Lent Reflections 2018

Thursday

Askeo – which gives us the word ascetic – originally meant training for war but was also used to describe athletic training. A well-trained soldier who rapes and pillages or an athlete who cheats (or a businessman who acts unethically) betray the deeper purpose of their work however good they may be at it. In the same way, mindfulness used to train snipers or improve a currency trader’s performance misses the broader meaning. The larger context of the exercise has been lost and replaced by a view that is narrow and self-centred.

Whatever we do without respect for its deeper meaning turns to wormwood. But even bitter things gone through with faith in their final meaning turn sweet.

Nearly everything in the materialistic scheme of values that dominates life today becomes instrumentalised, turned into a technique which self-interest controls. People sometimes say ‘I’m really glad to have found meditation and I’m going to use it as a tool for balancing my life’. Anyway, this attitude is a beginning, a rather primitive start to understanding what asceticism means and what it is you are really being trained for. We start from where we are.

Good spiritual training reduces this attitude by achieving, quite naturally, the balance and harmony we seek. Then we notice them by surprise. These and many more benefits appear without our trying too hard to force their arrival. A lucid mind, greater and more selfless awareness, a more comprehensive ability to pay attention to others, a heart open to beauty and tenderness, to the joy in natural things and to a reduction in the compulsiveness of desire – these are fruits of the kind of asceticism we are beginning now in the lean, clean days of Lent. Some effort is needed to start, some will is called for to re-start when you fall by the wayside.

But grace is a bigger player in the process than willpower.

Where grace is allowed to enter and when it is welcomed, a sense of gift in everything will follow, subtly wound up with the wonderful ability to once again be genuinely surprised.

Turning everything into a tool, controlling all the outcomes, evaluating the results compared with the investment you are making are all eventually going to fail. Failure can be liberation from deception and a breakthrough into greater reality. But it is never easy to undergo the wrecking of your plans or the wasting of the spirit of joy that makes everything worthwhile. Asceticism helps here.

Ascetical training is not just for Lent then. The mantra is a continuous interior Lent and leads to a deeper spontaneity and sense of freshness in ordinary daily life. Prayer is the essential ascesis of the spiritual life. What you do and what you give up during the Lent cycle re-sharpens the edge of the knife that our spirit uses to cut through the dross that built up when we weren’t looking.

Friday

The successive days of Lent – like a good addict just taking it day by day – are an opportunity to become clearer about our lives, their functioning or dys-functionality and also their greater meaning. If this happens during these forty (or forty-six) days it will feel more by accident than will-power. We do however need to prepare ourselves for the accident and to be surprised.

Clarity and obscurity, however, are never far from each other. We are never clear about everything, except perhaps sometimes in a deep dream where all things may appear for a timeless flash of eternity-as-a-whole and beautifully connected in a cosmic order that fills us for a moment with wonder and huge relief: a homecoming where we no longer need to think or worry or plan any more.

But most of the time, some things, or some angles of the same thing, are crystal clear while others are simultaneously as murky as the lake of Bonnevaux after heavy rain. Naturally we prefer to take refuge in the few clear patches of our perspective on the whole picture. Nor are these to be disregarded. But in fact it may well be the unclear things – the fog of life – which are more significant. In any case, we must account for and equally respect both the clear and the obscure.

This helps us to deal with the problems of moral obscurity, when we are not sure what to do or what is right or wrong. Few things and even fewer judgements about things are simply black and white. Motives – and human character itself – are often mixed or weak and unstable. The good can morph into the bad and the dark can suddenly surprise us with astounding brilliance. Living with this oscillation between good and bad (as we see them) is at times a little messy and irrational. But at least it defuses the worst viruses of prejudice, racism, intolerance and many of the other stupidities that cause such extreme misery.

Lent – by this I mean the daily Lent of our morning and evening meditation and the moment by moment Lent of the mantra – help us to stay on the middle path. It leads us securely through the patches of obscurity and helps us to avoid falling into the abyss of the great darkness, which is also the greatest superficiality and waste of time and always what we should fear most.

Saturday

Hunger for power, in any of its multiple forms, domestic, sexual or political, is perhaps the deepest human craving. If we so often feel dissatisfied and restless it is because this hunger conflicts so directly with our hunger for love. Power as we imagine it – possession, domination and control - is irreconcilable with love. The conflict between them accounts for much of interior human suffering.

Love is the real power. Everything else is eventually exposed as a kind of substitute. Love may be missing in our life or our capacity for love may be chronically damaged. When this is this case we seek alternatives, false gods to worship in place of persons to love, positions, possessions or projects. No doubt many great works of art and political achievements have resulted from this transference from love to power, born from deep, unsatisfied human longing. These may have incidentally brought much joy and many benefits to others.  But equally, this dysfunction in the human soul has caused immeasurable social disruption and often triggers huge regressions in the path of human evolution.

The lonely tyrant, in any field of human endeavour, may be ruthlessly cruel in the process of acquiring and holding onto power. At the same time they reveal – especially as power drains away from them – the pathos of loneliness caused by the transfer of our attention to a false god. If we witness the last moments of a tyrant’s fall from power – whether in a family or on the stage of global politics – and see their pride and prejudice crumble, revealing a vulnerable and neglected child; and if we then feel only a cruel glee at their humiliation, we are showing ourselves to be likely addicted to false power as much as they were.

The narrative of Lent unfolding in scripture and liturgy builds up to the most intense and transformative story every told and passed down the generations. Over the three days of the paschal mystery the falseness of the power-lust is stripped away. Innocence not tyranny is humiliated and rejected. But extreme vulnerability, like the sun breaking through dark clouds, reveals the one and only true power to be the divinity of love,.

Easter is an amazing, annual opportunity to reset our lives on the axis of true priorities. It displays in heroic but simple terms the meaning of love on a cosmic, not an egotistically romantic, scale. Because of Easter bunnies and public holidays celebrating nothing, this opportunity is barely even recognised let alone embraced.

That is why we train in Lent for the three day marathon of the Triduum. What we are doing or not doing during this training, what we take on or what we give up, have meaning beyond themselves.

Monday

It is hard to write about the spirituality of Lent with the cry of Rachel filling the public space we occupy.

A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more. (Jer 31:15)

The families in Parkland Florida, the soul-sick nation it belongs to and the members of human family anywhere who know about it are painfully penetrated by the tragedy of the high school shooting. The image of the pathetic, broken perpetrator, finally getting the attention he craved but not the kind he was looking for, evokes the sense of hopeless helplessness that we will soon contemplate in Holy Week. Nineteen-year-old Nikolas Cruz is not a Christ-figure but it would be a strange Christian who could not see Christ in him. In this incident, at the beginning of Lent, the Cross has come to us early, wrenching our attention away from ourselves for a while. It confronts us with the mystery of the thick darkness that any journey into the light must pass through and struggle with.

In the face of other people’s helplessness we don’t know what to say or do. We would like to help, console, explain but we are disarmed of all these means. Hardest of all – and yet most valuable – is to do nothing. But we usually escape helplessness through platitudes and talk of prayer. Uncomfortable soon with the tone of our own voice, we beg to leave and move on.

Bitter sadness seeks to escape from the prison of its anguish and loneliness. Increasingly in our affluent culture of fake freedom and limited opportunity, those suffering most intensely are offered least care. Without sufficient attention, and balm for the damaged soul, little can prevent loneliness from mutating into madness. Our human options in the face of loneliness are limited. We can deal with the pain by turning it inwards and destroying our own psyche. We can try to escape it by inflicting it on others. Or, with the love of another refusing to give up on us, we can, with difficulty, transform the angry sadness of our soul into peace and compassion.

The prayers of politicians at a time of collective tragedy may give some temporary, formal relief: even the most dysfunctional and shallow of personalities may occupy a kind of parental role for the people in a crisis. Yet, prayer without action on the causes of the suffering is fake prayer, a cover-up and deliberate distraction. It is perverse because it actually participates in and belongs to the darkness and corrosive deception that causes the pain.

Tuesday

Do you think of yourself as an ‘upright person’?

Do you mean a respectable member of my community who keeps to the standards and values of my group?

Kind of. What else does upright mean?

Sitting or standing with your back straight

Or being of greater length than width.

So what’s the point of this?

The point is to suggest there is a connection between sitting upright in meditation and living in an upright way - being moral, fair, kind, true.

All I have to do is have a good physical posture then and I will be a good human being?

If only. No, but when we meditate we are told to sit in a ‘good’ posture which means with the back straight. This helps breathing and the discipline of stillness during the meditation and therefore helps us meditate. There is a link between physical posture and mental alertness and clarity – and even the sense of purpose that lies behind meditation. It is usually more difficult to meditate if your posture is slouched, lazy and uncomfortable

But could I meditate and be a cheat, liar and heartless exploiter of the weakness of others? Could meditation help me escape my conscience and make me better focused on my bad actions?

Maybe for a while, of course, but I think it would be unsustainable. In meditation as we sit in stillness we move. The deeper the stillness the greater the acceleration. This still movement takes us into our essential, interior uprightness. (We are essentially upright). Along the way we encounter interior postures of mind, maybe recent or well-established, maybe on the margins of our personality but also possibly in what constitutes our personality – and these postures may contradict our essential uprightness. They can be twisted and deformed aspects of ourselves.

Facing these will be very hard, then, and we will fight against being straightened out. It’s probably why we abandon or reduce our full commitment to the times of sitting upright.

I agree. It’s hard to meditate if you have just lied or slandered someone, had an orgy of gossip or over-indulged. But we can always correct our posture, inner as well as outer. If we don’t give up we can re-align ourselves with our essential value – our essential uprightness.
By discovering our inner value, we truly begin to live by the values we believe in and we can say sorry when we fail to do so. Are you still listening?

Wednesday

What we may ‘give up’ in Lent simply serves the greater renunciation on which any integrated form of life grows into fullness. Lent helps us remember what this greater ‘letting go’ means and how each of us is called to make it absolutely – when the time is ripe. Until then, we simply learn day by day to be as real as we can be.

In many religions it was widely believed that the big renunciation of life could only be achieved through the monastic path. For the great majority, family and worldly affairs dragged them down and blocked that full gift of self which is the highest human achievement. By turning their back, not only on career and fame, wealth, sex and family but all ‘worldly affairs’ monks soared into enlightenment on a higher plane of reality. The words of Jesus – the way to life is narrow and few find it – were misinterpreted to imply this.

