the Trinity - who cares?

Once upon a time a dandelion came to be growing in a meadow. The dandelion whispered to the amino acids and all the other nutrients in the soil:

“You need only to allow yourselves to be dissolved in a drop of water and I will suck you up through my roots. You won’t feel a thing. But afterwards, you will be able to grow and to flower and to fly away in the wind as a thousand miniature parachutes carrying seed.”

“OK,” said the amino acids and other nutrients. They let themselves be dissolved in rainwater, and sucked up through the roots, and they became, dandelion.

The next morning a rabbit came hopping along the meadow.

“Good Morning!” the rabbit said to the dandelion. “How would you like to become rabbit? You will have to allow yourself to become nibbled and swallowed. It hurts a little, but afterwards you will be able to jump and bounce and romp in the moonlight, wiggle your ears, and have lots of baby rabbits.”

The dandelion was not overly enthusiastic, but the idea of hopping around sounded like a lot more fun than just being stuck, in one place. “Okay,” said the dandelion with a sigh, and allowed itself to be munched and become a rabbit.

Toward evening, a hunter came by. “Good Evening!” said the hunter to the rabbit (for he was an unusually polite hunter). “How would you like to become human? You must allow yourself to be chased, shot dead, skinned, cooked in a stew, and eaten. This is not pleasant, I admit, but afterward you will be able to play yoyo, sing in the shower, and fly in a jet plane.”

The rabbit was scared, but flying in jet plane seemed so exciting that the idea was irresistible. So sniffing a little and wiping away a tear, the rabbit mumbled “OK,” went through with that ordeal, and became human.

The next morning the human became aware of a unifying presence, just beyond any personal reach. The human was so intrigued at what this could really mean, that he listened.

Until, that is, a voice said this: “Tell me, how would you like to become God?”

God? If you don’t sign up to that word, just for now, let’s stick to the word life. The point is that life is Being in communion, and life is all a relationship. To experience the fullest life means we are more than just genes and psychological patterns. We are aware of life, not just our model of life.

The scientific model suggests 14 billion years ago nothing exploded into something, and this nothing exploded into all of us, we who breathe the same air the trees breathe out, who are made of the same matter as the stars.

We are all part of one dynamic, unified system, and the word universe actually means One changing, and so, this seemingly separate life is actually interconnected. Difference is not separation, and we are in this together, like it or not, members of one another, as St Paul said.

But the way life is re-presented today, we’d be forgiven for completely forgetting this fact. Because at a fundamental level we believe we are separate, which feeds our guilt, our fear, our pride, our maladaptive coping, our anger, our suffering and our violence.

On an ecological level we destroy the earth, on an international level we destroy each other, and on an individual level we distract ourselves with an illusion of entertainment and control, and by never contemplating our own death. Beauty is replaced by glamour.

Our celebrity filled television is all about my body, my house or my garden, as if the limit of what we can do stops in the mirror or at the garden fence. We are inwardly divided, because we are educated as individuals, bundles of patterns deployed by a controlling independent ego, opposed to other controlling independent egos, each autonomous consumers, reduced to what we can measure, aspiring to be the sum total of purchases and lifestyle choices, in the technological bondage of a closed human conceptual system. Fake life. Alienation. To use and older word, sin.

And so true religion always calls us back, reminds us that being a person is being a part of one whole. Life is more than genes and psychological patterns, and the religious model of Unity in Trinity matters because three in One indicates life is beyond us, within us, and between us, and each aspect of this is One.

As Ephesians says, with wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will, to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth, under Christ.

By entering Christianity, we don’t have to leave humanity behind. John’s prologue says “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” The beginning is the Big bang, and the wisdom of God, which is the cosmic mind principle Jesus embodied, we humans can also embody.

One Lord and Father of all, who is above all, through all, and in all, saving us from egocentricity, reminding us we all have one mutual source, one true Self, one dynamic dance in the creatures. Such is the intimacy between the Father beyond, the Son within and the Spirit between, that they not only embrace each other, but they also enter into each other, permeate each other, and dwell within each other.

We are not ancient Greeks, we are not ancient Romans, we are not even ancients. But even here in the 21st century, the compound Unity of the Trinity means relationship is at the centre of all life, and complete mutual love and knowledge, not just dry mathematics, are infinitely shared. Nor is this ancient theology.

There is a relationship of being, a mutual indwelling, or to use the Greek term, a perichoresis. Since there is a lot of fake life, life taken far too personally, let’s remember that the word persona literally means mask. Getting behind this mask is intrinsic to becoming unsuperficial, authentic, and to knowing who you are.

Which is why St Francis of Assisi once said this: you are looking for what is looking. In other words, the One is knowing itself in you, or as another Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart said, the eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me. Or to get a bit closer to the Bible, as Jesus is reported to say in St John’s gospel: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they be one in us.”

On the face of it, we are all different, but we are each midwives to One grace, because differentiation is not really separation. This is why Rublev’s icon of the Trinity, painted in 1410, shows Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as androgynous, heads bowed, deferring to one another. There’s a space for you to sit, be welcomed, join the dance of eternal life.

Which is all very poetic, but why did the Trinity ever appear as dogma at all?

Because, from a human standpoint, which is possibly why it took a few centuries to formulate it, there was a real problem about saying Jesus of Nazareth was especially divine, that God was directly present in him, without compromising that precious Jewish belief that God is One.

So the answer people arrived at acknowledged that God continued to govern from Heaven, the Spirit communicated him, while Jesus revealed him in person. Problem solved. God could remain One being, or Homo-ousious to use the language of the day, but in three persons, as co-eternal, ie. none of them came first. Father Son and Holy Spirit, one Being in three persons, became the Christian idea of God. Well, give or take the odd clause, which we will come to.

You don’t find this in the Bible, but there are pointers. John’s gospel says the spirit descends upon Jesus like a dove to confirm him as the Son of God. And the letter to the Romans says this Spirit, which was to embolden the disciples and enable healing, witnessing and speaking in other languages, could enable us.

“When we cry “Abba! Father!” it is that very spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs, and if heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”

But Christ is not some deadening certainty. Christ is a path we walk, a practice, an orthopraxy, with the Spirit’s company, to be lead into One Father. This is not uniformity, but unity in diversity, so it co-operates.

Of course it is a paradox. How can one really be three? And St Augustine apparently said that as soon as you start counting you are already into heresy, so the Western Church tended to stress God’s Oneness, while the Eastern emphasised the three-ness.

“But God doesn’t exist!” protests today’s atheist. Eastern Fathers also said he didn’t. As we understand existence. God is a spirit, and the Eastern Orthodox way of Church is more spiritual, knowing as it does that God is not a thing, but that God contains every other thing, that matter is in spirit, not the other way around, and that self-knowledge, or Gnosis, is key to understanding. It reminds us how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are relations in process, not static names, just as life is not static, even beyond death.

It is said of our personal life that our own skeleton is completely replaced in a mere seven years, so we are clearly not static. How much more so the persons of the Trinity. Father Son and Holy Spirit are distinguished not by different hair colour and different likes and dislikes, but by relating differently to one another, dynamically, through Fatherhood beyond, Son-ship within, and Sanctification, or holiness, that is, wholeness, between.

And now for that odd clause I promised you. The Western church, in the eyes of the East, downplayed the role of the Holy Spirit, by adding, in 589, a new clause to the Creed. The Filioque clause, which literally means and the Son.

"We believe in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son." In Eastern Christian eyes, this is not true. The Spirit only proceeds from the Father. To the Orthodox, the Holy Spirit is more than Jesus’ Spirit, something charismatic churches may sympathise with. There is no hierarchy requiring Jesus. The Holy Spirit is abroad in the world.

In case this is all irrelevant, what matters is the transcendent, that matter is in spirit, not the other way around, so life is more than genes and psychological patterns. Christian life means we live together in interdependence within God beyond.

To experience and participate in the bliss of this divine life is to be able to see ourselves as relational processes within the more and ever more, to change, but to be aware of the change. To release our grasp, enabling the Spirit to be in the heights and the depths of life.

This is the challenge of the Trinity today, to release our autonomy, here and now, and for eternity. We cannot live until we die, and let mutual indwelling happen.

In a nutshell, our awareness is not ours, but we are in it. It is God.

So I invite you to become still. Feel your breath rise and fall, and ask yourself if you are making it happen.. or is God’s spirit actually breathing you. Feel the weight of your body... notice all the colours in your field of vision… and hold them in attention… Hear as many sounds as you can…. notice the silence from which they all rise and to which they all fall.. and rest alert, in presence.

And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all, evermore, Amen +

INTO A LIFE WITHOUT A SECURITY BLANKET

Sister Wendy Beckett, nun turned unlikely media star, was asked by a TV journalist how she would like to be remembered after her death. She paused, looked at him, & said: “I don’t want to be remembered.”

