This event ended yesterday and apparently it was awesome
Independent Catholic News has some great articles, which are reposted here below:
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A contemplative GreenbeltBy: Rima Devereaux
Posted: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 9:20 pm
The Upanishads say that in the deepest centre of the human heart is a space that contains the whole cosmos. This year’s Greenbelt Festival offered a wealth of opportunities – different forms of worship – to discover that space. I made a spiritual tour of five of them.
Laurence Freeman, a Benedictine monk and teacher of Christian meditation, said that we worship something greater than ourselves, and this act lifts us into being more alive. Such surrender to mystery makes us better able to cope with the ups and downs of life. We can become aware of this greater reality, and it in turn wants to be closer to us. We call this reality ‘God’. The essence of worship is, as Jesus says to the Samaritan woman, ‘spirit and truth’. Jesus was sensitive to the external forms of religion and warns us not to get caught up in them. Having to worship in strange places reminds us that the real place of worship is the heart. Silence is about paying attention, not about the absence of noise.
After this introduction, Freeman led the group in ten minutes of Christian meditation – asking us to say the prayer word ‘Maranatha’ slowly, attentively, syllable by syllable. This utter simplification of prayer – the early Christians called meditation ‘pure prayer’ – is refreshing, deepening and energizing.
Still Point is an organization that tries to encourage and nurture the practice of spirituality in the Christian contemplative and mystical tradition. Two of its members led a series of meditative practices on the theme of water, vital to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In the first of these, ‘Sea swimming’, the group is asked to imagine itself on a beach and then swimming in deep water, at first afraid and then at peace. The second, ‘Immersed in water’, evokes the waters of the womb, the baptismal waters, and the meaning of water as chaos in the Hebrew Scriptures. You are asked to immerse your hands in a bowl, or do another action significant to you, reverently as if you were taking Communion. I found myself tracing the sign of the cross on my forehead.
The third practice, ‘Give me a drink’, combines prayer and action, where you simply give a stranger in the group a drink of water, or are given water by the other person. Done mindfully and prayerfully, this creates a sense of vulnerability, as you come up against the other person’s need for love and your own need. The final practice, ‘Water blessing’, is simply the aspersion of the group with water, as in the blessing with water done by a Catholic priest.
The other three forms of worship were enormously varied. The Orthodox Vespers sung by the parish of St John of Kronstadt in Bath were a mixture of flowing chant and prayer washing over me and focussing my attention. Both chants and words, as well as the use of icons, reminded me of the Jerusalem Community based in Paris; the words especially recalled their beautiful vespers, which mention that prayers rise like incense. The invigorating Taizé worship mingled music and silence, accompanied by meditative images projected onto the stage. Finally, the liberating eco-spirituality of Contemplative Fire involved touching the grass and feeling the earth’s lament, and praying aloud with a sound that represents grass, earth, God and one’s own name, all together as praise.
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Greenbelt report: Just Peace – voices from Israel and PalestineBy: Rima Devereaux
Posted: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 9:12 pm
In 2008 Greenbelt launched Just Peace, a three-year campaign focusing on the crisis in Israel and Palestine, which aims to raise awareness of the plight of the Palestinian people. Two landmarks in this year’s campaign were talks by the Jewish Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, who comes from Haifa, and the human rights lawyer Jonathan Kuttab, who is based in Jerusalem.
Ilan Pappe spoke of the war of 1948, known to Israelis as the ‘War of Independence’ and to Palestinians as the ‘Catastrophe’. Drawing on his latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, he sought to dispel three myths about that war.
The first of these is the myth that the events of May 1948, when an Israeli army defeated the Palestinian and Arab armies, involved a Jewish David against an Arab Goliath. The second is the idea that the Palestinian refugees were voluntary, and so had no right to return. Pappe discovered that 1948 provided a historical opportunity to empty Palestine of its indigenous occupants in order to prove Zionist logic right. The third myth is the idea of Israel as a peace-loving nation, and the world’s seeing the uprooting of the Palestinians as a purely humanitarian issue.
Jonathan Kuttab, Chair of the Holy Land Trust and a founder of the Centre for Non-Violence, gave an impassioned address on the role, methods and success of non-violence. Most of the Palestinian struggle has been non-violent, involving strikes, hunger strikes, raising flags in dangerous situations, political protests, appeals for international solidarity, and so on. The goal of violence is to impose the will. But Jesus came with the ethic of the upside-down kingdom. You win a non-violent campaign when you suffer casualties without retaliating. It is not an easy option.
Kuttab cited two examples of successful use of non-violence in the Palestinian cause: the Peace Flotilla, which brought building supplies and medicines into Palestine, was attacked by fully armed Israeli commandos; and the battle for boycotts and sanctions. ‘We don’t need guns’, Kuttab said, ‘but we do need people to stand with us in a fight against injustice.’
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‘God comes to us disguised as our life’ - Richard Rohr at GreenbeltBy: Rima Devereaux
Posted: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 9:01 pm
Fr Richard Rohr
In a series of four talks at this year’s Greenbelt Festival, Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest and the founder and director of Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, addressed his large audiences on the Greenbelt theme for the year, ‘the art of looking sideways’. Looking sideways, he argued, means developing a ‘non-dualistic mind’. This is a way of seeing that has the capacity to transform our relationship to the Bible, the Church, ourselves and Christ (the topics of the four talks). Rohr is expansive, lucid, enthusiastic, and brings a refreshing message.