Of course, lay people can come as close or closer to the renunciation of attachment to the ‘worldly affairs’ in their daily work and family responsibilities. All kinds of vocation have the same primary potential. What matters is not the outward form – the family hearth or the cloister - but how we fulfil the responsibilities associated with the particular path we are following.

To understand this means seeing how renunciation happens. When you push some ‘worldly’ aspect of life away from you – say an addiction or an excess -it does not automatically or immediately leave you alone. Things repressed tend to return. When you expel something by force it often springs back in some way if only as a compulsive desire or fantasy. There is a stray cat on Bere Island which I feed in the kitchen but throw out of the house, only to find it has had the nerve to re-enter through an open door or window in another room. Lent and the mantra both teach us this swing between renunciation and return. What appears to leave often returns.

Renunciation when it comes is a gift, a simple happening, a natural occurrence. To renounce we have to renounce the idea of renunciation as well. We cannot renounce by will-power if the essential renunciation is the renunciation of the will. We can loosen the grip but renunciation happens by itself.

So we come to see that the only renunciation that matters is what leads us into full freedom and spontaneity. This awaits the renunciation of all kinds of force and allows us to be filled instead with the power of the spirit.

Thursday

A cardiac surgeon in a group I was once introducing to meditation asked me to stop using the word ‘heart’ in my talks. He said it was distracting him with thoughts of his work and also, he added, in all his operations he had never seen anything in the heart that looked remotely spiritual.

At least it made him think. Many people when they hear the word heart used non-anatomically associate it with feelings and emotions. This is closer to the meaning of the word than the doctor’s materialist response. Emotions are indeed ‘felt’ in the chest area: we say we feel heart-broken or that our ‘heart drops' for reasons that might be connected to a link between the emotion centre of our brain and this region of our body. That may explain something of interest but not much. Love, interestingly, is said to be ‘felt’ throughout our body.

We can’t reduce feelings or emotions to the central nervous system. The heart is a spiritual symbol of the personal centre of conscious awareness and core identity. All the physical, mental and most subtle dimensions of human being converge and resolve in this centre of simple, abiding wholeness. We are our heart.

When we meditate we need to be prepared for different waves and kinds of feelings at different times. At first we may feel basic restlessness and itchy feet. It just seems impossible to sit still and do nothing in this unfamiliar posture for twenty or thirty minutes. Many struggle with even twenty seconds. Later, after our capacity has increased, we may feel a wave of anger directed at others or ourselves, or shame, or lust or greed, or a profound sadness and sense of loss. Feelings of nothingness and being dragged down into meaninglessness may be the worst we have to endure.

Meditation does not repress, deny or ignore these feelings. It is good they arise and are consciously felt. They come from somewhere and it is better they are outed. If we can sit through them we are calmer, freer and gentler with ourselves. In this sense meditation purifies our emotions by allowing these under-assimilated memories and associations to resolve and release their energy for better use. It is not the heart that produces these feelings, however. Rather, it offers us the still centre, the stable core of conscious awareness and attention that allows us to ride the waves, however stormy, and approach closer to the depth of being where pure consciousness, calm and clarity reveal a feeling beyond feeling and an emotion beyond emotion that we call the love of God.

Compassion and love are more than feelings: they may be associated with any feeling depending on circumstances and personal character. They flow effortlessly out of our true nature if they are not blocked by negative forces within ourselves. We cannot control or manufacture them because we are them.

The mantra – and our small daily practices of personal discipline and generosity to others – is our surfboard to this harbor of peace.

Friday

John Main once said (with Irish humour: monks, don’t take it too personally) that he had never met more egotists than in monasteries.

This is the point he was making. There are two dangers about monasteries. A monk might be very serious about self-transformation and his spiritual practice but also be focused on it in such a way that nothing and no one will get in the way of his direct path to enlightenment. Usually this is manifest in a hyper-critical attitude to those of his brethren who appear less rigorous – a kind of spiritual snobbery. The other danger is illustrated in the monk who enters the cloister with the purpose of escaping any challenging association with others rather than to find himself in others. An early Christian monk defined a monk as someone who sees himself in others and others in himself. This hyper-introverted type, self-centred type of person will use the monastic routine for insulation rather than encounter.

Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, spoke recently about ‘Leadership and Values’ at a Meditatio Seminar in London. He enumerated some of the ideal qualities of leaders and the values they embodied, recognizing (as with the figure of the Abbot in the Rule of St Benedict) that it is unlikely to happen that all this will be combined in one person at the same time. Governor Carney’s guiding principle, however, was the value of purpose. A leader needs a clear purpose – and the right purpose is always other-centred.

All this can only be relevant to us if, in some sense, we are all monks and we are all leaders. According to the Rule, the monk is someone who ‘truly seeks God’. Isn’t that what a serious meditator does, with deepening renunciation, as her journey progresses and transformation takes effect? Your image of God might not be anyone else’s and you may prefer to articulate it outside religious language. But, at the essential level, the experience of meditation is the experience of God – of love, wholeness and universal connection.

And we are all leaders – to children, for example, who watch us closely and imitate us. Even those who do the humblest service to the world – toilet attendants, street cleaners – can show real qualities of leadership and service in the way they work with their colleagues and relate to the public.

But we are also leaders to ourselves. Lent is a time when we do something extra and give up something familiar. Where is this decision made? How is it made? What is its motivation? Its source is in that subtle part of our own mind-heart mix that sees clearly and gives us a sense of purpose. It is not a rival or competitive part of our selves but the unifying, healing energy of ourselves that we call spirit.

Does it make us more or less egocentric? Or do we feel that the real purpose of our spiritual practice is actually direct service to others? Whatever fruits and benefits it might bring us are then dedicated to the well-being of the world. As we are also part of the world, we get our fair share of those benefits provided our guiding purpose is other-centred.

Saturday

Exodus is the great scriptural metaphor for Lent:  the forty years of the Hebrew tribe’s wandering in the wilderness before they reached the Promised Land illuminates the forty days we spend preparing for the paschal mysteries – and they are mysteries – of Easter.

The eighty-year-old Moses was charged with the task of persuading the pharaoh to ‘let my people go’. Personally, he was remarkably unselfconfident for a national liberation leader and by his own account a very poor speaker, but he trusted and did what he was told by the Lord. His show of magical powers – turning a rod into snakes – did not impress the Egyptians who could do the same. A lesson in religious competitiveness. The ten plagues that the Lord then brought on Egypt varied from turning the Nile into blood, to a plague of lice, another of flies and finally, most horrifically, the death of every first-born child. Finally the pharaoh relented and let them go.  Then he repented of his decision and tried to bring them back but as a consequence suffered the loss of his army in the Red Sea. This the founding myth of Israel was constructed – a combination of persecution and reaction and bad relations with all their neighbours.

It is neither, at first, very edifying nor very historical. There is no record of this event in contemporary sources. Most modern people, unaccustomed to the mythical and allegorical way of reading ‘history’ find this representation of God either disturbing or absurd. It is not easy to defend except as part of an evolving discovery of the nature of God that takes place throughout the Bible. In Jewish faith this culminates in the prophets (they met a God of peace and justice who says “what I want is mercy not sacrifice”). For the Christian it culminates in Jesus, the prophet who in all ways unites God and humanity.

As long as we feel dis-united from God we will be victims of our own imagination. Bad events will be interpreted as punishment for crimes – consciously or unconsciously committed. Good events will be seen as rewards and signs that we are more favoured than others. Either of these responses is disastrous to our relationship with God  (‘relationship’ should also be seen as a metaphor) and our relationships with others – especially those who hold beliefs different from our own.

So we need to read Exodus with a  contemplative mind, feeling our way below the surface to the deeper, subcutaneous level of meaning and its interaction with our own experience. Then the plagues might appear less as cruel punishments of an angry God and more as illustrations of the sufferings in life that form part of our awakening and liberation. Maybe the secret of the story – yet to be realised in Middle-Eastern politics – is that both sides in this story of human hostility are in fact, in relation to God, on the same side and that each has a lot to learn.

Monday

The Orthodox Church, better than the Latin, but not as fully as Eastern spiritualities, remembers the importance of the body in one’s prayer-life. Especially in the monastic tradition, an awareness of the breath and the practice of bows and prostrations, some very similar to the homage to the sun asana in yoga, help to keep body and mind in sync. Perhaps any spiritually that is only at the mental level and only uses will-power and self-evaluation, will fail to bring the practitioner to a higher state of integration and peaceful ease with him or her self. One can never say often enough to westerners that the purpose of ascesis , such as what we have chosen to do or not to do during Lent, is not to punish but to purify.

Fasting (reducing one’s daily food intake) and abstaining from meat and stimulants (caffeine and alcohol) are also traditional physical practices found in all spiritual traditions. Sometimes beginning such a practice makes one aware that we are more addicted than we had realised, which is humbling and advances self-knowledge. In our time, dieting has replaced fasting, as tourism has replaced pilgrimage but they can be understood as the same things done for different motives. Motives are important to the quality and outcome of what we do. Maybe an ancient Syrian monk tried to bridge them when he said ‘try to be thin so you can pass through the narrow gate’. Jesus said few can get through it, overweight with attachments and anxieties as most of us are, although ‘nothing is impossible to God’.

Meditation itself is a fasting and abstaining. But, in daily life, attention to our physical intake helps to condition our meditation. Regular drowsiness, falling asleep and even certain kinds of distraction can be reduced by healthier nutrition. Today many people meditate to be healthier. The meditator eventually comes to see that we stay healthy in order to meditate.

Sleep and rest, too, are part of the natural rhythm of the body and mind. Many people today are sleep-deprived because they work late or watch movies or play games late and many continue their digital life even after they have got into bed. The monks of old, by contrast, used to recommend to consciously limit the hours of sleep and encouraged getting up in the dark hours before dawn to pray. As my head hits the pillow I usually give a sigh of relief and often remember Jesus saying he did not have anywhere to lay his head and am asleep before I apply it to myself. When people do get up in the early, still hours to pray they discover a special joy and calmness, a certainty that stabilises them for the whole day.

In the Song of Songs we find “I sleep but my heart is awake.’ If you fall asleep saying or listening to your mantra you may find you awake doing so as well. With enough REM sleep you may find that you need less sleep but what you have refreshes you more. This helps the conscious and unconscious levels of the self to jangle with each other less during the day and so we may find we are both calmer and more intuitive.

Tuesday

It is possible to become as competitive and quantitative about spiritual things as about material pursuits. There are ascetical snobs just as there are successful people who regard social failures as inferior.

