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.

Being a God bearer now

I want to say something, which I think is both blatantly obvious and really very wonderful.

But people fail to see the obvious.

It is not just an interesting fact, such as that the annunciation, the revelation to Mary about her child, is celebrated in Islam, or that in Lebanon it is a national holiday for Muslim and Christian.

And it is not a belief either.

Nor is it a thing of aesthetic beauty, like the Orthodox hymn of the annunciation, which goes like this:

Today is the beginning of our salvation,
And the revelation of the eternal mystery!
The Son of God becomes the Son of the Virgin
As Gabriel announces the coming of Grace.
Together with him let us cry to the Theotokos:
"Rejoice, O Full of Grace, the Lord is with you!"


The annunciation necessarily comes nine months before Jesus’ birth, and from a particular point of view in the Church year this seems to clash with the Easter narrative. Either Jesus is about to be conceived, or he is about to be crucified. So what is it to be?

But to be is not to be stuck in a particular point of view or a narrative.

It is not time bound.

Thomas Merton said the spiritual life is not a long path where we eventually get somewhere. It consists in opening your eyes and seeing you are already here.

No, this is really wonderful.

The word Theotokos means God bearer.

That’s Mary, but it is also us.

Today is the beginning of our salvation, and the revelation of the eternal mystery.

Being stuck in time is not being in the now. And being in the now is encountering God, being, if you like, a God bearer.

St Augustine described eternity as the now which does not pass away, and when you are in the now which does not pass away, you are in eternity.

The Latin for the eternal present is Nunc Stans, which means Now Standing, or the now that remains, it does not pass away.

In a sense, this is eternal life. We are God bearers in the now because humans can experience eternity, and then really exist, because to exist means to stick out, or stand out, provided we are in the eternal present.

You see, the word exist comes from the Latin ex sistere – ex, meaning out, and sistere, meaning to set or to stand in place.

So when we do really exist now, we stand out, we stick out of our place in mere time, we are above thought, we are in eternity, we are, now.

NOW, this moment may include planning for the future, remembering something from the past, but is very different from being caught up in past or future.

It is the difference between having ones attention centred and having ones attention captured.

Not to be here today, where salvation is, is to bewail what happened, to long to bring it back, to fear what might happen, to fail to wait for it. In other words, not to be in the now is to be lost, and to be really present is to be saved.

Saved people give the impression that they are really present, and they make you really present too. Because today is the beginning of our salvation.

That is, being present now, is not being caught up with the past and future, which is our little ego, and not our true self.

When we are present in the now, we notice those who are not.

Somehow they don’t fully exist. They are not in eternal life.
So be here now, and you will be full of grace. The Lord will be with you.

KILL JESUS

As I walked down the road this morning I saw two words scratched into the frost on a car windscreen. “Kill Jesus.”

So I added four more: “It’s already been tried.”

Jesus is an inconvenient truth.

Imagine kneeling at an altar rail while gunmen enter the church and shoot the heads of those alongside you, mingling their blood with the communion wine.

That you would be upset is an absolute understatement, you would react with shock, horror and hatred. But just such a massacre by Pilate’s forces in the temple is presented in Luke 13:1-9, and Jesus simply dismisses it as if it has not happened.

Or imagine a tower block suddenly falling and crushing 18 people in your neighbourhood. This calamity, in the form of the collapsed tower of Siloam, is also presented to Jesus in Luke 13:1-9. He isn’t shocked, he doesn’t gush sympathy or offer an explanation. He just says: ‘Repent!’

What?

Jesus doesn’t threaten us, he undermines us, because we are asleep.

Our taken for granted, deeply held bed-rock belief is that physical matter is everything.

Or if we believe in a just God, we may think everything happens for a reason, so God allows bad things when people somehow deserve them.

Jesus simply won’t endorse this ignorance.

He doesn’t say the Godless will be struck by an asteroid, good fortune is God's blessing, or suffering is due to sin.

Jesus’ reality is not the parroting of religious platitudes.