In his book The Naked Now, he calls our usual way of seeing the ‘dualistic mind’. It is God, love, death, suffering and infinity that open us to the non-dualistic mind, or contemplation. Dualism means eliminating everything that is not like you. Jesus was a master of non-dualistic thinking.
‘You can’t see what you don’t look for’, Rohr says. So seeing sideways takes some learning. As far as the Bible is concerned, it means learning some basic attitudes: Jesus was a Jew. He almost always rearranges social relationships. Anthropological approaches to the Bible can be exciting.
The reality of the Incarnation means that Jesus became embodied. But so much Christian history tries to turn ‘flesh’ back into ‘word’. Words get us through conversation, but it is flesh and experience that really count – freedom, patience and compassion are required to love the moment as it is.
We need to bring this subtlety to our reading of the Bible. In the monks’ tradition of lectio divina, it is the text that is in charge. The literal reading that we tend to prefer these days is actually the lowest level of meaning. What is going on in the text in terms of relationships? Jesus almost always subverts these. What might the disabled and marginalized see in the text that so-called ‘normal’ people don’t see? Every tradition has its own agenda. But each tradition is ‘a jewel or a gem in the crown of Christ’, Rohr says.
The Church is the place where Christ has been conceived, and where his birth can continue to happen. The emerging church phenomenon is tied up with non-dualistic thinking. There are four pillars of this phenomenon. The first is honest Jesus scholarship, that isn’t offensive or defensive. The second is looking at the cultural critique in Jesus, the concern with peace and justice as well as individual salvation. ‘The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better,’ Rohr says.
The third pillar is rediscovering the contemplative mind. The great early twentieth-century thinker Owen Barfield, who inspired JR Tolkien, CS Lewis and TS Eliot, tells us that the world is naturally sacred. ‘God comes to us disguised as our life’, Rohr says, through nature, sexuality, art, music, dance and poetry. The energy of Christ cannot be communicated through abstract concepts – that’s why Tolkien and Lewis wrote novels. God works in secret because otherwise we’d stop him: we see this in the dark night of St John of the Cross and in Julian of Norwich’s experience of living through the Black Death.
The fourth pillar is finding appropriate vehicles of community, where, as Jesus encouraged, two or three can gather in his name. Such communities can have one foot in tradition, being sustained by the Christian worldview which supplies a ‘mythic universe inside of which the soul can live’.
Jesus was a brilliant psychologist, way ahead of his time, Rohr says. In Matthew 6 he says ‘the lamp of the body is the eye’ – it’s all about how you see. Our persona – our chosen self-image – has some accuracy about it but also a lot of illusion. It tries to eliminate all contrary others. The real meaning of repentance is to see what you’ve chosen not to see, the Jungian shadow. You can usually only see it through the painful mirroring effect that happens when you enter into relationship with other people, for example in marriage or community. So we can’t separate psychology and spirituality – Teresa of Avila said that the first spiritual ‘mansion’ is self-knowledge.
The grander your self-image, the bigger your shadow will be. Religion tends to be great training in dualistic thinking. We have lost the contemplative mind, and have rejected our embodied, physical, sexual life, because the dualistic mind splits matter and spirit. People think that ‘contemplation’ means high-level mysticism. But it is actually the pearl of great price that we all need. ‘Just learn to receive the moments that come towards you as mirrors that reveal yourself to you. Everything you need is right here; that’s the contemplative mind.’ It is always experienced as a surrender. Learning to live with the shadow, what Rohr calls ‘shadow-boxing’, means facing up to what God brings you in each moment.
Christ has existed since the beginning, we are told in Colossians, Ephesians and the prologue to John’s Gospel. Jesus was born 2000 years ago. Start with the cosmic Christ, Rohr says, and then understand Jesus as the human incarnation inside that mystery. Jesus’ life is the personification of what God has always been doing. So when you say in the Creed, ‘I believe in Jesus Christ’, you are making two affirmations of faith, not one. Many people who don’t accept Jesus are in touch with the eternal, cosmic Christ.
Rohr also says that seeing with a non-dualistic mind means being open to a ‘generous orthodoxy’ in our understanding of Christ. Christianity is full of paradoxes, doctrines that cannot be processed by the dualistic mind. Either God is everywhere, or God ends up being nowhere. God’s glory is revealed in everything by those who know how to see.
‘If God alone is good, everything else in the universe is a mixture of darkness and light’, Rohr said in his third talk. In John’s Gospel, we read that the darkness could not overcome the light. But darkness is never wholly overcome. CS Lewis called this world ‘the Shadowlands’. It’s part of the deal that darkness and light are in eternal embrace. Rohr is calling us to accept that and learn to grow through it.
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I heard Richard Rohr speak at the Nottingham Diocesan summer school about ten years ago. He was fascinating and brilliant.
Greenbelt is definately on the list of things that I really really want to get to one day
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