EASTER TRIDUUM 2007

Easter 2007

Dear Friends,

Someone asked me recently what uniquely did Jesus bring to the world? I found myself replying with the word ‘touch’. He did not bring a new philosophy or morality so much as a new capacity to experience God in the fullness of our human being, mind and sense. Touch reminds us of our wholeness. No part of us can be rejected or diminished without the divine beauty of creation being dishonoured. One reason that meditation opens up a new way of ‘verifying the truths of our faith’, as Fr John taught us, is simply that when we meditate we can only do so as a whole person. And wholeness is the accumulating effect of the daily practice. Wholeness is an expanding sense of reality and of integration with others. These aspects of spiritual growth make sense of salvation not as a legal reprieve but as full health, vitality and the liberation of overwhelming natural goodness.

This is why we dedicate special time to pondering the meaning of Easter in the light of the experience of meditation. It is also why we do lectio and why we share our insights with one another. Understanding of this type arises in us from the heart centre rather than from the intellect alone. However ‘spiritual’ we are we do need ritual, sacred symbolism, the communal repetition of the founding story to sensitise ourselves to the many more subtle ways in which this spiritual knowledge can unfold.

What grounds the immensity of the Easter mysteries throughout the sacred Triduum is this comprehensive, faithful sense of touch. Tomorrow we see the bodiliness of the Eucharist and its connection with mutual service in the ‘lost sacrament’ of the feet-washing. On Good Friday we see shockingly how touch can also be abused to cause deliberate pain and how, in doing so, it diminishes the one responsible by locking them into their own dark ignorance. But we also see that the deep inner touch of love – that never ceased to be the supreme reality of Jesus’ consciousness – need not be dispelled by suffering. With the nails in his hands and feet he asked the Father to forgive. Forgiveness is a way of touching the one who pushes us away and so of restoring the vital human connection with what has been lost.

Only on Holy Saturday does the gift of touch abandon us. We feel the strange limbo of being un-touched. It’s a necessary transition, but not one we want to linger in longer than necessary even though it feels as if many today are stuck precisely in that no man’s land of personal isolation. A disturbing feeling of unreality follows death but by the purifying process grief – the gift of tears – it is also transformed into a way of breaking into higher reality. It is like climbing a mountain and passing through levels of thick mist. Then comes the unobservable sunrise of Resurrection. At what moment exactly – any day – can we say that the rays of the sun touch our eyes and skin? The sun breaks over the horizon differently for everyone because the horizon itself is only an idea, one that is relative to our own subjective position. The Resurrection touches us – as it gradually did the first disciples – into the awareness that the horizon, all that limits our humanity, has been surpassed.

To be touched by Christ is to be reminded of all we had forgotten, to be restored to ourselves and to the actual world with a momentous new ordinariness. It is, as the New Testament says, like a new creation because everything within and outside is charged with fresh energy and meaning. The worst has happened and cannot happen again. What is lost is found and cannot be lost again. The power of illusion evaporates like the night and we begin an endless journey into everlasting day.

Meditation is itself like a Triduum as it takes us through different levels and on different time-scales through this process of the paschal mystery: the ascent of consciousness beyond the limited tangibility of the ego into the universality of the spirit where everything is touching everything.

I hope that during these days you have the opportunity to take the time to enter into the mysteries we are about to celebrate as a community in harmony with the universal church that is the new body of Christ. I hope you have the time to sit some quiet moments with the great texts that carry this meaning through the centuries. And I hope you can find a little extra time to meditate so as to allow these experiences to come together and lead you deeper into the wondrousness of everyday.

I will be celebrating Easter at the monastery at Cockfosters with the monastic and parish community here and with a group of meditators who will be making a Triduum retreat. Time and inspiration permitting I will try to share some of the retreat talks each day with you and the wider community through the WCCM website. I have recently heard from our co-ordinator in the Solomon Islands which has been hard struck by the recent natural disaster. It is a remote and often overlooked part of the world – but one where meditation is being taught and has formed a strong community. So let us specially hold the Islanders in our hearts and pray that in the midst of their troubles they may also feel like us the same touch of the Risen Christ.

