Holy Week | 2008

Dearest Friends,

Easter Sunday is eight days long, the Octave of the greater feast which distends liturgical time to keep us more focused in the present. That helps to justify sending a message from our retreat a day late in secular time. The other reason being twofold – a Vigil that ended late and started up again very early.

The retreatants and the islanders gathered in the church for the first Easter Vigil to be held on Bere Island in many years. Ignoring warnings we had received we started the Easter fire in an old wheelbarrow on the church steps. It was roaring as people arrived but then burned its way through the bottom of the wheelbarrow and began to consume the rubber wheel. The theological interpretation came later from Giovanni – the love of God that consumes everything it loves, the fuel and the fire becoming one. At the time we positioned ourselves according to the shifting winds to avoid the black smoke. No mention of smoke in the description of the burning bush, I think. But the burning wheelbarrow in the light of the just rising full moon over the hill ignited the Easter candle and then the hundred or so little tea lights that we were each carrying as we processed into the church, to listen to the ancient story again, to sing the long-awaited alleluias and an adapted Leonard Cohen, plunge the candle into the waters of the font, to celebrate the Eucharist and to meditate.

At 5.30 the next morning we came together in the cold and blustery dark in the middle of an elevated filed looking across the sea. Like Neolithic worshippers we huddled around the menhir, the standing stone said to be positioned in the exact centre of the island. Not the mathematical centre it seems but maybe a centre of another kind. We formed a witty, laughing shivering body of Christ as we sang chants and hymns, beginning with the cosmic gayatri and evolving into the Christian music that both expresses and feeds our faith. As the horizon turned to light we read from John’s gospel of the disciples discovering the empty tomb, of Mary staying behind weeping and of her hearing herself spoken in the recognition of Jesus. In the slow enlightening of the day one body pressed up against me identified itself as an islander and another as a new and late addition to our retreat from Prague. The Resurrection has a moment in history, or we would not have been able to be touched by it, but it never ceases to expand. To die always leads to rebirth, that is the law of karma and of physics. Energy cannot be destroyed only re-formed. But if we enter death with faith active in love we are assured (and in the resurrection we are convinced) that it is not rebirth but resurrection that ensues. A breaking out of the compulsive cycle of birth and death into eternal day the moment of Christ, God’s I Am.

As we left the island on the ferry yesterday afternoon I spoke a few moments with the ferryman, Colm whose son had been drowned three weeks ago. It was the first time I had seen him since his tragedy, tragically familiar to him, too, as years ago his brother had also been drowned. His rugged face, lined from decades of ferrying in all weathers, and his clear eyes did not flinch from talking about his grief, describing it with astonishing completeness and openness in brief space but really saying only that there are no words, no explanations.

No words to describe such loss, as there are no words to describe such hope as Easter insists on giving. Perhaps the ancient faith renewed each year as we have now done, and are still doing, embraces and finds space for all the doubt that our worldessness, and at times our worldliness, make inevitable.

Much love,

Laurence

HOLY SATURDAY....

Dearest Friends,

The spare day in between. The day after the funeral. The day of blessed solitude and of unusual loneliness. When the worst has happened, and despair has been achieved. After enlightenment chopping wood and drawing water and doing the laundry. But with particular intensity.

When do we ever get what we want? And how long do we have to wait for it? Just as Eros is about pursuing the ultimately unattainable so faith too never grasps its goal. And yet, as this holy interval between death and resurrection teaches us, waiting is not about intensifying desire and trying to make time pass more quickly, but about dissolving the boundaries of time and allowing the consciousness of the present seep through and fill us to whatever capacity we may have attained.

This morning and afternoon we had meditation on our own or in small spontaneously formed groups. Solitude and community, freedom and discipline, melted into each other. A precious, unanticipated spontaneity and collectors’ freedom we could not endure for very long. At 6 we met in the island church to rescue it from its bareness. Some had collected yellow flowering gorse, others daffodils, some with strong convictions decided where they would be best placed as others practiced the music, ranging in the end from plainchant to Celtic to Leonard Cohen. On Bere Island, any island, like life floating in an ocean of otherness.

We prepare for parties, or liturgies, sometimes long before they happen. Often it’s half the fun of the final event. As the day and hour come closer so does the feeling of excitement, the coming up against the horizon that we have been looking at for so long. As the long awaited arrives we may wish we had practiced more patience. We may wonder why we did and said so many things that were impatient and unmindful when what was going to happen was always going to happen in its own time. But in the happiness of its happening our unwisdom is forgiven and disappears in the light of dawn.

Meditation is a passionate patience. It teaches us that we even wait and get impatient in the here and now. There is no escaping what we wait for.

O Happy Fault.

Much love,
Laurence

GOOD FRIDAY....

Dearest Friends,

“It was a good crowd today”, one of the Bere islanders was heard to say. We – meditators and islanders - celebrated the Liturgy of the Passion in the Bere Island Church at 3pm today. More people come to Good Friday liturgies than Holy Thursday, here as everywhere. The Cross is so universal an empathy with human suffering. For many it is even enough. Or it seems as if it is as far as some can go in the exploration of the Mystery of Christ. Certainly it is the place we start from. And if we are open to the Cross we experience the beginning of a relationship in faith that will lead us through the limbo of Holy Saturday to the new creation that the Resurrection is all about.

