Lenten Reflections from Father Laurence : Lent 2012

Easter Sunday

The angel said to the women he was not there, where they were looking for him, because he was risen. After death we know him no longer after the manner of the flesh – which includes the manner of the imagination. Like meditation, he is not what we think. Like the kingdom , not here, not there

Then the angel told them that he was going before them to Galilee where they would see him. “Now I have told you”, he concludes matter-of-factly. There is no explanation, simply the proclamation. Job done. How could this be made readily understood or explained satisfactorily? The job is to communicate it and hope. If it’s not true, after having seen the possibility and heard the proclamation, everything is drained of colour and energy.

The stakes of the human condition have suddenly increased dramatically.

Strangely, we can’t say exactly what it is the early Christians were communicating and that has formed a continuous chain of transmission since. It was an experience that could not be held in thought or imagination or in the senses, of his being present, in a way that touched and changed them indubitably, not as a memory or an archetype but as a personal presence.

How do we explain any of the most important occurrences in our life?

The women turn back, to do all they could do in the circumstances – speak about it to others. Then there he is. Coming towards them to meet them. Didn’t the angel say he would see them in Galilee? They aren’t in Galilee. Why he is here when they were supposed to see him there? Is he there too?

In seeing him they begin to see that they were in his mind despite (or because) of all he had been through. Death, the great oblivion, had not made him forget them. They must be worth more than they thought. He must be more than they imagined.

Do not be afraid, he tells them. It is fear that shrivels the mind and makes us incapable of the expansion needed to see him and to realise that we can live now in a quite different and fearless way. (Even the angel had told them not to be afraid). Perhaps we are more afraid than we acknowledge even to ourselves.

He too gives no explanation just the experience in itself, of hmself. It leads to an action, a new priority in life, that defines the life of his friends and disciples henceforth – to share this life-changing news with others.

Alleuia, he is risen indeed. Job done. A new creation. Where do we go from here?

Holy Saturday

An early Christian writer whose name is lost to us wrote these words in a homily to describe the meaning of this silent day of transition:

Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated.

After the drama of trauma there is the long aftermath of ordinariness. It is like a powerful wave of the sea that hit the land with great force and is now being sucked back into the ocean. You even wonder if the great crash ever happened at all, so quiet and empty and mundane everything seems.

As we accept the uneventfulness and the untimed waiting, however, something emerges. It transpires through the immeasurable emptiness that is all that is left. A sense grows of union with what we will not ever again see in the same way. A mutual inwelling and presence to one another in a greater presence that contains everything.  Even in the residual grief of the loss a new kind of peace also shows in an awareness that this new union is as definitive and permanent as the very loss that lies behind it.

So even when nothing is happening – as we learn in the emptiness of meditation where we experience death and resurrection daily – new life has begun to emerge. In the mind of Christ we see that there are two creations, both beautiful and terrible. The first is marked by mortality, the horizon beyond which we can see nothing. The new creation is known by those who awaken to their being one person with the one person who comes back to us over that horizon.

Good Friday

What’s ‘good’ about a day when an innocent and good man is convicted of a trumped up charge, betrayed and deserted by his friends, rejected by the people he spoke the truth to, physically and mentally tortured, crucified and killed?

The first vein of goodness is in his way of acceptance. When bad things happen we can try to deny them or they can turn us into bitter and hateful people seeking revenge. Clearly in his case this did not happen. Out of what deep well of goodness and love in himself did he draw on to meet his oppressors with forgiveness and to embrace what happened with an equanimity of soul that turned the evil done to him into good for others?

‘Only God is good,’ he once said to the rich young man seeking eternal life but still entrapped by his possessions.

The other vein of goodness in today’s events is the transformative effect they have on others. It began at the historical moment they occurred and it continues, indeed continues to accumulate in its effect. Through today a new consciousness entered the human realm which has begun to undermine the very roots of the darkness in the human soul which allows us to do such inhumane things to each other by forgetting who we are and forgetting that the well of divine being is sourced in each us.

With most terrible things we breathe a sigh of relief when they have passed. In this case we see that it has much more to do to lift humanity out of the cycle of violence into which we fell and which is our original sin. A violence that is born of Cain’s anguished and illusory feeling that we are not loved.

On the Bere Island mountain a cross stands, still, steady, shining at night, silently faithful. Not far away from it someone has illegally put up a wind turbine. The windmill spins like the ego in the wind making short-term profit at the cost of a greater integrity.

