Lent Reflections 2021

Click on the headings to open or close the Introduction or the week's readings and then use the tabs below the picture to select the day.

Introduction

These daily readings by Laurence Freeman, a Benedictine monk and Director of The World Community for Christian Meditation, are to help those following them make a better Lent. This is a set time and preparation for Easter, during which special attention is given to prayer, extra generosity to others and self-control. It is customary to give something up, or restrain your use of something but also to do something additional that will benefit you spiritually and simplify you. Running through these readings will be an encouragement to start to make meditation a daily practice or, if it already is, then to deepen it by preparing for the times of meditation more carefully. The morning and evening meditations then become the true spiritual centre of your day. Here is the tradition, a very simple way of meditation, that we teach:

Sit down, Sit still with your back straight. Close your eyes lightly. Breathe normally. Silently, interiorly begin to repeat a single word, or manta. We recommend the ancient prayer phrase ‘maranatha’. It is Aramaic (the language of Jesus) for ‘Come Lord’, but do not think of its meaning. The purpose of the mantra is to lay aside all thoughts, good, bad, indifferent together with images, plans, memories and fantasies. Say the word as four equal syllables: ma ran a tha. Listen to it as you repeat it and keep returning to it when you become distracted. Meditate for about twenty minutes each morning and evening. Meditating with others, as in a weekly group, is very helpful to developing this practice as part of your daily life. Visit the community’s website for further help and inspiration: wccm.org

Ash Wednesday to the Saturday after Ash Wednesday (17 - 20 February)

Ash Wednesday

Between 1347 and 1350 one quarter of Europe’s population died in one of the worst outbreaks of the plague. A forty-day quarantine period was instituted for travellers. Doctors wore leather protective costumes. Weird quack remedies appeared. Infected people were restricted to their houses with a cross painted on their door. It was blamed on a punitive God because of human sins. As it’s difficult to attack God, the Jews were often scapegoated, a favourite conspiracy theory throughout history. Hospitals were over-filled. The economy crashed. Groups of penitents and flagellants processed in city streets, singing litanies to avert God’s wrath. And also to comfort each other, because, when we suffer or are confronted by mortality, we feel frightened by the loneliness and inner chaos we discover within. Our regular routines are shattered and the usual things we complain about are overwhelmed by fears that challenge everything we think we know.

Why ash? It is an ancient symbol reminding us of mortal human nature. ‘You are dust and to dust you shall return’. Adam (the name means ‘earth’) heard God speak these words after his eyes had been opened by disobedience and he had first felt shame at his nakedness. Job covered himself with ash when his sufferings overwhelmed him. Putting ash on our forehead today is a kind of sympathetic magic or homeopathy where we use a small dose of plants to stimulate the healing process. All healing is self-healing but often needs help from outside. (‘Go your faith has healed you’, Jesus says someone he cured). The ash signals acceptance of our mortality. Strangely, it makes us feel better because we are no longer in denial about it. We live better lives when we accept that we are dust – because then we see we are also more than dust.

Why Wednesday? I’m not sure. Maybe because it’s the middle of the week. Probably because it starts the countdown of 40 days to Easter. Maybe because it’s the day of Woden who was the god of the element of earth. More important is ‘will I use this season to grow more aware that life is a spiritual journey’? There’s no such thing as a spiritual life inside my existence that I have to make space for. Life is the journey. If so, how will I do Lent this year?

Maybe begin by putting some ash on your forehead to remind yourself you are mortal - and more. It shows we are all in this together. Even in a pandemic (cruel but not as bad as the 14^th century), in shutdown, we can grow into a sense of community. Instead of joining self-flagellating processions, meditate online at least once a week with others. Instead of wearing sackcloth and ashes say the mantra with deeper attention and fidelity. A more contemplative approach to the situation we are in.

To start, you could do a renewal course in the essential teaching on our new website. There’s a timer, a short animation-video introducing meditation and two free courses on the How to Meditate page.

I’ll look forward to making the journey of Lent with you, Writing these reflections is my Lenten task which I hope will prove helpful to you.

