Interiority and Identity

"Who do you say I am?"

by Rev. Malcolm Galze

"Meditation can teach us simply how to be, to be one, whole and attentive, in the presence of God’s being. That is what meditation is about, coming into the presence of the One who is. And what you will discover, and you can only discover it for yourselves, is that simply to be in the presence is all-sufficient. That is, when you fully are the person he has created you to be...

"Being the person you have been created to be is to be rooted in your own deepest spiritual centre. The cultivation of growth is simply the daily return, every morning and every evening, to the practice...

"Meditation is just that flowing movement of self transcendence that unfolds as one reality – the person we are – in God’s eternal present. (p22)

"Meditation is the journey beyond our existence to our being. To our own unique being. It is the journey to the essential core of what and who we are. The wonderful thing we know in the Christian revelation is that, even more than that, it is the journey into the heart of Being itself. It is the journey into God. The One who made us who we are. (p24/25)
 
"St. Paul speaks frequently of the evolving maturity of Christians. The call to prayer, the call to meditation is precisely a call to grow up, to leave the ego-centred irresponsibility of childishness behind and to become ourselves by finding ourselves beyond ourselves in union with the All...

"The Christian vision requires us to be open to God at an imageless depth, and it is in openness there that all the false dichotomies are resolved in union, in oneness. In other words, the call is for us all together to return to a fundamental simplicity. The call of deep prayer is no less than the call to be, to be yourself, to be in love, in trust, in total openness to what is.’ (p124/125)

(John Main - The Way of Unknowing – DLT)

Rev. Malcolm Glaze

English Martyrs Church

Hillmorton, Rugby.

        Pope Benedict XVI on his recent visit to the UK in his greeting to Youth said: ‘Deep within your heart, he is calling you to spend time with him in prayer. But this kind of prayer, real prayer, requires discipline; it requires making time for moments of silence every day. Often it means waiting for the Lord to speak. Even amid the “busy-ness” and the stress of our daily lives, we need to make space for silence, because it is only in silence that we find God, and in silence that we discover our true self.’ Thomas Merton regarded a saint as someone who was simply their true self. In his autobiography ‘Elected Silence’ he speaks of his astonishment that a saint, Therese of Lisieux, should appear in what he describes as the ‘stuffy, over plush, over decorated, comfortable ugliness and mediocrity of the bourgeoisie.’ It seemed impossible to him that grace could operate in such an environment. He later saw this as a sin against God and his neighbour, a blasphemous underestimation of the power of grace and an uncharitable judgement of a whole class of people. Once he had glimpsed the real Therese he became strongly attracted to her, the most phenomenal thing about her he came to realise was that she became a saint not by rejecting the environment in which she had grown up but by keeping everything about it that was not incompatible with her Carmelite vocation. This discovery was one of the biggest and most salutary humiliations of his life. The discovery of a saint is a tremendous experience he says because it is so completely different to the discovery of a new celebrity. With a new celebrity idol all you can do is stare at a picture of them. But saints are not inanimate objects of contemplation rather they become our friends, they share and reciprocate it and give us unmistakable tokens of their love through the graces we receive through them. (Cf. Elected Silence – Hollis & Carter p305/6)

Lumen Gentium refers to the Church as a ‘mystery’, a people gathered together in the unity of the Trinity (LG n4). It emphasised the need to re-discover the Church as a ‘mystery’ in the context of a universal call to holiness (LG n39), which is intrinsic to our baptism. All the baptised participate in the one priesthood of Christ, each in their own proper way. The common priesthood is exercised in the unfolding of baptismal grace; the ministerial priesthood is at the service of this common priesthood, it is directed to the unfolding of the baptismal grace of all Christians. The ministerial priesthood is a means by which Christ unceasingly builds up and leads his church. (Cf. Catechism No. 1547) Training in holiness calls for a Christian life distinguished above all in the art of prayer, which in the Orthodox tradition is known as the ‘art of arts’. The word art has the Latin stem ar, meaning to fit together. The mantra John Main recommended ‘maranatha’ is Aramaic but has the ar sound occurring four times within it ie. ma-ra-na-tha, indicating its integrating potential. Christian meditation is primarily about being in the presence of God, being attentive to that presence through the work of silence, stillness and simplicity. John Main, and others who have followed his example, have experienced the celebration of Mass, the Word of God, especially the Psalms, the Sacraments and all the Liturgy and Prayer of the Church come to life in a new and personal way through the practice of meditation and has helped build communion, everything appears transposed into a new key. The Mass is the source and summit of our communion with the Holy Trinity and through them each other and all creation. Gaudium et Spes (n24) refers to Jesus’ prayer to the Father ‘that they all may be one ... even as we are one’ (John 17:21-22) and links this to the Trinitarian life, which it says ‘opens up prospects inaccessible to human reason, hints at some likeness between the union of divine Persons and the union of the children of God in truth and charity. This likeness shows that man, the only creature on earth that God wanted for its own sake, cannot fully find himself except in sincere self-giving.’ Christian communities must be genuine schools of prayer, meditation has an important role in building the communion of the Church which in turn becomes a sign for the world, ‘that the world may believe’ (John 17:21) an attraction for others to faith in Christ, in this way ‘communion leads to mission, and mission itself to communion.’ (Cf. Christifideles Laici 31) ‘This ‘pastoral plan’ is not a new programme, it is found in the Gospel and the living Tradition, it is the same as ever.’ (Cf. Novo Millennio Ineunte 29-32)

Therese, according to Merton, became a saint not through some self generated image of her self, but by simply being the person God had made her to be. Through her ‘Little Way’ her real self was gradually actualised in her daily life. We know that she was initially puzzled about her own vocation when consulting St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians and reading his description of the different members of the mystical body. She could not recognise her vocation in any of them or more accurately she could see it in all of them. Only when Paul speaks of charity did she realise this was the key to her vocation. If the Church was a body it needed a heart and one burning with a love that was the motive force enabling all members of the Church to act. So love is the vocation which includes all others, a universe of its own, comprising all time and space – it’s eternal. She was beside herself with joy, her vocation was to be love deep down in the heart of Mother Church; to be everything at once; her dream was not a dream after all. (Cf. Office of Readings for her Feast, 1st. October) Given the interdependence of communion and mission we can begin to understand why Therese felt called to be a missionary and was declared the Patron of Missionaries in 1927. When we pray we are in God and God is in us, he is in all things precisely because he transcends all things, only because he is not a creature himself can he be in all creatures, in him everything lives, moves and has its being. In meditation, the prayer of the heart, we are continually called beyond ourselves to find ourselves, our true identity; it is about interiority but not introspective self analysis. Eckhart in his paradoxical way has said that ‘the more in God is the more out he is’ and ‘the more out the more in’, the more inreach the more outreach. It is like breathing; the more we breathe in the more we can breathe out; the more we breathe out the more we can breathe in. Every singer knows the importance of breath control; it is like keeping the two poles of a paradox in balance, like prayer and good works, or communion and mission.

