Lent Reflections
These daily reflections 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 ra na 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: UK wccm.uk and International wccm.org
If you prefer to listen to the Lent Reflections they are available on the WCCM Soundcloud.

Doors and windows always seem wondrous to me. I often can’t resist taking a photo of them even when they are actually very ordinary. But anything ordinary becomes wondrous when it catches your eye in some sudden, unexpected way and you look twice at it or even gaze at it. They don’t explain themselves rationally but seem to return the attention you give them.
This is why I thought of using this photo of a door that is just open enough to show us what is on the other side. In this case, a calm ocean the same colour as the clear light blue sky above it, both merging on the horizon. Horizons, of course, are merely illusions in the mind of the observer because when we see with the clear eye of the heart there is no horizon, only unity.
As we start the forty days of Lent, we can think conventionally of giving something up (usually something we may be even slightly, unconsciously addicted to, like sugar) and doing something extra (usually something we think we should want to do more of, like meditation). This is a good thing if it is done as a simple childlike practice. Then it reminds us we are dust and unto dust we shall return. The ashes drawn on our forehead like a temporary tattoo impress on us that we are made of earth and belong to the animal kingdom. But it also reminds us that our short journey in life is towards and beyond every horizon. We are luminous and conscious and capable of ever greater degrees of love.
In the gospel today Jesus teaches us to give up something and to do something. We need to give up the self-consciousness of the performer (or the observer) worrying about what God or other people are thinking about us. This typical concern of the ego blocks us from wonder and closes the door of consciousness. So this Lent why don’t we catch ourselves whenever we start to be controlled by the desire to look good or be admired. Jesus also tells us to do something, to go into our inner room, close the door and pray there in the clear light of God. Then we merge.
When we feel wonder the ordinary is reborn. Lent is the celebration of the ordinary. All w e have to do is return to the present. If we are sad it is a sign we are living in the past consumed with our thoughts and memories. If we feel anxious we are living in the future. But if we are at peace within ourselves and with others sadness and anxiety are overcome and we are in the present moment. We shouldn’t look back at past experiences of peace trying to recapture them. Nor should we postpone now the work of returning to the present until we have solved our problems and secured ourselves against the worst.
Whether we give something up and take on something extra, or not, we can do the most important thing of all that brings us to peace and benefits others: the practice of the presence of God.
When the mind wanders we become absent-minded. Can you remember times in childhood when you were happily daydreaming in class only to be abruptly called back to the present by the teacher asking you a question about what he had been saying? We might have felt silly and been laughed at even by our friends. “Off in your own world again Freeman? Would you like to tell us all what you were thinking?” Horrible thought.
Later we discover how hurtful and disappointing it is when we think we are present with others and even open the door of our heart to them only to find they only seemed to be there but were actually miles away. In today’s gospel Jesus takes his friends apart specially to share with them what he knows about his fateful destiny. They don’t understand what he said. Mark, who always seems to me closer to the real event, tells us they were too frightened to ask. To risk loving trust and be coldly greeted by fearful silence is rejection where it hurts most: to fall into the loneliness of absence with those you wanted to be present with.
Presence simply means being. Being contains infinite seeds of becoming, unlimited potential. In itself, though, being just is which means we don’t have to do anything while we are being. It does itself. (Meditation is not a waste of time). Being present means to be in the same place, at hand, within reach, being a contemporary. So, we co-experience what those we are present with are undergoing and become capable of free-flowing compassion. We shouldn’t need to take a course on how to be compassionate or a good listener. A daily, contemplative practice germinates the seed of compassionate attention in the eternal womb of being that is waiting to be awakened in us. The teacher within calls us out of our reverie. Then the union of inner practice and the events of life brings about a bursting capacity for presence which is what the mystics call the birth of God.
We become like God: how can we not feel compassion? A famous heart surgeon told me once he had tried meditating but stopped because it made him too compassionate towards his patients. He had understood something of meditation. He had not yet grasped that being present to others expands us beyond any of the passing moments in time which are only gestures of presence. Reality dilates as the eye opens to light. This expansion of being strengthens us to endure and to serve in ways we could not have imagined when we were cocooned in our absent-minded, self-absorbed world.
To be fully present – shall we make it our contemplative goal for Lent? – is not just for here and now but for everywhere and everywhen. It is metanoia to become conscious of all dimensions of reality not merely those of time and space where we begin.
Returning to the present is to find ourselves on both sides of the open door simultaneously and naturally. It means we don’t have to lose the gift of being in whatever task our destiny calls us to do. Meditation is the opening of the door.
Have you ever tried pulling on a door that can only be opened by pushing it? One feels frustrated or angry or just foolish until you understand your mistake, push gently and see it open effortlessly. All the force and anger expended on trying to compel the door to act against its nature, your will against its, all this wasted energy suddenly evaporates. You might even laugh at yourself (and we should).
That’s how we learn, by failure and feeling foolish so that we can see more clearly through the lens of failure. ‘O happy fault’ as we will sing at the Easter Vigil in a few weeks. Samuel Beckett’s famous quote about failure itself often fails to be understood. It could be our Lenten koan:
Ever Tried.
Ever Failed.
No Matter.
Try Again.
Fail Again.
Fail Better
It may sound like an inspirational speaker’s ego-rousing, macho call to triumph saying, if you don’t give up, eventually you will beat everyone and succeed brilliantly. Beckett’s vision after World War II was darker than this. After the catastrophic failures of western civilisation to be civilised, life seemed to him as a tragicomedy ending in the inescapable failure of the body and mind in death. In a few weeks’ time Good Friday will support that. Our regression in recent years into a political culture of deception and brutal violence shows that sin is always making a comeback. Failure is a constant companion, so don’t trust the pride that accompanies success. Nevertheless, even in this dark vision, or perhaps only in it, there is an inextinguishable light of hope.
Returning to the present will always restore it. As Maria and Albert our coordinators in Ukraine said, ‘We are in a war. Now is the time to meditate’. The contemplative mind discouraged by failure is reactivated by contemplation. Seeing that, we understand the necessary role that contemplative wisdom and practice play in all human affairs. However much we fail at meditation it takes us deeper. Firstly, it allows us to respond rather than blindly react. Remember how effortlessly (or with minimum pressure) the door opens when it is invited to do so according to its true nature. How resistant and negative it seems when we use unnatural force.
It is like ringing the gong at meditation. Some people attack the bowl it as if it were a call to battle. There is a 15-minute video showing a zen monk gently showing how to ‘invite the bell to sound’. Non-violence in our personal lives – and everywhere and everywhen – begins with how we pray. How we pray is how we are (whether we call it ‘prayer’ or not). Are we pushing against the door of God, setting our will and identity against His or are we allowing the door of metanoia to gently swing it open?
The sweet point between pushing and pulling is the stillness of the present.
Open doors can be inviting but also frightening if you don’t know what lies on the other side. A traumatising moment in my childhood was walking into a room, putting my hand up on the wall to turn on the light and feeling another cold hand cover mine. Every horror film I had seen rushed through my body and I discovered what it means for your heart to stop, frozen with fear. My friend couldn’t stop laughing.
In the same way, new opportunities, doors opening into new rooms in the course of our lives, can fill us with hope but also with anxiety or dread. Closed doors from the outside can seem to be coldly excluding us. From the inside the same door can bestow on us security and peace. Jesus tells us to enter the inner room, which means we have first to open and pass through the door which takes time, courage and perseverance. What might be there to find in this unopened space within us? We have to pass through the unconscious to identify, then open and pass through the door of our heart into the inner room. These stages can take years because the heart is far deeper than the unconscious.
In the Chandogya Upanishad we find a description of what we find in this inner room:
The space in the heart is as big as the space outside. Heaven and earth are both within it, so also fire and air, the sun and the moon, lightning and the stars. Everything exists within that space in the embodied self—whatever it has or does not have.
Not the hand of a ghost, but the spaciousness of all space. The body is the city of God which is why we are urged to love and honour our bodies. The Katha Upanishad tells us more of what dwells in this inner room and yet is there without displacing anything else: in the room without taking up room.
That being, of the size of a thumb, dwells deep within the heart. He is the lord of time, past and future. Having attained him, one fears no more. He, truly, is the immortal Self.
The source of the greatest human transformation is always in inter-personal encounter. Finding not just a but personal being in our inner room might sound like the shock I had as a child when a stranger invisible hand covered mine in the dark. But it does not fill us with fear. It removes fear so that the immense other is known intimately as the other myself, the friend sought throughout time and found in the present.

