My Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ

I wish you all a happy New Year and pray that 2004 will be a year of blessing for us all. Because I do not want to interrupt what I hope is a quieter, more reflective time after the business of Christmas, this will be a shorter, more reflective Ad Clerum with the focus on spiritual, rather than business matters.

There was a time when the New Year began with everyone making one or more new-year's resolutions, almost always for the wrong reasons. Today, few people bother to make new-year's resolutions, again for the wrong reasons. And behind both these, lies a paradox that is at the heart of Christianity.

Luther once commented that most Christians are Pelagian at heart, believing that we must in some way try to earn God's love and show ourselves worthy of salvation. We know that this is not true - "By grace, you have been saved through faith, and this is not to your own doing, it is the gift of God [Eph 2:8]." Nevertheless, we find it hard to accept that, as William Temple said, "The only thing we bring to our salvation is the sin from which we need to be saved." "Try harder," is an all too common refrain in many of our sermons, and many new-year's resolutions were simply that, a case of trying harder.

But even though they may no longer use that language, people are still trying to earn salvation - among the biggest section in any bookstore are those books which promise self-improvement and fulfillment. But few people really still make resolutions, because the whole ethos of our society has changed. The world of "instant coffee" has given rise to a demand for "instant gratification" in which people want instant results with minimum effort. Discipline and "hanging in over the long haul" no longer have appeal and have fallen into disfavor.

And yet discipline is central to our Christian life. Richard Foster, in his book, "Celebration of Discipline" likens the spiritual journey to a narrow ledge with a deep chasm on either side. On the one side is the moral bankruptcy of human striving for righteousness; on the other, the moral bankruptcy of inertia. And the one is as wrong as the other.

For our desert, parent's growth in the spiritual life requires attention to two very important spiritual disciplines; that of "attentiveness" and "indifference." And each works on the other to ensure balance and growth.

Just as no-one can live for long in the desert without constant attentiveness both to the world around them and to the physical changes going on inside their bodies, so the spiritual life demands that same attentiveness to both our exterior and interior worlds. It requires that we watch the world around us carefully and attentively, always alert to what is actually happening and aware of the impact the outside world is having on us.

Such attentiveness is crucial to spiritual growth. Few of us have had much experience in continually remaining alert and attentive to anything. Belden Lane, in his book, "The Solace of Fierce Landscapes" says,

"Our conditioning as members of a consumer society . . . [leaves us with the hope that] . . . we might be able to see and do everything. To move slowly and deliberately through the world, attending to one thing at a time, strikes us as radically subversive, even un-American. . . . Plagued by a highly diffused attention, we give ourselves to everything lightly. That is our poverty. In saying yes to everything, we attend to nothing."

For our desert mothers and fathers constant attentiveness required three things: simplicity of life, a rhythmic pattern to life, and time and space for reflection. Those three things, so crucial to attentiveness, are at a premium in our modern world. And yet, without them we will find it difficult to distinguish between our external and internal worlds, and will simply end up projecting our inner turmoil onto the outer world.

But attentiveness is balanced by indifference. Indifference, for our desert parents, is not blasé disinterestedness, but rather a constant ordering of our desires in accordance with God's will. It is discerning what is of no importance in God's scheme of things and learning to ignore what doesn't matter. Indifference, therefore, provides focus by indicating what does and does not deserve attention. It is detachment from the world in order to be attached to God.

This indifference is of enormous importance to us today. It enables us to resist the temptation to buy into the false values and expectations of a greedy, unjust society that co-opts us to itself. It allows us to remain indifferent to the disdain of its sophisticated unbelief that so often causes us to abandon the prophetic call for radical obedience to Christ in the world.

Together, attentiveness and indifference keep us aware of what matters most in our lives, and enables us to ignore the unimportant. As we focus on the things of God, so more and more we long for and seek after God. We are no longer driven by a need for people, popularity, position, and possessions to give us a sense of fulfillment. And it is at that point, our desert parents say, that we are truly set free and able for the first time to love the things of the world and the people we meet. Desire has been transformed into love.

My hope and my prayer for each of us, is that we will begin this year by making a new-year's resolution for the right reason; not attempting to earn salvation, but expressing our gratitude for God's grace. Let us commit ourselves this year to be attentive to God and indifferent to the things of the world. And as we make more space in our lives to be with God in prayer and contemplation, may God draw us into a greater simplicity of life, a slower, steadier and balanced rhythmic pattern to our lives, and the experience of the indwelling God transforming our desires into perfect love.

With God's every blessing for this new year

Brian

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