The main themes of Therese’s Little Way of discipleship are simplicity, trust and boldness. (Cf. Holy Daring – John Udris, Gracewing) The word ‘simple’ or ‘simplicity’ comes from two Latin roots, semel = once and plicare = to fold, so it means literally ‘once folded’ or ‘unfolded’. In the Office of Readings the versicle for Wednesday Week 3 is ‘The unfolding of your word gives light, it teaches the simple.’ The versicle is to provide a transition from the praise of God in the psalmody to ‘listening to the readings’. The sounds we hear when the word is read are a vehicle for the meaning in the words, this meaning only enlightens the mind or is revealed  to us through an attentive listening which requires silence, for God is ‘wrapped in light as in a garment’ (Cf. Psalm 104:2) he is ‘silent as light’ (Hymn: Immortal, Invisible, v2). Having been open to receive the word, the next step is Lectio Divina, ruminating on the word; literally chewing it over so as to receive the nourishment in it for our own lives, a further step of the unfolding towards complete simplicity. During Mass at the Preparation of the Gifts only when the corporal is completely unfolded is it ready to receive the gifts that will be transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ. Therese carried a pouch close to her heart in which there was a small piece of parchment with a depiction of the Holy Face, obviously it would only reveal the Holy Face completely when it was unfolded or simple, a reminder of Veronica’s facecloth and the Orthodox Mandylion. In Orthodoxy a distinction is made between the image and the likeness to God in which he made us. We have the image of God as a matter of course, but the likeness to God is something that has to be worked at. The liturgy, word and sacrament are there to help, strengthen and guide us. St. Catherine of Sienna expressed in prayer to God ‘Our nature mirrors yours as yours mirrors ours.’ (Cf. Office of Readings, Sunday Week 19) Therese too wanted her life to be a looking glass of God’s love. Both saints have the same intuition as St. Paul ‘And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.’ (Cf. 2 Cor. 3:18)

On that parchment Therese had a short prayer ‘Make me like you, Jesus!’ The Eucharist of course changes us to become more like what we receive in faith, Christ Himself. Christ’s gift of his own life to us, if we are open to receive it, does not destroy but makes us who we truly are. As Therese herself put it in one of her prayer-poems ‘the soul which has simplicity gets – every moment – You as nourishment.’  In the story of Mary and Martha both sisters welcome Jesus into their home, into their hearts and minds as a guest, as we do in the liturgy of the word. Martha we know is intent on keeping Jesus simply as a guest whom she must feed, whereas Mary in sitting at the feet of Jesus is prepared for him to be transformed from guest into host as he feeds her. Jesus simply points Martha to the example of Mary for the healing of her anxieties, the one thing necessary. Thoughts and images come and go like lodgers, but we desire communion with Him who dwells in our hearts. If we allow Jesus to move from being a guest to being a host, we enter into his peace, which is beyond all understanding. We may not be worthy to have him under our roof, but he has prepared a place for us in his Father’s house. For Sunday week 16 of year C the Gospel of Martha and Mary is linked to the Genesis account of the Hospitality of Abraham (Genesis 18:1-10), this is transformed by Andrei Rublev in his famous icon into The Holy Trinity. Abraham’s guests are now the hosts seated around an altar in front of which is a space for us the viewer to enter as guest, to share or participate in the life of the Trinity. (Cf. Psalm 23:5-6 and John 14:23) The word ‘hospitality’ begins with the word ‘hospital’ and so has links with healing and wholeness.

The opposite of simplicity is duplicity, twice folded, or complexity, many folded. Therese thought that Christianity in her day had acquired too many creases, too many rival contenders for our hearts and so we compromise, compartmentalise or parcel out our loyalty. But as St. Paul asked the Corinthians ‘has Christ been divided?’ (1 Cor. 1:13) Like the Psalmist who said ‘They utter lies to each other; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak.’ (Psalm 12:2) and James in his letter who said ‘for the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to receive anything from the Lord.’ (James 1:8) and also ‘Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double minded.’ (James 4:8) St. Therese too sees the real problem as double mindedness or double heartedness. Elijah uses a limping dance as an image of worshiping false idols, he says to the people ‘How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.’ (1 Kings 18:21) It reminds us of the story of Buridan’s Ass, who when presented with two equally delicious meals could not choose which one to begin eating and so died of starvation. Sometimes we can be so open minded that we are blind to the truth before us. We need to be aware of what God has already implanted in our hearts. (Cf. Romans 2:14-16) St. Paul put it to the Corinthians like this ‘I wish you would bear with me in a little foolishness. Do bear with me! I feel a divine jealousy for you, for I promised you in marriage to one husband, to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by its cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.’ (2 Cor. 11:3) We are to ‘will the one thing necessary’, which recalls the Gospel story of Martha and Mary. God has planted in each of us a desire for unity with him, a homing instinct, the capacity to choose the one thing necessary and so overcome our dualistic way of thinking; nothing can rival or equal God. He will never impose himself upon us but wants to be invited into our lives. Meditation is a discipline that helps us let go of all the distractions to willing the one thing necessary, we open our hearts to follow Christ in poverty of spirit and develop that purity of heart which sees God. As Eckhart said if we reveal ourselves to God he will reveal himself to us, it is about manifestation rather than causality. Therese, understanding this intuitively as did the peasant of Ars (Cf. Catechism No. 2715 also Luke 4:20), wants to clear a highway through the undergrowth of our endless equivocation. Following St. Paul’s reference to the serpent deceiving Eve we might see this undergrowth as the place where Adam and Eve hid from the ‘presence of the Lord God’. (Cf. Genesis 3:8) Their nakedness had not been a problem until the act of disobedience. For the Hebrew mind a persons’ nakedness was reserved for their spouse and so their nakedness becomes a problem when they obey the serpent rather than the Lord their God. This adultery symbolises religious unfaithfulness; the Covenant relationship between God and His people has been broken because of a divided, distracted consciousness that does not respond to God’s traction.