Jesus was led by the Spirit out into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil (Mt 4:1)
The original meaning of ‘temptation’, it seems, is simply to ‘try something out, to see what it’s like’. How else do we learn? Can we blame Eve for trying out the forbidden fruit? Who tells us what is forbidden and what is allowed? God or our image of God?
What if we were never to do what is forbidden? Would we ever grow up, our eyes opened to the difference between good and evil, real and unreal, so that we know the difference for ourselves? The devil is the master of division and doubt and so there is no end to questions when we enter into temptation. We question the motivation behind what is prohibited and we question our own motivation in risking disobedience. We pray not to be tempted. But we are also drawn to temptation because it tests and teaches us where we are truly prudent and strong and where we are merely frightened and weak.
The desert is a place without trees, the tree of life or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil which the Bible says are at the innocent centre of the garden of Eden. But these alluring trees are outside us, separate from us and so we feel we are being tempted by some outside force. As a child I was fascinated by cartoons in my religion book of a good angel telling me ‘don’t’ and a bad angel ,on the other side, urging me to ‘go on, you goody-goody do it’. The duality of it all seemed very simple but in fact it was deceptive.
I once crossed the Australian Nullarbor Plain by train for three days. As the name suggests, it was a treeless desert which I thought would be intolerably dull to look at for so long. No beautiful views, lovely coastlines or rolling hills. I soon discovered, though, how varied and subtly beautiful it was in its endless radical simplicity. It was in fact surprisingly beautiful. Jesus fasted for forty days in such a desert as his mind ran out of memories and his desires were uprooted and he was left facing the root division in every mind.
This was just what the Spirit – which is nondual and simple, beyond questions and doubts – had led him into the desert for. Now with an empty mind he was ready. Being mindless in this way is further along the way to selfhood than being mindful. We are not looking at things and merely desiring or resisting because we are looking at nothing. External temptations – not just the sensual but the ego-sensual things like power, fame and wealth in their many forms – keep us locked into the devilish world-view of division. In the beautiful bare-ness of the treeless desert, when the mind is undistracted, we meet the root cause of temptation in our divided self. (Will we ever know how it became divided from itself except through a myth of creation?)
Strengthened by his fasting from thought and imagination, not weakened by it, Jesus has no problem in sweeping away the last remaining illusions of power, desire and the final illusion of the devil’s independent existence. Free, one in himself and one with all, like the desert monks after him, he returned to the world knowing what he was called to do and then discover in the end who he truly was.
He will place the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left. (Mt 25: 32)
We were driving through the Canadian Rockies when this photo happened. I was more interested in seeing grizzlies than goats as we came upon this one separated from his flock, perhaps with a death wish, grazing on concrete.
There are different kinds of desert. Sand dunes, water stretching everywhere, dense trees confusing your sense of direction, libraries of endless words and crowded subway trains of people looking at their mobile phones, distracted minds and empty roads through mountain ranges. The common elements of a desert experience can be found in all these forms – and of course in meditation. They include an initial feeling of remoteness and separation that you have to embrace to let it become true solitude. There is no solitude at first without some degree of loneliness, but solitude is the cure for loneliness. Loneliness is the symptom of separation while solitude is the restoration of companionship.
The goat trying to eat concrete or, more likely, something edible that an unmindful driver had thrown out of his window, did not seem lonely. Quite unaware of us looking at him and taking a photo, he seemed contentedly solitary which would mean (if this applies to goats as well as us) he had found the Friend within himself. He didn’t look up and wonder if we were what he was looking for because he wasn’t looking for anything. Even for the truck that might have come tearing round the bend at any moment. Goats are more independent than sheep and so are often thought to be more self-centred which, taken further, may explain why they became symbols of evil. The devil is often represented as a nasty looking goat.
Anyway, it’s only a parable and probably Jesus didn’t have much against goats personally. However, goats do seem smarter than sheep, especially to those who like them, although looking at this one, eating the road on a dangerous bend made me think otherwise. Even in the form of an empty mountain road, the desert welcomes everyone. This is why meditation, by leading us into the desert of the heart, creates and repairs community and bestows the blessed awareness of equality.
At first the desert explorer does not even notice that there are other people around him, like himself a little lonely, trying to embrace solitude. Even then he can still judge them by first appearances, as we all do,. He may start to put sheep on his right and goats on the left. He may even think he is justified in separating and judging others because he is imitating Jesus.
Transformation comes when we understand fully that we are in the desert, accept it humbly and allow ourselves to feel at home. Then we stop looking for what isn’t there. Life becomes simpler and more livable the more we see only what is there.
The separation of sheep and goats separation is ended. They look into each other’s eyes and see themselves reflected there: the good, the bad and the ugly, the rich and the poor, the healthy and the sick, the imprisoned and the free, those with golden lives and beautiful dinner services and those who have only ever eaten off plastic, if they have eaten at all.
It is usual in the language of the mystics – which is more like the language of the bedroom than that of the lecture room – to speak of detachment. Detachment from everything leads us into the free enjoyment of more than everything but only after it has shown us we are nothing. Annihilation, what Sufis call fana, the passing away or total annihilation of the self, is the small price we pay for realising we are nothing. We will see the totality of this disturbing prospect better on Good Friday. So, let’s allow Lent to get us ready.
Experiencing this mystical wisdom needs a container of sorts, which is usually provided by a spiritual tradition underpinned by religious belief. Today, in our secularised, untrusting and individualistic age, both of these are rare and problematical. Most of us do want to find union, enlightenment, nirvana and God and we often take the first step. It’s the next steps that form a spiritual path deeper than our own wanting and our far greater than our egos. However, as soon as we sniff fana or the Cross, we are tempted to cash in our losses and run back to the starting block.
Together with the goat eating the road, let’s see how we can get into this challenge. The mystics say we need to detach from images and life-goals that stop short at physical or emotional fulfilment: a good partner, good income, good health and low-cost air travel. They say that these images should be replaced by the images we find of God in the ‘imaginary’ of scripture and other spiritual teaching. They wait for us, for example, in the words and stories of Jesus that translate the mystery of God, that is way beyond our understanding, into the mystery of human existence with which we are quite familiar. Secondly, after these sacred images, the church or sangha offer religious ‘practices’: rituals, devotions, big and little ‘sacramentals’. With both the images and these practices, there is still desire; but spiritual desire is a different and higher form of desire. It changes our lifestyle and lived values. We might choose a week’s retreat rather than a week in shopping malls, a pilgrimage rather than a package tour, a charitable donation over a tax-free investment.
In the hands of Christian moralists, detachment can be twisted to become hatred of the body, rejection of sex and other natural pleasures and seeking God can become like a safari hunter chasing a beautiful animal as a trophy. This misreading of detachment has badly defaced and damaged the Christian brand. But, in the hands of the mystics, the spiritualised imagination detaches us from low-level fantasy. It prepares us for what the great medieval mystic Jan van Ruusbroek calls the ‘bare imagelessness’ of God. Jesus calls it the ‘Father’ or the ‘reign of God’.
In the Beatitudes, detachment is called poverty of spirit. It is the track through the desert to the oasis of true happiness awaiting us in the Reign of God. It is not cheap but it is a bargain. The big question is, how do we find it in our tempestuous lives? In economic language, perhaps, as a balance between austerity and growth-investment.
So, a little more about detachment, always remembering the importance of not becoming attached to our ideas about things. Difficult to do because once we have expressed an idea it becomes an opinion; opinions represent us and so we end up defending them as if they were ourselves. Detachment doesn’t mean rejection or cancelling which is what is happening in much public conversation these days. Make a mistake and you’re ‘cancelled’. Detachment makes room for the return of forgiveness and second chances.
The mystics speak of the need to be detached from our images of ourselves which are usually made up of our judgments of the past and fantasies (called ‘predictions’ if you’re being paid for them) of the future. They say it helps to replace these ego-driven images with the imagination drawn from sacred scriptures. This is a problem for those who lack any direct connection with the original writings, at best knowing only second-hand commentaries. Sacred texts are sources, ever fresh springs of wisdom. Primarily, we need to drink from them ourselves: read them first and then feel how they are reading us as we absorb their purity. (If you can’t read, find someone who can). Our own interpretation of their meaning comes from personal reading (or listening) and the feeling of being touched by light. Then we may be helped by secondary sources.