It reminded me of Jesus and the Sadducees, but before we go there, allow me to borrow a parable…

There was a man who invented the art of making fire. He took his tools and went to a tribe in the north, where it was cold, bitterly cold. He taught people to make fire.

The people were very interested. He showed them the uses to which they could put their fire – not just to cook and keep themselves warm, but they could even see one another and see things they had previously just taken for granted. They were so grateful to learn this fire making.

But before they could express their gratitude, the man had disappeared. He wasn't concerned with getting their recognition or gratitude; only with their well-being. He pressed on to another tribe, where he again began to show them the value and the light of his invention.

People were interested there, too, a bit too interested for the peace of mind of their uncomfortable priests and politicians, who began to notice how the man was drawing crowds. They were losing their influence, so they decided to do away with the man, and crucified him. But they were afraid that the people might turn against them, so they were very wise, and even very wily.

Do you know what they did? They had a portrait of the man made, and mounted it on the main altar of the temple. The instruments for making fire were placed in front of the portrait, and the people were taught to revere the portrait and to pay reverence to the instruments of fire, which they dutifully did.

A book was written all about the man and a liturgy all about the book, and songs all about the liturgy. Veneration and worship to the fire making man went on for centuries after centuries, so that his name was remembered, but his fire was allowed to die out.

The moral - IF worship isn't leading to fire, if adoration isn't leading to love, if liturgy isn't leading to life, if this sermon isn’t leading to clarity & awareness, why?

IF you agree that it is not from lack of religion that the world is suffering, but from lack of love, lack of awareness, lack of freedom, then Jesus speaks in you.

IF you believe Jesus told disciples to watch and pray, to be alert, to judge not, to be the light in the word, to die to the self, to love the neighbour as the self and not to resist violence... Jesus presumably thought this was not only possible and preferable, but even realistic. How?

Psychologists today call these experiences intrinsic religion, bringing with them life in all its fullest, and not that religion which psychologists call extrinsic religion, bringing with it a social convention of guilt and anxiety.

I mention all this because the Sadducee religion was also a social convention, a keeping it all in the family, a maintaining of Israel’s corporate life, a using of laws, like the law to ensure effective biological reproduction.

Wanting to protect this everlasting tribal life, the Sadducees were suspicious of resurrection, Jesus’ fuller life.

They revered only the first five books of the OT, so to make Jesus look stupid, they confronted him with a joke based on the law from Deuteronomy 25, a law by which an unmarried but living brother of a recently dead but childless man would be required to marry his widow.

So in Luke 20, 27-38, the Sadducees challenge Jesus, rolling their eyes, mocking, implying a celestial orgy or a family feud, by saying: “Look Jesus, if a woman marries seven brothers who all die one by one still leaving her childless, whose is she in resurrection life?”

Quite like Sister Wendy Beckett with the TV journalist, Jesus just undercuts their basic premise. Resurrection, he says, doesn’t even mean continuity. In eternal life, since angels are undying and genderless, there is no marriage anyway, and so the old names and forms do not even apply. It is an entirely different order of life.

Jesus also brings up Moses, who the Sadducees revere, perceiving the living God saying through a bush: "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” And, if you remember, Moses also seeks to know who God is, and perceives God say: “Tell the Israelites, I am sent you.”

Now, Jesus knows Abraham Isaac and Jacob have died, but he stresses that God is present, and therefore beyond time. He tells the Sadducees all live in God, the God of the living, the God who is I am. Jesus stresses the present as eternity elsewhere, as in John 8:58, when he says of himself: “truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.” Time is in us, but in God, its all happening at once.

SO, resurrection is not only a past event for Christ and a future event for us, but a present event for both. It is being present, letting go and letting God, I am, watch and pray within you. Just as Jesus’ resurrection life caused the Sadducees to rethink the meaning of their own life, it can cause us to be more conscious, right here and now, so that our own awareness of I am can actually evolve.

I am not telling you, I am exploring this process with you. What is it? Firstly, I am can evolve through our body, whose job, with its worldly drives, is to keep going as long as possible. Then, I am can also evolve through our ego, that reactive sense of individuality, whose job is to identify with some part of the world, to grab it, and not to let it go at any cost, to be, as eucharist liturgy says, the I am who is unworthy to receive the Lord.

And then again, for some of us, I am can evolve even further, into the life of the soul, a subtler, finer, more conscious awareness, until, at last, I am evolves to a point, as it says in 1st Corinthians, when God will be all in all, all that is, a pure ’isness.

Finally then, I am can be, since sickness, age and death are all unavoidable, an I am who really is.

Christ Jesus, as we can clearly see by looking at the gospel reading, doesn’t regard this as automatic. He draws a distinction between those who are worthy of resurrection and those who are not. What does this mean? I think he means that this evolution of I am, as a potential inner growth, a process of creation knowing itself in creator, is a matter of potential, not one of fact.

It was expressed by 17th century Lutheran Christian turned Catholic Priest Angelus Silesius, who said of personal life: “The beast will become man, man will become angelic, and the angel, once fully healed, will become God. Beast will become man, man will become angelic, and the angel, once fully healed, will become God.”

If we die to our past, eternal life enters. If we try to preserve it, perhaps we are the dead burying their own dead, as Jesus said. Even today, there is a Christian version of the Sadducees’ religion, an everlasting life, not eternal life, a mere continuity grab, a security blanket for the guilty, a fear management system, which, if we are not quite careful, locks us into even more inner conflict and perpetuates a pre-human image of God, a controlling law giver from a necessarily fearful, terrible stage of human development – the trauma of self consciousness.

But God wants us to grow up. To continue the parental metaphor, no good Father wants a child to depend on him, but to become a good Father too.

Remember, Jesus in Luke 12:34: where your treasure is, there your heart will be. What you put your highest value onto is for all practical purposes what you become.

We have a choice. Either to be like British Victorian Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, who said religion is a very good thing as long as it never interferes with your private life, OR to live the personal life so deeply that it expands into resurrection truths beyond itself.

To fear not, as angels always say, whenever they turn up in the Bible. Because Christians who do let religion interfere with their private lives have discovered love, not fear.

This is really important.

Many times, Jesus said the Kingdom of Heaven is close at hand, in fact it is within you, and you are the light of the world.

So, let’s draw some conclusions!

…If Jesus says you are the light of the world, and the author of the gospel of John says that in God, there is no darkness, then who are you?

In non-judgmental awareness, and by being alert, as Jesus says, by judging not, by repenting, which doesn’t mean grovelling but waking up, the beast can become man, man can become angelic, and the angel, once fully healed, can become I am, the way the truth and the life.

God is close, which is why Jesus called God Abba, an intimate Aramaic word more like Daddy than a comfortably removed Father, a Monarch, or even worse, a Judge. Judge not, Jesus said, God’s consciousness can grow in us, as if smaller than the smallest mustard seed but growing larger than the largest plant, teaching us our enemy is a projection of our own fear, and our neighbour is an extension of our self.

Which is why Jesus parables often begin with a: "who of you doesn't know this already?" We really do, but it isn’t very comfortable to realise it, it is cosier to go back to sleep.

Recall the words of retiring Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “I am not certain Christianity can flourish where people are comfortable. We need a modicum of suffering to realise what it means to belong to the Church.”

So we need to penetrate fear through constant awareness, in order to disarm and be resurrected. A BBC programme called the Big Silence has just ended, which has been showing five people as they are filmed entering monastic silence for the first time. One of them is scared of the silence, as we may be scared of God, but when he experiences the silence, it is a revelation to him that the fear of silence is actually in people, not in the silence.

To be resurrected we must die to self and evolve into God, even if the tradition is an obstacle. The theological construct that God would require the bloody sacrifice of Jesus so as to be able to forgive us our sins is as bizarre as it is repulsive. It is in the tradition, yes, but so is child sacrifice. Jesus lived for our sins.

Jesus ended our alienation and our separation. Jesus re-defined the world’s understanding of what it is to be human, and threatened vested interests. Jesus only died for our sins because he lived for them, and he still does live for them, in consciousness.

Despite the tradition, I don’t love Jesus Christ because I feel inadequate or guilty or fearful about the fire, or because I think you should. I am not even sure you should worship the fire-maker, and here is why.

Our truest nature, the open centre inside all our personalities, expresses everything else that is... the spiral galaxies above us when we walk on the beach, the spiral shells on that same beach which we walk on, the spiral fingerprints on our hands as we hold them, and the spiral DNA helix inside our suffering flesh. Philosopher Heraclitus and author of John’s gospel called this fire ‘Logos’, the wisdom of God. And we need to become, not merely worship, wisdom incarnate.

You are not a small wave in a great sea, you are a great sea knowing itself in a small wave.

You are not a human being having a spiritual experience, you are a spiritual being having human experiences.

