Living Christ: an Eastertide Anthology
The Spiritual Letters of John Main
As I prepared to become a WCCM Oblate in July 2021, alongside the Rule of St Benedict, I also read Monastery Without Walls. The collection brings together the quarterly newsletters John Main sent around the world from the growing community in Montreal. These letters present a moving insight into his last five years of ministry, and the early flourishing of what has become the WCCM. Interweaving biblical theology, spiritual wisdom and practical advice, these words continue to encourage and inspire. It is striking how full they are of Resurrection hope and expectation.
I have selected short excerpts, arranged in chronological order, one for each day of the seven weeks of the Easter season. The teachings are paired with a scripture reading they have called to mind. Reflective reading of these texts, in the light of each other, has given rise to the accompanying contemplative wordings. Together, they are offered to nurture lectio divina, to frame a time of meditation, or simply to ponder a while.
Celebrating Easter, may we know the breath of new life in reading scripture, learning prayer, and living Christ.
Peace,
Mark Ball – Kent Regional Coordinator
Easter 2023
Easter Day
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Easter Day
Every one of us is called to be a full person, fully realized in the light of the power of the Spirit continuously springing up into life eternal in our heart, fully mature, fully human. When the Spirit is set free in us, free of the constricting bonds of ego and self-fixation, it pervades every faculty and fibre of our being. Then we become the witnesses we are called to be. We can witness with our own quality of life and our own fearless power to love. We witness to the essential, Christian and truly human experience of the transcendent Spirit of Jesus living in the centre of our being, where he holds us and all things in being. In that experience we find our own inner coherence, our harmony with others and with the forces within us and outside us. The sense of our own coherence creates the confidence we need to leave thoughts of self, self-consciousness behind: to live no longer for ourselves but for him. There is only one Teacher and that is the Lord Jesus, the Teacher within. But in our union with him we are summoned to mediate his teaching, which is only his love – to make his union with all people fully conscious, fully alive.
Monastery Without Walls, pp 35-36
The love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
2 Corinthians 5.14-17 (NRSV)
anew
christ
alive
anew
in me
in you
alive
anew
in christ
Monday
The essential meaning of Mary is, above all, in her being a model of simplicity: a simplicity of consciousness, simplicity of heart, simplicity of faith. With this condition of simplicity – ‘a condition that demands not less than everything’, as Mother Julian of Norwich puts it – there comes that directness of encounter with the power of God within us that deepens and fulfils us. The process is continuous because there is no end to the power of God. And no end to our capacity for love. Our task is to persevere – not grudgingly or self-importantly, but with simple faith and self-renewing love. Just as Mary carried the human Christ within her, so we must bear and worship Christ in our own hearts, remembering that he is just as truly present within us as he was bodily present in his mother. Mary in the gospels has another meaning for us: her silence is both the medium and the response to the presence of Jesus within us. The true silence of our meditation is creative and fertile. As it deepens and grows, so does the presence and power of the risen Christ expand the kingdom of love in our heart. Our task is to be silent, to be still, and to allow his transforming presence to emerge within us, out of the living, creative centre of our being.
Monastery Without Walls, pp 36-37
It is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.
2 Corinthians 4.6-10 (NRSV)
bearing
light
bearing
christ
bearing
all
bearing
love
bearing
life
Tuesday
The means of the communication of God’s power to us is, everywhere and always, the person of Jesus. Jesus, who is the image of the invisible God, is also the Son of Man, our brother. Because he incorporates us in his person, we are able to receive that communication from God. It is the communication of the power of the experience, the knowledge, and the receiving of God’s love. The experience of the love of God in Jesus is a transcendent experience, and so an experience of joy. This does not mean that it is not also a present reality, rooted in us as we are here and now. The whole Christian mystery proclaims the meeting of our world with the world of God in the person of Jesus: the same person of Jesus who calls us into himself through the Spirit he has given us. And so the power of God is a power within us – in our inmost hearts. And yet it is also a power utterly beyond us – the transcendent power of the God whom the eye cannot see or the mind imagine. This is the difference that the coming of Jesus has made for all humanity: his redemptive love is a continuous, insuperable power that makes it possible for us all to enter the experience of the power of God. Through him because he is the Way.
Monastery Without Walls, pp 38-39
The Beloved Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.
Colossians 1.15-18 (NRSV)
imago
unseen power
beyond within
who holding all
holds me
my blinded minds eye
dies
firstborn love
birthing
me
Wednesday
A group of Christians who meet together to meditate, to pray, to worship is not just a social gathering. It is a group aware of its power: a power that arises from the transcendent reality of the presence of the Lord Jesus in its midst. The purpose of their meeting is, above all, to attend to the reality of this presence, to deepen their silent receptivity to it, to make it (what it already is) the supreme reality of their lives. So, each member of the group is other-centred, turned away from himself or herself toward the living Lord. A Christian community is aware of its ultimate meaning as beyond itself. All truly Christian response requires detachment, the letting go of self. Detachment helps us to enjoy the transient gifts of life without being distracted from the essential reality. The reality is the power of the risen Jesus.
Monastery Without Walls, pp 39-40
With the eyes of your heart enlightened, may you know the immeasurable greatness of this power for us who believe. God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
Ephesians 1.18a, 19-23 (NRSV)
where
is christ
in church
in you
in me
but in
together
lightward turning
together
making space
Thursday
The profound Christian reality is that the Way is more than an historical tradition. It is our lived experience of the presence of the risen Lord Jesus, the Christ. The wonder is that this is our Way. In Luke’s Gospel Jesus’ ministry is framed as his progress toward the holy city of Jerusalem. His life is his being en route to his priestly destiny, that culminating moment when he burst the bonds of every limitation accepted in his incarnation. He thus became, as St Paul tells us, ‘life-giving spirit’. In Luke’s stories of Jesus encountering disciples on his journey the test of a person’s response was whether they turned around, changed direction, and followed him. During his ministry, the way was the journey that Jesus followed, his pilgrimage through love and suffering to his Father. But after the perfection of his love in the sufferings of the Cross, he reached the goal of his pilgrimage and was glorified in his return to the ‘Father’s right hand’. Then in Chapter 14 of his Gospel St John tells us the Way is now the person of Jesus himself. The one who finishes the way becomes the Way. The Christian pilgrimage is a turning, a conversion, a following of Christ and a journey with Christ. Salvation is not a possession. It means being on the Way continuously, being turned toward the dynamic power of Jesus and being taken up with him to the Father. Salvation is entering the kingdom of heaven within us.
