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.

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.