Thursday 20 October 2016

Ask and it will be given

So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.

Luke 11.9-10

I take the Bible as fascinating, not from the point of view of dogma to be literally believed and obeyed, but from the diamonds of wisdom that are studded through its pages. The above passage quoting Jesus from the Gospel of Luke, rich in poetry and meaning, is one of them.

One of the advantages of our times in the West is the abandonment of religious certainty. Heartbreaking though it is for many of us, it allows us to look back on the spiritual traditions with a different view – one tuned to the basics of the message, the core of the revelation and the wisdom it brings forth. We align ourselves not with the practical details of the tradition, the doctrine, rituals and sacraments (though these have their place and are important in their own right), but with the spiritual quality that is at its heart.

Ask, and it will be given you ... To ask, spiritually speaking, is to pray, and to pray is to establish and nurture a relationship with the divine. To ask is not simply to utter words to God, pleading for one thing or another; it is to place yourself in direct contact, in communion you could say, with the source of life. That’s no small thing, and all religions recognise the grave import of doing so, with paths of ritual leading believers to the right of frame of mind for divine communion.

Asking requires discipline in which a person is in touch with the centre of their own being. From this centre, which is the spark of the divine within, the atman as Hinduism calls it, the individual opens to the world and to spirit. Opening to spirit necessitates abandonment of ego, surrender to the will of the divine (“Islam” means surrender), which for all spiritual traditions is the aim and cornerstone of living.

Spiritual communion requires no goal, no reward – it is an end in itself which replenishes the vital purpose of life. Hence when you Ask, the answer is given you; to search is to find at the same time and to knock on the door is to see it swing open. This does not mean that pain and suffering is abolished for the person who asks, that the cares of the material world are somehow erased, but that there is grace for the true seeker, a spiritual core from which they act and which affords lasting peace.

The passage from Luke is also, I think, about the importance of intention. We have to truly Ask, build a genuine path to God, in order to find spiritual gold. A counterfeit relationship – one based solely around a person’s ego needs, petitioning the divine mystery to satisfy desires, simply does not work. The door will stay shut. When our intention is appropriate we set a course in the right direction and, perhaps immediately, perhaps after years of hard work and patience, by the will of the divine, the seeker finds.

There is another sense in which Jesus’ words are somewhat subversive to the practices of the Church as they manifested over the centuries of Christianity. He does not say “Ask, and a priest will give you God’s blessing” or “Knock, and the door will be opened for you in the afterlife”. There is an immediacy in the words which points to the imminence of God and the availability of unmediated redemption here and now. From the gnostic Gospel of Thomas: “The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.” To Ask is to see heaven in the splendour and beneficence of creation here on earth, and the only consequent action is to affirm and preserve that splendour.

Sunday 9 October 2016

On humour

One of the funniest moments that I can recall happened many years ago when I was a university student and doing everything I could, in idealistic twenty-something fashion, to change the world.

I had traveled with a few friends to take part in a mass protest encampment in Canberra against an international weapons exhibition that was being set up on the edge of town. We arrived one morning and pitched our tents, like a few hundred other young folk, in a grassy reserve across the road from the arms fair. Nothing much was planned until later in the day, so we sat around and talked, ate some food and prepared for what protests would be happening.

Among our number was a tall, lean gent we affectionately called Stevie P. He was a few years older than the rest of us, was doing an Honours in politics studying the radical student movements of the 1960s, and loved to talk. Though affable, Steve was a bit edgy and shabby – he wore dirty, knee-holed jeans, had shoulder-length wavy hair and was rarely seen without a can of VB (a cheap beer) in one hand. He’d had a fairly rough working-class upbringing in one of Melbourne’s outer suburbs which took the shine off his idealism and he would bait the more romantic types like me with arguments about the imperfection of what we stood for and the impossibility of meaningful social change.

Stevie also had a nervous condition that made his hands shake. I’d taken little notice of this until that day in Canberra. At some point in the late morning clouds started to gather above us, the sky turned a shade of dark purple and an enormous storm broke, scattering everyone to their tents to avoid the downpour. All except for Stevie – he just happened to be hungry for a peanut butter sandwich. As I ran to gather my belongings I caught sight of him sitting on the ground, trying to spread peanut butter on a slice of bread with hands impossibly flustered. Everyone else’s agitation had accentuated his shakes and the bread was flipping around while he did his damnedest to shove some spread on it. I stopped what I was doing and roared with laughter, so determined was Stevie to have his way in the midst of chaos.

Now and again something will trigger the memory of that moment and it brings a smile. Sure the laughter was at the expense of someone else and their difficulty, but I couldn’t help it. It was a ridiculously funny situation.

Humour has that ability to bring something special to a moment, to lighten and ameliorate whatever is going on. In his 1956 essay Aboriginal Humour, the great Australian anthropologist Bill Stanner related a story of how on a field trip in the Northern Territory an Aboriginal friend of his kept stealing tinned milk from his stores. Eventually it came to a head: “I looked at him and he looked at me. We both knew it was a crisis ... Then he went to the case of empty tins, and held up one or two so that I could see the tiny holes through which he had sucked them dry. He held one tin speculatively, poked at the hole, looked across at me, and said: ‘Rust’.”

Humour doesn’t just make life more bearable, it makes it more whole, more balanced and in tune with the overall conditions of living. It’s telling that the hardest things humans can bear – war, grief, depression – close the door most to humour. Yet even in the middle of darkness unexpected rays poke through, such as when funny stories are told at funerals about the deceased. They demonstrate a kind of completeness of spirit in which joy is not absent even in the most dire of circumstances.

Humour of course can have a sting in it. It can be barbed like a javelin aimed at the powerful, the egocentric and corrupt. In those instances it brings a force of truth that is more irresistible and more palatable to more people because it is delivered in a funny way. Humour invites us to let our guard down and accept whatever is wrapped inside it. And unfortunately it is often used the other way – to belittle the already powerless, to wound and denigrate, and maintain an oppressive status quo.

Like any spark of creative act, humour can be inspired or miss the mark completely. It needs a person to be in the moment, spontaneous, fully alive. I’m a fan of the American stand-up comedian Rich Hall, a master of his craft, who in his routines of funny guitar songs and audience banter laughs as much at himself as at the people he sends up. Humour exposes humanity’s foibles, and in doing so is able to acknowledge without rancour the quirks and imperfections we all share. We can all do with just a little bit more humour in our lives.