Monastery Without Walls, p 41
Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe. I am the way, and the truth, and the life. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.
John 14.1a, 6a, 11a, 19-20 (NRSV)
pilgrim
this his story
ours to tell
his way
ours to follow
his truth
to learn
life
to live
Friday
The dynamic structure of a spiritually awakened life is based on regular, silent times of attention to the source. This is the discipline needed to accept that fullness of life Jesus offers. The way of the mantra leads us into the way and keeps us on the way. The spiritual beauty of the truth of the Gospels, the delights of creation, the problems of our life – everything must be placed on the altar of the living sacrifice of praise we offer by saying our mantra. By saying it to the exclusion of all thought and imagination we are led into a depth of silence, on the other side of all distraction. In this silence, Jesus, the Word made flesh, is rooted in our human heart. In this faith-filled silence we are made one with him. We journey with him beyond Jerusalem to the Father.
Monastery Without Walls, p 42
Mary turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him “Rabbouni!”. Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
John 20.14-17 (NRSV)
awakening
searching
she cannot see
distracted
cannot know
her one word
heard
awakens her
to one
not holding on
Saturday
For a full and balanced life we must be open to every dimension of the Christ-event. Its fullness is found in the mystery of the death and Resurrection of Jesus. It is to be found in the community of those who accept him as Lord and Saviour. This is the Church. It is an experience found in our hearts: in the presence of his living and life-giving Spirit within us. So let us live our lives to the full as followers of the Way bringing this fullness of life to all humanity.
Monastery Without Walls, pp 42-43
I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3.14-19 (NRSV)
amen
within
this space within
christ dwells
and opens up
beyond
all measure
and all knowing
filled
to overflowing
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Prayer, above all, is not nostalgia for God. Prayer is the summons to a full experience of the living Christ. Paul’s emphasis is not on religion as anaesthesia. It is not thinking about the absent God. It is not absenting ourselves from the present moment to be lost in a kind of pietistic dalliance. For Paul, authentic religion summons human beings to enter fully and courageously into the present moment. There we are filled with the life of the living Christ. The call of prayer is to be fully alive in the present, without regret for the past or fear of the future. And so we have to accept the responsibility of being fully alive. We must understand the full significance and depth of the mystery contained in the Christian experience. This experience is in essence being fully open to our own humanity and the gift of our creation. It is nothing less than conscious participation in the self-knowledge of God. What becomes clear is that God is never an object that we know. We know God, not just speculatively in our minds but existentially, lovingly in our hearts. We know and are known in the fullness and richness of prayer that leaves self entirely behind and plunges into the depths of God.
Monastery Without Walls, pp 57-58
I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God. For to me, living is Christ.
Philippians 1.6,9-11, 21 (NRSV)
prayer
good work
completing
among us
love
overflowing
within us
christ
living
through us
Monday
The growth of the Kingdom in our hearts is the meaning of the journey of meditation. Day by day we let the husk of the ego drop away and like a seed we die to self so that we can fulfil the destiny, our true meaning, in which the potential of life within us comes to full fruition. It is the same when any Christian community takes root and allows the love of God to fill and expand it. The Christian vision has always respected the processes of natural growth. Grace builds on nature. Christian faith has always seen that redemption means that all human growth is now incorporate in Christ and shares the limitless achievement he has won. The mystery of the fully mature Christ is infinite growth. The mystery, as St Paul wrote, is ‘Christ in you.’
Monastery Without Walls, p 61
At the festival, some Greeks came to Philip, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.“
John 12.20-26 (NRSV)
growth
to see
whom you seek
close your eyes
see a seed
dying to grow
root shoot fruit
letting go
life
dying to live
Tuesday
In prayer we enter the cloud of unknowing. We set aside our own knowledge together with our expectations and our memories so as to be wholly open in purity of heart to the word of God in the present moment. The courage to do this comes because we believe wholeheartedly, at a level beyond desire, sorrow, or imagination, that God’s Word is alive, active, and in continual utterance. This is faith beyond what we normally call belief. It is a faith that is at once courage, commitment, and openness. The daily pilgrimage of meditation takes us into the simplicity we need in order to enter the silence of selflessness. Here we awaken to hear this eternal utterance and to attend to it with our whole beings. The wonder of prayer is that we hear this Word addressed to us directly and personally. We listen to it without the distracting interference of our own cleverness. In hearing it we learn that we are continuously being called into being by Being.
Monastery Without Walls, p 73
The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare. We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Hebrews 4.12-16 (NRSV)
being
cut
to the chase
nothing left
to hide
nothing left
to divide
nothing left
to fear
Wednesday
Our time has become an age of the half-hearted commitment, with the other half holding on to scepticism, self-monitoring, keeping one’s options open. If this led to happiness, to richness or breadth of experience it would have something to recommend it. But, as we all discover, when we hold ourselves back on the brink of commitment we become enmeshed in a sense of isolation, of discontent, of anxious, restless desire. Whereas on those occasions when we have the courage really to let go, we have found ourselves unexpectedly more alive, miraculously borne up. The act of faith, of generous self-commitment, is the context in which we know the power of transcendence. In committing ourselves we are lifted above ourselves, out of the prison of self-consciousness and beyond our limitations. Transcending ourselves through the power of the risen, transcendent Christ, we are led into oneness with the Father, our Source.
Monastery Without Walls, p 80
A man ran up and asked Jesus, and asked, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honour your father and mother.’” He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” .
Mark 10.17-21 (NRSV)
brink
how
to go
from half
to whole
let go
the half
held back
Thursday
Meditation prepares us for the real freedom that lives and rejoices at the heart of the mystery of love within us. It connects us with the movement of divine energy that is known in the stillness of meditation. To pray in the infinite depths of our spirit, which are the depths of God, is to be utterly free. Daily meditation, the deepening experience that flowers on the trellis of our discipline, teaches us the essential lesson of maturity that freedom does not consist in doing what we want. Freedom is found in being who we are. To be free is to have been liberated into being by a power of love greater than the power of our own ego. It is to have encountered and responded to the Other in humility. The liberty is the liberty to be open to God as the ground of our being and the structure of all inner and outer dimensions of reality. It is to be redeemed, by love, from the slavery of self-consciousness and self-preoccupation.
Monastery Without Walls, p 82
The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
Romans 8.2,11,15-16, 27 (NRSV)
liberty
deep
calls
to deep
and life
to death
and love
to fear
and god
to child
Friday
How immediate is the challenge today to be spiritually serious. We can be blinded to the urgency of the situation by the large institutional structures that still remain around us. But these structures are dwindling. And without a living Spirit issuing from committed and open hearts they easily become preoccupied with self-survival rather than with self-transcendence. We must learn from our experience in prayer that our call is to follow Christ through death to self and then into resurrection to unlimited new forms of life in him, with him, and through him.