When I was making an extended retreat with Fr John and a small lay community, before I began my novitiate, a young guy came to stay for a few weeks fresh from the exotic ashrams and zendo of the East. He knew it all, had read everything and made us in the lay community feel rather provincial and amateurish. He looked in good physical shape, spoke sparingly, smiled rarely and sat in a posture with a stillness the Buddha might have envied. As if that was not enough he was (of course) vegetarian and abstained when on a special occasion we would have a glass of wine or beer.

Then one afternoon, when I had gone to the shops, I passed a restaurant and saw in the window our noble ascetic devouring a thick steak with a pint of beer and already eyeing the cream pastries near him. Looking back I can’t say for sure whether it was his sense of superiority or my sense of inferiority that made me so judgemental. A long time later, when I mentioned it to Fr John, he did not look surprised and clearly understood the young man better than the rest of us did. As my own self-expectations moderated I became less absolute about such things; and I think now he was probably just a genuine practitioner, not without an ego, who simply needed a day off and whom we had foolishly put on a pedestal.

Our harshness of judgement about others is invariably linked to our attitude to ourselves, to a sense of competitiveness or to the simmering shame of failure or of just not coming up to the mark. If we harm others we harm ourselves, whether we get caught or not. Similarly, if we judge others in a condemnatory way (we still need to be discerning about people) we cause anguish to ourselves. Judge not that ye be not judged.

Perhaps, at the root of the worst cases of political persecution or religious oppression of others, there is the infantile fear of ourselves not being approved by those whose approval we crave, even long after they have left our world.

What a relief and liberation it is, then, to discover in the spacious inner room of meditation that these mental and emotional games are fantastical. They are games that give us no delight and weave an ever-tightening bondage of spirit. As these games fade from our inner world we are set free and let out to play as children of God in the real world.

Wednesday

There is a tradition in the more exotic part of Christian ascetical tradition, from the good old days when ascetics meant business, of standing in icy water to cool off the passions while reciting the psalms. By passions, they meant not only the obvious carnal ones but generally all disordered and unbalanced habits or states of mind. Usually strict moderation seems to be the best way to re-set the system but, just as some countries use extreme austerity to improve the economy, so some individuals preferred cold nightlong baths.

There is another element in these stories, however, which make them less sensational and more significant. It is often described how someone tested the water the ascetics had just been standing in to see how cold it was and found it was in fact very warm. The energy of prayer had heated the water. This echoes the quite well-authenticated tales of Tibetan monks who sit in the Himalayas wrapped in cold wet blankets and heat them up by mental-physical power until they steam dry.

Most of us are a bit strange, if true be told, in ways that we normally don’t make public, so we should not be too quick to judge or ridicule those who like to do such things. Most people don’t want to invent and endure voluntary suffering of this kind even if it does develop self-control and personal training. Athletes might understand them better. But perhaps there is a lesson for the more conventional and, hopefully, more moderate among us as well.

It is the message that by acceptance, resilience and strong attention in the midst of difficult situations we can radically transform them. The discovery of a serious illness can evoke crippling fear of death but then lead through that fear to powerful love and produce compassion for others, in which the fear of death dissolves. A destructive addiction can threaten to wreck our life and then evolve into the discovery of inner freedom and joy. The most anguished sense of absence, as after the loss of someone we love, can gradually open like a flower into a new kind of intimate presence. And death can lead to resurrection.

More important then praying to have the unavoidable taken away from us – asking for a suspension of the laws of nature – is the prayer to endure and stay awake – what Lent is about.

And more important than that, as the great desert teachers advised, is to pray for the gift of true prayer itself.

We have, however, to learn to pray – just as we learn to walk or to talk

Thursday

In the middle ages Catholics were expected to refrain from meat and dairy products and sex during Lent. Jewish tradition has a sexual morality with a very different idea of sexual ascesis. It has a more celebratory attitude to sexuality which is reflected in seeing the Shabbat as a day when a married couple are expected to have sex. Attitudes to sex are culturally conditioned.

Yet universally sex is such a delicate subject and difficult to regulate because it is so intertwined with our need for love and with our sense of beauty. Bede Griffiths thought that it was equally dangerous to give unrestricted expression to sexual energy as to repress it. The only solution, he said, was to see it as a sacred energy, as many of the great spiritual traditions have done, capable of transforming us if we handle it well. But how?

Any kind of love, according to Thomas Aquinas, is a ‘similarity of participation’ in divine love. The theology here is beautiful and integral. Eros is divine, belonging in the life of God, because it is an aspect and manifestation of all love. The difficult thing is believing it and then living the belief in the context of our lives along with the inconsistencies of our own character.

Many of the most loving and generous people in the world have not got their sexual energy harmonised in this ideal way. They struggle with fear and guilt, excess or compulsiveness. But if they are honest with themselves this struggle itself can humble them and so create spaces for grace and wisdom to flow in and eventually through them.

Sexuality is a sensitive and ineffably intimate energy. It relentlessly drives us to union with others but also often and painfully separates us from them: a source of bliss but often of anguish. It is odd, then, that we can be so cruel and high-minded towards other’s sexual faults or indiscretions. By we, let’s  include many Christians and most of the media. Perhaps the reason for this is that when a sexual fault is exposed in one person it threatens to expose something of the same kind in everyone. ‘We’ defend and protect ourselves by attacking those who have already failed and been cast out.

This judgementalism might be a good thing to observe and arrest in our daily reflection on what we have done or failed to do. But then we have to act to reduce it. Do we give people the benefit of the doubt? Do we automatically join in the jeers of the crowd as it turns on its latest scapegoat? Do we project our own shame into a condemnation of others? Can we see how much of our judgeing of others comes not from our own considered decision but through our absorption of the opinions of the media, the ‘news’.

Stepping outside the crowd is a spiritual necessity essential for integrating ourselves and for being compassionate. But to do it we must face an even more dangerous secret in the human heart which is loneliness.

Friday

Loneliness can be an even bigger secret and source of shame than sexual dysfunction. Social statistics – and government responses to them out of concern for mental health – suggest that an accelerating number of people, young and old, report that they feel disconnected from others, unloved and with no one to share with. It is an awful thing.

When we feel lonely – and, if truth be told, loneliness is part of the human condition – we realise that we do not and cannot exist independently. We feel false, unreal, odd and out of place because the truth is that we have no wholeness sufficient to itself. ‘No man is an island’. Yet it is also painfully true that there is something in each of us that cannot be as fully shared and revealed as we would like. Loneliness can open up even in the most intimate and loving relationships. Often when we want to be most open and clear we find it doesn’t work.

When we enter Holy Week we will notice this in those parts of the story where Jesus is shown in his terrible isolation, misunderstood by his friends, rejected for false reasons by his enemies. Not surprisingly when this appears in ourselves many try to gloss it over, become busier, look aghast at an empty space in their day or week, join more online networks, seek any form of escape. But community is not everything. It does not work, any more than marriage can, for people who fail to face their loneliness.

If we see ourselves running away from our loneliness, ashamed of it and secretive about it, we should also see how we are not learning the lesson it is teaching us. For his followers, Jesus is the master of loneliness and, seeing that, we might emerge from isolation into love. In his confrontation with his loneliness he was deeply silent. He did not blame his disciples who let him down or the powerful who abused him. His last words show that it was not the silence of bitterness but of love.

Silence is terrifying to our culture. The more lonely we become the more we turn up the volume of life and, as in evident in the over-sexualisation of our world, the intensity of distraction. We need to allow ourselves to be silent. Simply let ourselves be silent. Doing this with others – at times making silence, not talk, the real work of being together – intuitively allows us to see the loneliness of others without being frightened by it. We shall see that in this loneliness is our potential for God and so we begin to look at each other with gentler and wiser eyes. The pain of loneliness gives way to the clarity of solitude and we become solitaries in a common love.

Saturday

There is a false peace which comes merely from the feeling that we are in control and can explain everything that is happening. It is what Jesus called ‘peace as the world gives it’ and he distinguished it from his own peace which he bestows as gift. Like all gifts from a truly authentic source it is without conditions, regardless of whether the beneficiary – us – deserves it or not.

Peace as the world gives it breaks down and is easily dissolved leaving us confused, frightened and angry. What we had relied on is no longer there and its disappearance undermines our trust in the benevolence of the universe. We can no longer be sure we will be treated fairly by life. Any number of misfortunes may cause this breakdown of peace. It might be the loss of an epiphany of love that we had cautiously allowed ourselves to believe in and felt would last forever. It could be an unexpected medical diagnosis or a letter telling us we are made redundant. In a moment the peace which gave us a cushion, on which to ride out the small bumps of life with a smile, is gone in a puff. We land with a hard bump on an earth that has suddenly become hard and inhospitable.

Worse of all it makes no sense. Religious platitudes may give temporary relief: God works in mysterious ways. We have to take the rough with the smooth. Jesus suffered like this too. It is not that they are untrue but they remain tasteless platitudes, ungrounded and bloodless, until we have experienced their meaning. Once we have, we may use them, sparingly.

There is no explanation. At least none that takes account of the full range of human destiny including the comedy and the tragedy of life. Explanations seek harmony and present an orderly view of things. As in music, we relax into harmony and allow it to soothe us. Bach has many sections in his glorious harmonies where he tips this apple cart over and, for a while, lets the apples roll chaotically around the listening mind. These are the times when he deliberately introduces dissonance. It sounds as if things fall apart, just as they were taking beautiful shape. Why does he do this: is he really a secret cynic laughing at our gullibility for believing in ultimate harmonies? Or is he revealing the dark secret that it will all end in chaos.

These explanations of why Bach sometimes denies us the harmony of explanation do not flow with the deep faith that pervades his music. His use of dissonance might be a statement that the inexplicable has to be accepted just as much as the predictable and all the orderly explanations we like to protect us. But none of these are complete or real unless they can co-exist with what is at times senseless and resists being given any reason.  A mother who has lost two children in a car accident should not be told by a young priest eager to smooth away this fatal dissonance, ‘don’t worry, they are in a  better place.’ There is no trustworthy explanation that does not respect the inexplicability of things.

Our Lenten disciplines are a sort of controlled dissonance that can teach us this in a small way. So does the ebb and flow of feeling in daily meditation over the years.

Monday

There is a fair consensus today that something fundamental has gone wrong with the way we do things. The gap between rich and poor, how democracy works, how medicine is practiced, the goals of education, the use of technology and the media, corporate culture – and the role religion plays in society. The dysfunctionality in all these areas seems stronger than those who try to change things and so stress is at epidemic levels.

