Lent Reflections 2021

Ash Wednesday

Between 1347 and 1350 one quarter of Europe’s population died in one of the worst outbreaks of the plague. A forty-day quarantine period was instituted for travellers. Doctors wore leather protective costumes. Weird quack remedies appeared. Infected people were restricted to their houses with a cross painted on their door. It was blamed on a punitive God because of human sins. As it’s difficult to attack God, the Jews were often scapegoated, a favourite conspiracy theory throughout history. Hospitals were over-filled. The economy crashed. Groups of penitents and flagellants processed in city streets, singing litanies to avert God’s wrath. And also to comfort each other, because, when we suffer or are confronted by mortality, we feel frightened by the loneliness and inner chaos we discover within. Our regular routines are shattered and the usual things we complain about are overwhelmed by fears that challenge everything we think we know.

 Why ash? It is an ancient symbol reminding us of mortal human nature. ‘You are dust and to dust you shall return’. Adam (the name means ‘earth’) heard God speak these words after his eyes had been opened by disobedience and he had first felt shame at his nakedness. Job covered himself with ash when his sufferings overwhelmed him. Putting ash on our forehead today is a kind of sympathetic magic or homeopathy where we use a small dose of plants to stimulate the healing process. All healing is self-healing but often needs help from outside. (‘Go your faith has healed you’, Jesus says someone he cured). The ash signals acceptance of our mortality. Strangely, it makes us feel better because we are no longer in denial about it. We live better lives when we accept that we are dust – because then we see we are also more than dust.

 Why Wednesday? I’m not sure. Maybe because it’s the middle of the week. Probably because it starts the countdown of 40 days to Easter. Maybe because it’s the day of Woden who was the god of the element of earth. More important is ‘will I use this season to grow more aware that life is a spiritual journey’? There’s no such thing as a spiritual life inside my existence that I have to make space for. Life is the journey. If so, how will I do Lent this year?

Maybe begin by putting some ash on your forehead to remind yourself you are mortal - and more. It shows we are all in this together. Even in a pandemic (cruel but not as bad as the 14^th century), in shutdown, we can grow into a sense of community. Instead of joining self-flagellating processions, meditate online at least once a week with others. Instead of wearing sackcloth and ashes say the mantra with deeper attention and fidelity. A more contemplative approach to the situation we are in.

To start, you could do a renewal course in the essential teaching on our new website. There’s a timer, a short animation-video introducing meditation and two free courses on the How to Meditate page.

I’ll look forward to making the journey of Lent with you, Writing these reflections is my Lenten task which I hope will prove helpful to you.

Laurence

Thursday

The ash is over, the action begins. However, we do Lent – giving up or adding on things – the desired outcome is to become more aware, more mindful, more conscious of what and how we are living. Being aware of mortality, as I said yesterday, helps sharpen our sense of vitality. So, TS Eliot’s lines on how we live and breathe the past are not just about nostalgia:

Ash on an old man's sleeve,
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended,
Marks the place where a story ended,
Dust in breathed was a house.
(Little Gidding)

So, the past is always present and when we assimilate it we can stop fearing it. I’m told it’s true that we are made of star dust and that all the atoms and elements in our body come from generation after generation of stars over the past 4.5 billion years. The past is continually changing as we become consciously one with it. This is what the phases of our life allow and demand of us so we can be more present to the always now.

I am spending some time in my hermitage on Bere Island, not as much off-line as I should be, but taught and blessed every day by the immediate nowness of things. The weather, interior and external, is as always variable but forms a pattern and in patterns we can usually find a seam of the truth running through it, like a vein of gold in a piece of rock. After a few stormy Atlantic days, a beautiful serenity and peace has returned. Yesterday I ventured outdoors again. Everything seemed more aware of its beauty, more justifiably delighted with itself and happy to be restored to all the other parts of the world with which they were connected. I was grateful to feel welcomed as part of it too.

The astonishing thing is how it all works and how every part allows everything else to be what it is and do its thing in its own way without interfering. Feeding off each other is tolerantly included in this dancing system of birth, flourishing and dying. And bats, which are not my favourite manifestation of the divine, knit the evening together as I walked back along the road, swooping around me and making me feel confident they were not interested in me or my blood. The world is a community.

Robins are cheeky and cocky little things. One was sitting on a branch, singing its redbreast off. Their average life is 13 months but can be as long as 19 years. Aggressively territorial, that’s probably why he was singing so loudly. But I am sure he just loved producing such a free and joyful sound. After all, we are meant to enjoy our work.

Part of the human work is to ponder the meaning of this beauty. We can’t explain it, but we can see the Logos in every part and in the whole. The Word that made everything is present in everything. It is its uniqueness and its connectedness, its order, form and harmony. Its rationality and its sheer, inexplicable divine beauty.

That might be a good thing to do for Lent: to contemplate the innate beauty and harmony of things and cut back on judging.

Laurence

Friday

The second of the monthly Bonnevaux Health Seminars led by Dr Barry White took place online on Tuesday. It has attracted a large following because of his deep, integral understanding of what health means and, no doubt, people’s anxiety and curiosity about their physical and mental well-being during this pandemic. He places meditation at the centre of his model of health which affords it a unifying role for the different aspects he will talk about in later talks such as sleep, exercise, diet and pain.

Barry’s thought on this theme has been evolving for years and we are receiving the benefits of it now. Some people’s thinking on a subject jumps from branch to branch while staying at the same level. His goes consistently deeper and shows the root system that supports the whole tree of knowledge. I was struck this time especially by his insight based on John Main’s view that to transcend our limitations we have first to accept them. Barry applied this to our personal health. Sometimes we must just accept our infirmities of body, mind or character, even our mortality. Yet mysteriously this acceptance reveals new sources and ways of healing and with it also comes unique personal insight into the meaning of suffering.

We learn these things best by experience which allows us to interiorise the knowledge it brings so that we can’t ever forget it. Not only dramatic events do this but also small annoying things ,such as kept happening to my internet connection whenever I spoke. Until then, the wifi seemed to hold up; but whenever I spoke the ominous warning flashed on the screen ‘Interconnection connection is unstable’ like a message that had escaped from the dark hole at the centre of the Cloud. Each time I hoped for the best but inevitably the connection dropped, my words evaporated into the ether and I had to wait to see if and when the connection would restart,which it did. I wasn’t so unstable interiorly as to throw my laptop on the ground but after the tenth interruption the fourth of the fruits of the spirit (patience) was hard to find. By then I realised that there was nothing to do except to accept the limitations imposed, whoever, if anyone, was responsible. I soon understood I had to choose between audio and video and rightly chose to be heard rather than to be seen. The struggle with frustration and impatience was for the time being, over.

Once a young person told me he had been unsuccessfully seeking his ‘personal why’ for so long but that meditation was teaching him to live with his failures to find it. He felt sure he would find it one day but not in the way he had been imagining.

We would waste Lent if we treated it just as a way to try harder, increase our will power and succeed better in getting to our personal whys. A contemplative Lent requires – as does the understanding of health we are exploring in the seminars – a central and regular contemplative practice. It renders us teachable. We learn that to fight our limitations with the ego only intensifies the ego. To accept them with a true love of self converts them into a bridge beyond the ego, into a friend beyond future misunderstanding.

Laurence

First Sunday of Lent

The bridegroom’s companions would not think of mourning as long as the bridegroom is with them… (Matthew 9:14-15)

On Friday a member of our Bonnevaux business meditation group gave a beautiful, personal account of her life, terrifying and funny in turn. Until forty, she said, she had been focused entirely on success and having fun, and she accomplished both. Her ambition to be John McEnroe’s ball-girl at Wimbledon was not fulfilled but all others were. Then her mother was diagnosed with severe cancer and her life began to disintegrate. Her body was the messenger of what was happening as she lost control: pain in muscles and joints, insomnia, breathing problems, memory blanks and panic attacks of increasing frequency. The body never lies. At last, after a horrifying incident of amnesia with her children at the mall, she accepted ‘I need help’. The inescapable humility of this was the turning point in her life that led her on a gradual process towards other-centredness. She now successfully helps others recognise these symptoms and face them in time to avoid the worst. Not everybody survives the worst as she did.

She said that when she began to make time for stillness and silence – which she had never done before in her whirlwind of unmindfulness – she began really to notice other people. Sitting in the park just looking at people, for the first time she saw not just a parade of faces but expressions, feelings, communicative signs. Meditation is now a pillar of her new more joyful and meaningful life and all the stressed executives she helps are introduced to it.

Many of the stories of Jesus show him at meals or wedding-parties. He often uses these events to illustrate his teaching as in today’s gospel. One cannot imagine he would have been a miserable or gloomy presence at any event where people would have been having fun and wouldn’t he have joined in the dancing? His brief teaching today recognises that life is not all fun and games. Nothing we can perceive is not a mixture of light and shadow. To deny it is to repress what we fear to face. Repression eventually explodes, through the body or our behaviour. Truth will out. (If we notice we are attracted morbidly to news stories or movies about what we fear, we should ask why it is unconsciously cathartic for us).

The word for ‘mourning’ is penthos in Greek: the spirit of lamentation in mythology and an important element of mystical theology. In his major teaching on the Beatitudes Jesus says ‘happy are those who mourn for they shall be comforted’. We shouldn’t be afraid if at times meditation has a feeling of mourning or grieving. Lent can be a time when we acknowledge this as a healthy aspect of our being a work in progress (as this woman describes her life now). Progress towards fullness of being and true happiness. An early sign of which is our capacity to notice the expression on other people’s faces and to pay responsive attention to what they are communicating. For Isaiah, in the first reading today, this active compassion is the meaning of justice. Without it, fasting and almsgiving and all that stuff are only shadows of what they are meant to serve.