We can see elements of this in the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Briefly – By now the disgrace of Minos’ family had grown big and the queen’s foul adultery was revealed to all by her strange hybrid monster-child. Minos planned to remove this shame from his house and to hide it away in a labyrinthine enclosure with blind passages. Daedalus, a man famous for his skill in the builder’s art, planned and performed this work. He confused the usual passages and deceived the eye by a conflicting maze of diverse winding paths.... In this labyrinth Minos shut up the monster of the bull-man form.... Now before Daedalus left Crete, he had given Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, a magic ball of thread, and instructed her how to enter and leave the labyrinth. She must open the entrance door and tie the loose end of the thread to the lintel; the ball would then roll along, diminishing as it went and making, with devious turns and twists, for the innermost recess where the Minotaur was lodged. This ball Ariadne gave to Theseus and instructed him to follow it until he reached the sleeping monster; whom he must seize by the hair and sacrifice to Poseidon. He could then find his way out by rolling up the thread into a ball again. That same night Theseus did as he was told.
 
As Eve was deceived by the serpent so the labyrinth would deceive the eye of all who entered. The thread helps Theseus overcome these distractions and reach the centre of the Labyrinth, to destroy the fruit of unfaithfulness and return victorious. The mantra is like the thread that leads beyond distractions of the ego and helps us overcome false images of self. We dry up the root of unfaithfulness in order to live from the nourishing root of faithfulness. The simplicity of pure attention brings us to the presence of God according to John Ruusbroec and keeps us free of needless fear. As Moses said to the Israelites as they saw the advancing Egyptian army ‘Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today you shall never see again. The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be still.’ (Cf. Exodus 14:13-14, 2 Chronicles 20:13-17 and Isaiah 30:15)  The journey from slavery to freedom is the story of every soul and requires all of Therese’s qualities of simplicity, trust and courage or boldness. Becoming more like our true self in Christ our outward actions become more authentic expressions of our inner reality, in that they become more truly sacramental. Faithful attention to the presence of God is an act of love, Richard of St. Victor said that ‘Love is the eye, and to love is to see.’ What is seen is beyond mere appearances; it is that inner light of the true self, perceived more by intuition (intellectus) than reason (ratio), and it enables that which is never an object of perception to become self evident. This perceiving requires silence, only what is invisible is transparent, only the one who is silent hears. The more radical the will to listen to the whole the deeper and more complete the silence must be. Philosophising as the realisation of the perception of reality (theoria) involves engagement in a listening silence that is not disturbed even for a question. (Cf. For the Love of Wisdom p106/7 – Joseph Pieper, Ignatius) In Matthew Jesus says ‘The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, (sound, clear or single are alternatives) your whole body will be full of light.’ (Cf. Matthew 6:22)

Daedalus’ deceptive art reminds us of Pharaoh’s wise men and sorcerers who turned their staffs into snakes just as Aaron had done, but Aaron’s staff swallowed up theirs. Pharaoh’s heart was hardened and he still would not listen. (Cf. Exodus 7:8-13) It is interesting to note that John Main likened the mantra to a Pilgrim’s Staff. We need an art that overcomes the deceptive arts and this is the prayer of the heart which Origen said is primarily about becoming more like God, not getting benefits from him; it is good in itself for it calms the mind, reduces sin and promotes good works. Prayer that is only about outer change can easily degenerate into a kind of ‘white magic’, but prayer becomes a way of faith when we realise it involves an inner change for us. We begin to recognise that to pray for vocations or peace is good in that it unites our will to God’s will for these. But we also realise the need to teach a way of prayer which includes silence, through which as Pope Benedict said in his message to U.K. Youth we discover our true self – ‘we discover the particular vocation which God has given us for the building up of his Church and the redemption of our world.’ Meditation is one form of this prayer of silence through which we realise that world peace begins in our own heart; only through this inner change can we become makers of peace. The many different forms of prayer, of which meditation is one, are sometimes likened to the spokes of a wheel that all meet at the centre where we come into the presence of Christ. The journey from the circumference of the wheel to the centre involves overcoming distractions which cause us to lose the traction of God; that is his power to pull or draw us to himself. One of Therese’s shortest prayers was a simple ‘Draw me’. In the language of Jeremiah Therese has been enticed and has let herself be enticed by God’s attractive love, (Cf. Jeremiah 20:7) this is the proper understanding of love as Eros. (Cf. Benedict XVI - Deus Caritas Est n5-6) This love, echoing Dante, is like a gravitational pull keeping us in our proper orbit around the centre which is God himself, gravity and grace become one.

The circle and wheel are ancient images in all cultures. In early Christian art the Chi-Rho in a circle was popular, sometimes becoming a six spoke wheel, a traction wheel. The six spokes are formed by three diameters; whichever diameter you use to divide the wheel into two halves each half mirrors the other and is in three sections perhaps representing the Trinity. Rose windows in churches of the Twelfth century depicted the Wheel of Fortune, expressing the transience of earthly power, wealth and status. At the circumference of a wheel life is experienced as a series of ups and downs with its perpetual turning. But as we move towards the centre these are smoothed out. John the Baptist reminded his hearers of the prophecy of Isaiah 40:3-5, ‘Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low.’ to make a straight highway for the Lord.  (Cf. Luke 3:4-6 and John 1:23) This journey was called the ‘battle of the soul’ or ‘Psychomachia’, it involved the moral and intellectual virtues. Meditation is this journey to be one with Christ at the centre, the still point of the turning wheel, the unmoving source of all movement. As T. S. Eliot put it in East Coker of his Four Quartets, we must be ‘still and still moving, into another intensity; for a further union, a deeper communion.’ See the vision of the creatures of human form in Ezekiel, who do not turn as they move, like the centre of a wheel. (Cf. Ezekiel ch. 1, especially vv9 and 12-14 and Ch.10:15-22)