In resurrection, if we get there, name and form does not matter so much. Maybe we only get there because it does not matter. Maybe we are only important because a loving intelligence called I am can know itself through us, we who are the latecomers in a very long process of physical evolution. Despite what happened to Gallileo, we now know that our planet is not at the centre of the world, it moves around one hot star among billions of stars, in a universe among possibly billions of universes.

We are not at the centre of things, and below the atomic level, they say, God seems to be more real than we are. So Jesus was a religious revolution because he came into a culture where holiness was up there and out there - separate - and he realised that a God who is over a chasm up a power pyramid, anywhere but here in fact, is no God at all.

TO CONCLUDE - Our 1st spiritual step is our belief, our interior conviction in a higher power, an other, not us, not another one of us, but an Other with a capital O. But belief is not enough.

If Jesus had had a parrot, he might have taught it to say: “Help, they’ve turned me into a parrot.” Jesus doesn’t want the parroting of belief, but a transformation into experience. It is in the gospels. “Not everyone who says to me: 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom.” (Matt 7:21).

SO THEN - our second spiritual step, is handing our life over to God, to be what we might not imagine we want to be, because prayer doesn’t change God, it dissolves the judge who is in us. We don’t merely believe in this Other with a capital O, we try to let God become us.

In the final step, the resurrection, which Sadducees didn’t believe in, there is no other… there is One.






In the name of Father Son and Holy Spirit, Amen +

Not just a private hobby for nutters

I’ve heard some right nonsense preached from pulpits, and who am I to break with tradition? What better chance to uphold nonsense than a gospel passage in which Jesus tells us we must hate our fathers and mothers, our wives and children, our brothers and sisters, our life itself, and give up all our possessions. I could avoid it.

I could instead talk about how Stephen Hawking has been implying that physics can explain why we are all here, or tell you about latest protest group planning to surprise the Pope when he visits.

It would be a lot of fun if I did that, but it wouldn’t be nearly as controversial as just sticking to what Jesus is saying in Luke 14:25-33. If we wish to learn, he says, hate father and mother, wife and child, brother and sister, our life, and give up all our possessions.

The notion of an established church may say that religion is a very public matter and not a private hobby for nutters, and this is a very, very good thing. But it should never, ever fool us into thinking that the gospel is just sanctified common sense. Jesus’ advice to hate your family and your life and your possessions really is anything but respectable, established, common sense, and it is as well that we know it isn’t.

If you’ve ever met a group of people on holiday for the first time, or overheard strangers meeting one another, you’ll know that we humans tend to talk about where we come from, what we do for a living, who our relatives are, what we own and know, and so on. It can be sometimes quite boring in the face of the mystery of life.

On holiday recently I closed my eyes rather than go through it with one person. And it was the Irish novelist George Bernard Shaw who was once at a polite English society dinner party when he was asked by a lady if he was enjoying himself. “It’s about the only thing I am enjoying here,” he replied.

Nevertheless, where we come from and who our relatives are and so on still has purpose. It establishes a social existence, a set of conventions so people feel they know one another.

Without this socially constructed sense of existence, there might be no you, and that just wouldn’t make sense would it?

For example, in a job interview I was once asked: “So, who are you then?” But it’s not a static fact. I could spent a whole lifetime finding out, and it is something like this is which is going on when Jesus tells us that if we wish to learn, we must hate father and mother, wife and child, brother and sister, life and possessions.

Jesus knows that in his culture, filial relations are primary, and so people seem to have no existence at all without their ties to blood relatives, and especially to parents. He knows that without a family, frankly, who are you? But then he also knows that these roles are all so very temporary and contingent, a very mixed blessing, which can cause as much pain as they can pleasure.

So he is confronting what he knows will fade into insignificance compared with what he considers to be the only real relationship and claim on our human loyalty. What he is asking is this: Are you really no more than the product of social mirrors, or are you a child of God?

Jesus’ requirement for you to hate your family may of course be Semitic exaggeration, and the heightened language should not be pressed too literally. We know that Jesus cared for his mother at the foot of the cross. But we also know that his family thought he was going out of his mind. So the point is still the same.

Blood ties and personal property cannot and will not have the greatest claim on us. They will both disappear, and it is best to accept this now rather than later, or life can be hell. Building a watch-tower to protect your property or defend your city is pointless if they are both transient resources. As Jesus says in Mark 8:36, what will anyone gain by winning the world but losing their true self?

They say hold onto what you can in this life. Consciousness is an accidental by product of the brain, and beyond death there is oblivion and no awareness.

And maybe this is common sense, because it is a convention. But it is like saying that if you smash a television so that the images die, then the radio waves outside the house will also be destroyed.

If you wish to learn, Jesus says, relegate your claims on what has ultimate meaning for you. Hate your father and mother, your wife and child, your brother and sister, your life, and your possessions, which is to say, discipleship turns the world’s values upside down.

It takes a commitment. You have to chose between common sense and discipleship. As someone once said, it really is no measure of health at all to be very well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

And just think, said Fr Anthony De Mello, about someone who is afraid to let go of a nightmare, because that is the only world he knows. This is actually a picture of you, if you are not ready to see father, mother, and yes, your own life and possessions for what they are.

If you wish to attain lasting happiness, stop clinging to them, and whether you keep them or not, they lose their power to hurt you.

Spend some time seeing everything you cling to for what it really is. You cling and crave to them because they cause you some good feeling, some excitement and pleasure, but they also cause you worry, insecurity, tension, anxiety, and fear.

Of course, you cannot renounce the world - it is here. But you can be happy without clinging to it. Your future and the world’s future depends on your response to the gospel, the good news that you are a child of God, not a child of the state, a child of biological ties, a child of social or commercial pressures, or social existence.

The Church may be respectable, but the gospel is anything but respectable common sense. After all, in common sense, they say, love is blind. But actually it is attachment which is blind. Love is very clear sighted, and if we wish to be disciples of Jesus, making the most of our gifts means risking them, not playing them safe.

Then we can experience that mysterious state which cannot be uttered or named, and begin to understand that if we loosen our grasp inwardly, we are repaid a hundred times over, by gaining eternal life. +

Transforming Suffering

Thich Nhat Hahn Room | Shift In Action

An interview with Basil Pennington, by Mary Nurrie Stearns

Basil Pennington is a Cisterian monk whose worldwide ministry focuses on bringing contemplative practices into the lives of spiritual seekers. He is a spiritual retreat leader, lecturer and author. He is most known for his work in the Centering Prayer movement, which is how I was introduced to his ministry. He resides at St. Joseph’s Monastery in Spencer, Massachusetts.

Upon the recommendation of a friend, I read his recent book, Lectio Divina, a description of the meditative practice of praying with the Christian scriptures. I came to understand more deeply how sacred texts can bring us to union with the divine and how contemplating inspired words can ease suffering. Realizing that he had a depth of understanding on suffering, its transformation, and the use of meditative practices in easing suffering, I arranged to interview him by telephone. His spiritual presence and depth of understanding were apparent during the interview and are present in the words that follow.

Personal Transformation: Let’s begin with the question: What is suffering?

Basil Pennington: First of all, it is important to distinguish between pain and suffering. As the Buddhists make very clear, suffering comes from wanting something and then not having it or feeling that you can’t have it. Pain causes suffering because we think we should not have it. We think we should be free from pain, that we should be filled with pleasure. Suffering is when something is going contrary to what we want. That is why some Buddhist schools say the way to get rid of suffering is to get rid of desire. We Christians believe that we are made for God. St. Augustine says, "Our hearts will not rest until they rest in you, O Lord." There is always going to be desire, but happiness can be found in knowing either we have what we want or we are on the way to getting it. We can want to participate in a certain amount of suffering and pain, and find a deep joy, because we have what we want. For example, when a little child suffers terribly, the mother and father want to be with that child. Even though it will cause them to suffer, they want to be with their child in that suffering

PT: If suffering comes from desire, and there is a difference between pain and suffering, do young children suffer or do they have pain?

Pennington: From a very early age, not to want to have pain is there. Pain is alien to us, so there is probably some suffering, but not the same kind of suffering we have later in life. There is suffering because we instinctively do not want pain. Only somebody more mature can see a value in pain or can transcend pain so that it does not cause them suffering.

Children suffer, but not as much as somebody older who has a reflective consciousness and suffers not only the immediate desire to be away from that pain but also suffers from the frustration of their desires.

PT: Let’s go back to the example of the parents wanting to be with the child when the child suffers. The parents want to suffer with their beloved.