Something is missing. Let us call it ‘heart’. When the Mid-Staffordshire National Health Trust broke down some years ago it was meeting all its government-set targets. Unfortunately it was doing so at the cost of an unacceptable – the numbers are disputed - avoidable deaths. A US advisor was asked after the enquiry if he could identify one essential cause of this institutional disaster. He replied ‘a lack of love’.

The loss of heart in modern life has many consequences. Until we understand this we will continue to be overwhelmed by the feeling of helplessness and impending disaster. Many actually hope a general disaster will happen to allow everything start over again. Heart, however, does not mean only emotion. Racists lack heart but are driven by strong emotion. The financial markets are very emotional but often heartless.

‘Heart’ is a universal symbol of wholeness, justice and tenderness. If a politician speaks with integrity and tells the truth as he sees it, he exhibits this quality. The lack of heart in politics and in business today makes the rest of us feel hurt by this lack of heart. We are a heartsore generation. When the solution to mass school killings is to put more guns into schools the heartless image of armed teachers shows the lunacy that a lack of heart leads to.

What can we do? Take time. You cannot raise a healthy family without giving it time and attention. Too much stress destroys the joy of life and replaces inner peace, which is our true state of being, with anxiety, fear and violence. Take time to be, not to plan, review or do. Just to be. It is amazing how this quickly initiates a personal transformation in the individual and how this is then reflected in the way they work and relate to people. Families, businesses, hospitals, schools become different places when the people who work there rediscover their heart

Facing their crisis, the Hebrew prophets called on people to exchange their hearts of stone for hearts of flesh. Today we can contribute to this healing of our world through teaching a contemplative practice that teaches us again how to be, how to open our hearts.

Self-contradicting institutions and wounded and wounding people need to be exposed to this in the simplest and most inclusive of ways. It is not about religious propaganda but neither is it about reducing the human person to neurons and synapses. It is about finding again the universal truth that our full humanity is finely balanced in that centre of consciousness we call the heart. The result of this balance is a better, fuller life.

This is why we teach meditation - as a healthy ascesis, a liberating discipline.  By the beginning of its third week, Lent should be showing us this.

Tuesday

The philosopher Spinoza is said to have the gift of  giving peace to his readers by clarifying things and leading them to understand the big picture of life for themselves. ‘To understand is to be free’. It was he who said that ‘all our happiness and all our misery solely depends on the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.’

Or, as Jesus said ‘where your treasure is there will your heart be also’ (Mt 6:21).

There is a thriving happiness industry today. One side of it is entertainment which offers us continuous stimulation and more distraction than we can consume in a lifetime. Ancient history, for this generation, the days when television shut down at 11pm and people went to bed. The other side of the compulsion to be happy is the contemporary self-help, self-improvement industry. This offers a production line of courses, publications and quick tips, of varying quality, which promise that secret of happiness which entertainment-addiction patently fails to deliver.

It is our right, as the Declaration of Independence asserts, to pursue happiness. Politically, though, this means something different from what it means spiritually. The spiritual declaration is about inter-dependence; and we do not pursue happiness as a state of private satisfaction and fulfilment. We realise it.

We are all happier than we think. If we detach from thought in the right way (entertainment is not the best way), we transition into deeper levels of awareness where happiness is waiting for us. We find it, as Jesus described in his parables,  like a treasure buried in the field or a seed that grows naturally into its full potential.

Our happiness is not our own. It is the happiness of the universe in being itself. Each of us, as an interdependent entity, shares in this joy of being. We cannot grab or possess it. This is blatantly obvious to us when we are surprised by true happiness. But we forget it as quickly and go back to pursuing it independently. Most of the time we don’t know where our treasure is; and therefore we have lost track of where our heart is. The ironical thing, too, is that we then forget what we truly love.

Reducing and slowing down our consumption and clarifying and improving our mental activity – which Lent and meditation can help us to do – show us where our heart is; and also, as Spinoza said, the real quality of what we have become attached to. There is no love without attachment. But no less truly, no love can grow without detachment.

Your smart phone probably has a feature showing you where your car is parked. Very useful when you parked it unmindfully and are wandering the streets looking for it. Meditation reminds us where our heart is and, in addition, clarifies for us what it is we truly love.

Wednesday

Yesterday I mentioned the seed parable of Jesus. Actually there are several parables where he uses the seed to convey his teaching. This is one:

He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.” (Mt 13: 31-32)

The mustard seed is in fact one of the smallest seeds in the world; and when I first saw a full-grown mustard tree, in India, I was astonished how massive it was. How does Jesus see the kingdom of heaven in this, that he had obviously seen and wondered at himself? The simplicity of his language, as of his teaching, reflects this experience of what was later called the ‘contemplation  of nature’ – the facility to read the book of the natural world in symbolic depth rather than just skimming over it unobservantly, literally as we usually do.

It is the natural world he is looking at but also the human intervention in it. ‘A man took and planted’ the seed in his own field, that is in his life and being. The act of taking and the act of planting change nature without harming it. He is not crudely exploiting but respecting the forces of nature in his work of cultivation.

Our spiritual practice should also respect the natural process and the conditions in which we practice. What may suit one person may be harmful to another if applied in an unobservant way. Anyone can meditate; but someone suffering mental illness, for example, may need to adapt the discipline. Children can meditate but for less time and with less emphasis on the daily discipline (although many children do choose meditate daily). St Paul said we ‘work out’ our salvation. The Buddha continued to practice meditation even after his enlightenment. The church, for all its historical faults, extends the life of Christ ‘until the end of time’. Taking and planting the seed suggests a practice that starts small but continues indefinitely. Although this is a natural process, it is not, at any stage, a passive one.

Growth happens when the conditions are right: if the developing seed is properly cared for. The focus of the parable is not to zoom in on the minutiae of the process, to observe what is happening moment by moment. Similarly, when we meditate it is not helpful to evaluate and measure each meditation period. If we do so we will fall into thinking of good and bad meditations and we will make the process, the perseverance, much more difficult for ourselves. Instead, allow yourself to see the larger picture in which the seed of your practice (the seed of your mantra, your ‘little word’)  is growing. As it grows it also expands the world view you are living with, your universe. Our very way of judging is changed by this growth; and so to cling to the old way, limited, narrow and self-referring, sets up a resistance to the very growth we want to go with.

We grow beyond isolationism, beyond private goals and desires. We grow into inter-dependence, into reality. The seed becomes a tree that is not competing with other trees but offers hospitality to the birds to come and rest and nest on its many branches. The tree has become, as we hope we may become when we grow up, strongly rooted, multi-dimensional and wholly other-centred.

Thursday

The funny thing about a seed is that although it contains a living embryo it often appears empty. Holding a handful of seed you can feel, in this smallest and most fragile of beginnings, all the potential of the living thing it will, under the right conditions, grow into. I held some newly born kittens the other day, still with their eyes closed, as their full-grown mother roamed the kitchen in her feline way. Not long before, they were a miniscule fertilized egg. Bound by time as we are, considering how old we are or how much time there is left, we easily forget the continuum of life in which beginning and end, seed and harvest, are interwoven.

First the seed produces tiny roots, breaks open and then the emptiness germinates and bursts into fullness. Eastern wisdom incorporates the complementarity of these two apparent opposites: ‘fullness is emptiness, emptiness is fullness.’ The Christian parallel is the first Beatitude – poverty of spirit – as the live link into the kingdom of heaven. And if the kingdom is not fullness, what is?

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. (Jn 12:24)

Lent softens us up to read into the language of paradox. The combination of giving up something and doing something extra makes ascesis work. Physically we send a message to our deep mind and if we are doing it with the right intention (to train not to punish) the physical experience is interpreted. Then we become aware of a different way of seeing everything. Lent thus prepares us for the greatest of all paradoxes in the human range of experience: death and resurrection. Yesterday I heard a brilliant writer speak scathingly of, as he saw them, such myths and crutches generated by religion. Paradox seems nonsense unless you decipher the code, and this happens not just intellectually. It is the vision of faith.

Wittgenstein, no mean intellectual, understood this:

And faith is faith in what is needed by my HEART, my SOUL, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can only say: Only LOVE can believe in the Resurrection. Or: it is LOVE that believes the Resurrection. We might say: Redeeming love believes even in the Resurrection; holds fast even to Resurrection …

I am jumping ahead by three weeks, I know. But the Resurrection is folded into the meaning of Lent. And to prepare for a deeper insight in the three days’ drama of Easter, we need to prime our response to paradox. After all, it pervades every moment of our life.

The seed that dies so that it can bear much fruit: this is another parabolic key to open the door into this core dimension of reality. Is this death as we imagine it – is death anything like what we imagine and fear – in the light of this paradox? Is it a termination or a transformation? An end that becomes a beginning? We cannot see the answer to this unless we fall into the ground. To fall is to let go, to lose control.

Friday

I hope you are not getting tired of seeds because there is one more parable to look at. It is the most famous of all seed stories, simple and inexhaustible. Non-dogmatic, but it won’t let us go until we have been read by it. Luke 8:5-8

A sower went out to sow. He scattered the seed in all directions, with varying results. Some fell along the path and the birds came and ate it up. No response, predictable waste. Some fell on stony soil and it sprang up but for lack of moisture withered. Quick response but bad conditions. Failure. Some fell among thorns which were also growing and soon choked the seedling. Bad company. Disappointment. Some fell on good soil and grew healthily, a hundred times return on investment. A successful outcome of nature.

Jesus delivered this story, we are told, to a large crowd of people who were pouring out of the towns to see and hear him. He told this parable to a multiplicitous multitude: some real seekers, some curious, some just following the crowd as they would attach themselves to any crowd. Didn’t he realise that his words would fall on their ears as the seed in the parable fell on different types of soil? If he had wanted to win them all over and enjoy a short-lived Oscar award he would have chosen another message with less of the fullness of truth buried in its apparent emptiness. At the end he throws the ball into our court by saying: ‘Anyone who has ears to hear, let them hear.’ Our own ears are the soil into which the seed of his words fall.

This could lead to different conclusions about the crowd – which now includes the (say) two hundred generations that have heard the same story since. Or, the twenty hundred-year old people that, hand to hand, link us to that moment of the first teaching. We could conclude that all his listeners would be ranked in terms of their receptivity to the seed of his teaching. A pity then for everyone who is not in the good soil category. And most of us would suspect we are not in that. Are we really producing a hundredfold on the investment he has made in us?

