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.

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)