Monastery Without Walls, p 89
For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline. He has saved us and called us to a holy life – not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Saviour, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
2 Timothy 1.7-10 (NRSV)
dwindling
spirit
dwindles
death to death
breathes
life to life
and graces time
beyond itself
to light
Saturday
Even the hardest parts of life point us into freedom. They are times, of which Lent is the great symbol, when we live through the preparatory stage of the Paschal mystery. We need to be prepared for the gift of life, to be ready for it as infinite gift. Lent is a time of preparation when we get ready to enter, once again but more deeply, into the great awakening of Jesus, his Resurrection. Our preparation itself is joyful because this awakening has already taken place, in time and into eternity. In Jesus the cycle of death and rebirth is definitively completed and perfected because he has broken the cycle that kept humanity within the circle of the finite. Jesus has transcended all the limitation of human experience that we recognize and confront in ourselves during Lent. He has led humanity into the infinite circle of God, whose ‘centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’. This is the realm of liberty and joy we enter daily in prayer. Because we can observe Lent in the dawn light of Easter it is a time of joy. The Paschal mystery is completed and we enter into it through the Spirit, preparing ourselves with the silence and stillness of our meditation.
Monastery Without Walls, pp 108-109
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ.
Romans 6.3-5, 10-11 (NRSV)
cuckoo
laid to rest
life cheats
death’s nest
swallows
flies
and victory sings
and on its wings
bears us
timely shelled
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Every year the Easter celebration reveals a little more clearly the depth to which the love of Jesus, his own fullness of life, has penetrated our human heart. The Easter Vigil repeats the same ceremonies every year but we are never the same people who celebrate them. Each year we have grown in our capacity to understand and enter the mystery of life they point us toward. We have been made more capable of receiving the revelation of his love – both through our deepening commitment to meditation and through all the many new challenges of our life. And so each year we take another step into full consciousness – toward the full knowledge of the personal mystery that underpins everything we are and do and without which we would lack meaning and purpose. Each year the radical change that the death and resurrection of Jesus has worked in our ability to see God rises a little further in our experience. The risen life that wells up in our heart at prayer and whose tidal flow is felt in every part of our life takes us more confidently into the mystery of Oneness. This is the mystery that is the Resurrection.
Monastery Without Walls, p 114
As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, opening the scriptures to us?”
Luke 24.28-32 (NRSV)
even
as dusk falls
and sunset
deepens
nightward
realisation dawns
recognition rises
and embered hearts
remembered
spark
Monday
Increasingly, we see the utter simplicity of the call Jesus addresses uniquely to each one of us, to leave all things and self behind and to follow him into the infinite freedom of his union with the Father. If this is the centre of our vision of life the rest gradually falls into place in the particular pattern that we are called to bring into ever more resonant harmony. That harmony we may discover in different ways. Each moment of discovery is an eternal moment in which we open our eyes to the divinizing light of Christ. Our life is a growth in simplicity because all things are bathed in the light and held together in the new creation of the Resurrection. To see this is to see ourselves also as an integral part of the universal harmony that is Christ. All that is needed is to look away from ourselves.
Monastery Without Walls, p 115
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
Ephesians 1.3-6, 8-10 (NRSV)
resonant
praise echoes deep
before
within
beyond
all things
time harmonized
and this child’s voice
in chorus
sings
Tuesday
We need to remind ourselves that the stream of distraction is not the ocean of God. It is only too easy to anaesthetize ourselves, to be so soaked in all our own self-images and self-reflection, to drift along, floating in a realm of self-conscious piety. But it is also possible to take the journey to reality, to be led by Christ the risen and enlightened One into the great awakening to his Father and to realize our vocation to sanctity. By ourselves we could not make the journey. But we are not by ourselves because we are ‘in the Spirit’. Nor can this experience even be understood just as our own experience. Our vision is the vision of Jesus and our knowledge of God is a oneness with his knowledge.
Monastery Without Walls, p 116
I want their hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that they may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him.
Colossians 2.2-3, 6-7, 9-10 (NRSV)
seaward
love floods
ebbing over me
over flowing me
ocean washing me
me
now sea
Wednesday
Contrary to prevalent belief, commitment sets us free, seriousness brings us joy, and discipline leads us to transcendence. This is the understanding with which we communicate the gospel and our Christian tradition of meditation. To underestimate the absolute demand the gospel presents to each one of us is to also underestimate the absolute joy and fullness of life it offers. We have to be clear that we are not communicating a short excursion but a way that spans our lives, a way that St Paul tells us begins and ends in faith. Meditation in the Christian way is the way of faith. Christ is our way to the Father. Christ is our faith: relationship, trust, spiritual knowledge. Christ’s risen life supports us in the journey of our life.
Monastery Without Walls, p 118
Let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God. Endure trials for the sake of discipline. Discipline always seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
Hebrews 12.1-2, 7, 11 (NRSV)
crossroad
which is the way
the lay aside way
the race running way
the for joy‘s sake way
the pain bearing way
these are the jesus ways
faith
is the way
to choose
Thursday
Each of us has infinite importance. Our creation is designed in a mysterious way by God to fulfil the design of God’s own holiness. When we have turned to God we reflect the divine glory we have received back to God. This is our meaning, our vocation. It is in Christ that we turn. We could neither know nor realize our destiny without Jesus who awoke to it in his human consciousness and who has realized it in the Spirit he sends into our heart. Each Easter the experience of the risen Jesus calls for a deeper response from us and we grow a little further into the completion he brings us. To commit ourselves to this growth is the greatest opportunity any of us could ever have.
Monastery Without Walls, p 121
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
2 Corinthians 3.17-18 (NRSV)
reflection
dimly seen
at first
a nascent face
awakened
on the surface
deepens
unveiled breaks free
no longer mirrored
image
Friday
The light of consciousness we expand into is complete in ways that the ego’s dim self-consciousness never can be. We live no longer but Christ lives fully in us. Christ is light. He is the light that fills and gives range and depth to vision. He is also, in his fully realized human consciousness, the eyes with which we can see the Father. Without his light our vision would be tied to the dimension of limitation and finitude. Our spirit could not soar above itself into the unrestricted liberty and pure clarity of the unified being that is God. Consciousness would remain forever an observer of the imagined periphery of God’s boundless space. Without the Holy Spirit ‘dwelling in our mortal bodies’ and opening up the dimension of Being within our spirit, we would be prevented by our limitations from moving into the liberty that is our destiny. The light that empowers our weakness and makes of our limitations a crucible in which God’s power is brought to perfection, has been freely given. It has been poured into our heart as the pure effulgence of the Father. For Christ is the radiance of the Father. The light of our vision is not less than this radiance, the glory of God itself.