The story of Emmaus reminds us that Jesus is with us on the road from the circumference to the centre (Cf. Luke 24:13-35), he listens to our story with its hopes and disappointments and then opens the scriptures to us. If we are attentive and our hearts burn within us then we will invite him to stay with us, he then feeds us with his own life, bringing us into communion with him. At the point of recognition he vanishes, because now we are one with him, we do not look at him but with him, we look as though through his eyes, our prayer is his prayer to the Father, his heart carries our heart in his, our perspective is reversed as in an Orthodox Icon. As the Prodigal Son retraced his steps home to his father the disciples now retrace their steps back to Jerusalem. We gather at Mass in order to be sent out, to share what we have received with others; communion is always the basis of mission which respects diversity, because it understands that union differentiates. In ‘Christian Meditation: The Gethsemane Talks’ John Main describes how we begin by saying the mantra in the head, then you begin to sound it in the heart, you hear rather than say it. The third stage is when you begin to listen to it and now your meditation is really beginning, but it is like going up a mountain with the mantra sounding below you, the higher you go the fainter it becomes and there comes a day when it is out of earshot altogether. (Cf. Silence and Stillness in Every Season for April 4th.) Compare this with how we receive Holy Communion, beginning in the head it is swallowed and descends towards the heart, gradually the presence becomes fainter and fainter but continues to do its work of changing us into the likeness of Christ received in faith. Daedalus gave instructions that the thread be tied to the lintel, for us the thread is then the ‘blood of the lamb’, God’s gift of his own life, his love that draws us to Himself in the new and eternal Covenant. A ball of thread is known as a clew, an alternative spelling of clue, a guide for the perplexed. Therese’s simple prayer ‘Draw me’ can of course be interpreted as a request to God for him to draw a likeness of her, the image is already given but the likeness has to be drawn out, so that image and likeness become one. It requires stillness in the sitter! We seek because we know there is something to be found, every pilgrimage begins with the first step and continues with the second step which is simply a repetition of the first step, and so on to the end. Just keep saying your word is the wisdom of the tradition. As Eliot put it, in my beginning is my end and in my end is my beginning.

According to Greek mythology the Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of Memory. The artist Cecil Collins has said that we all hunger or yearn for something we have lost and that we remember in varying degrees. This is a state of wholeness, perfect consciousness or selfless happiness, which he calls the lost Paradise, even the happiness of childhood is a diminution of the marvellous world in which our souls dwelt before birth. (Cf. Cecil Collins – The quest for the Great Happiness – William Anderson, Barrie & Jenkins) We might think here of Mary and Elizabeth who have both become bearers of new life. On the one hand mercy is described as ‘hesed’ which denotes faithfulness between people through an interior commitment, also fidelity to oneself; on the other hand mercy is described as ‘rahamim’ which denotes the love of a mother, from its root ‘rehem’ meaning a mother’s womb. The masculine ‘hesed’ is complemented by the feminine ‘rahamim’. ‘Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.’ (Cf. Isaiah 49:15) Out of fidelity to himself, his own love for his people God says ‘I will heal their disloyalty; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them.’ (Cf. Hosea 14:4 and Dives in Misericordia – Pope John Paul II, Footnote 52) John as the child of repentance looks in hope to the manifestation of God’s merciful grace in the coming of his son Jesus. Pope Benedict XVI describes Mary’s visit to Elizabeth like this: ‘When you hastened with holy joy across the mountains of Judea to see your cousin Elizabeth, you became the image of the Church to come, which carries the hope of the world in her womb across the mountains of history’. (Spe Salvi n50) A beautiful image of the Church, Pope Benedict goes on to say that Mary alongside the joy is also aware of the prophetic sayings of the suffering servant of God in this world. The journey to our goal our end, ‘telos’ in Greek, is a taxing one. Like Mary we have to make our journey in the context of the contours of our time and place, with all its possibilities and obstacles to our path, gravity or necessity and grace meet. The encounter between John the Baptist and Jesus at this point involves none of the physical senses and so is a mystical encounter. Even in his mother’s womb John senses the nearness of Christ and his leap of joy echoes the psalmist ‘O come, let us sing to the Lord, let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.’ (CF. Psalm 95:1) The author of the Cloud of Unknowing says that ‘It is not what you are nor what you have been that God sees with his all-merciful eyes, but what you desire to be.’ (Cf. Chapter 75) As we pray during the Communion rite ‘Look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church, and grant us the peace and unity of your kingdom.’ John rejoices in that future which at the moment is beyond normal sense perception. ‘May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the Lord.’ (Cf. Psalm 104:34)

John the Baptist would later become a rebuke, to Herod in particular. Cecil Collins says that our memory of the lost Paradise is a constant rebuke to us for what we have let our minds and hearts become. But this memory is also a constant stimulus to creativity as the making of works of art and our appreciation of them is an attempt to recover the lost state of wholeness. For Therese simplicity was closely linked to truth, simple people hate duplicity and have a passion for the truth. Therese herself could never pretend, unlike Jeroboam’s wife who is given away by the sound of her footsteps. (Cf. 1 Kings 14:6) The actor Alec Guinness used to say that when learning a new part he would begin by learning to walk as the character would walk, after that all the other aspects of the character would fall into place. Jesus’ opponents are best described as hypocrites, literally actors using religion as a mask, a false persona to hide behind. It is like being anaesthetised from their true reality by what Pascal termed ‘divertissement’, what Eliot described as being distracted from distraction by distraction. The word person has roots in the Greek word ‘prosopon’ which refers to the actor’s mask of Greek theatre. John Zizioulas says that for the early Greeks the concept of person was little more than anatomical referring to that which lies ‘below the cranium’ or behind the eyes. (Cf. Being as Communion p31 and n14 - DLT) We can think of the four men who carry the paralyzed man above the crowd and through the roof (dome or cranium) to meet the person within. Descending to the ground to be at the feet of Jesus he receives the healing which is the desire of his heart, he now picks up his mat and walks. (Cf. Mark 2:1-12 and St. Augustine, Office of Readings, Sunday Week 25) Cranium or skull in Hebrew is Golgotha and in Latin Calvary. Here is the radical solitude of Christ. As Eliot put it ‘Descend lower, descend only into the world of perpetual solitude.’ the only other way he said is abstention from movement. Only from our roots, from the lowest place can we grow, in stillness and silence we follow the light that draws us upwards and onwards. Merton said that interior solitude is the actualisation of faith in which a person faces the full mystery of his inner life in the presence of the invisible God and comes to the discovery that his own mystery and the mystery of God are one reality. God lives in us and we live in God. (Cf. Thomas Merton - The Power and Meaning of Love p46 - Sheldon Press) Standing under the Cross, literally understanding it, we have Mary, symbolising the Church and The Beloved Disciple representing us and they are instructed by Jesus to set up home together, just as Mary and Martha shared a home. Some common ground has to be found for the restoration of our divided consciousness. True discipleship is following in the footsteps of Christ himself who came to testify to the truth and restore us to our true likeness. (Cf. John 18:37) Truth is seeing things as they really are and it makes you free, it is always ultimately kind. Like Jesus Therese wants to get behind all pretence to the truth, but this truth speaking requires boldness, a preparedness to be unpopular and so also requires trust, especially the filial trust of Jesus in his Father.