But next mystics, like the great Flemish Jan van Ruusbroek, urge us to be detached even from these sacred words and images. The next stage of prayer is the kind of meditation where we ‘lay aside’ images, words and thoughts of every sort. Thoughts become images which become words. The mantra lays them all aside in the work of silence.
This deeper, more liberating detachment is difficult at first, then wonderful and difficult. The fear of becoming nothing becomes the joy of being. We don’t achieve this alone but with the help of grace, which is like an invisible hand always helping but never controlling us. We don’t become detached by austerity programs. Attempts at self-annihilation, negatively oriented spiritualities merely reinforce the ego. Nor do we become detached by indulging ourselves and calling what we want to do the right thing or even worse God’s will. The more detached we become, the less we think God wills anything. Or, perhaps we wonder if God only wants one thing: to be God and make everything he has made become God too.
It’s a winding straight road. We commute between images and breakthrough moments of imagelessness in the inner room. Sometimes the trains are on strike or the roads under construction. So, every day’s commute is unpredictable but we choose to have no choice about it and just do it. We never know what’s coming round the corner but we waste less time worrying and trying to control the future. Detachment becomes delightful but never an attachment or possession. It is not achieved because it is a natural development in the human process when we understand and accept that we are touched by grace. We don’t know what grace is or who is touching us. Nevertheless, we welcome it. At last we know we are on the way.
I have a confession to make. I have deceived you or at least some of you. This week’s photo that I took of a goat eating the road in the Canadian Rockies is in fact not of a goat but a Canadian or Bighorn sheep. I would like to thank the meditator from Alberta who corrected me. In fact, it’s a happy fault because the point of the reflection was to say that the judgement and separation of sheep and goats in the gospel of that day is not the whole picture or last word. It can sound disturbingly dualistic and punitive even though the difference between sheep and goats in the parable is about the compassionate level of response to the suffering and needs of others. (‘Lord when did we see you hungry and give you food?’)
I suggested that there is a step beyond this judgemental separation in the all-embracing, non-punitive love of God which is apportioned equally to the good and wicked. The merely moralistic, dualistic mind doesn’t like this kind of God at all or the prayer that awakens us to Him. This love creates a transformation of the two into one. Goats become sheep and sheep find themselves in goats. Maybe the moment of this unity is always coming round the bend of the road but we can’t see it until it thunders into us.
The power that effects this unified consciousness and metanoia is the same grace that supports and edges us into detachment. We live and move in grace as we do in the earth’s atmosphere which is an envelope that contains all the gases we need to survive. We take it for granted but, consciously or not, we receive it with every breath and movement as a free gift. All we have to do is receive it even if we don’t feel gratitude. Thankfulness awakens when we understand.
A young couple preparing for marriage may have different kinds of spirituality. Yet they can share a profoundly unitive sense of the mystery of their love and the strange coincidences and patterns that led them to meet and to love deeply enough for each to see him- or her- self in the other. Turning inward as the wilderness experience, the desert, has us do, we find in that boundless inner space as large as the external cosmos the ‘love that moves the sun and other stars’.
The hungry and war-weary human heart finds peace by seeing that the peace beyond understanding is always there. At first it partially delivers a new kind of happiness. But in the Sahara Desert night temperatures drop an average of 42 degrees Celsius. As the mystics discover, God is also an imageless desert we learn to adapt to. Adaptation is metanoia to what we cannot do without and yet cannot control. At times it is a roller-coaster of desolation and consolation, soaring and plummeting. The great poet of the inner journey, George Herbert, describes this in one of the most beautiful of English poems, the Flower:
These are thy wonders, Lord of power,
Killing and quickening,
bringing down to hell
And up to heaven in an hour
Turning the goat and the sheep in us into one is hard work. And we still think meditation is just about reducing stress?
Whether we are a sheep or a goat, whether we flip between the two identities or whether the fusion of the two has been completed and we are released from worrying about it, there are always surprises leaping out of unexpected places. Something is always coming round the corner. Until the integration of the personality has happened – the harmonisation of mind and heart and everything in between – we may fear the unexpected, even live in a state of incessant anxiety or hidden dread. But gradually the peace of the harmony of order proves stronger than fear which is ever rooted in the constant change which reminds us uncomfortably of our mortality.
This is already beginning to sound abstract, even preachy. Stories are more effective in getting certain truths across and discovering more even than the storyteller understood. Good stories, like creation myths, at first seem self-contained with a beginning, a middle and end. In fact, they emerge from a swirling cauldron of ancestral imagination. Literary theorists argue about how many basic plots there are: seven (of course) or up to thirty-six. However, if you’re listening to a story wondering about which category it belongs to, then it probably isn’t a very good one. Good stories persuade us they are unique.
Many of the greatest stories and the big questions they contain deal with the origin and meaning of suffering. God’s reputation hangs on this question. Nietzsche thought that to live is to suffer and that to survive is to find meaning in it. A neat answer but maybe too neat. The Hebrew creation narrative (Genesis 1-3) tells a timeless story. The first home of the childhood of humanity was a garden with beautiful fruit trees and our first parents could eat what they liked except the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They disobeyed because the Woman, as usual smarter than her mate, thought ‘well, why not?’. The result was expulsion from Eden and a life of suffering ending in death.
The biblical story doesn’t bewail this as later Christian commentators did when they called it the Fall, blamed the Woman and saw suffering as punishment. Not so the wise Hebrews, who agreed with Eve and saw the story not as terrible disobedience but simply about growing up and discovering what the world out there is really like.
Enter ‘Yetzer Hara’ in the form of the serpent who is cast as the devil in Christian imagination. In Chinese myth it becomes a dragon, symbol of power, strength and good luck. The array of stories of human wrongdoing in the Bible recognise there is something in us that does often wilfully choose the bad over the good. It seems the decision to invade Ukraine was simmering and finding self-justification in Mr Putin’s mind for many years. Nevertheless, remember the destiny of sheep and goats. The Bible never dreams about going back to Eden. What’s coming round the corner is a new future.
Jewish commentators turn the creation narrative into high art by naughtily saying that the Yetzer Hara, the cause of disobedience, was purposefully created by God and inserted in the human psyche. Otherwise, God would always know everything that was going to happen: and how eternally boring that would be for Him. Now, doesn’t that make God a more interesting character and make us feel better about being a goat?
When St Benedict wrote his Rule for Monasteries few people in his society were literate. Yet he insisted that members of his community should read daily and in particular have a book they would read with special attention during Lent. Reading at that time would have been slower and more communal. Anyone reading would have done so aloud, murmuring the words quietly under their breath, as this would have made it easier to break up the solid text on the page. If people were reading in physical proximity it might have sounded like a busy beehive. I experienced this once in the long reading room packed with Orthodox Jews studying the Bible adjacent to the Wailing Wall in the Temple Precinct in Jerusalem. They were so focused they didn’t notice the intruder among them.
Reading is a very different way of learning from watching YouTube. Literacy is a learned skill, like prayer half-active, half-passive. There is a stronger sense of intimate encounter with the writer’s inner consciousness. It doesn’t matter what they were wearing when they wrote down their inner thought processes or what they looked like or their accent. In reading, we encounter another mind – perhaps long dead but still alive in the words – which calls us out of ourselves in an act of other-centred attention. We can respond or disagree as we savour and reflect on their words and style but, first of all, we have to listen to what they say rather than what we think. Good reading is therefore a step towards pure prayer.
I am preparing for a series of online sessions later this year on how to read sacred texts. This is a particular form of reading that can bear great spiritual fruit. We have to read scripture aware that the meaning is not only in the words but also in the ‘white spaces between the words’ and in the way our heart-mind responds to them. Someone with a serious contemplative practice may have the advantage of feeling how the words are expressing her own inexpressible experience of silence in their meditation. In the 5th century Cassian, one of Benedict’s great teachers, whom he met through the written word, said that the meditator will ‘penetrate the meaning’ of scripture not just through the written text but by ‘experience leading the way’. The contemplative reader becomes like the author of what he is reading, grasping the meaning directly and intuitively.
‘Sacred scripture’ can be a stimulus for metanoia. It has a transformative effect on a mind already being trained by a contemplative practice, like the mantra. The spiritual power of the words is released and stops them from becoming objects of fundamentalist worship that can be misread to reinforce minds already set and unwilling to change.