Monastery Without Walls, p 127
All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. The true light, which enlightens everyone, became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
John 1.2-5, 9, 14, 18 (NRSV)
effulgence
even i came into being
even mine his light
and by this
darkness brightening
flesh embodied
light
i even i can see
that heartbeat beats
for me
Saturday
The human consciousness of Jesus dwells in the infinite space of his love in the human heart. He dwells there with the most perfect respect for our freedom. Destiny is not fate. Our destiny requires our freedom. Liberty is our capacity to enter with undivided consciousness into this destiny as the perfection of love. Experience, the spiritual knowledge that flows from this knowledge is not theoretical. It is touching the most immediate and personal heart of our being. We are not meditating long before our spiritual eyes begin to open upon epiphanies of love in life that before we were too short-sighted to perceive or not generous enough to receive. Liberty is the fruit of rootedness. Our materialistic, egocentric instincts dispute this. The ego sees freedom as the avoidance of commitment, freedom from ties, keeping options open. This negative self-protection temporarily offered by the ego demands the fruit before the seed. But while the ego is being melted away and desire dissolved in the faith of meditation, the kingdom dawns. The mantra leads into the rootedness that bears fruit beyond imagining. Through all the meanderings of the mind the simple faith of the mantra word keeps us homed on our true destination, the reality of God’s love. Then we enter the breathtakingly boundless expansion of heart that liberates us once and from all from narrowness, insensitivity, fear, fantasy, all the shadows of the ego.
Monastery Without Walls, p 133
God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: as he is, so are we.
1 John 4.9, 11-12, 16-18 (NRSV)
epiphanies
love revealed
remains
to be seen
believed
beloved
love revealed
remains
to be seen
to be lived
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
In the faithful commitment to meditation, each morning and evening, we accept and gradually come to see the priority of faith over belief. By repeatedly emptying ourselves of all that is passing away – all words, ideas and images – faith grows and goes deeper. The creative matrix of faith is silence. From human relationships we can see how much faith we need to have in a person to be silent with them. Our faith in a person is deepened by such silence. It is the same dynamic as the silence in mediation. In contemplative work faith becomes active in love. Silence realizes God’s love for us as it is expressed in the love of Jesus. In the silence of faith we are invited to enter into the enduring reality where Becoming is embraced by Being. What is visible passes away, what is invisible endures. Because of Jesus and the communication of his Being to us, this reality is no abstract, platonic idea. It is fully personal and wholly incarnate. The person of Jesus is the revelation of the person of God. And the gospel, which is the continuous extension of his teaching and presence, reveals the priority of the personal over all secondary, institutional forms. An extraordinary discovery is waiting to be made. It is that the goal of each person’s pilgrimage is the transcendent completion of each person realized in Jesus. We are made one with him who is one with God.
Monastery Without Walls, p 157
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
1 Peter 1.3-4, 8-9 (NRSV)
matrix
borne
unseen
unheard
untombed
unheard
unseen
born
Monday
Christ’s personal presentness to us is an aspect of his universal presentness in all time. As Christian thinkers understood from the beginning, the redemptive love of Jesus universalized for humankind on the Cross is situated in the centre of all consciousness by the Resurrection. It travels both backwards and forwards through space and time, uniting every human consciousness in him. From this historical moment both ‘in and out of time’, humanity has been plunged into a radically new way of being present to the mystery of God. We have been touched by a pure ray of reality that has opened our eyes to the ambiance within which we live and move and have our being. We are now empowered to be with God in an unprecedented way by participating directly in the plenitude of God’s being. We no longer have to regard this being as an external object. This objectification alienates us from God and is the root of what we call ‘sin’. Christ’s redemptive forgiveness of sin is not the reprieve of a judge but the embrace of a lover. Because redemption is our being brought near to God in Christ we need no longer focus on God as an external object. Instead we are lifted beyond all images to be in the presence of the truth revealed in silence of perfect communion. The eye with which we see is the eye that sees us. Our vision itself is Christ.
Monastery Without Walls, pp 162-163
Out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. Now you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ, in whom you also are built together into a dwelling place for God.
Ephesians 2.4-7, 10, 13, 22
presented
whose templed eye
in simeon’s sees
hope
die
here and now
in ours sees
new born
temples
rise
Tuesday
In the resurrection we are absolved from the need to objectify God. No longer do we need to talk to God, to appease or petition him. ‘Your Father knows what your needs are before you ask him,’ Jesus assures us. From that eternal moment in time when Jesus awoke to his union with the Father humanity passed beyond the stage of its spiritual infancy. In that moment it matured into the ‘full stature of Christ’. This moment of Christ is found in the centre of our being, in our own heart, where his spirit lives and grows like a seed buried in the ground. Finding that moment is the work of meditation. It is a joyful and vitalizing work because we move into the heart in a faith that knows that the moment has already dawned and is born imperishably. Once we know this union in our own experience our whole existence is reborn. It is known to be united in a wholeness that is holiness. And this is all the work of a moment, the moment of Christ.
Monastery Without Walls, p 163
What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, to each kind of seed its own. There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.
1 Corinthians 15.36-38, 40, 42, 44, 53 (NRSV)
imperishable
pushing downward
into dark
reaching upward
into light
flowering outward
into fruit
seed embodied
dead
undying
Wednesday
The Resurrection is the saving of the whole person, heart, mind, spirit and mortal body. This affirmation of the divine potential of the whole human condition happens because the life-source of the Father flows into us through our rootedness in Christ. The channel of communication is the human consciousness of Jesus open to the reality of God and to us also, dwelling with the Father and in us. The openness of his human condition to the Father allows us to realize union with the Father also, through him, in our human consciousness. With him, in him, we travel beyond ourselves, through him into the heart of God. This is transcendence realized.
Monastery Without Walls, p 164
Where I am, there you may be also. Because I live, you also will live. You will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them. Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.
