by our emotions. When our emotions are aroused, our feelings take over our thinking and we take leave of our common sense. Common sense so often becomes uncommon when we are not aware or attentive to our thoughts and feelings. But God knows our hearts as the psalmist reminds us:

"O Lord , you have examined my heart and know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I’m far away. You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. You know what I am going to say even before I say it, Lord . You go before me and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand!" Psalms 139:1-6 NLT

We may trust God but God knows that our hearts are fickle and that we cannot be trusted. Jesus saw that the Jews were beginning to trust Him because of the miracles He performed, but he did not trust them:

"Because of the miraculous signs Jesus did in Jerusalem at the Passover celebration, many began to trust in him. But Jesus didn’t trust them, because he knew all about people. No one needed to tell him about human nature, for he knew what was in each person’s heart." John 2:23-25 NLT

Jesus was proven right by the events leading to his death on the cross. The crowds welcomed him into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday with shouts of "Hosanna!" only to cry out, "Crucify him! Crucify him!" on Good Friday. Jesus was crucified because of the crowd but He rose from the dead to empower us to live in communities of love with Jesus as our Prince of Peace and our Shepherd of Love. This was what happened after Pentecost. The disciples were all filled with the Holy Spirit and they not only preached the word of God with boldness but lived out their faith with love:

"All the believers were united in heart and mind. And they felt that what they owned was not their own, so they shared everything they had. The apostles testified powerfully to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and God’s great blessing was upon them all. There were no needy people among them, because those who owned land or houses would sell them and bring the money to the apostles to give to those in need. " Acts of the Apostles 4:31-35 NLT

Henri Nouwen noted that community has little to do with mutual compatibility. We may be brought together by similarities in educational background, psychological makeup or social status but these can never be the basis for community. He saw that community is not rooted in the attractiveness of people to each other - true community is grounded in God who calls us together:

"The mystery of community is precisely that it embraces all people, whatever their individual differences may be and allows them to live together as brothers and sisters of Christ and sons and daughters of his heavenly Father." 

We are living in the dawn of a brave new world for humanity where we can live together as the family of God in love. The Covid 19 virus is thus not the enemy but a love message from God as Laurence Freeman reminds us:

"This isn't an easy language to learn. But it could not be simpler. Keeping this in mind, struggling with the strange idea that Covid-19 could be a love message, let's try to reflect on what the message 'I love you' might mean."

It may mean a judgment of God for we have traded the truth about God for a lie and worshipping money and using people instead of loving people and using money for the glory of God:

"Since they thought it foolish to acknowledge God, he abandoned them to their foolish thinking and let them do things that should never be done. Their lives became full of every kind of wickedness, sin, greed, hate, envy, murder, quarreling, deception, malicious behavior, and gossip." Romans 1:28-29 NLT

But we can also see it as God's discipline and a wake up call. The Covid 19 crisis according to Laurence Freeman may only be the first of a series of crisis to wake us up to our need for a new vision of reality and to cultivate the values of contemplative consciousness. To develop communities of love we need to rediscover the poverty of spirit and to be healed of our sins of greed and gluttony so that we can live simple and compassionate lives.

The discipline of contemplative prayer is not to help us find peace of mind but to lead us to the mind of Christ so that we will experience the peace that is beyond all human understanding and not dependent on the absence of trials or suffering. It is not a journey to have 100% happiness in life but the spiritual adventure to have 10% holiness in our daily lives. It is seeking to have a change of heart produced by the Spirit and to be a person with a changed heart who seeks praise from God and not from people (Romans 2:29). 

We will then become a people seeking to be the Body of the Risen Christ - to build a community of love in which each one is concerned for one other. To do so we need to turn back to God and to open our hearts and minds to the Holy Spirit. We need the Holy Spirit to purify our hearts from the love of power and fill them with the power of love as well as to renew our minds with the truths of God. 

It is love and truth that will deliver us from the evils of the mindset of a crowd that is obsessed with greed and gluttony. It is love and truth that will lead us to the joy and peace of a community rooted in the resurrection power of the Risen Christ. And so in our silence and solitude let us pray:

"Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way!
Hold o’er my being absolute sway!
Fill with Thy Spirit ’till all shall see
Christ only, always, living in me."