Laurence

Thursday

The ash is over, the action begins. However, we do Lent – giving up or adding on things – the desired outcome is to become more aware, more mindful, more conscious of what and how we are living. Being aware of mortality, as I said yesterday, helps sharpen our sense of vitality. So, TS Eliot’s lines on how we live and breathe the past are not just about nostalgia:

Ash on an old man's sleeve,
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended,
Marks the place where a story ended,
Dust in breathed was a house.
(Little Gidding)

So, the past is always present and when we assimilate it we can stop fearing it. I’m told it’s true that we are made of star dust and that all the atoms and elements in our body come from generation after generation of stars over the past 4.5 billion years. The past is continually changing as we become consciously one with it. This is what the phases of our life allow and demand of us so we can be more present to the always now.

I am spending some time in my hermitage on Bere Island, not as much off-line as I should be, but taught and blessed every day by the immediate nowness of things. The weather, interior and external, is as always variable but forms a pattern and in patterns we can usually find a seam of the truth running through it, like a vein of gold in a piece of rock. After a few stormy Atlantic days, a beautiful serenity and peace has returned. Yesterday I ventured outdoors again. Everything seemed more aware of its beauty, more justifiably delighted with itself and happy to be restored to all the other parts of the world with which they were connected. I was grateful to feel welcomed as part of it too.

The astonishing thing is how it all works and how every part allows everything else to be what it is and do its thing in its own way without interfering. Feeding off each other is tolerantly included in this dancing system of birth, flourishing and dying. And bats, which are not my favourite manifestation of the divine, knit the evening together as I walked back along the road, swooping around me and making me feel confident they were not interested in me or my blood. The world is a community.

Robins are cheeky and cocky little things. One was sitting on a branch, singing its redbreast off. Their average life is 13 months but can be as long as 19 years. Aggressively territorial, that’s probably why he was singing so loudly. But I am sure he just loved producing such a free and joyful sound. After all, we are meant to enjoy our work.

Part of the human work is to ponder the meaning of this beauty. We can’t explain it, but we can see the Logos in every part and in the whole. The Word that made everything is present in everything. It is its uniqueness and its connectedness, its order, form and harmony. Its rationality and its sheer, inexplicable divine beauty.

That might be a good thing to do for Lent: to contemplate the innate beauty and harmony of things and cut back on judging.

Laurence

Friday

The second of the monthly Bonnevaux Health Seminars led by Dr Barry White took place online on Tuesday. It has attracted a large following because of his deep, integral understanding of what health means and, no doubt, people’s anxiety and curiosity about their physical and mental well-being during this pandemic. He places meditation at the centre of his model of health which affords it a unifying role for the different aspects he will talk about in later talks such as sleep, exercise, diet and pain.

Barry’s thought on this theme has been evolving for years and we are receiving the benefits of it now. Some people’s thinking on a subject jumps from branch to branch while staying at the same level. His goes consistently deeper and shows the root system that supports the whole tree of knowledge. I was struck this time especially by his insight based on John Main’s view that to transcend our limitations we have first to accept them. Barry applied this to our personal health. Sometimes we must just accept our infirmities of body, mind or character, even our mortality. Yet mysteriously this acceptance reveals new sources and ways of healing and with it also comes unique personal insight into the meaning of suffering.

We learn these things best by experience which allows us to interiorise the knowledge it brings so that we can’t ever forget it. Not only dramatic events do this but also small annoying things ,such as kept happening to my internet connection whenever I spoke. Until then, the wifi seemed to hold up; but whenever I spoke the ominous warning flashed on the screen ‘Interconnection connection is unstable’ like a message that had escaped from the dark hole at the centre of the Cloud. Each time I hoped for the best but inevitably the connection dropped, my words evaporated into the ether and I had to wait to see if and when the connection would restart,which it did. I wasn’t so unstable interiorly as to throw my laptop on the ground but after the tenth interruption the fourth of the fruits of the spirit (patience) was hard to find. By then I realised that there was nothing to do except to accept the limitations imposed, whoever, if anyone, was responsible. I soon understood I had to choose between audio and video and rightly chose to be heard rather than to be seen. The struggle with frustration and impatience was for the time being, over.