Paul Tillich in his ‘The Courage to Be’ begins with Plato’s dialogue Laches, specifically on the subject of courage. He notes that the failure to find a definition of courage as a virtue among other virtues reveals a basic problem of human existence. Only those who understand man and his world, its structures and values know what to affirm and what to negate. The ethical question of courage therefore leads to the ontological question of the nature of being, and vice versa. Courage is related to mutig in German or coeur in French, it is therefore a matter of the heart, the personal centre. If our faith is an affair of the heart then Christ is the heart of the affair. Boldness or ‘parrhesia’ in Latin is etymologically linked to friendship; only with friends can we speak frankly, because friends are one in heart and can be trusted to have our best interests at heart. The amice worn at Mass was originally a helmet, a protection for the cranium and what lies beneath it, a guardian of the person, a true friend in that sense. Joseph was given the task of being the guardian of Jesus, the image of God not made by human hands; like him we each have the responsibility of guarding that image of God not made by human hands which is our true self. St. Isaac of Nineveh said ‘Blessed the one who, seated in his cell, like a noble warrior guards the treasures of the kingdom, that is his body with his soul, blameless in the Lord.’ Therese speaks of us needing to develop ‘parrhesia’ not just with friends but also with God and ourselves, the three great dualities in life for Therese must be united, but this is a unity that differentiates. Meditation is precisely the process of getting to the truth of things, getting rid of all that clouds our vision to become the person God created us to be. Its been said that art is more about love than talent, love as vision which connects it to meditation, both requiring poverty of spirit and purity of heart.

Cecil Collins’ ideas caused offence to the artistic and philosophical establishment of his day with its materialistic and rationalist outlook. Collins himself was a widely read man and strove to find a point of stillness in himself to re-create, at least for himself, what he called the ‘concentric imagination’, an agreed, all encompassing mode of vision which our civilisation has lost. The prism of rationality has split knowledge into different specialist areas like the different colours of light, a danger is that we lose sight of the common origin of these colours, what is needed is a second prism, the intellectus, to bring these separated colours back into the unity of white light. For Collins the artists vision is a unitive experience, but one which cannot be constructed by the human mind alone, it cannot be induced at will nor deliberately invented, it is not produced from a store of memory but an openness to what is new, that is what we must always remember. It will come as a gift, and more frequently to minds prepared for it. The concentric imagination is like the concentric waves radiating out from a pebble dropped into water, they are a constant reminder of the pebble, the centre that is their origin. Meditation is concerned precisely to recover this unitive experience which requires going beyond the products of our ego imagination, as John Main always said imagination is the enemy of prayer. Many were disconcerted by this assertion assuming it meant that meditation was not an incarnate way of prayer. (Cf. The Life and Teaching of John Main OSB – Laurence Freeman 2CD set) But John Main was concerned, from his reading of Cassian, about the dangers of anthropomorphism, in which we create God in our own image, as Serapion had done. It is precisely by letting go of our own imagination that we allow the image of God to be born in us, meditation is entirely incarnational. Mary becomes a model for the contemplative life through her own interiority and other-centredness. (Cf. The Other-Centredness of Mary in Community of Love - John Main, Medio Media) In becoming attentive to God’s image-in-us, we can become God’s ‘image-in-action’; paradoxically in losing our life we find it and experience the joy of that finding, the gift like nature of our being evokes gratitude. (Cf. Luke ch.15)

Martin Buber seems to agree with this, saying that if we interpret our encounters with God as ‘self encounters’ then man’s very structure is destroyed and God is eclipsed. So much of modern art is simply the product of the human imagination, and so much philosophy is an existentialism in which man has to create himself. Archbishop Rowan Williams recalls an old joke that an Englishman takes pride in being a self-made man, thereby relieving God of a fearful responsibility! (Cf. Silence and Honey Cakes p48) It is not just Englishmen of course! But it is impossible to create or make oneself, not even God can do it for he is unmade, he simply ‘is’. The attempt is well described by John the Dwarf as the heavier burden, or yoke. We can only get through the eye of the needle if we drop all our baggage of self justification. Seamus Heaney speaks of conscience in his poem – From the Republic of Conscience – ‘When I landed in the republic of conscience/ it was so noiseless when the engines stopped/ I could hear a curlew high above the runway.... I came back from that frugal republic/ with my two arms the one length, the customs woman/ having insisted my allowance was myself.... their embassies, he said, were everywhere/ but operated independently/ and no ambassador would ever be relieved.’ (Cf. New Selected Poems 1966-1987 pp218/219 Faber and Faber) This republic is a lonely, isolated place where everyone thinks they have a wisdom of their own which enables them to avoid reality. We must be restored to ourselves as Augustine said, but this is then a stepping stone to God, we cannot do it through our own resources, we need the inner light of God’s intervening redemptive love. This love is not in opposition to us but is ordered to our flourishing, it sets us free from fear and isolation to experience hospitality, a sense of being at home in the world, to know the joy of being in communion. God’s love articulates us in the sense that it fits or joins us together into one body. (Cf. Light Within – The Inner Path of Meditation p67 – Laurence Freeman, DLT) We can liken it to the journey to the centre of the wheel where all the spokes fit together, the centre itself being like the vanishing point of the traditional perspective used in Western art. At that point everything goes into reverse and we begin to see with the reverse perspective used in Orthodox icons. These icons are not the product of human imagination; they attempt to express an inner spiritual reality, a saint’s true and original being which can only be made by God the creator of all. Looking or gazing at an icon draws us into it and helps us see what God sees in the person, their true nature or self. For John Main meditation is the journey beyond our existence to our own unique being, it is that flowing movement of self transcendence that unfolds as one reality – the person we are – in God’s eternal present. This is to live out the reality of our Baptism, dying with Christ so as to rise to newness of life in him. Martin Buber agrees that the person who refuses to submit to the effective reality of transcendence contributes to the eclipse of God. He says that the great images of God are born not of our imagination, which would be anthropomorphism, but of real encounters with real divine power and glory. Our power to glimpse God with our eye yields no image because God eludes direct contemplation, but it is from this contemplation that all images and representations of Him are born. When the I-It relation comes between God and ourselves the glance of God is impossible and the image making power of the heart is crippled. Only in so far as we are able to experience a reality totally independent of ourselves is our lameness cured and we are able to apprehend divine images. (Cf. Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue pp152/3 – Maurice S. Friedman, Routledge) We recall the man who had been ill for thirty-eight years; when Jesus asks if he wants to be made well tries to justify himself by explaining that someone else always gets to the healing pool before him. But was this ‘someone else’ simply his own ego imagination with all its distracting thoughts, images, desires and illusions? Jesus replaces the ‘magical’ healing properties of the ‘outer’ pool by the healing properties of the ‘inner’ pool of faith. He does this on the Sabbath day, the day above all to remember God and his presence in our lives. We must ponder on these things; treasure them in our hearts, for only through interior prayer can we regain the traction to get up and walk, become a disciple.