Chasing The Wind

"I observed everything going on under the sun, and really, it is all meaningless—like chasing the wind." Ecclesiastes 1:14 NLT

The man of knowledge in our time, according to Ernest Becker, is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever have: the overproduction of truth that cannot be consumed. Towards the closing decades of the 20th Century he shared the following insight in his book, The Denial of Death:

"For centuries man lived in the belief that truth was slim and elusive and that once he found it the troubles of mankind would be over. And here we are in the closing decades of the 20th century, choking on truth." 

Now in the opening decades of the 21st century, the Covid 19 virus has forced all of us to confront the existential truth of the uncertainty of life and the certainty of death. We are also forced to face the lies about security and happiness that our minds have been programmed with - that wealth and health are under our control. As human beings, we need to find the meaning and purpose of life in the face of sickness, suffering, disabilities and death. We have to come to terms with the reality that we suffer the same fate of animals who return to dust when we die. At the same time we also have the destiny to be like gods for we are made in the image of God. And so we live in terror of death and the horrors of living in the hell of being not able to live our lives fully as human beings.

Ernest Becker made the gloomy observtion that "men are doomed to live in an overwhemingly tragic and demonic world." Likewise, King Solomon, who had all the wealth, women and wisdom a person can have, lamented that life is meaningless - it is like chasing the wind. At the same time, he saw that God has planted eternity in the human heart. Although we have to carry the burden of not being able to see the whole scope of God's work from beginning to end we can trust that God has made everything beautiful for its own time (Ecclesiastes 3:10-11).

The Incarnation of Jesus is the good news of the gospel. The early Church Fathers saw that in Jesus, God became human so that humans can develop their divine nature as the children of God. St. Irenaeus, the great second-century theologian, espoused the view that  “the glory of God is a human being fully alive!” In union with Christ, God has raised us from the deathly existence of our false selves. By His transforming grace, we are to be testimonies of the incredible wealth of God's grace and love (Ephesians 2:6-7). For we are created to be God's masterpiece of love:

"For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago." Ephesians 2:10 NLT

We are at the dawn of a new era where we are challenged not to live into a new way of thinking but to live into a new way of being. In this season of social distancing and enforced solitude, we have the opportunity to change our old way of thinking which Kim Nataraja has described:

"We have been brought up in a worldview, in which thought is considered to be the highest activity we can engage in. Descartes in his statement "I think, therefore I am"; actually went as far as linking existence with thought. Not thinking feels like not being, a threat to our survival."

The Covid 19 pandemic is a hidden blessing if its threat to our survival drives us to a lived experience of a personal encounter with the Risen Christ. Dietriech Bonhoeffer noted that when we encounter Christ, we embark on the journey of discipleship by surrendering ourselves to Christ and giving our lives over to death:

"Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

The death of our false selves through centering prayer is thus the beginning of a new life in Christ Jesus. The practice of silence in centering prayer is a difficult and threatening discipline but a fruitful one. It is a "death rehearsal" as we seek to know our true self who is beyond our thinking. By letting go of our attachments to our roles, responsibilities and relationships we learn to live from the perspective of "I am, therefore I think".  And then our thoughts will not dictate our feelings, actions and beliefs but our feelings, actions and beliefs will be rooted in our relationship with God.

According to Henri Nouwen, our "personalities" such as a loving father, a supporting sister, a caring mother, a severe teacher, an honest judge, a fellow traveller, an intimate friend, a gentle healer, a challenging leader or a demanding taskmaster, create images in our minds that affect not only what we think but also what we actually experience ourselves. Hence it is easy for us to lose our true identity and conform to the demands of a consumer society when we try to live up to the images imposed on us by those who are distracting us, entertaining us or using us for their purposes.

Henri Nouwen warned that theses images lead us to live in a world of hatred, violence, lust, greed, manipulations, and oppression. To live in a world of love, joy and peace, we are not to conform to the world but we are to let God transform us in order to change the way we think by knowing God's perfect will for our lives (Romans 12:2). Rev Malcolm Tan, in his sermon in CCMC on Sunday, encouraged us to pray ourselves INTO the will of God. As we do so, we will find ourselves praying IN the will of God. The goal of centering prayer is to open our hearts and minds to the Holy Spirit so that we can discern God's will and live fruitful lives:

"If you live in me and what I say lives in you, then ask for anything you want, and it will be yours. You give glory to my Father when you produce a lot of fruit and therefore show that you are my disciples." John 15:7-8 GW

