Daily Lenten Reflections from Father Laurence Freeman OSB

Holy Saturday

By Laurence Freeman OSB

‘Something strange is happening today’. A second century Christian writer in a beautiful teaching once tried to express the experience of absent presence that fills the emptiness after the burial of Jesus.

Everyone who has buried a loved one has felt this strangeness that follows the rituals and the companionship of family and friends. In the jokes and stories at the gathering after the service, there is permission, within the social conventions, to step aside briefly from the sense of loss and emptiness.

But soon after, when the plates and glasses have been cleared away and the family have returned with some relief to their own lives, the strangeness of being a survivor descends. Life carries on but at its centre there is a felt absence that at moments calls the meaning of everything into question.

The ancient author peered deep into this absence and with the eyes of faith saw a purpose in the collective experience of nothing. “Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve.” Something is at work in the netherworld of grief. A process is being enacted that touches into the pre-consciousnes of the human race. Something is being touched and freed in a place that seemed too deep and dark ever to be understood and so remained a primal source of fear.

“Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form one undivided person and we cannot be separated.” Out of the ultimate separation there is now the daring prospect of eternal union.
Meditation is often a Holy Saturday. The feeling of failure or loss or disconnection has to be endured. But, at a deeper level, there is a certainty that has not yet broken the surface of consciousness that is hope.
 

Good Friday

By Laurence Freeman OSB

Under most legal systems through history death has been both the greatest crime and the greatest punishment. It is irreversible, absolute, and that is one reason why it is so terrible. Another, of course, is that it is the loss that laces all losses. In anything we have ever had taken away from us by force or accident the fear of death has been aroused. When death finally comes it seems to prove that this fear is justified: eventually everything goes; so everything is ultimately meaningless.

Jesus would have died anyway at some point. The conclusion of birth is death. It is not only that he died, but also how and why he died that makes this Friday good. How is his death different from that of the two thieves crucified on either side of him or of the other people who died on the same day in the course of nature?

Firstly, there is the extraordinarily lucid light that the accounts of his death shine into his mind and heart. We don’t see everything because no one can know everything that passes even in his or her own mind, let alone in that of others. But we see enough to know that he suffered the rending loss of his connection with the beauties of the world. He underwent the ultimate separation from those in whom he found human companionship and who had walked on this lovely earth with him as their shared home.

He knew death as every human being knows it. It had to be accepted and he surrendered to it. ‘Into your hands I commend my spirit.’ We are not told that there was a voice that whispered, ‘don’t worry this is all just for show, you’ll be ok’. It was for real, the shutting down of everything he knew and was. To surrender everything does not mean to be certain that everything given will not dissolve into nothing but will be transformed and returned.

Yet in the climax of this particularly terrible and lonely death we see - because he experienced - something that didn’t prevent his dying but illuminated it. As the light of life flickered and expired another light shone more strongly from another source. The love that he had known in his deepest knowledge of himself during his life was proved to be real, more real than death. We know this because at the moment of ultimate loss he gave himself in love to those who were taking his life from him. He gave and forgave and the for-giving puts ancient death in a new light. What this light is, we have to wait and see.
 

Holy Thursday

By Laurence Freeman OSB

He had always loved those who were his in the world, but now he showed how perfect his love was.

 

Wednesday of Holy Week

By Laurence Freeman OSB

Tuesday of Holy Week

By Laurence Freeman OSB

There are plenty who sit and talk. Fewer walk the talk. Even fewer are able to make the walking the ultimate and complete expression of the talking. By their actions they express everything that their words once meant. In this they acquire the pure eloquence of silence.

Monday of Holy Week

By Laurence Freeman OSB

Our Holy Week retreat began on Bere Island yesterday. There are people here from different parts of the world as well as locals from the island and the Beara Peninsula which is an area of great natural beauty, both gentle and rugged.

Many around the world will also be participating by internet. To a great degree today space has been conquered by technology. There’s a difference of course between virtual and physical presence, but presence it is either way. What really matters is attention. A person physically present can be absent because they doze through a talk and a listener from the other side of the world can be fully present because they are listening with full attention.

Time is more difficult to conquer. We can speed up the process of travel but we cannot physically be in two places at once. The time it takes to pass between them reveals an inescapable aspect of basic human existence. To be human is to be limited. Only in the spiritual dimension are we fully here and now.

