I’ve just finished rereading Glittering Images by Susan Howatch, the first in a series of six novels whose main characters are various clerics in the Church of England from 1937 – 1965. The series was first published in the late 1980s/early 1990s. They are all psychological mysteries, very well done. Although it’s a series, you could get by with just reading Glittering Images. It’s a self-contained story with a satisfying ending.

The narrator is a 37-year-old priest and theologian Dr. Charles Ashworth. The real hero of the story (as I see it) is his spiritual director, Father Jon Darrow, who leads Charles out of a self-defeating pattern of hiding behind his “glittering image” of a successful clergyman while inside, he’s a mess.

Here’s what I want to write about today: in order to strengthen Charles spiritually for some difficult conversations, Father Darrow assigns a month of spiritual exercises. Get up at 6am, no food, just a cup of tea, no cigarettes, get right to it. “The exercises will include your spending 15 minutes meditating on a short reading in the Gospels, which I will assign.”

Here’s how Charles describes his first attempt at such meditation:

I had been given a short passage from St. Mark’s Gospel to consider, not an interesting section like the Little Apocalypse [Mark 13] which would have involved me in some challenging scholarly thoughts on Jewish eschatology, but the few verses which described the healing of Jairus’s daughter [Mark 5.22 – 24, 35 – 42]. The story was excruciatingly familiar, and after five minutes I found all my attempts at meditation had run aground on the rocks of boredom. To pass the allotted time I translated the verses first into New Testament Greek and then into medieval Latin, but I was acutely aware that I was not supposed to be exercising my scholarship, and it was with mortification that I approached the last quarter of an hour which had been allocated to prayer.

This section was easier, as I was in the habit of praying, but I was so upset by my failure to meditate competently that I found my concentration was wandering again and my prayers lacked depth.

I saw then how adrift I was unless the scholarly side of my intellect was engaged, and although I was no stranger to a broader religious awareness I realised that over the years my experience had narrowed instead of expanded. I liked my religion to take a cool, hard, analytical form and then I was capable of feeling very devout indeed, but without the prop of my intellectual power I was lost. I told myself I was not temperamentally suited to meditation; my gift was for studying and teaching, not for sitting around brooding over the spiritual resonances of one tiny section of St. Mark’s Gospel. – Glittering Images, page 283, emphasis mine

Years ago I tried to teach a theologian how to read relationally rather than in a scholarly way, and he couldn’t meditate either. He spent a week in Psalm 1, for example, with no fruit. (I wrote on this phenomenon last year: here’s the first of a series of three.)

“I was not supposed to be exercising my scholarship” reminds me of a session I had with a church staff. I taught them how to have daily time with God and at our next meeting the pastor told this story:

I got up early and sat with my Bible opened to Romans, my journal, my Greek New Testament, and my commentary. After a few minutes I said to myself, this is not what Bob asked us to do! So I put away my Greek New Testament and my commentary and just practiced “Read, Reflect, Respond, Record” that Bob had taught us. I said to myself, “This is insanely simple!” – Pastor Mark

Kudos to Pastor Mark for “getting it,” and kudos to novelist Susan Howatch for capturing the deficiencies of the purely intellectual approach. Sometimes we just need to relax and give God a chance.

At that time Jesus declared, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. (Matthew 11.25, 26, ESV)