He is aware of life's fragility and the suddenness with which death comes. He doesn’t need murder and natural disaster to remind him.

I once wrote a sermon containing the image of dead bodies to shock, and a tutor warned me not to upset people. Which made me think, to coin that dreadful phrase, what would Jesus do? Well what does he do? Preach repentance in this life, or serve up inoffensive pie in the sky when you die?

It was Jesus who, when told about a funeral, said this: “Let the dead bury their own dead”.

Do we imagine a vicar saying this?

Those who die in Haiti and Chile and Iraq are not news items, unconscious intercessory reflexes, or chances to rationalise it all away.

They are nothing less than the very contingency of our own humanity reflected back to us.

There’s an unwritten rule in news-reporting which states that one death in your local news outlet is worth hundreds in your country, thousands on your continent, and millions on the other side of your world.

But a Church shocked by even one death is asleep.

Because repent means wake up, we are more than this, it shouldn’t take tragedy to nudge us into God.

Jesus commands us to repent, and repentance, or metanoia, simply is not some ritualistic religious expression of regret in some Sunday morning cultural backwater.

Repentance is a changed mind, new being, fuller consciousness, a way to see, to discover a different perspective which arcs toward joy in God just as it lives in the awful precariousness and odd beauty of our fleeting existence.

Repentance says live, because we are not this, so wake up, ACT, but out of peace, not fear, or compulsion, or desire, or profit.

You may have seen the film called: ‘Bucket List’, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. The two characters meet in a hospital because they have each been diagnosed with cancer. When they realize they are dying they set about writing a list of everything they now intend to get done.

But who isn’t dying?

If we live the knowledge of mortality, we become someone much greater, with no Bucket list required.

This is repentance, or as the Bishop of Lyons put it more than 1,800 years ago: “In his infinite Love, God became what we are, in order to make us what he is himself.”

Repentance then is learning to live wholly and fully.

Later on is always too late.

We have not been cut down, but we should not presume we have the fruit of God’s infinite and higher Self.

Our stay of execution is our opportunity to interpret the present times, the fundamental stuff of this life, which depends not upon dead matter, but conscious living spirit.

The "sin" of the fig tree is not that it is doing something bad, but that it is doing nothing in particular.

It is just comfortable, complacent, and taking up space in God’s economy until shocked to find physical life is nasty brutish and short.

While he may correct some bad theology, Jesus stays silent about why God, the supreme consciousness who expresses this unstable universe as his body, will allow bad things to happen to good people.

Repent, he says, look at it this way. The time to grow and watch and pray and turn on the light is always now, because we are in a much much much bigger picture, which is supremely good and conscious.

There IS more than this.

To repent then, is to act on this haiku by the Japanese poet Toyohiko Kagawa:

I read

In a book

That a man called Christ

Went about doing good

It is very disconcerting to me

That I am so easily

Satisfied

With just Going about.

Just Deserts

Asked in an exam to explain what a desert is, a child wrote this: It is so hot in some parts of the world that the people who live there have to live in other places.

Perhaps they know deserts are places of enforced learning.

More exam papers later, but first, a newspaper.

The Daily Telegraph, which recently reported how Karl Rabeder, an Austrian business millionaire, suddenly woke up and sold everything to charity, and bought a bedsit.

He had become heavy and unhappy with his version of success, and he kept hearing the words: ‘Stop what you are doing and start your real life'.

It all came to a head during a very expensive three-week five star holiday in Hawaii.

“We spent all the money we could possibly spend,” he said, “but we had the feeling we hadn't met a single real person.

“We were all just actors. The staff played the role of being friendly, and the guests played the role of being important.”

Jesus is also offered civilized rewards.

Maybe not, he says.

And when he opens the scroll in the temple and claims Isaiah’s word applies to him, it’s an astonishing sermon, but they still say of him: “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”

Maybe it isn’t, God says.

And maybe we are not just children of men either.

We journey through the world but we can reflect a parallel world in the crucible of the desert, like Jesus trying to work out what it meant to be Jesus.