Without love St. Paul tells us we are no more than a noisy gong or a clashing symbol, but with love we ‘sound true’. The word ‘person’ can mean literally – through (per) sound (son), God is love and so when we are rooted in him we become the person he has made us to be because he is sounding through us. Meditation is the way to become open to God’s sounding in us; unlike Adam and Eve who hid from the ‘sound of God moving in the garden’ because of their distracted disobedience they hardened their hearts in trying to jam God’s voice. (Cf. Genesis 3:8) John Main following his father and grandfather was interested in radio, the practicalities of communication across cultures. During WWII he was enlisted into the Royal Corps of Signals and sent to the front line in France and Belgium as part of a wireless tracking unit to locate and identify source of enemy radio signals. This was made difficult because they were being jammed; he had to move at high speed with another tracking vehicle because it was the point of intersection which told them where the signal was coming from. He would later compare meditation with this activity, we are searching for a signal that is being jammed by distractions, an inner signal, the word of God buried in the human heart but jammed by distractions and desires. The mantra is like a quartz crystal which enables us to tune in to the source, when successful we resonate in the Spirit with the humanity of Christ who resonates with the Father. We are now united to the reality of the Trinity and come to see the truth, beauty and goodness, the unity of all creation. As T. S. Eliot put it in The Dry Salvages – ‘But to apprehend the point of intersection of the timeless with time, is an occupation of the saint.... or music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts.’ (Cf. Four Quartets p30 Faber and Faber) We can distinguish a life of silence from the silence of life, as the famous hymn puts it in regard to the Trinity ‘their silent voice no ear has heard; but by their every word we live.’ A life of silence enables us to hear the communication of the silence of life, as Cardinal Ratzinger put it ‘silence is the sphere where God is born.’ St. John of the Cross refers to ‘the silent music and sounding solitude’ in his Spiritual Canticle v14. It is like Moses turning aside from distractions to attend to the presence of God in the Burning Bush and receive the name of God ‘I am who I am’, or ‘I am that I am’, God is revealed as the ‘I am’ that is the origin of all ‘I am’s’ John Main has quoted St. Catherine of Genoa who said ‘My me is God nor do I know my selfhood save in Him’ (Cf. The Inner Christ p33 – DLT) We are not God of course but we are to be one with him, our lives are to resonate with his for it is in him that we live and move and have our being.

John Main speaks of St. Thomas More ‘The ultimate meaning of God does not arise from what society says we are – that would be to ‘prefer human approval to the approval of God’, as Jesus puts it. When St. Thomas More was imprisoned in the Tower of London for preferring his conscience to the approval of the king, his public role was destroyed and he became a common criminal. Yet his integrity was not destroyed. He knew who he was not only in the eyes of the world or even his own eyes, but in the eyes of God.’ (Cf. Word Made Flesh – Integrity p55-57 – DLT) Therese’s desire for a speaking of the truth that requires boldness, a preparedness to be unpopular and a filial trust in God links her to Thomas More who preferred his conscience and God’s approval above any human approval, even that of the king himself. Martyrdom puts a limit on the exercise of power but it is the deepest loyalty to the king precisely because it is loyalty to God. Martyrdom as the witness to, and participation in, the one perfect sacrifice of Christ is a response to the call of the original image of God in us and so guarantees our likeness to God. Jesus often takes people aside before healing them, or asks them to stand out from the group, of his own accord Zacchaeus literally rises above the crowd when he climbs the tree to get a clear view of Jesus, only then can Jesus make eye contact with him, Zacchaeus’ response is to decide to share half his wealth with the poor and as Jesus says ‘Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham.’ His rising above the crowd has united him more closely with the people in the crowd, this new sense of sharing was important to Cecil Collins, instead of separation we have a sense of conscious participation, of empathy. Thomas Merton when he entered Gethsemane Monastery was rather disdainful of the world he was leaving, but after some years in the monastery and on a visit to nearby Louisville he had what has become a much quoted experience. ‘In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realisation that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers...Then it was as though I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are.’(Cf. A Seven Day Journey with Thomas Merton p75 – Esther de Waal, Eagle)  I know of others who have had a similar experience, including myself in the centre of the shopping district in Lancaster, where Penny Street meets Market Street at the corner of Market Square. We are all unique it is what we have in common and why meditation builds community!

Many today place freedom (or a morality of conscience) in opposition to authority (a morality of authority). We must follow or at least not act against our conscience, but judgements of conscience can contradict each other, so a morality of conscience would at best be the individual’s own truth or sincerity, nothing would lead from the individual’s subjectivity to the objective word of human solidarity and being itself. It leads to the conclusion that there is no truth but only opinions; there is no paradox. (ie. that which is beyond opinions) But as St. Augustine said no parent would be so foolish as to send their child to school simply to learn the opinions of the teachers! It is somewhat odd to think of conscience only in terms of opinions because the word literally means ‘with science’ or ‘co-knowing’. The history of the physical sciences is a continuous process of theories or hypotheses being disproved by the facts and then improved or new ones formed to take account of the empirical data to hand. Scientists work with a regulatory idea that there is a truth or reality outside of their theories or hypotheses, this truth causes them to change their theories, it is the unchanging changer of their theories, the lure towards which they are drawn, they have a homing instinct for the truth. Without this the scientific enterprise would be rendered meaningless, no ‘body’ of knowledge would be built up. So in the field of conscience placing freedom in opposition to authority overlooks something if human existence and freedom are to have meaning, for authority from the Latin ‘auctoritas’ means to build up, to enable something to grow and become what it is meant to be, its real self. Meditation is, as John Main himself said, a way of growth because what we are growing into is life itself. But true growth can only come from existing growth, ultimately from the roots; originality is about being connected to the origin. ‘And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.’(G.M. Hopkins) To speak with authority we have to be in contact with the author, joined or articulated to the source of life. All the members of the body grow together, but if a link is broken the member withers and dies. Joseph’s silent articulation in wood mirrors God’s silent articulation of Joseph himself. Joseph knew instinctively that his life had been formed by grace and revelation; it could never be just the product of something from his own resources. Like T. S. Eliot he knew that words after speech reach into silence; words strain, crack, break under the burden, they slip, slide perish and decay with imprecision. The Word in the desert is most attacked by voices of temptation. (Cf. Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness), it is ‘Only by the form, the pattern,/ Can words or music reach/ The stillness, as a Chinese jar still/ Moves perpetually in its stillness.’ There is only one maker (poietes) and we are to be simply, as Stravinsky said of his composing The Rite of Spring, a channel through which the communication passes. We are composed, in that we find composure and our correct posture rather than having to strike a pose. Meditation and the mantra help us slip through the crowd of voices of the ‘teeming mind’ to the presence of God and learn that wisdom of heart when we know the shortness of our life and are saved. (Cf. Wisdom 9:15, Psalm 89:47, Luke 4:30 and John Main – Silence and Stillness in Every Season, September 7th.) As Eliot said it is – ‘something given and taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, ardour and selflessness and self surrender.’ It is never completed in this life for Love is itself unmoving only the cause and end of all movement.

