The Silence of Holy Moments

 The Silence Of Holy Moments

Be silent before the Lord, all humanity, for he is springing into action from his holy dwelling.” Zechariah 2:13 NLT

God has a perfect story for each of our lives. But I am spiritually blind and spiritually deaf to God’s voice when I live in fear of God’s judgment and misunderstand His commandments of love. When my image of God is that of an angry Judge and not as our Heavenly Father, His seed of grace cannot bear fruit - my heart is hardened like a path instead of being a fertile soil. 

I am then driven to seek to do good works to please God instead of living out my life as His masterpiece of Love. I am misled to strive to live a life of prayer instead of thriving and bearing the fruit of the Spirit by abiding in God’s grace through the silence of contemplative prayer. Prayer is not a ritual but the spiritual breath of our souls. It is easier to spend time talking to God instead of listening to His still small voice. And so often I miss God’s voice in the silence of holy moments. Our Shepherd of Love has given us everything we need to live the life that we are called to live:

“Everything that goes into a life of pleasing God has been miraculously given to us by getting to know, personally and intimately, the One who invited us to God. The best invitation we ever received! We were also given absolutely terrific promises to pass on to you—your tickets to participation in the life of God after you turned your back on a world corrupted by lust.” 2 Peter 1:3-‬4 MSG

But, as John Blackwell so rightly pointed out in his book, “The Noonday Demon,” our eyes are closed and maybe blind to the gentle nudges of Love offering us the gift of sight. He asked us to imagine how the practice of our “wondering” together what God is saying to us, in us and through us will transform our lives. By becoming a community of reflection that we become more fully human.

Instead of studying the bible, we can reflect on what is God calling us to accomplish together. We can simply share what we heard - a verse of Scripture or a line from a hymn. Discussing what we think only lead us to wander in the wilderness of our human thoughts. Spending moments of silence to ponder on our sharing about what we feel God was saying to us in those moments will draw us closer to God and to one another. As we do so, we may be able to see how God is molding us each day in all our moments - in our pain, our conflicts, our fears as well as our joys. Henri Nouwen reminds us:

“Community is not a talent show in which we dazzle the world with our combined gifts. Community is the place where our poverty is acknowledged and accepted, not as something we have to learn to cope with as best as we can but as a true source of new life.”

Advent is a time to reflect on the story of the birth of Jesus Christ in a manger as there was no room for his mother in the inn. This is to illustrate the truth that blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Our spiritual life, according to Henri Nouwen, is “a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, expecting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination or prediction.” The spirit of poverty helps us give up control over our future and to let God define our life.

So let us worship our God of the Present Moment by seeking His presence in the silence of holy moments as we proclaim:

“Joy to the world! The Lord is come
Let earth receive her King!
Let every heart prepare Him room
And heaven and nature sing
And heaven and nature sing
And heaven, and heaven and nature sing.”

God's Gift of Silence

 God’s Gift Of Silence

“Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!” Psalms 46:10 NKJV

The season of Advent marks the beginning of our Christian journey - a time when we reaffirm that Jesus Christ is our Shepherd of Love guiding us to an adventure of a life of love. It is a time to reawaken our sense of awe and wonder with the stories of Advent and the Christmas carols. As we sing:

“Silent night, holy night
All is calm, all is bright
'Round yon virgin Mother and Child
Holy infant so tender and mild....”

let us remember that we are the children of God. Let us recapture the childlike spirit of meekness to inherit the beautiful world that God has created. The spiritual discipline of silence is to help us to do so. Keeping silence expresses our trust in God and when our minds are fixed on God, He will keep us in perfect peace (Isaiah 26:3).

Last year, I lost my voice during the season of Advent and I was led to rediscover God’s voice in the discipline of silence and contemplative prayer. “Desert spirituality” is the reaction to and liberation from “empire spirituality” of Christians in the fourth century after the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine and elevation of Christianity to a state religion in 313 AD. Instead of being persecuted, Christians found themselves being tempted with greed and the lust of power.

The practice of silence and solitude is to examine the true condition of our hearts. To seek meekness with the hidden agenda to inherit the earth is very different from having the be-attitude of meekness to bring heaven on earth, This comes from having a spirit of gentleness rooted in our faith in the grace of God. The journey to examine our hearts is therefore  a journey we all have to take before we can truly follow Jesus. We need to be aware of our hurts, hangups and negative habits of thinking in order to leave the God we know with our minds. Only then will we be able to meet a God with our hearts - a God we don’t know and can’t possibly imagine with our minds.