Because it wasn’t clear at that point that he knew who he was.

He discovered it in the crucible of being tested, in his response to God.

Change stones to bread - assert your status. Maybe not.

Make angels rescue you - rely on drama. Maybe not.

Bow down to me - become the way of the world. Maybe not.

Use fantasy shortcuts to happiness, counterfeit attempts to avoid suffering, and pursue worldly recognition. Maybe not.

There is a richer reality whenever we die to a lesser reality, because God is unimpressed with our power.

Like this other comment, also from a children’s science exam:

Asked to explain horsepower, a child wrote: “One horsepower is the amount of energy it takes to drag a horse 500 feet in one second.”

And asked about the relationship between thunder and lightning, another pupil wrote:

“You can listen out for thunder after you see lightning, to tell you how close you came to getting hit. But if you don't hear it at all, then you were hit, so never mind.”

And really never mind - the Christian life is a daily embrace of death and REAL life.

Because spiritual health is killed off by obsessive physical health, living faith by blind devotion, and genuine trust by trivial tests.

So if we too are in the desert, an enforced learning environment, do we depend on God, or do we do a spiritual risk assessment instead?

Do we share life or protect it instead?

Do we really meet people or engage in games instead?

Do we enlarge our capacity to suffer or project our fear instead?

Do we deepen our humanity or repress its difficult parts instead?

And is our faith attractively light - or tiresomely heavy, instead?

One final exam paper in the desert -

A child was asked how clouds are formed, and said this:

I am not sure how clouds get formed.

But the clouds know how to do it, and that is the important thing.

Amen.

The I of God

If someone in the street stopped you and prayed for you to be washed in the blood of the lamb, you may feel a little uneasy, even if you are not a vegetarian.

Not that this would comfort you, but it’s Biblical, from Hebrews 19:
“If the blood of bulls and goats, and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling the unclean sanctifies to the purifying of the flesh: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”

There is a cultural problem with religious language - it gets trapped in time and space - usually someone else's.

Because on an average day, the average person where I live does many odd things, but they don’t sacrifice and burn bulls or goats and sprinkle themselves with the ashes to get clean.

A shower usually suffices quite well for that.

The Bible can be culturally inappropriate.

But remembering we are dust and to dust we return is always a relevant human experience.

If you've ever seen a cremated body you'll know what it means to say we are dust, give or take a knee joint.

And this is why people put ash on their heads. Ash Wednesday reminds us to turn to a higher Being than the dust.

Archaeologists say that about 40,000 years ago something really radical happened to us homo sapiens. We started to make things of beauty – and not just tools. We started painting and talking and making music. And we started burying each other, with flowers and gifts, and possibly also with a belief in the afterlife.

But there's a second cultural problem with the word "after" as in afterlife. It implies durational time, and life beyond dust is non-durational, it is eternity, it is spiritual.

It is beneath the appearances of dust and space and time. It is beyond our understanding of nature, and therefore it is even supernatural.

But we don’t need to use that word.

Consider the voice the Bible says spoke to Moses from a burning bush.

It said: ‘I am that I am’.

This reminds us of an even more peculiar word than supernatural.
The word: ‘I’.

What is I?

I does not identify any material object in the world in which we are situated, nor any object out of that world.

What is it to look into someone’s eye and see the other eye look out at you?

It is an experience called Transcendence - it is metaphysically obscure and unintelligible.

But we are faced with this experience every single day, and so religion makes sense of it for us.

The Christian religion trusts in Jesus as the sensible image of this unintelligible eternity and mysterious spirituality.

But even for those who don’t have Jesus, or any religion at all, this unseen experience of I is always still there, because it is only the dust we can see physically.

Which is why, in the Bible, after his suffering and questioning of God is over, Job says: “I abhor my words and repent, seeing that I am dust and ashes.”

A human life is just like this.

It is all our experience to recognize that our lives are contingent on mysterious Being, Being greater than our own personal lifespan.