To disregard the laws of nature or the reality of human nature will result in pain or suffering of some sort. In his address to the Bishops of the U.S.A. in 1991 entitled ‘Conscience and Truth’ Cardinal Ratzinger as he was then, says that for Newman truth was the middle term providing a link between authority and subjectivity. If following an erroneous conscience excuses a person then conscience becomes a protective shell into which a person can escape and hide from reality, it dispenses with the truth. Conscience then ceases to be a window onto the common recognition of truth which builds and sustains us all, it ceases to be that openness to the very basis of our being and the power to perceive what is essential, rather it becomes the justification for a subjectivity that cannot be questioned and the justification for a social conformity that is intended to make living together possible. But then the search for truth ceases as do any doubts about the general inclination of society. Cardinal Ratzinger uses the insights of the psychologist Albert Gorres who shows that the capacity to recognise and feel guilt belong essentially to the spiritual in man. This feeling of guilt disturbs the false calm of conscience; it could be called conscience’s complaint against my self-satisfied existence. It is as necessary for man as the physical pain which signifies disturbances of normal bodily functioning. The value of physical pain is that it makes you do something to relieve it, to seek healing, in extreme cases we call for an ambulance, from ambulare = to walk. Jesus would instruct those he healed to get up and walk, the call to repentance and discipleship releases us from the disorder of guilt. (Cf. Laurence Freeman – Jesus the Teacher Within p43, Continuum) We are not to wallow in guilt but do something about it. Therese speaks of taking God by the heart, she asks us to consider a disobedient child who sulks in a corner out of fear of punishment and so is out of reach of forgiveness, whereas the same child if they run with outstretched arms to their mother; smiling and asking for a kiss and promising not to do it again will be welcomed tenderly, even though the mother knows the child will probably do the same again. Through poverty of spirit meditation helps us to purify our hearts to become more attentive to the loving presence of God in our lives, and so trust in his forgiveness. But if we are no longer capable of perceiving guilt we are, as Gorres says, spiritually ill, a ‘living corpse, a dramatic character’s mask’. Cardinal Ratzinger links Newman to Thomas More as the great witness of conscience. For Newman a man of conscience is one who never acquires tolerance, well-being, success, public standing and approval on the part of prevailing opinion, at the expense of truth. Newman was not enamoured of the state of Catholics in his day but saw the necessity to obey recognised truth over his own preferences. Thomas More only gradually mustered up the courage to obey conscience and the truth that was higher than any human court. Two standards appear in ascertaining the real voice of conscience; it is not identical to personal wishes or tastes and does not lead to social advantage as it is not the voice of group consensus or a demand of political and social power.

Where the light of conscience does not shine it is a consequence of a deliberate looking away from that which we do not wish to see. This is profound human wisdom and points to two levels of conscience. Anamnesis or remembrance and ‘conscientia’ itself; referring to judgement and decision. Anamnesis refers to something present in us, a law written on our hearts. (CF. Psalm 19:12-13, Jeremiah 20: 9, St. Paul to the Romans 2:1-16 and St. Gregory of Nyssa on the Beatitudes for Saturday week 12 in the Office of Readings) Newman links it to the angels, conscience is ‘a messenger of him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by his representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.’ (Letter to the Duke of Norfolk) To hear and follow the voice of conscience we need to be sufficiently present to ourselves which requires interiority because life often distracts us from reflection. (Cf. Catechism 1778-9) St. Basil too says that the love of God is not something imposed from outside but constitutes the capacity and necessity of our rational nature. Important to medieval mysticism was the idea of the spark of divine love hidden in us, like the fine pearl of the Gospel which to own we must sell everything.  Augustine said that we can only judge that one thing is better than another because a basic understanding of the good had been instilled in us.

Conscience then is like an ‘original memory’ of the image of God in us, it is an inner ontological tendency which draws us naturally towards the good, true and beautiful so that we become a true likeness of that original image. We resonate with some things and clash with others. The anamnesis of the origin, which is a result of the godlike constitution of our being, is not a conceptually articulated store of retrievable knowledge but rather an inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that the one to whom it is addressed, if he is not turned in on himself, hears its echo from within. In hearing the voice of conscience, like the Prodigal Son, we realise that our search for life has been in the wrong direction there is no nourishment where we are, but now we see where our nature points us and what we are truly seeking. ‘That’s it’ we say as we realise who we are and return home and are fed once more from the source of our life, the dead are raised to life in the spirit. Conscience and the mantra are like the needle of a compass always pointing us in the right direction back to our aboriginal homeland where our hearts are nourished by God’s life giving Spirit. The anamnesis instilled in our being needs some assistance from without so that it can become aware of itself, but this without is not in opposition to the anamnesis but ordered to it, it has a ‘maieutic’ function, like a midwife bringing to birth, bringing to fruition what is proper to anamnesis which is an openness to the truth. Eckhart speaks of the birth of God in the soul, it requires that silence which enables God to work and speak within, but it has to be called forth, like Mary being called forth from home at the raising of her brother Lazarus (Cf. John 11:28-29) and Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman (Cf. Matthew 15:21-28). Jesus’ delay in coming to Lazarus and his initial silence in response to the Canaanite woman are expressions God’s delays and silences which in themselves are signals for us to respond to the gift already given, if the child of faith within is to be born into the light of day and God’s glory made manifest. This is the basis of mission, the Gospel must be proclaimed to all because they themselves are yearning for it in the hidden recesses of their souls. (Cf. Isaiah 42:4) The teaching authority of the Pope therefore consists in being the advocate of this anamnesis or Christian memory, he elucidates and defends it. Newman’s toast to conscience must therefore precede a toast to the Pope because without conscience there would be no Papacy, all power that the Pope has is the power of conscience. It is a service to the double memory upon which the faith is based and which again and again must be purified, expanded and defended against the destruction of memory which is threatened by a subjectivity forgetful of its own foundation as well as by the pressures of social and cultural conformity.

