Lent Reflections 2024

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

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

Happy Easter. And finally, we can say Alleuia again! One word says it all.

St John looked into the empty tomb and let Peter, his companion whom he had outrun to get there, go in first. Peter, the good but less subtle part of us. Then John, the lover in us, went in and ‘he saw and he believed’.

As I have been writing these reflections during Lent I have had an invisible companion, no doubt part of myself, who is not merely a non-believer but who does not just ‘believe’ either. This is an important part of ourselves to befriend and learn from because its questioning curiosity gives space for faith to grow and teach us things we never dreamed of before. We become enthusiastically inauthentic if we just jump up and down saying we ‘believe’. Anyway, the word we translate as ‘believe’ has much more content and outreach of meaning – to have faith in, to be persuaded, to trust. The English word ‘believe’ grows from the word ‘love’.

Something bursts today in humanity’s journey into consciousness, long imagined and much hoped-for. It is not like the working out of a solution to a maths problem or even like finishing a work we have been long engaged on. It is more like the bursting of a seed or the opening of a flower. It can best be recognised if we allow it, moment by moment, to persuade us that it understands us.

‘He comes to us hidden and salvation consists in our recognising him,’ Simone Weil said.

It is like seeing what makes a joke funny or why a pun can both please and irritate us. We don’t have to try too hard, just wait for the penny to drop. Today is just the beginning and if the beginning is so good imagine what the rest will be like.

I hope these Lent Reflections have been of some service for you during our long trek. I would like to thank the great team, led by Leonardo, who got them distributed and very specially the translators who patiently (I think) put up with some last-minute deliveries and for their very generous gift of time and wonderful talent.

One word says it all.

Happy Easter!

 

Image: Pixabay/falco

In the coming days we are invited to encounter the power of an ancient tradition that makes a particular period of time sacred: we call it ‘holy week’. It culminates in the final three days in the transcendence of time, the bursting of the eternal present into the human dimension of time and space.

If we can feel it as an invitation, we could experience hospitality in its fullest meaning. Today the ‘hospitality industry’ means pubs, restaurants and hotels and is an important part of the economy in the service sector. Spiritually and in traditional societies, however, hospitality is an experience of a mysterious relationship in which roles are reversed and oppositions are entwined.

Today, Palm Sunday, remembers the triumphal welcome of Jesus into Jerusalem. The crowd of pilgrims who had come for the religious festival went wild and he seemed to be riding high in a way that a celebrity or a politician longs for. People wanted to see the man reputed to have raised the dead. Ironically, Jesus rode in not on a beautiful white horse but on a donkey. In a few days, the crowd had turned against him and were clamouring for his death as a blasphemer. That hospitality of Jerusalem proved shallow and false.

The root word for hospitality is the Latin hospes which oddly contains three meanings: guest, host and stranger. Stranger also hints at ‘enemy’ and links hospes also to the word ‘hostile’. Strangers are visitors from the foreign and the unknown. Maybe they are potential friends. But don’t trust them yet, even if they come bearing gifts. Prudence says treat them as friends, even as divine visitors. In some cultures, the welcoming host become responsible for the safety and well-being of the stranger whether they need a hotel or a hospital. In India the principle of Atithi Devo Bhava, the guest is God, must always be respected. In Christian communities the guest must be welcomed as if they were Christ himself and in a few countries this even applies to immigrants. The Qu’ran says that even prisoners of war should be treated like guests

Strangers pose possible dangers; and maybe the social custom of exaggerated hospitality is a way of protecting the host from them. But deeper than this fear is the vision of God present in in everyone. That insight arises from the simple and universal experience of human kinship. Some theories say that there is a hidden hostility in hospitality as it distances us from the stranger. But beyond theory, in the practice of gracious, courteous welcoming the projections of divinity or danger on the guest can be resolved. The Christ in me welcomes the Christ in you. Human relationship moves into a higher level, almost the highest level of nondualism. In this atmosphere, fear, division, conflict cannot survive. There is peace and unity.

If we see Holy Week as an invitation, then, we may soon find this peace even through the intense changes of mood and the tragic-transcendent conclusion of the following days. We will make a passover from a vision of life seen through the prism of fear to one of confidence and trust. I saw the almost full bright moon just now, walking out after meditation. She is both guest and host and a familiar stranger.

