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.
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.