Today, the Annunciation, is the real feast of the incarnation, nine months before Christmas Day. It must be one of the most frequently imagined and represented events in human history: an angel appearing to a young girl probably between fourteen and nineteen. (Shakespeare’s Juliet was thirteen). The angel told her not to be afraid but that she was chosen to bear a child, whose name would be Jesus. Mary gave her assent and opened her will to that of God in a very simple formula: Here I am… What you have said, so be it. The conception happened in her surrender to her being ‘overshadowed’ by the Holy Spirit.

This story is of the greatest mythic simplicity which modern rationalistic minds find as difficult to understand as it does magic and any post-rational vision of reality. We need to ask ourselves if we would like to understand it. But when we hear it for the first time, we need only to be open to it, to listen without dismissing it as ‘just a fairy tale’, and to hear it again and again until a feeling of awe replaces our scepticism. Maybe for us the focal point is not imagining how beautiful the angel was but instead focus on Mary’s existential dilemma. And her swift transition from rational scepticism – ‘how can this be?’ – to the total personal surrender of ‘Here am I; I am the Lord’s servant; as you have spoken so be it.’ (Lk 1:26-38).

Paying attention to this is more respectful and effective than trying to deconstruct the words or imagine ‘what, if anything, actually happened’. Sacred texts in all traditions resolutely resist this sort of treatment and insist instead that we surrender to a way of unknowing if we are to understand. The tender, powerful beauty of the paintings of the Annunciation found in churches and galleries the world over, help us to trust the story as a channel of sacred truth without our yet understanding it.

We aren’t supposed to celebrate the Annunciation in Holy Week so there is another gospel which describes Mary of Bethany, her sister Martha and their brother Lazarus whom he raised from the dead, entertaining Jesus at an evening meal a week before his death. Mary, the symbol of contemplation opens a bottle of very expensive perfume, ‘oil of nard’. Nard was associated with a beautiful scent but also with its properties as a sedative and a medicinal herb. Mary anoints the feet of Jesus with the ointment; and he defends her gesture when Judas attacks her for wasting something valuable that could have been sold and given to the poor.

Both gospels defy exclusively rational understanding. But also both are like a key to opening the mind to the intelligence of the heart. This brings a widening of our tent, which is the enclosed space consciousness and our way of judging everything – until we discover, through beauty or love, in words or silence that we each have within us a capacity to see beyond the surface of things and trust the unknown depth. ‘We cannot create experience, we must undergo it.’

The plot thickens and quickens in John’s description of the Last Supper. Jesus is reclining at the dinner, surrounded by his close companions. He again feels deeply troubled, knowing he will be betrayed and tells them so. When he dips a piece of bread into the dish and hands it to Judas, ‘Satan enters Judas’ and, when Jesus tells him to do what he has to do, Judas leaves the table to go and tell the authorities where they can arrest Jesus later that night. None of the others understand what is happening.

What is happening? The shadow is emerging from the shadows and, if not yet visible to all, its influence is and will be felt by everyone. Although the gospels tend to demonise Judas as a traitor, Jesus, while knowing what he is doing, sees his betrayal in the large perspective. This global perspective is the fruit of a profound interior life which enables us, and him pre-eminently, to understand every action in terms of its ultimate effect. That Jesus sees this action in this perspective, personally painful as it is at this dark moment, is made clear by his comment that it triggers his own ‘glorification’.

Glory is a slippery word as it suggests something external, lustrous, dressed up, dripping in medals and jewels. The real meaning is much more about revealing the value of someone as they truly are. One literal translation suggests: to ‘ascribe weight by recognising real substance and value’. One cannot glorify oneself. One has to be recognised for who one truly is.

The radical paradox is that Judas’ betrayal is part of a process that reveals who Jesus truly is. Because of his profound interior life and clarity of self-knowledge – still evolving until his last breath – Jesus understands this. This self-awareness explains the equanimity and peace that we see in him throughout his coming Passion.

As always, this understanding of the scripture flashes us back a message – ‘and what about you, o reader, what about your interior life?’

As the mystical understanding of Jesus developed in the early church, awareness grew in the whole Christian community about the importance of the interior life in each individual. The words of Jesus revealing the power of the inner truth of his self-knowledge became better understood and recognised. With this came the insight that to follow him means to grow in the interior life, to expand the perspectives of our understanding, to deepen and clarify our consciousness.

This becomes explicit not just in the lecture rooms of the early Christians but primarily in the cells and hermitages of the monastic movement spreading rapidly in the desert. The basic understanding there was to develop interiority through deep attention to oneself, while avoiding the obvious pitfall of increasing rather than transcending our egoism. Then as now the danger of contemplative life is narcissism. To avoid it we need guides, companions, discipline in practice and a robust sense of humour.

Aren’t these two of the kind of experiences which we can’t create or control but only undergo and, to some extent, perhaps, share with others whom we trust? By sharing I don’t mean we can really describe or explain them because, as soon as we try, we sound nonsensical. If you are going to speak meaningful nonsense to someone you first need to feel trust.

First, the sense of sheer wonder that the world exists and that we exist as part of it. It is wonder without the judgement that ‘I’m happy’ or ‘I am discontented’. Wonder does not even require we settle the question of why the world exists? Wonder is a pure response to what anything is in itself, without even comparing it with anything else. Childlike wonder, humbling and delightful at the same time.

Second is the conviction that everything will be OK, in the fullest sense of those two letters. Mother Julian clearly possessed it, when she said: ‘all will be well and every kind of thing will be well’. It can fill us even when appearances make us feel the exact opposite, that everything is doomed and will collapse into non-existence by tea-time.

When we play host to these experiences, we ‘feel better’ even though they don’t solve all our problems – except perhaps the big double-headed problem of despair and boredom. What makes us feel better, then, when we feel in a state of wonder and fundamental security? Whatever it is, it is like meditation – which doesn’t change external events in a magical way and at first doesn’t even numb us against the pain of uncertainty. But meditation is a quiet, gentle way of preparing us to welcome these two experiences and helping them become permanent guests and eventually co-residents in the house of being.

I trust you will forgive me if this sounds nonsense. When we think or speak about anything on the other side of language and thought we make nonsense. To make sense of it why not call the state of wonder and radical confidence ‘faith’. Belief, with which we usually confuse it, is influenced by faith; but faith itself is independent of belief. Faith is spiritual knowledge.

As we enter into the meaning of Holy Week and allow its central story to read us and show us our place in it, faith is the path we are following. We test and reset our beliefs against the experience of faith. Hiding behind faith is hope and secreted in hope is love. Like the eternal engine of God, these three are one.

From the first century of the Christian era St Ignatius of Antioch reminds every seeker today that

the beginning is faith, the end is love and the union of the two is God. Everything else follows on these and lead to perfect goodness.

The idea of sacrifice leads us deep into how human beings live and understand life. We are prepared to renounce ourselves for the sake of our children, country, cause or friends we love. Parenthood is a sacrificial offering extending over many years. But also the idea of sacrifice has shaped religious consciousness since the dawn of time. When we entered the magical way of seeing the world sacrifice became a way of influencing the higher forces and gods that controlled us. We give you this so that you will be gracious and give us what we ask.

Deeper than magic, however, sacrifice could also illuminate the deep, loving involvement of humanity and the divine powers. In Aztec mythology, Nanativatzin was the humblest of the gods. So that he could continue to shine as the life-giving sun over the earth and its inhabitants he sacrificed himself in fire.

The Eucharist fulfils this primordial religious practice and overcomes the dualism separating God and humanity and the community itself. We don’t need magic anymore and there is no fear in celebrating the great oneness. Yet, there is a great diversity in how different traditions express just how the sharing of bread and wine fuses Jesus’ offering of himself both at the Last Supper and on the Cross. None of the different styles of Eucharist with their different theologies would be celebrated, however, if it were not that doing so raised our consciousnesses of his real presence – in the fellowship of believers, in the Word and also in the ordinariness of bread and wine. In her poetic account of her mystical experience of Christ, Simone Weil included a down-to-earth eucharistic moment.

That bread truly had the taste of bread… the wine tasted of the sun and of the soil on which that city was built.

Although the Eucharist has been horribly politicised and exploited throughout history it survives in its original and spiritual freedom as a symbol of both the essential unity and the wild diversity of Christian faith. It will survive the present deconstruction of the institutions and will be re-discovered as a sacrament of the mystical Body expressing and nurturing the contemplative life.

From childhood, the gospel descriptions of the last days and hours of Jesus’ life have gripped and fascinated me as something of supreme importance and meaning. Each part of the story is part of me. As we prepare for good Friday here at Bonnevaux after a rather fun Holy Thursday celebration, it could feel like ‘well this is life’: celebration today, bad news or worse tomorrow. Does it have any meaning, this cycle of joy and misery? Or is it just about accepting what we have to? But, asking that feels like missing the point, looking for explanations where none exist.

When you can’t explain something, give statistics. Overall, the gospels give a disproportionate amount of space to describing these last hours : 30% of all the gospel texts about this 33-year-old man is given to his last two or three days. John, the deepest gospel gives 43% and 40% from Mark, the shortest and first gospel. It feels better to have measured it even though the gospels still do not give any explanation of its meaning. Why is his death so important? Why couldn’t more of his earlier life, his personality, especially his teachings, have been included and the last moments reduced?

So, although the Good Friday is so significant to me I cannot easily say why. What I was taught originally – Jesus died for us because of original sin – is the classic ‘atonement theory’. Even when I was young it didn’t convince me although I didn’t argue with it. Wittgenstein, who believed the Resurrection could only be understood by love, said that ‘whereof we cannot speak we must remain silent.’

I’ll squeeze in a few more words to explain why this response of silence can be applied to the attempt to explain the death of Jesus. First, that the details are unforgettably powerful – the last words (Father forgive them for they know not what they do; Today you will be with be in paradise (to the thief crucified beside him); I am thirsty; It is accomplished.) The scenes like carrying the cross, the soldiers casting lots, the triple denial of Peter. They all seem highly significant, inevitable, predictable, fulfilling destiny but unexplained and inexplicable.

One explanation is that the description is not just an historical narrative but a collective memory filtered through the present experience of the Risen Jesus. It is as if Jesus is telling the story himself: not to give explanations but to draw us closer to himself by our free choice.

Why tell the story at all if he had not risen?

In the Good Friday liturgy – like a global wake repeated annually – there is a reading of the Passion that stops at his burial. But the stunningly eloquent explanation is the Veneration of the Cross. People are invited to come up in silence – if they wish – and kneel before, or kiss, or simply touch the wood of the cross in silence.

When I do, I feel – perhaps like all who come forward – as if it is something definitive and authentic and I don’t need to explain it. We don’t have to justify what we love. More important than an explanation is a real encounter with a real person in a new kind of reality.

For some time death remains very hypothetical in the human panorama of life. After the brief immortality of youth, and with our first experience of losing someone we love, death seems an increasing possibility. Even when we have the inexplicable grace of accompanying someone we love to the point where ‘it is accomplished’ and they breathe their last as we hold their hand, the actual moment falls like the blade of a guillotine. As on Holy Saturday, there is a great silence, absence and bottomless emptiness.

