EASTER TRIDUUM 2006

Holy Thursday -- Today we begin the sacred time. As we do I would like to send you a short message as a sign that we are all united as a community these coming days through the silence of our meditation, with Christ and in the deep mystery he has opened for us by what we are once more about to recall and celebrate.

We celebrate Easter with an eschatologicall vision. This means, as far as I can understand it, that we are seeing the path we are travelling on in the light of the destination. The end has happened already and it has sent us a message of hope and acceptance that transforms the way we understand the journey itself. When we say that Jesus has ‘conquered death’ what do we really mean? Obviously death is still around. Look at the newspapers; look at our community or your own circle of family and friends. We know we will all die. Conquering death does not mean it ceases to be part of life but that the dark power it once had over us has been broken. Psychologists tell us that the fear of death is still our strongest repression and one that controls so much of our culture and society. Fear is the real cause of violence.

The Resurrection of Jesus was an historical event - a unique and unexpected new ending to the old story of birth, life and death. From the evening of the ‘first day of the week’ and over a period of time after that Jesus ‘appeared’ to his disciples. He astonished them not only by this experience of real presence but also by the total non-judgemental acceptance he showed them – who had largely failed him at the end. He showed them that he had absorbed death. He wasn’t a ghost but fully human. He wasn’t in limbo but truly with himself, with us, with the Father. On Thursday we look back at the last Supper and the mystery-gift of the Eucharist in the light of this experience of the Resurrection. We see that the meaning of what happened in his terrible abandonment, suffering and death was not a punishment he went through on our behalf. It was a self-giving of unimaginable proportions. On Saturday we taste again the wastelands of uneventful ordinariness that often test our spirits and hope to breaking point and yet which we can see through together in the refracted light of the Resurrection until the ‘third day’ – when the time has ripened. At the Vigil we ‘recapitulate’ all time. We condense the entire history of the cosmos and of humanity – and our own individual participation in it – in the one light. The Easter fire takes us back to the dawning of creation and of humanity. The light of the Risen Christ rising in our hearts like the silent morning star shows us its meaning.

The story is not Creation-Fall-Redemption-Heaven in that order. The light of the Resurrection shows us that creation and redemption are one. That means we are in the ‘new creation’ of Christ because the Resurrection is the fulfilment of the continuous act of Creation by which everything came out of nothing.

‘Why are you afraid?’ Jesus asks his astonished disciples. Yet, fear clings to us. You can reason it away for a while then it resurfaces from our old, old conditioning. Each time we celebrate Easter we have the opportunity to penetrate those old patterns and break them up more fully. To be more free. As Fr John taught, too, every time we meditate we enter into the paschal mystery. When fear goes, so does sadness. So: Happy Easter!

With much love,
Laurence

EASTER TRIDUUM 2006 | More...

A short summary of Laurence Freeman’s talks at the retreat at the Christian Meditation Retreat Centre, Cockfosters

HOLY THURSDAY -- Near the monastery today I saw the Jews of the neighbourhood walking to the synagogue and I felt how great a global mystery we are part of us as we celebrate Easter. What an ancient and profound tradition we belong to.

As we enter into these sacred days we make a special kind of retreat. We will be as silent as possible and the meditation periods will be the pivotal points of each day. But we will also be open to the language of the story we will be telling and re-living and the rituals in which we do the telling. The purity of the present moment we enter into at the times of meditation needs no explanation or description – as simple and self-evident as the happiness of a child.

Ritual is the necessary context for making sense out of myth. In the power of the Christian myth that we will be recounting again we will touch back into the most ancient reaches of our human consciousness – when our ancestors who awoke to consciousness sat around the fire and told the stories again and again that made meaning of life.

The myths of our religion are not myths in the sense the word is usually understood today – untruths or fairytales. They tell the truth as it can be told in no other way. We must tell and listen to them at a level deeper than the words themselves. We see and understand through the myths. We don’t make them an object of belief in themselves just as we don’t ‘objectify’ the horizon which is always receding as we approach it.

The story of Easter demythologises the myths but is also in a sense the purest of myth – the story that shows us that the great end is a new beginning. Above all this is true in relation to our fear of death, our deepest repression. St Benedict, who said to ‘keep death always before our eyes’, understood how important it is – if we are to live fully – to be free from the fear of death. It is this liberation from fear that we can hope to experience more deeply if we bathe in the sacred mystery during these days.

Much of this time we will be concentrating on the last day of Jesus’ life. What would we be feeling if we knew, as he did, that this was our last day. How would we use the time; what would we be remembering?

We go ever deeper into the mystery of the real – of what truly is as opposed to what we imagine or dream. History and ‘facts’ are not the only dimension of the real but they are often what we cling most tenaciously to out of fear. The silence of the meditation will help us as always to separate the real from the unreal. This separation – like all kinds of separation – is a taste of death. It is why John Main said that every time we meditate we enter into the Paschal Mystery.