With much love,
Laurence

www.wccm.org

HOLY THURSDAY -- In the Gospel of John we do not find an actual account of the first Eucharist in the description of the Last Supper. This is a little strange as John is very immersed in the Eucharistic imagery of bread (I am the bread of life) and wine (I am the true vine). What we do see though is a vivid telling of the Washing of the Feet. This story tells us about the meaning of the Eucharist and indeed is the key to the whole Easter mystery.

The Eucharist is the central shared and defining act of Christians at a symbolic, communal level. It is sacrament – an outward sign of an inward reality. It expresses the indwelling of Christ in the person of each member of the celebrating community and of the community as a whole which forms a manifestation of his whole self, his ‘Body’. The first Eucharist is not a purely lyrical moment. It has the shadow of Judas and the forthcoming denial of Peter running through it. We celebrate the Eucharist as sinners. It is a ‘medicine of immortality’ as the early Christian teachers said, not a reward for being perfect.

It is, like many family meals and other celebrations, both a celebration of who we are and an admission of who we are, that we can desert, betray and let down too. Yet seeing who we are in the round is good. Despite everything we still belong. Whatever we are like, we remain loved. In a friendly meal – as distinct from an official state banquet which the Eucharist can sometimes look like – we are prepared to serve each other. Simone Weil said that Christianity is a religion of slaves – not something we like to hear or can understand easily. One aspect of her meaning I think is that as slaves we cannot get any lower in the human pecking order. Slaves don’t have much opportunity to exclude other people. The Eucharist is the healing of divison, the transcendence of separation.

Perhaps this is why it is the washing of the feet that sums up the Eucharistic tone of Holy Thursday. This was a menial and distasteful task that even Jewish slaves were not required to perform. So we can understand Peter’s outburst and outrage, his refusal to let Jesus abase himself. Jesus’s response is equally definite. If I don’t wash your feet you cannot be part of me.

At our meditation retreat on the night of Holy Thursday, after the parish celebration, the retreatants came together quietly to sit in small circles and to wash each other’s feet. As it is not something we normally do for each other even ritually, it calls for a special openness, trust and overcoming of embarrassment. In return it yields an experiential, tangible insight into what Easter is about – the call that builds up through the three days and becomes audible in the Resurrection appearance. It is the call to life as mission, to be other-centred, to serve and to find the risen Christ in a reality bigger than our individual selves.

This must be why Jesus said ‘do this in memory of me’ about the Eucharist but made it equally clear that we should imitate his act of shocking – but liberating – humility.

GOOD FRIDAY -- More people seem to go to church today than on Easter Sunday. The Passion and death of Jesus, especially as it is recounted in the dramatic liturgy at 3pm – speaks to our experience of suffering in profound and powerful ways. On Sunday, by contrast, we are invited to celebrate at an invitation to pass beyond our present level of experience, to live in a new and more free way. Challenges are more difficult to cope with than laments.

Yet if we can live into the full meaning of the Cross we find the way to respond to that challenge and we see that these three days as a whole carry the meaning of Easter. There are many who would say that the Cross is enough. Yet its significance depends on its consequences.

The Passion narrative is an archetypal expression of the dark side of humanity. It shows our capacity for untruth and deception, for corrupt judges and juries, for Guantanemo Bay, the violation of human rights, show trials and legal murder. We also see the ugliness of the mob, the dark force of numbers which allows individuals the false ecstasy of losing themselves in a collective anonymity. In the story there is also the moral cowardice of our leaders who betray us and our ideals, political opportunists, religious atheists and those who are driven by the fear of not being on the winning side. In the description of the violence done to Jesus we can glimpse the sadistic side of human nature, the pleasure in mocking and hurting those who are defenceless. Through it all we see the playing out of the scapegoat drama in all violence. The scapegoat must be an innocent victim – Barabbas would not have satisfied them – who can be blamed for everything and sacrificed for a brief respite from social conflict.

We see the same story every day in the news. Injustice, lies, corruption, human trafficking, torture. We say ‘how could people do this? And yet we can’t deny that the moral line runs through every human heart. Anyone can desecrate the divine image of the human being. It’s an endless litany and we can be tempted to recite it endlessly. But what does it mean? Does Good Friday only show us the dark side and give us – as in a theatre or at a movie – a temporary catharsis and relief? Jesus tells Pilate his kingdom is ‘not of this world’ so we should expect failure, not worldly success. But he also tells him that he has come to ‘bear witness to the truth’. Pilate sneers: ‘what is truth?’ What matters to him is spin, results not truth.