The way a person dies can expand the portals through which the grace of death – confronting us with the barest face of truth – sweeps over us. As they hang on their cross waiting, they may be peaceful, confident, accepting and even conspicuously full of wonder at what they are seeing and being summoned to and welcomed by. We may not see it exactly as they do but we see something of it by seeing that they see it. For a moment, because of our irritating ego, we may even feel left out and forgotten as they are irresistibly drawn into what they are seeing. When they take their last breath, this shared vision appears to end, like the falling of a stage curtain at the end of a performance. We are left alone with our memory, in an ever- depleted world, as they pass beyond all the ways we have grown used to recognising them.

No more powerful words have ever been written that communicate this wonder, peace with pain and searing grief than those we heard yesterday. We see what they saw of what he was seeing through a memory passed on by those who were there and suffered changed by what they saw, but could not explain. Unlike most memories, however, it did not start to weaken from the day after and eventually fail and enter the great forgetfulness that consumes everything. The hand we are holding begins to lose its human warmth, still precious but no longer belonging to the person we loved and lost.

As she wept, she peered into the tomb.. ‘they have taken my Lord away and I do not know where they have put him’.

Holy Saturday is a state of mind: a neutral zone between what we know and do not know. It is too full of emptiness and the absence is too present and the silence is deafening.

We should not imagine anything. It is a day to make meditation the priority.

It is when you say goodbye to someone that you understand what the time you spent together really meant. The ending of something allows you to see it as a whole, beginning, middle and end, and its meaning is easier to grasp. You might feel sorrow at the separation or the loss about to occur. You might sense some missed opportunities, which makes it feel you not only had a wonderful time together but also that something is incomplete and there is a residue of unrealised potential.

Maybe this is why Irish goodbyes take so long, so that people have time to reflect on all these flavours of meaning before they leave. But, probably not, they just enjoy talking, and people tend to talk more at the end because perhaps there will not be another opportunity.

Saying goodbye – as Jesus is doing in many of the passages of scripture we will read between now and Holy Week – the week of the long goodbye – impresses on us that what is past can never be repeated. We may say ‘au revoir’ or ‘hasta la vista’ or ‘see ya again soon’ – but we know that, if and when we do, we will be different people. We will recognise each other but how much will have been forgotten, discarded or have wholly faded from the pages of memory. In a sense, then, at every future reunion we will be starting again. Every farewell is a death undergone in the hope of a resurrection. But the certainty of hope – which is faith – does not mean that death does not transform and transfigure everything. Understandably, we say Let’s not leave it too long before next time.

There is a uniqueness and unrepeatability in every encounter, all relationships and contact, however brief or enduring, intimate or superficial. Uniqueness is the fingerprint of God in this life on everything in time and space.

Nicholas of Cusa was a great Christian thinker of the 15^th century – cardinal and active church reformer – seen today as a transition between the medieval and the modern world. He anticipated many themes of modernity. His key insight was the ‘coincidence of opposites’ as being the ground of truth and so an especially good way of describing God. It means that God no longer needs to be thought of as separate and outside the human and natural world that He had called into being. He is here with us even when He is absent and absent, or self-concealing, when He feels most present. I learned recently that Nicholas was the first person to study plant growth and see that plants gain nourishment from the air – and that air has weight. Amazing, how much we can do in life when we are not wasting time with time-saving devices and trying to make our lives more convenient or productive.

Approaching God as the ground of being unites even the most polarised objects of consciousness in the ‘ever-present origin’ and widens the tent of consciousness which is our home in this universe. This changes even the finality of death, and so makes the daily goodbyes a little easier.

A key feature of Indian spiritual teaching is maya. It originally meant the magic power by which gods could convince humans that the unreal is real. Later it denoted the cosmic force that makes the whole phenomenal world convincingly real and enduring. This can be an attractive teaching at the mental level but a frightening one when it comes to experiencing and realising it for oneself.

It’s attractive because it seems to offer an escape route – should you ever need it or decide to risk taking it – out of the problems of this world into a real world imagined as a celestial resort wholly composed of peace and joy and selfless staff. Ramana Maharshi, the embodiment if anyone is of the wisdom of the eastern mind, is characteristically nondual about this. Yes, the world as we see and suffer it is unreal, like an image projected onto a screen or the words written on a blank page. But this concept of its unreality is a thorn used to remove a thorn. Once we have actually verified, the illusory nature of the world, as a projection of our minds dominated by ego-forces, we no longer have to reject it.

Ramana said: ‘At the level of the spiritual seeker you have got to say that the world is an illusion. There is no other way. When someone forgets that he is Brahman, who is real, permanent and omnipresent, and deludes himself into thinking that he is a body in the universe which is filled with bodies that are transitory, and labours under that delusion, you have got to remind him that the world is unreal and a delusion.’ But when you see through its illusory nature you see that God and the universe are one, the paper and the words on it are one.

Is this a problem solved? Or a path indicated? Only practice and patience can lead us gradually to see exactly what the ‘illusory nature of the world’ means. If we don’t see its meaning, we steal the idea to increase our illusory world and narrow our vision of reality. Yet experience proves that the world we think we live in as real is a projection of fears, desires and misreadings. Of course we want to escape the pain of this. But it is its illusory nature itself we should first be working on.

A practice of meditation will do this with an, at first, temporary and, eventually, unbroken effect. We can at any moment cease to worry and rage, simply by turning to the golden radiance of the kingdom within us. It is close at hand even if the path seems narrow. Change your mind, redirect the beam of your attention and place your trust in the reality that appears.

Is this a seductive call to separate us from those we love and to coldly turn our attention from a suffering world that we should rather bring engaged compassion to? First, we should come to the place where illusion and reality confront and then make the choice before we prejudge.

Recently I was on an immensely long and steep escalator at an airport. I don’t like heights but I turned around to look down. I saw a separated family regrouping themselves. As I went higher, they receded and became smaller but I saw the efforts happening in an ever-greater space. As I became more distant, I could also feel closer. Maybe dying is like this.

You cannot tell by observation when the kingdom of God will appear. You cannot say ‘look here it is or there it is’… for the kingdom is within, outside, among, between, around you. To think we can see it located anywhere except everywhere simultaneously is maya.

The Passion of Christ, like innocent suffering everywhere, suggests how wonderfully and tragically we are interwoven as human beings. It is a very crude and often cruel understanding of karma to say that when bad things happen it’s a result of our own actions. There is such a thing as chance and, although everything except Being itself has a cause, causes can be random. It’s not all about bad luck, however, there is the power of darkness arising from the action of a deluded individual, such as a global tyrant, which affects the world and whose effects last for generations.

By darkness I am thinking of ignorance, unenlightened consciousness and the incapacity to feel the feelings of others. Think of the ripple effect of the Holocaust or the pain and resentment of the Palestinian children in Gaza today or an incident of child abuse in an ordinary family that takes decades to be exposed. The interdependence of human beings is so astonishingly infinite in its nature that nothing except the principle of unity can explain it or cure us when we have been wounded by chance or darkness itself.

Yesterday I asked about the meaning of the idea that the world is illusory. It would be insulting to dismiss the suffering of a child or a torture victim as illusory and just say ‘meditate your way into oneness and everything will be alright.’ When you feel pain, it is very real and justice demands an immediate compassionate response from any human person, stranger or friend, who can offer it. The victim – it is not demeaning to be called a ‘victim’ of an earthquake or a war – has been hurt through no fault of their own and is innocent.

Innocence is the true essence of human nature and indeed of creation itself. It is what it is. When we see that the pain was inflicted through the cruelty of another person who could not understand what they were doing because they themselves were incapacitated by ignorance, we encounter the cosmic power of innocence, the goodness of creation. Even ignorance is an affliction with its own hidden causes. Jesus on the Cross asked the Father to forgive his murderers because ‘they do not know what they are doing’. He was invoking the power of truth to dispel the illusory nature of ignorance. The whole gospel is present in this, his last act on earth.

The unreal nature of the world we make up as a result of ignorance, pain and fear is tough, mean and tenacious. Rational argument rarely even dents it. All you can do is shoot down the drones it sends to attack the innocent before they do harm. We are trapped in our own crossfire: violence is the product of ignorance and history is its video loop.

Recall a time when you were locked in conflict from which there seemed no escape. Was there a moment when you or another softened and said, I’m sorry, or let’s talk or let’s start again? One word or a look is enough because love is the sole reality. Compassion, humour or forgiveness releases it from the prison of fear which is the breeding ground of the virus of illusion. Ignorance lifts like the mist. All its complicated constructs melt into air. A new world is born. At the end of his last play Shakespeare, who practiced illusion to reveal truth, understood that seeing the illusory nature of things is the reason to be cheerful:

Be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air.
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it shall inherit, shall dissolve.

Shakespeare – The Tempest: Act 4 Scene 1

Sometimes you meet a young person who, although lacking life-experience, has a wisdom beyond their years. You can also meet older people, with much experience, whose development was arrested at an early stage. When you meet individuals like these you can’t help seeing what you see but, of course, always need to remember ‘judge not that ye be not judged.’ Maybe they jumped off the train for a moment and were stranded on an empty platform waiting for the next one to arrive.

The stages of human development have been closely analysed in recent times. We know that our phases of growth overlap but also have an inevitable sequence. Certain capacities, like language, social independence and emotional needs, seem to be laws of development written into the human person and follow a timeframe. Each of us develops in a unique way but we are all equal under the laws of nature. Yet there are exceptions. In some, the developmental process can get stuck and await a restart for decades. For others, well, they seem to cover decades in months. Mozart began composing at five. An eight-year-old chess player has defeated a world grandmaster.

More importantly, though, are the spiritual masters who have reached the highest level of development in this dimension. From their unique view of the panorama of reality they have given teachings that have formed lasting channels of transmission through history and many cultures. To encounter such teachers or benefit directly from their transmission through their followers is to enjoy a boost to one’s personal journey. It does not mean that the master’s experience becomes yours and they are cloned in you. But in a sense, something like this happens through a close encounter with a person of high spiritual development. Scriptures insist on the value and need to be in the presence of such individuals.

For the influence to be transmitted there needs to be peace, a faith-connection, and freedom from doubt and envy. Then something of their knowledge enters your experience, expanding your capacity for the personal realisation you must still achieve in your own way. So, it is not that you will become a spiritual prodigy just through osmosis but the ‘grace of the guru’ will accompany you on your daily rounds, protecting and supporting you in times of discouragement and doubt and helping you turn a sense of failure into wisdom.

The gospel tells a story of a feast a man was preparing but the people he invited refused his invitation. Business meetings, new possessions that distracted them or having recently got married were among the excuses they gave. The man told his people to go out and bring in the poor, the handicapped and the blind. He said – and I missed this in many re-readings I have done of the story – ‘I want my house to be full.’

