Core beliefs

Coming soon, links for Core Practices and Guidelines for Practice.

Each of those will soon have its own page.

Page updated

11-3-24

MiCL is grounded in some core beliefs:

God is good, and on our side, and wants the best for us.
God is always at work for our good —

In all things and at all times, God is at work to help us come

to that fulness of life that he wants us to know and share and enjoy.

Everything begins and ends with God: his love, kindness and generosity. And key to seeing what this love means and also how we can both receive it and live within it, and also sharing it with others, involves three principles. These underlying the whole process of healing and growth. They can be summed up as:

Healing comes through kindness;
Growth comes through gratitude;
Wisdom comes through trust.

(Christian faith and belief have relatively little to do with having a particular set of beliefs in our heads about God; Christian faith and belief are much more concerned with the active trust that we have in God, a trust realised in our lives and actions and demonstrated in our love for others.)

To unfold these mysteries and wonders is a little bit further ...

As we grow in kindness, so we will find ourselves changing (or rather being changed) at a very deep level.

This is because, insofar as we offer kindness, we are living within God's own endless kindness, his own endless love and goodwill.

Similarly, as we look to grow in gratitude (gratitude for all life's blessings great and small) so we will find ourselves also growing in generosity. And as we grow in generosity, so we find we are sharing in God's own generosity.

Finally, as we grow in our trust of God so we will begin to see that God could always be trusted, and we grow in wisdom, coming to share in fact, in his own wisdom.

And going a step further yet, we can see that faith links to wisdom, that gratitude links to hope, and that kindness to love.

Speaking of spiritual gifts, St Paul writes 'Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, … there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit ... it is the same God who activates all of them …Strive for the greater gifts. … Now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. (See 1 Corinthians chapters 12 and 13.)

And remember that faith and hope and love, wisdom, generosity and kindness are gifts; they are things we receive—not accomplishments we achieve by our own efforts or at our own initiative.

And again, we see that everything begins and ends with God: his love, his kindness and his generosity.

Everything, including our own healing and growth, come to us as gifts of his grace, a grace freely offered and feely given.

And beginning in love, his gifts of love are all for the sake of love, a love which naturally belongs to God but which (purely out of love) he wants us to know. In fact, he wants us to share in that love, to live within it and also to share it with others.

(Remember that God wants us to be like him in all things, and that means he wants us to share his generosity and goodwill towards others — indeed, towards everyone.)

One thing that can take us by surprise in all this is that being kind and compassionate towards everyone includes being kind and compassionate towards ourselves, especially towards our own wounded and wayward selves.

Many of us have spent far too long trying to batter, beat or cajole ourselves to change. But real, lasting change and growth never come through violence or cruelty.

But just to note here: being kind doesn't mean being indulgent. The kind parent isn't the one who gives her child everything they want or ask for. And also, it should go without saying that we cannot ever be kind to ourselves at the cost and expense of cruelty to another.

The secret is in a light touch and in gentleness, both towards ourselves and towards others.

One of the consequences of what's often called the Fall (though that's not a term used in the Scriptures) is that we don't really know what's good for us and don't really know how we 'ought to be.' In fact, we are all, more or less, mistaken about how we ought to be or how it would be 'good' to be. The Fall means (if for convenience we call it that) means that there's a certain disorder in the world, and that disorder extends to us, so that we don't see things clearly, and that extends in all directions. For example, we have to learn what even such key ideas as love really are and such what key words as 'hope' or 'faith' or 'trust'. Of course, God is at work to teach us, to enlighten us and lead us forwards. And it is not for us to decide or declare that we have clear insight or attained deep wisdom ... And one undoubted fact about those who are 'enlightened' and do share God's wisdom is that they are very humble, sit light to themselves. They never aggressively push their view on others. They never demand or insist that anyone follow their teaching or advice.

I remember a very wise Christian teacher — it may have been Russian Orthodox Archbishop Antony Bloom — once suggesting that if we could become the person we would like to be or the person we think we ought to be then we'd turn ourselves into something of a monster. We be unbearable for others and might even find we've become unbearable to ourselves too. Think of how many 'successful' folk, whether film stars, sports stars, or celebrity of some other kind winds up deeply unhappy, more or less ruined by what seemed to be their success.

Not 'getting' this theology, not understanding this outlook?

Many years ago, when I was just setting out on the path of quiet prayer and quiet mediation (the sort of thing that mindfulness is seen as part of now), the lead teacher said something that has stayed with me ever since. She said, 'You don't have to believe what I'm saying ... I believe the ideas I've offered you are more than suggestions and the more than just my ideas. But don't worry if you cannot make much sense of them just yet or don't know what to make of them. You don't have to believe them. I certainly don't expect that.'

