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 medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, called beauty ‘a kind of knowledge’. Dostoevsky famously said that ‘beauty will save the world’. More personally and so less abstractly, would you agree with me that when we find anything beautiful we love it? Could you call to mind for a moment a few things that can awaken this sense of beauty in you? I find there’s often there’s a big element of surprise when something we didn’t think special reveals the reassuring news that beauty does live in the world even if we cannot always see it.

For example, a person who is doing something for you as part of their paid work. When some people some to help you they look as if they are being forced to and wish you would pay and go away quickly. Others do their task efficiently and with courtesy but without personalising it. Occasionally there is someone who for some magical reason makes you feel the presence of selflessness. It is their own presence but also something shines through their manner with a relaxed, super-confident yet totally uncoercive kindness that for a while makes you feel a happier and a better person simply because another human being is relating to you in this way.

For the sceptics among us, there may also be unconscious reasons for this – the person reminds you of someone you like or are attractive in other ways. But these factors wouldn’t explain the sense of grace. This means an energy or presence which has an impenetrable motive, which is a sign of it being pure goodness, agapic love.

It is ‘beautiful’ and effortless. In works of art that touch you deeply and bestow a perspective on the world which is obvious but surprising, familiar and yet fresh – whether it’s in music, a novel, poetry, painting or film or a child’s drawing – beauty is always felt as effortless. The ego and the creative labour of the artist have been absorbed fully in the final work.

Beauty is a manifestation of grace. It is as present around us always as oxygen. Beauty was only created once: it is a window opening onto the timeless. But it is the essential nature of all things and every person. This is why it can emerge suddenly anywhere.

That is part of the work of Lent to sensitise ourselves, despite the daily news and the disharmony around us, to the beauty in which we live and move and have our being.

Taking Off

Bumping over frozen ruts
Until hard brown ground
Becomes a song, a threnody
Of no one’s pain but mine

A relief to rise over the tops
Of budless bushes and naked trees
Whose thin bony fingers try
To touch anything

Unlike a child who knows
Better than to ask, I ask
Why this funeral of earth
Where is the green of life gone?

Then, into himalayas of clouds
Knowing nothing
Of the expired world,
Appears the sapphire blue of mind

Keats, who of course did not write the poem above, died young and, like many older people, had to face despair about his unrealised potential and lost youth. (His poetry became very popular during Covid.)

He had long struggled with the contradiction of death as something to be avoided at all costs and yet desired as the source of the peace the human psyche longs for. This tension is at the heart of any truly religious approach to life, meaning seeing life as a sacred wonder. The difficult death of his brother who John nursed changed him permanently. His way through the paradox became what he called ‘dying into life’. It means finding the peace of accepted suffering.

I think our daily meditation is a way of dying into life, not by using the precious time to analyse our problems for the millionth time or to wallow in resentment and self-sorrow or to construct an alternative reality we call miscall detachment or thinking we are enlightened. But it is to find the small point, too small for the ego to enter, where acceptance is secretly accomplished. How this happens can hardly be observed or remembered but it is undeniable: we know we have died to something and live with a peace that the world alone cannot give.

Keats was also in love with the mystery of beauty. Without the experience of beauty, one of the three attributes of God, along with truth and goodness, we could not find this small point where we let go of everything and become richly poor. Beauty even its brief appearances is overwhelming.

When he was very young Teillhard de Chardin became deeply anxious about the transient nature of the world. Perhaps he had had his first awareness of death which can be a surge of consciousness for a child. Maybe he had heard St John: ‘the world is passing away along with its desires’. It is a striking insight. Not only is the world, events, people, objects, patterns we are accustomed to passing but also desire itself. What we long for today with unbearable intensity diminishes to an afterthought tomorrow. Even our minds and feelings are in flux.

Teillhard’s response to his anxiety of transience was to seek what in the world was fixed and solid. He investigated nature in a way that led to his future work. Discovering that even mountains pass away his search took its deeper direction.

In our culture we are habituated to transience and novelty. In the rapid succession of new things, messages, people, activities, there is little space to mourn. But when we lose someone or something that we love, which is truly irreplaceable, the void of meaning will attack us ferociously. We ask, ‘Is this what it all comes to?’