I read this as an example of the humility of God which we see in the altruism of spiritual masters through history. A child once said God made people because he wanted them to enjoy the beautiful things he had made. He didn’t want to be alone A law of development is that the full empty themselves in order for the empty to be full.

Let all those who seek their own fulfilment,
Love and honour the illumined sage
(Mundaka Upanishad)

The word ‘upanishad’ means literally ‘sitting next to your teacher’ – just as you do at a meal.

There’s a simple map for the journey which every meditator is on. It helps those who are frightened to start to take the first step and encourages those who drop out to reconnect to the path. The first stage is discovering your own monkey mind and the embarrassing level of distraction that prevents you from stillness and the simple enjoyment of reality that is the fruit of attention. Giving up at the first hurdle is common but it doesn’t mean you cannot start again – as many times as you fail. You will discover the value of the selfless encouragement of meditating with others – of spiritual friendship.

The second stage is encountering the hard disc of memory. Everything, real or imagined, in our history is stored there and some of it may be repressed. Like grief, anger, fear or shame which cause suffering and control us from the unconscious. The mantra brings healing to this level of consciousness without – at the time of meditation anyway – requiring self-analysis. In fact, it is the complement of usual psychological therapy because it involves taking the attention off ourselves. This is not avoidance but detachment. Healing is the prelude to enlightenment: nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light (Lk 8:17)

Then we touch the ego level itself, the ‘source of the I-thought’ as Ramana called it. Here we encounter a feeling of being blocked by our innate sense of separateness even as we long for the peace of union and non-duality. This brick wall has taken a long time to build and it takes time for the bricks to start falling out. As they do, we see through the wall and in God’s own time we find ourselves on the other side of it, in the Spirit. Here self-consciousness is reduced by transparency in the experience of recognition – seeing and knowing ourselves even as we know that we are seen and loved

At each of these levels, until we enter the full language of silence in the spiritual dimension, the mantra, with deepening subtlety is our faithful guide.

The important thing to remember is that as one level is reached and opens its mysteries the previous levels are not shut down. Distraction remains, though greatly reduced and at times more easily overcome. Healing continues even after the major wounds have been triaged. And the ego continues in daily life but more as a servant than as a tyrant.

This applies to other maps of human consciousness. For example, we could say we begin the journey in a pre-temporal state of oneness with all. This ‘uroboric’ mind will open to the magical with its attempt to manipulate what is now a strange, threatening world outside us. As the mind develops, we make stories – myths – to explain and manage things. Then we discover we can step back from them with rational objectivity. If we keep going, we break through into the conscious oneness of non-duality.

Wonderfully, though, all levels can stay open and be integrated with the next. Life without a sense of magic would be as algorithmically shallow as what we call ‘artificial intelligence’ but should think of as merely ‘very fast computers’. Life without the mythical imagination would lack the essential language which gives entry to the great scriptures and transcendent meaning. Rationality without these other levels contributing would be like getting the best grades at school but having no friends.

Before I became a monk I had several mini-careers including a couple of years in a merchant bank in London. It paid well and the work was quite interesting at first. I had gone there to get a break from academia and learn what really made the world go round: love or money. I had no desire to climb the corporate ladder but I liked my colleagues and found the personalities and interactions quite instructive about my other big question: what is the meaning of life and what happens to you over time?

It was this question perhaps that led me to decide to do a retreat – my first – in a monastery. I didn’t have much idea of what that meant, maybe prayer, silence, being alone, simple food. It didn’t turn out quite as I expected. When I arrived, I decided to fast as I thought that might prime me for higher spiritual experiences. What I received was a first night of intense nightmares which was something new for me and left me very shaken. One followed another and woke me up each time in a cold formless fear. No one in the monastery had taken any interest in me but I asked to speak to someone and an old kind looking monk came to see me. I described my night experience and he looked uncertain what to say; but when I mentioned I had been fasting he brightened up as if he had found the answer. ‘It was the devil,’ he confidently said. I waited for more information and he said ‘you see the devil saw you were fasting and decided to attack you because you were weak. Have a good lunch and you’ll be fine.’

My second and last night I went to my room after compline and was reading before going to bed. Suddenly there was a rapid knocking at my door. I opened it to find one of the other old monks looking very anxious and beckoning me into the corridor to follow him. I asked him what was the problem and as he shuffled ahead of me all I heard was ‘mass, mass. Theres’s no one to serve the mass. Quick!’ Before we got to the chapel the abbot appeared, apologised and rescued me from the delusions of monastic dementia.

Things rarely, if ever, turn out as we expect. The random games that the multiple universes play on us are infinite. It was a long time before I entered another monastery to learn from the teaching and personal example of the wisest and sanest person I have known before or since. Wisdom, goodness, personal sanity and who we learn from make all the difference to our life. But even then things never turn out as you expect.

Everything depends on perception: how we see things and the response we have to what we see (or think we see). Theoretically, we value objectivity and detachment and like to feel we have these qualities but, even in the rigours of the scientific method, what is objective to me may seem sheer prejudice or stupidity to you and even, after the event, mistaken to me. How can we ever be sure that what we perceive is real and that our way of seeing has value. Perception is all-important but perspective shapes perception even without our knowing it. Perspective is constructed of all our cultural, educational and personal influences. Our crisis is that the perspective we took for granted is collapsing.

The era we are in – and feeling our way through – is in a crisis of perception caused by the shifting of fundamental perspectives that are shifting just as tectonic plates deep below the surface of the earth move imperceptibly until they produce a devastating earthquake. In such times, feeling like sheep without a shepherd or like a car running downhill whose brakes have failed, we dash from pillar to post trying new solutions and doubling back on ourselves when we reach another dead end. Life is no longer perceived as an amazing revelation of the mystery of creation. It feels like a maze and we like mice caught in it desperately trying to find the way out.

However, there is an all-important distinction between a maze and a labyrinth.

A simple kind spiral-labyrinth is among the most ancient designs painted by human hands on the walls of magical-mythical caves up to 40,000 years ago. In classical times and later in the Middle Ages the more sophisticated labyrinth, such as we can still see on the floor of Chartres Cathedral, looks uncannily like the two hemispheres of the brain or, to some, the intestinal tract. It is a spiritual practice to walk it as it calls to the conscious mind what is unfolding or blocked in the unconscious. To the meditator, it is a symbol of their daily inner journey. It requires faith and perseverance to do the labyrinth, following one narrow path, one measured step at a time, which we enter through a single entrance which is also the single exit once the journey has been completed. The labyrinth is a unicursal pilgrimage which tests our faith because it can it seem to lead away from the centre it is leading to. God doesn’t write straight with crooked lines. He draws curving lines that we try to improve on by straightening them out.

While the labyrinth is a pilgrimage that we learn to follow, a maze is a problem to solve, a puzzle to master. Mazes have multiple entrances and exits. The goal is to just to get out once you have got lost and getting lost is the thrill – or the horror of it. There are also frequent dead-ends which force you to the retrace your steps and face the fear of never getting out. A maze, then, is a corrupted labyrinth and works as a metaphor for what many feel modern life has become. Whoever designed the first maze was expressing a disgust at the meaninglessness of life in the same way that makers of horror movies are tapping into those fears of our inner darkness that build up for explosion behind the mask of false optimism.

Meditation converts the maze into a labyrinth. As it does so, life once again becomes truly amazing.

The students and some of the faculty of the WCCM Academy are meeting together in Bonnevaux this week. Although most of our previous encounters have been online, an extraordinarily warm, trusting and energised bond has developed among all. Vladimir Volrab, the Director of the Academy, has helped create this unique environment for a contemplative learning group, with skill and sensitivity. He manages the connections between participants from different parts of the world in class and other times with personalised care which allows each to grow interiorly but also see each other’s growth. As St Benedict understood, in any community practical things should be done smoothly and ‘in good order’. Then, all involved need not become sad. Few things make us sad more quickly than messy organisation. Meeting with the students to discuss their reflections on the course on Jesus (‘Who do You Say I Am?’) that I taught last term, I was moved and inspired by their joy and the wisdom evident in their eagerness to share.

I had asked them to share their personal experience of the stages of the journey of their relationship with Jesus. How difficult it is to put this into words in an abstract way – as we do when we reduce experience to ideas or formulas. It is like the challenge of explaining to people who don’t meditate why you do. Our relationship with Jesus – even this phrase can be discomforting – can best be expressed by a simple but transparent telling of the story of how it happened and how it continues to is evolve.

Most referred to their early childhood, whether in a religious environment or not. Religion in early life, even when very flawed, at least gives us a language for the future. Where there has been no such formation, reflecting on our raw experience will develop a language of its own which can later engage with the language of tradition. But the strongest formative influence in the development of an ongoing encounter with Jesus at an authentic level was people. It was through the individuals who influenced them at different times of their life – people of all kinds and ages from a childhood friend with a terminal illness to an old person who compensated for something missing in their lives. In these relationships faith could be felt to be alive without any attempt to persuade or manipulate. Simply by their presence and personality, their example of living embodied it.

This can be put even more simply. It was through certain individuals that the members of our group here first felt unconditional love. A love that was characterised by tenderness and concern, but also marked by great personal detachment. What releases our capacity for spiritual growth, it seems to me as I listen to these stories shared with such transparent trust, is discovering that we can be loved with a perfect love by other human beings. These are otherwise ordinary people whom we relate to in an extraordinary way. They have become channels of the love we yearn for and may call ‘God’. Then we see how God can be, is, fully human and indeed was so in an individual we dare to call Jesus who is the grace of the great encounters of our lives and whom we can meet even when we don’t know it.

Throughout his teaching Jesus specifically tells his listeners to abandon their habitual state of anxiety. He urges them to ‘set your troubled hearts at rest and abandon your fears.’ In the same vein, St Paul says to his fledgling Christian communities that the guide and compass of their whole life of feeling and action should be the peace of God which is ‘beyond understanding’, rather than ceaseless conflict and dejection. We should not and need not live oppressed by fear and stress, anxiety, dread or panic.

Living in an age of anxiety reaching levels that are linked to chronic physical and mental illness, depression, obsessiveness and inability to concentrate, insomnia and digestive problems, we might listen to Jesus, thank him for the nice words and think ‘well that’s easy for you to say.’

In fact, he is not giving advice but an authoritative teaching and a challenge to make a journey that will seem long and hard. He indicates how this can be achieved: by embracing the gift of peace that he promises to leave behind when he has gone. A peace ‘such as the world cannot give’ – the short-lived reduction of stress created by self-distraction and over-consumption – but his own peace. But how can you give peace to another person that is more than a comforting arm around the shoulder? He seems to be speaking about a direct and targeted transmission, face to face, heart to heart, of a boundlessly renewable energy.

To receive this transmission we have nothing else to do except open ourselves to it and trust it before it appears. Sometimes, however, fear locks us into a paralysed, self-harming pessimism which we cannot escape. We end up craving consolation rather than desiring transformation. No wonder the injunction to transcend the grip of fear is the first step of the spiritual journey in all traditions. The ‘fear of God’ as it is translated from the Bible doesn’t mean fear in the sense of expecting punishment. The fear of God – awe, wonder and peace –is the cure for the fear that blocks us from making the human journey.