Or we can conclude that at different times, different phases of our life, in different moods, subject to different conditions, each of us contains all these different responses. We are after all very inconsistent, much of the time.

In search of lost time, we see our many failures and missed opportunities, many misunderstandings and not a few stupidities. If we can’t, others will point them out to us.

The birds who ate the seed before it germinated, the short-lived and the choked seedlings – are they not also part of the great cycle of nature? Is anything really ever wasted? Does anything really die? Of course it does. But when it is accepted and seen in the big picture it is, as Wittgenstein saw, touched by ‘redeeming love’. What is the greater force in the germination of the seed of our life: failure or forgiveness?

Saturday

The way through any crisis is to go deeper, to find the stillness that never changes and yet is the creative source of all change through the countless shifting shapes that life takes.

Culturally we no longer revere this stillness. We even deny it and have long worshiped the golden calf of speed and action for its own sake. We have forgotten the power of stillness to release peace and creativity upon the sufferings and challenges we confront. If it seems hard for us to regain contact with this stillness it is because we have lost touch with the obvious ways to do so – of which meditation is the most obvious, most simple and most immediate.

There are, however, states and stages that come at different times and in which access to this stillness suddenly becomes clear and simple. It may be a state of great joy, when we have first found love with another person, or a state of profound loss when what we thought would always be there is suddenly whisked away. These kinds of states and their variables come and go. But they are recurrent windows of opportunity that we can recognize if we take sufficient detachment from the emotions they throw up in us.

Stages are more like milestones. They remind us that we are on a journey through a linear experience of time even though there seem to be many cycles repeating themselves as well. In other words, none of us are getting any younger. Except in the sense that, as our union with God deepens, we realize God is always younger than we are: so we do become younger as we grow older if we have awakened to the purpose and meaning of time.

Stillness is not a state of piety or belief. It is their source as of all our devotion and values. The special stages of life in which we can most readily enter this stillness and ‘know God’ are childhood and, if we have stayed awake, old age. But the reassuring thing is that we can access the childlike state here and now because ‘the kingdom of heaven is very near to you’.

Children themselves are the most powerful authority for teaching this. I would also add those who found wisdom through suffering or those who enjoy prosperity with poverty of spirit. But children are the best teachers. This was brought out well last night at the Meditatio Centre in London, where we were launching a book by a former teacher who has written a book on meditation with children.* He has given a voice to the children he spoke with about their experience. Their simple and profound comments are very economical.

Ella (9) said, ‘When I meditate it feels like me and God are connected.. like he’s giving me loads of love when I’m meditating. I can feel his love. And sometimes in my dreams, I’m meditating and I can see God sitting there beside me meditating’. And Aideen (11) said, ‘I think we can all be like God if we try, so.. we all have a little bit of God in us.’

The anxiety and fear that often dominate us in later life are frequently linked to our childhood. We almost expect to become more burdened and complex as we get older and so forget that this state of childhood is still accessible. We give up the attempt to reconnect to it too quickly, too pessimistic and lacking faith in the wonder of our own being.

Stillness, simplicity and silence are the undivided trinity of states that lead us to become like children again.

*Noel Keating, Meditation With Children: A Resource for Teachers and Parents (Veritas 2017)

Monday

Forty is the biblical number that symbolises an extended period of time during which a process of transformation is completed. We have not finished the whole journey after this period of time but we are prepared to embark on a new and possibly quite different phase.

Most of our long-term commitments – in marriage, parenthood, in any long work undertake or in monastic life  - will take us through this cycle of transformation and bring us to moments of transitional completion. The whole process includes long periods where there is a combination of daily repetition and self-renewing acts of fidelity leading at unpredictable times to total surprises. Growth is a series of forms of completion that we could never have imagined and that, when they come to pass, re-write the plot line of our lives. It is better not to fast-forward or skip to the end of the book because we miss a lot of the meaning of the story.

Each meditation is a microcosm of this forty-day process:  of exodus, purposeful wandering and arrival at a promised land, which then sets us a new set of challenges and points of departure.

Perseverance is essential. We need to identify and dismiss the siren voices of frustration or desperation that urge us to turn back. The Israelites in the desert longed for the food they had left behind in Egypt, having got bored with the miraculous manna and quails that fell from the heavens every day to sustain them. Everything, even miracles, can eventually become mundane when we begin to crave variety or the imagined security of the past.

But after a while perseverance can become an unattractive idea as our desire to take a new route or spice up our routines gets overwhelming. Then we need to see that it not all just a mechanical repetition we are committed to but a faithful repetition. It could be boring to get the children fed and off to school every morning but not if it is done in love and for love. Love transforms boredom into quiet wonder. Meditation is a work of love built into the daily routines of life.

A young meditator told me recently that he liked the boredom of meditation and he felt that his generation had been deprived of the value of boredom by the continuous stimulation and diversions of their lifestyle. I got what he was saying but I wouldn’t put it like that. I can’t say I have ever found meditation boring – often difficult and tempted to skip, it but never boring. There is always a surprise even if it comes after the meditation when you realise what a bad idea it would have been to miss it.

There is a subtle level of perception which faith awakens that allows us to know something new -  that perseverance, faithfulness has a meaning and constructive purpose which though we cannot quite put our finger on and describe is more real than the greener grass we imagine on the other side of today.

Tuesday

I have been leading a retreat in Italy and learnt two things last weekend, each concerning my perception of the world that I thought I was seeing accurately.

The first came after I spoke about the purpose and value of ‘doing something for Lent’, which these daily readings for the past few weeks have returned to regularly. How doing something and not doing something can help re-orientate our minds and hearts, shift old patterns and even, without doing violence to us, trigger or enhance deeper levels of transformation. I assumed that a fair proportion of the hundred or so people I was talking to would have done something or given something up. It was a naïve assumption because when I asked for a show of hands of people who had a Lenten practice, and expecting at least fifty percent, only a very few did so. Now maybe they misunderstood me. Or maybe they were applying the warning of Jesus not to parade your good deeds before men. I don’t know. We misperceive our misperceptions too.

If I was right I had made a mental misperception. Later I was given two powerful digital art works made with striking colours and dynamically abstract. As I looked at them longer I saw a face in one. In the other, I saw a shape that reminded me of an extra-terrestrial, though I didn’t say this to the artist. After a third look, it struck me that the face I saw was very familiar and I did mention this. The artist looked at me, surprised that I had not recognised myself. When I looked at the other painting the alien merged into a new composition and I saw a different view of my face there too.

To become aware of our misperceptions of reality is always humbling and can also be humorous and enjoyable. In more serious matters where our reputation or privileges are challenged by acknowledging our mistakes, we may pretend we always saw things correctly and were misunderstood in what we said before – or we simply deny and evade the embarrassment. As effective leaders know, it is always better to admit mistakes and if necessary say 'sorry' but it takes a contemplative detachment from ourselves and our image to do this.

One of the values of an ascetical discipline is the humility, the down-to-earthiness it brings. We never practice them perfectly because, even if we are consistent, a measure of self-congratulation can always creep in. But the humble fidelity to what we set out to do nevertheless creates a detachment, an optimum distance from ourselves and our subjective view of the world. It allows our powers of perception to function within the flow of events rather than creating a model of reality that we defend at all costs even when it has been exposed as false.

This personal trait, which we can all be subject to without knowing it, also affects the collective psyche. Electorates who have made a big mistake, which is pointed out to them by subsequent events, rarely see reason and change their mind. To change our mind is the essence of human development. Like snakes we grow skins of perception that we have to learn to shed without regret when the time comes; just as, one day, we have shuffled off our mortal coil and enter naked into the kingdom where we see with perfect vision because we no longer objectify reality.

Instead of looking at it (and getting it wrong much of the time) we see with the eyes of the artist who made both us and the world that we are ever one with. Ultimately, we see because we see that we are seen.

Wednesday

William Blake said that if we could only cleanse the doors of perception we would see everything as it truly is: infinite. ‘For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.’

It is always tempting to think that solutions lie outside us. Others who fail to collaborate can then be blamed for the problem. Slowly through life we learn that we cannot change the world or other people until we first change ourselves. It is very annoying that this is a universal law but there’s no getting around it.

One attempt to evade the need for personal transformation is to think that we can cleanse the doors of perception by taking something outside ourselves and putting it inside. Humanity has had a relationship with alcohol for ten million years and then mastered the arts of producing it about ten thousand years ago. Our drug-addiction epidemic today merely confirms how easy we find it to escape painful perceptions of reality by changing them by external means. Every alcoholic and addict witnesses to the ultimate failure of this attempt.

If we want to see things as they really are we have to cleanse the powers of perception that permit us to know ourselves as we truly are. There are many of these powers, as there are many dimensions of consciousness in the physical, mental and spiritual realms. Proprioception, or kinesthesia, is the medical term for one of these powers, which is perhaps the perception we most take for granted. It is the sense by which we can perceive the position and movement of our body. For example, even with our eyes closed we know where our left and right hands are and what they are doing. We also know by this sense whether we are feeling balanced. Athletes make good subjects for the scientific study of this form of perception.

We practice it – and cleanse it – each time we meditate, when we take a few moments to be aware of our body and its posture. Are we sitting upright, still, with neck balanced and hands in position – ‘comfortable and relaxed’? This intuitive checklist becomes second nature with regular practice and grounds meditation in the wonder of perception itself. That we can be aware of ourselves in this most simple and immediate way reminds us that we are sentient beings not just stressed, anxious, discontented or complaining individuals. A few moments’ attention to our posture shows a way out of the cavern in which Blake says we have incarcerated ourselves.

Paradoxical as it may sound, this most basic power of self-awareness, perception concerning our physical reality, initiates the journey into other-centredness. It is, if you like, basic mindfulness and however it is practiced it brings its own kinds of benefits. But, if we are not to get stuck at self-awareness and if we are to enjoy the fruits of self-knowledge, we need to take the next step. This is why we meditate and why some of us support it with the perception-cleansing work of Lent.

Thursday

Meditators can be the most egocentric of people, especially if the cleansing of their doors of perception (see yesterday’s reading) gets stuck at the starting gate. The perception of our egotism, however uncomfortable, is liberating, but only if it extends beyond itself. If the contemplative remains fixed in her self-perception she betrays the goal of her journey which is other-centred perception. In training children we call this ‘thinking of others’ and it is related to basic social graces. But its deeper sense is the clear, direct perception of others, their needs and their goodness, that happens when we become subtle enough to pass through the walls of the cavern of our ego.