Rather than looking for permanence and discovering transience, we could ponder the meaning of change. We discover that, in a certain way of seeing, change is the only constant. In that paradox we find a portal of mystery and our search shifts into another perspective. We seek not answers or explanations but God, realising eventually that God is neither of these.

From this change of seeing things we develop deeper self-knowledge. This leads to horizons where self-awareness merges with the knowledge of God, even with an at first disturbing sense that it is God’s knowledge of us is that is the starting point of every search.

As we think of ourselves historically, we see how we have changed over time and also how we haven’t.

Instead of seeing our experience of life as successive episodes or like the frames of a video, a sense of wholeness emerges. We can’t see the beginning, though we know there was one. Nor can we see the end though we know there will be one. Yet we feel how they are connected. Is it our evolving wholeness, still not complete, that is the permanence we seek?

Bring back the body. The body is our faithful reminder of changeability. It is the key to understanding Christianity, in fact it is its ‘sacred language’. With the body and in the light of the emerging wholeness of our self, I can make some sense of the references to eternal life and immortality in the scriptures, like this: ‘For our dying bodies must be transformed into bodies that will never die; our mortal bodies must be transformed into immortal bodies’(I Cor 15:53)

So, when wholeness is eventually achieved, the latest model of our body, the final issue, is released?

The critical and commercial success of the film Oppenheimer, the creator of the atomic bomb is worth a Lenten reflection. The movie reveals though hardly deals with the human fascination with evil and our inability to control ourselves. Self-control is one of the fruits of the Spirit according to St Paul: not just concerning our intake of sugar or use of the internet but the correct use of our liberty as children of God.

Einstein’s equation explained the energy released but not how to build a bomb that would convert certain atoms into other types of atoms thus producing the heat and pressure that killed more than 100,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The film deals with the supposed ‘moral dilemma’ about using the bomb. If it would shorten the war and ‘save lives’ could it be justified? This was the argument they followed. ‘Woe to them that call evil good’, Isaiah said. A deeper reason challenges this yielding to the fascination with evil that is an ice-cold feature of the human being. Einstein’s simple response reveals it: Mankind invented the atomic bomb but no mouse would ever construct a mousetrap.

The film needed to keep its protagonist somewhat sympathetic and lightly shows Oppenheimer’s guilt that he had started a chain reaction, an arms race. As indeed happened. Because humans are competitive and imitate each other, this game has come to be a darkening cloud of fear and hatred over humanity since the first bombs were dropped.

Evil is justified by being presented as a ‘necessary evil’ that can be called ‘good’.

It is the kind of mind game we play in our heads every day. The code name for the first successful nuclear test in Los Alamos was ‘Trinity’. Bernard McGinn, who is leading a series on Christian Mysticism in the WCCM Online programme at present, studied and wrote about the figure of the Antichrist and our related fascination with evil throughout history.

Today we do not locate evil in a mythical devil figure but in the unconscious darkness that can overtake human intelligence in science, psychology or biology and genetics. However we may deceive ourselves because we cannot control ourselves, evil will destroy. Look at the still devastated cities of Syria or the ‘collective punishment’, as the UN Secretary-General calls it, of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

The fascination with evil makes it hard for people to control the power they have especially if it is the power over life and death. There is no conversation with it because it destroys even the gift of communication. It creates a negative silence, a shutdown. Only an absolute radical alternative can be asserted. However powerless it may seem and doomed to failure this assertion survives the self-destruction built into every new wave of evil. It is the universal witness of spiritual wisdom in all traditions on which our future depends. Let’s end with one supreme expression of it:

With gentleness overcome anger – with generosity overcome meanness – with truth overcome deceit – Beware of the anger of the mind – master your thoughts – Let them serve truth – the wise have mastered body, word and mind – the wise harm no one.
The Dhammapada

The story that runs through scripture during Lent is of course the Exodus. I have followed it many years and sometimes get tired of it, especially when I remember it is purely mythical in the sense that there is no historical record of it anywhere. I never minded the supernatural or magical elements – dividing the Red Sea, Moses striking the rock or God sending manna to feed them in the desert. These have deep, satisfying levels of meaning. As does the constant lack of faith among the Israelites and poor Moses having to keep up their morale with God’s help. Last year, I stood on Mount Nebo ‘in the land of Moab’, where Moses stood viewing the Promised Land and learned from God that, because he had doubted, he would never cross the Jordan himself. This seems a bit harsh of God but it’s painfully realistic. We never reach the Promised Land in this life. When we think we do, we are soon disillusioned.