Laurence

Monday

 How do you respond to the word ‘stillness’? Do you associate it with balance, counterpoise, equilibrium, order, quietness? Or with inaction, stagnation, recession, passivity? Is stillness dynamic or static? Is it the goal we should be pursuing or a condition we should get out of as soon as possible? As meditators we might say, ‘it all depends’ because meditators like to have the best of both worlds. And they can.

Probably it does depend on circumstances but there can (still) be a preference for or against the concept. Behind that preference might lurk either a fear about or a longing towards stillness. If you are overactive, stillness will seem attractive. If you’re bored, out of work or in quarantine stillness is the last thing you want. Polarising opposite views, even over the meaning of a harmless little word like this, leads to a feeling of conflict which is often based on the sense that ‘if I don’t get everything, I might end up with nothing’. And so, the person who disagrees with me, who appears to be on the other side of a river flowing faster than thought and without bridges in sight, is my enemy. He therefore doesn’t have as much right to exist as I do. The sense of potential deficiency – even what I think I have might be taken away from me, becomes inflamed.

The pro and anti-Trump factions in the US, the Remainers and Leavers in the UK have generated a deep sense of division and disunity. Rebuilding dialogue and the spirit of trust will be the hard work for both societies for years to come. Where in the world has this not been felt? Divisions upset the balance of civil society and stillness, a calming of factionalism and mutual rejection, has at least some attraction. The question is how.

The ‘it all depends’ approach is inadequate. The answer is not either/or, but both and both in harmony. The most practical way to achieve the blend of dynamic stillness and harmonious activity is to sacrifice willingly time for the work of stillness. Because human nature is prone to over-activity (physical, economic or mental), the challenge, as the Martha and Mary story makes clear, is to protect the element of stillness and silence; and to appreciate it as an essential part of human well-being. The life of Jesus, exemplifying how human beings should live, included periods of solitude and quiet as well as times of busy external action.

Stillness is inherent in the good life. Along with prayer and fasting, justice touches the centre where stillness is found. All three are aspects of doing Lent well. It is about balance, always hard won and hard to maintain, whether in our personal or social life.

Laurence

Tuesday

He kept a secret bottled up for as long as he could remember. Protecting it became a priority reflex that influenced all the decisions of his life. Afterwards, he wasn’t sure if he knew what he was doing or not. He thought perhaps he did know, sometimes, and then repressed or forgot it. He kept the secret secret even from himself though he knew more about it than anyone. Was it the actual event that had happened or the reason it had happened or the shame it had inexplicably left him carrying? What drove him to construct an identity whose falsity only increased his shame?

The event was an abominable abuse of adult power over a child, a degradation and confusion of what the child had the right to expect, to be sure and confident that he was loved and cared for. The reasons for this betrayal of the child were part of an adult world of revenge and power incomprehensible to him as a child. It had left him with a shame he could not cast off. It clung to him beneath a persona which the world found charming and enviable. But, since childhood, it had made him unable to yield himself, to love or to relate seriously to another except for short periods before it became impossible not to run away again.

His was a particularly intense case. But all of us have this tendency to keep secret what has once hurt us and caused the cloak of shame to be wrapped around us. This whole system of hurt, shame and secrecy can be called sin. The Fall of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis describes it with precise honesty. Anyone who does not see him or herself in the story should learn it by heart.

Lent is an opportunity to consider what we understand by sin. Until we get it straight, we will not understand grace. It is a severe handicap to be prevented from recognising grace. I have noticed recently how many advertising campaigns selling pleasures (chocolate, Netflix series, health spas) use even the term ‘sin’ itself to attract our attention or just tease us by the lure of the naughty or forbidden. It looks harmless but is dangerously stupid because it limits sin to its seven deadly manifestations and distracts us from the true nature of sin and its deep stain on the human condition.

Where sin is, grace abounds all the more. Grace is the divinely unconditional and never-withdrawn offer of help. All it needs to be released is to confess our need for help, our having got it wrong and wanting now to get it right. Then an amazing grace comes in the revelation that all healing – and forgiveness is healing – is self-healing. This tears away the cloak of shame with the discovery that we have, by God’s grace, immense powers within us greater than anything that could enchain or disgrace us.

On Holy Saturday night in the dark lit only by the Paschal candle we sing gratitude for the Fall because it brought a grace vastly greater than itself. ‘O Felix Culpa: O Happy fault of Adam that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer’.

Laurence

Wednesday

An up and coming young judge came under the spiritual influence of a Sufi master and began to pass through the first stages of a personal awakening. This led him in time to renounce his position and status and to become a dervish, resident in the Sufi Lodge as part of a community gathered around the sheik. He was blissful. He had no doubts about his decision and was filled with generous enthusiasm and hope.

Then slowly, subtly at first, his ego resisted and complained. ‘You were very noble to renounce everything and follow this path. People admire that’. He was happy to following such an illustrious path - this ‘way of love’ as the sheikh called it – under a highly regarded teacher. ‘But,’ his ego whispered, ‘you are different from these other disciples. You are educated, well-connected, a good leader. You deserve to be recognised for that’. When a legal issue concerning a property was brought to the sheikh to arbitrate the new novice proudly offered his services remarking that this was his specialised field of training which he ‘knew everything about’ . He could not repress the smile of self-satisfaction and pleasure at being able to use his talents. The sheikh looked at him, lovingly but shrewdly, and told him there was a special work in the Lodge that the former judge could fulfil better than anyone else. The smile on the novice’s face broadened. The sheik led him to the back of the Lodge and showed him the dog, handed him the dog’s bowl and said ‘your work is to feed and look after our dog.’ When the sheikh turned and re-entered the Lodge the novice exploded with angry shame and threw the bowl on the ground. The sheik returned and looked at him.

He fed the dog obediently every day and endured the ensuing struggles with his ego, in his room or when he met people from his former life who were amused by his new lowly status. He was helped by the special attention of his teacher and made progress with his mantra. This however led another member of the Lodge, a young senior official, to feel envious. This grew into an uncontrollable jealousy of how the sheik was treating the newcomer and how the other members of the fraternity were growing in respect for him. Viciously he invented a slander about his rival and the sheik’s daughter and spread it.

The victim of his jealousy suffered intensely, for himself and the young woman. He was outraged, furious and determined to confront it; so he went to tell the sheik what was happening. The sheik listened and then told him he had failed. He should have borne the trial silently. He looked at him and told him coldly he should leave the Lodge. In tears, broken and devastated, he left to go out into the world again a wanderer in the desert with nothing.

Of course, this isn’t the end of the story. But it casts light on the process of confronting and wrestling with the ego that every meditator passes through as we move from the surface to the deeper levels of the ‘way of love’. As Lent is a time especially to reflect upon that journey this might be a story to help us understand where we are and what challenges we are facing at this time.

Laurence

Thursday

Todays Gospel Reading is: Matthew 7:7-12 Ask and you shall receive…

The gospel today exemplifies how not to read and also how to read scripture – and indeed life.

In the UK, which has an immensely successful and rapid vaccination programme the news is full of ‘how soon can we get back to normal?’. When the number of cases go down there are calls to save the economy and open up again. When they spike, someone is blamed for opening up too soon. Governments who like to be liked by everyone hide behind ‘the science’. Be careful what you ask for because you may get it and not like it.

The gospel today opens with the assurance by Jesus that if we ask, we will receive. Anyone who knocks will have the door opened and anyone who seeks will find. This could be interpreted in the same short-term, impatient way that governments could open up restaurants and hotels too soon. Clearly, just asking for anything you want isn’t like rubbing a magic lamp and making a wish. ‘If only it was’, we might say. But, if prayer was wish-fulfilment like this, life would become deadly in another way, deadly boring; and our humanity would be reduced to the low level of a consumer with infinite credit whose unfulfilled life would be spent fulfilling desires. If Jesus meant that and if receiving what we ask for means instant gratification, we would soon be asking for this great blessing to be removed. We would long for suffering of a healthier kind.

There is a deeper insight into the mystery of life in the last words of the passage. Jesus draws a comparison between a good parent and God. If a child asks a parent for bread will the parent give it a poisonous snake. “In the same way your father in heaven gives good things to those who ask”.

Does this mean ask but for anything in particular. Ask but from a place where fantasy does not interfere with pure desire. Seek but seek within rather than externally. Seek without imagining what you are looking for. Knock at a door that cannot open and wait for another means of getting through. Knock on both sides of the door.

It ends with the Golden Rule found in all wisdom traditions, the universal pass-key into reality. It is what we have to do if we are to be able to receive, to find, to open the door: Treat others as you would like them to treat you.

Laurence

Friday

Today’s Gospel is: Matthew 5:20-26 If your virtue goes no deeper than that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.

Some people have asked recently about how the Covid Year has influenced me personally. I think I may be in the ten percent of people that research suggests drew overall advantage from it, embarrassing in some ways as it is to say it.

Apparently, sixty percent have been very resilient, some with pre-existing mental illness have suffered intensely and others have experienced episodes of depression and anxiety. Of course, that’s a neat statistical survey that ignores the sacredness of each personal experience and the immensity of the tragedy it has been to some. Most of us over the year have moved across the spectrum of response. A final evaluation may not be meaningful for some years. I know people who have died and those who suffer from long Covid. And I am very conscious that although we have all been buffeted by the same storm we haven’t by any means been in the same boat.

