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 5^th 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.

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 15^th 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.

Last Sunday was called ‘Laetare Sunday’ and, in the midpoint of Lent, had a distinctly upbeat tone. The liturgy gave a view of the season’s outcome in the celebration of Easter. In these reflections I have been trying to show that the opportunity of taking Lent seriously goes way beyond giving up a few treats or indulgences. In the same way Ramadan is more than fasting during the day and eating too much after sundown. Lent really shapes time for us to understand the process of human metanoia which is continuous from conception to expiration. Benedict says that the life of the monk – that is whoever ‘truly seeks God’ – is a continuous Lent.

Benedict was nothing if not aware of human fragility and lack of mindfulness. So, he says, ‘Since few have the strength for this, we urge the entire community during these days of Lent to keep its manner of life most pure and to wash away in this holy season the negligences of other times. This we can do … by devoting ourselves to prayer with tears, to reading, to compunction of heart and self-denial. During these days, therefore, we will add to the usual measure of our service by way of private prayer and abstinence from food or drink … so with the joy of the Holy Spirit (1 Thess 1:6, let each one deny himself some food, drink, sleep, needless talking and idle jesting, and look forward to holy Easter with joy and spiritual longing. (Chapter 49).

At any mid-point it’s a good practice to look backwards and forwards. This helps us re-converge in the now, to be more conscious of the present and sink deeper into the freedom from time it offers. For living with an ever deepening and expanding consciousness, there are no fixed formulas, like a course of antibiotics or buying a ticket and letting the train do the rest, that require we only do them to the letter for us to be saved.

At Bonnevaux we have been holding the first residential week for the new WCCM Academy. Nearly all of the first cohort of 35 students have been here with members of the Faculty also here in person or online. Soon we will start the online classes and meetings with tutors that will unfold in the two-year programme aimed at supporting ‘contemplative living’, in whatever lifestyle or stage of life the students may be. It has been an exceptionally joyful week with an almost instantaneous meeting of minds and hearts in friendship and the discovery of deep commonality. It was well-organised but the spirit of Bonnevaux was also powerfully at work. It wasn’t hard to have a happy Laetare Sunday.

The day before we visited the oldest monastery in Europe, our friends at Ligugé, a short distance from Bonnevaux. The Abbot, Dom Christophe, spent the afternoon with us, showing us the foundations of the 1^st century Roman villa on which the 4^th century monastery was built and, with great good humour and charm, shattering the pious illusions about monasticism to which those who live outside are prone. He also gave us new insights into the prayer of lectio, spiritual reading, the partner to meditation. We returned to our home in the good valley with proof: that we share the human journey with everyone despite our differences of calling or culture or age; that we always have more to learn from and to teach to each other; and that when we can say ‘it’s good to be home’, we are beginning to see that we are at home everywhere in the vastness of the universe; and that Lent isn’t such a hard thing.

In many zen and Christian desert stories a breakthrough in consciousness can be triggered by a trivial incident or a single remark from a wise teacher. They are unpredictable moments of enlightenment which seem to pop out of nowhere but which have been in waiting during a long hidden process of preparation. When the right moment arrives it is irrepressible. A long-existing self-delusion or a fatal projection is undone in an instant

This example is from the early 2^nd century apocryphal work the Acts of John. One day St John was sitting outside when a partridge flew down and started playing in the sand in front of him. (You can check sand partridges on YouTube. What John was watching was probably a sand bath.) John was absorbed and amused in watching the creature playing when an old priest came by and saw the great man wasting his time enjoying the antics of a partridge and was secretly shocked. As in many such stories, including scenes of Jesus in the gospels, John read the thoughts (or maybe interpreted the facial expression) of his critic.

He turned to the priest and said ‘my son it would be better for you to look at a partridge playing in the sand than to be getting up to the shameful things you are doing, and with which are contaminating yourself. This is why God, who expects the repentance and conversion of everyone, has brought you here today. I don’t need a partridge playing in the sand. The partridge is your soul.’ The priest instantly knew he was known and fell to the ground and asked Christ’s beloved disciple to pray over him. John did and gave him teaching and instructions and sent him home.

‘The partridge is your soul’. The insight that brought about this sudden moment of metanoia was not only his knowledge of what the priest was thinking and of his secret life. More profoundly, it was his awareness of what we would today call projection. The priest, who was involved in some kind of shameful behaviour that dishonoured his true nature, was projecting his guilty self on both the innocent partridge, which was only doing what it was its pure nature to do, and upon John, whom he condemned for enjoying it.

The steps that lead us to judge and condemn others can be subtle and complex and reinforced by strong, deceptive self-righteousness. Argument or rational explanations from outside rarely have the sharpness necessary to penetrate this concrete bunker of self-preservation. But there is one missile that can do so. It is insight into the major root of the problem fired with crystal-clear honesty and precision. It crosses the wasteland surrounding the bunker in a loving way that is intended to release and not to destroy its target.