This dark side is part of the truth but not the whole truth. The whole truth is seen in the silent response and the spoken words of Jesus during his passion. His non-violent mind and behaviour, his inner poise that reveals the light of his true self. He remained who he was and the shadow that crossed him only showed up his light, his God-nature more strongly. His Seven Last Words from the Cross (Mt 27:46; Lk 23:24; Lk 23:46; Jn 19:26; Jn 19:28; Jn 19:30) reveal the redemptive power of the Cross as the way he embraces the shadow. Broken physically, emotionally, socially, he remains spiritually whole. In this way he ‘takes our sins away’ by being the ‘Truth that sets us free’. The glory of God and of humanity is seen in the Cross. It would have been enough. But there is more to come.

HOLY SATURDAY -- Apart from learning to love, experiencing death is the great initiation into life. In facing death all the ideas, opinions and images in which we wrap the gift of life unravel. We see what is really there and it is rarely what we supposed. Having an idea of something is not the same as seeing it directly – which is enlightenment. For the Christian, enlightenment is a ‘new creation in Christ’. It is not anything esoteric or discovering a new power but simple unobscured vision. Seeing things as they really are is seeing God and all it needs is a pure heart.

Holy Saturday liturgically symbolises that great tract of time and space between one way of knowing - that death concludes – and another way of seeing which includes full understanding. The first feeling is of utter loss. “We will never see him again” and there is really no consolation for this because it is irreversibly true. At least we will never see him in the same way ‘in the flesh’ which is the only way we knew.

Every true human friendship – and every kind of relationship aspires to perfect friendship – evolves beyond fear and self-consciousness. It becomes ever more a sacrament. We take such gifts for granted, that’s part of the gift. It’s a fruit that has grown and should be eaten. But then we learn that it’s not the end. After the fruit there is death which has to separate again before final union is realised. “It is good for you that I am going away..” Jesus told his friends. And when re-union happens it is something quite new because a third presence is there – the space in which two solitudes meet, the go-between who was always there, the invisible, unobtrusive, Holy Spirit. We really grow up with the sending or rather the receiving of the Spirit which opens our eyes to see all that is really there as well as all that we had misunderstood.

The best is to grieve before death happens and nature often gives us this chance if we can face it. Jesus tried to prepare his friends for his leaving but they could not understand who he was and so could hardly be prepared for losing him. So they were scattered and the community broke up, held together probably by the women waiting for what they did not know.

Someone calculated we spend in all two weeks of our life waiting at red traffic lights. So much of life evaporates in mindless, impatient waiting in line or for bureaucracy to work or rectifying mistakes or just getting small things done. So much of the fruits of our labours are not what we planned and so many hopes fizzle out. This is part of the Holy Saturday meaning. Yet it doesn’t have to be a waste of time. It can be a holy waiting, an enlightenment without the light (this is faith and hope), a blind vision, in which simple acts of kindness in ordinary daily affairs give us enough of the light of love by which to see our way. Embracing the ordinary that lies between Friday and Sunday, accepting the uneventful, staying faithful to commitments even when the novelty has worn off: this is the ascesis of the ordinary and it is the only cure for the conditioned boredom of our culture.

Seeing is the treasure buried in the field of the ordinary. Meditation is the discovery and the re-burying of it, the selling of everything ‘for sheer joy’ and the appropriation of the field which means making our life truly and uniquely ours. Christ too is buried in the field of daily life. The buried Christ may confuse us about the kind of faith we have. Are we looking backwards just to the historical Jesus or forwards to a second coming? These are blurred, dreamlike ways of seeing. Clear seeing which Holy Saturday prepares for is the vision of a pure heart, contemplative knowing. At first it feels odd because the old subject-object setup has gone for good. The mirror mind is smashed by death (as it is by meditation), the infinite regression of two facing mirrors has gone and so has the image reflected in them. If we are to see anything now it will be in the way the Risen Jesus is seen. But how can we describe this without using the language of the old way of seeing? Now in the Spirit we see the Risen Christ who penetrates subject and object, making the two one though without destroying the two.