We enter the spiritual through the power of pure attention transcending the ego’s limitations. For us, during these days, the story of the Passion, death and Resurrection of the Lord is the portal to this realm. The power of attention is the key that opens it. In the spirit, the power of all limitations is lifted. ‘Where the spirit is there is liberty’. Certain mental states can mimic this freedom of the spirit. Many people crave for the freedom of these states and use artificial means to induce them. But by these means the limitations of space and time are weakened or bent, not transcended. The way to the spiritual respects the laws of nature.

When the spiritual dimension opens to us – in us – it throws a new light onto the worlds of space and time in whose limitations we still live. We remain human – limited – but the limitations do not prevent the full aperture of our being to the divine. We become divinely human.

The Easter mysteries are like what the ancient world called initiation rituals. The ultimate transformation is yet to come. But here and now – if we don’t doze off, if we take the attention off our limitations and the suffering they cause – we begin the process and taste the new wine that Jesus drinks with us in the Kingdom.

The first step is to enter the story and let it work on us. Meditation helps us to listen to it but also opens us to the unlimited realm of the spirit which is the meaning and purpose of the story.

Sunday of Lent Week 5

By Laurence Freeman OSB

Without passion there’s no compassion. In the same way there has to be eros in the mixture if there is to be agape as well. If there’s no force of attraction there’s nothing to propel us into transcendence.

Passion can however break loose of this formula and become autonomous – just serving its own appetite and self-interest. It morphs into a rogue force in our psyche that causes devastation in the world around us. We bounce wildly from desire to exhaustion before we start looking for another object to desire. Any addiction soon teaches us the misery this involves. How this happens is a complex story. But the way out of it is simple: to allow yourself to be loved.

It might seem you don’t need passion to let yourself be loved. Passion is all in loving and seeking the object of desire. But the Passion of Jesus that begins Holy Week today takes us to a more concentrated point of truth where this duality between loving and being loved, the dualistic source of all egotism, is dissolved.

With the dissolution of self-centredness comes the dispersal of karma. The Scriptures look at this collectively as well as personally. The story we are starting to re-tell again today is so inexhaustible and universal because of this.

All the priests stand at their duties every day, offering over and over again the same sacrifices which are quite incapable of taking sins away. He, on the other hand, has offered one single sacrifice for sins, and then taken his place forever, at the right hand of God. (Heb 10:15))

That’s a religious and biblical way of expressing it. The point however is universal: in Jesus a cyclical repetition is snapped and karma is transcended. We do not need to seek ‘temporary relief’ medication any more. This medicine really works a cure.

We should be sceptical about this at first hearing.
The gospels however just tell a human story and leave it to us to make sense of it. This turns scepticism into faith. This happens as the story becomes us.

Then he withdrew from them, about a stone’s throw away, and knelt down and prayed. ‘Father,’ he said ‘if you are willing, take this cup away from me. Nevertheless, let your will be done, not mine.’ Then an angel appeared to him, coming from heaven to give him strength. In his anguish he prayed even more earnestly, and his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood. (Lk 22:41ff)

This is no fairy tale. For any mature person it resonates with our own experience. Aloneness, anguish, fear, physical symptoms, the unexpected angel of mercy. But at the heart of it is the love he felt holding him, which empowered him to love those he did not even, at that instant, consciously know.

Saturday of Lent Week 5

By Laurence Freeman OSB

John Cassian, the 5^th century master of the spiritual life, advises us to say the mantra, continuously revolving it in the heart, ‘in prosperity and adversity’.

The global economy illustrates the often dramatic ups and down of life. Boom periods where expectations and greed run amok lead to bust. Then times of austerity follow and, as always, inflict most hardship on the most vulnerable members of society. Personal careers and fortunes can also ride high and then be smattered over the newspapers in a moment. Our moods and physical health have their cycles, too, of prosperity and adversity.

It is hard not to grab at the prosperous times and fool ourselves into thinking that we have made it for good and that all will always be well. Fantasy – escapism - is the great enemy of moderation. The downturns in life or fortune can also mire us in despair and isolation. Yet we fear moderation because it seems tepid and boring; and we want to feel life as something thrilling and adventurous. If we don’t have the courage to live it this way ourselves, we do it vicariously through films and stories.