John 14.3, 19-23 (NRSV)
home
i will live
and i will love
but god
at home
in me
how can that be
because
you live
you love
Thursday
Christ reveals humanity’s new involvement in the truth and it makes us wonderfully, terribly present to God. Even rituals and symbols cannot distance or objectify the one who has drawn so near to us: God with us, Emmanuel. If we learn to reciprocate, to be with God, we grow in union and the divine presence becomes not a source of fear but of peace, a harmony of being that is both the union and the fulfilment of all creative energy. Harmony is achieved when we take a step of faith into the silence where truth resides, the contemplative step from image to reality. In the marvellous dispensation of God we have only to take the first step for us to be swept along by the Spirit’s power for the rest of the way. The truth we yearn for is not a cold platonic wisdom but a movement of love. The indwelling of the Spirit of Christ is itself this movement of life resolved into a person and it lingers within us with the ache of love until it evokes a fully personal response. This presentness of Christ to us is what drives our transition from image to reality, from fantasy to person. We are the ‘heirs of the prophets’ as the New Testament declares. In the new modality of being in which the risen Christ is the universal centre all signs and symbols explode with meaning. Even the most sacred and potent symbol is now only a stage in the revelation of a reality with which we are already one.
Monastery Without Walls, p 165
You have not come to a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken. So terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.” But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word.
Hebrews 12.18-24 (NRSV)
ache
distance aches
for drawing near
as love aches
for response
so piece
by shattered piece
each finds its place
and trembling stilled
emerges into one
Friday
The truth of human destiny that Jesus has uncovered for us is the new age of presence. It calls for a correspondingly new understanding of how we share in the Trinitarian mystery. Because of the new Christo-centric consciousness we understand, in ways that are disturbingly personal and universal, that we do not so much exist in relation to God as subsist within God as the ground of being. We are called to know, and know fully not just notionally, that no one can be outside the ground of being that God is. Jesus uncovers God to us as Abba, Father. Human dependence on God shifts from being a source of terror into a source of infinite joy and wonder. We are because God is. God is our being and therefore our being is good, as God is good. We have nothing to fear from such goodness because the nature of his goodness is pure love. The ground of our most haunting fear – the fear of isolation and extinction – is exposed as illusory. The dream-world created by the ego which is the source of our sense of isolation, fear and loneliness, the feeling that the world itself is only a terrible mistake or a meaningless accident, is dissolved by that experience of love. In the Christian vision of reality prayer is the way we see and feel that the human condition is not separateness but communion, being-with. This is the effect of the Christo-centric consciousness. It both commands and empowers us to be-with everyone in the harmony of our experience of communion.
Monastery Without Walls, pp 166-167
After he had washed their feet, Jesus said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord – and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. Very truly, I tell you, whoever receives one whom I send receives me; and whoever receives me receives him who sent me. I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
John 13.12-14, 20, 34 (NRSV)
damp
the towel
that speaks of love
not words
but sole refreshing
toe betweening
giving
and receiving
Saturday
The power of the Resurrection of Jesus collects all time and space into a single, universal focus. Within the microcosm of the human heart the cosmos has also been radically transformed by this power condensed into the single point of pure and limitless love. We are freed from the illusion that we are outside creation or outside God. Through the power that dwells in the open space in the centre of our being we pass beyond ourselves into divine fullness of being, the pleroma of Christ. We need only to be simple, to be rooted in reality, faithful to our pilgrimage of mediating each morning and each evening. Then we realize union with our point of origin. Our destination and the teacher, our source and companion are one.
Monastery Without Walls, p 170
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father.
John 15.9-10, 12-15 (NRSV)
befriended
servants
befriended in knowing
commandments
befriended in keeping
each other
befriended in loving
death
befriended in serving
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
We see reality divided into inner and outer worlds because our mind is divided. As the etymology of the word implies, religion ‘relinks’ us to the power that brings life to its destined fullness, which is its wholeness. We see with the vision of God. We see the same presence of God shining with supreme, benevolent simplicity in both the mental and material dimensions. The presence of God is never a partial revelation of love. Wherever God is God is wholly present. This is the human ability to be only ‘half-there’ because of our divided, distracted nature. Do we not know this only too well from the sad experience of being with someone who is evidently not as present to us as we are to them; or of being unable to concentrate on what we are doing? To meditate is to know the value of paying complete attention to whatever we are doing or to whomever we are with.
Monastery Without Walls, pp 175-176
While they were talking, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.
Luke 24.36-40 (NRSV)
complete
nothing missing
nothing ghostly or apart
peace
has hands and feet
no need to fear
no need to doubt
see touch
touch see
be here
Monday
God turns with complete and undivided attention to humanity in Christ. Wholly turned towards us means wholly loving. That is why we do not say just that God is loving but that God is love. To be wholly loving is to be love, to be one with what we see. If God were in any degree self-centred – not wholly attentive and concentrated on the movement of love – then we would be able to analyse, to objectify God. As it is, the divine wholeness means we know God only by participation in God’s own self-knowledge which is the ever-flowing stream of self-transcendence, creative other-centredness. To enter the life of the Trinity through union with the Son is not at all settling down to contemplate a finished picture. It means to be swept off the side roads of self-centredness onto the highway, the living stream of God’s eternal creative love.
Monastery Without Walls, p 176
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.
1 Corinthians 13.4-8a, 12 (NRSV)
unfinished
impatient and unkind
envious and boastful
arrogant and rude
self-centredness
finds itself
turned
inside out
upside down
solved
Tuesday
The simple truth encountered in meditation is that the natural movement of our spirit is to rise above self-centredness by the opening of our consciousness to God in the mind of Christ. Great harm to our understanding of this truth, which is integral to our ability to pray, is wrought by the impersonality and materialism that our society develops in all our attitudes. The value of presence has been replaced by the idea of function. What counts is not what a person is but what he or she does. The truth is rather that the value of action consists in the quality of being. Our experience of love contradicts these false assumptions, but they remain deep-rooted in modern consciousness. Meditation challenges it at root because when we meditate we are not trying to do anything. We are simply attending to the divine presence and learning to be present to it. Each step we take, each time we meditate morning and evening, this presence strengthens. We discover that to be does not mean to be isolated but to be realized in communion. Christ is eternally present to us and we grow in the capacity to be present to him. In realizing this reciprocal presence in communion the divine self-transcendence sweeps us out of the netherworld of self-centredness into the reality who is love.