The cross has greater energy than the ego and to contemplate it in our lives, to embrace its transformative effect, is what makes this Friday good. 

Holy Thursday

Do this in remembrance of me.

We feel offended or diminished if we meet someone we know and they don’t remember who we are. To have significant days or events in our lives remembered by those whose affection or opinion we value means a lot to the sense of our own worth.

Yet remembering in a positive way – affirming we are still there and that the important things in life have not finally sunk out of remembrance under the waves of time – requires effort. ‘Thank you for remembering’, we say because the natural lethargy of egoism makes it easier to forget. Negative remembering – hanging on to past hurts and dead actions – is easier although sometimes we can feel a twinge of regret that even a negative memory is fading from our minds.

The Greek word that we translate as ‘remembrance’ and use to speak of the ‘memorial of the Eucharist’ is not just about remembering what we might (and one day probably will) forget as our brain cells run out. It means making present an event that had a historical beginning but whose life and influence has not yet expired.

Because we forget so much so quickly – what happened two days ago in a twenty-four hour period? – the things that ride the waves of time and do not disappear are the significant and life-enhancing forces. It requires effort and time to recall them but then we are called to life by their becoming present.

The gift of self never dies. It is ever present and can be called to mind at any time in order to renew and reassure us that life, for all its fatalities, is not just about survival. It is about flourishing, fullness.

This is what the Eucharist is. Despite the fact that it has been ringed round by rules and regulations and the politics of religion, its life-enhancing energies never cease to amaze. It is a channel of the endless generosity of one who cannot forget us.

Wednesday Holy Week

Toothache is bad enough. While it lasts, extreme physical pain blocks out the other stimuli of the world, good and bad. It becomes the centre of our field of perception. We can be annoyed that our minds are so absorbed by something so accidental; and also that it makes us so self-centred. We may say to ourselves that it won’t last forever but while we are going through it is like a demanding animal that expects all our attention.

It is no only toothache of course. Great grief at the loss of someone we love weighs on our cardiac region and pierces the solar plexus exactly as a physical pain. The body is a sacrament and a medium of expression of our awareness at all levels of consciousness.

While they were eating he said ‘I tell you solemnly, one of you is about to betray me’

The experience of betrayal as many marriages and friendships testify is also terrible suffering.

Where does Jesus get this knowledge that he will be betrayed? We don’t know. But he holds it with reserve. He does not demonise Judas as some of the gospel writers seem to do. The traitor’s motives remain hidden and it is hard to forgive without insight into why someone in whom we had placed our trust and love throws it away.

If we do have that insight, as Jesus must have had, we are silent rather than condemnatory. And forgiveness rather than recrimination enters the damaged system of our relationships.

Tuesday of Holy Week

‘Now has the Son of Man been glorified.’ This is his response to the moment when his fate is sealed and one of his close disciples, ‘filled with Satan’, leaves the common table to betray him.

The act of personal treachery hangs strangely loose in the story without explanation. No one is convinced he did it just for money. Inexplicably it seems necessary because it brings the main player to his supreme moment.

We speak of glory in battle, glorious weather and the glory of God. But what is this kind of glory that happens at a moment of defeat and disappointment. When someone in whom we have placed our trust or hope lets us down or when a plan we have been working on collapses it seems an odd time to speak of glory.

When you open a fresh scallop it firmly resists you. It clams its shell tight against the probing knife you are trying to slip between the two hinged halves of its protecting world. The art of this cruel act, without which there would be no scallop farmers, is to find the muscle that holds it closed and slice through it. Then the shell springs open, the luscious looking food is there and the food chain continues.

We prefer not to see this done or to hear of it but it is part of the world we inhabit. The ending of a life is the feeding of another in the chain of being. One should acknowledge the individual sacrifice and feel the loss of life as some native Americans are said to thank a tree before they cut it down.

If the end of a life is accepted in this humble way it is as if something opens. The dark side of it is the shadow cast by the intense light that has been released.

Monday of Holy Week

We began the Holy Week retreat on Bere Island yesterday. Between the liturgies, the meditation times, the times of reflection and sharing on the elusive and unforgettable symbols of the Passion, we will try with all of you who have been reading these reflections to prepare for the three great days.

