Coming Around Again

Visiting S.D. yesterday we talked about routine in clerical life. The knowledge that certain things happen at certain times in certain ways is one of the things that makes for stability and calm in the spiritual life; but a lot of clerical experience is a bit of a rigmarole - coming up with words, words, words, often the same ones to the same people, and often to little apparent effect – and in those circumstances routine can evolve into something which keeps God at arm’s length rather than something which shapes our experience of him.

A friend sent me a copy of George Verwer’s Messiology, a slim and simply-written book from 2015 arguing that God can use even the most chaotic and contradictory situations and that we mustn’t assume that even ministries and churches we don’t approve of can be channels of grace to those involved in them. This is no startling news to pathetic liberal-Catholics like me, though I dare say it may be to the conservative evangelicals who would form the majority of Mr Verwer’s audience. What struck me rather than that was the sense of freshness and energy coming from someone who’s been a missionary and mission organiser for decades. I may not come from the same stable spiritually or theologically, but I can see the grace in that.

At one level, all liturgy, from the most ‘spontaneous’ charismatic hand-waving jamboree to the contemplative solemnity of a Latin mass, attempts to fix and replicate spiritual ecstasy. Of course it can’t do this, at least not reliably, and anyone who seeks that will swiftly find only dissatisfaction and eventually resentment. They may try to recapture it by rearranging that liturgy or by going to another church, and again that may work for a while and then fade. It’s the same thing that the addict seeks: the energising, transforming rush of dopamine that creates ecstasy, literally ‘standing outside oneself’: self-forgetting. But the brain learns to anticipate the mechanism and as that happens it ceases to work.

What we need in order to keep forgetting ourselves is to be surprised by those peak experiences, and you can’t engineer surprise. God is infinitely surprising, but how do we keep exposing ourselves to that surprise? The answer seems to lie in paying close and grateful attention to that which is not us. The natural world is not us, and neither are other people. The liturgy (whatever it’s like) is not us, and when we can forget our expectations and demands and instead use it as material for prayer we do good work. Scripture, in all its huge variety, is not us, and there are times when a verse we may have read a score of times slaps us in the face with sudden relevance. In such attention, and not in our own feelings of uplift or lack of it, lies the blessing.