A Simple Path Through Lent
Father Laurence's weekly reflections for Lent 2026
Ash Wednesday
Dear Friends,
We are about to begin a new Lent. For seekers everywhere, especially for us as meditators, it is a chance to discover afresh what attention and compassion truly mean for the world. and our own lives. We start again from where we are.
In a hectic and anxious age, polarised, violent and so often lacking simple kindness we need a Lent of hope and interiority. In such times, our contemplative practice — both our inner voice and active example — is more important than ever. Let’s try to renew our daily practice, seeing it as a gift richly invested in our lives as a small but positive exercise of ascetic discipline. It bears fruit in the hope and joy of the Resurrection which is where we are heading through these forty days.
To support you during this journey, here are a few suggestions:
The First Day of Lent
Join us online on Ash Wednesday, 18 February at 10:30am (CET, France) for a live session, a teaching to open Lent concluding with the ancient ritual of the ashes.
More info here (this event is in the past)
Weekly Lenten Reflection
Subscribe to our mailing list to receive a weekly Lenten reflection every Sunday.
A Daily Companion
My book Sensing God – Learning to Meditate During Lent is a daily companion and can be used as a guide to starting or renewing your practice. It is available in paperback and digital formats. (See on Amazon or Medio Media)
A Lenten Practice
You may also choose to add an extra meditation during Lent, even a short one in the middle of the day, or identify a habit you would like to reduce or let go of. Lent resolutions are a good idea: they soon teach us we are not perfect but we can always start again.
Holy Week Retreat
Consider coming to Bonnevaux in person for our Holy Week retreat, which is also online. The rituals of the Triduum, its last three days, always make the mysteries of Death and Resurrection fresh with wonder.
May we all grow in love and kindness together during this Lent.
Love,
Reflection on the Gospel for the First Sunday of Lent 2026
The Temptation in the Desert: Matthew 4:1-11
Pope Francis proposed that the phrase in the Our Father ‘Lead us not into temptation’ should be translated differently. He felt it gave the misleading impression that God lures us into temptation and sets traps for us: as if God enjoys playing God with us and smiles when we fall into the trap. He proposed a clearer version: ‘Do not let us fall into temptation’.
It’s worth reflecting on these options as we enter Lent with the gospel account of Jesus being led by the Spirit into the desert where he is tempted by the devil after his fast. At that point, he was bound to be especially weakened and vulnerable when the devil turned up. Deep within himself Jesus perhaps felt how easy it would be to slip into one or all three parts of the ego’s web of illusion.
The first is to rely on the material substitutes for reality and so avoid the endless challenges it presents to us in daily life. How much easier it is to slip into self-indulgence and justify using our power or gifts in egocentric ways (turning stones into bread) – easier than learning what enduring the desert has yet to finish teaching us. Secondly, he waved away the temptation to throw himself off the pinnacle of the temple just to show that the angels would rescue him. How tempting is the illusion of the deluded pride of egoism to use risk to avoid engaging with reality and fall into the comforting nets of illusion. Thirdly, he shatters the temptation to expel ourselves altogether from reality by enthroning the impulses and cravings of the ego for power and control.
The Desert Teachers believed that we need temptations and tribulations in order finally to break out of the web of illusion and self-deception. It is good to see that we are making progress in living life as a spiritual path but dangerous to be complacent and think the old patterns will never try to return. ‘Be vigilant’, therefore, ‘at all times. That’s what the desert experience is about – staying awake. Abba Sisoes was on his deathbed, his face shining like the sun and surrounded by his disciples. When the angels came to take him, he asked for a little more time to repent. The younger monks, who thought he was perfect, asked him why he had asked for more time. He replied, ‘Amen, I tell you, I do not think I have even begun to repent’.
The myriad temptations to the illusions of pride are part and parcel of the school of life. Just when you feel you’ve got it under control, the insinuating whisper can return. Not from the Spirit who accompanies us into the desert and never leaves us at the mercy of the forces of darkness even when we fall into temptation. Temptations come from the human inclination under duress or disappointment to deny truth and choose the unreal over the real.
Facing this human weakness is what the desert is about and why we meet more than the devil there. We meet the Spirit who always has our back. In front of us we see and are helped by radiant angels when we need them, for just as long as we need them.
Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him. (Mt 4:11)
Reflection on the Gospel for the Second Sunday of Lent 2026
The Transfiguration: Matthew 17:1-9
Last week we were in a desert facing our demons and then being looked after by angels who spend a little time comforting us. This week we are atop a misty mountain and our beloved, though mysterious and elusive teacher, reveals himself to us in a way that shatters our hope of any real intimacy with him. We see him (as Arjuna saw Krishna in Chapter 11 of the Gita) in his cosmic glory, his physical body and whole being blindingly translucent. We see what we might have suspected: that the truth of him transcends the realm of time and space in which we felt drawn to him. Maybe we are hugely privileged to see this but we are utterly unable to respond adequately and so we look away and are terrified. Then, without our seeing it, he comes close again in a way we recognise, touches us and tells us not to be afraid. He is again how we have always known him, yet we can never forget what we have seen even though we might want to.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could be content merely to see things at the level of appearance? Yet, even when we are not in one of those rare moments, glimpsing the real in the unreal, the eternal in the transitory, even if we are comfortably ensconced in the mundane level of awareness, we cannot help but sense that what appears is never the whole truth. Life entails the risk that blinding truth might break through the familiar at any instant and upturn everything. We long for this almost as much as we fear it.
Fear is instinctive and chemical and self-centred: the amygdala sends SOS signals to the hypothalamus and I get a rush of adrenalin and cortisol. It is about saving my life as I know it and avoiding the risk of knowing it in any other way because I might lose control of it. So, I recoil from any change in a familiar pattern and desperately try to stay safe where I am even if it is a place and self-inflicted pattern of shame. Fear gives us the reason not to take the risk of an imprisoning pattern dissolving.
Even when we try to be free and creative, fear prevents us by imagining exposure and rejection. The possibility of trying and failing is terrifying. We balk at making even a small decision that might change things. If we do try, we pause half-way, feeling inauthentic in the uncompleted process that would change us. I turn back or go on at a snail’s pace. If someone, something, somehow doesn’t approach and touch us and tell us not to be afraid we might never reconnect to the courage to be human and alive.
This story strikes me as less of a manifestation of glory shining through the surface as a revelation of tenderness and patience that touches us deeper than the skin of things and suggesting a proof of what God is really like: so much more like us than we think.
Reflection on the Gospel for the Third Sunday of Lent 2026
Christ and the Samaritan Woman: John 4: 5-42
Christ Healing the Blind, El Greco (Wikipedia/Public Domain)
This story is one of the most meaning-packed in the whole gospel. It demands time and attention but richly rewards our investment.
It has two parts. The first describes a ‘kairos’ moment: one of those flashes where the eternal intersects with ordinary time – a personal encounter, a word overheard, a revelation of beauty or love. Jesus arrives at a well at noon wearied by his travel. His crucifixion would take place at noon. It is the hour of debilitating heat that the desert monks called the noonday devil, when we are most vulnerable to exhaustion or discouragement. His disciples leave him to buy food while he meets a woman who has come to collect water. She is apparently a socially excluded person because village women came in the cool of day to get water and talk. She preferred to be alone.
She is an intriguing personality. What kind of woman do you think she is? She does not treat Jesus deferentially; nevertheless the conversation dives deeper than personality when he shows that he knows and understands her. As with Mary of Magdala, we see that it is when we realise we are known and recognised that we become capable of a more subtle kind of knowing and our perception is suddenly enlightened. He then leaps from the mundane to the mystical by speaking of another kind of water that alone can satisfy the endlessly raging human thirst: an inner spring of consciousness that wells up to boundless life.
Their exchange and deepening intimacy leads him to do what he does nowhere else in the gospels: to declare explicitly who he is. ‘I who speak to you am he’, the messiah that Jew and Samaritan both believed would come. In the same moment he enacts a transformation of the entire human experience of religion. While she still conceives religion as denominational and separated, he unveils the universal truth that the worshippers the father wants are those who worship not here or there or in that mosque or temple or church but ‘in spirit and in truth’. It is like realising that the game is greater than the team, the whole human family than its races and creeds.
He has shown what the ‘future of religion’ will be.
She runs back to the village (he never gets his cup of water) and his disciples arrive. We flip back into ordinary chronos time. His companions, however faithful, are less spiritually intelligent than the woman but he helps them to see themselves as the agents of the great change that is coming over the world. The villagers arrive and feel for themselves what the woman had reported. He stays with them an extra two days.
Perhaps it those who are marginalised – or the marginalised aspects of ourselves if we can own and accept them – who arrive recognise the Truth when they see and hear it.