About two weeks ago three young men were tragically drowned near here, one of them from the island, Colm Harrington had just celebrated his 21st birthday. Because of the sea such deaths are not uncommon here and many families have been riven by these personal good fridays.

Whenever death strikes it is a good friday, a meeting with mortality, an inescapable reminder of the horizon of our lives. We celebrate the death of Jesus and call this Friday Good because in it we see a meaning that transforms our sense of the horizon of life and gives us unexpected grace to deal with the tragedies and limitations of our lives. Perhaps the key to this meaning, the effective power of the Cross is its manifestation of powerlessness. Before Pilate, the consummate politician, the spinner of words and worker of crowds, Jesus stood silent in his own embodying of the truth. He told Pilate he was there to ‘bear witness to the truth’ and then let the silence speak for him.

Hard as it is for us to trust powerlessness the overwhelming energy of Good Friday tells us this truth. Our reflex is always the opposite, to control, dominate, manipulate. We are economical with the truth or suppress or package it. To tell the truth is to trust a power that can only be released in powerlessness, the transcendence of the ego. All Good Fridays, personal or liturgical, remind us of this. And whether we choose to accept it or not, we cannot realistically deny it. But in meditation, in saying the mantra, we trust and embrace this truth and entrust ourselves to it. “Every time we meditate,” as John Main says, “we enter into the dying and rising of Jesus”.

Much love,
Laurence HOLY THURSDAY....

Dearest Friends,

Last night, at the mass of the Lord’ Supper that opens the Easter Triduum and ends Lent we entered into sacred time. Here on Bere Island we are making what we call a spiritual retreat. But what does “spiritual” mean? We often use the word only when we don’t know what else to say. Sometimes we use it to distinguish a level of experience that is different from the ‘material’. Yet as we explore these meanings in the light of our ordinary experience we see the boundaries between mind and matter, the spiritual and the material, simply dissolve.

Science gives us ways of describing reality, rather than exhaustively explaining it. We know now for example that what we call solid matter is as impermanent and evanescent as mental energy. All is energy. Einstein said matter is a form of energy and Teilhard that spirit is “matter incandescent”. With the discovery of ‘dark matter’, composing a major part of the cosmos, we have another metaphor to help us understand both ourselves, consciousness and the universe.

The mandorla is an ancient symbol illustrating the overlap and intersection of two parallel circles, creating a zone of integral unity – what we might call the expanding and contracting realm of the sacred.

At the Eucharist we enter into this union of the spiritual and material, living out the deepest implications of the Incarnation itself. We ingest the bread and wine which become part of us and then, through us, part of the world (both human and impersonal) that embodies us.

In meditation we bypass and transcend the egoistical force that separates and then often tries to make the divisions themselves into substitutes for the sacred – forgetting that what divides (the di-abolic) negates the sacred. Behind the mysterious communion of spirit and matter, self and others, that we celebrate in the Eucharist, is not magic but the self-giving of Christ that incarnates the divine self-giving.

How odd then that we should have turned the Eucharist into another power structure, ringed round with rules and regulations that can more often divide than unite. At the heart of the mass is the supreme energy of powerlessness, the all-powerful and all-creative energy of love. As we washed each others' feet, meditators and islanders, last night, as the wind blew hard outside, I felt we were trying to express and understand this simple and all-unifying truth that allows us to enter into the darker valley of Good Friday without fear.

Much love,
Laurence

WEDNESDAY....

Dearest Friends,

As Holy Week unfolds I am writing from our retreat for young meditators on Bere Island. At this moment there is not a cloud in the sky and the clear light is calling out every hidden colour, shade and texture of the sea, trees and mountains. Nature makes it easy to believe that we are on the human journey into the light of Christ, the Sun of the Resurrection that never sets. The weather forecast however is warning us of some cold snaps and showers (this is Ireland) just as we know that our lives cannot be free from suffering.

In our conversations during the retreat we are looking at the tensions we have to hold in day by day living. How to manage the balance between family commitments and meditation or retreat times? How to deal with the challenges to faith that the Church in its culturally conditioned forms can present us with and still remain within it? How to read the essential revelations of Christian doctrine in the light of modern language and experience? Sacred time, such as we have entered upon this week gives us the wiggle room for these tensions, the inner space necessary to accept what seems unacceptable and balance what seems unsupportable. During these next few days we are empowered and sensitised to respond to that whole spectrum of being human that Easter illustrates. Tomorrow in our presence at the Lord’s Supper we experience the joy and the tensions of being in community, washing each others’ feet and learning what faithful relationship means. Do we prefer to opt for the no-growth security of the modern atomised individual? On Friday we face the deepest repression of our psyche, the fact and fear of mortality, the terror of absolute loss and abandonment. We learn that in facing it we can touch a meaning that opens a door through which we must pass but which is still a passage into the unknown. On Saturday we rest on the horizon of that meaning, balanced between loss and finding. We are uncertain, even unconvinced, yet we have not closed ourselves to the possibility – the possibility that rises in the early morning from the nowhere of the tomb into the flooding reality of new life.

Let us stay in the communion of our meditation these holy days and feel the presence of community even over the physical distance and different time zones that separate but cannot divide us.

We will post some further reflections from the retreat on the website www.wccm.org.

Much love,
Laurence

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