Both Passover and Easter festivals are controlled and reconciled by her. She is full-faced, innocent and lovely and you can bask in her cool healing light without any fear.

Lent begins with the tribal story of the Exodus and concludes with the myth being lived out in the person of Jesus. From today the liturgy readings focus on the events that led to the tragic climax of his downfall, death and resurrection. Today’s gospel, however, opens with an apparently mundane detail: Among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. These approached Philip, who came from Bethsaida in Galilee, and put this request to him, ‘Sir, we should like to see Jesus.’ Philip went to tell Andrew, and Andrew and Philip together went to tell Jesus. Is the point to highlight the expansion of his influence beyond the Jewish world? Or to accentuate the physical danger Jesus was in and the need for security?

At many moments in life the very uncertainty of what might be the correct interpretation sharpens our sense of reality. How often do we have a sense of uncertainty about the meaning of something or the incipient feeling of meaninglessness while we also sense that something of great significance is underway? The passing details of a loved one’s last hours of life can remain with you for the rest of yours. In important moments we pay attention to everything. including all the loose ends and unanswered questions of life.

From this point in the Lent cycle, we are swept forward in a story of inescapable intensity, drawn into a sequence of events which we have heard before. But, as with children, repetition makes them new.

Jesus has just been told that some foreigners have asked to see him. His response to this small thing is not to check his schedule. Instead, he expresses both his anxiety about the direction events are taking happen and the meaning that is now beginning to unfold and whose outcome he already knows is inevitable. His hour has come and the ultimate meaning of his young life will be fulfilled. This will happen not through success and acclaim – as we fantasise fulfilment will come to us – but through failure, pain, loss and the non-negotiability of death. He sees the necessity of this when he says that a seed has to die before it will produce a harvest.

Then, turning from his personal fate to the universal truth of the human condition he shares with us the meaning, the truth. Anyone who wants to find their life must lose it. We cannot have our cake and eat it until we have let go of the cake and our desire for it. And, if he is the way we follow, we will have to go through what he is passing through. Hard though this path seems, discipleship reveals the Father, the source, to us as it has known and lived with it since his mission began.

The exodus in this personal transition is the final break with the powers of samsara, all the alliance of illusory forces that block and delude us. What seems the end becomes transparent and we see a new beginning take shape. Everything will be made new as we free ourselves from ancient bonds and embrace the unique gift of life that makes each of us who we truly are.


We are God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus to live the good life as from the beginning he had meant us to live it.

Ephesians 2:10

So writes St Paul in the second reading of today’s mass (Ephesians 2:1-10). It strikes me like a chord or melody of Bach, who I could listen to all day, that suddenly emerges from his music, transcending everything that has prepared for it and, soaring high above all contradiction with an effortless joy and sapphire blue simplicity. Merely to argue with it would feel like the perverse jealousy of the ego when it is confronted by the self.

The idea that we are actually created is difficult to grasp. It’s beyond our backward view of things. Whatever knows itself has the feeling from the dawn of consciousness that it has existed for ever. Maybe this was Lucifer’s mistake, a deceptive perspective. In the same letter Paul addresses the dilemma like this: ‘he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blemish before him in love’.

You can’t argue with the ground of being. You can never undermine it. You can only try to accept your degree of self-knowledge in humility. However uncomfortably to our independent spirit, it reveals that we are accepted, chosen, known, before we emerge into the world of space and time. Our meaning in this emergence is to learn to enjoy the goodness of life by realising we are a creation, not self-made and therefore not self-sustaining, but a spontaneous emanation of divine beauty. But enough of this, or we will be drawn into the maze of the gnostics instead of simply walking the labyrinth of our lives in the faith of being unfinished works. We are God’s work of art still incomplete; but, as God doesn’t do bad art, so we must be uniquely beautiful.

Little dramas of human relationship illustrate this. When a friendship is interrupted for no obvious reason, days and months pile up a seemingly endless absence separating us. It is easy to imagine rejection, something misunderstood, a failure or fault on our part, guilt for an unknown fault. The more we imagine the worst reason, the harder it is to reach out towards the other person – even with the life-giving words ‘how are you?’ Life goes on but the part of us that was given into the friendship is lost, part of life’s collateral damage. Then the absent one is there again by chance, unexpectedly. Before either of you know it you are conversing, catching up and coming to understand what happened. No blame. No fault. Just trust mistakenly placed in fearful thoughts.