Actually the middle way is a knife-edge, a high-wire balancing act. It takes many stumbles and falls from great heights to learn how to walk it well. Moderation is the way and in the deepest sense the goal. The centre of reality exerts the force that holds us in balance as we walk across the ravine of life. When we relapse into thinking that it is achieved by our own willpower or cleverness, it won’t be long before we have another fall.

Personal, interior balance and sharpness of mind is what Cassian is talking about in his asceticism of the mantra. That is where the universal centre is connected with: in our own personal centre.

All prayer that is not an indulgence of the rollercoaster of fortune is the prayer of the heart. The more personally balanced, deeply-centred people in the world there are, the greater the level of justice in all institutions. The more the gulf between rich and poor narrows, the closer we all come to reality.

Soon we will be contemplating the Cross with particular intensity. What does it say to us of balance, rootedness and compassion? What does John Main mean when he says that every time we meditate we enter into the dying and rising of Jesus?

Friday of Lent Week 5

By Laurence Freeman OSB

Recently an unmanned research vehicle plunged to the deepest level of the ocean, seven miles down I think. To the scientists’ surprise they found abundant life there feeding on the detritus that had sunk down from higher levels of the ocean.

The emotional and neural patterns which determine our behaviour and responses to events run very deep too. We can be aware of a process of change starting when we undertake a spiritual practice deep enough to address these patterns of our mind and lifestyle. But real change happens slowly. Real change means irreversible as well as positive. When it happens we no longer snap back like an elastic band to our old settings when we are under pressure or when off our guard.

There are two levels of motivation then that we have to cultivate. At the first level, for example, we accept that there are patterns that it is not desirable to continue. We eat or drink too much. We indulge fantasy too often. We cannot control our anger. Sadness overwhelms and disables us. We push away the people we love and need, preferring to be isolated. Aware of these patterns a motivation develops to change. We probably thought of these five weeks ago as Lent began.

Then we find hope from sources and we trust that change is possible. And we start to do something about it. Meditation is a major catalyst for change. It is rather like the unmanned research vehicle. Unmanned because the ego – what we think we are and what we are when we think – is not in charge. Someone else is pulling the levers. We entrust ourselves to the spirit.

But it is a long journey and it gets murky. (I won’t push this analogy any further.) What happens is that we notice changes in ourselves or others point them out. But things look and seem to remain pretty much the same. The patterns may shift and reduce but they still click in. I once had acupuncture on a bad knee. The intrusive and over talkative acupuncturist seemed to want to find a childhood trauma to explain it. But he was my best hope at the time and eventually during the treatment I noticed change – the pain persisted but it only moved further down my leg. The tropical sun, my next stop, finished the job more silently.

It is when we see a change in the patterns but we are disappointed that they are still there, that the second level of motivation needs to be cultivated. This is where we move from technique to discipline in the practice. And when faith becomes evidently the power of transformation and healing. ‘Your faith has healed you’.

And it is by faith – this powerful but elusive quality of consciousness – that we see the one who once taught this and continues to be the source of deep motivation.

Thursday of Lent Week 5

By Laurence Freeman OSB

Life comes in many shapes and sizes and from unexpected directions. It is irrepressible. The denial of life, however, is rampant too. The denial often begins with fear because life presages change and so it demands that we adapt. If this demand scares us too much we attempt to diminish the potential of the new life and to limit its energy so that we can better control it. Before long all we have done is succeed in stifling it. And then we complain because life seems to have got boring or feels unfulfilled.

One characteristic of life is change – we call this growth. Life is also self-communicating and brings to consciousness the relationships it establishes. An important question for human beings - especially in a culture like ours that relies so much on virtual reality for its stimulation - is do we feel really alive? Are we aware of change as growth or merely as challenges to our attempts to be in control. As beings-in-relationship do we see these relationships as the sacred ground of our existence or as adjuncts, add-ons to the ego’s quest for happiness on its own terms?

Such questions can of course also become life-denying if they make us too self-centred. Life radiates outwards from the mysterious centre of its origin. It is that centre with which we most need to feel connected, not the shadowy centre which is our ego. Meditation shifts the centre in the right direction.

Two days ago we opened our new Meditatio Centre in London. It is a sign of change and expanding relationships that has evolved from the Meditatio program in the community that we started three years ago. Many people came to the centre to celebrate this new life and to wish it well. The beginnings of new things – babies, books or centres – are naturally joyful and pulse with optimism and potential. They remind us what life means.