We Christians may trust in the particular and perculiar qualities of Jesus, but St Thomas Aquinas, the most famous Catholic theologian, said God cannot be a person - or a substance - or a thing - or even a being at all, because God IS Being.

Being is intelligent and conscious, but it does not need a skull and a forehead which turn to dust.

In our culture we may not sacrifice animals or dress in sackcloth and pour ashes on our heads – but we are dust… and to dust we return, and really knowing this in our experience will open us up to Being.

Being, not dust, and Being has persisted in us ever since we began.

And God is Being, the origin of all dust, space and time.

Acknowledging this is called repentance because it turns us to God, and opens us, and can fill us.

So permit me to use some religious language - for I acknowledge a Creator beyond us, as much creator of now as any other time, a Redeemer within us, as real as anything else within us, and a Spirit between us.

In the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Come again? Lord Jesus

This year the school nativity service had to pause.

Instead of the doll we were expecting to use as the infant Jesus, we discovered that all we had been brought was a small, furry, purple, bear.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine put on a nativity, but three young boys dressed as Kings couldn’t remember their words.

There was a pause there too, and the first boy was prompted.

‘I bring you myrrh’ he said.
‘Oh! I bring you gold’ blurted the second boy.
And Frank sents you this! shouted the third.

They say don’t work with children or animals.

Perhaps wise women would be more practical.

Wise women may have bought better gifts, arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, cleaned the stable, and made a casserole.
But no, Jesus doesn't discriminate.

God as a baby says, 'yes, there is indeed another world, and it is right here in this one!'

Shouldn’t that cause us to pause?

God as a human is called incarnation, and it says humanity is indeed good.

But some of us have celebrated Jesus’ birth even more times than I.

42 times, I have celebrated Baby Jesus being born, over and over and over and over and over again.

So I ask you - isn’t this more like reincarnation than incarnation?

Isn’t this the first coming being celebrated over and over again?

God created us in his image, says the Bible, and we returned the favour, added Voltaire.

Perhaps he had a point.

We don’t turn Jesus into a small furry purple bear or call one of the Kings Frank – but our churches do make God into a judge with all the responsibility.

Supernatural Love may indeed be a much better judge than we are, but Jesus didn’t stay in a crib.

He grew into perfect adult humanity, and he urged us to grow up spiritually, too.

So let’s pause.

Matthew 5, verses 43-48: ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy,” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.’

Jesus left the crib, faced danger, suffering, and death, and before his resurrection, he made no distinction between outsider and insider, or between good and evil.

And likewise, humankind, that’s us, before we ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, couldn’t distinguish between good and evil, which was the reason this life was paradise – we treated all life as a gift.

Well, according to Genesis.
But the fact is this.

All life is a gift.
None of us earns life.
None of us avoids death.

So we do live a life that is a gift.

In daily life, we can therefore celebrate the second coming, not merely remember the first.

One Benedictine monk puts it so well: “In daily life we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy.”

In daily life, we must see that is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy.

Life is gift, gratefulness is the response, an appreciation for something unearned, free and gratuitous, our existence, our belonging, the voice of our God, and they all come, literally, from a great-full-ness.

So, let us pray.

Giver of all good gifts, you spread out the world before us like a feast.

Help us to be open to your gift and alive in your presence.

Let us not attempt to give your presence back and look after ourselves, as if we were returning something we bought.

It is all gift.

In us too, realise the power of a good God, the infinite compassion of a returning Christ, the abandoned delight of the Holy Spirit, and let us practice gratefulness, every day, so Jesus will really come.

Happy Christmas Everyone.

Hard to follow, harder to refuse

The TV phenomenon called X factor relies on recycling.

200,000 hopefuls recycle songs, get whittled down to two finalists, re-cycle some fading pop-stars by singing with them, and a winner emerges from and disappears into obscurity while another series is planned.

Re-cycling clearly works.

In our very home the bins have become so diverse I barely understand how to throw anything away.