Read today’s gospel (John 3:14-21) in the light of this. God loved the world so much that… Where you read ‘believe’ put ‘have faith in’ and see how it changes the landscape.

Image: Laurence Freeman

Today’s gospel (John 2:13-25) describes Jesus purifying the Temple in Jerusalem. Outraged by the commercialisation of this sacred but also politicised space, seeing the animals being sold for sacrifice and moneychangers exploiting foreign visitors during the busy time of Passover, he reacted with anger. He made a whip of cords and drove the animal merchants out; and then turned the money-changers’ tables over scattering their coins. His reason was clear: ‘You must not turn my father’s house into a market.’

Catholic pilgrimage sites, like Lourdes, have built their economies around pilgrims but, perhaps remembering this passage, the sacred zones themselves are commerce-free. Last month the Extinction Rebellion activists dressed in business attire occupied insurance companies in the City of London which, they claimed were complicit in climate chaos by insuring companies involved in environmental damag. The Occupy Movement protesting social and economic inequality disrupted Wall Street. Greta leads school-children strikes. In all these cases, as no doubt in the Temple, once the disruption is over, things return to normal and the money-changers haggle to recover their scattered coins. Protests like these don’t bring radical, lasting change; but they do raise and sustain awareness of injustice and challenge stay-at homes like most of us to take sides, thus helping us feel less helpless and hopeless.

They are easily dismissed as emotional, ineffective responses. But when people feel helpless what matters most to them is to enjoy freedom of self-expression – precisely what is being crushed in the rise of repressive totalitarianism in countries like Russia, China and Iran. We need protests that don’t seem to achieve anything but say something nonetheless. Yet anger without depth can lead nowhere or worse to bitterness and despair.

In the gospel Jesus explains his behaviour in the Temple in the deepest mystical terms: identifying the Temple with his own resurrected form of embodiment.

The wonderful film Jesus of Montreal, shows a contemporary Jesus-figure mirroring the events leading to his death and resurrection. He leads a motley group of actors among whom, in one scene, the Mary Magdalene figure is auditioning, lightly clad, for a TV beer commercial. Jesus is present in the studio and witnesses her mocking, degradation and humiliation by the producer. Jesus stands up and silently, calmly walks round pushing over the expensive cameras and lighting. This leads to his trial and eventual death.

We are obsessed with objectives, outcomes, measurables for all we do, oblivious to the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita on work: You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction. (BG 2:47).

Anytime, anywhere in the world when anyone sits to meditate, they are making the perfect protest against the illusion that underlies injustice. Each meditation witnesses to truth and kindness and bring them closer to being realised.

Image: Laurence Freeman

It’s one thing when events don’t turn out as we hoped they would. We have to deal with disappointment or a range of feelings from anger to despair. But it’s another thing entirely when the outcome of something we had been deeply concerned about and maybe became anxiously attached to, is just inconclusive. However many times you examine your options about what to do, you feel blocked. The bottom line is there is nothing to do – yet. We must simply wait and see.

In conversations in this kind of situation people start imagining all sorts of outcome but eventually you have to admit that none will work – yet. And over again you hear ‘we’ll just have to wait and see.’ You can try to get round it, but true, radical uncertainty can’t be argued with. It is like fate. There is no choice except to accept it for as long as it is what it is. There are few things more humbling than just having to wait and see, humbling and strangely liberating.

This is not the same as when people, who don’t like making decisions, postpone them indefinitely and consequently create unhappy inactivity. Indecisiveness makes everyone feel frustrated that we are wasting time. But trying to make a definite decision and then discovering that we simply can’t – yet anyway – leads us into a different zone of being.

I once checked in at an airport and the person I handed my ticket to suddenly looked very uncertain and disturbed. Then she saw why the computer wouldn’t respond and she said, ‘but sir this is for tomorrow’s flight’. Everything of a sudden began to unravel for me in a wonderful way. I felt very foolish then free. What should I do? Go home and come back tomorrow or…? I accepted her offer to change the flight to today and arrived in my destination deliciously uncertain what to do. I had a whole free day, no one to meet me, no talks to give, nowhere to stay.

