Spirituality
2010 Fight Poverty
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4 April, 2010 Fr Laurence's reflection for the the Easter event in every meditation. |
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Easter Day - The first witnesses of the Risen Jesus were women. This was despite – or because – they were not seen as legally competent witnesses. Perhaps it shows us that to believe in the Resurrection we have to rely not just on other peoples’ comments but on our own experience. The ‘women did not know what to think’ and Peter was dumbstruck when the news first broke that he was risen. This is the precondition for faith and the vision of things unseen. To be open to the deep wonder of our own creation and to how our being is penetrated by the mind of Christ – this is the way eventually to recognize him. It is also one of the fruits of meditation to bind faith and belief to experience – or as John Main says to ‘ verify the truths of our faith in our own experience. The Resurrection is not ‘otherworldly’. It sends us back to this life in a new way. |
"As John Main reminds us every time we meditate we enter into the paschal mystery. Each meditation takes us into fellowship (never a ‘perfect’ community) as on Thursday, the silent meal. Through death of the ego as on Friday. Through days of uneventfulness and hidden action as on Saturday. And onto Sunday and into the beginning of the great dilation and great awakening of the Resurrection, the universal embrace that is salvation."
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2010 Lenten Reflections with Father Laurence Freeman http://www.wccm.org/item.asp?recordid=Lent10LF&pagestyle=default |
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28 March, 2010 - Six Sunday of Lent - Palm Sunday
The Passion and Death of Jesus are a lived teaching. Deeds incarnating
the teaching empower the most ordinary words with exceptional power and
fill authentic silence with transformative meaning. The differences of
perspective between the four gospel narratives express the infinite permutations
of significance in these historical events.
Jesus prepares the disciples for the mystery they are about to be plunged into
by reminding them of the meaning of humility – service rather than manipulation, accepting that we are closer to truth among the least, the lost and the last rather than among those who cling to facades of their own omnipotence. The events are packed with the tension, almost the hyper-reality of paradox. In these intense moments we meet the oppositions of success and failure, of the light and dark hemispheres of the soul, of the good and the bad thief, the polarities of loyalty and betrayal. Beneath this realm of duality we find the realm of the spirit, of unity. All that seems to divide converges in the central person of the narrative who himself seem to disappear in what he embodies.
Laurence Freeman OSB
21 March,
2010 - Fifth Sunday of Lent - Passion Sunday
Today’s gospel tells the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. It is a disputed passage by the scholars but so loved and deeply understood by generations of Christians that it has stayed in the canon. Why does it seem so emblematic of Jesus and the spirit of his teaching? Not only because he is as always on the side of the oppressed and the marginalized. One true test of where to see Jesus is to be on the losing side and with those who refuse to polarize and scapegoat others. But it also reflects his profound and tough gentleness towards that part of us that does on many occasions choose to point the finger and condemn. Jesus does not simply exonerate the woman, defending her against a crowd of angry patriarchal males. He forces them, without using violence against them, to confront themselves and their own self-deception and bigotry. They do not seem to repent but their self-shame makes them slink away. He has saved and taught in one act that unites the forces of wisdom and compassion.
As a desert father once said when he was asked how best to find peace of mind, “judge no one and in every conflict ask yourself, ‘who am I.’”
Laurence Freeman OSB
14 March, 2010 - Fourth Sunday of Lent
Then the day they had often dreamed of came. And the people who had
spent forty years in the wilderness, oscillating between hope and despair,
making of themselves another generation that would have no memory of
slavery, entered the Promised Land. On that day the manna ceased – the
special food, a bit bland perhaps but that had followed them so faithfully,
was taken away from them. And they had to get used now to the food grown
locally. (Joshua 5:9-12) Laurence Freeman OSB
7 March, 2010 - Third Sunday of Lent
Mountains hold a fascination even for those who don’t like heights. In religious traditions mountains become sacred places – from Horeb to Ularulu.
Hiking in the Himalayas you might have a Blakean moment and briefly see the mountain peaks as waves, only seemingly solid, but really like everything else in the universe, flowing energy. The tops of the mountains are the meeting point of earth and sky where what is visible and tangible touch and disappear into the ethereal and the transparent. Perhaps Moses on Horeb had a similar experience when he approached the burning bush and the great I AM addressed him. But the sacred easily becomes territorial as the unholy ‘Holy Land’ has long shown. In the new dispensation of the mind of Christ we no longer identify worship with sacred places – ‘this mountain or Jerusalem’, as Jesus told the woman at the well. Worship now is ‘in spirit and truth’. In a stroke our grounds for shedding blood or acting unjustly in the name of religion has been pulled out from under us. We fall into the mystery of the living God not our image of God.
Our spiritual practices of Lent should be enhancing this way of seeing. If we become attached to them for their own sake, or give them up because we get bored, or fail to re-start them at the right moment, then of course they can no longer have this potential.
Laurence Freeman OSB
28 February, 2010 - Second Sunday of Lent Transfiguration
Jesus
went up the mountain with his three close disciples to pray. There in
the midst – as they struggled to stay awake – he was transfigured in
light. A Tibetan Buddhist with his knowledge of the mind-body continuum
has little difficulty accepting the story literally. The modern westerner
is inclined to go for the metaphorical meaning. But if everything in
the material and mental world is in some sense a metaphor of a reality
we can not grasp but only enter and be united with and transformed in,
is the difference so great? The point is not just to wonder at what happened
but to see that it shows us something of our own incomprehensible destiny
and potential. Today I will be with a family whose 21 year old son died
in a tragic accident two years ago. The experience of time does not lessen
the pain of absence but something does change. Life flows on and every
day has its distractions but a deeper process is unfolding. Grief is
a work that is part of the transfiguring of human consciousness. When
the illumined Jesus ‘spoke’ with Moses and Elijah he was speaking about
his coming death, grieving for what would soon come. We cannot make sense
of life without this horizon.
Laurence Freeman OSB
21 February, 2010 - First Sunday of Lent
You don't have to believe in the mythical figure of the devil - the composte
of the psychological shadow and the collective force of darness - understand
what tempation means. When Jesus 'was led into the desert to be tempted'
he faced it all - the lure of power, self-sufficiency, vanity, everything
the ego instinctively prefers and sees as the means of its self-preservation.
To resist the lure of illusion demands the conscious risk of opting
for the real. It is fasting from the false consolations of all substitutes
for reality. The desert is a place where we can do this because its
simplicity minimises distraction. the forest of distractions in which
the unreal easily hides and regroups its strength. Each meditation
period is about allowing ourselves to be led into the desert. At times
there is the struggle with distraction and the ego. But at times,
unexpectedly and by grace, the desert blooms with all the fresh colours
and fragrances of our meeting with the real. Laurence Freeman OSB
Walk the Labyrinth and found out about the one built during the World Youth Day/Magis08
With thanks to Penny Sturrock who provide us with continuous spiritual
thoughts.
“The deepest level of communication is not communication. It is communion.
It is wordless. It is beyond words; and it is beyond speech; and it is beyond
concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear
(sisters), we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have
to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are” (Thomas
Merton)
"Nothing is more important for people of our time than to recover
the capacity for silence. Silence is the medium of unity. http://www.wccm.org
I was struck by this phrase of John Main's
" We begin to appreciate the sheer wonder of the experience
of prayer itself, the wonder of entering into the limitlessness of Christ’s
prayer"
May we all share that experience.
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John Main OSB (1926-1982)
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Thomas Morton (1915-1968)
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