‘Suddenly from Heaven there came a sound like
the rush of a violent wind and it filled the entire house’
Acts
2:2
Thoughts
from India
Dear All,
It is good to be back
from India where I had a wonderful time thanks to the kindness of my friends
there. Here are some thoughts to prepare us for the great Feast of Pentecost
inspired by my time there.
The
ashram where I was staying in the
Himalayas had been started by Vandana Mataji, a
co-worker of the French Benedictine, Henri Le Saux. Born in 1910 to a poor
Breton family, Le Saux had a long interest in India and Indian spirituality
joining at an early age the minor seminary at Châteaugiron in 1921 before
entering the Benedictine order at the Abbey of Sainte-Anne de Kergonan in 1929.
In 1948 he sailed to India to begin a monastic community with his fellow French
priest, Jules Monchanin, their aim being to live the ancient Western monastic
life within the frame and ambit of classical Indian ideas, philosophy and
spiritual practice. The monastery they founded, normally called Shantivanam (The Forest of Peace),
survived their passing and today flourishes, however while they both lived
there it largely remained (as both priests liked it) a quiet and empty hermitage.
Both priests began wearing the kavi
of the Hindu renouncer in the 1950s at which time Henri le Saux took the name
Abishikteśvarānda
(throughout this article I have used the normal English version of his name,
Swami Abhishiktananda, omitting the diacritics). In 1968, Swami Abhishiktananda
decided to head north to the source of the Ganges where he spent the final
years of his life alternating between a small hermitage he had built there and
seeking to convey his message to a new generation of seekers to India.
Still controversial today after his
death in 1973 there are elements in his life and writings that pre-empt our
twenty-first century concerns in a prophetic fashion. A few days after my
return to England we suffered the horrendous attack on the Manchester Arena.
Watching the groups of mourning, distressed and disconsolate folk in that proud
city I was reminded once again of the Swami’s message: that we must open up to
the new possibilities that are now arising. Accordingly in this article I would
like to concentrate on a key aspect of the Swami’s teaching: that we are now
being called by the Risen Christ to a new awakening and the instrument for that
call will, certainly, be the ‘vent de l’esprit’.
The Trinitarian Nature of Christian Prayer
In her wisdom the
Church presents us with a wonderful series of mysteries to contemplate week by
week as we proceed through the church year, beginning with the Annunciation,
passing through the mysteries of the Incarnation, the call to Christ’s ministry
and suffering leading to his Crucifixion and Resurrection. Now we are led at
this climax of Easter to the Ascension and the Descent of the Holy Spirit. All
this culminates in the great feast of the Trinity which we celebrate shortly.
For, as the church reminds us, we cannot think of Christian life, Christian
vocation, Christian action or indeed Christian prayer outside the Trinitarian
perspective. As St Paul puts it in the Letter to the Romans (8: 26 – 29):
The
spirit participates in our weakness for we do not know how to pray as we
should,
But
that very Spirit supplicates on our behalf with unutterable groanings.
And
the Father who searches the heart knows the mind of the Spirit,
Because
the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to God.
We
know that in all things God works for good for those who love God
And
they are called according to God’s purpose.
And
for those whom he knew long ago
He
also destined that they be conformed to the Ikon of his Son
So
that He would be the first-born of a large family.
The passage is truly
wonderful as we realise that our Christian prayer is caught up in the
‘conversation’ between the Father and Son by the Spirit, even if we have no
idea what our ‘groanings’ are going to accomplish. The inevitable consequence
of being caught up in this conversation is that we are initiated into ‘the large
family’, the Church, to which we are destined by virtue of our baptism. Thus,
for Abhishiktananda ‘the Church is essentially a spiritual reality and the
Christian religion is, first of all, a living experience in the Spirit’ (Renewal of the Indian Church: 1).
Therefore, he continues, Christian life must
be lived at the level of the Spirit, if we do not allow the Spirit into our
prayers and lives we are not really acting as Christians. The Gospel writers
talk of Christ as the lodestone of the psyche (or soul) that leads to the
Spirit – the pneuma. Christ, as it
were, produces, an ethical field that surrounds our thoughts and souls, so that
the psyche now has a moral or ethical
life. By focussing our lives on Christ, they suggest, we will be led to the
Spirit. Contemplation in the Christian tradition is thus not something that focuses
on attaining esoteric inner states through self-absorption, but rather it is
the process that leads the soul (the
psyche) to the Spirit – the pneuma:
‘Those who try to make their psyche
secure will lose it, but those who lose their psyche will keep it’ (Lk
17.33 see also Matt 16.25, Mk 8.35 and Lk 9.24).
This
then colours how we view contemplation in the Christian tradition. As
Abhishiktananda puts it: ‘by contemplation we do not refer simply to a life of
habitual separation from the world and its lawful activities, that is to the
acosmic life of the monk or hermit’ (Renewal
of the Indian Church: 5). Christian contemplation is not a withdrawal from
the world but a call to re-engage with the world, but, and here is the rub,
with the Spirit at the centre of our activity. What St Ignatius called
‘becoming a contemplative in action’. In a letter to Antonio
Brandao written in 1551outlining how he saw the balance of prayer and work in the
life of his Jesuit scholastics, he gave a list of practical activities wherein
they can find God, concluding the letter by stating that: ‘this kind of
meditation – finding God our Lord in everything – is easier than lifting
ourselves up and laboriously making ourselves present to abstract divine
realities. Moreover, by making us properly disposed, this excellent exercise
will bring great visitations of our Lord even in short prayers’ (Letters of St
Ignatius in Ganss: 353). As this passage reveals, action and contemplation are
for Ignatius two sides of the same coin and one cannot develop mystical pieties
without at the same time developing a life of Christian action in the world.
Over-emphasis on the latter has sometimes led to downplaying the former.
So
therefore as we contemplate these great mysteries of Pentecost let us remember
that the descent of the Spirit reminds us of our essential Trinitarian nature:
rooted in Christ we look both to the Father in Heaven as well as to our fellow
suffering humans on earth. We all live in what Abhishiktananda called ‘the cave
of the heart’ but we also extend our hand of service to suffering humanity in
the tears and bloodshed of bombs, death and civil strife. For contemplation is
‘the constant attention to the mystery which we are, by nature and grace, in
the deepest recesses of our own spirit’ (Renewal of the Indian Church p.6).
Edith Stein, the great Carmelite martyr of Auschwitz, reminded us that we sit
with the ‘God-man’, Jesus Christ, on the axis of the infinite spirit and finite
suffering flesh. Let us remember this constantly in the coming days of what the
Orthodox call ‘The Bright Week’ – recalling our birth-rite in the Spirit and
our duty to our fellow suffering humanity.
Come
Holy Spirit!
Bringing
from Heaven
The
radiance of your light.
Come
Father of the Poor
Come
giver of all gifts
Come
light of our hearts!