Pennington: When you willingly enter into suffering, a lot of the suffering is relieved, even though suffering is very much there, because not wanting the suffering increases the suffering. When Christians speak of suffering we think of the crucified Lord and the tremendous sign of His Love for us. He said, "Greater love does no one have than He lay down his life for his friend." Jesus laid down his life in this graphic and dramatic way as a sign of His love, His concern for us. At one level, He suffered a great deal. Part of him did not want to go through that pain and suffering, and there was suffering because he took on all of our sins and stood before the Father in that sinful state. He suffered, but in the end He said, "Not my will but Thy will be done." Love conquered. The Beloved, His Father, wanted Him to go through this as a sign of love for us, and so He went through it. His love and concern kept overcoming his suffering. He was concerned about his executioners and forgave them, He was concerned about those being executed with him and promised them eternal life, He was concerned about His mother and saw that she was cared for. Even while He, at times, on the cross, prayed, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?," He went on to triumph. In the end He gave a magnificent cry and had such a victory over suffering and death that the centurion said, "This must be the Son of God." Suffering can be very much there, but love constantly overcomes it when one embraces that suffering because she wants the fruit that that suffering can bring about.

PT: Love overcomes the suffering—whose love and the love of what?

Pennington: The persons suffering are less conscious of suffering because their concern is their love; they either want to suffer or are so concerned about something else that they don’t notice their suffering. The Buddhist idea is to get rid of all desire so you don’t notice the suffering. But love can be so great, going back to the parents who want to be with their child in the suffering, their love is so much with the child, that it would be more suffering for them not to be with the child in the suffering. The question is basically, "What do we want?" If we want to be free from all pain, if we want to be free from anything, and it is there, it begins to cause suffering.

PT: Buddhist precepts say it is our nature to suffer.

Pennington: Christians say suffering is an effect of sin. Because we are all sinners we all have suffering in our lives. Once we are able to completely overcome sin, we will no longer have suffering, or the effects of sin, which is in all our lives, because death itself is an effect of sin.

PT: How is death an effect of sin?

Pennington: The understanding of the Judeo Christian tradition is that God first created humans to live eternally, and because they rebelled against God in some way, part of the punishment was that in time they would die.

PT: For the sake of definition, what is sin?

Pennington: We understand sin as something that is contrary to the will of God, whether His will is expressed in explicit commandments, in the Revelation, or in the way God created things and meant them to function, what we call the Natural Law.

PT: Is there anyone who does not suffer?

Pennington: No, everyone has some suffering. Our Lord took on suffering voluntarily. The rest of us sinners suffer for our sins. We aim toward arriving at a state of complete union and communion with God. The result of that would be we would no longer suffer. In deep meditation we are completely free of suffering but we can’t abide in that beautiful state all the time.

PT: What is the best medicine for our suffering?

Pennington: In a way, suffering is a sickness and the best medicine for it is love, although love itself can cause suffering.

PT: Does love transform suffering, is suffering sloughed off?

Pennington: Suffering is caused by desire, so when we change our desires, what was originally suffering can become a sort of joy. When someone you love greatly suffers and you enter into their suffering, their suffering remains, but there is a deep joy in sharing suffering, and that solidarity may ease their suffering. In Christian thinking, we believe that Christ’s suffering is redemptive and, to the extent in which we can participate in Christ’s suffering, our suffering can become redemptive. In our love for our brothers and sisters we are happy to enter into redemptive suffering.

PT: What are the most prevalent ways that suffering is manifested in our individual lives?

Pennington: Many people equate pain with suffering. Because they are so desirous of being free from all pain, pain immediately causes suffering. In meditation you learn to move to another state of consciousness and you leave pain behind, so you gain a growing freedom from pain. In lovingly going out to others, you forget your own pains and sorrows because you are concerned with theirs. For instance, when you visit a retirement home, you find some people in absolute misery. They are taken up with the aches, pains, and limitations that age has brought upon them. They are miserable and they make everyone who comes near them miserable; nobody wants to be near them. Other people who have as much or more aches and pain are outgoing and loving. They are a joy and people like to be with them. Throughout their lives, they gradually schooled themselves, from meditation perhaps and through outgoing love, to leave their pain and suffering behind. For most people, suffering is experienced through pain or frustrations in love—being lonely, not having the persons they love with them, or not having anybody who is in communion love with them.

PT: I appreciate how you link suffering to desire, especially the desire to be free from pain. I thought suffering came more from a sense of separation from a spiritual self or from God.

Pennington: Separation from God is the essential suffering and we call it hell. Many people don’t know that much of the emptiness or longing desire that they suffer from is because they are not in touch with God or whatever name they give Him. Separation is a very real form of suffering in this life. Many, many people suffer because there is nobody in their life. They are not in touch with God, with the inner spirit. They are not in touch with their true selves, and they are not really in touch with anybody else.

PT: When we suffer, whether that suffering comes in the form of physical pain, loss of meaning, or alienation, what can we do?

Pennington: Of ourselves, in a certain sense, we can do nothing. The Lord says, "Without me you can do nothing." But, by the grace of God, and coming directly from Him, or through others who reach out to us, we can begin to open up to reality. The reality is that we are infinitely and tenderly held by the divine. We cease to exist if God does not bring us forth every moment in His creative love. We are united with everybody else in our human nature and in our sharing of a divine nature, so we are never really alone, we have all this union and communion. Getting in touch with that reality is the greatest healing. We can adopt meditative practices which enable us to begin that journey of finding our true inner selves or transcending our separate selves and leave behind some of the pain and suffering. Relief occurs only during the time of meditation until, through meditation and the grace of God, we come to experience the reality beyond our individual selves that then flows over into our lives.

PT: What practices transform suffering?

Pennington: Meditation practices are found in all the major traditions. In our Christian tradition are many forms of meditation. One that is growing in popularity, which goes back to ancient times, is today called "Centering Prayer" and originally called "Prayer in the Heart." It is a simple form of meditation where we turn to God, who is within, and rest with Him. He says, "Come to me you who are heavily burdened, I will refresh you." In this practice we leave everything else and rest with Him within, silently uttering one word of love, such as God, peace, Shalom, to quietly stay with Him. That’s a simple and ancient Christian form of meditation which is effective and fairly easy to practice.

The meditation practice of Lectio Divina is somewhat different. It is opening to the experience of God. One of the reasons we leave the words in Latin is because simply translated as "Divine Reading" conveys a false idea. I used to annoy my translators when lecturing in different languages around the world by quoting that old Latin phrase, "Traducta estraditor es," meaning that every translator is a traitor. If you translate a word, you leave so much behind and you pick up other meanings.

Lectio does not mean reading in the sense of printed symbols immediately conveying ideas to the intellect. Lectio is hearing a word—whether you see it on the page, pronounce it yourself, hear somebody else speak it, or recall it from your memory—hearing that word in the here and now being spoken by the one speaking it. In Lectio Divina, God himself is speaking. In the practice of Lectio Divina we read sacred texts which we believe have been inspired by God as a means of communicating with us. Lectio Divina is coming into communication with God and letting Him speak to us now, and reveal Himself to us now, through His inspired word. It is a type of transcendental meditation, at the same time it uses the rational mind to work with the words. In a meditation like Centering Prayer, you leave the rational mind and emotions behind, open yourself to rest in the Divine. St. Thomas Aquinas says, "Where the mind leaves off, the heart goes beyond."

PT: Lectio Divina is the practice of praying the scriptures…

Pennington: I am not comfortable with that expression, because praying is a word that has different meanings to people, but it could be a valid way of saying it if praying is understood the right way.

PT: How do we need to understand prayer?

Pennington: It is being with God in His inspired word, meeting God in His inspired word.

PT: I understand Lectio Divina as allowing the Word to take life in us, to move in us, so that it is a living experience of God in our hearts, not just an intellectual exercise.

Pennington: It is letting God be present to us in His spoken word. You could read my books and know a lot about me and my thoughts but you wouldn’t really know me. But if we have lunch together and visit for a while, you still hear my words but now it is a real experience of me and afterward, you know me.

PT: I am quoting from your book, "The simple little practice of each day meeting the Lord in His word and receiving from Him a word of life can indeed transform our lives." How does this practice transform our lives?

Pennington: The actual moment, the time of reception, is transformative in that God is present to us, speaking to us, reforming our minds and our hearts, and bringing us into His understanding. In order to remain as much as possible at that level, and there is only so much we can do, we take some particular word that He has given us at that Lectio session and we carry it with us. We come back to it as much as we can through the day. That word makes Him present with us but also invites us into His way of seeing things.