Fruitfulness is not a condition for salvation but the hallmark of our salvation. And we need to die to our false selves to bear fruit as Jesus tells us:

"I can guarantee this truth: A single grain of wheat doesn’t produce anything unless it is planted in the ground and dies. If it dies, it will produce a lot of grain. Those who love their lives will destroy them, and those who hate their lives in this world will guard them for everlasting life." John 12:24-25 GW

John Main has described meditation as a way of power because it is the way to understand our own mortality. It is a way beyond our own death to the resurrection and to a new and eternal life in union with God. He draws attention to the essence of the Christian gospel:

"The essence of the Christian gospel is that we are invited to this experience now, today. All of us are invited to death, to die to our own self-importance, our own selfishness, our own limitations. We are invited to die to our own exclusiveness. We are invited to all this because Jesus has died before us and has risen from the dead. Our invitation to die is also one to rise to new life, to community, to communion, to a full life without fear."

Instead of chasing the wind to deny death or to find immortality, we can let our Shepherd of love leads us to rest in green pastures and beside still waters. Even when we find ourselves in dark valleys or buffeted by storms we will fear no evil for our Shepherd is with us and comforts and protects us with His rod and staff. And we can stand on God's wonderful promise that His goodness and unfailing love is following us all the days of our lives and that we will live in the house of the Lord forever. And this is where I believe God wants us to be - at home in His Love and to know that we are His beloved. And so may our cry in this time of uncertainty and loneliness be:

"Oh, gentle shepherd hear my lonely cry
And in Thy cool green pastures let me lie
Beside the still clear waters lead Thou me
Oh, gentle shepherd safe forevermore with Thee..."

From Us To We

"So now you Gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God’s holy people. You are members of God’s family." Ephesians 2:19 NLT

The Covid 19 pandemic is a great revealer of the best and worst in all of us. It presents us with the opportunity to reframe our thinking to see one another as fellow pilgrims of faith to create heaven here on earth instead of godless rivals competing for greatness in a hellish and competitive world. The Covid 19 outbreak in the foreign workers' dormitories in Singapore is a grim reminder of our need to care for one another. We need to change our mindsets from "us" to "we" -  we are all members of God's family whether we are foreigners or citizens. 

As Christians we are reminded that we are to live together as the family of God. The parable of the prodigal son teaches us that some of us are like the prodigal son who squandered his inheritance seeking happiness in the pleasures of life. He had to experience suffering and much sorrow before he came to his senses to return home to his father. On the other hand, the elder brother did not find joy living with his father because he was so caught up with trying to please his father to secure his inheritance instead of enjoying his father's presence and love.

Jesus came to show us the way to dwell in God's house here on earth now and forever. He had such a close and intimate relationship with God which empowered him to heal the lame man as he told the Jewish leaders:

"So Jesus explained, “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself. He does only what he sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, the Son also does.  For the Father loves the Son and shows him everything he is doing. In fact, the Father will show him how to do even greater works than healing this man. Then you will truly be astonished.  For just as the Father gives life to those he raises from the dead, so the Son gives life to anyone he wants." John 5:19-21 NLT

When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, he taught them the Lord's prayer. As I spent time in comtemplative prayer, it dawned on me that the Lord's prayer can help me to deal with envy, acedia, greed, pride, gluttony, guilt, anger, lust and fear so that I can bear the fruit of kindness, faithfulness, goodness, humility, self control, joy, patience, love and peace through the power of the Holy Spirit with Jesus as my Servant King to glorify God in my life. It is only when the Holy Spirit heals our distracted minds and deceitful hearts that we can move from the narcissitic community of  "us" to the agape community of "we".

To pray, "Our Father who is in heaven" is to remember that Christ died for all of us, Christians and non Christians. So we need to see each other as a child of God and to treat one another with kindness. This is God's antidote for the sin of envy which leads to the sibling rivalry that is epitomised in the murder of Abel by his brother Cain.

As I  pray, "Hallowed by Your name", I am reminded that I am called to live a awe-filled life and not the awful life dictated by the sin of acedia - a state of listlessness or torpor, of not caring or not being concerned with one's position or condition in the world. To do so, I need the fruit of faithfulness - to persevere in the contemplative prayer of silence.

