CHRIST CHURCH            8/3/09           
Psalm 22:1-5, 22-31
            In his introduction to a major work on the Psalms, Hans-Joachim Kraus (a German scholar obviously) makes some very helpful observations. The Psalms, he suggests, are prayers and praises arising from the very depths of human experience and even more to the point, they are the poems (language) of the poor (the enslaved and the persecuted), “not the hymns and praises of the church triumphant.”
            In other words, their language - their very essence and intent - is centred in a radical experience of truth telling, never to simply sound religious or to be in any way pious. For all (and I mean all) human emotions are permitted here: anxiety, anger, hatred, revenge, lament, kindness, patience, wonderment and love, just to name a few. Indeed, because they are offered without pretence, they have a far greater chance of being heard and valued; that originating place/point of poverty, whether it be material, spiritual or both, somehow giving prayers like the Psalms a power or validity that no amount of training, wit or knowledge could ever give. It is a bit like the crowd’s reaction to Jesus at one early point in his ministry: “He speaks as one with authority, unlike the (learned) scribes.” Well, exactly. He is refreshingly real, whereas unfortunately life’s reality is often missing in the religious context; the need to be something extraordinary for God – being far greater than simply be at home in the good grace and broad mercy that is God.
            For if nothing else, the bold (outrageous) expressions of the Psalms, give a clue as to what encourages the human heart to fully open and find its true expression. That being, a permission to be, an invitation into life without conditions and without the fear of punishment or self-shaming because we feel we are not good enough.
            And without doubt this is the lived experience of most, if not all of these writers. For God is ultimately liberator, not gaoler, a lover, never the tyrant. And so with that statement of relational knowing, one says what needs to be said, however deep, mysterious or even dark, knowing equally that through the expression, the airing, things do change; such consciousness always giving birth to a new perspective and hopefully remodelled behaviour.
            One of the many lessons to be learnt from the Monastic tradition(s) is the way in which the prayer life of the given community pivots on the reading and the chanting of the psalms. That so squarely in the midst of a common and ordinary experience of life, with all the extremes of emotion, God is claimed and reclaimed as the ground of all being, the essence of life itself. The point being, that faith is practised and expressed not in a rarefied, sanitized environment but in the messy workshop of life itself.  My own experience of late being the naming of the unnameable, the liberating expression of the unmentionable. And all within the affirmation and holding power of God’s grace. “You are acceptable. You are loved.”
            It occurs to me that if religious faith cannot help give rise to such openings, such ripening of soul (spirit), such breakthroughs in consciousness, it is of little or even no use. Possibly even a firewall to what is most needed; a bulwark, to use an old-fashioned word, to newness of any description.
           
            The invitation before us then, is to pursue a spirituality way beyond mere niceness and respectability, way beyond neat order and predictability; a spirituality that is refreshingly honest in its intent to seek depths of both self-understanding and compassion for others, however daring or even foolish it may first appear.
            Critically, a spirituality with a starting point in poverty, emptiness – humility by another name. For from there, and only from there, can openings into new life truly begin and start to flourish. And it is that very same surprising, if not shocking principle, celebrated by the now widely read Rumi, a 13th Century Sufi mystic poet:

 “Be helpless, dumbfounded,
unable to say yes or no
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.”

Openings. New possibility. Another way of worship, doing, another way of being. This is the stuff of our prayer, the path of authentic faith.
Friends, this is the journey of Lent. May we continue to take the winding road together.