Each of these spiritual practices – meditation, liturgy, lectio – reinforces the others. Like a dance they swirl together without competing or clashing, like the divine communion itself.

The deeper we go with their help the more we realise our wholeness. We become less divided and conflicted within ourselves and so between ourselves and others. The journey deeper is a healing of everything in our lives that has pained or damaged us, holding us back from the fullness of being we are designed for.

But the focus is Jesus not ourselves. If we focus on ourselves the imminent danger is that we get stuck in self-centredness (often without knowing it). But to be focused on him is to elude the trap of egotism and fall into the great freedom of the true self where we are one with him; and then we fall into the even greater freedom of the divine communion in which all that is human is divinised.

The focus on Jesus shows us that it is not through a series of triumphs and gains that we do this but by defeats and dispossessions. It is not the way the ego likes to go but it is the secret path direct to the Kingdom.

Palm Sunday

The curtain lifts again and we begin to recount ritually and relive interiorly the great events that took place over a few days a long time ago. The world did not stop when they happened. Only symbolically did the sun darken and the veil of temple split.  Peoples’ commercial and emotional lives carried on as usual through the short tragic drama of the humiliation and extinction of a powerless pawn in the politics of the world. A short show-trial, public torture to keep the crowds satisfied, another execution of a religious (or political) activist who flared briefly in popular imagination and then lost their favour and sunk between the bigger waves of public affairs and personal concerns.

His close friends ran away, disappointed and maybe angry with him, to save themselves. He was left to die with only his mother, one disciple he loved and a few loyal women at the foot of his cross.

And here we are in 2012 telling the story again from the slightly disjointed but unforgettable accounts written down several decades afterwards. We do not have his own words except in translation. He put nothing in writing himself. We don’t know what he liked for breakfast or exactly who he thought he was. He is more present than any other historical or fictional figure and yet when you look at him closely he becomes transparent and disappears. If we meet him we are changed but we cannot get a grip on him.

These inconsistencies and paradoxes that so irritate the rational mind, when it operates in isolation, are the medium of a great transmission.

Children who like a story and those who recognise the value of a great work art are happy to repeat it indefinitely. In this story the repetition itself is an act of faith that strengthens faith and so clarifies vision.

It is more powerful if we act theatrically in the telling rather than sitting like a passive audience. In this story there are no mere observers.

We have a limited number of chances in one life to replay the drama and penetrate its meaning. Not knowing how many is a part of the process that connects us with the one who suffered and died but did not stay dead. 

Saturday Lent week 5

Generally speaking, experience comes first. First-hand experience always has something unpredictable about it even if we knew it was coming, like a long awaited birth or death. We can consciously wait for an experience that we know is in the pipeline but when it actually happens an unpredictable change has occurred.

Experience then presents us with a challenge and often a conundrum. How does it fit in to the bigger pattern of our story? Is it really as significant as it looks? Does it mean anything at all? We would be content with being able to predict the future. That would give us a sense of security even if it would reduce life to a computer program. But human consciousness has to rise to the level of prophecy which is about insight into the present that cuts through all the layers of time. We have to take life seriously if we are to find it joyful.

..you fail to see that it is better for one man to die for the people, than for the whole nation to be destroyed.’ He did not speak in his own person, it was as high priest that he made this prophecy.

Meaning is bigger than we are. So, when experience and meaning combine in the prophetic vision the person we are expanded.  Uncomfortably but wondrously. At that point in the process people stop arguing for a moment. We stop being anxious about things and we rest for a moment in a still and watchful state we could almost call pure worship.

To be led to meaning is to be led home. Perhaps this is why Lent is built on the metaphor of a long trek to a promised land which we feel we belong to and that (more dangerously) belongs to us. It may also be why people so often say, as they reflect about the experience and meaning of meditation in their lives over a period of time, that it felt like a ‘coming home’.

Friday Lent week 5

Man has always seen the world in terms of great natural cycles. Everything that was will be again, says one of the Wisdom books of the Bible. The seasons revolve like the constellations, predictable and reassuring to those below who experience change and mortality. Repetition however has a double edge: comforting in its predictability, tedious in its sameness. So we try to have the best of both worlds, seeking change as it might better fulfill our wishes yet clinging to the status quo because, however incomplete, it’s what we know best.

Perhaps most of human history and most of our lives are spent trying to square this circle.