Praying, "Your Kingdom comes" draws my attention to how much suffering in the world is caused  by the sin of greed. It is heartwaring to see how the plight of the foreign workers infected by Covid 19 has opened the hearts of many Singaporeans to do good for them. The fruit of goodness is indeed God's healing for the sin of greed. We do good to others not to feel good but because we are living in the Kingdom of Heaven and feeling good.

As we pray, "Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" we seek to surrender our pride so that we may be filled with the spirit of humility.  The practice of contemplative prayer is to enable me to be a living sacrifice to wait on the Lord and let God transform me into a new person by changing the way I think. Then I will learn to know God’s will for my life, which is good and pleasing and perfect. (Romans 12:1-2 NLT)

Then we pray, "Give us today our daily bread" to counter the sin of gluttony as we affirm our trust in God's providence. In Exodus 16:14-31 we see how God provided the Jews with manna everyday when they were in the wilderness. They were commanded to collect only what each family needed. Those who tried to hoard found that the manna they kept became infected with maggots the next day. Trusting God keeps us from gluttony and helps us to develop self control in our lives.

We are set free from our guilt as we pray, "Forgive us our sins so that we can forgive those who sin against us." We need God's grace to forgive others and it is only when we have truly experienced the joy of our salvation that we will be able to forgive others. Unforgiveness keeps us from God's feasts in heaven like the elder brother who refused to attend his father's homecoming party for the prodigal son.

In our confinement at home during the circuit breaker, we need lots of patience with one another as we will be tempted to lose our temper. So we need to pray, "lead us out of temptation and deliver us from evil."  The practice of contemplative prayer increases the awareness of our negative thoughts so that we can bring them to Christ for healing. Our thoughts determine our feelings and actions which give the devil control over our lives as the apostle Paul reminds us:

"And “don’t sin by letting anger control you.” Don’t let the sun go down while you are still angry, for anger gives a foothold to the devil." Ephesians 4:26-27 NLT

We proclaim God's Kingdom of peace where we can live without fear and affirm the power of love and reject the lust for power for the glory of God as we conclude our prayer, "For Yours is the  Kingdom and the Power and the Glory for ever and ever. Amen

A dear friend passed away early this morning making death and grief so much up close and personal. Love and sorrow moves us to know God in a deeper way and to remember that we are all in the same boat of life.  In such times, we thank our Heavenly Father for His presence and His promises as we sing the song, "I'll Never Forsake You:  

"I'll never forsake you, this pain will not break you,
For I will remake you for unending joy;
My promise is faithful though now it is painful;
No power can trample My covenant love."

Dying To Love

"While we live in these earthly bodies, we groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and get rid of these bodies that clothe us. Rather, we want to put on our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life. God himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee he has given us his Holy Spirit. (2 Corinthians 5:4-5 NLT)

Living in a multiracial, multireligious and multicultural society can be enriching when we learn to see God's truths that is revealed in the beliefs of others. The apostle Paul noted that the people of Athens were very religious as they had many shrines. He found an altar with the inscription, "To an Unknown God." And he used it as the platform to share the gospel:

"This God, whom you worship without knowing, is the one I’m telling you about. He is the God who made the world and everything in it. Since he is Lord of heaven and earth, he doesn’t live in man-made temples, and human hands can’t serve his needs—for he has no needs. He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need." (Acts of the Apostles 17:22-25 NLT)

Today is Vesak Day, a day when the Buddhists commemorates the birth, enlightenment and attainment of nirvana of Siddharta Gautama Shakyamuni (Sakyamuni) Buddha. Siddharta Gautama was a Hindu prince who struggled to find the meaning of life in the face of the realities of sickness, aging and death. He discovered enlightenment in the Four Noble Truths - the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering. 

The Buddhist way to end suffering is the Middle Path of Right Understanding; Right Intention; Right Speech; Right Action; Right Livelihood; Right Effort; Right Mindfulness; and Right Concentration. It is a way to freedom FROM suffering. But Jesus Christ came to show as the way of freedom THROUGH suffering and death. We need to taste death, to quote Martin Luther,  if we are to be born again:

"If we are to be born again, we must first die and be raised with the Son of God [on the cross]; I say die, i.e. taste death as though it were present.”

Two days before my 73rd birthday I had the experience of having a "living funeral" and a taste of death. It was the last day of my work with HCA Hospice care. I had been associated with the charity for the past 35 years - first as a volunteer and for the past 13 years as a part time staff. I was deeply touched by the collage produced by my co-workers documenting my journey in hospice care which they presented in an online farewell party for me.