Maybe a concrete example would be helpful. Sometimes God seems very present, sometimes Lectio really speaks the word to you and you come alive with it. Other days, you listen and listen and it is just words you’ve heard before, and at the end of Lectio you have to choose a word on your own. One morning I was doing my Lectio and the Lord did not seem to turn up, so I chose the words, "I am the way." I let that word be with me when I was not tending to something else. A few hours later I was walking down the road from the monastery to the guest house, saying, "I am the way," and suddenly I realized, I am just not walking down a road, I am walking "in the way," the way to eternal life. Ever since then, when I walk down a street or a corridor, this comes back to me. I am, the whole of my life, is in the way. That word, at that moment, transformed my consciousness about walking through life. When I got to the guest house, a young fellow was waiting for me. The poor guy had about every problem in the book. I sat there listening to him, and I asked, "Lord, what am I gonna say to this fellow?" The Lord poked me in the ribs and I remembered. I told him about the Lord saying, "I am the way." As I shared that word with this fellow you could almost see the burdens falling off his shoulders. He now had a way to go. The word was a living word for him and it really changed his life. I remember, toward the end of that day, climbing the steps to the church. I was exhausted, and as I climbed up the steps, I said, "Lord, how I am going to get through Vespers? I will sing every note flat." Again, the Lord poked me, and I said, "Oh yes, You are the Way." I went up and sang Vespers and had a great time.

PT: If we look at Lectio Divina as a practice to transform suffering, the word for the day is something to hold onto, a word that guides us when we feel overwhelmed or lost.

Pennington: I am doing an anthology of Aelred and I read a passage this morning where Aelred said, "how sad it is for those who don’t know that they can go into the field of scriptures when they seek consolation." He uses the image of Isaiah who, after his mother died, went out to the field in sorrow and in the distance saw his beautiful bride coming. He said, "They can go out into the field of scriptures and lift up their eyes and the Lord will come to them, the beautiful bride will comfort them." In our time of suffering and sorrow we can find consolation and divine love in the scriptures, if we know to go there.

PT: This leads to my next question. I am again quoting your book. You say, "We need to separate ourselves from the enslavement of this world’s values. We have to be in the world, we cannot be of the world." How can we be in the world, but not of the world?

Pennington: It is taking the world in two different senses. We live in this world, this creation, but are not of this world, in the sense that we don’t accept the materialistic outlook and values. We are invited to see the world the way God sees it, as a wonderful evolving process which has been going on for millions of years. Evolution has reached a high level in us humans who can now, through Grace, be transformed to participate in the divine life. We are destined to pass beyond or transcend the materialistic world to enter into the divine level of being in life and love. The revelation of God through the scriptures reminds us, calls us to, and assures us of the help and the means we need to go beyond this material creation and enter fully into the divine reality.

PT: Talk about the four-stage process of lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio in Lectio Divina.

Pennington: In practice, sometimes we separate these phases, although more naturally this process takes place at the same time and in varying degrees, depending on what’s happening in the relationship at the moment. Lectio is primarily opening ourselves to let God speak to us, to be present to us in, through His inspired word. You can do Lectio with Nature too. God speaks to us through everything in Creation—the flowers, the wind, the beautiful child. You can do Lectio in a broad sense through everything, but His inspired word is the vehicle of His communication with us. He says: "I no longer call you servants but friends because I make known to you everything known to me." Lectio is meeting the Lord and letting Him speak to us and invite us into deeper relationship with Him, to realize our call and our destiny.

Meditatio, in the earlier Church tradition, is when we take and carry that word as a way of having the Lord as a presence, walking with us throughout the rest of the day, beginning in the session itself. This particular word speaks to us and we let it drill down into our hearts, into the powerful experience of the presence of God and the transforming call.

Oratio is translated as prayer. Here prayer means the complete response of giving oneself to God, trusting God, who has spoken to us through the Lectio. That word has become alive in Meditatio and our response is prayer, a trusting response to His word.

Contemplatio is when we rest together and nothing more needs to be said or even be thought of. It is being together with God. I learned contemplation when I was four years old, sitting with my grandparents on the porch. They sat there for hours saying nothing. I felt wonderful and I loved to sit with them. I realized later that they were with each other in love and that love embraced their little grandchild. I experienced the Contemplatio of love in that presence of my grandparents. So it’s coming just to sit with the Lord in that embrace of refreshing love. You can’t love what you don’t know, and Lectio is where you get to know that loving.

PT: We are talking about intimacy with God. What is your understanding of God?

Pennington: My understanding flows out of the Catholic expression of the Christian faith, of knowing that Jesus is God incarnate. God became man so that He can bring us into the fullness of the divine life. Jesus is the Son of the Father, and they have in them immense love, they embrace each other in Holy Spirit. I experience God as an immensely loving Father. I am very compassionate and sympathetic with women and others who have a problem with that name of Father, but it has been there for me for over sixty years. Also, I was blessed with a very special father, so it makes it easier for me to use Father. I look to Jesus in the gospel to help me understand this tremendously loving Father. As a monk of the Cisterian tradition, I have been fed by St. Bernard of Clairveau, who spent the last eighteen years of his life commenting on the Song of Songs, the beautiful love song in the Hebrew Bible. Their God is very much the lover, and I have grown to enter into that experience with God as an immense mother, an all-embracing love and creative energy. To enter totally and be completely embraced by divine love has all the richness of the very best experience and understanding we can have of personal love, and yet is so much more. Trying to talk about my concept of God is complex and difficult because it is so rich, and yet in experience it is absolutely simple, it is simply a communion in a totally satisfying love.

PT: I am quoting you, "Herein is the true purpose of our practice, to free ourselves from the empirious domination of our own thoughts, passions and desires, to free the spirit for the things of the Spirit." What are the things of the Spirit? I ask this because I see a relationship to things of the Spirit and the reduction of suffering.

Pennington: The first and most fundamental one is reality. The virtue of humility means acceptance of reality. If we are not in reality, then we can’t possibly be in the things of the spirit. The reality is that God is good, all loving and that his creation is good. What immediately follows upon the perception of reality is beauty and goodness, and what follows that is love. We love this immense beauty and we love most of all the author of this goodness and beauty, God himself. These are things of the spirit. It is astounding when we start to reflect that God, the source of all goodness, all truth, all beauty, all life, all love, did, in His enormous love, enter into our struggling evolving human reality and accept our suffering. Suffering is a thing of the spirit, too, for that reason. It has been made a vehicle of love and everything can become something of the spirit when it is informed by love.

PT: We have talked about suffering, particularly as we experience and relate to it in our personal lives. Let’s shift to social issues. First, I would like you to talk about suffering in a social context. Then I would like your comments on the war in Kosovo and Yugoslavia. Can we have any impact on suffering in Kosovo and Yugoslavia?

Pennington: We all suffer because of our parents. One element of maturing is realizing that our parents were poor stupid sinners like we are. Even if they did their best, they failed in ways. However, we can never thank them enough because they have given us, with God, the gift of life and being. Along with that comes struggling. If that happens in the individual, it also happens in the social level. The failures of many, or the limitations of many, build up and become our inheritance. Kosovo is an example of that. The suffering in the Balkans, except for the short time that Tito held it in an iron grip, goes back centuries to the time when Islam invaded and conquered parts of the area, leaving this heritage of strife. The willingness to live together and share was never engendered, which is what we have to learn to do everywhere in the world today. They are not the only ones who did that. We did it to the Native Americans, the Scotch Presbyterians did it to the Irish Catholics in North Ireland, and the Jews have done it to the Palestinians in the Holy Land. We can find instances of it all over history.

When you take away people’s land, when there is not a willingness to live and work together in some way, inevitably there begins to be a minority group and that minority suffers, like the Native Americans in the United States. At some point that minority revolts or seeks violent means, after decades of non-violent means not getting them anywhere. Sometimes just a few turn to violence, but it involves all the others. Then there is the problem of what the oppressive majority does in the face of that violence. They usually react with even more violence. These days the human community steps in to try to relieve that situation, often making it worse before it makes it better.

It is out of the complex heritage of our poor sinful struggling human family that these situations arise. Sometimes media makes us intensely aware of things going on and sometimes it doesn’t. There is less awareness of what is going on in Afghanistan and East Africa. When we hear about violent oppression we are confronted as fellow humans. Those of us who are Christians should be conscious of how Christ suffered and died for every human person. Therefore, these people are precious to Christ and they are precious to us.

PT: Then comes the question, what can I do about it?

Pennington: We believe in the power of prayer. God and Christ have told us that our prayer is effective. "Ask and you shall receive." God, who constantly brings this creation forward in his creative love, is affected by what we ask and seek of Him. Prayer is important because of the deep intersolidarity of the human family and the whole cosmos. Creating deeper peace in ourselves creates a level of peace for the whole human family. By giving up violence in our own attitudes, feelings and spirit, and seeking peace, we can become an instrument of peace. We are just one among billions and that may seem little, but sometimes we have to be content with doing the very little that we can. There is always political action. We have to discern, in each case, the appropriate political action we need to take. Certainly we should try to move our own government toward a less violent attitude. It is extremely difficult, when the situation is occurring, to say what we can immediately do, apart from prayer to try to bring peace. We can do whatever is possible to provide relief for the people suffering. This kind of suffering brings us into strong and painful contact with our limitations.

