To Group Leaders.... & More....

I have been in Australia the past few weeks and as Pauline told me she was sending you the latest Tablet column I wanted to send you a short personal word. As I travel around the community some of my strongest moments of inspiration and insight into what the Spirit is doing among us come when I sit and meditate with a small local meditation group. It is in these small groups that the work of renewal and the deepening of consciousness is really happening and spreading mysteriously through our churches and into our society at large. I am only saddened if a leader apologies for the group being small! Sometimes the smallest groups have the strongest faith and they are often the ones that generate new groups further afield.

But of course we all need support and friendship for the journey so let us continue to keep each other in our hearts and to share the gift with others as the Lord shows us how.

With much love,
Laurence

The prison sits in the summer furnace of the San Joaquin valley which (I am told and find hard to believe) produces a quarter of the world's food. But as you approach it, it is a frighteningly un-green oasis, like a nuclear power station or a weapons plant, saying to inmates and visitors alike that there is no need for beauty in a place of punishment.

The stark white cubes behind the razor wire electrified fences and the sequence of locked security clearance points manned by officers who seem both bored and insecure house 13,000 human souls. Sr. Christine is one of two Catholic chaplains who care for this metropolis of suffering. She herself, in her seventies, with mobility problems but cheerful and transparent with compassion, gets around from yard to yard on a golf cart. The prison has been shut down for several days which means the prisoners are confined to their cells after a racial riot that led to a fatal stabbing. It feels like visiting a school while classes are in session. Sr. Christine had however worked a miracle and persuaded Lieutenant Brown to allow out the meditation group that I had come to visit. “It's never happened before,” she says and so we go first to visit the lieutenant to thank him. He emerges from a soulless office, a short muscular ex-marine clanking with guns, cuffs, sprays, batons and, of course, keys. He seems a very courteous and perceptive man with more than a touch of human kindness. We talk about prisons and prisoners and he says that many of them have become pretty mean by the time they get incarcerated and I see that although he is a just man he would be hard to fool or get around. Although, he adds thoughtfully, set in hardness as they can be that wasn't how they started out on their unfortunate lives. I ask him how he seemed to have kept open and human after 18 years as a maximum security officer and he speaks about his children and having a real life outside. It would be pretty scary to work there and have no human fulfillment.

Rob, who has seven more years to go, is to make his final oblation as a Benedictine oblate of The World Community for Christian Meditation. For two years he has been studying the Rule to understand how his life in prison and after can be enhanced by the precepts of obedience, conversion and stability. “No problem with stability here anyway,” he laughs. He has worked hard on his inner life and healing and his commitment to the daily practice of meditation is evidently firm and has produced a visible peace and joyfulness in the midst of his ordeal. I talk with him alone about his oblation while the other 30 or so inmates who meditate regularly gather in an adjoining room. Like him they are the leaven of contemplation in a place where it is hard to pray because it is always hard to pray when your very humanity is under threat. But this is the problem for many people in the outside world who are told endlessly how free they are. Here where individual freedom is stripped away by the brutality of a total institution there appears, in some blessed ones, the different more subtle quality of liberty.

Our talk before we meditate together is a holy conversation, open and trusting, such as the desert monks must have had when they met to encourage one another and such as few monasteries achieve very often in their community life. I learn more than I can teach but they are also a wonderful attentive and motivated group to speak to. (Unlike the two free people in the back row of a church I will be speaking at in a few days who spend the entire talk whispering and laughing over their text messages.)

We sing a hearty hymn after meditation led by two or three who form their monastic schola . The meeting overruns by a couple of hours but because everyone else is locked down no one seems to notice we are there. We even take some forbidden pictures as Rob declares his oblation in a ceremony that everyone attends. There is no posturing in the ritual. The men all strongly speak out the renewal of baptismal promises that early monastic profession included because it was seen as a kind of second baptism. “Lord it is good for us to be here” I hear floating into my mind. It is very odd when and where the kingdom appears. It evades the inhuman control freakery of power systems, religious, political or military. It pops out unexpectedly among the oppressed. For a moment I feel what almost seems like envy but must really be just thankfulness.

Laurence Freeman, OSB

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