So, although Exodus is over-familiar and we might prefer to skip it, it still has power to grip and teach us something new. Recently I was interested to read an interpretation that saw it as the earliest story protest against slavery as a social institution: the divine element in it was the affirmation of universal human dignity. The fact that the escaped slaves find freedom a burden and at times want to go back makes it psychologically very convincing.

Children love familiar stories when they go to sleep and so do cultures that stretch over millennia. Humans think in stories. Overwhelmed by data or opinion we revert to making up a story, even a conspiracy theory any fool can understand. To persuade people about something tell them a story, don’t show them graphs. We dream in stories. How do we put them together so effortlessly and feel them so terrifying or blissful – and yet so difficult to recount to someone else without making them sound trivial or silly? We remember in stories even if we twist the facts in the re-telling.

Stories connect us. We bond and find an identity through them. They then become not just my but our story in which we find ourselves and meet each other. Football supporters share stories of their team. Jews find this bond especially in Exodus (and the Holocaust) and Christians in the re-telling of the story and stories of Christ through the year and of his last hours during Easter. Through the storytelling over long stretches of time something soaks deep into our consciousness and distils as an experienced truth that cannot be narrated but nor can it be denied.

So, even when you think ‘O, I’ve heard that before. Tell me a new one’, just remember Jesus on wine at the wedding feast: ‘the old is good’, he said. In fact, the stories of every known culture share a universal narrative structure. Someone has something to achieve, they face obstacles which they overcome, finally they achieve and return home. Like a trip to the shops or a hero on a quest or God becoming Man.

We come to know Jesus through a story oft-repeated but also as a story which, however elevated, is recognisably mysteriously akin to my story too. It’s not a coincidence that Jesus was also a master story-teller – as we shall see tomorrow.

If you missed yesterday’s reflection, you might read it as a preparation for today’s about Jesus as a master storyteller. But not necessary, because his stories stand alone with simplicity, clarity, down to earth and yet transcendental and often with an element of exaggeration. Imagine a twinkle in his eye as he told them to the people seated entranced in front of him. He might not have been a stand-up comic but it’s hard to imagine him as being solemn in person as he has come to be seen.

His message, the theme that runs through all his teaching and epitomises his life and personality, could be summarised as the ‘kingdom of heaven’. This is not exclusively within us or outside us, it is not a place or a reward. It is what it is and many different parables and his life-story birth, death and resurrection describe it. Why not take these two as an exercise in listening to the storyteller?

The kingdom of heaven is like a man who found a treasure buried in a field. He buried it again and for sheer joy went and sold everything he had.

Again, he said, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of immense value, he sold everything he had and bought it.

They have much in common: finding, selling everything, buying. These are things we can understand from ordinary life even if the ‘everything’ is a bit over the top. Are they saying exactly the same thing? Kind of. But from greatly different perspectives. What’s the difference? Warning, spoiler ahead (or one kind of spoiler).

To work on it yourself ask yourself about the first parable and the lucky man who found the treasure: imagine how he found it; why did he bury it again?; what made him so joyful as to sell everything?; what does buying mean? Same questions about the merchant. Any reason why it does not say that the merchant was ‘joyful’?

I leave the questions for you. Except one, what is the big difference of perspective in this descriptions of the kingdom experience? It seems that in the first parable the man found the treasure by chance, as happens still today, for example, when farmers dig up a treasure buried from marauders centuries ago. But in the next parable, alike in many ways, the big difference is that the finding of the pearl is part of the daily work and routine of the merchant. The finding of the pearl may still be a joyful surprise but it is parallel to the experience of the first one. Nevertheless, both may feel immensely grateful and feel it as the work of grace.

Apply this to contemplative experience: the morning and evening routine work of daily meditation and the being taken by sheer surprise. Karl Rahner who thought the only real Christian of the future would be a mystic described the mystical in a way that includes ordinary people in daily life, in chance and daily routine: ‘genuine experience of God emerging from the very heart of our existence’.

I hope this two-in-one parable may help you see your day today as a parable that opens you to the kingdom.