The cycle of nature is the bass-beat. But on it we prepare the creative variations that offer us freedom from all its monotony. Once the spirit of creation has been set free we feel connected to the source of the cyclical repetition which is never tedious and is always new. The experience of God as the fountainhead of all that exists is ultimately the goal of all human effort and desire even the most deluded and offensive. Like the great migrations in nature that constantly take place around us, we always seek home because that is where we can be fulfilled and at peace, secure and capable of development.

“The Father is in me and I am in the Father”

On pilgrimage, in the great exodus from oppression of spirit, we realise that we carry home within us and that we make progress towards it in cycles of discovery and dispossession, of finding and losing. In the daily exodus of our meditation we turn the wheel of prayer and it always carries us to somewhere new.

Thursday Lent Week 5

People generally agree that exercise, like meditation, is a good thing. Physically and mentally we feel better for regular physical exercise. Depending on our personal temperament we may struggle to keep a daily exercise discipline and look for every excuse to avoid it even though we know we will feel better for doing it. Or, given a more compulsive personality, we might get so fixated on the exercise that we overdo it and so make it play a more dominant role in our lives than it merits. Enough is never enough. You can always be fitter than someone else.

There are some parallels here to spiritual exercise. There’s the need for discipline and the obvious benefits. But only a very few people overdo it, trying the fast track to get enlightened. These become spiritual extremists and the more extreme they become the further they are from their goal. There are of course also religious extremists, but they tend to be people who are escaping from something unpleasant – a personal problem or a political situation – and they turn religion into a justification for anything they think will help them. Spiritual extremists are not unknown but they are rarer because the stakes – sanity and health – are so much higher.

So it is rare that people get addicted to meditation (depending as always on what you mean by ‘meditation’). The main reason, though, is that the discipline of meditation includes an inherent commitment to moderation and the middle way in everything, including spiritual practice. Meditation is the universal regulator because it attunes us to the spirit which pervades everything and is available to correct any imbalance or error as long as we are open to it. Meditation is also inherently a commitment to be open to reality as it is, not as we write it.

Moderation and openness. The two sides of the ladder to happiness and peace. And every step we take is a deepening of our capacity for love. Let us hope that the 40 days in desert, which will soon be over, have taught us that. If not we can, thanks to the spirit, compress the 40 days into the present moment, now, because it always helps us make up for lost time. That is redemption.

Wednesday Lent week 5

When winter comes to the Arctic the solitary polar bears scoop themselves a bed in the ice and curl up for their long hibernation. Then snow comes and covers them keeping them alive in the frigid desert, the cold insulation preserving them from a fatal cold. The female bears give birth during their long deep sleep. The squealing of the tiny cubs activates her milk supply, seven times richer than human milk; and her maternal instinct proves stronger than the most powerful sleepiness. In Spring she goes forth, with the cubs tumbling at her heels, in search of solid food but keeps an eye open for hungry males for whom her babies would provide an irresistible snack.

We cannot help but see ourselves reflected in the animal world. All our human faults are there, territorialism, sexual jealousy and possessiveness, the survival instincts of the ego. What is lacking among them is any sense of sin. To eat the young cubs, to fight to the death sexual dominance does not stain their innocence. If they do things that we find reflected in our higher qualities, fidelity or self-sacrifice these also remain in the natural sphere and cannot be counted as virtue. In Genesis God made animals to keep humans company but found that they were not enough to ease the human need for union.

We often condemn human inhumanity as animal-like which is of course an insult to the animal kingdom. Animals hunt and kill but they do so in order to survive not as we do for pleasure or to displace their anger onto the weaker creatures.

What makes the difference then? Some factor we call consciousness or a particular quality of consciousness that is specifically human. Not a kind that makes us innately superior but one that makes us infinitely fortunate. It is not (only) that we are biologically smarter or kinder. But we have been tickled into a more wakeful condition by the awareness that we are known. We live inside a benevolent knowledge that is more than instinctual and self-preservational. Let us call it grace – a gift that flows from some unobjectifiable spring of pure being straight into the reservoir of our souls.

The next leap forward is that in becoming aware of this we are impelled to turn the attention towards the invisible source even if it means, as it does, taking the attention off ourselves. And so we search for a tangible, visible teacher in whom the great source is fully present and available. Through that connection we can drink from the source of being as nourishingly as the cubs drink their milk.

Enter Jesus.

If you continue in my word, you are my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.