Once a young person told me he had been unsuccessfully seeking his ‘personal why’ for so long but that meditation was teaching him to live with his failures to find it. He felt sure he would find it one day but not in the way he had been imagining.

We would waste Lent if we treated it just as a way to try harder, increase our will power and succeed better in getting to our personal whys. A contemplative Lent requires – as does the understanding of health we are exploring in the seminars – a central and regular contemplative practice. It renders us teachable. We learn that to fight our limitations with the ego only intensifies the ego. To accept them with a true love of self converts them into a bridge beyond the ego, into a friend beyond future misunderstanding.

Laurence

Saturday

The ash from Wednesday traditionally comes by burning the branches from Palm Sunday of the previous year. The waving of palms on the streets of Jerusalem welcoming Jesus’ triumphant entry. A day later they were shouting ‘crucify him’. Everything turns. Burning the palms is like burning memories. The European colonial powers still find it hard to let go of empire, swallowing the shame of imperialism. That’s why it’s hard for them to welcome the children of the colonised peoples as part of their family. Individual memories also cling to us. The struggle with the ego is the same, in the individual and in the nation.

But life is always beginning. This time round, let it be more simple, humble and kind. A new attitude to the new life. Sprinkled daily with small acts of kindness, shedding protectionism, domination and exploitation. The choice is always there: becoming the kingdom of God, being welcomed into the reign of God, changed. A second chance is infinitely available: God isn’t like us but wants us to become like him.

Ash means that everything is burned. It is the last visible sign of the past. Everything will go up in flame like this eventually, the cosmologists tell us. Apocalypse to come. Bonfire of the vanities today.

We can’t help but learn to accept mortality: all attachments, big projects, plans, fantasies. A holocaust sacrifice offered to the only real, the present moment. Burned by the mantra. The loss is painful yet not violent. A transformation by the great love that has no attachment, clings to nothing. The death of the ego feels terrible but is gentler than we fear. It depends how long we resist it. St Francis praised it: ‘Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no living man can escape.’

Ashes in the mouth now. Soon the sweetness of the Word of God on the tongue. The poison swallowed becomes medicine. Meditation brings us down to earth. God told Adam, ‘you are ash and will return to ash’. The truth of impermanence that we postpone. Like an agenda item that no one wants to discuss but eventually takes over the meeting. Ash Wednesday prepares for Good Friday. Fear is burned away too in the fire of love.

Lent is a time of joyful grieving – loss and recovery, restoration to true health. We wean off fake medicines, false consolations. We face the stark-naked reality stripped of decoration. We discover the transcendent beauty, the treasure in earthen vessels. Holy grail. Alchemist’s secret. Pearl of great price. Prodigal Son returned. Eternal life that has not been born and can never die. Eternal birth that consumes death.

Nothing to fear. Do not fear nothingness.

Jesus said don’t look sad about this, make your face shine, because it’s not sad. Let the ashes themselves rub off. Say the mantra like a lover.

Laurence

First Week of Lent (21 - 27 February)

First Sunday of Lent

The bridegroom’s companions would not think of mourning as long as the bridegroom is with them… (Matthew 9:14-15)

On Friday a member of our Bonnevaux business meditation group gave a beautiful, personal account of her life, terrifying and funny in turn. Until forty, she said, she had been focused entirely on success and having fun, and she accomplished both. Her ambition to be John McEnroe’s ball-girl at Wimbledon was not fulfilled but all others were. Then her mother was diagnosed with severe cancer and her life began to disintegrate. Her body was the messenger of what was happening as she lost control: pain in muscles and joints, insomnia, breathing problems, memory blanks and panic attacks of increasing frequency. The body never lies. At last, after a horrifying incident of amnesia with her children at the mall, she accepted ‘I need help’. The inescapable humility of this was the turning point in her life that led her on a gradual process towards other-centredness. She now successfully helps others recognise these symptoms and face them in time to avoid the worst. Not everybody survives the worst as she did.

She said that when she began to make time for stillness and silence – which she had never done before in her whirlwind of unmindfulness – she began really to notice other people. Sitting in the park just looking at people, for the first time she saw not just a parade of faces but expressions, feelings, communicative signs. Meditation is now a pillar of her new more joyful and meaningful life and all the stressed executives she helps are introduced to it.