When the shutdowns began, I was at Bonnevaux with a warm, lively and loving community. It is a place of great natural beauty and a long history of contemplation has soaked into the land and the buildings allowing it to emit a continuous energy of peace. Over the years I have been travelling a lot. But, whenever I left on a journey, I often hoped, for a moment the day before departure, that something would happen to cancel it. Some people assumed I had become attached to travel for its own sake but that was not true. Yet, once away, I felt at home everywhere and richly blessed by the people and places I visited. When travel ground to a halt I didn’t miss it at all and spent nine months at Bonnevaux mostly contentedly. Between the daily spiritual schedule, being part of what others were going through in community and with sixty-seven national communities as extended family, it was a full life, in fact very full.

We felt the need to reach out to those less safe and content than we were. So we developed an online programme teaching and supporting meditation, offering retreats and courses and many speakers and dialogues aimed at helping people make contemplative sense of the crisis. From the feedback, we feel this is worthwhile and it was without doubt an intense but creative time. I discovered the spiritual potential of the internet and also how it could be more demanding of time and energy than the physical dimension. I also felt clearer about the role Bonnevaux was coming into being to serve.

Then, when the community decided to take a fallow time at the end of the year, I came to a hermitage on Bere Island and have spent several weeks in solitude. Although I stayed teaching online, life has been very different. I have been able to set my own schedule and meditate longer. It has been, not only a less intense time than before, but it also revived personal capacities for peace and contemplative living that had weakened without my realising it.

Covid has hardly been easy but I have suffered far less than many. I hope the graces that unexpectedly emerged will help me in our community better serve those who are looking for meaning in this chaos, peace in their fears and God in their hearts.

Laurence

Second Sunday of Lent

Today's Readings from Mark 9:2-10

Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain where they could be alone by themselves.

Once he was described ‘praying alone in the company of his disciples’. He led them, as us, to where we are both solitary and irrevocably connected: alone and with. However we may resist it, there is no avoiding this destination.

There in their presence he was transfigured: his clothes became dazzlingly white, whiter than any earthly bleacher could make them.

He could beckon them into no deeper intimacy than this. His physical form was revealed to them, as he already knew it to be, translucent with the light of the Father. Out of this core of his being he says, ‘I am the light of the world’.

Elijah appeared to them with Moses; and they were talking with Jesus.

This is his spiritual heritage: the Law and the Prophets. They talk with him from within himself as the Word, from the eternal into history. They each understand each other because they are one in the incarnate Word.

Then Peter spoke to Jesus: ‘Rabbi,’ he said, ‘it is wonderful for us to be here; so let us make three tents, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.’ He did not know what to say; they were so frightened.

Peter is again the spokesman for the Twelve and again shows that the rock on which Jesus bult his church is fallible, fearful and yet, all importantly, faithful. Fear is a sign of recognising that what he is meeting is the limit of his own identity.

And a cloud came, covering them in shadow; and there came a voice from the cloud, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him.’

From behind the veil, from a new dimension of reality, they receive understanding, that they cannot understand, of where Jesus comes from and where he is leading us all through those who listen to him.

Then suddenly, when they looked round, they saw no one with them anymore but only Jesus.

Life resumes as before but a life being transformed by what they have seen

As they came down from the mountain, he warned them to tell no one what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. They observed the warning faithfully, though among themselves they discussed what ‘rising from the dead’ could mean.

How could they talk about it openly yet? They needed the full revelation, the Resurrection, which would transfigure them and all humanity.

(The Feast of the Transfiguration is August 6^th, the day in 1945 of the blinding flash of Hiroshima.)

Laurence

Monday

Today's Gospel: Luke 6:36-38. Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate

In Martin Luther King’s last speech before he was assassinated, he said ‘I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go the mountain. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I’m so happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man.’ MLK was steeped in the great founding myth of the Bible, the Exodus. Like all the great teachers of the Christian tradition, the language and imagery of the Bible was soaked into his thinking and way of expressing himself, indeed of understanding himself. What was the Promised Land that he saw and that we, living out the inner meaning of the Exodus in our Lent? Can we recognise it as the purpose that keeps us going?

Moses saw this Land from afar but never entered it. The biblical story says this was due to his having doubted God at one point in his journey, which seems a bit hard given all that he had put up with. I prefer to think of it as an indicator of what the Promised Land means: not a place, a destination or fulfilment of a plan but rather the journey itself.

In the Axial Age, (8^th to 3^rd centuries BCE), the age of the great awakening from the Upanishads, the Buddha, Plato, the Hebrew Prophets) humanity began to think of itself as having a destiny, a fulfilment beyond the cycles of nature and its own survival. It was the great dive inwards. Moksha, Nirvana, Pure Land, Paradise, Janna, Nirvana are different expression of this discovery and the new hope it awakened in the purpose of life. Although, it must be said, it was also a great disruptor and like all great lights cast a long shadow. What if I fail to get to heaven? What if I fall into the eternal suffering of the other place? In a way it was the second loss of innocence, another fall that had to precede a great leap forward.

The Kingdom of Heaven in the teaching of Jesus is explicitly not reducible to a place or terrestrial utopia. ‘You cannot say look here it is or there it is…’ Religion without a contemplative consciousness insists on thinking in terms of reward and punishment. But Gregory of Nyssa, typical of the mystical vision generally, sees it as an endless becoming, a continually fuller participation in the nature of God who is infinitely simple. This is his great contribution to Christian understanding. There are endless degrees of heaven, no end to the rooms in Hotel Paradise. Perfection, like beauty, truth and goodness, has no terminus.

John Main said of meditation that the important thing to know is just that we are ‘on the way’. To ask ‘where am I, how long it will take, am I there yet…’ is to miss the great truth that the Kingdom is within us and among us (‘close at hand’ as Jesus said). What are the indicators of this? We’ll look at some tomorrow. But today’s gospel points to the essential one – that we are becoming Godlike in our compassion and love for others in the human journey and that this is reflected in our becoming less judgmental and divisive. The Promised Land is close at hand.
Laurence

Tuesday

Gospel today: Matthew 23:1-12. The greatest among you must be your servant

The Promised Land is the journey and the journey is the Promised Land. Accepting this gradually detaches us from illusory ideas about what the goal we think we have to achieve by endurance, personal virtue or willpower might look like. The goal in fact is to let go of the images and even the will to succeed. Faith is not will-power. Practice becomes more authentic as the faith it embodies grows deeper.

The purpose – this is important for traditional believers doing Lent - is not to strengthen the will but to transcend it. The will is too implicated with the ego and has taken too many bribes from it to be trusted not to be corrupted again.

Does this mean we just give up and do nothing purposefully? That would mean being without faith, which gets us nowhere fast. If the will (in tandem with the ego) is not used at all, it atrophies and we become like bed-ridden people who lose muscle tone. The will has to be exercised in a manner that wears it down until it can be transcended. People who understand why it is they say the mantra, understand this experientially.

Then we pass from will to obedience, doing what we should do because we know it to be right. Adopting this approach is hard for everyone because it is hard for the ego which always tries to partner with the will. It is especially hard for Type A’s. They feel they will not be so competitive if they become obedient rather than intensifying their will. In fact, the obedient person works and achieves just as much, if not much more, than the ego-driven will; and they retain their peace of mind and balance.

So, where’s the proof of this? ‘Experience is the best proof’, said Francis Bacon, a founder of the scientific method. ‘Experience is the teacher’, said the desert fathers and mothers.

The first proof that the promised Land is about realisation, not invasion and conquering, is manna. The Israelites in the desert were fed on manna, a ‘light white flaky’ substance which they found on the ground like frost in the morning. I’m told it’s on the menu of a New York restaurant as a kind of sweet, nutritious sap that oozes from certain plants and bushes. The facts are less important than the truth because as we know now there are always ‘alternative facts’. The truth is that this delicious food not only sustained them but delighted the desert pilgrims. As for many Christians does the Eucharist, however it may be served.

In other words, the food for the journey is a direct fore-taste of the destination of the journey. The end is not nigh, then, but nearer to us than we are to ourselves. We can taste it now. The Latin word for wisdom means ‘taste’. What greater proof is there than taste? Especially if it both delights and nourishes, and keeps us going in the realisation of who and where we are here and now.

What is your experience of manna?

Laurence

Wednesday

Today's Gospel Reading: Matthew 20: 17-28. The Son of man came not to be served but to serve

The Promised Land is woven into the journey we make towards it at every stage. Prove this statement. Let’s try.

The first proof yesterday was that the most authentic food (manna) that supports us on this trek is an actual experience, albeit limited by time and space, of the real presence of this Land here and now. Another way of experiencing this is Presence.

As the spiritual dimension is awakened progressively by regular contemplative practice many people become aware of a presence in their life. They will often say, as I would, that it gives them a feeling of guidance and accompaniment. Put like this is can sound a bit creepy or ghostlike; but it’s not like that. It’s not a separate entity that informs or manipulates you or interferes with your freedom to choose and take responsibility. Some people do interpret it like that. But then it’s usually a constructed fantasy or in extreme cases a mental pathology.

