Love unknown

"Faith is not a thing of the mind; it is not an intellectual certainty or a felt conviction of the heart. It is a sustained decision to take God with utter seriousness as the God of my life. It is to live out each hour in a practical, concrete affirmation that God is Father and he is 'in heaven'. It is a decision to shift the centre of our lives from ourselves to him, to forego self-interest and make his interests, his will, our sole concern. This is what it means to hallow his name as Father in heaven." Sister Ruth Burrows, O.C.D.

I am indebted to "Leafyschroder" who comments on this blog for introducing me to Ruth Burrows, a Carmelite nun, who wrote the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent book last year. In particular she recommended Before the Living God. I found this in an on-line review: "Her other books demonstrate the way God used even her worst experiences in the convent for her (and other's) spiritual benefit. It seems one purpose of the book might have been to encourage the reader to realize that God will take the most traumatic, or unfair circumstances if we turn to Him and transform it into one of our greatest blessings that brings spiritual peace and personal intimacy with God." 

Leafyschroder then sent me this beautiful extract from a review of Ruth Burrows' latest book, Love Unknown:

"She has been trying to pray as a nun for 65 years. And what has she to show for it? Darkness, by her own account, and the feeling that God does not exist. As a young woman, when she prayed, nothing 'happened', and she soon realised it would always be like this. 'It is impossible to understand my life unless it is seen all the time against the background of black depression,' she wrote 36 years ago, in one of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century, Before the Living God.


"Her depression did not stem from any 'Dark Night of the Soul'. It came not from her vocation as a nun, but happened to be something that she brought to it with her, as part of her disposition. Those who have met her find her a sharp, intelligent, amusing interlocutor, but things are no easier for her in her spiritual life today. The difference is that now she is 'happy to be poor'. This attitude of poverty is the underlying, human theme of Love Unknown. The two themes go together: the objective reality of a loving God, and on the other side a radical human poverty on the part of the Christian loved by him.

"In this lies the answer to the person who finds that he or she is 'not getting anywhere' with prayer. Ruth Burrows challenges any such judgement based on subjective experience. Since it is God who prays in us, what would we expect to see and feel? Only by focusing on what is revealed by the risen Christ can we be sure that our God is real and not just a projection. We can only know the true, living God through his incarnate image."


Forgive me if you've already read my conversation with Leafyschroder, but I thought that last quotation really merited being a main blog entry. I'm ordering some of Ruth Burrows' books.

Beauty for ashes

You might like to read my Diary of a Dancing Donkey blog, where I described what Julian of Norwich  called a "revelation of divine love". We spent last week at the New Wine Festival, a big gathering of Christians in Somerset, which led to my starting this blog a year ago.

Gorgeous Grace - Click for link

In the end it was an encouraging time for me. On the way I noted things which people said. Unfortunately I was just using my iPod on which I'm very slow, and so they may be approximate quotes. Anyway here's the first of them, from Karen Jones - who's recently published her first novel with the unlikely title of The Babe's Bible - Gorgeous Grace, which I am reliably informed is gripping. As I was saying, here's the quote:

"Our sufferings cost us too much to waste them."

It's true, isn't it? We can either nurse our pains and almost cherish them, clinging to them rather like Gollum and his "my precious" ring. Or we can release them and use them more like St Paul who used his afflictions "to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God." 

I think Karen was thinking not only of that, but also of our suffering being a seedbed for the growth of our own maturity and our relationship with God. We can regard suffering as entirely negative and destructive, or we can allow it to be turned to good. I say "allow" as I don't think it's merely a matter of the will. Paul talks about "the God of all comfort" who enables us to pass on the comfort we've received. That has to be the work of the Holy Spirit. And equally it's Him who turns our ashes into a crown of beauty and gives us a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair (Isaiah 61). It's certainly true that when we're going through suffering like depression or bereavement it doesn't lie in our power to drag ourselves into the light, not really. We may put on a brave face, but it always conceals a weeping heart. But God... "is able to do immeasurably more than we ask or imagine". YIPPEE! 

"Weeping may last through the night,    
but joy comes with the morning."   
So I wait for you....

The vulnerable mind

Last Friday, the Evangelical Alliance published an article of mine in their Friday night theology series. The aim is to write about 500 words on something topical. I've written for them a number of times, but I think in the end I have been most pleased with this article. You can read it here: Friday Night Theology: The Vulnerable Mind.

It's very tempting for Christians to pretend life is a bed of roses for them. I think that has a number of causes. One is the habit that preachers used to have of saying something like, "Come to Jesus and all your problems will be sorted." As Anne said at Stanford's Festival Songs of Praise last Sunday, that certainly wasn't the message that Saul, later St Paul, was given at his conversion, as God tells the reluctant evangelist, Ananias, “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.” Not a great sales pitch! 