And then on the next day, the Upper Room devotional written by a 73 year old lady, was a retirement and birthday message to me from God reminding me that I do not have to do great deeds to make a difference as God values small acts of service which may seem insignificant. I was further enlightened by Dan Moseley's description of the process of grieving loss from losing someone or something signficant as a spiritual pilgrimage. He made the point that to grow spiritually is about the way we process changes in our lives - we travel from death to life as we move from what is lost to what is yet to love:

"Spiritual growth is about living through a breaking, stretching, aching, remaking process of letting go of that which is gone and taking on a life formed in response of what is becoming."

The dying have been my teachers teaching me that what is most important is not a "good death" but a "fruitful death" for death is not the end but the beginning of another season of life. Death frees the living from the heavy burden of caring for the dying. Death is never good but it can sow the seed of a new life for the living.

Retiring from my work in hospice care has opened the door for me to embark more fully on the spiritual journey of contemplative prayer. It is a way of putting on new minds so that our dying bodies can be swallowed by life in the Spirit. We become more aware that we are more than our thoughts and to be more attentive to the stirrings of the Holy Spirit who fill our hearts with his love so that we can know how dearly God loves us. (Romans 5:5 NLT) And so I am reminded on this Vesak Day with the Covid 19 pandemic of our human suffering  and our need to die to self which Ernest Becker has described:

"The self must be destroyed, brought down to nothing, in order for self-transcendance to begin. Then the self can begin to relate itself to powers beyond itself. It has to thrash around in its finitude, it has to "die' in order to question that finitude, in order to see beyond it."

It is through contemplative prayer that we come to know the secret of godly contentment in life - that we are nothing without Christ and that we have everything when we are in Christ. As the apostle Paul wrote to the church in Philippi:

"I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little. For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength." Philippians 4:12‭-‬13 NLT

Contemplative prayer is not an easy path as it will lead us to face the harsh realities of life - that life is full of suffering because of sickness, poverty, old age and death. To face the truth that we suffer when we realise that we cannot keep what we want and we cannot avoid what we do not want. To face the truth that it is our wrong thinking that leads us to wrong actions and bad feelings which is the cause of our suffering. For this is the truth of our sinful nature that the apostle Paul has described:

"And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can’t. I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway. But if I do what I don’t want to do, I am not really the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it." Romans 7:18-20 NLT

The good news is that we have the victory over sin in Christ when it is no longer we who lives but Christ who lives in us. (Galatians 2:20). Soren Kierkegaard believed that Christianity was not a doctrine to be taught but rather a life to be lived. In his view, many Christians who were relying totally on external proofs of God were missing out on the true Christian experience which is all about a personal and intimate relationship with God. Contemplative prayer offers us the way of dying to self that we may know what is true love - that God is love and we are God's beloved. May we experience the joy of knowing that we are the object of God's love through contemplative prayer:

"Now I am yours and You are mine,

Oh precious thought to me!

The priceless gift of love divine

Provides security.

The life I owe such mercy

Could never be enough.

But thank you, Lord, for making me

The object of Your love."

From Me To We

"All the believers were united in heart and mind. And they felt that what they owned was not their own, so they shared everything they had. The apostles testified powerfully to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and God’s great blessing was upon them all. There were no needy people among them, because those who owned land or houses would sell them and bring the money to the apostles to give to those in need." Acts of the Apostles 4:32-35 NLT

The Covid 19 pandemic has shaken the whole world and turned it upside down. We are forced to see the world as it really is - devastating and terrifying. It is the "thunderclap of heaven" to wake us up to the reality of death. It is a time to face the hard truth of life that Sigmund Freud had pointed out - our need to confess that in our civilized attitude towards death we are once more living psychologically beyond our means, and must reform and give death its proper place in our thoughts and in life. The Covid 19 pandemic has forced us to confront our existential dilemma that Ernest Becker describes and which we are all now experiencing:

"As an animal organism man senses the kind of planet he has been put down on, the nightmarish, demonic frenzy in which nature has unleashed billions of individual organismic appetites of all kinds - not to mention earthquakes, meteors, and hurricanes, which seem to have their own hellish appetites."