Listen to the homily for the Third Sunday of Lent by Laurence Freeman during his visit to Benedictus Church, Australia: ▶️ CLICK HERE
Reflection on the Gospel for the Fourth Sunday of Lent 2026
Christ Healing the Blind: Matthew 17:1-9
Christ Healing the Blind, El Greco (Wikipedia/Public Domain)
Soon after I joined the monastery, I became aware of a slight distortion in the vision of one eye, a blurred area I could not blink away. My optician said I should see a specialist and an appointment was made in six weeks’ time. When Fr John heard this, he called a man in the monastery parish who, so it turned out, was the best eye surgeon in the country. He thought it was probably nothing but agreed to examine me in his lunch break the next day. He detected an imminent detaching retina in both eyes and did successful laser surgery the same afternoon. Ever since then, today’s gospel reminds me of my fear of blindness and the joyful relief of having had my sight healed.
Last week, in the story of the woman at the well, we needed to see the dual meanings of the symbol of water – the real stuff we drink that constitutes 60% of the human being and the symbol of the ‘interior’ ever-present, ever-flowing spring of pure consciousness that makes us fully human. Today we have to combine the literal meaning of blindness with that dark force that obstinately refuses to see the light, perversely preferring the blindness of denial and insisting that it is the light. This battle between the powers of light and darkness is being waged in our world today at the highest levels of geopolitics.
Paul says, ‘anything that becomes visible is light’. In order to see with the eye of the heart we have to accept what is really there and visible to a pure heart and unclouded mind. In this story I resonate with the gratitude of the man whose sight was restored at the Pool of Siloam near the Temple and, surely to God, so should have everyone. Instead, the goodness we have seen manifested is overshadowed by the jealousy, bitterness and deliberate hebetude of the regulatory-minded authorities. Regulations are a necessary evil in life but quickly swamp and stifle the good, as they easily can in every human organisation, because they are a means of control and nurture the illusion that we are God.
Hebetude means dullness, sluggishness, of mind. Especially if it is deliberate, watch out. When we choose to be blind the battle between the powers of truth and illusion begins. George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, was imprisoned and beaten many times for proclaiming the Christ-light within us in contrast to the regulations of the steeple-houses (his term for churches). Like Christ he did not fear to tell the truth to power and believed that ‘he that shows a man his sins has taken them away’.
Meditation reverses deliberate hebetude. It sharpens the mind and cleanses the eye of the heart with the laser-light of truth. In our global conflict today it is the hidden code that disarms all the destructive weapons of denial and oppression.
Reflection on the Gospel for the Fifth Sunday of Lent 2026
The Raising of Lazarus (John 11: 1-45)
The Raising of Lazarus after Rembrandt by Vincent van Gogh (1890)
(
Public Domain)
As I write this the fireworks are going off in Penang for the end of Ramadan. Soon we will be singing the A word and decorating places of worship for the end of the three days Jesus spent in the underworld of the dead, the liminal space between life here and Life itself. The raising of Lazarus prepares us for the mysteries of Easter. It is a simply complex story whose many levels of meaning and paradox form a kind of labyrinth that we have to enter before it begins to make sense.
Why didn’t Jesus go straight to Lazarus whom he loved when he was told that he was seriously ill? He loved Lazarus and his sisters Martha and Mary and yet, so it seems from the text, because of his personal love for them he waited those two precious days. What power of presence did Jesus propel across this time and distance while Lazarus was dying? His delay can only be understood in another kind of light that he calls the glory of God. When he said he would go, the disciples loyally accompanied him but feared the growing conspiracy against him would soon end his life and theirs. His arrival in Bethany suggests the intimate subtleties of his relationships with his friends.
When he meets their grief and approaches the tomb he is ‘deeply moved and troubled’: better perhaps to say grief-stricken and numbed by the power of death. ‘Jesus wept’ puts it barely. His four days of emptiness and grief were his own preparation for the power of life he would exert over death. In Jewish belief the spirit remained near the body for three days before leaving for good. Four days symbolise an emptiness beyond emptiness.
Martha, ever-practical, warns him not to open the cave-tomb but he overrides her calling to the Father out of his desolation just as he would soon do again as he hung dying on the Cross. Across the strange landscape of this story events and powers, divine and human energies, criss-cross weaving a story we cannot read until we lose and find ourselves in it.
What really happened? What really happens in us when we engage with the power of love’s grief that is stronger than our own death?
Reflection on the Gospel for Palm Sunday 2026
The whole city was shaken and asked ‘who is this? ’
And the crowds replied, ‘This is Jesus the prophet,
from Nazareth in Galilee.’
(Matthew 21:1-11 and Matthew 26: 14 to 27:66)
Christ's entry into Jerusalem, by Pietro Lorenzetti
(
Public Domain)
And the crowds replied, ‘This is Jesus the prophet,
from Nazareth in Galilee.’