Meditation makes this kind of experience of the beginning of a new life-form continuous. It stays fresh because we learn to be more alive day by day, less frightened of growth, less in denial. ‘I have come that you may have life, life in all its fullness.’ This translates into personal experience. Or rather it is not translated. It is discovered on the way that is life.

Wednesday of Lent Week 5

By Laurence Freeman OSB

Sophistication is a dangerous quality and often very deceptive. What looks sophisticated – refined, subtle, intelligent, worldly - can actually be remarkably stupid and naïve.

The word suggests wisdom (sofia). But when it was applied to the sophist school of philosophy it was associated with making money out of teaching wisdom and with complicating and adulterating the purity of truth. Many of our higher institutes of education today, too, are very sophisticated and complex organizations. They have huge budgets and are run by financial motivation but they no longer arouse and cultivate the love of truth and learning in their students.

Religion has the same fate as education when it becomes too sophisticated. Theological hair-splitting, pharisaical worship of rules, depersonalised ways of worship replace true spirituality.

In these last days of Lent, the scripture readings take us deeper into the markedly unsophisticated and genuinely wise self-awareness of Jesus. It was this that made him the extraordinary yet empathically human being whose experience has such universal, trans-cultural significance. We listen with attention to his words and look with wonder at his life and death not because he was a polished, smooth talking sophisticate but for other reasons.

Sophistication often conceals strong self-doubt and confusion. Jesus is a universal teacher because he knows himself and is clear. He therefore conveys the personal simplicity and authenticity associated with any experience of truth itself. Such people are conspicuous because they deserve to be trusted. The over-sophisticated by contrast are cynical, trusting in nothing. The simple are warriors whose only weapon is love. For that very reason they are seen - and rejected - as foolish or dangerously radical.

Meditation is not for sophisticated people. To learn to meditate we need to trust ourselves to the pure simplicity of truth found within our own experience. Even more than the force of other people’s wise ideas or words, and far deeper than smart worldliness, it is the integrity of our own experience that brings us to life.

Tuesday of Lent Week 5

By Laurence Freeman OSB

Ken Wilber once wrote a very moving account of caring for his newly wed wife through her last illness. As those who know his other writings will appreciate, he is a born intellectual with a huge appetite for acquiring and integrating knowledge and understanding. His books get longer and longer. But as it became clear that his wife’s cancer was terminal he abandoned all his other activities and interests to concentrate on caring for and being with her. As the stress of the role increased he began to crack under the strain. Ominous shadows began to appear until a friend told him to take at least an hour or two each day for his intellectual work, which he wisely did.

We are who we are, and we cannot change ourselves by will or thought alone. Being is all we are most deeply meant to do. It is complete fulfillment and happiness and allows for the fulfillment of our responsibilities. The first step in being ourselves is to accept who we are even – especially – if we think we should have had other features written into our software from the moment of our creation.

‘In meditation we accept the gift of our being’. John Main’s short definition rings truer each stage of the journey of meditation. Its meaning can be explored ever more deeply. Yet this work of self-acceptance is a great deal harder and more demanding than the merely self-help mentality appreciates. Therefore, accepting and being who we are should consciously start as early as possible, before the encrustation of imaginary selves becomes too thick. Many of these selves are sources of suffering and complexity because they set us up for patterns of failure and so often lead to self-rejection, the very opposite of what is natural.

Shedding these layers of identity is like refusing unnecessary clothing. We need some clothes, for warmth or protection or to be respectful to our neighbours on the subway. But, on the spiritual journey, as few as possible.

Jesus would have been crucified naked. In the Resurrection clothes were no longer an issue.

Monday of Lent Week 5

By Laurence Freeman OSB

In a time of crisis people look around for someone who seems to know what is happening and what should be done. This often leads to disaster.

A country is falling apart and people see someone who is supremely confident and full of noble sentiments. In fact his confidence comes from opportunism. He knows that this is his moment to seize power and he has a sure intuition about how to do so. He is not concerned so much with leading people to a better place as just to take charge. Probably this assuages a deep anxiety and insecurity in himself that is only bearable when he can dominate and control.

Soon people realise they have put the wrong person in power but he clings to it at any price – including their lives. How many fallen dictators are determined to drag their country down with them into the ruins of their own ego? Unrestrained egotism inevitably destroys.

Calmness in a storm is a powerful force in itself. Sometimes it can even calm the storm. But we have to discern where the calmness comes from – the ego cynically seizing an opportunity or a wisdom and compassion that sees through the present turmoil to the centre where the energy of peace resides.