Perhaps the Presence I mean is better understood as a modifying of our self-consciousness. As we grew up and a sense of self developed (healthily or not depending on circumstances), we became present to ourselves, self-aware, self-judgmental, self-observing. ‘O why did I say that? I feel I’m a failure. If people knew what a mess I am they would never have given me this job. Or (occasionally) I am the greatest). This presence to ourselves can become a burden, even an affliction. Increasingly, we would like to shake it off and just be ourselves, spontaneous and un-self-conscious.

With a growing contemplative consciousness, this intense self-consciousness is modified. We still know when we have put our foot in our mouth but we are less hard on ourselves, less touchy and self-protective. Where does this change come from? Some would say, from an increasing sense of God’s presence. This sense is like the other physical senses and the sixth sense of intuition. It is inborn but needs to be released and grow. The presence of God is not like an extra person in the room or our shadow. It is an ‘I Am’ that doesn’t compete or threaten. It comes to be understood as what makes us able to be present to ourselves to others, to the world – and to God.

This I Am is everywhere. You can’t escape it and why would you want to? If you try to, you are trying to run away from yourself. It doesn’t bully or pull our strings but accompanies us in good times and bad. When we are good, we feel in greater union with it. When we are bad it doesn’t withdraw or get angry, although we may withdraw and project our anger.

The Exodus tribe in the desert were accompanied by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. When I first heard that as a child, I remember thinking how kind it was of God to adapt his presence to them according to their capacity to be aware of it. As the Gospel today reminds us, he came to be present to us in order to serve us rather than to be served.

Laurence

Thursday

Today's Gospel Reading: Luke 16: 19-31. Give them warning so that they do not come to this place of torment too

Another sign that the way and the goal are not essentially separated is the experience of community that arises when we follow the way in company with others. We usually do not select these companions, as we do in other areas of life; or when we are attracted to certain people because we get on well with them and like each other. The people we walk through the desert with, feel as if they have been chosen for us. When a monastic community decides to admit a new member, it is not just on the basis of their being good company and having a lot to offer. It is somewhat like an arranged marriage. There has to be personal compatibility but there is a deeper sense of destiny at work. The closeness of members of a community, over time and through trials, grows in a common sense of each and all together, being called to follow the same way. It is rooted in a very personal response and yet develops a common mind and purpose.

The Israelites trekking through the Desert towards the promised Land were a tribe. Community is not tribal. It is a marriage of solitude and other-centredness giving birth to something like, but different from a family. The Book of Exodus implausibly claims that 600,000 men (not counting their other halves) escaped from Egypt. They were an unruly, fickle and ever-complaining band, blaming their leader whenever they got into difficulties. Community, like all relationship groups and whole societies, can descend at times into this kind of tribalism for a number of all too human reasons.

Yet, conflict is not the problem. "All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things (the whole)) flows like a stream’, a philosopher says. Everything is in flow. The only constant is change. What matters is how conflict is handled and whether a common will emerges to survive the storm and lose no one overboard if possible. This common will is not the result of politics but a direct movement of the Spirit which specialises in unity. When this attitude to community growth is shared there comes, at moments, a glimpse, sometimes even in the storm, of the Promised land itself where all opposites are reconciled.

In today’s gospel, the rich man and the beggar are said to be eternally separated. But the one who tells us this is the one who reconciles opposites and does not wish that anyone be lost.

Laurence

Friday

Todays Gospel: Matthew 21-33-46. The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone

‘Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Never lose a holy curiosity’. Albert Einstein’s words - that would have resonated with the mothers and fathers of the desert and all the founders of spiritual movements who spent years in caves, and also for some today, but by no means all, who have been shut down, shut off and shut up for so long because of Covid.

Any innovator or creative person needs to be a loner. Sometimes that becomes a pathological aversion to society and company, but it doesn’t really mean that. Rather, it is the ability to be with oneself without fearing the solitude that opens around you, at first like a force-field, but later as a noosphere, an alive web of loving silence and connection. The difference between exclusive and inclusive aloneness doesn’t need words or explanations. It is self-evident on first contact with it.

Perhaps it is above all the fear of solitude that makes meditation so problematical for so many at first and even for a long time. It’s not setting the time aside. It’s not the feeling of failure to ‘blank out the mind’. It’s not the sense that time could be better spent. But often, it is just the edgy inability to be alone with oneself. How many careers, marriages and communities have become ways of avoiding or denying this?

Being a loner, isn’t the best way to put it. Yet it might resonate with that phenomenon of a narcissistic society, where social contact is experienced excessively on social media, that is called ‘self-partnering’. ‘I don’t need you; at least not just now. I’ll let you know when I do…’ The solitude Einstein knew was different as his joyfulness, passion to communicate and his creativity suggest. Being alone gives you time. It shows you that time is there, and you don’t have continually to feel you’re wasting it or that there’s never enough of it to get on top of everything. If you receive the time that solitude gives you, you will get a taste for it and use it to search for the truth. ‘One Christ loving himself’ is how Augustine described the mystical body we are forming.

As I look at what I have just written, I’m wondering if it sounds out of touch with the life of constant demands that many people experience who suffer from a lack of the bare necessities of life. But I am not talking of life-style choices. Or if it suggests a contemplative life as it was conceived in the ancient world, the privileged option of the wealthy slave-owner. Actually, it’s the opposite of this. And being the opposite, it clarifies why meditation is universal. The solitude necessary for contemplation is not leisure, about having loads of time on your hands and people to wait on you. It is an interior awareness that external circumstances, however demanding, cannot destroy. It is the awareness that comes not with the quantity but the quality of time turning your attention wholly to the source and ground of being.

Once it has started to awaken, this awareness becomes stronger and develops that holy curiosity about where it might lead. Our life then, however we might prefer its conditions to be different or over, becomes by itself a search for the truth.

Laurence

Monday

Today's Gospel Luke 4:24-30. No prophet is ever accepted in his own country

“What makes you FEEL GOOD? (photo here of slim good-looking people having great fun). It could be a regular running session, or perhaps you’re more the ‘bath and a book’ type. Take time out every day to focus on you”.

I pass on this advice from Marks and Spencer that sneaked into my email today. Maybe it needs qualification, but I am not condemning it outright. A puritanical rejection of all forms of pleasure is unChristlike. Another rabbi once said that on the day of judgement we will be held to account for every legitimate pleasure we did not accept. An accepting attitude to pleasure and pain feels closer to moral and spiritual health; but it also demands more discretion and even self-discipline than a fundamentalist fear of ‘feeling good’ in a sensory sense.

Especially during Covid time, when so many simple pleasures have been taken out of our reach and criminalised outside safe bubbles, feeling good in this ordinary sense should not be seen as a problem. People have found other ways to find or intensify pleasure to compensate. I saw a man’s face transfigured by his daily zoom with his grandson before the boy goes to bed. Many people, myself excluded, have found intense pleasure in a daily dip in freezing water, which they often refer to as a spiritual awakening. I found a more nutritional pleasure in my hermitage by discovering I could cook stir-fry, which previously I had thought very specialised and beyond my skillset.

Under extremely difficult conditions people can often find great pleasure in childlike and ordinary ways. While commuting between the internment camps for Jews under Nazi rule, until her own eventual train-ride to death, Etty Hillesum described the blissful pleasure she derived from observing flowers in Springtime or brief exchanges with the families she was helping. Finding such pleasures help restore us with a newfound feeling of innocence which is energising and relieves any burden of oppression, guilt or shame we may have been carrying. The advertisement I received was for pleasures bought by card online and so don’t refer to the ones that emerge graciously from the fabric of daily life. The old adage ‘the best things in life are free’ doesn’t fit most marketing strategies.

Maybe one post-Covid day the pleasure of being restored to peace and wholeness through meditation may be added. The blurb above might then read: What makes you feel good? It could be a regular running session. Or perhaps you are a bath and book person. And, of course, your daily meditations. Take time out every day to feel really good by taking the attention off yourself.

Laurence

Tuesday

Today's Gospel Matthew 18:21-35. Were you not bound to have pity as I had pity on you?

Occasionally people report a dream in which they blissfully find what they are looking for at the deepest and fullest level. They say it is as if they were working on a complex problem and suddenly it was solved - with simplicity, elegance and total beauty. Scientists often use these terms to describe their greatest discoveries. When the dreamer awakes, they are still aglow from this experience of pure truth. But when they try to remember what the solution was that gave them such a moment of fullness and joy, the glow rapidly fades; and soon, as they return to ordinary consciousness, it is at a great distance from this discovery. In fact, they have even forgotten even what it was they had been looking for. All that remains is an afterglow made of seeking and finding – but for what or how has now been lost – as happens to so much of our dream life. No wonder people wonder what they will remember of this life in the next life. Perhaps this is the real question about our ‘survival’ – there will be no memory because all will be now.

There are things we cannot hope to explain at this mundane level of awareness. The more we try to, the more the reality of it recedes. If you keep trying to solve the ‘problem of God’, for example, you will be left holding onto many ideas and counterarguments. You may become a world expert on the theory but you will feel that the taste of God has disappeared and become dry and stale.

Truth’s elusiveness is an eternal challenge to our left hemisphere. Even the Way and the Truth is a challenge. We can feel we are ‘following Jesus’ with a stronger sense of union growing over the years. At times if you thought of leaving the relationship you repeated to yourself St Peter’s words ‘Lord, to whom shall we go?’ Yet, despite this and all the theologies expounded over millennia about Jesus and his meaning for humanity no single explanation has been found. The questions ‘who is he?’ or ‘what did he do?’ lead us towards a receding horizon. This is a little embarrassing when you need to explain your faith to someone who doesn’t follow him. On the other hand, it may be the best proof that discipleship is not illusory. Even stranger, is that the more you accept this state of irreducible unknowing the more peace you feel about it.