Learning and practising to be still is to become aware that we are more than our brains or minds. We are not human beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human experience. At Christmas we celebrate the coming of Jesus from heaven to embody meekness as a baby in a manger:

“Instead, he emptied himself; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross.” Philippians 2:7‭-‬8 NLT

The truest sign of our salvation is when we live with humility or meekness because we know that we cannot take our salvation for granted - just like  a member of Alcoholics Anonymous who can never take his cure from alcohol addiction for granted and is always dependent on the grace of God to keep him from falling back into addiction.

Our human tendency is to show off our strengths and to hide our weaknesses. When we do so we become our own worst enemies for then we know deep within ourselves that we are hypocrites. The way of meekness is to keep the good things we have done in our hearts and to share the messy realities of our daily lives.

The first step in our journey in Advent is therefore to offer ourselves as living sacrifices as we seek a Christmas that is really Christmas when we truly give our hearts to Jesus in repentance and surrender:

“And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him.  Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.” Romans 12:1‭-‬2 NLT

May the Lord lead our hearts into a full understanding and expression of the love of God and the patient endurance that comes from Christ (2 Thessalonians 3:5 NLT) as we seek God’s gift of silence in this first week of Advent.

Advent In A Blue Christmas

 Advent In A Blue Christmas

“But no one knows about that day or hour. Not even the angels in heaven know. The Son does not know. Only the Father knows. Keep watch! Stay awake! You do not know when that time will come.” Mark 13:32-‬33 NIRV

The COVID 19 pandemic has cast dark clouds over Christmas celebrations this year. Instead of a merry Christmas, we are faced with the prospect of a blue Christmas - with financial worries and health concerns hanging over our heads. Together with political upheavals, climate changes and natural disasters, the COVID 19 pandemic has also given birth to many false prophecies about the end times. However, the blessing of COVID 19 is that it is a wake up call to rediscover the real meaning of Advent. To overcome our feelings of blues over our inability to prepare for our traditional Christmas celebrations, we can take time for silence and reflection - a time to be captivated by the season of Advent. Advent without the hedonistic trappings of Christmas can be an exciting adventure to make room in our hearts for the Risen Christ.

Instead of speculating on the second coming of Christ which no one can know, we are called to keep watch and to stay awake. A more fruitful exercise for Advent is to spend time in Silence, to wait on the Holy Spirit, to search the Scriptures and to seek the leading of our Shepherd of Love.

How we spend our time in this world is determined by what is in our hearts. The spiritual condition of our hearts determines whether we will bear the fruit of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility and self control. In the parable of the sower, Jesus describes the four kinds of soil that represent the condition of our hearts - the path, the rocky ground, the soil filled with thorns and the good soil.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has drawn attention to the truth that the line separating good from evil runs not between countries or classes or cities or political parties, but right through the human heart. And it oscillates. He saw that even in the best of us, there remains some unpurged evil, but even in the worst of us, a small corner of goodness remains. It is therefore so important to be aware of the kind of soil that we may have in our hearts.

First Sunday of Advent: Our hearts as a path

A seed sown on the path cannot bear fruit. People walked on it and the birds ate it up. When our hearts are a path, we are unable to believe and to receive the power of God’s love. We are under the control of lust and greed. We are only concerned about what we want and how we can make use of others to get what we want. We are addicted to our need for control and blind to our need for God’s amazing grace.

In the midst of our successes and comfortable lives we are in constant danger of forgetting God. We are tempted to turn health, wealth and longevity into our idols. COVID 19 is a grim reminder that the future is unpredictable and that we are powerless over life and death. This tiny virus is teaching us to realize how short our lives are so that our hearts will become wise (Psalm 90:12). The call to keep watch and stay awake is not an order from a tyrannical God to keep us from enjoying life but the wise advice from our Shepherd of Love to help us live life abundantly.

When Jesus is our Shepherd of Love, we are the sheep of His pasture. As His sheep, we will have the be-attitude of meekness. And we have the wonderful promise that the meek will inherit the earth. This is not about going to heaven when we die but living in the kingdom of heaven here on earth. It is living with Jesus reigning in our lives as the Servant King in the here and now. It is living in the power of love and not to be seduced by the love of power.

With Jesus as our Shepherd, we will not fear poverty for we can trust that God will always provide for our needs but not our wants. We need the spirit of poverty to live in the kingdom of heaven. This does not mean that we are to be materially poor - it is to be free from the sin of greed. It is only with the spirit of poverty that we can live a life of total dependence on God. And this will keep us from the love of money that is the root of all evil.