The Sufi poet Attar wrote an allegory of this journey to God called the ‘Conference of Birds’. Every kind of bird comes to a meeting and decide to set out across the seven valleys to find the king, called the Simurgh. The word ‘simurgh’ means literally ‘thirty birds’. As the time of departure approaches most find excuses not to go. Of those who set out many turn back. In the end only thirty bedraggled birds arrive at the king’s palace having spent most of their lives on the journey. They are met by a servant who tells them they are unworthy to enter and to go home. But when they insist, he tells them that, even should they enter, the glory of the king will reduce them to nothing. They reply that a moth desires to be one with the flame it is attracted to. The thirty birds enter the presence of the Simurgh and seeing him they realise that he is themselves.

They see the Simurgh – at themselves they stare
And see a second Simurgh standing there
They look at both and see the two are one.

The peace beyond understanding and the end of fear is the disappearance of duality.

Ramadan is the Muslim equivalent of Lent. Observant Muslims fast each day until sunset as they mark the month when the Qu’ran began to be revealed to the prophet Mohammed. The actual beginning of Ramadan depends upon the first sighting of the new crescent moon which this year took place last Sunday in Saudi Arabia.

While the fast from food and drink begins, the orgiastic feast of violence in Gaza continues unabated. The ceasefire that civilised nations have been calling for has not been agreed. Humanitarian corridors have not been created to permit aid to reach those in extreme suffering. Children, non-combatant women and old men continue to be killed and the numbers of newly mentally and physically mutilated who are entering a life of extreme hardship grows every day. While the religious fasting begins, the UN has warned that a famine in northern Gaza is almost unavoidable.

Aren’t human beings interesting? There is a story from Auschwitz about a group of rabbis who were discussing whether God had broken his covenant with His chosen people by permitting the Shoah. Exhausted and hungry at the end of the day, they convened a court in their freezing hut to put God on trial. It did not take long to find Him guilty. He had clearly abandoned His people. Then the presiding rabbi concluded: ‘we will now say the night prayer and go to sleep.’ I asked an old rabbi friend of mine once whether he thought God had favourites. He said that as a young man he had no doubt: it was the Jews. Later he came to believe that God had no favourites but loved all equally always. Now, he said, he felt God’s favourites did exist: they are the ‘anawim’, the most poor, abandoned, rejected of humanity whatever their faith or ethnicity.

It seems that the practice of religious faith is resilient to a point of sublime absurdity. Perhaps, as the conditions of human decency collapse around us and the spirit of religion is rejected, the outward signs of faith assume a new, paradoxical significance, as the last hope that human beings can be rehabilitated after they have dehumanised themselves. These religious practices are then no longer superficial or routine or merely tribal signs of belonging; they have acquired a radiance, even a paradoxical kind of glory because the mystery itself, beyond all signs and words, is exposed through them when humanity is in its most desperate state.

We might mock this. Or we might glimpse what shone through in that hut in Auschwitz or in Ramadan in the bombed hospitals in Gaza today. It is something we need not even try to name. Yet, if we see and recognise it, we are compelled to dive into the deepest silence where solidarity with the suffering of humanity reveals the core reality of the resilient oneness, even of oppressor and victim.

It is often said that spiritual teachings in all traditions urge us to develop an indifferent attitude to happiness or unhappiness. This reflects the teaching of Jesus that the sun of divine benevolence shines equally on good and bad alike. Does this mean we should aim to have no preference? Or, more realistically, that we should accept the rough and the smooth and take the rough graciously without complaint. Buddhist teachings emphasise the danger of clinging
to any one side of experience because we then bounce between aversion and possessiveness.  Yet Buddhists are not indifferent either. They believe in reducing suffering and in a state beyond it which we should aspire to. Similarly, the Gospel teaches us to ‘consider that the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory to be revealed in us’ (Romans 8:18).

The problem in assuming that we should be equally happy with suffering or joy is that it is unrealistic. It is not true to human nature or to the meaning of suffering. It is not detachment, more like estrangement. The true wisdom of the spiritual traditions is to avoid what suffering we can avoid and graciously accept what we cannot with the confidence that suffering is not meaningless. Thus we are brought closer to the source of joy within ourselves that is reflected
in all natural cycles.

One test of this is the arrival of the entrancing season of Spring in the Northern hemisphere. I can see it happening today as I look out of the window as I write this at Bonnevaux. Senses awake, forgotten scents, new colours and textures return, joy-filled daffodils and the green wash you can hardly see in the bare trees emerging from their seasonal death. We have had a grey, wet winter with several of the extreme variations that are characteristic effects of climate change everywhere. Nevertheless, thank God and His manifestation in the beauty of the world, that the timed wheel of the seasons is still turning.

Another simple test is our preference for life over death even when, like Jesus in Gethsemane, we accept the painful destiny of death as part of life. The love of life transforms this destiny. Because it is so deeply rooted, it touches in us the core of eternal life free from the cycle of death and rebirth within which we grow but which we also transcend.

Looking down the Bonnevaux valley today, I can authoritatively say that Spring is still spring. Few are they who would say they don’t prefer it to winter. We are time travellers passing through a cycle of spirals, measured by the sun and moon, towards the solitary source where all are at home. Through each revolution and repetition we come deeper into resurrection, the union of opposites where what we once just glimpsed is proved real.

Those who realise Brahman live in joy
And go beyond death. Indeed
They go beyond death.
OM shanti shanti shanti
(Aitareya Upanishad)

Speaking of preferences… Do you prefer to meditate alone or with others? And why?

Some people find meditating with others to be beneficial because the presence of others helps them to strengthen the basic disciplines of the practice, like regularity, punctuality, physical stillness and meditating for the full time. If you are part of a group, say on a retreat or in a community meditating at regular times during the day, when you see the time or hear the bell calling, some additional force kicks in to pull you to the meditation space. You feel physically and emotionally part of something and your presence with the others in the group completes it. You may even feel that it is when people meditate in each other’s presence that ‘meditation is creating community’. In physical ways during the meditation, the discipline of stillness, of body and mind, work together. Controlling your coughing, throat clearing, sneezing and scratching becomes a generous part of your contribution to the peaceful stillness of all the others around you.

On the other hand…

I prefer meditating alone because it is a solitary practice. I can’t meditate for you, nor can you for me. Yes, we can meditate together but then there are even more distractions. What if I am next to someone with an itchy skin complaint, a noisy tummy or a persistent cough or who shifts their sitting posture every few minutes? I could remind myself of a zen story that puts the blame on me. The anger I feel is already inside me, etc. I found some truth in this when I realised that the irritation arises mostly when you yourself are mentally distracted; but when your mind is calm, external distractions can pass without hooking your negativity. Nevertheless, you need some time to get to that calm spirit of attention and if you are irritated and distracted by your neighbour from the beginning you may not reach anywhere near that restful green valley. ‘I’m surrounded by noise and other people all day. Meditation is my time for solitude, to get away to my cave in the Himalayas, the cave of my heart.’ Meditation as someone once innocently said, is my ‘me time’.

How do we balance the advantages and disadvantages of each way of meditating? Is it just a matter of temperament? We could also ask if there is an either-or-ness about meditating alone or with others.

When I meditate alone I enter the particular space-time of solitude which is the cure for loneliness. Solitude is the discovery, recognition and embrace of our eternal uniqueness. This is far from the ego’s rabid defence of its individuality. In my uniqueness ego has been dethroned and I am capable of relationship, communion, of a depth and meaning the ego has no knowledge of. The peace in solitude is an emanation of my participation in the great shalom of the cosmos, the oneness in which fear, desire and conflict dissolve. Solitude therefore, as Keats said in his poem to her, can be shared:

…it sure must be,
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

Meditating alone I am in communion with others. Meditating with others I am part of the making of communion. Seeing that truth, rage at a neighbour’s fidgetiness or rumbling stomach can be harnessed and turned into patience and compassion for someone who is already part of me.

The thousands of people who dared to go to Alexei Navalny’s funeral in Moscow last week were risking a lot, not least their physical freedom. Why do so for a such a gesture? In making it they declared that they could see through the lie under which the Russian state is forcing its citizens to live. It does not demand that people believe the lie but only that they deny that it is a lie and join the pretence it is the truth. Making people live like this – and religion and most social institutions, including families, have a history of doing the same – is to destroy their soul in return for acceptance and security. But what’s the point if we gain everything we want at the cost of our true self?

The mourners were also testifying, courageously in such a lie-saturated society, that only ‘truth will set you free’ (Jn 8:31).

Truth is suppressed as soon as we start thinking of it as an answer, an explanation or a dogma. The Greek word for truth is ‘alethia’ which means literally ‘not being concealed’ or ‘unhiddeness’. It is interesting that it should be expressed in this apparently negative (apophatic) way rather than being a straightforward definition. But truth is never a fixed thing or at least not for long. The experience of truth is when we see and feel the continuous clearing away of falsehood or illusion. We could say it is revealed as the pure ‘isness’ of things – or people – their authenticity and real presence.

This why we feel the truth in a person’s being as well as in what they say; but most fully we see the truth in what they do. The theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, struggled against the Nazi lie until he finally joined the resistance to Hitler which he paid for with his life. It led him to see, what the rest of us learn from daily experience, that truth is always the right thing to do. It is in action not just words that truth is revealed.

It is in doing the right thing that we rise above the fears and desires of the isolated and self-centred ego consciousness. We do this when we do meditation, when we are not daydreaming:

So cut through the strap and the thong and the rope. Unbolt the doors of sleep and awake (Dhammapada 26)

This is how truth sets us free and shows us that freedom, too, is not what we usually think. It is a relationship between two people in which we are free for the other. Bonhoeffer said, ‘only in relationship with the other am I free.’ This is why meditation brings people together in unity and why the mourners in Moscow last Friday were a sign of the new Russia waiting to be set free.

Navalny, like Bonhoeffer, showed supreme detachment to make his sacrifice. Detachment – which is discipline – is necessary for us to know the truth which sets us free. At the heart of this mystery of being is a state of non-clinging and even non-action. Again, the Dhammapada describes it beautifully:

Like a mustard seed on the point of a needle,
Like a drop of water on the leaf of a lotus flower,
We do not cling.

You always bring things back to meditation, someone once said. I don’t apologise for it, as I feel without the level of experience that meditation opens all the rest we say risks being just theory – or habit or worse. The ever-fresh challenge is to come back to it differently, like a musician to the repertoire they love. I was once in a conversation with Yehudi Menuhin and was about to ask him how he felt about always coming back to Bach and Beethoven, pillars of his art; but thankfully before I could ask such a naïve question, I understood the answer. (It would have been like asking ‘why did you stay married to one woman for fifty-two years?) He did say on another occasion that time gives a dimension to relationship that no other dimension of reality can do. I saw the truth of what he said but didn’t ask why. I suppose it involves the heightening sense of mortality which time bestows on us.