One further illustration of this peculiar situation is in the experience of meditation when we lose self-consciousness to the degree that we enter the fullness of consciousness. ‘The monk who knows that he is praying, is not truly praying’, say the mothers and fathers of the desert. This is a statement about the nature of the highest experience we are capable of in this life. It may sound absurd – as paradoxes do – and inexplicable. Yet it also bears an authority we are inclined to trust. Maybe the very fact that it is so impossible to explain shows we can believe it to be true.

Laurence

Wednesday

Today's Gospel Matthew 5:17-19. I have not come to abolish but to complete

‘All art aspires to the condition of music’. When I read that as a student of literature, I was instantly bowled over by what I thought was a new universal truth. Gradually, I saw that sweeping universal truths like this may have value but one sees how they fail to hit the mark or hit it only occasionally. Yet we keep trying to capture the truth in words. The same applies to the failure of success and the success of failure that we learn by learning to meditate. What we see in that process is the importance of always laying aside the words and ideas we put our trust in. There are no answers that fit everything, but learning this illuminates the entire landscape of our experience.

Meditation is a way of wisdom - for all - precisely because it cannot be summarised in a striking sentence or even a long treatise. A scientific approach to the measurable benefits can say things about it that are verifiable. But they are merely observations, illustrations of what is constantly growing beyond us.

John Main understood and taught this with the genius of simplicity. He knew that wholeness is not static but a freeing from all the limitations that stop us from unlimited expansion. In the work of the mantra we detach from yesterday and tomorrow; we discover how limited are these dimensions of reality. As they lose their sway over our minds we experience how we are ever in the present moment and that we can indeed taste the peace and fullness it brings. But experiencing the present is the first step of entering into the eternal now that is God’s bring present to us. The first step into an expanding universe, into the wholeness that is God.

We cannot catch much of this in words or concepts; but we can sit and say the mantra. Learning the humility, fidelity and trust involved on the way of the mantra opens us to the immediacy of the infinite. Meditating therefore brings us home to God but coming home, in this case, does not mean settling down in security and familiarity. It is becoming a pilgrim growing in the freedom of love but with fewer and fewer things we are attached to.

The forms of life this pilgrimage take, even in one lifetime or over one week, are countlessly unpredictable. We learn how to be ready and obedient to the law of perpetual change. Yet whatever the form, there is the peace and certainty of what the Gospel calls the Way itself. John Main understands the daily experience of growth in meditation in direct relation to the Christian calling. I say ‘understands’ rather than ‘understood’ because as I listen to his talks during Lent the depths and vistas of his teaching are like a fresh revelation sending me back to the Way of the gospel with new wonder.

His emphasis on freedom is a pillar of his teaching. Freedom from limitations. Freedom for fear. Freedom to love. This freedom is an energy of the Christ-consciousness that flows into daily life. ‘You died and now your life is hidden in God with Christ’. The Way – and the little way of the mantra – continuously reveal what is hidden even as the expansion shows us what lies beyond what we can know.

Laurence

Thursday

Today's Gospel Luke 11:14-23. ..then know that the kingdom of God has overtaken you

One of my disciplines for Lent is to keep these daily reflections to less than a page. At times, or maybe too often, this means omitting connections between ideas that might make the point clearer. Sorry.

Yesterday I moved in a few awkward leaps from saying how ungraspable truth is; and how wanting to make everything explicit and measurable makes us miss the mark. (‘Missing the mark’ is the literal meaning of the word ‘sin’ in Greek). The result is that we are left hugging an abstraction, a handful of dust. Like the hero in the film Bladerunner 2049 whose girlfriend was a computer program that/who was terminated when the chip was broken.

I ended yesterday by speaking of John Main’s connection between what we do in meditation – which is giving up trying to be explicit – and waking up to the implicit, revolutionary insight of the teaching on the kingdom of heaven. It’s not easy but it works. Just when you give up what you thought was the best way to get somewhere or to achieve a goal, you suddenly see what it’s really all about. The goal is there all along. “Idiot, why didn’t I see that before?” This is what I mean by the success of failure.

Nowhere is this more painfully obvious than in the goal of happiness. Today, we are told endlessly that everyone should seek to be happy as their first priority. This means that politicians and others are over-concerned with being popular by making people happy in the short-term. In fact, what everyone wants is just to be free from pain, which is perfectly understandable. To want to be in pain or to enjoy inflicting it is unnatural and if it gives pleasure it is not happiness.

Of course, we do all want to be happy, as well as to have pleasure and be free from pain. This is a tall order and sometimes we’re fortunate. But if we pursue happiness as a goal, explicitly, we inevitably miss it. Missing it makes us feel discontented and unhappy. This doesn’t mean that God or the universe doesn’t want us to be happy. It suggests instead that happiness is found in our having the right disposition towards the way things are (pleasant or painful as it may be in any one situation).

The right disposition means an accepting and realistic approach. This depends on how our mental and emotional furniture is arranged and how we approach circumstances. ‘For the joy that lay before him he endured the Cross,’ (Heb 12:2). This doesn’t mean he wanted to suffer or enjoyed it. But he understood what the suffering was a bridge to. He was prepared. We need to be trained to be happy.

There are connections – between happiness, joy, suffering, peace and the other qualities of the kingdom of heaven experience which fill the pages of the gospels. Knowing them in our own experience is what makes its implicit truth leap from the page and the brain straight into the heart.

Laurence

Friday

Today's Gospel Mark 12: 28-34. You are not far from the kingdom of God

When as a university student I was first introduced to meditation by John Main I knew I was being touched and awakened by a fully authentic wisdom. It was a glimpse, a taste of a certain truth so simple and profound that it was on the other side of doubt. At the same time, a new hunger was aroused - maybe you could call it the love of God - which was the purest desire I had ever felt. In short, I really wanted to meditate. I tried to get into a regular practice and failed, although the clarity that one day it would click did not weaken. A few years later it came together. Timing is everything.

I have spoken with many people who are in the same position that I was in on first hearing about meditation. They have often genuinely wanted to start the journey for some time. When we finish speaking, they may say they are clear and determined - and they have the discipline - so now, finally, they will start. Sometime later, when we speak again it still hasn’t come together. They may be doing it a couple of times a week, missing it for periods altogether, feeling stuck in the swampy middle ground between starting and giving up.

This is another example of the success of failure. Of course, it is embarrassing to one’s vanity not to be able to do what you want to do, just as it is when you can’t stop doing something that you want to stop. Failure, however, merges into success (without the ego) as you learn that what matters in the spiritual realm is faithfulness not achievement. Lent is an annual reminder that the climb to the top is what matters, not planting your flag on the summit in triumph.

Nothing is wasted, especially missing the mark. Repeated failures wear down the ego a notch more as soon as we start again. Humility is the fragrant flower of this process; obviously not as a virtue you feel proud to have acquired but as a disposition that you feel surprised and grateful to see taking form in you. One loves oneself better when you see the first shoots of humility appear like Spring flowers amid all the remnants of the past.

Meditation is not an end in itself. It is a way. As long as you are on the way, with whatever fidelity you are capable of, seeds of contemplation are being produced and fall around you. In little ways, you are becoming a contemplative without knowing it. But when the right degree of self-knowledge has been reached and you see that your failures are less significant than your faithfulness, it won’t be long before you can do what you want to do.

Laurence

Saturday

Today's Gospel Luke 18: 9-14. Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

We are on the home-stretch now, in the middle of Lent. On Ash Wednesday as we began our forty-day trek through the desert we remembered our mortality. This was not to instil fear but to become free from the often repressed fear of the passage of time and of our eventual exit out of this realm of existence into the unimaginable. Remembering that we are dust is a well-known spiritual tonic in all wisdom traditions. It prepares us for death, reduces our anxiety about it and allows us to relish the wonders of life more intensely by seeing how the unimaginable already permeates the present.

The end of the third week of Lent then, is a good point to look back and see the footsteps we have left behind us. Where are we standing now compared with then? We might be self-judgemental about how we kept our resolutions. More importantly, we should reflect on what we have learned. We often squirm when put on that particular spot: ‘Have I really learned anything? What do you want me to say?’ Yet we cannot pass through time without learning something, even if it is to understand why we think we have learned nothing.

Ideas and experiences are also mortal. And so, if we limit what we have learned to what we have read or listened to or to events, we feel discouraged. Ideas, films, encounters, emotional highs or lows do teach us, of course; but their impact fades. Isn’t it amazing how we can struggle to remember what once overwhelmed us? All experiences on the river of time are borne out to sea. Do we learn anything, then?

To feel that we are learning nothing is depressing. To misjudge what we have learned is an unnecessary mistake that slows us down. Learning, at the deeper level, is not about keeping up with the flow of information. Education today is largely restricted to information and skill sets which have an economic value stuck on them. In some countries at this time, children going back to school after the shutdown are deemed only to have ‘fallen behind’ in the race for examinations and qualifications. What they might have learned from their painful experience of Covid is more urgent. Shorter holidays and longer schooldays are being proposed to help them catch up. Will they have learned how to live better, more wisely and resiliently? Is the opportunity being missed to ask the fundamental question of what education is really about? One of the greatest artists of the 20th century, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, received an evaluation from art school which told her she lacked talent and would have ‘no future in sculpture’.