(Matthew 21:1-11 and Matthew 26: 14 to 27:66)
‘Who is this’ is the key question for the full experience of Holy Week. If we let the question lead, rather than looking for a rote answer or explanation, we may find we plunge into the mystery of the Week’s climactic events and feel forever moved and changed. In real sacred theatre we find that the truth is a portal into reality as vast as the cosmos itself not a statement that settles any issue. Each of the four gospels points into the same mystery of ultimate inclusion from a unique angle.
Mark’s is the rawest and darkest. The abandoned Jesus is silent until his last words, a line from Psalm 22, asking from the Cross why Eloi had abandoned him. For the centurion at the foot of the cross, representing all those who would follow wondering ‘who is this?’, the moment of his absolute humiliation is the moment when the portal opens. Death is, for us and all creation, the great humbler.
Matthew (today’s account) builds an interpretation into his description of events. The answer to the question, ‘who is this?’, is ‘the fulfilment’. Not just of the Messianic hope of one human tribe but of all humanity. This is the one who leads us like a new Moses into the Promised Land. Not the fulfilment of our dreams and expectations but of the one desire we have all and always felt but have never been able to name.
The story we become immersed in this week is the story of humanity’s long evolution enacted in each human being. It shows what human existence is about: recognising and accepting our work and destiny as we learn the absolute liberty of saying ‘thy will be done’; of the need for companions to share the vision with; of not allowing the experience of betrayal to turn us into disillusioned traitors; of speaking truth to those corrupted by power without breaking our silence; of suffering affliction without the distraction of anger; of loving others who are suffering even while we are suffering. Of rising from the dead and passing through extinction into the eternal dawn of consciousness.
The sacred language of the Christian Way of Living is the body, not words or dogma. This week we edge towards understanding in an embodied way the significance of all that has happened to us and of what yet remains to become a signal and reassure us of the direction we are moving in.
Resurrection Day 2026
Jesus said to them, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father
has sent Me, so also, I am sending you.’ He breathed
on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you
forgive anyone their sins, they are forgiven; if you
withhold forgiveness from anyone, it is withheld.’
(John 20: 21-23)
Easter Tree, Bonnevaux (photo by Laurence Freeman)
has sent Me, so also, I am sending you.’ He breathed
on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you
forgive anyone their sins, they are forgiven; if you
withhold forgiveness from anyone, it is withheld.’
(John 20: 21-23)
Easter Sunday is the longest day of all. Since it once happened in time it has become every day.
It wells up from the atavistic depths of creation where the love of Jesus penetrates as he ‘harrows hell’. It breaks the surface of the visible world and continues to expand backwards and forwards in time. The word ‘harrow’ is an Old English term that translates as pillaging or plundering. It is what victors often do in violent and vengeful ways.
But this harrowing is a cosmic work of universal liberation, a total reconciliation releasing all creatures from their bondage to decay and death. Entropy has met its match in the unbounded creative energy of the Word of God that brought all things into existence. Karma has met a higher law – not just suffering the consequences of actions and thoughts but embraced by the all-transcending law of love. Forgiveness rules, not competition for power. We are exposed to the fact that we have the greatest power: to forgive.
The Resurrection began on Good Friday when Jesus breathed his last and surrendered himself irrevocably to the Father, his Father and our Father as he reminds us. The sequence of events which we are obliged to imagine in explaining this single all-inclusive gaze of divine compassion should not entrap us into thinking that anything happening ‘in eternity’ has a beginning or an end. Easter exists in the original Creation.
We breathe in Easter today with the peace Jesus breathes into us as even we huddle behind locked doors of fear and shame. It is the ever-present now of God made present in the entire time-space dimension of human reality. Everything has been harrowed, yesterday, today and tomorrow.
The tragedy of the Cross which shames humanity is harrowed. The sad, empty, waiting wasteland of Holy Saturday is touched by the same redeeming of time. The enlightenment of the Resurrection is not like a short-lived flash of lightening. It is the process and goal of all consciousness beginning with our first breath and at the right moment leading us into eternity. It is the light in us. We have only to awaken and trust it.
Thank you for following the long trek of Lent with us. Today we can all see better what it all means. And like Mary Magdalene, who first recognises the risen Jesus because he recognised her, may we experience and enjoy the mutual recognition of love. It is a love so comprehending that we no longer need to cling to it or indeed to anything. We have been harrowed and freed. Let us run and serve the fulfilment of the new creation that has begun.