Scripture and other practices have been compared to a raft taking us to the other shore. In a famous sutra, the Buddha said ‘monks, I have taught the Dhamma like a raft, for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of holding onto.’ Yesterday someone brought this alive for me by saying that they felt scripture is like a manual, valuable for showing us how, how to be or how to do, but not life, not the being or doing itself. A finger pointing at the moon, but not the moon.

suddenly a bright cloud covered them with shadow, and from the cloud there came a voice .. (Mt 17:1-9)
Firstly, I must update you on my learning curve about sheep and goats. My teacher on the issue who, you may remember, corrected me last week has informed me of another significant insight. Each of the animals is in a different genus but belong to the same sub-family, family, order and class. The roots of good and evil are entangled.
In the first reading of the liturgy today we see Abraham commanded by God to ‘leave your country, family and father’s house’ for a land God will show him. Generations of Celtic monks did the same. Abraham who went as told is the ‘father in faith’ of Jews, Christians and Muslims, but no less a model for all faiths of the human response to the ultimate mystery of human existence. Abraham exemplifies total and simple detachment in obedience to an intuition that transforms us even though it cannot be fully understood. He exemplifies one-step metanoia, which also takes a lifetime of meditation and of trying to treat others as we would like them to treat us, (even and especially when they don’t treat us in that way). Contemplation and action, meditation and service. In our slow, stumbling way we learn from those who in one bound leaped into the light.
The photo for this week comes from the long, wide monastic corridors at Monte Oliveto. One day I was leaving my room for the morning conference of the WCCM retreat that we hold there annually, when I met an old monk doing his slow and solitary morning walk up and down the polished floors of the corridor. He greeted me with a gentle smile of recognition. We talked for some time. He didn’t want to talk about his health as many older people understandably do but asked questions about the meditators from around the world whom he had seen in the church. As we parted, I turned and saw him walking straight into the light. He died soon after, transfigured into the luminosity that already shone through him, as I had been gifted to see, during the last days of his life.
In Matthew’s account of the Transfiguration, Jesus took his closest disciples to the top of a mountain shortly after telling them of the dark destiny awaiting him. On the mountain he is revealed as the new Moses and the fulfilment of the prophetic tradition. All is light. ‘His face shone like the sun’. Peter feels he has to say something about what is ineffable and offers to build three tents. Today he would have said to Jesus, ‘just stay there a moment and I’ll take a photo’. People don’t believe an event has happened or that they have been somewhere unless they take a selfie of it. But there is darkness too on the mountain of Transfiguration. A bright cloud envelops them all, covering them with its shadow. The brightest light, the best things in our lives, can cast the darkest shadow when anything – like a camera or a self-conscious thought, comes in-between.
Everything we call or describe as an ‘experience’ has actually already become a memory subject to the weaknesses and deception of our minds. As they walk down the mountain Jesus tells them not to tell anyone about the experience of illumination until after the Resurrection when the transparent Mind of Christ sheds a present light on everything.
The simplest things in life are the most difficult – the most difficult to describe, to understand, to live. We long for them but a simple desire can innocently develop a field of great complexity around it. We want happiness, or relationship, or to do the work we love. When circumstances prevent this, we can become sad, angry, or hopeless and go off looking for false consolations, substitutes and distractions. The original authentic desire is now lost in a virtual web of inauthentic lookalikes.
Contemplative wisdom says to detach from desire. But what kind of desire?. Lent trains us in self-control. Spiritual discipline teaches us discernment not to abandon the original desire but to separate the sheep from the goats among our many secondary ambitions and fantasies. Original desire then transcends desire in purity of heart. It is not a desire for some thing but an imminent happiness prepared to remain non-possessive. A gazing, not a hungry staring, a receiving not a snatching. This is the desire for God, aligned with God in a way that egocentric desire can neve be.
As a boy I longed for a bicycle. When it arrived, I was ecstatic. Then I became painfully frustrated and humiliated by my inability to ride it. My simple desire had been satisfied: the problem was enjoying what I had wanted by letting go of desire. I just wanted to get on my shiny new bike and cycle off fulfilling my fantasies of freedom. I didn’t understand the learning and patience necessary to handle getting what we want. The bike taught me this through failures, crashes and slight concussion. Then I got the hang of it. Meditation takes longer but teaches the same principle of simplicity of how to receive a gift.
We desire deeply to find the simple core of reality. Proving harder than we imagined, we may try dissecting reality, by over-analysis, intellectual control, or religious fundamentalism, in order to cut through the layers of ordinary life. However, it is life as we are living it, tangible, messy and unpredictable, where the simple, radiant light of God shines on and soaks into us. God is infinite simplicity.
God is also eternally present. In complicating things we imagine the present moment as a freezing of one of the fleeting ticks of the ticking clock of our life. But time cannot be frozen. The eternal presence of God is in and outside time, the heart of time.
I don’t know any more simple way of coming into the present moment than saying the mantra. Like the bike it is mastered through failure and, like cycling, we do it properly only when we stop thinking about doing it.
Time is the problem solved by stillness. Anxieties of the future, the resurgences of the past that may flood our feelings, resolve over time and through deeper presence. No theology or neurology can explain the immense power of love set free by this deep stillness. Whatever else they may be as well in the world, the contemplative is a lover and an artist. Contemplation unleashes a flood of beauty and beauty shows us how the simplicity of the whole manifests in the present because it is present in each particle of every part.
Last week Diane Tolomeo, a meditator from western Canada and a member of the WCCM Academy, gave the second of this year’s conferences on our theme ‘Metanoia: Let Your Minds be Re-made’. As a teacher of English Literature, she spoke both brilliantly and entertainingly about ‘Education: Teach me what I do not see’.
This week our reflections play with the symbol of light. Learning is being enlightened. We should not think we ever have learned enough and burying our gifts is ignorance, stifling the divine light in ourselves. “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Mt 5:15-16). On the holy mountain Jesus allowed his inner light to shine visibly, even though his disciples could not yet understand the experience. Continuously learning what we cannot understand, is the essence of discipleship and the dynamic of metanoia. The aim of learning and letting your light shine is to bring benefit to others not to ourselves.
Diane mentioned George Herbert’s poem ‘The Elixir’. She drew our attention to the lines where he speaks of how we can use a mirror. We can look at the glass and see our own reflection or we can look through and ‘heaven espy’. We are sovereignly free to choose where to place our attention. But the right use of freedom needs discipline
Contemplative learning is the aim of our new WCCM Academy. Its teaching-learning community formed over a two-year cycle will help students deeper into ‘contemplative living’, whatever their age, work or way of life. Simone Weil said in an essay – we will use it with students as the Academy starts next month- that the deeper purpose of study is not to pass exams or acquire qualifications but to develop the power of attention. In its higher stages, attention becomes both pure prayer and compassion for others.
Drawing from contemplative wisdom in the two streams of Christian and other traditions, through many fields of knowledge, the program will build a learning community between students, faculty and personal tutors. The third stream will explore how this wisdom can be applied to the challenges all humanity is presently confronting.
We learn best when we find joy in learning. This mirrors the boundlessness of knowledge because study should lead, not to narrow over-specialisation, but to transcendence. Diane spoke about education as a balance between browsing and concentration, spontaneity and discipline. Meditation itself is continuous learning. One of its fruits is seeing how discipline launches us into a life of freedom. But as with anything that becomes a regular part of life, there are moments when we are tempted to reject discipline for novelty.
Herbert understands this with masterly brevity in his poem. He refers to the self-transcendence of the process: we learn and change not for my sake but, quoting a clause of Jesus’ teaching, ‘for thy sake’. Then, he speaks of restlessness and boredom – when learning can seem ‘drudgery’. But, he adds, other-centredness (for thy sake) makes ‘drudgery divine’. Ordinary things done with other-centred attention become not less than ‘divine’.
Human life is not drudgery. Nor is the endless activity of the universe up there and far away that we hear so much about. Or the life of the invisible microcosms living inside us. Yet, there are times when it can seem a drudge denying us what we need – food and shelter, justice, companionship or good work. When we feel existence is a meaningless drudge, as many today do, a change of perception and opening the heart can make the ‘drudgery divine’. We have only to look through the glass that we are narrow-mindedly looking at. Maybe we’re waiting for a message to appear on the glass as if it were a screen. Compulsively checking our phones is like looking at the glass rather than through it.