Whatever we learn, even what we quickly forget, is useful. But it is secondary compared to life as a school of becoming fully human. Real learning consists more in what can be called intuition – the source of all creativity, genius and courage. What we learn in the heart is that, we will always be searching how better to understand and express the most important truths we discover. The more we know them the more we need the contemplative gift of unknowing.

As a way of the heart, meditation teaches us how to learn and how to live.

Laurence

Fourth Sunday of Lent

Today's Gospel John 3:14-21. Jesus said to Nicodemus:...

Jesus speaks here in a tone of paradox: humanly divine, personally cosmic.

‘The Son of Man must be lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so that
everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.

In the desert of Lent ‘fiery serpents’ appeared biting and killing many. Moses made a bronze serpent, erected it on a staff and whoever looked at it was healed. Looking at the Cross is to face and transcend mortality. Looking, seeing. Contemplation heals. Eternal life is more than just not dying. It is to die without fear, to live without fear of either death or life.

Yes, God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes
in him may not be lost but may have eternal life.

Jesus reveals himself through the founding myth of his people in terms they recognise even though it bursts out of the confines of myth and leads them (and us if we listen) into a direct experience. Crucially, he says he has ‘been sent’. Knowing this is to know that he carries God’s love directly to humanity and to each human being. This is as simple as difficult for us to accept as it was for Nicodemus.

For God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but so that through him the
world might be saved. No one who believes in him will be condemned but whoever refuses
to believe is condemned already, because he has refused to believe in the name of God’s only
Son.

Our idea of God is a superego projection. It says we will be rewarded for being good and if we aren’t, we are condemned. Jesus throws this image of God, of a god, straight into the fire of the Burning Bush. All ‘condemnation’ is now seen as self-condemnation. ‘Refusing to believe’ means hardening our hearts, refusing to leave the prison cell even after we have heard the call to freedom. But we are not punished twice for our refusal. It is a self-inflicted wound. Once is enough. But the divine therapist, healing the world, waits. If one kind of treatment doesn’t get through to us, another will. As I have just had the first vaccination, forgive me if I compare this to refusing it.

On these grounds is sentence pronounced: that though the light has come into the world
men have shown they prefer darkness to the light because their deeds were evil. And indeed,
everybody who does wrong hates the light and avoids it, for fear his actions should be
exposed; but the man who lives by the truth comes out into the light, so that it may be
plainly seen that what he does is done in God.’

Life carries moral responsibility. To do nothing is to do wrong. It is darkness because we can’t see what we are doing. A new light has broken into our dark minds but darkness remains more familiar, easier. Religion without the light of wisdom conspires with darkness without knowing it. Jesus transcends religion, even the one that carries his name. The truth is relentless in exposing our double-standards and hypocrisy. When we let go and surrender to the truth, there is nowhere to hide. Then we see that it is all love’s work and always has been.

Laurence

Monday

Today's Gospel John 4: 43-54. So you will not believe without signs and portents...

The still point of the turning world. Where is it and what turns around it?

Good, ordinary people like you and me are a bit baffled by the idea that there is something ‘beyond good and evil’. When a Sufi master says: ’good and evil are in the realm of dualities, there is only Oneness’; or when Jesus says that God is ‘like the sun shining on good and bad alike and is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked’, what do we feel? Maybe that it’s a misprint – it’s not what they really meant. Or we conclude it’s a profound truth not to be understood yet in this life.

What about someone who devotes their life to caring for refugees and the homeless and someone who blows up a disco where young people are having an evening out? No difference between them? What kind of society would it be if there were no laws, policeman and prisons? Hopefully good laws, decent policemen and humane prisons, but we need to discriminate between evil and altruism. So, let’s put this mystical wisdom to one side and let dervishes and theologians think about it. We’ll get on with the real world.

The still point of the turning world.

The turning world is in constant flux. We try to keep balance but everything is shifting and even what is considered good today is cast as evil tomorrow. In politics we take sides, pro or against Trump, Brexit or Remain. Without wise people or at least wise leaders, the shifting duality of good and evil becomes a rigid and bitter polarisation. To entertain us out of this, the media give us a prince and an actress talking about their personal feelings and the world takes sides for or against them. Morality becomes entertainment. Complexity becomes conspiracy.

Jesus did not deny that there are bad people and he said what he thought about them. The Sufi Master did not deny good and evil but said they are dualities lower than Oneness. To move from thinking about this Oneness to experiencing it, we require not entertainment or conspiracy but contemplative practice. The dualistic mind needs to be trained and stilled before we begin to know what Oneness means. As we come to know the still point around which our mind and feelings turn, we undergo a change in attitude towards good and evil and the myriad dualities.

Discovering the still point is the essential task of life for good ordinary people like you and me, now. It’s not meant to be postponed until the next life or until we have more time to read and meditate. Otherwise, wouldn’t Jesus and the Sufi Master have said, ‘don’t worry about all this stuff yet’?

We assume that the world turns around our ego. That is why dualities are misunderstood, harden and produce violence. Oneness is the higher truth. We are destined and designed to experience it now. The ‘kingdom is close at hand’. We will still confront good and evil; but we will be empowered by Oneness to forgive each other, to use compassion rather than violence. Then we understand why the still point is love, absolutely, simply loving towards both sides.

Laurence

Tuesday

Today's Gospel John 5:1-3,5-16: ‘Do you want to be well again?’

Jesus asks many questions. Like all true teachers his intention is not to give people answers but to help the student discover truth for themselves. ‘In your own experience’ as John Main often said. A question has revelatory power. Perceval in the Legend of the Holy Grain fails, through immaturity and self-doubt, to ask the wounded king the question that would heal him and the ailing land: ‘what is the Grail and whom does it serve?’

Questions bravely asked or deeply heard can unexpectedly reveal the source of consciousness. If we look back on our lives, we might remember pivotal moments, often seeming completely ordinary at the time, that did this. We remember them because they lifted us to another level of consciousness. I will share a couple of those moments in my life to encourage you to identify similar ones in your life, if you have time for such frivolous things. When I was a schoolboy I was very interested in stamps. On my way home I would often stop to gaze longingly in a shop window displaying many packets and collections of stamps. One day a friend of the family passed and greeted me. The following day, as I was absorbed in the same window display, he passed me again, asking humorously ‘hello, Laurence, have you been standing here since yesterday?’ Pop.

Why should I remember that so vividly? The word ‘conscious’ is composed of two words: com (with) and scio (I know). To be conscious means to know with. We become more conscious when we meet someone who knows with us. If they know us better than we know ourselves we are intrigued to know ourselves with them. To be in the company of more conscious, more awakened people stimulates growth in consciousness. To meditate together is to know with. Another moment for me, when I was a student, happened while standing in Pall Mall in central London having just had lunch with John Main. We were saying goodbye as he was returning soon to the US. We shook hands. Pop. Another one just popped into my head. After I had started working in the City I would often go to early morning mass and walk from the church to the station in the state of Eucharistic communion that Christians know. One ordinary day, at the bottom of the hill, again: Pop. Why these moments and not other more dramatic experiences, I do not know.

Consciousness is about connection and mutual understanding. It is the secret of Jesus and his Father and the nature of God as Being in Communion. It’s the same always and everywhere, so it can pop anytime.

We take particular times, like Lent or a special celebration or our daily meditation sessions to do the work necessary to grow gradually in consciousness and in receptivity to this reality. Only our ego blocks us from knowing-with all the time. Whenever the ego slips, for whatever reason or for however long, there is a pop.

Laurence

Wednesday

Today's Gospel John: 5 17-30. My aim is to do the will of the One who sent me

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation…
I arise today Through the mighty strength of the Lord of Creation (Prayer of St Patrick)

Over the years I have felt myself becoming more Irish. My mother was Irish, my father English and I was raised in England. For long, I assumed I was English with a touch of the Irish greenbrush. But I never felt wholly at home with the way the English saw the world and reported it to one another. I saw there was a parallel perception of reality operating in me. The more I got to know Ireland, the more I felt expanded by it. There is no such thing, as racial purity, a false myth of racists or nationalists. In my experience, it is liberating for everyone to know and value their roots and good for any society to celebrate its cultural diversity.

Today every wise person thinks they have some Irish in them. Irishness is a state of mind which allows the best interplay of unbridled imagination with reality in any culture. It is why the Irish outwitted their English oppressors for hundreds of years even though their language, culture, religion and freedom were repressed. Through their faith, humour, love of language, their bond with the land and their music and other arts they turned humiliation into victory. They supplied the best generals and entertainers to their occupiers. In the 20th century this small island half of whom died or were exiled by famine, an island of saints and sinners and great poets, produced eleven Nobel Laureates including four for literature. (There is only minor exaggeration in the claims above which you may fact-check.)

Although the Catholic Church in Ireland has crumbled as a spiritual authority,
the faith of the early centuries is alive and perhaps will be the point for future regeneration to come from. St Patrick was a contemporary of John Cassian who brought the wisdom of the desert to the West in the 5th century. But already there were links between the desert fathers and the Irish church which was originally a monastic church. Patrick had been enslaved, escaped and trained as a monk in France under Cassian’s influence. He returned to Ireland to preach the Gospel using the shamrock as a symbol of the Trinity.

Seven miles off the coast of Kerry, Skellig Michael is a 6th century monastic settlement built on top of a pyramid rock rising sheer from the sea. The monks who built it and prayed there were either mad or mystical or an Irish blend of the two. When I have visited it, I felt like nowhere else the immediate presence of God in a place where heaven and earth embrace. It makes meditation visible.

