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?
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 4th 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 20th 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.