We are not asked to look at Jesus asking him, ‘what would you do now, what would you say, who would you vote for?’ Those are questions we might ask looking at someone on screen whom we are zooming with. In each chapter of his story, his forty days in the desert, his illumination on the mountain, his passion death and resurrection, we look through him in order to see him as he really is now. Then we understand how we are in an indescribable union with him, on a journey in him, with him, through him.
The malaise of meaninglessness in our consumerist, techno-scientific phase of human history is demoralising. The shared beliefs and values, the faith or fears that kept us aligned to some kind of morality and restrained the madness of some leaders have disintegrated. What holds us together as humanity, making us ashamed to invade another country and brainwash your own people into believing that the victim is the aggressor? What kind of meaning does a teenager find in world news? Where did the ethical values of business and politics go? Why do the worst candidates so often get elected? How can one claim divine approval for denying education and equality to girls and women? The moral void of our time convinces many that life is not only unfair but essentially meaningless.
Yet we search for meaning even in deserts. Just to be searching, however, can be a trap that increases desertification. Searching for meaning, like pursuing happiness tricks us into thinking we have to do something to find the answer or the theory that captures meaning. We cannot actively achieve meaning, only create the conditions for it to appear.
Let’s say that meaning is connection. Think about this by remembering how meaningless and miserable we become when we feel dis-connected. Merely actively looking for meaning, becoming a busybody who can’t stop trying, just increases our disconnectedness.
Of course, active searching is part of responsible living. But the deeper part of meaningfulness is surrendering into our powerlessness to find it. In the release that follows, connection at the deepest levels is revealed. A different kind of empowerment then fills us by the power of non-action (not to be confused with in-action). This is the great gamble in our connection to reality, in meditation, to put everything we possess into non-action.
When the Egyptians were pursuing the Israelites after they had left slavery and had got as far as the Rede Sea, the chosen people regretted their choice for freedom. They told Moses to take them back. At least they would have leeks, onions and wifi. In this critical moment, their leader told them: ‘the Lord will do the fighting for you. You have only to be still.’
Even in our chaotic world contemplation has not disappeared. It can never be completely lost because, just like beauty and hope, it is an inextinguishable hunger and need in the human heart. What changes from one period of a culture to another is how we understand contemplation, its nature, purpose and how we cultivate it. Contemplation creates its own light by which we see it for what it is.
In an age of faith, we understand contemplation as entry into undivided union with God. On our journey into oneness with the source, ground and goal of our being, we also awaken to our essential union with all other people and parts of nature, even those we are in conflict with. By contrast, in an age of materialism and consumerism, contemplation is reduced to a private experience, even commodified as a program with a price tag. What you buy with commercial contemplation may still be good in itself, like reduction of stress and anxiety, better sleep patterns and health but this is mere packaging compared with what the contemplative traditions urge us to meditate for.
A major difference between these two approaches is the understanding of the benefits that meditation brings to others both near and far away. Materialistic attitudes collapse us into a narcissistic mindset with terrible blind spots where we focus mostly on ‘what I get out of it’. This severely limits what we do actually get out of it, because materialism blocks the pure, other-centred attention that brings us into transcendence. The nature of narcissism is that the victim doesn’t know he is a narcissist, any more than a cat that jumps on your lap to curl up and puts its claws into your leg knows that it is hurting you. Being so self-involved you become increasingly limited in your level of empathy for others.
If, on the other hand, you come to your daily contemplative work with a mind open to its deeper dimension and purpose, with a sense of mystery, not a purpose of acquisition, then meditation will look quite different. Your approach and practice will be different. The Cloud of Unknowing says that we should look after our health and well-being so that we can meditate. Its harder to do it when you have a fever or are in pain. This is the reverse image of meditating primarily to feel better in the short term. Julian of Norwich says ‘prayer is not an idle occupation. It’s a very powerful instrument of our work and love.’ In that understanding, every meditation becomes good work that brings out the best in you and brings benefits to others.
Indra’s net of existence is a symbol of universal connection in which everything is joined and every point of meeting is a unique jewel reflecting the whole it belongs to. This is simply the way it is and therefore with practice, practice, practice it is how everyone comes to understand themselves in relation to others. What a different vision of reality and the human world from that of the individual collapsed into himself. The apostles were mending their nets when Jesus passed by and called them to follow. So are we even in our distracted meditation every day.
There are three springs at Bonnevaux. I like to walk between them and show them to people. For me, they have come to symbolise the three levels of consciousness that we open and connect on the path into light.
The first spring is close to the entrance, at the top of the gentle valley in the centre of which the old monastery seems to float lightly. This spring is like the surface level of the mind with its daily traffic of people, deliveries and the comings and goings of the life of the community and guests. When we start to meditate we interpret this mental traffic as distraction and feel defeated by it in our humble attempt to say the mantra. How intense or agitated this level may be varies with external circumstances. It depends too on how much input and stimulation we expose ourselves to before becoming too distracted. If we don’t take fright or become discouraged, we will see over time the level of noise reduce and of order strengthen. The mind is difficult to tame and concentration is elusive but regular practice develops the equanimity necessary for going deeper. At this level we don’t need to try to achieve perfect silence. The to and fro of thoughts, hopes and fears and fantasy are natural and necessary for life in the world. It is enough that they reduce and do not block us from going to the next spring.
In Bonnevaux it is in the sunken garden near the river, where the medieval church used to be. In the mind it is like the hard disc of consciousness storing memories of all that we have gone through. A few months ago, this spring appeared to have dried up which saddened me as it is a symbol of where memory is stored in the dream world but also in our bodies. Here the quality of distraction is different. But the journey of attention the mantra is leading us into is the same. The flow of consciousness here feels slower. But there is nothing that is hidden that will not be brough to light. Perseverance brings the healing with which sacred wells were associated in the past and which is the thing we now need most and ask for least. A vein of pure creativity runs through the mind at this level, the lower garden, which delightfully reminds us of how consciousness can recall the forgotten and perceive the familiar in surprising new ways. If we learn to let go of the insights and solutions to problems that break the surface we will make the next step more smoothly. We can learn to park them and pick them up at a pre-arranged place later. We are not repressing or ignoring the Spirit, as people sometimes fear, but we simply don’t tarry on the path of the mantra we are treading.
In my feeling the third spring at the far end of Bonnevaux is the most powerful. When I stand there, I feel the presence of many previous dwellers back through time but held in a constant peaceful presentness. It is like the beginning of creation. Protected by a small, rounded wall built, who knows when, a little visible bubbling breaks the surface. Small but continuous, a little river flows from it gaining strength as it goes.
Different and distant from each other, these three springs are active simultaneously. Down at the lowest, at the sunken spring of memory, the one at the entrance with the daily comings and goings is still working. In the journey of consciousness all levels are open at the same time. Nothing shuts down but the influence of the deepest one, the spring of light, is felt on the other two bringing connection, unity and peace.
Today’s gospel is about the Prodigal Son, as we usually call it. But more accurately it’s the parable of the two brothers. They are like two peas in a pod, of opposite natures and yet very similar. The conventional interpretation of the story is that it is about the sin and repentance of one and the hard-hearted self-righteousness of the other. The deeper meaning is not to judge by appearances and even not to judge at all.
Jesus taught by stories because they are a better medium to convey this kind of meaning. Stories adapt to fit each listener’s limited capacity to understand. In this way everyone comes away with something, even if it’s only a small bite of the cherry. Usually, his parables are electric with an unseen intention. Opposites are reconciled even as they are transcended. Yet they are too simple to understand at first and we defuse them by a moralistic interpretation that keeps the opposites safely polarised. So nothing really changes. Jesus was not a moraliser but a teacher of the wisdom of paradox.
The younger brother takes his piece of the cake and runs off away from home to squander it before coming to his senses and returning home with his script learned off pat and his tail deceptively tucked between his legs. I never felt convinced by the insincerity of his apology (Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you…) It is what he thinks will persuade his father not to punish him too much. ‘Restore me to my privileged position and I’ll be a good boy from now on’. By contrast, the elder brother who stayed at home, worked hard at everything and has a high moral credit score becomes bitter, angry and jealous when he sees that there is no just punishment for his brother doing what he may have wanted to do but didn’t. (You’ve never celebrated me but you lavish all your favours and attention on this irresponsible brother of mine).
The younger brother receives no punishment or even judgement. The Father is simply embarrassingly overjoyed to have him back. If this is the nature of God, we are in for a surprise when all our judgement of others and of ourselves collapses before a love that burns away the past and illumines in a flash of lightning what has so long been dark.