PT: Is there anything that you want to add about suffering?

Pennington: It is extremely important to have hope. The evolution of human consciousness has gone on for hundreds of thousands of years, and is a powerful movement. Divine Creative Energies, which are pure love, are at the base of this movement. Humanity, in its evolutionary course, has gone through terrible periods, yet has moved on and on. We are at a fairly high level of human consciousness in the rational period we live in. More and more people realize that we have to move to a more integrated level. One of the enormous challenges lying ahead of us is the full equality of men and women and the full integration of the masculine and feminine dimensions of our being. This will make an enormous difference in the way the human family lives and functions. Hopefully, we will be much more peaceful. That integration is a coming together as a human family, a human community. We are most empowered and find the greatest possible security and the fullest happiness in community when we embrace each other as brothers and sisters, as children of the Father.

Each of us needs to live the hope, realizing that we are in this wonderful evolving course. Even if there is suffering and struggle in the course of it, the grain of wheat that falls on the ground comes forth with a hundred grains; it is in process.

20 20 Vision

Here is a letter from an Irish mother. If you are Irish, don’t be offended. I have an Irish mother.

Dear Son, it begins, just a few lines to let you know I'm still alive, but I'll write slowly because I know you can't read fast.

You wouldn’t know the house now… we've moved.

Your Father has a new job with 700 men under him… he cuts grass at the cemetery.

The new house has a washing machine, which I broke by putting in 12 shirts and pulling the chain.

Congratulations are due, your sister Colleen has had a baby. I haven't found out if it's a boy or girl yet, so I am not sure if you are an uncle or an aunt.

And I’m so sorry to tell you son, but Uncle Mick drowned last week in a vat of Whisky at the distillery in Dublin. His mates tried to save him, but he fought them all off very bravely.

We couldn’t get hold of you for the cremation, but it took us four days to put the fire out.

I was quite ill, so I’ve been to see the doctor. He put a glass tube in my mouth and told me not to talk for five minutes. Your Father is now trying to buy it from him.

It only rained twice this week, firstly for four days, and then for three.

Love as always, Mother.
P.S. I was going to send you some money, but I'd already sealed the envelope.

It’s not an Irish mother in Matthew 20 20, its a Jewish one, the mother of the sons of Zebedee, and she is ambitious for them.

This particular mother makes a dramatic appeal to power, and she’s not the first to do so in the Bible. But it is the wrong power. Bathsheba appeared before King David on behalf of wise Solomon, a faithful Canaanite begged Jesus to heal her sick daughter, but this time, the ambitious Mother of James and John, we are told, wanted them to have special kingdom status, one at either side of Jesus.

If you think about it though, by the time this gospel was written, Jesus had already been crucified. One robber on his right, and another robber on his left.

So people would have had the memory of his crucifixion in mind. It had already destroyed their teacher, their holy man, their leader, and their hope. Jesus’ mother had watched him nailed up like a criminal, losing his bodily functions, crows threatening to peck at him. Military and religious authority had struck fear into his follower’s hearts.

And once his followers had scattered, how did Christianity even begin?

I want to suggest we have first marginalised, and then lost touch with that paradigm-shattering event which put hope and joy back into his followers hearts, despite more torture threats.

Fast-forward to the 19th century, as it might help to consider a paradigm-shattering event a bit closer to our own time-frame, first, and then go back to the resurrection.

When Charles Darwin presented his views on evolution by natural selection, this was a paradigm shattering event. So challenging was it for religious people, the Bishop of Oxford Sam Wilberforce tried to ridicule the idea in public debate, in front of 700 people and reporters.

Like many people, the Bishop just couldn’t accept he was related to monkeys. He was out of his depth.

He ended by inferring that evolutionist Thomas Huxley had an ape for a parent. He resorted to mocking his opponent Huxley by asking him whether he was descended from an ape on his grandfather’s side or on his grandmother’s side. Whereupon Huxley reportedly whispered to his neighbour: “The Lord has delivered him into my hands.”

People actually fainted as Huxley rose up to reply that he would much rather be descended from an ape than from a Bishop.

But this was 150 years ago, and already it is hard for us to imagine just how world changing it was for them. We just take it for granted now. How then could we not take for granted a 2,000 year old event?

The first Jesus movement went to their executions rather than renounce the resurrection. They refused to deny their experience and salute Roman rulers. The hard fact is, a fighter couldn’t even be baptised.

By worldly terms, Christians were powerless. They weren’t just pacifist, but regularly liable to public torture. When Constantine changed all that by adopting the faith for his empire, worldly power became more acceptable. And it was at this point that ascetic Christians like Anthony moved into the desert instead.

Last week I interviewed the Director of Mission and Public Affairs for the Church of England, Malcolm Brown, who himself said Christianity had long over identified with worldly power. Once this happens, I suggest, it is much harder to find and accept that a present spiritual reality could be the cause of Jesus’ dead physical body dematerialising and then re-materialising. The resurrection is a wholly different power.

Because if the primary stuff of life is economic or physical power, or even natural power, we are lost. If you’ve ever seen a dead body, you’ll know how natural processes still go on there, but the real stuff of life is profoundly and startlingly absent.

So I want to try to uncover a different power, by offering us a new exegesis of the resurrection. Twenty years ago, a Christian who studied anthropology and psychology was looking for reports of resurrection experiences outside the Christian tradition.

When he found them, in Bunpo, Buddhist, Daoist and Tamil cultures in China Tibet and India, he despatched a Roman Catholic Canon and Priest, Fr Francis Tiso, to investigate. Ten years ago, three people were interviewed on tape claiming to be eye witnesses to their own monastic masters dying and then dematerialising. These witnesses included Westerners, who said the atoms in the master’s bodies had dissolved after their death, and their bodies had disappeared, and had later re-appeared in the form of light energy. They didn’t call it the resurrection body, but the light body, or the rainbow body.

Now, I know this idea may detract from the uniqueness of Jesus the only Son of God, and if so, remember how in the Bible Enoch and Elijah are also recorded mysteriously leaving the world with their bodies. And no-one found Moses body, but apocryphal literature has him ascending to heaven. Not to mention Mary in the Roman Catholic tradition.

If you prefer scientific over Biblical and religious language, we already know matter can and does behave like energy, and light is a source of energy.

So, if these anthropological resurrection reports are true, could physical matter changing into light and giving off heat also explain some of our archaeological evidence?

It might, for example, explain why a burial cloth, the shroud of Turin, contains a 3D shaped image of a crucified man believed to be Jesus, not etched in paint or pigment like a middle age forgery on linen, but in blood and scorch marks, which create a photographic negative, as if a bleeding body quickly gave off tremendous energy in the tomb.

The one thing all four gospels agree about the resurrection is that a tomb was empty.

Maybe the idea that light is the basis and the source of reality sounds mad, but if so, I suggest that Darwin’s idea that apes are the basis of men also sounded mad. And if true, the light body would be a far more paradigm shattering truth than evolution was.

If it sounds unworldly, remember it is not the kind of power the gospel says was sought by the Mother of James and John. It is the kind of power sought by St Anthony and 4th century ascetic Christians in the Egyptian desert after an empire legalised the faith.

Isaiah once said: “Your dead will come back to life, your corpses will rise again. Wake up and sing, dwellers in the dust.”

Isaiah didn’t call it resurrection, but if the physical is secondary to light, then all our power relations based on force status and wealth are inevitably subverted. And then it makes perfect sense that the scattered disciples who first got the Jesus movement off the ground after his resurrection are joyous, despite their many persecutions.

I leave us words from chapters 1 and 4 the letter of James, the brother of Jesus.

“The rich man will disappear like a wild flower once the sun is up … make no mistake, my dear friends. Every perfect gift comes from above, from the Father who created the lights of heaven. With him, there is no variation, no passing play of shadows. A pure and faultless religion in the sight of God the Father is to keep oneself untarnished by the world ... What is your life after all? You are no more than a mist, seen for a little while and then disappearing.”

In the name of God, Father Son and Holy Spirit, Amen. +

Star stuff not shop stuff

A chic, expensive London restaurant is so well attended it is booked up a year in advance. A man is refused a seat and shouts at the headwaiter: “Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am!”

So the headwaiter spots a psychiatrist on his way out and says: "Will you please tell this gentleman who he is?"

In John 6 63 Jesus says the spirit gives life, but the flesh is useless.

The spirit prompts the question: “Who am I?’

Stars exploded to create our flesh. Consider how every atom in your body came from the nuclear furnace of an exploding star. The atoms in your left hand may be from a different star than the atoms in your right hand, or from the same star as those in your neighbour’s hand.

John’s gospel suggests we are not meant to separate our spirit from the Father’s - the Reality giving us all our life. “That they may be one as we are one,” prays Jesus.