The harsh truth of human life is that without God, we are psychologically and spiritually bankrupt and we are living as slaves to the gods of money, sex and power. We are driven by greed, lust and pride while living in fear of death. Our lifestyes are founded on the vital lie that Ernest Becker draws attention to:

"We don't want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don't want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us"

We have no control over the future but we live as though we have. It is a lie we need in order to live but which, Ernest Becker reminds us, dooms us to a life that is never really ours. We need to die to our false self in order to be reborn to be the persons that God has created us to be. The good news is that Jesus Christ lived, died and rose from the dead to set us free from the fear of dying and to die to our false selves:

"Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death. Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying." Hebrews 2:14-15 NLT

When we are no longer living in denial of death and are freed from our fear of death, perhaps we will then be able to see the hidden blessing of Covid 19 in providing us with the time and opportunity to practice silence and solitude. We read in the gospel of Mark that before daybreak the next morning, Jesus got up and went out to an isolated place to pray after a busy time of healing at the home of Peter's mother in law (Mark 1:29-35 NLT). The practice of solitude is not burdensome if we see it as the privilege of worshipping God in and through silence. Solitude also leads us to true community when we do not need the presence of others to keep us from feeling lonely but we can become the channels of God's presence and love to keep others from the spiritual poverty of loneliness. 

Silence is a very important component of prayer and worship. As the prophet Habbakuk reminds us:

"But the Lord is in his holy Temple. Let all the earth be silent before him.” Habakkuk 2:20 NLT

But it is so difficult to keep silence even in our worship services. Silence can seems deathly. So we either spend only a few seconds or a minute in silence or we fill it with music. We need to understand and appreciate the silence of worship for silence is the highest form of worship. We are not to worship silence but we are to use silence as the expression of our intention to seek God's presence and to present ourselves as a living sacrifice to Him. The silence of worship and solitude is not to empty our minds but to become more conscious of the truth which the apostle Paul experienced:

"For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain." Philippians 1:21 NKJV

In silence we experience the reality that we are more than our brain and our minds. In silence we can learn to observe our thoughts non judgementally and to become aware of our true self which is hidden in Jesus Christ deep within our hearts. Through the silence of worship, we will bear the fruits of prayer, faith, love, service and peace which Mother Teresa has described as her simple path. It is a path to an intimate relationship with God as our loving Abba Father. We will then do good not in order to feel good but we will do good because we are feeling good as the beloved children of God.

As we experience peace with God and as we are filled with the peace of God, we can face the terror of death. We will also be delivered from our greed and fear of scarcity. We can then formulate creative solutions to the two certainties about human life - death and taxes.

It is only when our mindsets towards death and taxes are reframed that we will be able to live in a co-operative and compassionate society that will be heaven on earth.  This was how the early disciples lived when the Holy Spirit united them in heart and mind as we read in Acts 4:32-35. Covid 19 will then truly be a blessing if we are delivered from living in hellish societies where human beings are driven by greed, pride and lust instead of kindness, humility and love.

Imagine what life after Covid 19 will be like when we are not filled with the terror of death and when we seek to live our lives so that our deaths will bear the fruit of love, joy and peace in the lives of those we leave behind. Imagine what can be done when the rich see it as a privilege as well as a social responsibility to pay taxes instead of using money to control others.  Covid 19 draws our attention to the following truth:

"Teach those who are rich in this world not to be proud and not to trust in their money, which is so unreliable. Their trust should be in God, who richly gives us all we need for our enjoyment. Tell them to use their money to do good. They should be rich in good works and generous to those in need, always being ready to share with others. By doing this they will be storing up their treasure as a good foundation for the future so that they may experience true life." 1 Timothy 6:17-19 NLT

I believe God is using Covid 19 to lead us from a "me" mindset to a "we" mindset - to live together as the family of God in the kingdom of heaven here on earth. Let us learn to be at home with God in silence for then we will know that we will never be alone. Then we can be God's channel of love so that those in need will not feel that they are alone.  I believe that I am called to be faithful in silence rather than to be successful in good works and so my prayer is that I will be faithful in my living and in my dying:

"Living or dying may honor be Thine.
For this wretched life, You loved and forgave.
A life that is on fire, be only our heart's desire,
Be faithful from now to the grave.

May the Lord find us faithful.
May His Word be our banner held high.
May the Lord find us faithful every moment,
Every day, every hour! Everyday tho' we live tho' we die..."