Mary also has a recycled song: “My soul glorifies the Lord … for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. He has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things.”

I say Mary’s song is recycled because it is similar to Zechariah’s song, and to Simeon’s song, both also in Luke’s gospel, and because the song of Mary, mother of Jesus, is based on the song of Hannah, mother of Samuel: “My heart exults in the Lord … talk no more so very proudly, let not arrogance come from your mouth. The bows of the mighty are broken, the feeble gird on strength ... Those who were hungry are fat with spoil. Not by might does one prevail.”

Re-cycling isn’t confined to TV or scripture.

In the Christian tradition, Mary is now immortalised by this: “Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

Beautiful, but which is the un-recycled truth? The X factor?

Mary sings that only those open to receive can receive. People who exploit self-sufficiency, however it is done, by pride, power, riches or by a legion of subtle psychological ways, close themselves to God’s future as it unfolds, here in the present. Mary is singing that the open can receive, and only the open. The Lord’s Loving presence does not force itself into self-sufficiency.

And the Bible is full of this truth re-cycled relentlessly, as the song of Hannah, of Zechariah, of Simeon, of Mary, and the lyrics of Jesus. All about the dead end of human self-sufficiency.

Proverbs 16: “Everyone who is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord.” Hannah’s song: “Not by might does one prevail.” Mary’s song: “He has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. Luke’s gospel: “Everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself, exalted.”

There’s a joke about a safe Preacher and an unsafe taxi driver. Both men arrive at St Peter’s pearly gates, but only the driver is richly rewarded. So the Preacher asks what in heaven is going on? "Simple really, answers St Peter. God’s aim is relationship, and as you preached, people slept. But when the driver drove, people really prayed."

Whatever else we think prayer is, it is not self-sufficiency, and nothing convinces us of this better than death, if we face it. But the lesson is for life. God can only relate in relationship. Only the open receive.

Bestselling paperback "the Shack" asserts that independence is the source of evil. Sin, whatever else we think it is or is not, is a separation from God, and Hell, whatever else we think it is or is not, is an everlasting separation from God.

The implication is that independence separates us from Love in the present, and whatever else we may think of God, God is a presence.

If life and eternal life is merely an independent struggle for survival, we are all diminished.

Even in the name of God, people diminish themselves by clinging and locking God out, but the Trinity itself is a relationship - one God as three interrelating presences. A parental presence beyond us, a Christ presence within us, a Spiritual presence between us, and each relates to the other in one Being, so none is in control.

For a human being, self-respect is vital, but self-sufficiency is not, and Eternal Love is only received by relinquishing.

As poet John Donne once said: “There are no human islands, and humankind is of one author. Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Mother Mary would agree.

Hers is not an X-factor Christmas pop song.
But she eternally sings: “The Lord is mindful of the humble state of his servant.”

LETTERS TO THE COSMOS

“There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear.” Luke 21:25

For human beings there have always been signs in the sun and stars, distress and perplexity on earth, and waves roaring. We are the cosmos knowing itself – we study heavenly bodies which share the same elements as our own bodies, and our war and perplexity all stems from fear that this is not enough.

I spent a morning with amputees last week and I came away exhausted, so I walked on the beach. Waves smashed in as the wind shook the sky and a sandstorm reflected the chaos in our bodies and emotions. In the turmoil a personalising ordering presence was seeking me as itself.

Nature’s imagination is reflected in us, and this personalising presence is sometimes called the Mind of God, what the Greeks called Logos, the divine reason filling the universe, which will not pass away.

Humans are connected to one another biologically, and to the earth chemically, and to the rest of the universe atomically. As cosmologist Carl Sagan put it: “We live in an in-between universe where things change according to patterns which we call laws of nature … [and] the beauty of a living thing is not in the atoms that go into it, but in the way those atoms are put together.”

The molecules in our bodies are traceable phenomenon in the cosmos, and although chaos and death is ready to re-exert itself, we need not fear chaos or death at all. There is a personalising presence at work revealing itself, as it revealed itself in the cosmic Christ Jesus of the New Testament.