But we promote consumer stuff over creation stuff.

In North America alone, only one per cent of the total material consumption from shops is still in use six months after it has been bought.

While creation stuff dies and rises, consumer stuff is designed to be quickly obsolete. Adverts say we’re not good enough without more of it. We destroy the planet to keep the consumption going.

As someone said: “We borrow what we can’t pay back to buy stuff we don’t need to impress people we don’t like.”

Until the system crashes, again.

After WWII the US retail analyst Victor Leboux declared that consumption must be made a way of life.

His words were: “We must convert the buying and use of goods into rituals that we pursue. We must find our spiritual and ego satisfaction in consumption.”

And the Chair of President Eisenhower’s council of advisors on the US economy declared that its ultimate purpose was to produce more consumer goods.

Not health or wisdom or community, but more products.

A Basque proverb advises us otherwise: “Mountains don’t need mountains, but humans need humans”.

So, back to creation stuff. Each second, not even as long as it takes to breathe in once, as many blood cells will die and be born in your body as London has inhabitants.

You don’t know how it works, but it works without you controlling or consuming it. You can’t give instructions to the 35 million digestive glands in your stomach to digest even one strawberry in an expensive restaurant.

You are fearfully and wonderfully made, as Psalm 139 says.

The maps in shopping centres add: “You are here”.

But you are also embodied, as Jesus was, and in your better moments, you belong to an all-embracing presence. Failure to live these blissful moments alienates you from God.

A seven-year-old recently asked me who made me. “Who made you?” he said. “God” I replied. “Who made God?” he responded. “No-one” I said. “Then how did God make you?” he said.

Laboriously is the answer.

John 16 12 says: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”

We are alienated from the divine in and beyond us. But when the heart breaks, truth beyond us can break in.

“Sin” a word connected with “asunder,” it is a rift. It is alienation, a feeling that our bond of belonging in God is gone, so we buy, borrow control or consume happiness.

Jesus is gone, so without God the Holy Spirit, death is a vastness too frightening for project self. But we either actively receive death or we are killed by it. We can’t make it or buy it. But we can let go of smallness.

Tumble in the expansive truth that we belong in infinite greatness and love does not come from a limited source.

If we put a fingernail against the night sky, there are a million galaxies just in the little space it obscures.

And in John 16 15 Jesus says: “The spirit will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

The Happiest Fish

‘You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He has been raised; go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.’

That’s all very well for them, but how will we see him?

This is not the kind of seeing which sees words in the Bible.

It is the seeing of what they point to, a shared aliveness behind patterns in the cosmos. Seeing expressed in spiral galaxies above us when we walk on the beach, spiral shells on that same beach which we walk on, spiral fingerprints on our hands holding them, and spiral dna helix inside the flesh.

This is the kind of seeing the Eastern Church calls Gnosis.

It is self-knowledge, and there’s a wonderful Chinese story about it.

When Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu were crossing Hao River by the dam, Chuang said: “See how free the fishes leap and dart. That is their happiness.”

As they walked Hui replied: “Since you are not a fish, how do you KNOW what makes fishes happy?”

Chuang said: “Since you are not I, how can you possibly KNOW that I do not know what makes fishes happy.”

Hui argued: “But if I, not being you, cannot know what you know, it follows that you, not being a fish, cannot know what THEY know.”

Chaung said: “OK, then let us get back to your original question. You asked me, HOW I know what makes fishes happy. From the terms of your question you know already THAT I know what makes fishes happy.”

“I know the joy of fishes in the river THROUGH MY OWN JOY, as I go walking along the same river.”

I know the joy of fishes in the river through my own joy.

This unity is the seeing of a shared aliveness, and is related to Christ’s risen life.

The Gospel of John starts: ‘In the beginning was the word,’ and it goes on, ‘the word became flesh and dwelt among us.’

John does not mean a literal word, he means what the word ‘word’ is pointing to.

The Greek for this word was Logos.

‘In the beginning was the Logos,’ he wrote, and he went on, ‘the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.’

Logos is translated word in English, but it points to a shared aliveness.

Logos is the expression of unity behind nature’s patterns.

Coined by Greek philosopher Heraclitus six centuries before Jesus, it suggests the pattern, the first principle, the knowledge, the unity in the world hidden from our view and the key to self-knowledge.

It is shared aliveness balancing conflicting opposites.

The Eden myth tells us a truth - humans are intended for this pure awareness, with no mental distraction, an innocent union with God, a harmony with creation. We are intended to dwell in grace, the uncreated energy of God, and participate in divine life.

We are intended to possess God’s energy, but if we misuse our will and became separated and spiritually dead, our awareness becomes fragmented, we fall under the illusion of self-sufficiency, and we fear death.

Whereas in God we can act spontaneously, without striving and self-interest, in desiring created things instead, we are lost to shared aliveness and divine life.

When the New Testament is translated from it's original Greek into Chinese, the Logos is rendered as DAO. In the beginning was the Dao, it says, and it goes on to say, the Dao dwelt among us.

Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu was writing about Dao at about the same time Heraclitus was writing about Logos, six centuries before Jesus.

The Dao is the path of heaven, the uncreated cause, the way that creates and balances the strife of opposites by not contending. It is also a pattern of shared aliveness.

The Dao and the Logos are one symbol.

Chinese sage Lao Tzu taught his own Eden myth as a return to the way, when people were closer to heaven and nature, the golden age when man was in a pure state.

Immeasurable indeed were the ancients, he said, subtle, unfathomable and penetrating, in pristeen simplicity like an un-carved block. Rising above compulsive thinking and desire for created things, the sage has no fixed will. The man of the highest virtue is like water, wrote Lao Tzu.

In intuitive perception, he meant, you use your uncreated light to return to unified consciousness, a shared aliveness.

We human beings can know this through intuition, but it was revealed to us humans in the flesh, and dwelt among us, through Jesus.

St John had known Jesus on earth and lain on Jesus’ breast. So his gospel represented the highest grace and truth a person could know through the flesh.

Today we share Jesus’ risen life when we cultivate his grace in our own person, and it becomes real. One might say when we walk on living water. Seeing the risen Jesus means returning to this experience Jesus once returned to us. This shared aliveness.

Shared aliveness is a knowing prior to all things, like the Dao, just as the Logos is in the beginning, the first cause. Because God is not a thing.

Nor is God is someone else, if we experience a return to selfless attention and shared aliveness.

Touching God wherever we touch reality, we are Jesus’ risen life.

We go behind thoughts.

We live what the words point to, the aliveness we all share, whether we like sharing it or not. It is a fact we share it.

Jesus says Love your neighbour as Being yourself.

This is our existential ‘yes’ to belonging to God. Our most exhilarating knowing comes not from thinking, but from the awareness of shared aliveness.

In this we are not separate, we are the risen One.

Not I, but Christ in me.

A healthier death

The Jesuit Priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once tried to combine the languages of science and religion.

He wanted to teach us to see that God IS everywhere, and like many religious innovators, he was opposed, but he embraced this.

While he was doing research in China, because Rome had denied him permission to lecture or publish, he found himself without the means to celebrate communion.

And this is what he wrote:

“I have neither bread nor wine nor altar, so I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labors and suffering of the world.”

Like Jesus, Chardin lived a full life, by living an anticipation of his death.

He once noted: “I should like to die on the day of the Resurrection.”

And then, interestingly, he did. He had a heart attack on Easter Sunday 1955.

His posthumous work on the universe as a living host has been praised, by many, Pope included.

13 years later, Martin Luther King was also pre-occupying himself with death’s effect on life.

His illegal but pacifist demonstrations were opposed with a legal violence, which he embraced, and the day before he was assassinated, he was supporting a refuse collectors strike to help end racial segregation, when he addressed the rally with this:

“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain and I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

Now of course we have a black US president, but 12 years after Martin Luther King was shot, it was Jimmy Carter who was president.

And Archbishop Oscar Romero was asking him to halt US assistance for El Salvador’s ruling military junta. He also appealed to the fighters to refuse their illegal orders:

"The peasants you kill are your own brothers and sisters. When you hear the voice of the man commanding you to kill, remember instead the voice of God. Thou Shalt Not Kill. In the name of our tormented people whose cries rise up to heaven, I beseech you, I command you, stop the repression."

But even more interestingly, echoing both Chardin and King before him, he said this:

"I have frequently been threatened with death, but I must say that, as a Christian, I do not believe in death, but in the resurrection. If they kill me, I shall rise again in the Salvadoran people."

The next day he was shot saying Mass.

12 years later the fear had lessened sufficiently for the civil war, if not the crime, to end.

Now.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Luther King, and Oscar Romero were all motivated by Jesus of Nazareth, but more than that, they, like Jesus, had a preoccupation with death, not the usual one of fear and shame and repression, but the best, healthiest kind of preoccupation with death.