Speaking about meditation, I also come back to the important fact, on which the future of the world may depend, that children take to meditation like ducks to water and enjoy it pure and simple, whereas their elders see it as a superhuman challenge beyond their capacity and tend to dilute it – or deny it. The only real teacher is experience; so there is little point in arguing about it with someone who pre-judges the experience.

There are various paths to meditation practice. Genuine practitioners should not compete and, if faithful to their main practice, will enjoy and benefit each other. All that matters is: does it open us to the state of contemplation – silence, stillness, simplicity – the simple enjoyment of the truth – beyond thought, word and imagination. Let’s take the mantra and do a sketch-map of how it leads us there.

First, we say it and discover the chaotic indiscipline of our minds, our lack of attention. It is like someone going for a mountain walk after weeks of convalescence. It’s hard-going and you shouldn’t overdo it. But practice, returning to the mantra, strengthens the all-important muscle of attention. Soon, less effort is needed even though the distractions are still present, sometimes overwhelmingly depending on our experience at the time and generally how we live. We could all meditate more deeply and enjoyably if we made a few changes in our lifestyle. Then you begin to sound the mantra and discover the natural harmony which prevails at the deeper levels of yourself. We are getting to know these new levels consciously for the first time. Tasting the peace and joy already within us promises the wonder of going beyond limits (aka eternal life). Whether we name it or not we are beginning to know God. If you are on a Christian journey, you will recognise Him. The third stage is not final because it is takes us over the boundary into the spirit. The mantra shows its purpose as it becomes more subtle and finer and we listen to it, lightly detaching our attention from distraction and the self-reflection which is the root of the illusory self.

When you are lost and your GPS battery is dead, you fall back to the old human practice of asking a passerby the way. You know quickly if they will be of help. The best is, they tell you in a way you can remember. Worse is if, like the Irish, they give interesting but too detailed directions. Worst are those who cannot say ‘I don’t know’ and make up an answer. Even in the worst scenario, getting lost might awaken our inner sense of direction. We are never actually lost.

Psychologically, we all need to aspire to a healthy individuality. One important way to fulfil this is to be close to healthy individuals who have a healing and balancing effect upon us, allowing us in our own way to be of help to others. But healthy individuals who have this effect are few and far between especially in a society as disturbed as ours.

Just having this aspiration is a good beginning and it develops by being aware that we have room for improvement – controlling our negative feelings, developing our capacity to give attention to others and so on. It’s consoling to know that, although we may not be very healthy individuals, does not mean we are all bad. Far from it. No one is perfect. Accepting our shortcomings, however, means we refuse to be dragged into self-rejection or self-hatred. For this, we need to feel the love and acceptance and unconditional forgiveness of those who know about or have even suffered from our faults. Community and family – if there are sufficiently healthy individuals in them – provide the love that allows us to be as loving as we can be at the stage of wholeness we have reached. Jesus insisted he did not come to condemn but to heal and why a true church does not exclude sinners but welcomes them.

What does healthy individuality mean? The best definition is a human being who exudes it.

Every human being is affected by an inner conflict between two aspects of their individuality which are striving, throughout life, to be integrated: like a double image trying hard to be set as one. One aspect of our individuality interprets everything from the outside, with itself as the illusory centre of everything. If we get stuck in this, we pursue power and control at any cost over others and become cruel (to others or ourselves) and disassociated from reality. A great deal of energy, which maybe is not available in this realm of time and space, is needed to pull us out of this extreme self-orbit. But even the majority, the less tragically divided and isolated individual, remains unhappy and creates unhappiness. However, they are still open to the ever-present grace of healing. Most of us even while making progress oscillate between the two states.

The unhealthy individual still needs others but treats them as objects for their own ends. They find the healing influence of community a difficult treatment to take. Honest, open relationship is difficult, except at the level of deep spiritual unity such as worship or contemplation together. Generally, however, it seems easier to relax and escape with others as part of a crowd, finding fleeting unity in some shared experiences (partying or sport). Community dissolves division while crowds allows each divided self to hide and protect from others its unique and vulnerable being.

Healing is progressive and a narrow path. It is a hidden, constant meaning of all life. In contemplative practice we balance, harmonise and unite the divided self as we die to the illusion of dividedness by taking the attention off ourselves altogether. Though we fear and resist this, when it happens, we expand into true liberty and joy of being. We even find that we are functioning better in daily life.

The kingdom is close at hand. And so is the Friend: the healthy individual who communicates his oneness to us when we feel most isolated.

The world seems to many today a desert of moral and spiritual values. Let’s draw on the great metaphor of Lent, the forty-year Exodus through the ‘Desert of Sin’. On a famous occasion when they were desperately thirsty Moses struck the rock at Horeb and water flowed. For the rest of the time they must have been kept going by a network of wells that tap into deep and extensive underground water tables.

Where are the wells of wisdom to keep us going until our forty years – the mythical biblical time symbolising ‘as long as it takes to complete’ – of transition into a new vision of reality? Because of the dust storms of distraction and violence it may seem they are lost to us but in fact, like the Kingdom, they are close at hand.

In my recent illness I have learned more of the wisdom that flows from the well of the body itself. True, it teaches us about our fragility and mortality but also how to live well and happily in this beautiful, magical medium that connects us so directly to the cosmos and to our fellow human beings. It teaches us we are ‘earthen vessels’ but also that we have a capacity to transcend just by living in the present moment. Whether we learn this from pleasure or pain is less important than that we do drink from this well, open to all it can teach us. Equally, sickness and the enjoyment of physical health (which we usually do not enjoy but take for granted), rearrange the perspectives in which we understand the world. By the miracle of accepting reality as it is, in harmony of body and mind consciousness itself expands, not merely our ideas and assumptions about the world.

Other wells are physical places which the Irish say are ‘thin places’ where heaven and earth meet. There is an ancient Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart but in a thin place it is much less. The veil there between the worlds is especially permeable or transparent and the new and the not-yet begin to unite. They may be places like, for me, Bonnevaux, Varanasi or the Garden of Gethsemane or countless sacred places globally, where ‘prayer has been valid’:

You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more / Than an order of words, the conscious occupation / Of the praying mind.. Here, the intersection of the timeless moment.. Never and always. (TS Eliot, Little Gidding)

These are places where we go as pilgrims not tourists, to be rather than to choose to spend our free time as holy days, not just holidays.

Then there are the wells of wisdom of the sacred scriptures. We have lost the art of reading them, understanding the space between the words, but they are waiting for us. Making short but frequent stops to drink from them arouses a taste and understanding that feeds back into our meditation because they describe the inner journey that we are making beyond words.

Certain people graciously present in our lives may also have reached a degree of purity and transparency of truth that make them wells of wisdom for anyone who recognises them

And then, most universally and simply there is the well of the human heart, the inner room. We can enter it by simple truthfulness and humility wherever and whenever we may be.

A friend recently offered me an ‘energy treatment’. I didn’t understand the theory but I trusted and the practice was effective. The atmosphere was calm, I lay down and was covered in a warm blanket. In the course of the hour, I felt increasingly relaxed and peaceful. My breathing slowed and mind slowed with it. I was curious and so distracted about the process and so despite being relaxing it was not particularly conducive to meditation. The person working on me told me I had fallen asleep; in fact I hadn’t although my breath might have given that impression and I was certainly on the delicious edge of guiltless sleep. In any case, I felt better, nice, relaxed and refreshed and grateful for the gift and skill I had received. I understood why so much of the promotion of what is sometimes loosely called meditation and various bodywork techniques is presented as offering relaxation. Relaxation is good. In a world where greed and speed are also called ‘good’, relaxation, however you may find it, is better.

Yesterday evening, I participated in a contemplative Eucharist in the remarkable Dublin Parish of the Ascension in Balally. It is led by Fr Jim Caffrey who is a meditator, much respected and loved for his vision of a new church in Ireland. The parishioners are responding positively to what he has to share; each morning and evening in the beautiful Icon Chapel there is prayer, following the Bonnevaux Book of Prayer, which integrates a full meditation. The children in the school next door meditate and seeing them enter the church for their weekly meditation with Fr Jim, so calmly and mindfully, is surprisingly moving and beautiful. The contemplative Eucharist, in the low-lit parish hall with everyone seated in a circle, is calm and mindful, with a lectio-style reading of the gospel in which most of the participants offer a word of their own. Meditation follows communion.

I was strongly touched by the depth of the silence and stillness during the meditation as well as by the joy and personal warmth of the people as they were leaving. Irish goodbyes are notoriously extended but this one was because they had so much to express and the goodbye was part of the celebration. Everyone was taking something precious and real away within them.

I’m thinking now about these different forms of relaxation – the energy-work and a Eucharist celebrated gently with an open and accepting community of faith. Under my warm blanket for the former experience, I was passive and I felt good. Last night I was participating and the calmness We were sharing was collective as well as personal – what the early church called koinonia. Today, in our suspicious world, it might be called a ‘safe space’. It is friendship of a high order. Relaxing it certainly was, but the idea just of destressing and relaxing doesn’t nearly do it justice. If the goal is merely relaxation, you will fall asleep (and you may need to). But when relaxation is the preparation or the side-effect of koinonia an awakening occurs.

A contemplative Eucharist and meditation itself could be seen as another form of energy work: the energy of inter-personal peace.

Peace is my parting gift to you, my own peace, such as the world cannot give.

John 14:27

If we have kept the Desert Frequency open during Lent we have probably received odd notifications of ways we have been unwittingly absorbed into the materialistic mindset of our culture. This happened to me listening to the financial news recently and hearing references to numbers ‘out of work’ or ‘looking for work’. We use the word work to refer only to paid labour where we sell our time, brains or muscle in order to survive. The phrase ‘numbers out of work’ suggests the depersonalisation of work that has taken place, reducing it to a mercenary transaction, rather than saying ‘the number of people who are not able to work and feel without use or value’… Even for those who are ‘in work’, however, their work can fail to connect them to the life of society and the sense of mystery in the larger process of evolution we are all passing through.

Work is a primordial right for human beings. It is an essential part of our way to the dignity of human existence by knowing ourselves to be co-creators with God. When we know this we become conscious that through our work we will experience beauty. Many people would find this a quaint and meaningless idea. There’s no time for the vast majority to find beauty in modern work. If you work today (as most do) in retail, service industries, or technology you may well find work exhausting, boring, even disgusting. Long hours, often minimum wage and, to support the family, the obligation to work six days a week. For those at the top of the pyramid, however, who work generally with less existential anxiety and many more perks and privileges, their labour may still secretly be a source of inner shame when they own to themselves that the power they wield is supporting a system that they know to be unjust and inhuman.

Simone Weil, in her great (newly translated work) The Need for Roots, wrote that ‘our time has a unique mission, calling for the creation of a civilization based on the spirituality of work’. Meaning not money is the essential value that gives work the ability to enhance our humanity, to repair it and reveal its dignity and this leads to the relationships on which civilised behaviour and perception is founded.

Next time you hear the word work used in ordinary conversation – she’s at work, he’s working himself sick, I’d better get back to work – listen to what the word is evoking for you just in the way it is spoken. How do you feel about your work?