Luke’s gospel goes on: “When these things begin to come to pass, look up, lift up your heads, for your redemption draws nigh … this generation shall not pass away till all be fulfilled: heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not.”

Sin is acting on the the belief that we are separate from all this, that we are better, that we should be protected. Love is knowing that this is false, but that the presence is always coming again in us, as it was in Christ.

R.I.P DR. BOTTOM

A university friend died suddenly. Simon had sent me off in the direction of writing and performing, because I sang my poems to his guitar playing. I thanked him as I scattered soil on his casket. His face smiles from his Facebook page, but he has left behind a wife with three young daughters.

His was a humanist funeral, which the celebrant said was for those with no strong religious belief. The celebrant also said a person’s death was the last event of a person’s life, which it seems to me is a belief a lot stronger than many religious ones.

I intuitively regard true life as eternal.

Meeting two friends in Whitby last week, we walked some of the Cleveland way along the cliff tops next to the North Sea. Before going our separate ways, we prayed that as we left one anothers’ physical sight, we would not leave one another’s spiritual sight, and they seemed to stay with me while I travelled through train stations hundreds of miles away. How much more is this the case with those who have gone beyond nature.

Our proverb: “Out of sight out of mind”, does not take into account the mind of God, a spiritual sight.

In John’s gospel, after Jesus leaves his disciples physically, the writer stresses his spiritual presence: “If you loved me,” Jesus says: “you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I … the Holy Spirit will remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you: I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”

The pain of a disciples loss is raw, but Jesus adds this qualification: “I do NOT give to you as the world gives.”

The world gives pain and trouble. Even today the world defines peace as merely a temporary cessation of open hostility, with tension and trouble still expressed or repressed. But true peace flows out from how we define who we are. Creations of God have an eternal nature, which is God.

Pain is real and we miss those we love, but true Love involves letting people be where they are. We will be there soon enough. Some say “Who is Jesus?” is the most important question in the world, but I disagree. “Who am I?” is the really dangerous question.

When the fourteenth century Christian Priest and mystic Meister Eckhart preached that “God and I are One”, he was brought before Pope John XXII and forced to recant. When the tenth century Islamic mystic Al Hallaj used language that claimed an identity with God, he was crucified.

Heresy got Jesus nailed to a cross. Claiming to be God today might not get you that, but it could possibly get you sectioned under the mental health act.

Mystics, however, are not psychotic, because when they say; “I am God”, they are not talking about their individual person, but their truest self.

Roman Catholic Thomas Merton put it clearly like this: “If I penetrate to the depths of my own existence and my own present reality, the indefinable am that is myself in its deepest roots, then through this deep centre I pass into the infinite I am, which is the very name of the Almighty.”

I am is one of the Hebrew names of God, the fullest background consciousness, the true light, the spiritual reality which makes hearts still, unafraid and untroubled.

But it cannot be grasped or defended, which is precisely why Jesus says it is a peace which the world cannot give. We identify with the presence beyond all our death.

St Augustine said: “People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering … [but] God is closer to you than you are to yourself."

Jesus’ physical presence left his disciples, but it wasn't the whole picture, just as it isn't the whole picture when our loved ones leave us physically. One day we will be changed too. “I am going away, and I am coming to you … I have told you this before it occurs,” says Jesus, “so that when it does, you may believe.”

There is a funeral prayer by the Quaker William Penn: “We give them back to thee, dear Lord, who gavest them to us. Yet thou didst not lose them in giving, so we have not lost them by their return. What thou gavest thou takest not away, O Lover of souls; for what is thine is ours also, if we are thine.”

So death is not the last event, it is merely the opposite of birth.
We miss them in time, but Life is outside time, it is eternal.

SILLY SIGNS

There’s a sign in a Paris hotel lobby: “Please leave your values at the front desk.”

And another in the restaurant: “Customers who find our waiting staff rude should see the manager.”