Blake spoke of the cleansing of our doors of perception. We could also think of it as a training, the ascesis that is life itself. Every act of perception is a lesson and a step to deeper consciousness. Just as we gratefully perceive things more clearly after physical exercise, creative work or meditation, so we come to love the training for the kind of work it performs in us. 

The training in this kind of perception takes many forms. Like every universal process it is never exactly the same for everyone. No one is exempt from this because it is the very meaning of human development. But we are each different in temperament and past experience, in the kinds and degrees of woundedness and in the combination of strengths and weaknesses that define both our limitations and our potential.

The training never stops until our last breath and, perhaps, not even then. It involves constant correction of the course we are on. Extremes take us off course – even though they may help us understand better where we are not going. At one extreme, for example is ADD, jumpy, short-lived, inconstant attention: when we struggle even to listen to the person who is speaking to us or to the page we are reading. At another extreme is OCD, fixated, mechanically repetitive, compulsive: when the needle of attention gets stuck on the vinyl and keeps replaying.

Any extreme eventually leads to discouragement or despair. But we can be reassured that even mistakes and neuroses have their positive side, when we perceive them for what they are. This itself is progress and we should feel a ray of the sunlight of consciousness enter our darkened minds just in this perception of our dysfunction. In biblical language, admitting your responsibility for the mess you helped create is a good thing, the beginning of repentance, which is simply putting things back in order.

Cleansing our perception is like sharpening a blunt knife or walking a narrow path. Seeing it is not enough. We have also, always, to take the next step. Which is why we say the mantra continuously.

Friday

Ultimately the cleansing of the doors of perception lead to purity of heart and the consummation of all conscious perception in the vision of God.

Every degree of perception - they cannot be numbered – is a door into another. If we reach a certain level of awareness – for example in peace and clarity of mind or imageless awareness – we may be tempted to think that we have reached the end of the journey. God, however, into whom the journey is being made, is infinitely simple. To arrive always means to set out again.

In our way of meditation, this explains the teaching about saying the mantra continuously and accepting that ‘we do not choose when to stop saying it’. However this does not mean, as some fear when they first hear it, that we are condemned to life-sentence of monotonous and mechanical repetition. Quite the reverse, faithful practice clears the way. The mantra itself is like an ice-breaker opening the way into deeper and more subtle levels of perception.

As it does this, the mantra is recited more gently and attentively, with the degree of subtlety appropriate to the level we have been led to. John Main described this work of the mantra to climbing up a mountain side. The more we climb the more the mantra sounds more faintly in the valley below us; but we continue to say or listen to it as soon as we fall into earlier levels of distraction or turbulence.

At times this may lead us into complete silence which means the letting-go of self-consciousness and the observing self. We are in a sense now beyond experience, because experience in the ordinary sense is always how we remember or describe something that is no longer fully present. Many people who remember a good experience long to recover it and endlessly regret its loss. Often what they remember and call the experience looks very different from what actually happened.

This is living in the past. But the essence of contemplative consciousness is absorbing and integrating the past, and then moving ever further into a deeper entry of the present moment. Real cleansing of our progressive levels of consciousness, which is what growth means, brings about progress by touching and throwing open the deep core of our being, in the cave, the abyss, of our heart.

All that is good about our humanity is there awaiting liberation and fulfilment. At this level of being we undergo a transformation that cannot be observed because it is simultaneously within and outside us. Often we become aware of the inner change by perceiving the new power of forgiveness, truthfulness and compassion in our daily life. These fruits of the spirit point to an interior change that we cannot watch happen. Without trying, though, we become aware of it in the silence of a pure heart (without effort or control on our part).

We then see God but without an objectifying vision, with liberty of spirit. This is prayer and it is the answer to all forms of prayer.

Saturday

I once visited a man in hospital who had taken a knife against his wife and child when she told him she was leaving him. In a deranged state he then turned the knife on himself. When I saw him he was calmer but in immense inner suffering and totally without perception about the reasons that had led him to his sad and sorry state.

He told me that he was totally surprised and unprepared for what his wife had told him. He insisted that for all their marriage they had been as much in love as at the beginning of their relationship. And, he claimed, they had never once had any kind disagreement but always been in tune and devoted to each other.

Perception can be a terrible thing when it is false and when anything that challenges it and the world-view it supports is at all costs denied. Sometimes the denial remains complicit in a group or marriage for long stretches of time. When it becomes unsustainable something – or someone like this poor man’s wife – snaps. Then the accumulated forces of self-delusion smash the mind and flood into all our feelings like poison. One of the greatest descriptions of this in literature is in Jane Austen’s Emma. As a novel it is a comedy: that means it ends happily with everyone getting married to the right person. But, as in many comedies, the dark side of experience and its great sufferings have to be faced first.

In the course of a few moments, at the end of the story, Emma realises what a foolish, arrogant and totally unperceptive young woman she has been. “She was bewildered amidst the confusion of all that had rushed on her within the last few hours. Every moment had brought a fresh surprise; and every surprise must be matter of humiliation to her. How to understand it all! How to understand the deceptions she had been thus practising on herself, and living under! The blunders, the blindness of her own head and heart! .. she sat silently meditating, in a fixed attitude, for a few minutes... sufficient for making her acquainted with her own heart. A mind like hers, once opening to suspicion, made rapid progress. She touched -- she admitted -- she acknowledged the whole truth.’(Chapter 47)

It is impossible not to feel compassion for someone when the veil of illusion they have been hiding behind is removed. It is a violent surprise and the violence is often, as in the man I mentioned, turned, one way or another, against oneself. Friends are never more essential than at such times of shame and insight into one’s misperceptions.

The negative surprise and misery of dis-illusionment is the mirror image of what happens when reality bursts upon us and we surprised by joy and filled with delight. This too can be painful but in a way of growth, like realizing your life has been turned upside down and inside out by love.

The sand in an hourglass appears (another misperception) to run out more quickly at the end of the hour. Our forty days are running out. But whatever we have been disillusioned about prepares us for Easter and the biggest surprise of all.

Monday

According to the Te-Tao Ching, an ancient Chinese wisdom text, right living depends on wisdom; and wisdom consists in a paradox as radical as that we find in the Beatitudes and the meaning of the story of the life and death of Jesus.

The Te Tao Ching, like Jesus, uses homely language not a hifalutin intellectual tone.

Thirty spokes unite in one hub
It is precisely where there is nothing that we find the usefulness of the wheel..
We chisel out doors and windows
It is precisely in these empty spaces that we find the usefulness of the room

The word ‘precisely’ in this translation engages our attention. We respect and demand precision, the right word, the accurate financial report, the correct assessment of a situation. Businesses and governments spend fortunes trying to achieve the appearance of precision. It is the new ‘virtuous’ and a universal value in an age where everything must be probably useful.

Used in this wisdom context, in a powerful but mundane metaphor, however, precision is not the same as scientific proof. Because the scientific method is our very highest value, it is easy to dismiss words like those above as mere folk-wisdom. We may read it on the train to work or in bed at night but we don’t feel challenged to apply it to the actual ways we live or run our institutions.

Our materialist value-system revolves around verifiable usefulness. What’s the point if something doesn’t produce obvious benefits? Naturally, wisdom is about making life better but not necessarily obvious. Lao Tzu – and the gospel story we will be plunged into next week – make a very disruptive point. The most useful may be the least obvious.

Meditation is a wisdom path. It is a narrow one – in the way Jesus meant when he said that the way to life is narrow. But its narrowness produces immense expansion in the way that two converging lines, meeting in a single point, ricochet outwards into an infinitely expanding trajectory. A point is infinitely small; it has a position but no magnitude.

It is like the emptiness of a window or the hub of a wheel, like death itself.

We owe an immeasurable debt to the transmitters of wisdom in every field who illustrate this in ways we can understand, even for a fleeting moment before we forget again. Such teachers of wisdom are not like loquacious consultants paid by the word or the length of a report. They say everything in almost nothing.

At which point in my failed attempt at Lenten minimalism I should stop.

Tuesday

Paradox is the portal to truth.

This may easily sound glib. Paradox can be fudged into something merely confusing where we don’t really suffer through the awkward contradictions of life, the bitter disappointments, betrayals of hopes, hurricanes of egoism, jungles of illusion and those swamps of misunderstandings that separate us from others for decades. We skirt around them rather than enduring the passion of them. Passion is undergoing.

Paradox - as the Tao and the Gospel testify, together with every sacred text that the human spirit has given birth to – is more than just not getting what we want or having a setback. It is ultimately not less than everything, not less than the Cross.

In a few days’ time, the purification of mind and heart that Lent has worked in us – to whatever degree – will be tested in the way we re-tell the story of the last days and hours of the life of Jesus. These occupy a disproportionate amount of space in his biography because they squeeze and distil, from the driest of stones, the meaning of his words and of his very nature. His story is who he is : the eye of the needle.

On Netflix – which is taking the place of novels in many people’s world – there is a menu selection of films or series that you have watched before and that you might like to ‘watch again’. In a world of relentless novelty, it is rather comforting that the world’s greatest marketing minds recognize the deep human need for familiarity and repetition.

As the perceptive Oscar Wilde said “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” The portal of paradox is rarely recognised at the first encounter and, if it is, it is often quickly denied. It requires many second visits before the full demand of reality can be faced.

Repetition burns away the dross of distraction. In meditation, as in any other form of faithful love, we learn to put our whole self into it. Then we have to take our whole self out of it. Even the idea that it is ‘my work’ or that it will bring me benefits must be given up. Having invested everything and then renounced everything, what is left is our true self, an authentic work, a new creation.

This is what makes for a good story and one we can never forget because we come to love it as a child loves.

Wednesday

Emptiness, like poverty, has negative connotations. In the spirit of paradox, however, these two terms are used by many wisdom traditions to denote the way to  fullness and transcendent richness.

A key word in relating to the mystery of Christ is kenosis or ‘emptying’, We are told that Jesus ‘emptied’ himself or ‘became as nothing’. This applies especially to the ordeals of his last days of life which are described as the ultimate act of service – using the metaphor of a slave or servant who has no identity of their own but has become wholly other-centred. It also illuminates someone caring for another who chooses, in love, to put the other first. Psychologically this sometimes raises alarm signals for modern people but theologically it opens the window into the deepest mystery.

Emptiness  - sunnyata in Buddhist thought – refers less to the way we relate to others but it is still an indispensable element in compassion. ‘No self’ refers rather to the essential nature of everything. Nothing has independent or permanent existence. This is reflected in the Beatitude of Jesus that he calls poverty or poverty of spirit. It sounds like a deprivation or afflicted state. But, if as he says, it is the direct way into the kingdom, then it is more truly understood to mean detachment, renunciation or letting go.