To keep watch, we can practice silence. It is a practice to become more aware of our thinking and the thoughts flooding our minds - it is not trying to empty our minds. At times, one may fall asleep during the silence especially when one is physically tired - and hence we need to stay awake!

Cultivating silence is the expression of our intention to seek God’s presence. It is an act of repentance. Through silence we invite the Holy Spirit to transform our minds so that we will not conform to the thinking of the world. And it is a concrete act of surrendering our will to God. Through silence we can become more aware of the sins of lust and greed. In silence we trust that the Holy Spirit is working to change our attitudes so that we will have the beatitudes of meekness and poverty of spirit.

Mother Teresa described prayer as the fruit of silence. In prayer, we seek the power of love to overcome lust. We pray for the fruit of goodness so that we will be freed from the sin of greed. In prayer, we confront the reality of evil as well as affirm our trust in God’s faithful Love:

“And pray that we will be saved from sinful and evil people. Not everyone is a believer. But the Lord is faithful. He will strengthen you. He will guard you from the evil one. We trust in the Lord. So we are sure that you are doing the things we tell you to do. And we are sure that you will keep on doing them.” 2 Thessalonians 3:2-‬4 NIRV

Let us learn to be still and to wait in silence during this Advent in a Blue Christmas of 2020 so that the Holy Spirit can break up the “path” in our hearts and change it into good soil for God’s seed of Love to bear fruit.

 

God's Message Of Hope

“Then he said to me, “Speak a prophetic message to these bones and say, ‘Dry bones, listen to the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Look! I am going to put breath into you and make you alive again! I will put flesh and muscles on you and cover you with skin. I will put breath into you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’” Ezekiel 37:4-6

The Jews were at the lowest point of their faith as they had been scattered and the Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed. They were utterly powerless and lifeless - like dry bones scattered in the valley - a picture of total helplessness and hopelessness. It was a time when they faced the consuming fire of God’s judgment as they lament:

“We have become old, dry bones—all hope is gone. Our nation is finished.” Ezekiel 37:11 NLT

The history of the Jews is to teach us that it is sin that separates us from God and like the Jews, we can become dry bones spiritually. We feel we are sinners because of our sins but God knows we sin because we are sinners. We need to see and understand that sin is the cancer of our souls that leads to death. God’s consuming fire of love is to purify our sinful and deceitful hearts. God’s fire of love is spiritual radiotherapy to cure the spiritual cancer of sin.

God’s discipline is restorative justice - to heal us, to redeem us and to set us free from our slavery to sin. It is not retributive punishment to make us suffer for our sins. It is so crucial to see the wonderful story of God’s Love in the book of Ezekiel. Instead of being blinded by God’s wrath we need to learn from the Jews the reality of our rebellious and sinful hearts that keeps us from living the abundant life as the children of God. We need to hear God’s message of hope given to Ezekiel that will transform dry bones into a great army of God:

“I will put my Spirit in you, and you will live again and return home to your own land. Then you will know that I, the Lord, have spoken, and I have done what I said. Yes, the Lord has spoken!’” Ezekiel 37:14 NLT

God’s promise has been fulfilled through Jesus Christ who came to be our Shepherd of Love - He died and rose from the dead to give us the gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ is also the cornerstone of God’s new Temple and we are the living stones. And as Ezekiel prophesied:

“I will make my home among them. I will be their God, and they will be my people. And when my Temple is among them forever, the nations will know that I am the Lord, who makes Israel holy.” Ezekiel 37:27‭-‬28 NLT

To be a follower of Jesus Christ therefore means more than just being a member of a church - it is to be a living stone of God’s Temple and to be a part of the Body of the Risen Christ. Christians are to be the ekklesia - a group of citizens called out of their homes to be witnesses of the reality of the Risen Christ:

“It is important that the church today understand the definition of ekklesia. The church needs to see itself as being “called out” by God. If the church wants to make a difference in the world, it must be different from the world. Salt is different from the food it flavors. God has called the church to be separate from sin (1 Peter 1:16), to embrace fellowship with other believers (Acts 2:42), and to be a light to the world (Matthew 5:14). God has graciously called us unto Himself: “‘Come out from them and be separate,’ says the Lord. ‘Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you’” (2 Corinthians 6:17).”1

The COVID 19 pandemic provides Christians with an amazing opportunity to live out the truth of being God’s ekklesia so that they will shine as bright stars in a world darkened by the pandemic and financial crisis. It is a time to pray that God will breathe upon us and fill us with life anew - to love what God loves and do what He would do:

“Breathe on me, Breath of God,
Until my heart is pure,
Until with Thee I will one will,
To do and to endure.”2

So may the Lord lead us to use this time of enforced solitude to draw near to God by learning spiritual breathing through silence and meditation.