The older brother’s negative reaction does not evoke anger or threat from his father but the strange reality of the divine yearning for us. It is revealed with disarming transparency – a declaration of love which plunges us deep into mystical wisdom’s most intimate truths and the self-disclosure of the divine love: ‘you are with me always and all I have is yours’. This ultimate statement of the nature of God transcends our capacity for moral judgement. The revealing of the purpose of existence makes judgement a thing of the past. We are hearing a declaration of love for the human by the source of being and it touches us in all our unworthiness and inadequacy.
The two boys could not be more dissimilar. One shows the selfish ego looking for pleasure and self-fulfilment. The other shows the self-satisfied ego which secretly craves notice and approval. Yet they are painfully alike in their total failure to understand the nature of the father’s love for each of them in equal measure, the one who was lost and was found and the other who never wandered away.
The same sunlight falls on good and bad alike transfiguring them both.

John 4:5-42 – The Samaritan woman at the well
One direction of religion is upwards transcending this world into a realm of breathtaking clarity and freedom beyond the limitations of both mind and matter. Most religions get stuck in these limitations and entrapped by the other direction. The second direction is downwards into human culture. Religions form institutions, belief and symbolic systems which are useful only for as long as they provide the resistance necessary for transcendence. Hence the inherent contradictions of religion.
In our time religion itself is being changed by the crisis humanity is passing through. The Catholic church’s inner turmoil reflects what is happening in all Christian institutions and in the surrounding cultures. Some key issues recur and become intense battlefields, particularly sexuality and women. Yet the forces of these two directions of religion are being reconciled. Whatever else is being worked out, it is reshaping a patriarchal religion into one with a vision of humanity based on equality not out of date hierarchies of power.
Other religions, like Buddhism and Islam, are going through similar revolutions. As they do, all religions may come together in an unprecedented way. Human culture will be transformed. Instead of competition they will find communion in the greater, common direction of transcendence. Religions have a core mystical consciousness from which they emerge but also quickly forget, falling prey to the collective egotism of power and polarisation. In recovering the transcendent force, within itself, each religion discovers that it is – astonishingly – one in the same force as every other religion.
One hot day Jesus was walking with his community when about noon he became tired and sat by a well. His disciples left him to go and buy food. A Samaritan woman, who is not likely to be dominated by any man, came to the well. Samaritans and Jews were sworn religious enemies.
He asks her politely for a drink from her well. This breach of cultural norms – him speaking to a single woman and she a Samaritan – astonished her. It leads to a conversation within which they soon come to a deep mutual recognition. She refers to the immense religious divide between them and he replies that the hour is coming when truly religious people will transcend all their divisions. The hour will come – ‘in fact it is already here’, he adds –
When true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. And that is the kind of worshipper the Father wants. Because not culture not a religious figure – but ‘God is spirit’.
This extraordinary encounter leads Jesus to confess openly to her, a foreigner and a woman, as to no one else, who he is, the Messiah: ‘I who am speaking to you, I am he’. For a Christian this is very moving and revelatory. But I think to anyone with a spiritual eye, this conversation affirms the truth of humanity’s oneness waiting to be discovered beyond religion and culture in the spirit.
When will this be realised? Are we in a birthing of a new manifesting of this truth? We are if we choose to be. The time is coming but in fact it is already here.
I was taking a very early flight – six in the morning. After security I had to trek on a cunningly winding path through the dazzling wilderness of perfumes, alcohol, chocolates, cigarettes and cosmetics and all the other things that make modern life worth living and keep our way of life going. Crowds of travellers gathered willingly in an early morning frenzy of browsing and buying, or better described as a dull addictive compulsiveness. On the other side of this, I found an oasis to have breakfast, tea and toast, maybe with an egg although I hadn’t decided yet. Smiling servers who must have got up at three am, like me, led me to a table. From there you had to go to the bar to order. Most of the customers there were ordering trays of drinks as if it was an evening at the pub. One thirsty, serious looking man drank two whiskeys while he waited. I had failed to note the number of my table so I went back and memorised ‘34’. From then on it was simple. After my breakfast, remembering I was there to take a plane not consume, I went out to look at the departures board. I checked the gate number. It also was, strangely, ‘34’. Do I wake or sleep?
As an Irish friend of mine used to say with a meaningful nod about strange things like this: ‘it only goes to show’. He rarely said what it showed. There are many things we can’t explain and have to consign to silence, small coincidences that stop you in your tracks for a moment or great losses that takes a life to process. We have to park or forget them in order to get on with other things, like not arriving at an airport before dawn and missing the flight because you spent too much time shopping. So, I left the ‘34’ hanging unsolved, after thinking if it was ‘35’ it might have had more meaning. (Suggestions please.)
Later, I was talking to a friend who was describing something that was hard to verbalise. I understood what he meant but, like him, could not quite find the right word for it. ‘It’ was about finding something within a relationship that had been interrupted, felt to be missing and then feared lost. When it quietly returned, it was as if it had gone away just to test the relationship, in order to show what the relationship itself might mean. My friend was trying to articulate that particular kind of subtly unnameable feeling. It can come when you find something that you thought had lost and had let go of. Perhaps you know what I mean.
Finding the word to describe something like this can feel like an urgent need. One is reluctant to select the obvious words because every one sounds, what?, incomplete, falling short. A poem might be needed to express the inexpressible through the magical combination of sound and sense. Nevertheless, between people, the joint attempt and failure to find the right word can also be expressive. The silence of the fruitless search creates connection and a clear shared understanding. The limitations of words can then be peacefully consigned to silence. The desert of that silence blooms in joy. It is very different from the wasteland of duty free and its false claims to restore us to the happiness we have lost. Sometimes, the best way to find what you are looking for is to admit that you have lost it for good.
The photo accompanying this week’s reflections shows a statue of a solitary Mary looking out over a vast, beautiful natural emptiness in County Cork, Ireland.
One wintry day while I was walking the hills over a stretch of Irish wilderness, I met this presence of Mary appearing out of the fog. Her statue stood looking over the bleak valley as the mist rolled around her. It moved me by its solitariness and the image of heart-felt compassion with both powerful detachment and all-embracing gentleness that was also almost impersonal. It recalled for me the deep reverence for Mary and the divine feminine in the Irish psyche through centuries of spiritual devotion and foreign occupation.
Many reports of apparitions, which don’t admit rational explanation, share common elements such as direct appearances to simple and poor young children, rather than priests or bishops or devout adults, and her call to social justice and peace as well as always to deeper prayer. Often these appearances have taken place in times and places of conflict. Characteristically at first the children’s reports are rejected by the ecclesiastical authorities. (I like the story of one child telling what she had seen to the bishop who rudely dismissed and tried to humiliate her. The girl replied ‘she told me to tell you what I have just said. She didn’t say I had to convince you’.)
For many people this stuff is hard to understand, partly because it cannot be rationalised or even psychologised. In fact it points to another dimension of reality and is an authentic element of a possible religious response to life. In the 1970’s when thousands of displaced Vietnamese were fleeing their war-torn country in small boats on dangerous seas many never made it to shore. One boat survived a vicious storm and on landing the passengers described an apparition of Kwan Ying, the maternal Buddhist goddess of compassion, comforting and accompanying them at the worst moment of the storm when they were about to sink.
To survive our present storm we need realignment of the feminine in a global patriarchal culture. Deepening our sense of reality and of the living God is essential but it involves more than changing language (although that is a necessary step). There is no single word, except the rather anonymous term ‘parent’ to convey the Father-Mother-hood of God. Another word to be conveyed to silence.
On All Saints Day 1950 the less than liberal Pope Pius XII announced the dogma of the Assumption. It had been a belief, now institutionalised, and long held by many Christians . For many it might have seemed out of date. Carl Jung saw it of supreme symbolic importance – the ‘hieros gamos (sacred marriage) in the pleroma’ which presages the future birth of the divine child. He saw the announcement as an attempt, no doubt unconscious, of the Catholic Church to move away from the ‘purely’ spiritual and masculine. Recently I realised that another great mind of this era, Jean Gebser, also thought it was a ‘renunciation of the excessively emphasised fatherhood of God that is itself a reduction of the divine and a reinstatement of the maternal principle to its rights’. Is this what Mary in the Irish Lenten wilderness was looking for?
The important insight is pointing to a future birth of humanity as a new ‘mutation’. A precondition of this, which needs immense maternal love, is to recognise the total failure of our present stage of human existence.