These ideas might sound abstract to the non-meditator or anyone who has not reflected on the meaning of their life-experience. Meaning arises through connection. Meditation is a universal way to meaning because – another paradox to add to the list – the solitude we enter when we meditate opens up the reality of our fundamental connectedness. This begins with feeling connected with our selves as we overcome the illusion of separateness and the suffering it brings. But this is only the beginning.

Exactly how these general truths work out in the story of our lives – as it did in the life of Jesus – make for the uniqueness of our existence. This singularity of human existence is also the basis of love and justice. We love another because they are unique and their singularity somehow resonates with our own. Justice treats each case, each person, on their unique merits. All love is solitude transformed in communion.

In the case of the story of Jesus this touches not only the individuals he loved, his family and friends, but us as well – ‘us’ meaning all those who have ever lived or ever will.

However much we like to postpone thinking about it, death is also an indispensable element in the meaning of life. It makes us see that every life-story, however insignificant it may be in terms of the power-and-wealth systems of the world, is a universal drama. Properly reverenced, each human being and his or her unique story, thus reveals the cosmic mystery.

Thursday

We crave drama, anything to animate the monotony of the mundane. But this craving contradicts the need for security and the advantages of routine that usually win the day. We are attracted to risk but we do everything we can to manage it. We want growth and progress but haggle over the price. Cliff-edges are dramatic places that sharpen our senses and give us a buzz: but there are always persuasive reasons for not jumping.

How to handle this contradiction and get to the paradox? Entertainment offers a quick solution though not a very satisfying one. Hollywood and Bollywood feed us a buffet of crime drama, war movies, passionate romances and cliff-edge series. In a well-run buffet the serving dishes are constantly replenished and our appetite re-kindled by fresh food. In a similar way, our consumption of vicarious thrills through sensational news, disaster weather warnings, TV and movies is fed so continuously that we don’t know we are becoming addicted. (‘I don’t have time to meditate but it’s been a hard day and I have earned a couple of episodes of…’).

Life is dramatic because we are unique and so no modelling of the future can really prepare us for what is going to happen next. Prediction works well for weather, less well for economics and hardly at all for when we fall in love or when love seems to die. We cannot predict when the contemplative dimension of the soul awakens and eventually disturbs the entire pattern of our priorities and habits.

This is the real cliff-edge of the human journey but it is usually a slower dramatic transformation than we have come to expect in the course of an action movie or even a gripping novel.

The other day I was watching a child acting out the intense dramas of his imagination in a world of his own. He was oblivious to everyone around him. I wondered what programs or cartoons were animating his rich and turbulent inner world. Such fantasies are part of our development. In the middle ages he would have fancied himself as a knight in a jousting match or as a hero slaying dragons. When you see a young adult walking down Islington High Street dressed like the long-coated character in The Matrix, and walking like him, you wonder where fantasy feeds the imagination and when it cannibalizes the creative forces of the mind.

Without knowing it we dramatise ourselves, occupying self-generated roles of succeeders, heroes, victims, unrecognized geniuses or neglected sages. We typecast ourselves and thereby cease to be surprised by the wonder of our own being and our liberty of spirit.

Meditation smashes the shells of fantasy that entrap us. Then we feel at risk; and we are. We risk the cliff-edge of reality, the passing through the portal. The very non-dramatic nature of meditation is what opens us to real wonder and amazement at the way things truly are.

Friday

When we dramatise ourselves we miss the real drama, the real meaning, of experience. Self-posturing gets in the way of real presence and distorts our vision of things. Behind this universal tendency – Martha’s reaction to stress is a good example – is the sense of separation from ourselves.

Making a fuss about things: this may mean talking too much, gossiping with false sincerity, analyzing and psychologising others’ faults, attributing blame, playing the victim or the outraged person who has been dis-respected. It is not a good way of dealing with real instances of injustice.

We have ambivalent reactions to the great saints, like Francis of Assisi, who delighted in the opportunities that rejection or humiliation offered them to transcend their egos. At first their humility may win our admiration. But then, we may suspect they were masochists who enjoyed their humiliation.

As always, the test is in how grounded we are in deep silence. It is easy to be superficially silent when we feel calm and all is at peace around us. But, when we are upended by events, hurt or confused, silence is lost and replaced by the noise of our self-dramatising complaint. Then we lose the opportunity hidden in the hard lesson we are being taught.

Deep silence not only holds us steady through the storm. It also secretly contains the presence and the meaning, which want to reveal themselves to us. And which redeem the mistakes and transfigure the tragedies of life.

This deep silence is perceptible in many of the scenes of the Passion drama, which next week we will be listening to again. It is stronger than the noise of the crowds.

At the start of every meditation session we run into the busy traffic of the shallow dramas of our lives. Even though we know that these issues will have changed by tomorrow or next month or next year, now they absorb us – distracting us – as if they were of absolute significance. But, if we do the work of silence – pure attention to the ascesis of the mantra – we escape the traffic. We find the deep silence which in timeless stillness patiently, kindly awaits our arrival.

Free from the noise of our self-dramatising we move into the real drama of existence which is not the drama of desire, fear, anger or pride, but the drama of love.

Saturday

Anthony of the Desert, the archetypal monk of the fourth century, once summoned all the brothers. When they gathered around him his words were few: ‘Always breathe Christ’. Reminded of their goal of continuous prayer, they returned to apply his teaching in each moment of their life.

In our stressful times we have forgotten Anthony’s meaning and miss the experiential authority of his teaching. But, when anxious loneliness and the fear of the void threaten our well-being and sanity, we are ready to re-discover the simple immediacy of what the desert wisdom teaches us.

Before the mantra becomes rooted in the heart, conscious breathing, paying attention to the in and out rhythm, is the simplest and quickest way to recover from an agitated mind and, as Jesus says, to ‘set your troubled hearts at rest and banish your fears’. We can’t deal with anxiety just by thinking about what is making us anxious. The body is the natural place to start.

John Main emphasises simplicity. Our body, although it is as complex as the cosmos, is radically simple. In the heart, the spiritual centre and inner room of prayer, body and mind unite. Fr John warns of the dangers of complicating the simple discipline of meditation by turning it into technique.

Like all masters of prayer, he understood the role of the breath in simultaneously calming mind and body and preparing us for a gentle, steady deepening of consciousness that we call the inner journey. Breath links mind and body.

He did not advocate only one way of synchronising the mantra with the breath; he was aware that some align it with another rhythm such as the heart. But probably most people say the mantra with the breath, either breathing it all in and breathing out in silence or (if you are saying maranatha as he suggested), saying the first two syllables on the in-breath and the second two on the out-breath.

If you self-consciously divide your attention between the breath and the mantra your meditation becomes more of a technique. The purpose of the discipline is to unify attention and become single minded. So at first you could rest the mantra lightly on the wheel of the breath, giving undivided attention to the mantra. Eventually the mantra finds its own rhythm in the subtle field of the spirit. Then we start sounding it more gently and listening to it more wholly.

In spiritual time the mantra leads us into deep silence where we move beyond my prayer, my meditation, my experience. When our prayer becomes the prayer of the spirit we truly ‘breathe Christ’. 

Holy Week begins tomorrow by focusing on the mortal body of Jesus; but also on how this body becomes us, as Christ is formed in us, and we become his body.

Monday

Immediately after the dark and apparently motiveless scene of Judas selling his teacher for money, Jesus instructs his disciples to prepare the Passover which he will eat with them. This celebration of family, friendship and solidarity with the past will include the betrayer.  What would it say of Jesus as a teacher if Judas was excluded?

The exchange between Jesus and the disciples about preparing the Passover meal to be celebrated in Jerusalem is quite detailed. He tells them what to do and who they will find and where – an upper room with divans and cushions : a middle-eastern eating space for reclining not Leonardo da Vinci’s quattrocento table. The impression we receive is that he is actively preparing for what will happen to him. Some people, who know they are going to die and have accepted it, cease to be victims of their mortality. From the hospital room or bedroom where they will die, they become more concerned about others than themselves. Death becomes more than an individual, terrifying extinction but a passage for a group of people tied deeply together by bonds of love and faith. And wherever there is love and fidelity hope is never far away.

The upper room – later called the cenacle - is not just a rented hall but a community space. Tradition says that it is the room where the disciples gathered on the day of the Resurrection and later for Pentecost. It is not a virtual community – as we have come to understand it – but one physically connected and identified with particular space. As with Bonnevaux - increasingly for our community - the space feels filled with a living presence.

The shared meal (that became the Eucharist) was meant to be a joyful gathering; but a shadow is cast over this one by the consciousness of the coming betrayal. The old Fathers of the Church agreed that Judas took the bread and wine with the rest. It is an important detail because it shows that the shadow in ourselves - and the darkness in the world before and since – is absorbed by the very light it tries to block. What seems a contradiction (as to those excluding people from the Eucharist) then becomes a paradox in which transformation happens and reality is realized.

This is my body: this is my blood. Two Greek words with distinct, overlapping meanings point to the gift he is making. Sarx (flesh), Soma (body). If he meant sarx it would be a rather gruesome gift – the cannibalism that people thought the early Christians were practicing. But soma means the whole embodied self. If a woman gets disturbing blood-test results her family don’t just hug her flesh but her whole body-self. The pain of the flesh is relieved by the love experienced in the body. Perfect abs and biceps may be the attractive wrapping of our self; but we love the whole embodied person, even when they lose tone and put on weight.

Before the physical and mental suffering for which he was preparing them, he was touching them, as Leonard Cohen says, with his ‘perfect body’ and, even more, including them in it.

Tuesday

The Last Supper weaves a high level of consciousness around the polarities of friendship and betrayal. It refuses to see one without the other. It refuses to make an eternal enmity between them – as we do when, hurt or rejected, we say we will never communicate again with the person who caused us this suffering.

In this open and vulnerable state of mind Jesus walks across the Kedron Valley to Gethsemane, a small estate where he was used to pray. In the light of the Passover moon he would have seen the funerary monuments already built there. Muslims, Christians and Jews have since added their graves to this place of ancient memories. Once when I meditated in Gethsemane with fellow-pilgrims, I faced an olive tree reputedly 2500 years old which the eyes of Jesus would have seen. I also noticed some small red flowers I had seen earlier on the slopes of Galilee where the Sermon on the Mount was given. I wondered whether seeing these ‘lilies of the field’ on his last night, Jesus remembered his home and more peaceful days – days when he taught, before he was called to live, to be, his teaching with every cell and fibre of his being.