Today’s celebration warms up Lent for me. I hope St Patrick’s prayer can do so for you.

Laurence

Thursday

Today's Gospel John 5 31-47. How can you believe if you look to one another for approval?

Meister Eckhart praises things which the human mind usually runs away from. He saw detachment as the essential dynamic of our progress to God, our process of enlightenment. But not a superficial detachment, like giving up sweets or gin and tonic for Lent. He is more like Benedict who says, ‘the monk’s life is a continual Lent’. At this point most say, ‘well thank God I’m not a monk’ and most monks say, ‘well let’s see how we can interpret that’. Eckhart uses the vocabulary of Lent for every day - and for daily meditation: desert, emptiness, poverty, nakedness of mind.

These terms don’t refer to external practices or ascetism but to how we learn not to be dependent on external things for our sense of who we are and are called to be. One of those external things is people’s opinion of us. Jesus refers in today’s gospel to our tendency to seek human approval rather than ‘God’s approval’ which we might describe as ‘authentic being’. This is a good marker to self-knowledge as we come closer to the greatest human drama of the Easter story. At the centre of this theatre of life is the death that follows detachment, seeing plainly how not depending on others’ approval may lead to violent rejection.

All of this would be very unattractive if it were not, in fact, about human flourishing, realisation, not degradation or loss. The desert blooms when we understand and accept its simplicity. Emptiness fills to infinite degrees of fullness when we have completely pulled the plug. Poverty becomes ‘grand poverty’: as Cassian describes the effect of the mantra. Nakedness of soul, when we divest ourselves of self-imagery and vanity, overrides shame, duplicity and the fear of being known. Eckhart’s style of mystical thinking is robust and positive, especially when he talks about things that at first sight make us want to withdraw from the path or at least to slow down.

I think people who struggle to meditate every day, although they’d like to, are more likely to improve their practice if they understand the meaning of meditation in this way. It is simply understanding what is the meaning of life, with its joys and griefs, losses and discoveries, loves and loneliness. Life is a serious business and, when we realise that, we can be joyful about it in its wholeness.

Eckhart said the journey is about being ‘un-formed, in-formed and trans-formed’. John Main understood this as the absolute nature of meditation while recognising it needed to be achieved by stages. What matters for him is actually starting the journey and ‘being on the way’ rather than thinking we should be doing better and becoming too self-discouraged to start again. For him, the mantra combines these three stages of the journey in one: one simple act of pure, poor faith repeated and always leading us deeper.

We find encouragement to practice this full interior detachment in scriptures like this:
‘I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him…  that I may know him and the power of his resurrection.’ (Phil 3:8-10)

Laurence

Friday

Today's Gospel Matthew 1:16,18-21,24. Her husband Joseph being a man of honour…

Einstein said that you only observe what your theories allow you to see. We are full of blind spots even when we may have sharp focus on a portion of what is before us. Research into perception shows that totally new, unexpected phenomena can be totally blanked out, even from a whole group’s awareness, because the brain doesn’t know how to deal with it. What we don’t know, we don’t know and if we did know what we don’t know we would know everything. So we live with our limitations

Today is the feast of St Joseph, carpenter, husband of Mary, patron of manual workers. He’s usually in our blind spot when we read the first part of the gospel story, after which he drops out of the picture entirely. However, in the few words that describe his decision not to put his pregnant betrothed aside in shame, he has found mythical immortality, innumerable shrines, speculative biographies and recently a named place in the Roman canon of the Mass.

It would be hard not to like St Joseph, supporting role though he has. He’s not a star. He’s like the workman who comes to repair something in your house which has been causing you a lot of inconvenience and which you have been unable to fix. His superior knowledge and skill gives him a touch of the supernatural. He does the job on his own quietly after assessing it and deciding what he needs. He charges modestly and glides away like an angel having delivered his message, taking your profuse thanks without fuss. A model of good work that we would like to imitate in whatever, probably less useful, work we may be doing.

A good workman, good women manual workers too, deserves his fee and respect for what he does. He reminds us that all we have to do is what we are meant to do and to do it without greed or an egotistical desire for approval. A job well done is its own reward and brings benefits to others. Joseph handled the problem of somewhere to stay in Bethlehem, the royal visitors, the hasty escape into exile, the return to Nazareth and making a business that provided for the family. In one translation, Cassian calls the meditator the ‘Lord’s bedesman’, meaning the simple monk whose job it was to say prayers, to tell his beads. Repeating the mantra is good work. Like manual work, it involves the whole person, body and mind. It does not stroke the ego, in fact the reverse. It is its own reward.

It would have been culturally odd for the time if Mary had been the carpenter and Joseph the homemaker. But today gender roles are more flexible and allow both men and women to do the kind of work they are best suited for. The husband of an ambitiously powerful and successful woman told me he and the children had always preferred him to be the one running the home and family because he did it better than his wife. Consorts of women in positions of power that I have met strike me with their personal integration, masculine confidence in a backup support role stereotypically assigned to wives.

All that matters is that we recognise what we are meant to do and have the courage to do it wholeheartedly. We all have cultural blindspots and vanities to cope with. But meditation has a way of removing them and helping us to see what is before our eyes.

Laurence

Monday

Today's Gospel John 8: 1-11. Jesus bent down and started writing on the ground with his finger.

Jesus, the Buddha and Socrates have influenced the human family more vastly than any other individual teachers, yet none of them left any writings of their own. They walked, ate with people, talked and conversed. Their direct transmission was oral; it was their privileged first listeners who misunderstood, remembered, repeated and finally wrote down what they said.

In an age of continuous written messages, emails, tweets, reports and summaries, excessive legislation (from ‘legere’, to read) and official documents it is hard to imagine how the spoken word could be so transforming through time and space. Our compulsion to write down the ephemeral, not to trust the spoken word and to control the future by what we write, is exhausting. In the end, it erodes simple trust and intuition and so summons the spectre of anarchy. I am told that if you say in a court of law that you trusted their word when making an agreement with your opponent, you will lose the case because you lacked proper diligence. You were at fault for trusting. As I returned to France recently, I was armed with eight signed official documents, none of which were called for as I passed through immigration. I don’t think this was because I looked trustworthy but because the official just couldn’t be bothered. He had seen and checked enough papers already that day. The lack of trust leads to not caring.

Trust is more deeply given to someone you are listening to than by reading their written words. A speaker unconsciously employs more ways of communicating trustworthiness than a writer, like tone of voice, body language and eye contact. Many prophets and teachers have reputedly not been at all eloquent, so even being a ‘poor speaker’ is not a barrier to awakening this trust. Professional, motivational speakers on the other hand can be so smooth-talkingly persuasive that you instinctively don’t trust them.

Of course, writing can also create an intimate bond of trust and, over time, with a much larger number of readers. Speaking too can be deceptive. But when the heart is pure, a speaker transmits more, directly and deeply. When the message is not about marketing or policies but the deeper spiritual truths, a unique event occurs. A dimension of communion is triggered that does not end when the speaker finishes or dies. The spoken word has found a place in the heart and mind of the first listeners. It continues to in-form them in the way a seed grows until the point that when they speak about what they heard and eventually write it down, something of the original transmission is communicated in the written words.

This first-hand presence is the meaning of the expressions ‘Word of God’ or ‘sacred scripture’. It is also partially reflected in the greatest literature. Nor is the essence of the original communication ‘lost in translation’ because the meaning is not literal. It is the ever-ripening fruit. It grows not through a literal reading but through personal interpretation and sharing with others. It somehow bounces off the experience of the reader-listener and creates the resonance of understanding that is fresh in each moment. It feels like ‘I wrote that myself’ or ‘how did he know that was what I felt?’

The Word was not spoken originally in order to inform, instruct or speculate but to initiate.

Laurence

Tuesday

Today's Gospel John 8: 21-30. What the Father taught me is what I preach

Before the big shutdown many people were stressed by work, travel, meetings and the rush of modern life. Their personal energy was expended just surviving in the big cities that we made for our pleasure but which for many became a prison. Since the shutdown and the new waves of the virus, for many people stress has come from different sources: loneliness, financial worries, demanding childcare, lack of physical contact. Stress results from excessive tension, sometimes leading to a nervous snap and collapse. Under such stressful pressure we understandably look to relax the tension. Some may try meditation and healthier living; but others toy with alcohol, drugs, over-eating or bingeing in other ways.

Relaxation is natural and necessary for both physical health and mental balance. Trouble begins when the ways of relaxing themselves become unnatural and excessive. We need to be relaxed when we meditate as well as meditating in order to relax. There is no realisation of the Self if we are trying too hard or if our expectation of results outstrips the need to do it just for its own sake.

If we relax naturally and healthily - and approach meditation in the same way that we care for our physical and emotional states - we will find the right degree of tension. Tension is not the enemy but the friend. Life without tension is unliveable: either collapsed or ended. Even walking naturally across the room or typing on the keyboard employs tension to the right degree.

Too much tension or too little is a problem with dire consequences. How then do we know if we are heading in the right direction? Because we and others we serve will know that we are paying attention more fully, as we give our self to people and tasks. The perfect degree of tension is pure attention.

Attention needs to be directed and then gently, steadily held. Regardless of what we are giving our attention (and self) to it then becomes the gaze of love or contemplation. Pure attention to another is attention to the Other, to God who is the ground of being in all things good and bad. In paying attention to something good this may be felt as delight or being energised. In the case of something unwelcome or hostile it is felt as forgiveness or compassion.