Tests show that our mind is wandering for about half the time we are awake. We rarely pay full attention to the work we are doing or to the person we are with. We are dissecting the immediate past or rushing on into the next thing. For work to regain its dignity and spirituality on a large scale public action leading to a shift in collective consciousness will be needed. But the sure and immediate way to restore work to its life-giving, creative dignity in our own life is to act directly on our lack of attention, our absent-mindedness. The Bhagavad Gita, like the Cloud of Unknowing, speaks of this as the work of silence:

Whoever in their work finds silence, and who sees that silence is work, this person in truth sees the Light and in all his works finds peace  (Bhagavad Gita 4:18)

The medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, called beauty ‘a kind of knowledge’. Dostoevsky famously said that ‘beauty will save the world’. More personally and so less abstractly, would you agree with me that when we find anything beautiful we love it? Could you call to mind for a moment a few things that can awaken this sense of beauty in you? I find there’s often there’s a big element of surprise when something we didn’t think special reveals the reassuring news that beauty does live in the world even if we cannot always see it.

For example, a person who is doing something for you as part of their paid work. When some people some to help you they look as if they are being forced to and wish you would pay and go away quickly. Others do their task efficiently and with courtesy but without personalising it. Occasionally there is someone who for some magical reason makes you feel the presence of selflessness. It is their own presence but also something shines through their manner with a relaxed, super-confident yet totally uncoercive kindness that for a while makes you feel a happier and a better person simply because another human being is relating to you in this way.

For the sceptics among us, there may also be unconscious reasons for this – the person reminds you of someone you like or are attractive in other ways. But these factors wouldn’t explain the sense of grace. This means an energy or presence which has an impenetrable motive, which is a sign of it being pure goodness, agapic love.

It is ‘beautiful’ and effortless. In works of art that touch you deeply and bestow a perspective on the world which is obvious but surprising, familiar and yet fresh – whether it’s in music, a novel, poetry, painting or film or a child’s drawing – beauty is always felt as effortless. The ego and the creative labour of the artist have been absorbed fully in the final work.

Beauty is a manifestation of grace. It is as present around us always as oxygen. Beauty was only created once: it is a window opening onto the timeless. But it is the essential nature of all things and every person. This is why it can emerge suddenly anywhere.

That is part of the work of Lent to sensitise ourselves, despite the daily news and the disharmony around us, to the beauty in which we live and move and have our being.

Taking Off

Bumping over frozen ruts
Until hard brown ground
Becomes a song, a threnody
Of no one’s pain but mine

A relief to rise over the tops
Of budless bushes and naked trees
Whose thin bony fingers try
To touch anything

Unlike a child who knows
Better than to ask, I ask
Why this funeral of earth
Where is the green of life gone?

Then, into himalayas of clouds
Knowing nothing
Of the expired world,
Appears the sapphire blue of mind

Keats, who of course did not write the poem above, died young and, like many older people, had to face despair about his unrealised potential and lost youth. (His poetry became very popular during Covid.)

He had long struggled with the contradiction of death as something to be avoided at all costs and yet desired as the source of the peace the human psyche longs for. This tension is at the heart of any truly religious approach to life, meaning seeing life as a sacred wonder. The difficult death of his brother who John nursed changed him permanently. His way through the paradox became what he called ‘dying into life’. It means finding the peace of accepted suffering.

I think our daily meditation is a way of dying into life, not by using the precious time to analyse our problems for the millionth time or to wallow in resentment and self-sorrow or to construct an alternative reality we call miscall detachment or thinking we are enlightened. But it is to find the small point, too small for the ego to enter, where acceptance is secretly accomplished. How this happens can hardly be observed or remembered but it is undeniable: we know we have died to something and live with a peace that the world alone cannot give.

Keats was also in love with the mystery of beauty. Without the experience of beauty, one of the three attributes of God, along with truth and goodness, we could not find this small point where we let go of everything and become richly poor. Beauty even its brief appearances is overwhelming.

When he was very young Teillhard de Chardin became deeply anxious about the transient nature of the world. Perhaps he had had his first awareness of death which can be a surge of consciousness for a child. Maybe he had heard St John: ‘the world is passing away along with its desires’. It is a striking insight. Not only is the world, events, people, objects, patterns we are accustomed to passing but also desire itself. What we long for today with unbearable intensity diminishes to an afterthought tomorrow. Even our minds and feelings are in flux.

Teillhard’s response to his anxiety of transience was to seek what in the world was fixed and solid. He investigated nature in a way that led to his future work. Discovering that even mountains pass away his search took its deeper direction.

In our culture we are habituated to transience and novelty. In the rapid succession of new things, messages, people, activities, there is little space to mourn. But when we lose someone or something that we love, which is truly irreplaceable, the void of meaning will attack us ferociously. We ask, ‘Is this what it all comes to?’

Rather than looking for permanence and discovering transience, we could ponder the meaning of change. We discover that, in a certain way of seeing, change is the only constant. In that paradox we find a portal of mystery and our search shifts into another perspective. We seek not answers or explanations but God, realising eventually that God is neither of these.

From this change of seeing things we develop deeper self-knowledge. This leads to horizons where self-awareness merges with the knowledge of God, even with an at first disturbing sense that it is God’s knowledge of us is that is the starting point of every search.

As we think of ourselves historically, we see how we have changed over time and also how we haven’t.

Instead of seeing our experience of life as successive episodes or like the frames of a video, a sense of wholeness emerges. We can’t see the beginning, though we know there was one. Nor can we see the end though we know there will be one. Yet we feel how they are connected. Is it our evolving wholeness, still not complete, that is the permanence we seek?

Bring back the body. The body is our faithful reminder of changeability. It is the key to understanding Christianity, in fact it is its ‘sacred language’. With the body and in the light of the emerging wholeness of our self, I can make some sense of the references to eternal life and immortality in the scriptures, like this: ‘For our dying bodies must be transformed into bodies that will never die; our mortal bodies must be transformed into immortal bodies’(I Cor 15:53)

So, when wholeness is eventually achieved, the latest model of our body, the final issue, is released?

The critical and commercial success of the film Oppenheimer, the creator of the atomic bomb is worth a Lenten reflection. The movie reveals though hardly deals with the human fascination with evil and our inability to control ourselves. Self-control is one of the fruits of the Spirit according to St Paul: not just concerning our intake of sugar or use of the internet but the correct use of our liberty as children of God.

Einstein’s equation explained the energy released but not how to build a bomb that would convert certain atoms into other types of atoms thus producing the heat and pressure that killed more than 100,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The film deals with the supposed ‘moral dilemma’ about using the bomb. If it would shorten the war and ‘save lives’ could it be justified? This was the argument they followed. ‘Woe to them that call evil good’, Isaiah said. A deeper reason challenges this yielding to the fascination with evil that is an ice-cold feature of the human being. Einstein’s simple response reveals it: Mankind invented the atomic bomb but no mouse would ever construct a mousetrap.

The film needed to keep its protagonist somewhat sympathetic and lightly shows Oppenheimer’s guilt that he had started a chain reaction, an arms race. As indeed happened. Because humans are competitive and imitate each other, this game has come to be a darkening cloud of fear and hatred over humanity since the first bombs were dropped.

Evil is justified by being presented as a ‘necessary evil’ that can be called ‘good’.

It is the kind of mind game we play in our heads every day. The code name for the first successful nuclear test in Los Alamos was ‘Trinity’. Bernard McGinn, who is leading a series on Christian Mysticism in the WCCM Online programme at present, studied and wrote about the figure of the Antichrist and our related fascination with evil throughout history.

Today we do not locate evil in a mythical devil figure but in the unconscious darkness that can overtake human intelligence in science, psychology or biology and genetics. However we may deceive ourselves because we cannot control ourselves, evil will destroy. Look at the still devastated cities of Syria or the ‘collective punishment’, as the UN Secretary-General calls it, of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

The fascination with evil makes it hard for people to control the power they have especially if it is the power over life and death. There is no conversation with it because it destroys even the gift of communication. It creates a negative silence, a shutdown. Only an absolute radical alternative can be asserted. However powerless it may seem and doomed to failure this assertion survives the self-destruction built into every new wave of evil. It is the universal witness of spiritual wisdom in all traditions on which our future depends. Let’s end with one supreme expression of it:

With gentleness overcome anger – with generosity overcome meanness – with truth overcome deceit – Beware of the anger of the mind – master your thoughts – Let them serve truth – the wise have mastered body, word and mind – the wise harm no one.
The Dhammapada

The story that runs through scripture during Lent is of course the Exodus. I have followed it many years and sometimes get tired of it, especially when I remember it is purely mythical in the sense that there is no historical record of it anywhere. I never minded the supernatural or magical elements – dividing the Red Sea, Moses striking the rock or God sending manna to feed them in the desert. These have deep, satisfying levels of meaning. As does the constant lack of faith among the Israelites and poor Moses having to keep up their morale with God’s help. Last year, I stood on Mount Nebo ‘in the land of Moab’, where Moses stood viewing the Promised Land and learned from God that, because he had doubted, he would never cross the Jordan himself. This seems a bit harsh of God but it’s painfully realistic. We never reach the Promised Land in this life. When we think we do, we are soon disillusioned.

So, although Exodus is over-familiar and we might prefer to skip it, it still has power to grip and teach us something new. Recently I was interested to read an interpretation that saw it as the earliest story protest against slavery as a social institution: the divine element in it was the affirmation of universal human dignity. The fact that the escaped slaves find freedom a burden and at times want to go back makes it psychologically very convincing.

Children love familiar stories when they go to sleep and so do cultures that stretch over millennia. Humans think in stories. Overwhelmed by data or opinion we revert to making up a story, even a conspiracy theory any fool can understand. To persuade people about something tell them a story, don’t show them graphs. We dream in stories. How do we put them together so effortlessly and feel them so terrifying or blissful – and yet so difficult to recount to someone else without making them sound trivial or silly? We remember in stories even if we twist the facts in the re-telling.

Stories connect us. We bond and find an identity through them. They then become not just my but our story in which we find ourselves and meet each other. Football supporters share stories of their team. Jews find this bond especially in Exodus (and the Holocaust) and Christians in the re-telling of the story and stories of Christ through the year and of his last hours during Easter. Through the storytelling over long stretches of time something soaks deep into our consciousness and distils as an experienced truth that cannot be narrated but nor can it be denied.

So, even when you think ‘O, I’ve heard that before. Tell me a new one’, just remember Jesus on wine at the wedding feast: ‘the old is good’, he said. In fact, the stories of every known culture share a universal narrative structure. Someone has something to achieve, they face obstacles which they overcome, finally they achieve and return home. Like a trip to the shops or a hero on a quest or God becoming Man.

We come to know Jesus through a story oft-repeated but also as a story which, however elevated, is recognisably mysteriously akin to my story too. It’s not a coincidence that Jesus was also a master story-teller – as we shall see tomorrow.

