Do you remember this scene from ‘Titanic’, when Jack is locked up somewhere on one of the lower decks, having been arrested after Cal Hockley accused him of stealing the diamond? The ship is already sinking but Rose walks through freezing cold water to find and free him. She believes that he did not steal the diamond, despite the evidence pointing to the opposite. When she gets there, he asks, ‘How did you know I didn’t do it?’. Rose replies, ‘I don’t know, I just knew’. There was no proof, no evidence, but somehow she knew. I think it must have been love that taught her this.
Let’s leave Rose and Jack for a moment and travel to Taiwan, where, just over a week ago, American rock climber Alex Honnold free solo climbed Taipei 101, one of the tallest buildings in the world. Getting ready for the climb, he said he had a good feeling about this, that he just knew that it would go well. Honnold climbed a 1,667-foot building with no ropes, no nets and without any kind of security, somehow, in the knowledge that he would reach the very top of it safely. The secret to this knowledge could be in practice and experience. Honnold is a very experienced climber; in addition, he studied the building and did two practice runs with ropes, so the actual historic climb was confident – you can still watch it on Netflix and see for yourselves how his every step is calculated; he knows exactly what to do. He is certainly not protected from mistakes and accidents but the inexplicable knowledge that he does not need to worry about them is clearly guiding him.
You may have guessed by now that where I am going with this is experiences of knowledge and confidence that are not intellectual and evidence-based but instead completely metaphysical and I guess almost mystical.
This sort of stuff is also not reserved to some few chosen people, and you may have experienced it yourselves. Those of us who remember the time before mobile phones may have had moments when the landline rings and you just know exactly who is calling. Apparently this experience is so common that it informed a proper academic study of telepathy. The findings indicated that participants could guess the caller’s identity with a hit rate significantly above chance levels. This success rate was further increased among people who had a strong emotional bond.
Where am I going with this? Well, in today’s reading Simeon and Anna greet Mary and Joseph with little Jesus in the Temple courts and recognise Jesus as the Messiah. How!? Malachi, in his prophecy, which we heard earlier, tells us of the Messiah: he will appear like a refiner’s fire and purifier of silver, he will bring judgement against those who sin; ‘who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?’ Simeon and Anna would have known the same prophecy, as well as Isaiah’s prediction of the Mighty God, the Prince of Peace who would be great and reign on David’s throne. The person described in these texts does not sound like the little baby Simeon and Anna are greeting, whose shocked parents are also clearly hearing for the first time that their child is somehow special. In addition, Anna lived in Temple courts for about 60 years and must have seen countless babies brought to the Temple for purification rites according to the law. How did she know this was the right baby?
I think I might know how, but first let me turn briefly back to the examples I have used earlier. I think they show us that knowledge of and confidence in something that seems to come from nowhere, certainly not from facts before us, may originate in familiarity – familiarity with our work and our craft to such a degree that it becomes part of our being and we just feel it, and familiarity with the people, when we are connected through bonds of love, intimacy and trust to the point of not just knowing each other but feeling each other even at a distance. But I think there is another type of familiarity that can give us knowledge even greater than what I have described – it is familiarity with God.
Both Simeon and Anna are described as righteous and devout. Simeon’s righteousness was so great the Holy Spirit rested on him and directly communicated that he would meet the Messiah in the Temple. This sort of righteousness must have been sustained by prayer, discipline and a strong desire to live according to the law of the Lord. Anna never even left the Temple, having devoted her whole life to prayer and fasting. Both Simeon and Anna made it the task of their lives to know and to serve the Lord. Their every day must have revolved around Him and their lives became subordinate to His will. The bond of familiarity, love and trust this would have created must have been strong – so strong that our telephone telepathy is frankly a bit of a joke, and the messages such a close relationship would have allowed to communicate are way beyond knowing who is calling or having certainty that a dangerous task will turn out ok. These messages are from God Himself and are about the things that matter the most: forgiveness, salvation and His plan for us.
The secret to creating such a bond is prayer, presence and consistency. I think all three are important. We often think of prayer as a dialogue (I certainly do). We come to talk to God, to share something with Him or to ask Him for something, in the hope of receiving an answer in whatever form He chooses to communicate it. But prayer coupled with presence means that we do not just talk to God but offer all of our being to Him; we step out of our own needs and concerns and focus on His desires for us. As with any good thing, true goodness only comes with practice and time – it is not a one-off exercise and needs repetition and regularity to effect long-term changes.
Alec and I are preparing a group of teenagers for confirmation and I really liked what he said to them about prayer last week, which I think encompasses all three – prayer, presence and consistency. He said that prayer is about making ourselves available to God, trusting that he is working in us, and about consistently bringing ourselves into His presence, to see what can happen!
The gift of discernment and the miracle of revelation are not usually momentary experiences; they are a result of our transformation brought about by long-term investment into prayer and presence. As tempting as it is to want everything yesterday, we really have to be disciplined and patient in actively growing our familiarity with God. C.S Lewis said about prayer, ‘I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.’
This change is what makes the highest form of non-intellectual knowledge possible: it allows to pick the Messiah out of a million babies, it shows us how to live our lives, it tells us what we really need to know, it allows true discernment to happen. If you feel this is something you don’t practise enough, and I am certainly one of you, let us start now. Silence can be uncomfortable but bear with me; we are now going to keep silence together. I have a timer and will give us three minutes to pray and to be present.
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Amen.