‘You are the partridge’. Not a noble beast, perhaps, but lovely in God’s eyes and in the eyes of those who see with those eyes, lovely and worthy of contemplation.

Know yourself to be lovely and play in that innocence as you are made to do.

Some years ago, I used to have interesting discussions with a Buddhist monk about my age about the way the key ideas found in our respective traditions either converged or diverged – or both. I originally thought that the idea of love and of metta would be convergences. Not so.

Metta is one of the ‘four immeasurables’ of Buddhism. It describes selfless loving-kindness, fellowship and benevolence. It is closely allied to another of the immeasurables, karuna, which is generally translated as compassion. For Buddhists the contrast between the two is very subtle. I only have a page so we won’t go into all the discussions I had with my fellow monk. What surprised me, was the vehemence with which he dismissed the Christian idea of love as being equivalent to metta. For him love suggested a form of attachment, with all the seductions, traps and tricks of eros: control, possessiveness and, sadly, the inevitable prospect of further and deeper suffering. You may have met people who declare they will ‘never fall in love again’ as the pop song of the sixties proclaimed. At least until they did

I could see his point and so we also spoke of the other meanings of love in Christian thought. But he never accepted that love could be a translation of metta because it had too much eros in it. Eros, of course, is not bad: at least Pope Benedict XVI didn’t think so in his first encyclical on the theme of 1 Jn 4:16 (‘whoever loves lives in God and God lives in him’). The Pope argued the need to integrate eros into the ‘God is love’ definition. Nietzsche of course said that Christianity found eros as a god and tuned him into a devil. He also had a point.

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges Christianity confronts today is to get its understanding of love straight – this would include understanding why the Ugandan parliament’s penalty of death for expressing gay love is so completely un-Christian. This task involves a lot of reflection, but the reflection also demands a lot of contemplation. Only in contemplation can the full meaning of ‘God is love’ be felt, tasted and experienced. In the contemplative state of mind, we discover that we are loved and that is the discovery of our source, our true self and the mystery of being itself. It is painfully unsentimental and explosively liberating.

My monastic brother, who later fell in love and got married, helped me to understand how we should use the word love. At the same time the ambiguity between the love of the pop song and the Song of Songs and the first letter of St John is wonderfully potent too. It affords us an insight into those most painful human situations, especially in divorce courts and murder trials, when those who have fallen in love have then fallen so viciously and destructively out of love.

Certainly, then, when eros collapses all the forces of metta, karuna, koinonia (fellowship) and agape (the main Christian word for love) need to be brought in to prevent the worst and to repair the broken.

Rome. The word evokes history’s longest-lasting empire, so long no one agrees exactly when it started or ended but a full millennium. A civilisation but also brutal and corrupt as all empires are. Or, as a word it also means the church that flourished through persecution by the empire to partnership with it and eventually in some ways succeeding it: the ‘catholic’ or universal church. Like empires global churches also fall into the self-contradicting pitfalls of power. Walking through Rome as a tourist or a pilgrim is like visiting an exhibition of moral teachings on the seductions of controlling others and putting ideas and ambitions before people. And, as we have been noticing several times in these Lent reflections, the interlacing of good and evil is inescapable in anything human beings do or aspire to.

Rome is an architectural jumble of exposed layers of architectural history, temples, forums, ancient shopping malls, stadiums that hosted mass sadism and churches that

honour mystics and saints. It is a beautiful chaos overlaid by a fully alive modern city, capital of a member of the G7, restaurants and bars, luxury good stores and cheap trinkets, cars, buses, tourist buses and clicking iPhones. It is a multi-channel swirl of landscapes and soundscapes. This is obvious but as Wittgenstein said, ‘the aspects of things that are most important are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity’. We can fail to see something precisely because it is before our eyes.

Yesterday I spent most of the day yesterday in the Benedictine university of San Anselmo. The rhythm of life that S Benedict lived and taught after he had run away from his studies in Rome in the 6^th century because of the low morals of the school is lived her daily while students from around the world come to prepare for their later work in life. In the evening I met with a wonderful Italian Buddhist group whose journeys wove both traditions.

The obvious feeling as I leave today is of the rise and fall of all things, empires churches and of each of us. At the end of an era things fall apart, centres cannot hold and this includes ideas themselves which once animated great institutions. Our present time is also experiencing a great dissolution. Some fight to prevent it. Others, led from behind by a growing proportion of contemplatives, look to see how what must be discarded and what midwifed into something new and untried.

Jung said that to give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation. The new time is also time-free when we see the eternal newness of the now. This perception, the result of continuous metanoia prevents us from collapsing into the collapse. We see it is chaos but still a beautiful one.