To see the risen Christ means to recognise him and this happens when we are ready. The Holy Saturday aspect of life can be lived contemplatively, mindfully, as our preparation for this. We learn to feel his expectant gaze. For we are also got ready by the experience of being seen – and known and loved - just for who we are. This is the beginning of enlightenment. The Resurrection experience is the experience of seeing. It is prepared for by a long period of blind vision (‘never seeing again’) and a purification of heart helped by the knowledge that we are seen. This is the silent activity of Holy Saturday. And it lasts as long as it needs to.

EASTER SUNDAY -- It seems odd at first that so little space in the Gospels is given to the most important element of the story. We would not have celebrated the last Supper or the Crucifixion or got through the emptiness of Saturday if it were not for the Resurrection. Yet the Gospels seem to treat the Resurrection almost as a footnote. The point is probably that they and the communities for whom they were written well understood the all-embracing centrality of the Resurrection. They took it for granted that the meaning of the whole story came from it. Everything in the Gospels is bathed in the light of the Resurrection. The Gospels don’t only make a case. They reflect the actual life of the community they nourish.

The Resurrection experience is real. It happened. But exactly what were the physics of it we don’t know. It wasn’t observed and it can’t be described. But it can be seen by its effects and felt deep in our selves. In Indian thought there are four states of consciousness: ordinary waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep and the fourth which is enlightened, unitive awareness. This fourth state (‘turiya’) is pure consciousness but not strictly a separate state because it enfolds and penetrates all consciousness. Perhaps this helps understand the Resurrection experience as something that underpins and pervades all Christian thought and action.

The Resurrection appearances that are the theme of the liturgical readings in the coming days of Eastertide are strange narratives. They emphasise the physicality of the risen Jesus. He can be heard, seen, touched and eaten with. But he is no longer bound by ordinary material limitations. And he is still on a journey through this realm of perception towards the Ascension when he passes beyond the realm of signs or, perhaps, enters into everything so that everything is capable of signifying him.

How do the Gospels describe the disciples’ experience? In Matthew we are told that ‘Suddenly Jesus was there in their path’ and his first words are ‘do not be afraid.’ Before he disappears from their sight he assures them he will be ‘with you always to the end of time.’ In Mark he reproaches them for their incredulity and dullness but never for their desertion of him. In Luke he teaches the Emmaus walkers how to understand him in terms of scripture. And in John we have the richest collection of stories, including the appearances to Mary of Magdala, to Thomas and to the disciples at the Sea of Tiberias. In John, too, Jesus breathes on them and gives them the Spirit as part of the Resurrection event. There are many theologies in these diverse accounts. Over the millennia they have been developed into the profoundly catholic diversity of Christian understanding.

One common feature of the Gospels on the Resurrection is the role of women. The first appearances are to women who, unlike the male disciples, believe immediately once they recognise him although, like the men, they are amazed or at first prevented from seeing him clearly. Women are also the first apostles of the good news. For a patriarchal society in which the testimony of women was not valued this is an extraordinary choice. Perhaps it illustrates the meaning of the event. The Resurrection does not usher in a new religion or philosophy or dream about the next life but a new way of living this life. The injection of the risen life of Jesus into the human and cosmic realm is progressive. As it spreads – through the transformed minds and hearts of disciples – we see that it is not a privatised experience. We see and meet Christ in community. (Meditation for this reason creates community as we know). And those can be called his disciples who have felt the beginning of the transformation he effects and also the mission and meaning that follow. When this happens we are no longer paralysed by choice, as so many modern people are, but experience the freedom of being chosen and empowered. Jesus as teacher has expanded beyond his culture, his time and himself. He is a teacher on a scale and at a depth that is hard to imagine. But he is not a co-dependent guru who accumulates adoring but star-struck disciples. He empowers those he loves to become spiritually mature, to go out and make their proclamation and with whom he works (Mk 16:20). The Resurrection continues to happen and extend its influence. It is still beginning.

As John Main reminds us every time we meditate we enter into the paschal mystery. Each meditation takes us into fellowship (never a ‘perfect’ community) as on Thursday, the silent meal. Through death of the ego as on Friday. Through days of uneventfulness and hidden action as on Saturday. And onto Sunday and into the beginning of the great dilation and great awakening of the Resurrection, the universal embrace that is salvation.

Happy Easter!

Laurence Freeman OSB

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