She went on, 'What I found when I was setting gout on this journey was that if there was something coming from a teacher that I respected but which wasn't something I could believe or make sense of, that was usually because I was trying to make sense of it, as it were, in the wrong way. I was trying to make myself believe something I wasn't even supposed to believe!'

She continued, 'Meanwhile, I'd suggest that you keep these "difficult" ideas in mind; maybe pop them into a 'slow cooker" or tuck them away inside somewhere. One day you might find them useful.' The idea is that as our experience and understanding grow, so we may find that these ideas, once so hard to understand or relate to, now help us to make sense of things we find ourselves experiencing. What once seemed nonsense now becomes both meaningful, and often deeply so.

Her advice was, 'Don't worry and certainly don't try to force yourself to believe these things.' Here the idea is that if we try to force ourselves to believe something that seems to us to make no sense, one of two things will happen. We will either 'distort' ourselves, so that we can fit in this idea, or we will distort the idea so that it fits in with what we already think or believe. One way or another, there some kind of damage will be done — and there will be no real progress or growth. (Much the same will happen if we try to 'force' someone else to believe something that seems to make no sense to them.)

You might find some of these suggestions useful. For example, the Church's teaching about the Trinity doesn't make much sense until we have the insight to see where this teaching is coming from and where it is leading. If we don't have that kind of insight, then, as suggested a few lines above, we will inevitably either distort ourselves or distort the teaching — and come away with all manner of unhelpful ideas. (Sadly, many of the things written and said and written about the Trinity are unhelpful or misleading for this very reason, namely, that they lack real insight and so are based on an inadequate, unenlightened understanding of the meaning of this central part of the Christian tradition.)

In some sense, the principles outlined here are fundamental to all mindfulness practice, in whatever tradition. But they are especially important for mindfulness practised in a Christian context.

. . .

As we grow in kindness, so we will find ourselves changing (or being changed) at a very deep level. This is because, insofar as we offer kindness, we are living within God's own endless kindness, his own endless love and goodwill.

And who are we called to have goodwill towards? To whom are we invited to offer kindness? Quite simply, we are called, or invited, to offer love and goodwill, kindness and compassion to everyone—just as God himself has compassion and good-will towards everyone. Jesus himself tells us as much:

Jesus said:

'You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy." But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.' (Matthew 5:43-45.)

Of course, there's no denying that this is quite some challenge. But if we take Jesus at his word and trust in his endless goodwill and endless work on our behalf, then his work in us and for us will make it possible.

In our mindfulness practice, keep in mind that we don't really know what it is to meditate; we don't really know how being mindful 'should' feel.

I recently came across a rather strange comment by a Professor of Biblical Studies. He said that in some traditions people practise mediation or quiet prayer, 'which is a sort of emptying the mind and drifting about in the realm of emptiness.' But I don't know anyone who thinks that's what mediation is. So, this professor may know a lot about the Scriptures, but clearly knows nothing about meditation.

Indeed, we might well ask ourselves the very simple question, 'What makes us think that we do know what mediation should be like? How do we know whether it is going well or badly? The fact is that we don't!

Certainly, we can say, 'I'm not enjoying this...or 'I don't think it should be like this...' But perhaps we can learn to sit light to these judgments, these assessments, and simply get on with doing what we can, as we can.

This is one of those instances where judgement belongs to God. So, let's try to be content to leave it with him!

Often in our practice (perhaps always) there's something going on at a level and in a way that we cannot recognize or understand.

Here, when it comes to our practice, sports brand Nike offers the best good advice: Just do it — and leave all judgment about how it's going to the one who knows, namely God. (By the way, God always appreciates our efforts more than we can imagine.)

Try to keep in mind:

God understands.

And God is loving, patient and kind.

What Jesus says on the cross is the divine motive for all his action on our behalf:

'Forgive them. They do not

understand what

they are doing.'

Luke 23:34 CJB

theology challenging?

Very sadly, a number of key ideas in Christian life are all too often misunderstood or misrepresented. Among those soon to be explored in this section of the MiCL website are: The meaning of grace; free-will; God's peace; what it to be human; the relationship between time and eternity—including how the eternal Kingdom is breaking into time, pressing in upon us even now, faith and belief, the root of sin and our waywardness, even in this ordinary, messed-up world of uncertainty and suffering ... Check back again soon.