Another is the culture of "strength" fostered among the clergy. It's not done to admit weakness, either mistakes or mental fragility. I was very fortunate when I was an apprentice pastor to have an understanding boss - as within my first year I was plagued by panic attacks. Early intervention and counselling restored my equilibrium. Later on, I actually believe that my MND, which is such an obvious weakness, helped some in our church to feel free to admit to their vulnerabilities. It made us all more real with each other and with God. 


Depression is of course not at all obvious. It may creep up insidiously as MND does, but it's easier to conceal and has a public stigma which encourages concealment. However, to my mind, it's worse than any physical ailment, as is true for all mental unwellness. The truth is that people of faith have never been insulated from mental struggles. Look through the Old Testament and try to find heroes of faith who sailed untroubled through life.... Of course the example who is most often cited is Elijah, whose treatment begins with food and rest, but you can uncover questionings, doubts and tears all over the place. The psalms contain their fair share of complaints and honest misery. If you've suffered depression, you'll recognise the feeling of Psalm 55: 

“Oh, that I had wings like a dove!
    I would fly away and be at rest;
⁷ yes, I would wander far away;
    I would lodge in the wilderness;
⁸ I would hurry to find a shelter
    from the raging wind and tempest."

Jesus himself was not immune from doubts (in the temptations) or from the sense of God having abandoned him. When he said, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" I can't believe he was pretending, or merely reciting poetry. I believe he was using the closest words he could find to describe his experience. "This is what I'm going through - and it hurts even more than the nails." The sheer cliffs of the mind are dreadful places to hang.

My article was inspired, oddly enough, by the transparent honesty of four MPs in a recent debate. When, I wondered, did I last hear a prominent church leader talking about his struggle with mental health? Would someone who admitted the vulnerability even be considered for ministry in the church? And if not, what sort of message does that send to other Christians? The wrong sort. The Church is not the domain of the strong and satisfied; it's the haven for the hurting and the hungry. It's not the resort of the successful, but of the lost and limping. It has good news not for the righteous, but for washed-up sinners. It's meant to be a ragbag of mixed-up, messed-up men and women, not there in the first place because they need mending, but there because they need loving - and they are loved. And because Christ loves every member of his motley Church and gave himself for them, so they in turn are meant to accept and love each other in the same way, without conditions and without reservations.

Withered joy and blasted hopes

When I lived in London, my brother was training at St Thomas's Hospital and I used to visit him in Lambeth. That's when I first came across the imposing Metropolitan Tabernacle at Elephant and Castle. It was built to accommodate the huge congregations that came to hear the Victorian Baptist preacher, Charles Spurgeon. According the Wikipedia he preached to more than 10 million in his lifetime - which in the days before broadcasting and electronic media is a remarkable statistic. He still has a lot of fans today, including someone who teaches preaching near here. Simon put this on his Facebook this morning. 


Great focus for today from Spurgeon: "'Yet,' says Moses, 'though we are always changing, Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place throughout all generations.' The Christian knows no change with regard to God. He may be rich to-day and poor to-morrow; he may be sickly to-day and well to-morrow; he may be in happiness to-day, to-morrow he may be distressed - but there is no change with regard to his relationship to God. If He loved me yesterday, He loves me to-day. My unmoving mansion of rest is my blessed Lord. Let prospects be blighted; let hopes be blasted; let joy be withered; let mildews destroy everything; I have lost nothing of what I have in God. He is 'my strong habitation whereunto I can continually resort.' I am a pilgrim in the world, but at home in my God. In the earth I wander, but in God I dwell in a quiet habitation."

I thought it was worth repeating. Another friend of mine in the Far East who has cancer wrote, "Real theology comes out of suffering." That's probably true of Spurgeon who suffered from depression. By the age of 22 he was the most popular preacher of his day, preaching to audiences of 10,000+. "On 8 January 1856, Spurgeon married Susannah, daughter of Robert Thompson of Falcon Square, London, by whom he had twin sons, Charles and Thomas born on 20 September 1856. At the end of that year, tragedy struck on October 19, 1856, as Spurgeon was preaching at the Surrey Gardens Music Hall for the first time. Someone in the crowd yelled, 'Fire!' The ensuing panic and stampede left several dead. Spurgeon was emotionally devastated by the event and it had a sobering influence on his life. He struggled against depression for many years and spoke of being moved to tears for no reason known to himself" (Wikipedia). He must have gone from elation to devastation, feeling his "joy withered". But God proved his place of "quiet habitation".