There is only one great teacher and leader, the spirit. Some people carry a strong measure of the spirit in themselves and can be trusted. But such people, hands-on people not wafflers, discourage projection and do not seek acclaim. This self-knowledge was a characteristic of Jesus as he came to the crisis of his life.

One of the best leaders I have known was Sr Margaret Collier from Cork, a soft spoken woman, working always with great clarity and gentleness. She had the rare gift of inspiring, empowering, pushing from behind and then deftly stepping aside to let her protégés run things and take the credit. She left a strong and well-run community behind her.

People who build new things that last and can guide others through crisis are filled with the spirit. There’s always some ego at work in the available memory of our operating system. No one is perfect, even the very good and not many are very good. But, better concentrate on the good in people than the bad in order to avoid the ego in ourselves from seizing power.

With good practices embedded, our lives become attuned to this dimension of reality. Gradually, there is less and less space for the secret, crippling self-doubts of the ego. The doubts that do remain active are not destabilizing. They keep us grounded and ready to learn.
There is only one leader and we are all disciples. “Call no one on earth your teacher because you have only one teacher.” It’s strange how quickly the practice of meditation reveals the meaning of this and changes our values and way of living

Fifth Sunday of Lent

By Laurence Freeman OSB

As all the people came to him, he sat down and began to teach them.. Then Jesus bent down and started writing on the ground with his finger. As they persisted with their question, he looked up and said, ‘If there is one of you who has not sinned, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ Then be bent down and wrote on the ground again… (Jn 8:1-11)

Like Socrates and the Buddha, Jesus taught by the spoken word. He left no books or treatises and all we know of his teaching is in translation. That might seem to put a great distance between him and us. In a sense it does. In his time he moved people by his words to the core of their being while we don’t even know the exact words he used.

But in another sense this silence of Jesus brings us dangerously close to him. The words we have are hints, pointing fingers. They communicate his ideas. But what engages the heart and develops the bond of love that becomes discipleship is a living presence - more than either a historical memory or a literary legacy that we have to deconstruct.

The words of the gospels are important and precious but even they pale by comparison with the spirit of his presence. How powerful this presence is can be glimpsed in this story of the woman caught in adultery (and the invisible man who got away with it). If it seems archaic we have only to remember the vindictive justice in which the Taliban deals out the same kind of punishment today.

We have all been caught in adultery at times. At least, the adultery that Jesus identified as residing in imagination and fantasy, not only specifically sexual but any form of escaping reality or responsibility. The ego, in a rage of shame or self-rejection, has often wanted to stone our weaker selves or, by projection, others to death.

It is not words that save us from this terrible fate but pure presence. This presence is not dispelled or exiled by even the worst we can do or think. Its words are written in the ground of our being, the dust of which we are all made. But what turns the anger aside and deflates it is the power of a true, gentle and undeflectable, undeniable love.

Saturday of Lent Week 4

By Laurence Freeman OSB

Habemus papam. Lent is given a new dimension. May Francis be blessed.

Not so long ago it would have taken days or weeks to spread the news of a new Pope. Today we are all there in the Square as the news breaks. First impressions are made globally and instantly. He seems to have the gift of making an impression without trying to, which is called humility. Within minutes he has been googled by millions and predictions and evaluations are piling up from experts.

Yet there were also many thousands there physically, standing in the cold and indeed singing in the rain. The joyfulness of the crowds in St Peter’s Square was a very different thing from the commentaries of pundits and the cautious response of distant observers. It is a ritual and rituals require physical presence and participation. There is a kind of knowledge and insight that comes only to those who are taking part in the ritual, even if they don’t get a good view or clearly hear his name pronounced. Theirs was the immediate knowledge of relief – no one likes to be on a ship without a captain. But also of hope.

Pope Francis reawakened that hope in many by a wonderful economy of gestures – his humour, his choice of name, his asking to be blessed before he gave a blessing, his stillness before the cheering crowds and his bowing low in silent prayer.

We cannot live well without hope and this key virtue of life can be eroded and sapped over time. We are eager to have it reawakened by our leaders and indeed that is part of their work and service. But then we easily project unrealistic expectations on them. We may even mythologise them as they stand before us. That is why Francis’ gentle and gracious words about his predecessor were hopeful too – the resignation of a pope re-humanizes the office. And Francis’s first symbolic gestures seem to want to remind us of the humanity of Christ - and therefore of our own.