Monastery Without Walls, p 180
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” – these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. “For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
1 Corinthians 2.9-11, 16 (NRSV)
minded
unseen
unheard
and unconceived
what god has prepared for us
that god is preparing
us for
a mind
of god’s own
Wednesday
The social vision of the Gospel sees charity, not exploitation, characterizing human relationships, generosity not possessiveness controlling the economy, and freedom not fear shaping the psychological atmosphere. It is a vision, a revolutionary dream that comes true in some Christian communities even if only partially or for short periods of time. But any Christian revolution must be energized by centrifugal forces that radiate from a personal centre outwards not by ideological coercion. An ascending movement of liberation and expansion is the Christian vision of change, not, like most revolutions, a descending movement of aggression and constriction. This centrifugal revolution of the Gospels is conversion, the deep interior shift in the basic orientation of our being from self to what is beyond self. Conversion is a rediscovery of our true self and of our participation in the reality of God which is so much greater than our own limited potential reality. Every conversion (and, as St Benedict understood, our whole life is a conversion, a turning to God) is an ever finer degree of awakening. The intrinsic momentum of human being urges us towards full wakefulness.
Monastery Without Walls, p 184
All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.
Acts 2.44-47; 4.33(NRSV)
conversion
people
waking up
to god
to one another
to themselves
resolving
to revolve
round something
other than themselves
Thursday
We trivialize ourselves whenever we set limits to the energy we can access for this inner journey to our own heart and to the presence of Christ within us, the journey with Christ to the Father. The power source from which we draw our dynamism for this journey is inexhaustible. It can be measured by nothing less than the power that God exercised in raising Jesus from the dead. This power was exercised in the root of Christ’s being, and Christ’s presence is found in the root of every human being. The transformation that this power of God brought about – ’the glory of the Resurrection’ – was worked in the depth of the collective being of all humanity. In the depth of our soul we have died and been raised to new life in Christ. The basic challenge of existence is to be open to the life of Christ. To be open to it is to become fully alive. Only life can respond to life. Only in the loving attention of our own deep openness to Christ can we recognize that his life is the energy of the whole creation, the energy of the Creator, the energy of love.
Monastery Without Walls, p 187
I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Galatians 2.19-20 (NRSV)
energy
from
en ergon
within work
from
god love
christ
inexhaustibly
within works
me
Friday
The Church we meet in the New Testament is a community of the spiritually alive and enlightened, charged with a life beyond their own arising from the power of the risen Christ. The writers of the New Testament everywhere call on Christians to be open to this power. We today, carrying on a tradition greater than ourselves, must enter the dynamism of the marriage between God and humanity in Christ. We can only do so when we ourselves have begun the pilgrimage into this union by our commitment to the selflessness of deep prayer. In the experience of our meditation we learn that the power for this pilgrimage is inexhaustible and present. It takes only one step of faith to know it from our own experience. The important thing to remember is that one real step of faith, however faltering, is worth more than any number of imaginary journeys. As beginners we need to accept that there is a gap between what we say and what we are internally. As we tread the path that unites surface and depth we recognize that we are limited and that we are sinners. We are only setting out, we have not yet arrived. Nothing is more arrogant than to imagine that we have arrived even before we have actually left. Leave we must. When we reflect on the need today for this commitment to depth in prayer it illumines both the opportunity and the responsibility we face.
Monastery Without Walls, p 188
Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 3.12-14 (NRSV)
step
by step
i make
my way
christ’s
christ makes
me
christ’s
past lies close behind
truth prises future open
Saturday
Christ is consciously present in time to the degree that we, his brothers and sister, open our minds and hearts to him now and commit to be real, to be still, to persevere. When we do embrace this commitment, the Church becomes first of all not a building or institution, not an organization or hierarchy but the Body of Christ filled in every limb with is vital and vitalizing power. Not only filled with his power but – in the way of all conscious life – alive to that life in full self-awareness. All this remains potential energy – not the kinetic energy which the Resurrection is – until we realize it. Commitment to the reality of Christ is in effect commitment to prayer. Prayer is our empathy with the consciousness of Christ. In that empathy we know that his consciousness is his love for the Father and the Father’s infinite love for him. Our openness to this consciousness is the Spirit praying within us and it sweeps is out of and beyond ourselves into the stream of power flowing from the human heart and mind of Christ to the Father, his Father and our Father.
Monastery Without Walls, p 189
Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.’
Matthew 25.37-40 (NRSV)
kinetic
moving
empathically
my mind eye sees
my heart ear hears
my christ in them
my need in theirs
the same
they see and hear
in heaven holding me
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Ascension Day
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
We celebrate Easter liturgically over a few days but we discover its meaning throughout a lifetime. Every year I celebrate it I hear these words of St Paul read out during the vigil service and their meaning becomes sharper and more real, more urgent and also more mysterious.
By baptism we were buried with him, and lay dead, in order that, as Christ was raised from the dead in the splendour of the Father, so also we might set our feet upon the new path of life. (Romans 6.4)
To know this is what it means to be a Christian, not just a member of a church or sect but a joyful personal disciple. It means knowing that this ‘new path of life’ is already opened up for us because of the energies set free within all humanity by the Resurrection. From one point of view we may see only the same tired, worn, old paths. But if the Resurrection energy has touched us and if we have touched it in our hearts, the new path stands out brilliantly as a new way of living that transcends all the old ways. As the snows of winter melted in our garden here, a carpet of brown, withered leaves from last fall was exposed. As we raked them away we found that the soil was covered with young green shoots pushing up from the earth with the irrepressible energy of new life. We have to penetrate beyond the surface to make contact with the new life of the Resurrection.
Monastery Without Walls, p 200
For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength. Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him. Your Teacher will not hide himself any more, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. And when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.”
Isaiah 30.17-18, 20-21 (NRSV)
pathway
i see
the teacher
clear away a path
from here and now
to there and then
i hear
the teacher’s whisper rise
this path
this way
Monday
We must be wholly committed. We must be ready. The revelation takes place in the moment of God’s choosing: the co-mingling of the eternal with time that we cannot predict or record. Resurrection, as it unfolds in each person’s life configures us to the one Resurrection. The configuration is the work of love. The only ultimate tragedy in life would be not to be ready for this moment of love, to be distracted at the time when time is transcended. Meditation and our daily re-commitment to it is our preparation for this moment. Day by day we leave egoism behind and shed all divisions. We meditate in deepening silence in the humble acknowledgment that everything we can learn or experience is in the direct gift of God. Underpinning the journey and the deepening commitment is the simple acknowledgement that God is God and God is one, God is love. The moment of revelation is our entry into the eternal now of God. So the revelation encapsulates, unifies time. It unifies our whole life ‘before’ and ‘after’, just as the one Incarnation, the one Crucifixion, and the one Resurrection embraces past and future in the eternal present. At this moment we recognize what we have all along been seeing. We know that we are called – by name, personally – into the ocean of oneness ever closer towards God. We recognize the call because it comes from one of ourselves who has attained this oneness. It comes from our brother, Jesus, our Lord, our Guide.