In this garden, in the night’s silence, he took a few close companions to pray. They fell asleep. In his solitude, he was overwhelmed by sorrow and the fear of death reared up from where it hides in each of us. Everything in him rejected his destiny; but something else appeared in this moment of panic. This was a sense of deep connection and ultimate purpose. With this he moved from panic to peace and acceptance. ‘Not my will but as you will it to be.’

‘In his will is our peace’, Dante said. But the word ‘will’, implying some contest of wills or clash of egos, may mislead. ‘Point of view’ or ‘way of seeing’ conveys the meaning better. We do not merely surrender our will to the divine will – surrender usually preserves a pocket of resentment. There is no violence done to us or by us in the union that happens between our way of seeing and the vision of God.

In this union of vision the illusion of our self as a separate individual is finally transcended. It is replaced by the self-recognition of a unique solitude. Centred, grounded in this solitude Jesus meets his betrayer’s kiss and the armed guard that comes to arrest him under cover of darkness. He is never more alone and never more equally connected to both friends and enemies. He is bound and led away to a mock trial, not as a victim but a universal symbol of freedom.

A singular detail in the story as told by Mark has intrigued readers since the beginning. A young male follower wearing nothing but a linen cloth was also arrested but escaped and ran away naked. Perhaps as tradition says, it is Mark himself. Because the figure is both anonymous and autobiographical, many readers find themselves identifying with this very vulnerable and for the moment rather absurd disciple of the Master.

Holy Wednesday

I have been reading the three-volume biography of Kafka for some weeks, surprised at myself for plodding through it. He had an uneventful life revolving around a few compulsive obsessions including his irrepressible need to write and his perfect ear for literature. It was the compulsion to write that made this insurance lawyer who could not commit to love or escape from his parents one of the prophets of the modern era. His insight into the dehumanizing effect of bureaucracy and the sense of personal oppression and alienation caused by contemporary life speaks to us still with moving intensity.

In The Trial he describes the sickening influence of unjust power structures crushing down against the innocent. The Passion narrative of the show trial at which Jesus was condemned to death evokes the same nightmare scenario when paranoia is exposed as not imaginary and we see that we are indeed the innocent target of malevolent enemies.

But with Jesus this nightmare of persecution, though as real as a Stalinist purge, does not overwhelm him as the innocent victim. This is because he simply does not allow himself to identify himself as a victim. He is a sacrifice. And so there is a quite different outcome.

For a religious person - of any faith - the complicity of religious authorities in the injustice committed against Jesus is deeply disturbing.  So, to the Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was the compliance of the Christian churches with the Nazis. In these cases we see – as today with the alliance of the Russian Church with its political regime – how power, false prudence and privilege corrupt faith.

Power is a flow of energy. If, from whatever source, it bears the virus of corruption it carries it to every part of the system. As the monstrous corruption of power turns personally against him, Jesus confronts it with rationality (‘if I have said nothing wrong why do you strike me?’), equanimity and silence. His own power, flowing directly from his source of being, confronts and engages with the systemic corrupt power held by those who have declared him to be the enemy.

When power is corrupted, the darkest shadows in human nature surface, from top to bottom of the hierarchy. The sadism of the death camps, or Srebrenika, or the inhumanity at Guantanemo authorized by civilized politicians on Capitol Hill are reflected in the torture and cruelty described in the Passion narrative.

Pilate, the consummate successful politician, is the foil of this confrontation between pure and corrupt power. His creepy question ‘what is truth?’ answers itself as he washes his hands of the injustice he has permitted. Every power system thereafter will see - and be forever disturbed - by seeing the innocent victim as the only character to walk away from this drama of corruption with integrity.

Maundy Thursday

Man does not live on bread alone. But bread is the first level of what feeds us and keeps us going. We need to ensure that we don’t eat too much of it and to recall that the materially hungry also need our help in finding what they need. Distribution of food exemplifies both physical health and the health of justice in any society.

The Eucharist was conceived in the last Passover ritual that Jesus shared with his disciples. He could not have foreseen the great liturgies taking place today in St Peter’s or Canterbury Cathedral. But it is hard to imagine that he did not know that he was plunging into the symbolic life of the ritual and transforming it; or that he might be giving a new expression to it by merging himself with it and with those who, in future, would identify themselves with him.

From childhood,  I was reared on Sunday mass and loved it in an unconscious way. In adolescence it lost its meaning for me, as the Church’s ability to address the major issues I was confronting faded. Meditation brought me back to the mass and to the Church in a meaningful and more mature way. I came to experience - and later to understand - that the meaning of the Eucharist is essentially the meaning of meditation practiced in Christian faith. The real presence is in the ritual as much as it is in the silence of the heart. This combination, for me, was explosive.

Bread and wine symbolize the first level of food. But we don’t go to the Eucharist to fill our stomachs (it seems the early Christians were a bit more rowdy than us their sedate, passive descendants sitting in pews and they went over the top in their celebrations). The Eucharist is a living physical symbol and enactment of the real presence. But it is also a sign of the kind of life we would be living in the world if we were really present to this real presence. This is the challenge. And only meeting this will ‘bring people back to the church’ (if that is how we want to put it). The Eucharist is not a closed club privilege. It is a witness to those who are not in the club that it is not a club but an open-hearted community.

The real presence of Christ is radicalizing. It is a threat to every power structure that humans have ever constructed, including Christian structures, including the often strange roles that clergy and laity play out together. The minister of the Eucharist is not the priest, but Christ himself – a nice idea often invisible in the practice but still an essential truth. Community not hierarchy is the message even though human beings long for hierarchy and some measure of subordination in order to feel safe. Liturgical change, for this reason, is usually the most bitterly resisted kind of change.

When a rich person or a celebrity comes to communion he does not demand more of the bread or a better chalice to drink from than that shared with the poor. The Last Supper is the first proclamation of radical equality that revolutionizes the relations between men and women and children – and of humanity with the planet.

This message is so fresh in every celebration that we need meditation after communion to absorb it. To unite and embody the inner and outer presence.

Good Friday

To all appearances it is not a very good day. So how do we understand the tradition that calls it good? Not because what happened today – the triumph of injustice and the judicial murder of an innocent – was good. Not because humanity missed the opportunity to be changed by one of their own who was ahead – light years ahead - of his time. It is good because of what flowed from the collective failure to accept the message this man carried and  - to those who see him with the eyes of faith – embodied.

When someone we love dies, or in the death of a great spiritual artist, as Jesus was, we feel stricken by all that is lost. We foresee all the events that they will not be there to share with us; we suffer the loss of that unique participation in our life which once enriched us and now leaves us feeling half-dead.

Death has this effect. But over time, as the trauma of grief reduces and we find we are engaged in life’s challenges again despite ourselves, we discover that the absence is not merely the grey void we thought. It is a new and more spacious dimension of life, pain notwithstanding, in which the physical and psychological presence of the absent person is interiorized. This absent-presence saturates consciousness. It reveals the spiritual in a strangely enhancing way.

Death however is always the great disrupter. It shatters all routines. For a time we live on automatic pilot waiting to see whether anything new will happen – often in despair that it will not.

Pilate was surprised that the crucified Jesus died so soon. The purpose of any death penalty is to have the longest possible deterrent effect. However at the deeper level of meaning the suffering of Jesus is not the main source of today’s good influence. We are not saved, healed, transformed, liberated from illusion by the suffering but by the love shown us by one who was not afraid to love God with his whole self: because, Christian faith goes so far as to say, his self was one with God.

Now we have also seen the inner working of sin – fear, cruelty, denial, untruth, addiction to power. The façades of civilization have been stripped away and the veil of religious institutionalism complicit with power has been rent in two. Seeing life through the eyes of the compassionate crucified one we can never see anything the same way again. The old deceptions, hypocrisies and hidden fears that corrupt all relationships have been disempowered.

We are shattered by this but not destroyed. In place of the old deadening routines a fresh way of being forms. It is too soon to see this new life. But it is already conceived through death, in the womb of the earth, awaiting its birth, ready to begin its transformative growth among us.

Easter Eve

A day of transition. Of choosing between patience and restlessness. Of ‘waiting in joyful hope’ or of anger at loss of control.

I told someone recently of a mutual friend who was ‘in transition’, meaning they were at one of those in between periods of life. The person I was telling looked shocked and utterly taken aback. ‘I would never have thought..’ they started to say. As we could say ‘in transition’ of ourselves or of anyone on pretty well any day or in any phase of life, I was surprised by their response. Then the misunderstanding crept out of the corner where all misunderstandings hide. By ‘in transition’ they thought I meant gender change.

This would indeed be a major transition, filled with fear, hope and anticipation by whoever feels compelled to undertake it. But, in fact, the transition of Holy Saturday for the patient Christian is not less. When we reflect on what is happening deep down in the earth, out of sight, far out of reach of the dualistic mind we see an irreversible, evolutionary change is underway. Having crossed the valley of death, Jesus dives deep into all the layers of matter and consciousness from which the human has arisen, through all the stirrings of planetary and cosmic consciousness.

Icons illustrate this as the ‘descent into hell’, the nether regions that remain untouchable and unknowable to the ordinary functions of the human mind. They are  alien to what we think of as civilisation. Reaching this deep mind of creation, Jesus – and perhaps all who die – touches the source where it is also seen as the point of return. In every cycle there is a turning point, where yin transitions to yang and in time yang yields to yin. In every journey there is a point where we shift imperceptibly from being the one who left to one who is arriving.

Hamlet peers into this journey over the event horizon ‘from whose bourn no traveller returns’. What if one traveller does return? What if that unity that allows us to speak of humanity as a whole, not just as a mass of individuals, were to be touched and gathered into one who makes this journey not just for himself but with and, compassionately, for us? What would that say about our life on the daily surface, about the unity of the human family unity and about the meaning of death, our final finality?

It would be worth waiting patiently for, just to see. We would need patience for the coming of that moment of consciousness, called the vision of faith, where we see that the return has happened because it is happening. To rise from this depth would be more than a transition to another point on the spectrum. It would be a complete transformation, a bridging of opposites, the conquest of fear. Not less, in fact, than a new creation. While still going through the cycles of life, we would be already sharing in the mind of the one who returns, seeing through his eyes. We would feel as if - along with all humanity before and after us – that we were, finally, waking up.