The remote statue of Mary in the Irish wilderness has avoided vandals and iconoclasts. In the 9th century however the Iconoclast controversy in Eastern Christianity led to widespread destruction of many works of sacred art. Hard to believe today, when it’s hard to get into many Orthodox churches so full are they of icons.
The religious mind, especially when it is politically influenced, has an unresolved conflict about the value of images. Islam and Judaism reject them entirely. Twenty years ago, the Taliban shocked the world by blowing up the 6th century states of the Buddha in Bamiyan that towered over the ancient Silk Road. In 17th century England Puritans of the Reformation desecrated much medieval art in the ancient cathedrals, fortunately with characteristic English moderation. The Chinese government did the same, more thoroughly, to cultural artefacts during the Cultural Revolution and more recently directed its iconoclastic hatred against Tibetan religious places of worship. Tourism today may be the best defender of these works of devotion – or idolatry, depending on your point of view. The ravaged site of Bamiyan is now a tourist attraction.
St Gregory of Nyssa gets behind this with his comment that every image of God is an idol, beginning with thoughts. The deeper Christian wisdom here is that if the interior or external image distracts us from the living God and from our own true nature as the image of God, then it has become an idol. It is not necessary to smash beautiful works of human sacred imagination but we do need to dissolve our inner attachments to mental and emotional images. The mantra rather than the hammer.
The episode of the Golden Calf in the Exodus story, as the Israelites trekked through their forty years in the wilderness, illuminates the cause and the cure of idolatry. When Moses was delayed in his interview with God on the mountain, the people got restless and said: ‘Come let us make us a god at the head of us’. They donated gold, fashioned the calf and had a rave. The interesting thing is how conscious and calculating they were. They knew this god was their own creation just as people who worship money today know they are making it. There’s no mystery in it at all, except the phenomenon of ‘deliberate hebetude’, my favourite expression for dumbing oneself down. Nothing sacred, transcendent or deep. Just a technique for avoiding what we do not want to face in ourselves. For the Israelites it was their inability to face the emptiness of waiting, the desert experience. The horror of the void soon becomes the horror of a created god that lacks divinity and so is a demon. And we know what demons are: gluttony, lust avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory and pride, to name a few.
So far, the cause. Next, the cure for idolatry. Moses comes back carrying the stone tablets of the law written with God’s own hand (quite a valuable work of art) and in rage smashes the tablets. The ultimate iconoclasm. Even God’s Law can be an idol. Then he destroys the golden calf, grinds it into powder, adds water and makes the people drink it. It must have tasted horrible but the poison was the medicine.
When we arrived in Bonnevaux we found a rather beautiful statue in the old chapel of a child and an older woman united in deep attention. Mary is often represented in sacred art as a young girl being taught to read by her mother. As soon as you see the book on the mother’s lap you realise where their unified consciousness is directed. Symbolically she is learning to understand the words and to absorb them until she is ready to fully absorb all words into the Word and allow it to take flesh in her.
This week we have welcomed the first students of the WCCM Academy here in Bonnevaux for their first residential week. It is a time to build a community of learning and to start to think with a beginner’s mind about what learning essentially is. We start with a discussion of the phrase of the Rule of Benedict: ‘we intend to start a school for the Lord’s service.’ He says this will not demand anything harsh, oppressive or burdensome although discipline will be necessary to correct errors and protect love.
The Academy is a school for contemplative living. So much of modern education has become harsh and burdensome because it has lost touch with its essential purpose of awakening the student to an ever-greater degree of consciousness. Most educational institutions have created an idol out of academic success in the service of high performance in a later career. Rather than expanding, consciousness contracts into a sequence of paper degrees by worshipping the golden calf of grades and qualifications. We hope in the Academy to relearn the art of learning: not acquiring knowledge but allowing knowledge to be embodied.
To learn we only need a beginner’s mind, fresh, curious and open to metanoia. With this mind, we don’t worry about looking bad or silly because it is obvious we can’t learn unless we know what we don’t know and move from ignorance to understanding. There’s no crippling ego reaction about being wrong. Failure and errors turn swiftly into new starting-points and teaching moments. There is little need to be harsh to ourselves, to feel oppressed by the challenges of moving from confusion to clarity or to find burdensome the yoke of the discipline that keeps us learning.
Success, competition and the desire to win can become dangers as soon as we acquire a certain level of competence. The time comes to learn something new. Yet continuity is also necessary. We change by remaining on the path and discovering the interconnectedness of all branches of knowledge. Now we are learning the most important thing. We are learning how to learn. The discipline of study produces fruit that lasts not only in character, stability and personal integration but in the fruits of the spirit awakened through the power of attention.
The interconnection with meditation then becomes obvious. As it arises from stillness and silence, the spring of self-knowledge refreshes the student’s mind. It teaches us that the school we are learning in exists not for what we get out of it but for the service of the Lord.
I can vaguely remember when Lent was Lent. As in a child’s play, many dramatic things were done seriously and unquestioningly. The Stations of the Cross, all the statues and crucifixes in churches were covered with purple cloth. This happened from midnight on the day before Ash Wednesday. There was no Gloria or Alleuia. Holy Water was removed from the stoups at the entrance. Everything had to be done correctly and you trusted the people who knew about it to do it on time. As a young child it was incomprehensible and magical because it was being done rightly. It preserved an enclave of enchantment in a world prostrate before the of altars mammon that were everywhere.
The faithful felt a curious effect during this religious desert of Lent. They were denied these comforting symbols and images together. Denying them, however, increased their mystique. When the Triduum (Friday, Saturday and Sunday of Holy Week) unleashed their flood of colours, alleluias, visual and musical exuberance, you knew with every sense that something had happened and that time was changed. Liturgy is a kind of sacred theatre that we cannot take seriously if we take it too seriously and lose a sense of its playfulness. You had to join in the game even just inwardly to be a real player.
The moment of transition, the shift from sandy, unsweetened Lent to the flowery, sweet music of Easter took place in the dark, during the Easter Vigil. The Resurrection being acclaimed was such a huge and irrational acclamation of faith that you felt it must be true even without understanding how on earth you could make sense of it.
In transitional moments time slows down. Somehow, by first denying the religious mind its usual diet of images and feelings, we can be better prepared by the rich symbolism of the Easter Mysteries for entering into their stillness at their core. If time is being stopped the Risen Christ feels more fully present.
For some, the slow movement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto brings the absorbed listener almost to the end of time. There are moments in prayer, too, which are timefree, or almost. As long as they can be observed, with even a trace of objective thinking, they will cease to be present. They will take on the nature of an experience, already a memory, something belonging to the past. Thought, as we think of it, also stops when time stops.
Lenten rituals are a way of disrupting time so that we can slow time down. Covering the statues in purple is better than smashing them but the intention is the same. Even to the confused and confined fundamentalist mind there remains a sense that the essence of God is nothing, no thing, nothing that can be thought. Yet we can say nothing about God that stops us from saying the opposite equally truly: God can also be known in every thing and through every human sense.
Stillness is not fixation. The truth lies in undulation, a smooth wave motion, up and down, in and out. When we are natural and in harmony and our demons are sleeping, the opposites of life that cause us such violent distress are resolved peacefully. Then, when we are at peace, we know ourselves to be energised and brimming with potential. We can then rebuild war-torn countries and heal broken hearts.
We have all thought of doing something that we more often advise others to do, to ‘step back’ from the confusion and hassle of life, to get better perspective, to allow emotions to calm and make difficult decisions in a wiser way. In a healthier culture than the kind ours has become, life itself provided these opportunities even if they weren’t always taken up. There were pauses, religious seasons like Lent or slow travel in uncomfortable carriages rather than our fast travel in uncomfortable planes and trains
Today we have to make a personal effort to step back from the torrent of the ‘ten thousand things’, the swarm of distractions, deadlines, demands for immediate response and the difficulties of daily life. (Even at Bonnevaux. My computer just froze and I had to restart).
Step back now, if you have time, and search for Chapter 16 of the Tao Te Ching. Here’s a taster:
Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind rest at peace.
The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return. They grow and flourish and then return to the source. Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.
The impact of Covid could be broadly described as either bringing people into great distress or bringing people to rebalance and pre-prioritise. I know many in the second group who intended to learn their lesson of Covid, to step back, but who quickly became as swamped by the ten thousand things as they were before, or even more.