Many of the stories of Jesus show him at meals or wedding-parties. He often uses these events to illustrate his teaching as in today’s gospel. One cannot imagine he would have been a miserable or gloomy presence at any event where people would have been having fun and wouldn’t he have joined in the dancing? His brief teaching today recognises that life is not all fun and games. Nothing we can perceive is not a mixture of light and shadow. To deny it is to repress what we fear to face. Repression eventually explodes, through the body or our behaviour. Truth will out. (If we notice we are attracted morbidly to news stories or movies about what we fear, we should ask why it is unconsciously cathartic for us).

The word for ‘mourning’ is penthos in Greek: the spirit of lamentation in mythology and an important element of mystical theology. In his major teaching on the Beatitudes Jesus says ‘happy are those who mourn for they shall be comforted’. We shouldn’t be afraid if at times meditation has a feeling of mourning or grieving. Lent can be a time when we acknowledge this as a healthy aspect of our being a work in progress (as this woman describes her life now). Progress towards fullness of being and true happiness. An early sign of which is our capacity to notice the expression on other people’s faces and to pay responsive attention to what they are communicating. For Isaiah, in the first reading today, this active compassion is the meaning of justice. Without it, fasting and almsgiving and all that stuff are only shadows of what they are meant to serve.

Laurence

Monday

How do you respond to the word ‘stillness’? Do you associate it with balance, counterpoise, equilibrium, order, quietness? Or with inaction, stagnation, recession, passivity? Is stillness dynamic or static? Is it the goal we should be pursuing or a condition we should get out of as soon as possible? As meditators we might say, ‘it all depends’ because meditators like to have the best of both worlds. And they can.

Probably it does depend on circumstances but there can (still) be a preference for or against the concept. Behind that preference might lurk either a fear about or a longing towards stillness. If you are overactive, stillness will seem attractive. If you’re bored, out of work or in quarantine stillness is the last thing you want. Polarising opposite views, even over the meaning of a harmless little word like this, leads to a feeling of conflict which is often based on the sense that ‘if I don’t get everything, I might end up with nothing’. And so, the person who disagrees with me, who appears to be on the other side of a river flowing faster than thought and without bridges in sight, is my enemy. He therefore doesn’t have as much right to exist as I do. The sense of potential deficiency – even what I think I have might be taken away from me, becomes inflamed.

The pro and anti-Trump factions in the US, the Remainers and Leavers in the UK have generated a deep sense of division and disunity. Rebuilding dialogue and the spirit of trust will be the hard work for both societies for years to come. Where in the world has this not been felt? Divisions upset the balance of civil society and stillness, a calming of factionalism and mutual rejection, has at least some attraction. The question is how.

The ‘it all depends’ approach is inadequate. The answer is not either/or, but both and both in harmony. The most practical way to achieve the blend of dynamic stillness and harmonious activity is to sacrifice willingly time for the work of stillness. Because human nature is prone to over-activity (physical, economic or mental), the challenge, as the Martha and Mary story makes clear, is to protect the element of stillness and silence; and to appreciate it as an essential part of human well-being. The life of Jesus, exemplifying how human beings should live, included periods of solitude and quiet as well as times of busy external action.

Stillness is inherent in the good life. Along with prayer and fasting, justice touches the centre where stillness is found. All three are aspects of doing Lent well. It is about balance, always hard won and hard to maintain, whether in our personal or social life.

Laurence

Tuesday

He kept a secret bottled up for as long as he could remember. Protecting it became a priority reflex that influenced all the decisions of his life. Afterwards, he wasn’t sure if he knew what he was doing or not. He thought perhaps he did know, sometimes, and then repressed or forgot it. He kept the secret secret even from himself though he knew more about it than anyone. Was it the actual event that had happened or the reason it had happened or the shame it had inexplicably left him carrying? What drove him to construct an identity whose falsity only increased his shame?

