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.