Mary, looking out over the mist-covered mountains, is a symbol, not just of the neglected maternal side of God, but of contemplation as an integral part of human flourishing. What she didn’t understand, she ‘pondered’. The Greek word (symballousa) is only used once in the Bible to describe how she responded to the challenges of the pain-filled and wonder-full mystery she was caught up in. It is the root of the word symbol, which means to bring or throw together.
To perceive symbolically is more than merely thinking about something or analysing it looking for an answer or explanation. It is to ‘symbolise’ it, that is, to bring it together into the whole. For that we need to step back from thinking for a while. It doesn’t mean we have to go to a mist-covered mountain. Our twice-daily meditations are sufficient.

John 9:1-41 – The man born blind
This is the story of Jesus healing the man born blind. After he had healed him, his disciples asked Jesus ‘who sinned, this man or his parents?’ A naïve view of karma. If something bad happens someone must have done something bad to deserve it. Jesus who embodies a higher law than karma, says that in this case no one sinned. The meaning of the blindness and its healing is as a manifestation of mercy.
Jesus then disappeared into the crowd but the man he had healed fell victim of the jealousy of the Pharisees. When he failed to deny what had happened, he was expelled. Jesus hears of this and seeks him out so that the cure he had performed can be upgraded to a full healing. The symbolic meaning of the event is manifested when Jesus reveals his true self to the man. It is not described from the perspective of the man, as the glorious self-disclosure of Krishna to Arjuna is in the Bhagavad Gita, but the man is shown something utterly overwhelming, surpassing the ordinary mind. The man declares his belief in what he has been seen and falls down and worships him.
The last part of the story zooms back to the pharisees who have been watching all this and try ineffectually to continue their confrontation with Jesus. In response, he says, ‘it is for judgement that I have come into the world’. This contradicts what he says on another occasion (Jn 12:47) that ‘I did not come to judge the world but to save (heal) it’. The larger and deeper meaning of anything depends upon seeing how it and its opposite can merge.
In the 15th century Nicholas of Cusa was on his way back from Constantinople where he had been part of an unsuccessful attempt to reunite the Eastern and Western Churches. He said on his journey he had a mystical vision which made him see that the ‘least imperfect name for God’ was ‘the union of opposites’. Jesus says he did not come to judge and he says he came for judgement.
The Greek word for ‘judgement’ gives us a frequently used word in our news bulletins today: crisis. Crises judge us; they make us investigate, weigh the different sides and expect us to decide what to do. All of these are aspects of judging. Blaming and condemnation may be necessary but they are not the essence of right judgement. The pharisees on the other hand (we have a tribe of pharisees operating undercover in our psyches) were harsh and unfair judges who leapt to condemnation before pondering the case. It is these nasty judges, operating within us unconsciously, whom Jesus does judge and call out of their hiding places into the light of consciousness. To be called into self-knowledge like this is about healing the ego-domination of the psyche, being saved from our dark side.
We live in a highly judgmental culture. At times, commonly on social media, it generates the violent collective mind of the lynch mob. When someone, especially a figure who has been put on a pedestal, has their dark side exposed, do we judge in the right sense or, taken over by our own shadow, do we rush to condemnation and revenge? Jesus doesn’t say we should hide the dark side. But he says, if those who cannot see, deny their own blindness they have a guilt that sticks to them in a very ugly and dangerous way.
We don’t appreciate something until we lose it. Often that is true but not necessarily. If we live consciously and protect the inner space for joy to bubble through from its hidden spring, we will fully appreciate the good things of life and when we lose them, we will be able to let them go. And wait.
But what if we find something wonderful for the first time? Like a blind person suddenly being able to see the world. (Jesus restores sight to at least eight individuals, more than any other affliction). I can’t remember where I saw this particular colourful display of fruit but whenever I see fruits and vegetables on proud, exuberant show like this in a market I delight. Such humble and glorious things. Whatever else there may be going on in your life to be sad about, the colours, enticing shapes, sensual textures and promise of sweetness from these fruits of the earth claim their undeniable moment of celebration. It’s hard not to touch and squeeze them, juggle with them or, of course, eat them. Imagine seeing this eruption of colour with its forty shades of orange for the first time after a life of greyness.
There is no language to describe colour adequately because colour is its own language. As, too, is the experience of contemplation which is in its own way also an energising and en-joyable vision of beauty. Aquinas said contemplation is the simple enjoyment of the truth. Why, then, should religion so often have a problem with contemplation? Why were the pharisees so jealous and upset by Jesus restoring sight to the blind? In many religious cultures throughout history, not least in the Christian, religious officials have felt threatened, furious or violently repressive towards manifestations of contemplation. Branches of Islam persecuted the Sufis. St John of the Cross spent nine months imprisoned by his brethren in a tiny cell with a single small window high up in the wall, the ‘dark night’ of his soul that became one of the great works of Christian mysticism.
I think some of our recent and contemporary spiritual teachers would have suffered a similar fate if their more extreme critics could have had their way. Why? No doubt, politics, power and jealousy are partial answers. More essentially, it is the misunderstanding of contemplation itself. Let’s say, theology is the mental thinking-aspect of religion. Liturgy is its physical and emotional. Contemplation is its spiritual essence: when Jesus speaks of prayer he teaches contemplation, not theology or external forms. Religious institutions can control theological orthodoxy and enforce liturgical correctness, but the contemplative is beyond human control. It is beyond mind and body because it unites them.
Religion likes to replace contemplation with mental prayer. This has hijacked and confused the language we use. ‘Meditation’ which is the way to receive the gift of contemplation came to mean thinking, discursive reflection which is a fine form of prayer but not for the ‘inner room’ of the heart. Even ‘the word ‘contemplation’ suffered the same fate. This coup justified the heavy-handed repression of contemplation by the ignorance and fear aroused by the radical poverty of laying thought aside – or interior silence as it is called.
Why does this matter? The problem is that religion without a proper understanding and respect for contemplation becomes a dangerous, rogue elephant on the human stage.
Yesterday we started with healing blindness, moved on to a barrow of colourful fruit and ended with religion like a rogue elephant trampling humanity when it forgets what contemplation means – and that it is meant for everyone.
I don’t think we will ever have a perfect religion which always holds the balance of contemplation, theology and externals, any more than we will ever have a perfect democracy. By nature, religion and democracy are flawed. In the heavenly Jerusalem (Rev 22), there is no temple and God is the unelected absolute ruler. But, as a political friend of mine says, ‘to avoid the worst is also a good thing. So, we have to do our best with both religion and politics even if it means getting thrown into prison or burned at the stake.
The loss of contemplation as the essential truth of religion matters: because it is the central truth and meaning of the human journey. Aristotle said that a ‘life of contemplation is the ‘best and happiest life for both gods and humans’. If you don’t trust pagan wisdom, Aquinas said ‘all other human activities seem to be ordered to the goal of freeing us for the activity of contemplation’. If you think this means just thinking about heavenly things, St Bonaventure explains: “For this passover to be perfect, we must suspend all the operations of the mind and we must transform the peak of our affections, directing them to God alone. This is a sacred mystical experience.’
Lacking some taste of the sweet fruit and sight of the beautiful colour of contemplation, this might seem like dangerous ant-intellectualism. Or, as some critics think, meditation is a blanking out of the mind and that will let the demons in; whereas in fact it strengthens the mind and kicks the demons out.
Absolutising thought is a common human error. It is prevalent in our techno-scientific culture and leads to a preference of virtual reality to the real thing. For example, Zoom is a not bad thing because it has opened up wonderful new possibilities for encounters and exchanges. But as most people agree, real meetings are better. Without them zoom makes us zombies. Only absolutising something is dangerous because it reduces the dimensions of reality we can be conscious in and that truth demands. Eventually it would lead to reality being replaced by illusion. ‘Democrats are absolutely bad, so they are cannibalistic paedophiles’. Ridiculous, yes, but believers in it in the US peaked last year at 22%.
Absolutising thought, in the context of religious experience, is just as absurd and dangerous. The word ‘absolute’, however, does mean something valuable – perfect, complete. It is even related to ‘absolve’, to set free and declare innocent. But we should not absolutise something without also concretising it. Surprisingly, the word concrete essentially means to grow with (con-crescere), to unite together in a body.
Contemplation – and meditation in its original sense of preparing us for the grace of contemplation – is the marriage of the absolute and the concrete. It has many offspring.