The event was an abominable abuse of adult power over a child, a degradation and confusion of what the child had the right to expect, to be sure and confident that he was loved and cared for. The reasons for this betrayal of the child were part of an adult world of revenge and power incomprehensible to him as a child. It had left him with a shame he could not cast off. It clung to him beneath a persona which the world found charming and enviable. But, since childhood, it had made him unable to yield himself, to love or to relate seriously to another except for short periods before it became impossible not to run away again.

His was a particularly intense case. But all of us have this tendency to keep secret what has once hurt us and caused the cloak of shame to be wrapped around us. This whole system of hurt, shame and secrecy can be called sin. The Fall of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis describes it with precise honesty. Anyone who does not see him or herself in the story should learn it by heart.

Lent is an opportunity to consider what we understand by sin. Until we get it straight, we will not understand grace. It is a severe handicap to be prevented from recognising grace. I have noticed recently how many advertising campaigns selling pleasures (chocolate, Netflix series, health spas) use even the term ‘sin’ itself to attract our attention or just tease us by the lure of the naughty or forbidden. It looks harmless but is dangerously stupid because it limits sin to its seven deadly manifestations and distracts us from the true nature of sin and its deep stain on the human condition.

Where sin is, grace abounds all the more. Grace is the divinely unconditional and never-withdrawn offer of help. All it needs to be released is to confess our need for help, our having got it wrong and wanting now to get it right. Then an amazing grace comes in the revelation that all healing – and forgiveness is healing – is self-healing. This tears away the cloak of shame with the discovery that we have, by God’s grace, immense powers within us greater than anything that could enchain or disgrace us.

On Holy Saturday night in the dark lit only by the Paschal candle we sing gratitude for the Fall because it brought a grace vastly greater than itself. ‘O Felix Culpa: O Happy fault of Adam that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer’.

Laurence

Wednesday

An up and coming young judge came under the spiritual influence of a Sufi master and began to pass through the first stages of a personal awakening. This led him in time to renounce his position and status and to become a dervish, resident in the Sufi Lodge as part of a community gathered around the sheik. He was blissful. He had no doubts about his decision and was filled with generous enthusiasm and hope.

Then slowly, subtly at first, his ego resisted and complained. ‘You were very noble to renounce everything and follow this path. People admire that’. He was happy to following such an illustrious path - this ‘way of love’ as the sheikh called it – under a highly regarded teacher. ‘But,’ his ego whispered, ‘you are different from these other disciples. You are educated, well-connected, a good leader. You deserve to be recognised for that’. When a legal issue concerning a property was brought to the sheikh to arbitrate the new novice proudly offered his services remarking that this was his specialised field of training which he ‘knew everything about’ . He could not repress the smile of self-satisfaction and pleasure at being able to use his talents. The sheikh looked at him, lovingly but shrewdly, and told him there was a special work in the Lodge that the former judge could fulfil better than anyone else. The smile on the novice’s face broadened. The sheik led him to the back of the Lodge and showed him the dog, handed him the dog’s bowl and said ‘your work is to feed and look after our dog.’ When the sheikh turned and re-entered the Lodge the novice exploded with angry shame and threw the bowl on the ground. The sheik returned and looked at him.

He fed the dog obediently every day and endured the ensuing struggles with his ego, in his room or when he met people from his former life who were amused by his new lowly status. He was helped by the special attention of his teacher and made progress with his mantra. This however led another member of the Lodge, a young senior official, to feel envious. This grew into an uncontrollable jealousy of how the sheik was treating the newcomer and how the other members of the fraternity were growing in respect for him. Viciously he invented a slander about his rival and the sheik’s daughter and spread it.

The victim of his jealousy suffered intensely, for himself and the young woman. He was outraged, furious and determined to confront it; so he went to tell the sheik what was happening. The sheik listened and then told him he had failed. He should have borne the trial silently. He looked at him and told him coldly he should leave the Lodge. In tears, broken and devastated, he left to go out into the world again a wanderer in the desert with nothing.

Of course, this isn’t the end of the story. But it casts light on the process of confronting and wrestling with the ego that every meditator passes through as we move from the surface to the deeper levels of the ‘way of love’. As Lent is a time especially to reflect upon that journey this might be a story to help us understand where we are and what challenges we are facing at this time.

Laurence

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