Monastery Without Walls, pp 205-206
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Saviour. You are precious in my sight, and honoured, and I love you. Do not fear, for I am with you. Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
Isaiah 43.1-5, 18-19 (NRSV)
present
time called
on time
unforeseen
and unremembered
time telling tale undone
and i untimely freed undrowned
unburnt
i’m called
Tuesday
In all places the human consciousness of Christ appears through the consciousness of those who seek him daily in love, service and humility. There is only one enlightenment – the opening of the human consciousness of Jesus to the light of God. Because he is incorporate in our humanity, we are all affected by that enlightenment. Indeed his light is what we call redemption. We are redeemed in the light of his love. To try to define this in exclusive terms would lead to pride or arrogance. To know it through the fidelity of our daily pilgrimage is to be made humble by the sheer wonder of it. Each of us has a unique and urgent responsibility to know it. Once we hear, we must respond as generously as we can. When the light of the kingdom dawns in our hearts it touches all we touch. We need not fear the dawn because the light must dawn and must expand and burst in our hearts until it becomes the full dawn of the Resurrection.
Monastery Without Walls, p 212
And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Luke 1.76-79 (NRSV)
dawn
before
the shortening shadows
as morning gilds the rose
midaslike
we gravely go
and lightly touch
with untombed light
whose paths we cross
in peace
Wednesday
Meditation is a gentle way of growing into a freedom beyond all egocentric limitation. It is not magical. It is not instantaneous. Meditation does however surely restore us to a deeper harmony of body and spirit and so it is and essentially spiritual growth. We cannot measure it therefore. But we can recognize it. All growth is a kind of healing. Not only a retrospective healing of past wounds but a making whole that propels the person-in-healing we all are now into a fuller life, a greater wholeness, the holy health that gives life meaning because it is what we are created for. And so we can say that meditation is growth beyond all the limitations that prevent us from being whole, entire, in ’divine health’. Once we have passed a limitation that previously held us back we discover that we are free from it forever. We are no longer dominated by the fear or the narrowness that limitations impose on us and which seem, while we are still in their power, to be immovable. Time is so precious because we have to use the opportunity time gives us to grow as much as we can beyond all limitations. Time used for liberation prepares us to enter into eternity – fullness of being – as persons who are essentially free to be fully alive. What we call eternal life is the state of perfect oneness. It demands that all those who enter this unity are free to do so because they are free of self-consciousness, free to love, free to commit ourselves without reserve.
Monastery Without Walls, p 215
Jesus answered Nicodemus, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
John 3.3,6,8, 14-15 (NRSV)
windborne
forktongued fear
raised up
itself transfixed
sheds bronzed skin
and seen at last
for what it is
unravels
heeled
windborne into life
Ascension Day
Each meditation is another step into the eternal now of God. Every time we meditate we take one more step into the divine life that heals and enlivens us and brings us to fullness. Whoever turns from self opens his or her self to this new life. A life which is grounded in the present, wholly free of reverie and daydream, in which everything is whole and yet always expanding in self-transcendence, is a life of love. Like all growth, entering the divinizing experience of the present moment involves pain. It is the pain inherent in all maturing. It hurts because of the necessity of leaving behind all earlier stages of development. All that we have been is let go in favour of what we are to become. Growth is the transition from time to eternity and so it is continuous. Every moment is a dying to the past and a rising to a new present in which the past is not rejected but enfolded. We are who we have become through the experiences of a lifetime in which memory is allowed to crumble back into the dust from which it was formed. No memories survive the transition from the condition of incompleteness to the state of fulfilment. All limitations are created and sustained through memory. We have to forget, to un-know everything we have been if we are to come to completeness. We are only fully present to the now of the divine moment when we leave the past behind totally.
Monastery Without Walls, p 216
Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” A second time he said, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” He said the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.”
John 21.15-17 (NRSV)
enfolded
feeling hurt
past catching up
caught up
in now
rock
rolled aside
crumbles
healing
into love
Friday
Meditation takes us into the self-knowledge which is the life of God. It is full with the knowledge of self born from self-transcendence. Meditation is entry into divinization through Jesus. Through union with him we pass beyond the limitations of division to become one with God in God. Through Jesus we utterly transcend ourselves, eventually leaving our whole self behind and becoming a new creation in him. Meditation is the process of self-transcendence. To the degree that we are transcending self we are becoming divine because we are becoming one with the power of love. Spiritual growth is more than the accumulating of experiences. What we so often call a memorable experience is first and foremost a memory. But in the eternal act of creation which is the life of the Trinitarian God everything is now.
Monastery Without Walls, p 218
I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away. See, I am making all things new.” I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.
Revelation 21.3-4, 22-23 (NRSV)
i hear
eyes forgetting tears
life death
day night
light dark
heaven and earth
forgetting time apart
and god
untempling
remembering me
Saturday
It is easy to so completely inhabit the centre of an imaginary universe that we think the rest of the world would fall apart if we left our position at its centre. Of course the only world that does fall apart is the world of the ego. The real world then comes into being and we become a new creation. Small though the relative cosmic impact of our self-transcendence may be it still has an absolute value. The completion and liberation of a single human consciousness express the mysterious meaning of all creation. Each of us, by our own little liberation, is empowered to become one with God. We must not forget this if we want to remain rooted in the expansion of the divine life, if we are to grow on the pilgrimage of daily life. Each time we sit down to meditate we enter into the oneness of God who is now and who is love. We can barely begin really to understand this vocation to total, integral unity. It is too much for the mind alone to hold or imagine except in fragments. But we can sit down and say our mantra. To do this with humility, fidelity and absolute trust in the goodness of God leads us beyond limitations to become ‘like him’. Jesus calls us, such is the marvel of the Christian revelation, to expand into the divine boundlessness.
Monastery Without Walls, pp 218-219
O God, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. I come to the end – I am still with you. Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Psalm 139.1, 2, 6, 16-18, 23-24 (NRSV)
boundlessness
who said unbind
now unbinds me
my ups and downs
my heart and mind
everything about me known
an unbound book
still being penned
by lazarus’s friend
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
The mystery surrounding Jesus was perceptible from the beginning of his life. Not until his death and resurrection, however, could it be fully apprehended, fully known, because not until then was it complete. Our life does not come to full unity until it transcends itself and all limitations by passing through death. This is why we do not fully comprehend the mystery of Christ, through which we enter the mystery of God, until our own life is complete. We begin to enter it as soon as consciousness stirs into perception and learns the laws of reality by learning to love and be loved. But in this life we are always learning, always preparing for the fullness that eventually comes to us all.