Mistranslations make what is genuine sound silly.

There’s a sign in a Greek hotel: “Visitors are expected to complain at the office between the hours of 9 and 11 daily.”

In a Japanese hotel: “You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid.”

In an Egyptian hotel: “If you require room service, please open the door and shout room service.”

And outside a dry-cleaners in the USA: “Drop your pants here and you will receive prompt attention.”

Mistranslations make a genuine sign sound silly.

Signs are unusual, even miraculous, and in Hebrew the word miracle means both a sign and a wonder.

God is described in Deuteronomy 26:8 as having brought the Israelites out of Egypt: "with an outstretched arm and with signs and wonders".

But the Jewish Talmud recognizes these signs and wonders as ordinary when it says: “it is as wonderful to watch the support of a family for someone in trouble as it is to see the parting of the Red Sea.”

The fact that life exists at all is a sign and a wonder. The miracle of self-consciousness is that other animals have to be born and live and die, but as far as we know, none of them also have to be aware of it like us. And what is this awareness?

If we are empty of our own spirit, we can be filled with God's. And Jesus was sign and wonder, going around Galilee curing demoniacs, epileptics and paralytics, giving a teaching we now call the Beatitudes, which means Blessednesses – as in ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’.

These Blessednesses: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ etc, were written in Greek, but Greek was not Jesus’ native tongue. So even though some people imagine him waking up one morning and getting out of bed to announce he was fully human and fully divine in one hypostatic union, he walked Galiliee before the Talmud, before Rabbinical Judaism, and before the Christian creeds.

So he would have dreamt in Aramaic, and thought and spoken in Aramaic, which can help us get behind the text a little.

In the New Testament, the Blessings open with the word ‘Makarios’, a Greek translation of the Hebrew word ‘Ashrei’, which in our modern English means: ‘firmly and deeply happy’, firm, as a house is firm.

So what we get is something like: ‘Firmly and deeply joyful are the peacemakers.’ Jesus is holding up a mirror to the world, he is reflecting reality to show us where happiness already is.

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ is the only text to include the phrase: ‘poor in spirit’. Almost. Because it also appears in the Dead Sea scrolls, which helps give us the Aramaic idiom Jesus dreamt in. And once you leave this context, the idiom is difficult to translate. Maybe it’s a bit like the hotel signs again, or like trying to translate: ‘Bob’s your uncle’ or ‘That’s the bees knees’ into another language.

Because an Aramaic phrase which is something like: ‘Ashrei Nedav Sedic’ gets translated through Greek into English to become ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness.’

But biblical scholars like the one I met on a hot insect filled day above a cool calm sea of Galillee say re-applying the idiom of the Dead Sea scrolls would make it more like: ‘Deeply and firmly happy are those in whom the urgent desire for justice and salvation is so strong that they literally cannot sleep at night.’

They are pursued by that desire, until justice and salvation is spread across the earth, and the Kingdom of Heaven is brought down to earth.

This, of course, is less like a future state and more like holding up that mirror to the world which shows us where happiness already is, having nothing and being empty of everything but the potential of the Kingdom.

It’s so easy to turn the Kingdom of God into something it was never intended to be. I remember being at a service at theological college which was based on these Blessings, and one young man got up to do the prayers. He loudly invoked: “King Jesus” who he announced would destroy followers of other faiths.

But I just can’t imagine Jesus beginning the Lord’s prayer with “Our Jesus”, and announcing he had come to start a religion named after himself, or “live by the sword die by the sword” as early campaign propaganda on the way to later world domination.

The ten commandments for healthy living may begin ‘Thou Shalt Not’, but the Beatitudes are not even suggestions. They reflect on a reality which can still be ours today, empty and open to receive, nothing to claim or cling to and at odds with this world, but also a salt and light to it, like a sign which brings glory to God.

We Christians can be far too clear about what we are trusting. Really to have faith, really to trust in God requires not knowing, because when we know, we no longer need to reach out in trust, to receive the signs and the wonders.