So even when you are in the grip of uncertainty – as powerful a cosmic force as any – something always happens. When you have consciously embraced uncertainty and stopped trying to solve it, what does happen – and something always does – has a wonderful freedom and inevitability about it. You glimpse liberty of spirit.

Jesus climbed to the summit of the holy mountain with his three close disciples and there in their sight he was physically transfigured. The disciples were uncertain how to respond and felt fear in the pure white light. But then a cloud covered them and the Father spoke. As uncertain, easily frightened human beings we wend our way every day between the light and the cloud.

The Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness and he remained there for forty days, and was tempted by Satan. He was with the wild beasts, and the angels looked after him. After John had been arrested, Jesus went into Galilee. There he proclaimed the Good News from God. ‘The time has come’ he said ‘and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News. Change your mind and have faith in the new vision you are able to see. (Mark 1:12-15).

I love the economy of this gospel passage. But I have taken the liberty to change the translation of the last sentence because we associate ‘repent’ with remorse and regret which feed guilt. Jesus is hardly summarising his message with this. ‘Metanoia’ is the root Greek word of the original, which means ‘change your mind’. Like the supreme teacher he was, rather than condemn or rub their noses in our sins, he changed our perspectives. Because his mission so radically undermined the way religion, politics and the money worked together, Jesus ended up on Golgotha, the rubbish dump of Jerusalem. It was the place where the Romans performed criminal executions and later threw their bodies.

A landmark for me on a route I drive quite often is the sign ‘Landfill Ahead’. Eventually I found out what landfills are, how they operate and why, because of the greenhouse gasses they emit, they are so unpleasant and bad for climate change. Plastic bags buried under layers of soil take up to 300 years to decompose and when they do they produce tiny particles that pollute soil and water and enter the food-chain. Waste takes a long time as well as a lot of space. There’s nothing good to say about them except they are convenient places to brush our sin of waste and excess under a carpet of earth. I discovered the difference between a rubbish dump and landfill and then learned that archaeologists found that Golgotha was actually a landfill site.

Over the years we bury our mistakes and whatever shames us out of sight in psychological landfill. Dumps don’t hide the memories well enough. Our mistakes and failures are legion and perhaps cosmically speaking the great majority of events at the human level, if not outright bad, are mediocre failures. In this karmic dimension of reality what happens to all the waste? ‘Ridiculous, the sad waste time, stretching before and after’, as T.S. Eliot described it.

But what if someone, wasted on the vast landfill of failure, underwent something that wholly moved our perspective and how we see it? If this person, extending across all the dimensions, were to show a completely new understanding of how to deal with the sad waste of life?

Image: Laurence Freeman

Today we begin another forty-day trek through the desert to the river of life-giving death which both separates and unites us to the promised land. But, let’s not become too spiritual. Those who have the ashes written on their foreheads reminding them of their mortality also hear the liberating invitation to ‘change your mind and have faith in your goodness and the beauty of your being’.

How could we understand this unless our spirituality was immersed in the material world, allowing the material, when appropriate, to dominate? I loved the poem I read recently called ‘Ash Wednesday’ by the Catalan poet Joan Maragall. It is addressed to a woman whose youthful beauty has ravished him.

death and ashes, you know haven’t the least bit to do with you.
Don’t let this token tarnish
Your forehead rosy and fresh
You needn’t be acquainted with the gloomy phrase
The priest will say
When he turns your way

Her beauty, he says ‘was given you, tender sanguine bud, for other palettes that are not ash or dust’.

Our WCCM theme this year is the beauty and goodness of all worlds. We could dedicate this year’s desert experience to giving up some excess and increasing what is deficient in our life, to help us see more of this in our daily life? (Meditation gets it right). Then we might see, like the mystic scientist Teillhard de Chardin, that

Crimson gleams of Matter, gliding imperceptibly into the gold of Spirit, ultimately to become transformed into the incandescence of a Universe that is Person.

Teillhard felt at home in the world of ‘electrons, nuclei, waves and the vast cosmic realities of mass, radiation and curvatures’. If only we could see the world for a flash on each of the next forty days with this wondrous beauty, human and cosmic, we would become truly useful.

That is why meditation is useful and transforming. If you want to start meditating or start again this Lent, you will not be alone.

My book on Lent, ‘Sensing God’, might also be a practical help with questions and encouragement in the daily practice.

Laurence Freeman