In this sense the election of Pope Francis is not a distraction from the season of Lent but a magnification of its meaning.

Friday of Lent Week 4

By Laurence Freeman OSB

The anguish of loss today can become the joy of deliverance tomorrow. We don’t really understand the nature of the attachment that caused the pain when separation or loss came until the operation is over and the trauma subsides.

Either we breathe a sigh of relief as we realise we have been delivered – from an addiction or a compulsive delusion, for example. Or we see that what we have lost has become a genuine death experience that drags us into a vortex of surrendering to something vaster than we can control. If we lost something we are better off without, we pick up life again quickly with renewed enthusiasm. We had so many assets tied up in a bad investment but now they are liquid again and can be invested in life with much better returns than before.

There are pain and periodic twinges of regret. Like the Hebrews in the desert who regularly rebelled against their deliverance from Egypt and could only think of the ‘fish we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic! Here we are wasting away, stripped of everything; there is nothing but manna for us to look at!’ Oh no, not that supernatural manna again. No addiction ends instantly. No time of imprisonment ends at the moment the door is unlocked.

But the deeper losses of life are different. The difference is revealed when, as our attachments weaken, in their place a dark void opens all around us. The first is like going to the dentist. Forgotten when it’s over. This is major surgery with a strong anaesthetic that puts us out. There is so much that is new and unwelcome that we have no choice but to accept and integrate.

Seeing the distinction between these two kinds of loss makes for living wisely. The perception needed is gained through the micro-losses we freely undergo by dealing with distractions during meditation.

Thursday of Lent Week 4

By Laurence Freeman OSB

Soon Lent will be transitioning into one of the greatest and deepest of all reflections on the nature and meaning of suffering. Let us hope we are ready for it this year.

There are many forms of suffering, as there many manifestations of love. Maybe in the great cosmic secret they are exactly proportionate.
When the mind is confused, doubt-stricken, divided and agitated we experience a particular kind of suffering. It may not appear – yet – on the surface of our lives and in our interactions with others. That depends on our measure of self-control or on our ability to put on a good face. But, eventually, there is nothing hidden that will not be exposed. Few secrets go to the grave - or stay there long.

Mental suffering is often said to be worse than merely physical pain; although comparing degrees or forms of suffering is an abstraction, the luxury of those who observe but don’t experience. Mental anguish, however, may indeed be worse because it is particularly isolating; and to outsiders – even those who have solutions and solace to give you – it often seems exaggerated. You feel they will listen with empathy but are secretly thinking (as you may be too), ‘why don’t you just get on with it and make up your mind?’

The problem is that the mind cannot make up itself. Thinking about something doesn’t solve it. To resolve a dilemma and decrease the suffering of confusion we need insight, wisdom, the intelligence that cannot be measured by cognitive tests. It is there, like a pure spring under muddy soil, ever-flowing.

Perhaps we follow politics and show-business so avidly because we see reflected there, at a safe distance, the inconclusive arguments and self-indulgent distractions that beset our own minds and life-styles.
Yes, it’s hard to put meditation into such a confused picture. The laying aside of thoughts. Faith in the pure spring. The patience of regular practice that itself involves suffering of a kind – but of a redemptive kind.

Wednesday of Lent Week 4

By Laurence Freeman OSB

When the blackbird flew out of sight
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles
(Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird)

Tuesday of Lent Week 4

By Laurence Freeman OSB

I was talking to someone about another person who had offended her. She said ‘I can get on with her now alright. But I will never forgive her’. It was revealing: the ‘will never’, rather than ‘can’t ever’.

I was struck by the sense of defiance even of pride in that resolution never to forgive. It was as if she knew she had the ability to forgive, let go and move on. But, for whatever, reason she preferred to stay with the bittersweet chemistry of resentment and anger. Maybe it brings us a satisfying sense of moral superiority – ‘I am the offended party so I am always in the right as long as I act out of that resentment’. Maybe too there isn’t as much freedom in the choice not to forgive as we might think.

Why on earth would we prefer the pain and negativity of the past than to grow through it and move on with the balm of wisdom, compassion and new depth? No good reason; and yet we can always find reasons. Whoever did something consciously bad without building a defence or justification for it?