If you missed yesterday’s reflection, you might read it as a preparation for today’s about Jesus as a master storyteller. But not necessary, because his stories stand alone with simplicity, clarity, down to earth and yet transcendental and often with an element of exaggeration. Imagine a twinkle in his eye as he told them to the people seated entranced in front of him. He might not have been a stand-up comic but it’s hard to imagine him as being solemn in person as he has come to be seen.

His message, the theme that runs through all his teaching and epitomises his life and personality, could be summarised as the ‘kingdom of heaven’. This is not exclusively within us or outside us, it is not a place or a reward. It is what it is and many different parables and his life-story birth, death and resurrection describe it. Why not take these two as an exercise in listening to the storyteller?

The kingdom of heaven is like a man who found a treasure buried in a field. He buried it again and for sheer joy went and sold everything he had.

Again, he said, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of immense value, he sold everything he had and bought it.

They have much in common: finding, selling everything, buying. These are things we can understand from ordinary life even if the ‘everything’ is a bit over the top. Are they saying exactly the same thing? Kind of. But from greatly different perspectives. What’s the difference? Warning, spoiler ahead (or one kind of spoiler).

To work on it yourself ask yourself about the first parable and the lucky man who found the treasure: imagine how he found it; why did he bury it again?; what made him so joyful as to sell everything?; what does buying mean? Same questions about the merchant. Any reason why it does not say that the merchant was ‘joyful’?

I leave the questions for you. Except one, what is the big difference of perspective in this descriptions of the kingdom experience? It seems that in the first parable the man found the treasure by chance, as happens still today, for example, when farmers dig up a treasure buried from marauders centuries ago. But in the next parable, alike in many ways, the big difference is that the finding of the pearl is part of the daily work and routine of the merchant. The finding of the pearl may still be a joyful surprise but it is parallel to the experience of the first one. Nevertheless, both may feel immensely grateful and feel it as the work of grace.

Apply this to contemplative experience: the morning and evening routine work of daily meditation and the being taken by sheer surprise. Karl Rahner who thought the only real Christian of the future would be a mystic described the mystical in a way that includes ordinary people in daily life, in chance and daily routine: ‘genuine experience of God emerging from the very heart of our existence’.

I hope this two-in-one parable may help you see your day today as a parable that opens you to the kingdom.

One of the best ways to change your perspective on life and view of reality is to speak intelligently with a child. Or, rather, to treat the child as an intelligent being and listen. The questions a child asks, the insights that they naively transmit can halt and humble us.

From our first glimmer of consciousness, the human is conditioned not just to survive and reproduce but to question, seek meaning and long for fulfilment. I sometimes think how much easier it would all be if we didn’t have this conditioning because the questioning, seeking and longing also bring discontent and suffering. Not surprisingly there is an industry today, called tourism and entertainment, that allows us to step out of this human burden and fantasise that we can be happy just by consuming what we desire. Nothing, then seems more wonderful than getting hooked on a Netflix series or even, more sadly, worse forms of addiction and denial.

A young visitor once told me how he had been revelling on a hedonistic trip on beaches in Thailand, with a new girlfriend and other friends. Lying back on the golden sand, he thought to himself ‘this is the life’ and then, as if the floor had been suddenly pulled out from beneath him, he realised it was not enough, not what he really wanted. Questioning, meaning and longing returned.

I am not saying life can’t be enjoyable or we always have to be serious. Far from it, as I am a hedonist myself. But that whatever we are doing, working hard, chilling out, or questing and longing we, being human, need to be open to the vastness we are travelling through and part of. We cannot hide from what is hidden in plain sight to the human mind.

Our search for meaning and fullness will never be satisfied. For all our questions, there is no final answer. We can never see light but we see everything by light. Psalm 36 contradicts this: ‘In your light, we see light,’ it says; and wonderfully and maddeningly both are true. The horizon is a boundary we can never reach because we always go further than we think possible. Happiness is forever elusive and forever inescapable. The ego’s need for closure and control will forever be frustrated.

What does this mean? That God is with us in our basic humanity, within our humbling limitations. In a tumbling world, when things fall apart in our lives, there is inescapable reason for optimism.

We often fail to do what we think or say we want to because we convince ourselves we will fail. ‘Not even worth trying’. Sometimes we justify this by blaming people or circumstances for making it impossible. ‘If I was able to live the easy life of a monk or live in a meditation centre, I’d meditate all day. If I had a degree in counselling, I could spend time with people in need of attention. If I wasn’t a monk in a community, I’d have time for lots of good works.’

We all do it. But the desert fathers and mothers of the 4^th century didn’t. They came from all levels of society and different cultures. In common, they simply shared an insatiable hunger for God, which they may have tried to suppress, and an awareness of their own limitations which made them leave everything in order make God the centre of their life. They had an air of extremism about them, therefore, which made many put them on an unwanted pedestal. There are stories of monks running deeper into the desert solitude to avoid the tourists who came to have selfies with them. Some individual monks had exaggerated reputation for ascetical extremism – surviving on stale bread and water – which made them seem different from ordinary mortals to the to the point of being a bit insane.

In the collections of sayings and stories collected by genuine followers not mystical celebrity-hunters, we can see what they were really like: in fact how extremely moderate they were and how humanly approachable in their remoteness. Some stories instructively mock the monk who savours his reputation for self-denial and becomes a spiritual exhibitionist. They tell stories of genuine ascetics who without drawing attention to it, break their usual fast to dine with visitors who have come from afar to see them. Rowan Williams’ book on the desert wisdom, based on his John Main Seminar of that title, is called ‘Silence and Honey Cakes’ – because sometimes the authentic life of the desert was lived in deep silence and sometimes they enjoyed desserts. The only absolute in their lives was God, not the means by which they prepared themselves to know and be known by Him. The stories that describe the monks who by faith and humility have entered into a luminously loving state capture the essence of the desert – for us in the future as well.

For the Christian of the future the wisdom of the Desert is essential inspiration. Karl Rahner, the great theologian of the 20^th century, said that ‘the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not be a Christian anymore’. He describes a mystic simply as a person who has known ‘genuine experience of God emerging from the very heart of our existence’. You don’t have to go the desert for that, and the fathers and mothers of the desert were the first to say so: ‘You can be a solitary in your mind even if you live in a crowd. And you can be solitary in the desert but still live in the crowd of your own thoughts’.

The desert is not a place but a state or direction of mind. Prayer is a gift we prepare ourselves for in the unique way best suited to ourselves.

Yesterday we looked at the wisdom of the Christian desert and its relevance for us in our present confusion of values and purpose. John Main – and subsequently the community he inspired – drew on that wisdom and re-presents it in its essential, experiential simplicity. ‘Experience is the teacher’, this transmission of wisdom tells us. Any who help this transmission do not distract those they teach with too much autobiographical information and see themselves as bridges or voices carrying a word. When we see the infusion of wisdom into our world like this, free from personality but proceeding from personal authority beyond the ego, we glimpse its universality.

The ego is merely the dot over the i and when it is removed the true I is revealed.

At the heart of the genuine, selfless transmission of wisdom there is a junction where all transmitters of wisdom meet at source. Experiencing this unity releases the everfresh energy of hope. Without hope renewed we cannot believe or work selflessly for a new evolution of humanity. And where else can we so clearly see what unites us as in this experience of oneness in our common origin, our ground of being?

So, let’s do what we can to deepen that experience in ourselves and our immediate community allowing it to spread as the dawning of a new contemplative humanity. Little lights joining to illuminate everything, the dawning of the new era. It won’t be easy. There will be those who may not be seen explicitly as ‘spiritual teachers, who will even give their lives for this work: Mandela’s six years of solitary confinement and twenty-one subsequent years of imprisonment or Alexei Navalny’s death in a Russian labour camp last week. But as there is no peace without justice, all forms of truth are friends and work together

Every meditation, every meditator’s unique journey, every truth-teller helps reduce and heal the collateral suffering that we will have to endure and the reconstruction to come.

Ramana Maharshi is one of the great teachers of the modern era, long passed but still actively present. I feel linked to him through John Main’s teacher who was guided by him. Ramana’s continuous state of Being-awake was diffused mostly by silence but also in his response to questions. In affirming the work of single-minded, persistent realisation of the Self that we are all called to, he releases the hope that consciousness bestows on every seeker.

He would use the familiar image of a coil of rope to describe the process. Seen as a blurred shape in the half-light, it is mistaken for a snake and provokes fear, paralysis or violence. In the light of dawn, it is seen for what it is and fear dissolves. In total darkness it is not seen at all. This darkness, like chaos before creation, is the original ignorance or original sin we all carry. In the full light the rope is just a rope. Everything is what it actually is and joy bursts.

During our recent Lent retreat one of the participants wanted to share just how sad and angry she felt about the way the world was going. She described the dismal political situation and the fear of sliding into a new callous and cruel administration out of touch with anything except its own version of reality; she lamented the surge of violence even in her own, once idyllic corner of the US. It was not new; but her lonely sadness and frightened anger about it all and the strong, fatalistic pessimism of her tone and body language touched and moved us. She thanked us at the end for creating a space where these feelings and fears could be spoken and heard and for the conversation we were having. She said she felt better and smiled.

Unique as she is, there are many millions who struggle with the same outlook. Despite the heavy bias to hopelessness in that view of things, a lighter, against-all-reason feeling of certainty can also quickly take us by surprise, just as, or just before we hit bottom. We might call it grace. If hope does not have this certainty it is almost certainly just a wish. Grace can be shared and even become contagious during a genuine and heartfelt conversation. In communion with others we dare to know that this hope is not false and that it is only that sure interior knowledge – we might call it faith – that makes it communicable to others.

A remarkable woman mystic of the 14th century, Mother Julian of Norwich, went through the darkest of inner experiences as she almost died of the plague. The world around her was pretty troubled – vast numbers killed by the pestilence, economic disruption, violent civil unrest and an overseas war. No doubt her awareness of this suffering informed her inner world. We interiorise what is happening around us and we project outwards what we are feeling. The inner and the outer dimensions of our experience of reality will collide violently until we reach a deep enough centre in ourselves from which we can integrate them.

Julian’s turmoils were expressed in images drawn from deep faith. Without such allies as these powerful symbols, we are far less prepared for the resilience that is demanded of us in order to survive and emerge more whole. For years after her crisis she processed these ‘shewings’, as she called them, and wrote up her insights into them in the first book written in English by a woman. Thomas Merton called her one of the greatest theologians. She stood head and shoulders above the mass of devotional and intellectual theology being routinely produced around her.

Her insights went straight into the nature of God and of ‘Christ our Mother’, as she called him, into sin and grace and into the true meaning of prayer. They came through a mystical intelligence – we might call it love – that raised her above her personal perspectives, revealing just those evolutionary new perspectives on reality that we need for our time.

The heart of her new level of consciousness inspired one of her most famous sayings. There is a certainty in these words that the strongest pessimism must face. Because of the faith hope and love concentrated in that certainty, we should not be surprised if the downward spiral of pessimism, even for a brief moment of clear vision, was reversed. She said simply: ‘all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.’