Tonight we celebrate the institution of the Eucharist and the real presence in the sacrament of the altar. It is both historical and atemporal. It takes us into the imagination – not the daydreaming but the clear understanding – of Jesus himself. Our minds and hearts are united and transformed by entering into his in this way. Our work these days is to be open to the real and to allow it to teach us its rue nature as it purifies our hearts of fear and sadness and anger. It is the work of being silent and still and also listening to the stories and entering into the rituals. It’s a powerful combination, a paradox like dropping a stone into a mirror-still lake.

Father Laurence

The Northern Irish poet Michael Langley was once asked how he understood the nature of violence and he replied it seemed to him to be a ’failure of imagination’. He meant the failure to se the situation from the point of view of other parties. But it is an insight that has deeper meanings. Ultimately it suggests that we can even see reality as God sees it. This means the vision of God can be ours – not in the sense that we can see God as an object but that we can share in the seeing that God does. Or as God ‘does’ nothing in our human sense of the word, in the seeing that God is. This is the gift of Christ in whom God dwells embodied that eh enables us to see in and with his ‘mind’ which is as God sees. On the Cross he did not say merely ‘I forgive them’ when he turned his attention to his killers but ‘father forgive them…’ Because they ‘did not know what they were doing’ he saw they terrible, destructive lack of imagination.

All violence, however we glorify it and even however courageous it may be betrays our failure to be full human and therefore to be Godlike as we are capable. Violence inevitably conceals a huge denial of reality, a lurking lie.

To understand the Cross we must try to see it as Jesus saw it. That means we must try to get up on the Cross with him, which means seeing our own experience of suffering, alienation, betrayal and rejection in relation to it. In preparing for his ordeal Jesus underwent ‘deep agitation of spirit’. He oscillated in a human way between emotions as we do in the grip of grief or fear. In his case this is not doubt but a natural response to death. ‘Anguish and dismay came over him’ and he told his companions ‘my heart is ready to break’. He asked them to stay awake and pray with him but their grief overwhelmed them and they slipped into the denial of sleep. Yet the gospels also show him responding to his fate from a profound inner stillness, clarity and serenity. ‘Peace... not as the world gives it ... is my parting gift to you.’ The world gives peace only through the satisfaction of desire. His peace arose from his penetration of the wall of denial and his entry into the realm of paradox which is the portal of reality. The cross itself – the absolute horizontal crossing the absolute vertical – is the ikon of this.

At the centre of the cross is found the intersection of fate and freedom. Death is our fate – so to some degree are betrayal and suffering and disappointment. But accepting rather than denying it (Oh, it’s not so bad, it will never happen, we’ll get over it, it’s not there…) overcomes denial as perseverance overcomes the temptation to be seduced by our capacity for denial and illusion.

Aquinas says that the Cross was not necessary for the plan of salvation. The Incarnation was necessary. This shows that the suffering of the cross is not the price Jesus pays on our behalf to an angry God. Yet the suffering still has meaning and is redemptive. Its meaning however is not expiatory but revelatory. It redeems us by what it exposes.

It exposes the nature of sin through the mechanism of the scapegoating of an innocent victim that runs deep into our personal and social psyche. It explains why violence is the original sin and how much we need it to keep denial of death working. It also shows how complicit religion is with this cult of violence.

Do we understand? Do we stay awake and pray or fall back into the coma of history and its addiction to violence. What is the ‘true Cross’? The thing that the mother of Constantine discovered in Jerusalem when she demolished an ‘idolatrous temple’ and built another? She sent two of the nails of the Passion to the emperor, one of which he put into his battle helmet, the other into the bridle of his horse. Religion can perversely absolutely reverse the meaning of the Cross – as the history of anti-semitism shows. Justin Martyr railed against the ‘senseless Jews’; for misinterpreting their own scriptures. But Jesus constantly criticised his disciples for failing to understand what he was saying and teaching them.

Daniel Barenboim, the musician, speaks about music as a metaphor for life. He says that as the first note of a piece sounds out of silence, the music has its duration and then ‘dies away’ into silence; it is a metaphor for the tragic dimension of life.

Even more is the Cross, in the light of the Resurrection, the metaphor for life. Does it teach us the undeniable reality of death as part of life and how denial leads to violence? Do we see the meaning of life hidden in the heart of the mystery of death? Does the true Cross show us that in our deepest solitude is our deepest communion?

Today is also the anniversary of the death of Ramana Maharshi in 1950. When his disciples begged him not to go away he looked at them with great compassion and consciousness and said ‘where can I go? I am always here.’

Do we see this in the peace of Christ as he reigns from the Cross?

Father Laurence