One which brings great appreciation of life, in the resurrection, where love and death co-incide.

Our lives may or may not be as dramatic as their lives, but whatever we are training for now, we will accomplish in the hour of our death.

By exposing ourselves to the resurrection, a place where death and love coincide, we can break open prisons.

By sharing Christ’s passage through death into life, we can give ourselves to this present moment and hold nothing back, in love and detachment.

Jesus breathes this spirit on his followers, followers like Chardin and King and Romero, and us, and says: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

Like Narnia’s Aslan in the witch's frozen kingdom, the fundamental stuff of Jesus' spiritual consciousness breathes on us prisoners of death: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’

I say this twice to emphasise that the ancient Greek word for forgiveness, aphesis, does not mean: ‘I know you did wrong but I’ll overlook it.’

What it does mean is I let go.

I let go. I live a full life.

And the tense John uses, apheontai, suggests he also means: ‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are already forgiven.’

Forgiveness has already taken place in resurrection, which we realise now by letting go of the interpretations and evaluations and judgements we have projected onto people.

It is these judgements which separate us from God – and this is what sin is, our self-imposed separation from the greatest reality.

So we are included in the gospel which has a risen Jesus telling Thomas: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” because at the time John was writing, this meant us.

We had not yet seen.

We were then those future believers.

Like Chardin, and King, and Romero, but in our way not theirs, we must go on a journey to the present moment, where love and death co-incide.

Because the risen Jesus is described not as a fact, but as a sign. “Jesus did many other SIGNS in the presence of his disciples”, it says.

As a sign, Jesus’ rising points a way for us to accept and follow, and to make into a fact.

Just believing it is like trying to enjoy a holiday by looking at the brochure.

Like Chardin and King and Romero, if we are willing, through believing we may have life in his name.

We all must die, but full life comes in being preoccupied with death in the right way, which turns shame and fear into love and joy, joy who enters through our walls and our locked doors, and enables us to look back in retrospect, and, as Chardin was always trying to teach us, see God everywhere.

THE GREATEST STORY NEVER TOLD

Playing a Roman Centurion in the 1965 film “The Greatest Story Ever Told” John Wayne only had one line to say: “Surely this man was the Son of God.” When the director asked him to repeat it with awe, he tried in a cowboy drawl: “Awwwwwwe surely this man was the Son of God.”

The awe gets lost. The true stuff of the love of Jesus of Nazareth lives on, but the way it is communicated has become culturally irrelevant, so you can hardly blame anyone for disinterest or misunderstanding.

Jesus showed that the fundamental stuff of life is not physical material but spiritual consciousness, and this is a lesson we still need to learn.

I have a book on my shelves explaining: “The God part of the Brain”, as if the Creator of brains can be reduced to a creation of the brain.

Anyone bereaved knows we humans experience the strange presence of recently dead loved ones, but the love in Jesus of Nazareth lives on two millennia after he died, and he didn’t even have a family of his own.

The gospels tell us Jesus preached pacifism. Jesus used simple agricultural symbols to communicate. Jesus loved the powerless in his culture, women and children. Jesus healed those oppressed by disease and death. Jesus broke social taboos by mixing with law-breakers and ethnic outsiders. Jesus emphasised inner disposition over outward rule and form.

This challenged a religious establishment struggling under Roman occupation, and led Jesus to an inevitable struggle with the political-military alliance of his day and a famous execution in 33AD.

Jesus spoke Aramaic, but the dominant Greco Roman culture identified him as Christ, the Greek rendering of a Hebrew term, Messiah, meaning anointed one, after a ritual symbolising God’s empowerment by covering leaders in oil.

Jesus made tables. Jesus didn’t write a book. 15 years after Jesus’ demise Paul started this on Jesus’ behalf. Paul had had powerful post-mortem experiences of the love of Christ and interpreted them within his own framework, a Jewish tradition stretching back into a culture of appeasement to primitive fear of the unknown, the vicarious suffering of innocent animals, and even human sacrifice. Abraham was willing to kill his own child for his fear of God. So you could hardly blame anyone today for misunderstanding the living love of Jesus of Nazareth.

Paul also projected his post mortem experiences of the love of Jesus Christ forward, by writing the letter to the Romans into an imperial culture which dominated the known world through relentless organisation, ruthless violence and ceremonial pomp.

Then came the essentialist Greek philosophy which gave us the creeds, still in use. And so it was, a simple ecstatic experience of the living love in Jesus became a more static and highly complex hierarchical system, Christianity.

Culturally irrelevant as this can be, the fundamental stuff in Jesus, not physical material but spiritual consciousness, lives on, as it had for Paul.

“He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve,” wrote Paul. “Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.”

Paul didn’t mention a tomb. At least 18 years later, Mark did that. But by then it was easily 65 AD, and in his earliest short manuscripts Mark ends with a man in a white robe saying to three women who loved Jesus: “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

The written account ends like this: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. All that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterwards Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.”

Now then, why am I giving you boring Biblical history rather than the transcendent truth? Because at this point in the emerging New Testament record, we still don’t have a physical body of Jesus, at least as the author of “the God part of the brain” might understand one.

Paul harmonises our matter/spirit dichotomy by talking not about a physical body but spiritual body, or ‘pneumatikon soma’. And in a materialist culture like ours, fully material bodies not appearing can be as unsettling for Christians as their appearance where we don’t need them can be for anyone else.

The vicar, at my parents' church, for example, preaching when someone on the front pew keeled over dead. Or my sister, waiting on hotel tables during a catering exam. She repeatedly offered the sweet menu before looking closer to discover her diner had died after the main course. Or the apocryphal story of the coffin bearer having a heart attack.

But not to worry, from 80 AD on, Luke comes to the rescue by writing about an obviously more physical Jesus who can enjoy eating fish in Jerusalem and then show off his hands and feet. In doing this, Luke says that the true presence in Jesus is not a mere apparition. And then along comes Matthew, writing after 85 AD, describing a big farewell and mission action plan, eleven disciples sent to the entire world.

“When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Finally in the chronology, gospel Johnny come lately John confirms Jesus’ appearance in Jerusalem the evening of the day he rose, adding that the door was locked, as if to emphasise the risen Christ is not bound by normal space time conditions. He adds that it was locked for fear of the Jews, but disciples rejoiced anyway. Though it enters through walls, the love of Christ is not merely a ghost, and it can turn fear into joy.

Like Narnia’s Aslan in the witches frozen kingdom, the fundamental stuff of Jesus' spiritual consciousness breathes on prisoners of death, and says: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’

Here’s something truly relevant - the ancient Greek word for forgiveness, aphesis, doesn’t mean: ‘I know you did wrong but I’ll overlook it.’ It means I let go. And the tense used, apheontai, suggests that John means: ‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are already forgiven.’ Whereas Jesus of Nazareth used to forgive, now forgiveness has already taken place and you realise this in letting go of interpretations and evaluations you have projected onto people. We see the world not as it is, but as we are, using an internal construction, which can separate us from God – and this is exactly what sin is, a separation from the greatest reality there is.

John has transformed the Lucan understanding of forgiveness using material similar to Matthew 16:19 … “the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!” Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”

Within a minimum 60 years of Jesus’ death, the word become flesh was turned back into words. But to exist at all, God must come out of time place and language. We must not keep Jesus in an ideological tomb.

Physical death used to be defined as the heart and lungs stopping. Then we learnt to start them, so it became when brain activity stopped. Now maybe it’s just the neo-cortex.

A hospice musician writes this: “How can I possibly express what I have learned? I believe there is a mask we all wear, the mask of controlling, grasping intellect, which tries to impose order on our experiences and will accept things only in a certain way. Another name for it is fear. In many people who are terminally ill, the mask begins to slip.

“It is as though the individual, completely a citizen of the earth, begins to be aware of another home behind the mask. When the strength of the body begins to fail, the part which expresses fear and feeds on physical strength, the controlling intellect, also recedes.”

Colossians 3: 2-4 calls this our true life: “Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you will be revealed.”

The key is to recognise that the fundamental stuff of Jesus lives on in us, as it had in Paul. Not empty physical material but hidden spiritual conscious immaterial. Phillipians 2 says it best of all - Christ Jesus emptied himself, therefore God exalted him, and we should have this same mind.

Then Being expands beyond our little form and takes in everything.

Just as invisible warm breath becomes visible but transient in cold air, so do worldly things arise only to pass, regimes, romances, careers, perspectives, rules, relationships and religions. Even persons? Not quite. Love is more. Love is not a mere feeling, and God is not a person, but a personalising presence. Love it is not static physical matter on which our power is based, but the fundamental basis of reality, ecstatic animating conscious spirit beyond intellect and words, though we say God, and into God Jesus’ love lives eternally. Jesus knew it would. So should we.