Anna Karenina first meets Count Vronsky at Moscow railway station where, at the end of the novel, in despair and shame at what unfolded from that first encounter she will end her life by throwing herself under a train. In that first moment of their relationship they feel reciprocally the overwhelming attraction that neither will be able to repress but at first their social conditioning allows them self-control. Tolstoy, their creator, also gives Anna a disturbing presentiment of a coming tragedy but the excitement and sweetness of their attraction naturally pushes it away. Later, when they meet at a ball the full force of their passion is released and unconcerned by what others are observing they discover and speak the unique language of love that lovers share.

The language of love has an unlimited spectrum of dialects, accents and vocabulary, not only in the form of Eros, as Anna and Vronsky discover theirs but also in friendship. We make many acquaintances in life, fleeting or longer-term. Each is unique but we may come to like or remember some more than others. The language of love shared is not unique in this way among everyone. Among future friends, however, there can also be this spark of instantaneous connection of sympathy and attraction which leads to a unique shared language of the love of true friendship. A journalist told me once how he met a political figure he was to interview and from the first moments of their exchange he recognised in the wit and outgoing humour something in common, the first sign of a shared unique language of love and they became friends for life.

The hope I was speaking of yesterday requires that we recognise the unique language of love of God: friend and lover but someone we never meet for the first time because we have never been outside the other’s company even if we did not recognise it. Gregory of Nazianzen in the 4th century describes the mystical awakening to this relationship when we become aware of God’s love-language of beauty everywhere around us: ‘the visible world around us’, the beauty of the sky, the sun in its course, the circle of the moon, the countless number of stars, with the harmony and order that are theirs, like the music of a harp? Who has blessed you with rain, with the art of husbandry, with different kinds of food, with the arts, with houses, with laws, with sttes, with a life of humanity and culture, with friendship and the easy familiarity of kinship?

In an age of fear and pessimism this intoxication with the beauty of the world and humanity seems inaccessible. The 4th century, however, was not a golden age – the end of the security of an empire, the invasion of barbarians, the great divorce between eastern and western Christianity, the corrupting marriage of church and state and an environmental disaster, one of the most devastating natural earthquakes in history. As Jane Austen wrote in a letter to her sister, we don’t love a place less because we have suffered there. Etty Hillesum, running between groups of Jews awaiting transportation one day was stopped in her tracks by the sight of an early spring flower growing in a crack in the pavement.

Gregory also discovers a unique feature of this language of divine love which challenges all we think of as love and which we will look at tomorrow.

When two people fall in love, like Anna Karenina and Vronsky in yesterday’s reflection, their language of love is intensely, exclusively intimate. Others may see it being spoken because the couple cannot hide their feelings for each other when they others are present but they are not part of their language community, outsiders.

God also has a language of love. It could be described as having a vocabulary of one Word through which the wonderful creative diversity of everything always continues to flow and multiply. Anyone who hears this creating Word through any small or immense aspect of the world experiences a new kind of intimacy with God. This is because it has opened up within us a new awareness of ourselves, what it is we come from and are travelling towards in the journey of our existence. To become more aware of ourselves means to discover a new closeness to God. Soon, however, we see that closeness isn’t what it is about. It is indwelling: ‘I in them and them in me’ as Jesus expresses it in the gospel of John. It is union.

This intimate-indwelling experience is the sign that our journey of existence is going in the right direction. The great difference in this language of God’s love compared with the love of eros alone is that it is universal and all-inclusive. This is why the love of God has its own name – agape – although this includes and integrates the love of eros and the love of friendship. Whoever loves lives in God, St John says. Every experience of love, in other words, leads us to God who is love.

Gregory of Nazianzen speaks of God’s language of love as including the beauty and order of the world and even of human society when it is healthily in harmony with nature. But he also draws our attention to the universal and apparently indiscriminate, non-judgemental love that God has for humanity. God is like the sun that shines on the good and the bad alike. God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Jesus concludes with the amazing command that we must learn to love just as God loves.

Love and compassion are inseparable and to realise it we need to allow the first exclusive expression of love to be broken open to include others, as when a couple have children. Love flows towards others and meets their needs as compassion. It starts with feeling compassion for the wounded on our own side, our tribe, our team, our party or our religion. But by its boundless origin it impels us to change our minds so that the same compassion can be directed towards enemies, those who are strangers or who make us fearful.

This is as much the highest theology as it is the clearest insight into the true nature and full potential of the human.

Jesus said to his disciples: ‘The Son of Man is destined to suffer grievously, to be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes and to be put to death, and to be raised up on the third day.’ Then to all he said: ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me. For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, that man will save it. What gain, then, is it for a man to have won the whole world and to have lost or ruined his very self?’ (Luke 9:22-25)

Jesus speaks to two distinct groups here, his close confidants and the general people. To the first he discloses his destiny in both its horror and its glory. Everything we flinch from, suffering, rejection and death. Being raised up is left unexplained. These are two hard contradictions, as in our own lives we find it hard to see disappointment and failure as a means to fulfilment. This cannot be how the God of reward and punishment we like to think of operates. So, we turn away from the narrow path to seek a more comfortable one. There’s nothing we value more than comfort.

Next, on the unwashed multitude, he bestows the uncomforting truth of radical renunciation as the way of living into this dilemma and turning the contradiction into a paradox. Paradoxes are portals into another worldview. To pass through them is metanoia. Paradoxes are not ideas but experiences, like the person you love dying and realising love still unites you. Or things falling apart with an almost absurd totality, one thing after another as they did for Job, and yet leading to an unpredictable wholeness.

Pema Chodron’s great work ‘When Things Fall Apart’ describes this. I was once at a conference with her when we were asked what led us into the monastic life. Her story could not have been bettered. She was working in the front yard of their suburban house one day when her husband drove in. He told her he was having an affair and was leaving her. She grabbed for the nearest thing to throw at his head which was a brick. Fortunately, she missed. From what she learned after this, she describes the way to deal with collapse and dissolution is not to deny or avoid but to plunge into them. Then loss, suffering, rejection and death reveal the portal that irresistibly invites you to pass through.

The ordinary people, the second group Jesus addresses in this gospel, knew him as a healer and a denouncer of corruption and injustice. Now they hear the hidden teaching made open: in the portal of transformation, where the material becomes transparent, we renounce not just possessions, not only the hurts and wounds we bear from life, but the victim, the craver and the possessor, the ego itself. To do so we may need immense love and support and patience. But he leaves us to conclude ‘what, actually, in the end, is the alternative?’

God once gave the mishmash of people, hardly yet even a tribe, who were trekking through the desert, rebelling today, repenting tomorrow, a simple choice: life or death. It scared and focused them (for a while). In our day the choice is in less religious terms: boredom or wonder.

Our craving for novelty and fresh stimulation extends into every aspect of daily life. We can’t possibly cram everything in and to try is nauseating. Greed, for the desert teachers was the power-fantasy of possessing and controlling everything, which is evidently impossible. But impossible fantasies often control our behaviour, Gluttony is different from greed. In the desert tradition it was the absurd attempt to stuff everything we fantasised about having into our ego, over-consumption to the point of throwing up or harming our beautiful planet. It also changes the way we think.

We measure meaning and values by economic analysis and, increasingly, what is not reduced to quantitative thinking? There’s a computer programme for nearly everything essentially human, even for compassion and therapy. Quantifying the human dehumanises and coarsens of our minds and corrupts our vision of the world. Marco Schloremmer, a renowned AI researcher in our community, told me recently that it is the language we use about AI that causes our dread and anxiety about it. Computers don’t learn. They don’t have memory. They don’t choose. AI is not intelligent. They just do what we program them to do.

If we make them our new idols and transfer our inner power to them we are merely repeating the idolatry ridiculed by the psalmist (Ps 115):

Their idols are silver and gold, made by human hands.
They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see.

The danger is not in the idol but in our willingness to subordinate ourselves, to see human consciousness and well-being as inferior or irrelevant. In their years of wandering, those who escaped slavery often got depressed and bored and made idols to comfort themselves. Idolatry fails and eventually bores us to death. The choice for life is usually not comfortable but it is never boring.

Meditation is practiced in the spirit of Lent throughout the year. In these days we can understand why. Meditating is a choice and makes the choice for life. Not always easy, comfortable or convenient. It is repetitious, but never boring.

One of the great English poets and one of my top favourites is the brilliant, visionary and humanly very flawed Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His harsh critics say he ‘wasted his genius’. Yet he remains luminously loveable and admirable for his gifts. He suffered from addiction to laudanum, a form of opium, which was inadequately understood at the time. He had lifelong effects from childhood illness and may have been bi-polar before that condition was recognised. He had a remarkable force of attraction combining deep, warm human feeling, a great mind and literary genius. His friends were loyal and loving through his moments of fame and his periods of collapse. One of them, the critic Charles Lamb, said ‘his essentials not touched he is very bad: but he wonderfully picks up another day and his face when he repeats his verses has its ancient glory – an archangel a little damaged’. Lamb condemned people who referred to him as ‘poor Coleridge’. He was a great – if damaged -archangel.

Coleridge wrote some of the most memorable and beautiful poems in the language: the psychedelic Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner and the unforgettable Frost at Midnight to his sleeping new-born son. He was also one of the greatest critics of English literature although, as in other aspects of his unsuccessful life, unable to conform to the standards of success and respectability of his time. He is the source of the literary idea of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ which allows us to enter into great fictional worlds while ‘knowing’ they are unreal. Another great insight – and why I am describing Coleridge like this for a Lenten reading – arose both from his understanding of how literature and the mind works but also from his profound and mystical Christian faith. He called wonder the ‘suspension of our capacity to compare’.

This gives us a direct insight into simplicity. It is the capacity to give undivided attention and to be one with what we are paying attention to. It excludes nothing but gives itself wholly in that moment to what we are loving, because pure attention turns objectification into love. Usually when our attention is caught by anything beautiful or beyond the ordinary, we have a moment of wonder but then quickly begin to compare and contrast. Is this beautiful face or view or poem more or less than the previous one that caught my attention? On internet dating sites, I am told, you click from one profile to another comparing them with increasing speed and the hunger of loneliness. To gaze, to behold, to give undivided steady attention without measuring it against previous or possible future attractions is contemplation. It opens in us the boundless tenderness of eternally loving the uniqueness we are encountering.
It is this tenderness I treasure and wonder at in Coleridge alongside his genius and his damaged archangel wings. His father used to take him out at night to behold the stars and galaxies. Later Coleridge remarked, ‘I heard him with a profound delight & admiration; but without the least mixture of wonder or incredulity’. However, this does not contradict what we have been saying about wonder. He is saying wonder is more than a fleeting pleasant surprise. It is a state. He explains that before seeing the stars he had already developed a deepening, continuous state of wonder not dependent on sense impressions or novelty. ‘My mind had been habituated to the Vast– & I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief.’

In other words, we don’t have to look for things to wonder at. Everything is transparent and luminous. We should begin to develop this state of mind by wondering why we don’t see the wonder of things all the time because we are not yet ‘habituated’ to the vast.