References:

1. What is the definition of ekklesia? gotquestions.org/definition-ekklesia.html

2. Breathe on me, Breath of God

Fearful Christians or Fruitful Disciples

“So then, my dear friends, just as you have always obeyed, not only in my presence but even more in my absence, continue working out your salvation with awe and reverence,  for the one bringing forth in you both the desire and the effort – for the sake of his good pleasure – is God.” Philippians 2: 12‭ -‬13 NET

We are living in fearful and unpredictable times. In such times, messages of gloom and doom and God’s judgment abound. These can lead us to become Christians living in fear of going to hell. Fear of God's judgment turns everything into nothing. Faith in God's Love turns nothing into everything. St Francis de Sales made the following wise observation:

"Those who love to be feared fear to be loved, and they themselves are more afraid of anyone, for whereas other men fear only them, they fear everyone."

God does not love to be feared - He wants us to know His love so that we can overcome all fear. The good news of the gospel is that Jesus Christ came to reveal the love of God and to show us that God is our Heavenly Father who has no desire to condemn anyone to death:

“As surely as I live, says the Sovereign Lord , I take no pleasure in the death of wicked people. I only want them to turn from their wicked ways so they can live. Turn! Turn from your wickedness, O people of Israel! Why should you die?” Ezekiel 33:11 NLT

We are not called to live as fearful Christians but as disciples of Christ bearing the fruit of love in our lives. God’s will is for us to live in His Kingdom in the here and now so that we can shine as lights in this dark world of sin. The Philippian Christians were exhorted to work out their salvation with awe and reverence. We have been given the gift of salvation which is our deliverance from the bondage of sin. This is but the first step into the Kingdom of heaven in the here and now. Like the Jews who were delivered from their slavery in Egypt, we are on a journey to our Promised Land - a life of freedom as a slave of Christ. It is not just a freedom from sin but the freedom to love God and others. But we have to face the spiritual battle for our hearts and minds as we have two natures in us. We read in the letter to the Galatians:

“The sinful nature wants to do evil, which is just the opposite of what the Spirit wants. And the Spirit gives us desires that are the opposite of what the sinful nature desires. These two forces are constantly fighting each other, so you are not free to carry out your good intentions.” Galatians 5:17 NLT

This is the harsh reality of our human life - we are in the midst of a spiritual warfare and our lives are filled with conflicts, temptations, trials and suffering. When we are under the control of our sinful nature, we are filled with fear and guilt as well as the temptations of lust, greed, pride, envy, anger, gluttony and acedia. We cannot be faithful witnesses of Jesus Christ when we are living as fearful Christians.

We glorify God only when we are bearing the fruit of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility and self-control. We are to live out our salvation so that the seed of love will germinate and bear fruit in our hearts of flesh. And we do so by the grace of God for it is God who is at work in us by turning our stony, stubborn hearts into tender responsive hearts:

“And I will give them singleness of heart and put a new spirit within them. I will take away their stony, stubborn heart and give them a tender, responsive heart” Ezekiel 11:19 NLT

So how are we to work out our salvation with awe and reverence? It is not by trying to be “holy” through a blind and superstitious faith in religious rituals but through the spiritual disciplines that can help us practice the presence of God. Christians have the rich traditions of the spiritual disciplines of meditation and lectio divina to renew their minds so that their lives can be transformed.

The writer of the Upper Room devotional on 22nd  August 2020 shared how we can waste our energy feeding our fears and doubts and harboring feelings of anger, jealousy, or resentment toward anyone. Advances in neuroscience have found that we can change how our brain function by our thoughts. Neuroscience has given us new and exciting insights about the neuroplasticity of the brain - that we can change our brain by changing the way we think. This has confirmed biblical truths such as:

“Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.” Romans 12:2 NLT

“And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.” Philippians 4:8 NLT

“We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God. We capture their rebellious thoughts and teach them to obey Christ.” 2 Corinthians 10:5 NLT

To work out our salvation we can cultivate the habit of taking an inventory of our thoughts and feelings so that we are more aware of how our negative thoughts are consuming energy that can be redirected towards loving others. The exercise of paying attention to our thoughts is to help us be more conscious of our sinful desires, ulterior motives and hidden agendas. As we do so, we can replace them with more godly and positive thoughts through the Holy Spirit in prayer. Then we can say with the psalmist:

“Then I said, “Look, I have come. As is written about me in the Scriptures: I take joy in doing your will, my God, for your instructions are written on my heart.” Psalms 40:7‭-‬8 NLT

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..."