Monastery Without Walls, p 222
So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.
Colossians 3.1-4 (NRSV)
revelation
it will be
a revelation
in the meantime
a seeking
and a minding
a dying
and a hiding
a life learning how
to be revealed
Monday
Until the life of Jesus passed through death and returned in the Resurrection this completion of life was a source of terror or despair when the human mind looked deeply at it. Now it has been transformed. What seemed a dead-end has now been revealed to the eyes of faith as a bridge. This is the hidden significance of the birth of Jesus, his growth through infancy and adulthood and his supreme sacrifice of self on the Cross. In our beginning our end is always present. And in the birth of Jesus death had already begun to be transformed. The intuitions shared by those involved in his birth and his upbringing were fulfilled in his teaching and his final paschal mystery. His life, like every human life, had a hidden, mysterious unity. End and beginning are two ends of the string of life held in the mystery of God and joined together in the mystery of Christ’s oneness with God and humanity.
Monastery Without Walls, p 222
See, I am coming soon; my reward is with me. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.” The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” And let everyone who hears say, “Come.” And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift. The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!
Revelation 22.12-13, 16b-17, 20 (NRSV)
completion
beginning ending one
root descendant one
god human one
come
completely
quench
this
one
thirst
Tuesday
Every part of us, including our faults and failures, must be included in the commitment we make to the pilgrimage to this fullness. Nothing real is excluded from the kingdom of heaven. Nothing that is natural is against it. Human wholeness is the accumulative result of staying on the pilgrimage. Gradually the separate compartments of life coalesce. The room dividers are taken down and we find that our heart is not a prison made up of a thousand individual cells but a great chamber filled with the light of God whose walls are constantly being pushed back.
Monastery Without Walls, p 223
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’
John 20.19-22 (NRSV)
unimprisoned
fearfully
we lock ourselves
in padded cells
and padlocked boxes
we lock each other out
and god
holds out for us
breathes out for us
the key
Wednesday
Sanity and balance mean knowing the context in which we live. This kind of knowledge makes us sensitive to the presence of God in all our surroundings. Meditation teaches us, in the only certain way, by experience, that God’s presence is not external to us. It is interior because it is the presence that constitutes and holds together the deepest ground of our being. Feeling this we no longer look for God’s presence just in the externals of our life or in transcendent ways. We see and recognize God in them too, however, because our inward eyes are opened interiorly to the indwelling Spirit. But we no longer try to possess or manipulate God. Instead we are grasped by God’s presence, interiorly and exteriorly, because we know that the presence is all pervasive and the ground of all that is.
Monastery Without Walls, p 225
Surely, this commandment is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?” No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe. See, I have set before you life and prosperity, death and adversity. Choose life.
Deuteronomy 30.11-16 (NRSV)
near
as outside air
mouth breathed
lung drawn
in
as inside oxygen
heart pumped
blood drawn
out
Thursday
To be possessed by God in this way is the only true freedom. The tyranny of love is the only true relationship. Inevitably we fear this as it develops and emerges during our pilgrimage, because our initial sense of freedom is so different. It is naively imagined as the freedom to choose what to do rather than to be. But if we have the courage to be simple and humble enough to enter real freedom we discover within ourselves the power of a faith that is unshakeable. Christian confidence is the discovery of this unshakeability and this confidence empowers the gift of self and therefore underlies compassion, tolerance and acceptance. We are made wonderfully secure in our own existence by this discovery and in this security we are empowered to drop our defences and to go out to the other. Our faith is unshakeable, not rigid, because it is one with the ever-living ground of being. Through Christ’s union with his disciples his faith becomes their faith and their faith is not a part or an adjunct to their being. It is the breath of life.
Monastery Without Walls, p 225
There is in wisdom a spirit that is holy, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all. For she is a breath of the power of God, a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty. She is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God. Although she is but one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God.
Wisdom 7.22a, 23, 25-27 (NRSV)
wisdom
freely breathing
mirror cleansing
breath
miracle lensing
god for me
and me for god
faithfully to see
and friends
unshakeably to be
Friday
The greatest difficulty is to begin, to take the first step and launch out into the depth of the reality of God as revealed in Christ. Once we have left the shore of our own self we soon pick up the currents of reality that give us our direction and momentum. The more still and attentive we are, the more sensitively we respond to these currents. And so the more absolute and truly spiritual our faith becomes. By stillness in the spirit we move in the ocean of God. If we have the courage to push off from the shore we will not fail to find this direction and energy. The further out we travel the stronger the current becomes, and the deeper our faith. For a while faith is challenged by the paradox that the horizon of our destination seems to be always receding. Where are we going with this deeper faith? Then, gradually we recognize the meaning of the current that guides us and see that the ocean is infinite.
Monastery Without Walls, p 226
Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, saying, “I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, ‘I am driven away from your sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple?’ As my life was ebbing away, I remembered, and my prayer came to you. Deliverance belongs to the Lord!”
Jonah 2.1-4, 7, 9b (NRSV)
still
inside
swept
further faster deeper
three day faith
cries out
urgent
agitated
and regurgitated
spirals on beyond
Saturday
Leaving the shore is the first big challenge, but it is only necessary to begin to face it. Even though later challenges may become even greater, we are assured that we shall be given everything we need to face them. We begin by saying the mantra. Saying the mantra is always to be beginning, to be returning to the first step. We learn in time that there is only this one step between us and God. Opening our hearts to the spirit of Christ is the only way into the certain knowledge that the step has already been taken. Christ has taken it in himself. He himself is the step between God and humanity because he is God and human. The language we use to express this greatest universal mystery of the human race and of all time, is pathetically inadequate – as theological controversies down the centuries have shown. No word, image or language concept could adequately express the mystery of Christ, because Christ is the full embodiment of God and there is no adequate expression of God except God’s own self-expression. The only way to know Christ is to enter his personal mystery, in the silence of love, leaving ideas and words behind us. We leave them behind so that we can enter fully the love to which life, death and meditation is leading each of us.
Monastery Without Walls, pp 225-227
Very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in white, sitting on the right side; he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. He is going ahead of you.”
Mark 16.2-6, 8a (NRSV)
hope
full
of hopelessness
and hesitance
we step across
this fierce threshold
and find
emptiness unending
the step already taken
ourselves already found
John Main texts are from Monastery Without Walls edited by Laurence Freeman © Canterbury Press 2006
Biblical texts are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible. Used by permission; all rights reserved worldwide. © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.
Reflective lectio wordings © Mark Ball 2022