Because God is being paid attention to in everything and because attention is love, when we truly pay attention (however imperfectly) we feel reciprocity. The perfect degree of tension is pure attention to the other which is in continuous exchange with the attention we receive from God. As our attention turns from ourselves and moves to another, the exchange of selves goes ever deeper, from reciprocity and mutuality to unity. When it is stuck on ourselves, we feel isolated and unloved. The exchange of reciprocated and reciprocating love is creation. It is birth and death - and the resurrection that transcends both. It is stillness and the dance of Being-in-Love that we call, for convenience, ‘God’.

Laurence

Wednesday

Today's Gospel John 8: 31-42. I have come from him; not that I came because I chose, no, I was sent, and by him.

John Main once said the purpose of a Christian education is to prepare people for the experience of betrayal.

Betrayal covers a great swathe of human suffering. Being betrayed. Betraying others, intentionally or usually unintentionally. Betrayed by our false hopes and expectations. Falling short, even with the best of intentions. In the end, betrayed by our body. Christ is a teacher whose life, or what we know of it, was shot through with experiences of being misunderstood and misrepresented even by those closest to him. Would there be an Easter without Judas?

And, poor Jesus, it continues. I witnessed a conversation not long ago among a group who had just listened to a talk by John Main on meditation. At one point he had said ‘What is real? What is truth? God is real and the reality of God is the truth revealed in Jesus’. After the talk there was meditation and after the closing bell, a pause. The first comment was about those words. The person had been comfortable with everything up to that point. He said he was confused and didn’t know why. It was not that he did not feel, sense or even believe that Jesus was real – although he backtracked then, distrusting himself. He didn’t know what that meant or what it meant to believe anything.

I may have been mistaken, but I thought the reason he balked, resisting these words were because of the confidence, the clarity in which John Main used the name of Jesus. Did it sound too much like a Christian speaking of Jesus? Even if Jesus may not be suspect for people today, Christians are. The conversation soon went off into abstract territory. What is truth? Just relative and subjective or, as John Main said, ‘absolutely reliable’? Everyone could agree, more or less, that truth is what ‘I’ personally perceive and feel. So, while it’s acceptable to say that, ‘for me’, the truth of God is revealed in Jesus, it is offensive to omit the subjective tone of the apologetic ‘for me personally’. This led on to a discussion of the gnawing pain of continuous self-doubt. It was then that I thought I glimpsed the great betrayal of our time, present deep in the way we have been educated. Not educated how to deal with betrayal but educated into a betrayal about what truth means.

The idea that truth is ‘subjective’ makes for a terrible loneliness. The idea that it is ‘objective’ leads to another kind of loneliness where we cannot tolerate another point of view. As it developed after it divorced itself from mysticism, theology led to a great betrayal of Jesus whom we can only ‘know’ both within and among ourselves. Not objectively or subjectively but non-dually. In the Christian mystical tradition John Main knew this. So did Meister Eckhart when he said the real truth of Jesus is not in what he did or said but in who he is.

Every betrayal is a tragic mistake. How did Christianity come to betray its teacher? And what happens when the one we betray doesn’t not go away but remains who he is?

Laurence

Thursday

Today's Gospel Luke 1:26-38. She asked herself what this greeting could mean

There’s a store in Florida I passed one summer day that saw a good opportunity in capitalising on the Christmas feel-good factor. It was called Christmas Every Day. I don’t know if it was successful, but it seemed a bright retail idea. I suspect it may have gone the way of all Christmases as people’s desire to cling to the nostalgia and upbeat mood of turkey and wrapping paper faded and they realised that if Christmas is every day then there’s no Christmas.

Incarnation, however, is a daily event. Today is the feast of the Annunciation when Mary was visited by the angel who offered her the chance to say a vast and unconditional Yes on behalf of us all. Nine months to the day, as a consequence, we will be saying Happy Christmas. Between now and then there will be changes of seasons, more lockdowns, more conspiracy theories, more vaccination nationalism and many more births and deaths. But through all the events constantly being delivered from the womb of time, as Shakespeare called it, a baby will be growing in Mary the universal Mother.

Like the seed planted in the ground that Jesus compared to the Kingdom of Heaven, the baby grows, ‘how we do not know’ while we get up in the morning and go to bed at night. It is like our ‘progress’ in meditation. What changes we may observe and objectify are small compared with what is happening as we are swept along the river of time and into an expanding universe whose limits we cannot see.

Yet we need to be reminded that this new life is continually being formed because it is only too easy to get distracted and downhearted by events that obscure the essential purpose of things. Clinging to good but ephemeral experiences, as the Christmas Every Day approach proposes, is an investment of diminishing returns. Plunging every day into what is taking shape with an unconditional Yes of full acceptance is taking the risk to be alive, to die and to plough back our deaths into the soil of rebirth. So the seed grows and the river flows until the blossom of youth, the fruit of middle age and the harvest of the last days have all been accomplished.

Having been speaking about the mantra for a few years now, I am aware that many people respond to meditation at first with the scepticism that Christmas Every Day arouses. There’s no arguing with them or with one’s own doubts, because experience is the teacher. There is no proof except experience. But nor is there experience without a Yes.

Laurence

Friday

Today's Gospel John 10: 31-42. They wanted to arrest Jesus but he eluded them.

We are approaching the end of Lent and the beginning of Holy Week. It’s a good time, if you are so inclined, to review and evaluate what the past six weeks have taught you. Has anything changed? Do you see anything differently? Are you more free or less? What patterns stay intractable? Where have they loosened up?

Any point of serious reflection on the meaning of experience is like the god Janus. For the Romans he was the god of doors and passageways, of ends and beginnings. Every door is a way in, a way out and a way through. Every window can be looked into and out of and through.

To reflect on meaning is a way of passing time but it shouldn’t take all our time otherwise we wouldn’t have time to live. Living fully means taking the attention off ourselves. Rather than keeping ourselves at the centre of every scene, delivering great soliloquies, we allow ourselves to become a minor player or even go offstage. Meaning then appears as an experience of intimate connection with dimensions of reality beyond the one which obsesses us, namely ourselves. As a result, we become aware of ourselves more clearly by activating our peripheral vision which includes most of our vision field. We see in more directions. Taking the attention off ourselves as a fixed point of self-observation allows us to see and know better.

In the gospel these days Jesus is described approaching Jerusalem, the beginning of his Passion and the end of his life. He is strongly aware of what is coming towards him as he approaches it. In many traditions the enlightened, who see in the whole field of vision, know of their approaching death.

As I thought of this, I remembered the phrase ‘future events cast their shadows before them’. Curious about its origin I was led to a painting of that title by a 19th century Canadian artist (Charles Caleb Ward) from the rural Eastern Provinces. It is a simple but moving scene of a poor family gazing at a poster advertising the imminent arrival of Barnum’s Circus. It depicts wonders and bizarre things, like Egyptian mummies and horned horses not normally seen in New Brunswick. Exciting things, out of the ordinary, to look forward to. Visible to us are tattered remains of old posters promising past futures. Behind the parents and two of their children is a third child, a boy absorbed not in the poster and things to come but in a puppet he is holding. His imagination is awakening within himself, now. For the others, it is externalised and projected into the future.

The only other figure is a dog lying on the ground close to the boy, looking at us like the god.

Laurence

Saturday

Today's Gospel John 11: 45-56. To gather together in unity the scattered children of God..

We love heroes and are constantly inventing new ones. On screen, in politics or in our personal lives we idealise the unfortunate victims of our heroic longings. We don’t believe ourselves to be heroes: we know ourselves too well but to make sense of life we should try to see the heroic myth that is enacted in everyone’s experience. Lent may not have made us feel like spiritual superheroes, hopefully, but to understand the Easter story that we re-enter shortly we need to understand this archetype. The crucified Jesus seems a strange choice as hero except as a kind of anti-hero conspicuous for his failure. But certainly not a Superman.

My favourite hero is Gilgamesh (2000 BCE), King of Uruk in Mesopotamia. We meet him in the oldest work of literature. Like us he is two-thirds god and one third human. Because he is an oppressive ruler the gods send a wild man, Enkidu, to correct him. They fight. Gilgamesh wins but they form a perfect friendship. They go off on heroic quests and in so doing anger the gods who take Enkidu’s life. Gilgamesh leaves on a solitary and dangerous journey to find the secret of eternal life. He fails but is taught the wisdom of mortality: "Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands". He returns home, wiser, humbler and a better ruler.

Three essential elements of heroic meaning are reflected in this story of Gilgamesh: separation, initiation and return. Our Superman heroes distract us from the heroic meaning that ennobles even the most ordinary-seeming life. They express huge ego-inflation, the fantasy of power and domination. They are not teachers and revealers of our truth but dressed-up fantasies demanding worship. Like the old gods, who are continually taking new shapes in human cultures, they dominate and exploit us but they are co-dependent on the offerings we bring. Without our worship and sacrifices they fade away like old movie stars.

Gilgamesh helps us to understand the story of Easter if we see that Jesus is not a superhero or a god; but he shows what human life means more completely than any myth or work of fiction. Yet, like every human being discovering who they are, where they come from and where they are going, he separates progressively. Ultimately, he detaches from everything. With each degree of separation that we endure we also pass through an initiation. Death is the ultimate initiation. We bounce back - return – after each cycle. The ultimate return which transcends the cyclical process is the Resurrection.

Jesus does not require hero-worship because he heroically illuminates our self-understanding.

Laurence