It is always easy to dress up the irrational and self-destructive as rational and healthy. Allowing anger and resentment to cling to us, however, merely obscures who we are and diminishes what we are capable of becoming. In the person I was with I sensed this contraction. Her remark – accompanied by a slightly crazy, if not demonic look in her eyes - was an expression not of badness but of diminished responsibility.

Like the younger son in the parable, when we indulge ourselves and then get sick on excess we think we deserve to be punished – by our bodies or other people or by God. It seems we don’t deserve to be forgiven and restored to the relationship we have offended. Not surprisingly, we apply the same primitive standard of justice to others.
The measure we give to ourselves will be the measure we give to others.

In fact - as every meditation can reveal to us - love is boundless and overflowing. Forgiveness is on tap. ‘The kingdom of heaven is close at hand’ – the refrain of each day of Lent.

By Laurence Freeman OSB

Life is a story with many stories and people who love life like stories. It’s a bad sign when no story stirs, amuses or saddens you. John Main taught meditation simply because he wanted to share with others what he had found: the gift of meditation to vitalize us and lead us continuously to a fuller experience of life and its meaning. He was a great storyteller. I can remember him telling this one to a meditation group one evening:

The Indian God Shiva was sitting with his wife, looking down on the world when his wife said to him, ‘’Why don’t you go and grant salvation to some of your devotees?’ Shiva said, ‘Very well’ and so they went down to a town and sat in the market place. The word got around that a great prophet was there and then the holy people of the town came out.

The first of them came up to Shiva and said, ‘I meditate three times every day, in winter I meditate for two hours in cold water, in summer I meditate for two hours in the heat. When will I get salvation?’ Shiva looked at him and said, ‘Three more incarnations’. You can just imagine the story as this man goes back to his friends, shaking his head and saying, ‘Three more, three more’. So it goes on with others. Another person comes and he is told that he has ten more incarnations. Finally a little man comes and he says, ‘I am afraid I do not do much but I do try to love everyone around me and I try to love creation. Can I get salvation?’ Shiva scratches his head and the little fellow gets a bit nervous and asks again, ‘Can I get salvation?’ Shiva looks at him and says, ‘A thousand incarnations’, at which the poor fellow jumps around for joy and starts shouting to everyone ‘I will get it, I will get salvation! A thousand, only a thousand more!’

At that, he bursts into flames and so does Shiva and his wife and they all become one flame and they are gone. Then his wife says to him, ‘How did that little old man get salvation immediately when you had said a thousand incarnations?’ He said, ‘Yes, that was my ruling; but his generosity overruled my ruling and so he was saved immediately.’

The point? If you don’t get it and feel better about your own limited efforts, read it again. Remember yesterday’s story of the two brothers.

Sunday of Lent Week 4

By Laurence Freeman OSB

Fear and resentment are two of the most corrosive forces in the human heart. When we are in their grip we are convinced they are justified. Each wreaks their harm throughout all dimensions of our life because they grow, or fester, in the conviction that we are not loved simply for ourselves. We may know love, even be in love, but its light takes time penetrate to the darkest depths of our mind. Salvation, redemption, enlightenment, liberation - consist in the light of love dispelling all the remaining darkness.

Consciousness is so much the consequence of love we could say that consciousness is love. Where we do not experience love we are as yet unredeemed, unconscious.

Today’s gospel of the prodigal son should be called the story of the two brothers. We focus on the younger one who sows his wild oats. He seems like us or what we would like to be, young, profligate and fun-loving. Then he runs out of resources and creeps home with his tail between his legs. He is frightened of his father’s response. His brother is apparently less attractive, less popular; the obedient one who stayed at home doing what his father expected. But now his father expects him to celebrate his wayward brother’s return and this is too much. He is resentful. The two brothers are the two sides of the ego, fear and anger, low-level consciousness, unable to understand love.

The father is everything we don’t expect a patriarchal tyrant to be like. God is never what we imagine. He ignores the young boy’s pious apologies. He is moved by pity when he sees him, embraces him warmly and kisses him tenderly. To the older son’s bitterness he shows not anger but patience and kindness, reminding him that everything he owns belongs to the boy as well. Neither son seems to get the point. They are loved for who they are.

Words can only persuade so far. Actions speak louder. Meditation is pure action. Something happens when we become silent and still, letting go of thoughts and of the fears and resentments they carry. In silence and stillness, when the mind finds its natural condition of equanimity, we can no longer project these