The second level in conscience is ‘conscientia’ which the medieval tradition understood as judgement and decision. For Aquinas conscience is not an ontological quality of man but an existential one, an event in execution. This may explain the diminution of the concept of conscience. Anamnesis is the ontological foundation, the inner repugnance to evil and attraction to the good, whereas the act of conscience applies this basic knowledge to a particular situation. But whether something is recognised or not is also dependent on the will which can block the way to recognition or lead to it. It depends on an already formed moral character which can either continue to deform or be further purified. At this level of judgement it can be said that an erroneous conscience binds. No one may act against their convictions, (Cf. Romans 14:23) but this does not in itself signify the truth of subjectivity, it may not be wrong to follow your convictions but it may well be wrong to have come to that conviction in the first place by having stifled the anamnesis of being. Levin, a character in Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, comes to enlightenment when he hears a peasant praise an old man, Platon, for ‘living for his soul and remembering God.’ Levin had in fact been living in inherited ways, the spiritual truth he had been given as a child, but he had refused to acknowledge them. He realised he had been happy whenever he had not been thinking of his life, whatever happiness is it is not generated by the mind, it might tell us whether we are happy or not but it does not generate these states of mind. (John McDade - Principal’s Address to Postgraduates 2005, Heythrop College.) Meditation too is not what you think it is! Guilt then lies not in the present act but much deeper, in the neglect of my being which makes me deaf to the internal promptings of truth. (Cf. Psalm 19:13) Stifling this anamnesis of being leads to an alienation from self, a divided consciousness that reduces religion to little more than following the rules, even the Jewish Law. But as someone said in relation to the recent BP oil leak, no amount of law and regulation can prevent people from making errors of judgement. Laws attempt to reduce life to a technique, but awareness of the limitations of law helps us understand the need for discipline, a change of heart. This is an inner change ‘metanoia’, which needs help from outside, we become aware of the need for that grace which can work in us regardless of our imperfections.

Jesus commanded us to continue the celebration of the Last Supper as a memorial of him. Without this anamnesis we lose contact with the power of God, ‘If I forget you O Jerusalem let my right hand wither.’ (Cf. Psalm 137:5) But Jesus came to heal the man with the withered hand to restore our anamnesis of the presence of God, to wake us from the sleep of conscience or heart. Jesus’ words challenge us, as Eliot put it they are like ‘disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves’. It is through prayer of the heart that we keep our hearts awake. Without it we can have the experience but miss its meaning, we can miss the mystery of life’s inner meaning by judging by appearances alone. John Main gives the example of Romeo, seeing Juliet asleep he thinks she is dead with tragic consequences. (Cf. Word Made Flesh p45 – Truth of the Spirit, DLT) But Jesus sees into the reality of a situation, when he says that a little girl is asleep rather than dead as everyone thinks, they just laugh at him. (Cf. Matthew 9:23-26) A well known painting by Cecil Collins – The Sleeping Fool – shows a lady and a landscape which is the product of her contemplation. The Fool knows how to share in the depth of her contemplation through the quality of his sleep. ‘My eyes are awake before each watch of the night, that I may meditate (ponder) on your promise.’ (Cf. Psalm 119:148 also the dreams of Joseph, the disciples at the Transfiguration and in Gethsemane and the ten bridesmaids in Matthew 25:1-13) At a dedication service for some of his stained glass windows Collins gave the sermon himself, in it he referred to an ancient idea which surfaced in the spiritual culture of the Sufis, that in our hearts there is an eye and that this eye is shut. We are sleepwalkers, walking in the nightmare of the world. All real culture and real education are concerned with the existential knowledge of the opening of the eye of the heart. This eye when opened sees the world of the angels, for like sees like. Angels become our friends; calming the storm in the mind so that the eye of the heart can see, ponder more deeply, through the still clear waters of our consciousness. (Cf. Jesus calming storm in Mark 4:35-41 and Psalm 107:28-32) The relaxed yet alert sitting in meditation is the work of keeping our hearts awake, preparing for communion with the origin of all, who dwells in our hearts. This communion is for the world as it reaches out to others, radiating the Glory of God which awakens the hearts of those who are prepared, reminding them of the God who is already present.

The path to truth, goodness and beauty is a challenging one and not comfortable. But to retreat into self, however comfortable, will not redeem; the self withers away and is lost. But in ascending the heights of the good, man discovers more and more the beauty which lies in the arduousness of truth which constitutes redemption for him. John Main likened meditation to climbing a mountain, but always warned of the danger of stopping to admire the view; we are to keep saying our word. Meditation is not a retreat into self but a continuous transcendence of self, finding ourselves beyond ourselves. It is a death that leads to life, a loss that leads to finding, it dispels illusions so that we may embrace reality, allow incarnation to take place in us. Prayer then leads us to the truth that sets us free to become the person God has made us to be.  Christianity would be just a moralism if no message that surpassed our own actions became discernable. To show how we can observe simultaneously both how the anamnesis of the creator extends from within us outwards to the redeemer, and how everyone may see him as redeemer because he answers our own innermost expectations we can look at the Greek myth of Orestes. Briefly – Clytemnestra could never forgive Agamemnon for having sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the gods, and so with the help of her lover Aegisthus she slew him in his bath. Subsequently Clytemnestra’s own son Orestes had them put to death, an act of conscience because carried out in obedience to the god Apollo. Following this act of matricide Orestes is hounded by the Furies or Erinyes, who were referred to as the ‘dogs of Hades’, the mythological personification of conscience from a deeper wellspring of recollection. They reproach Orestes and declare his decision of conscience, his obedience to the saying of the gods, as in reality guilt. Later in the holy court, the white stone of Athena leads to Orestes’ acquittal, his sanctification, in some versions of the myth the Erinyes now become Eumenides or the benevolent ones. (Cf. Revelation 2:17) Atonement has transformed the world, the myth represents a transition from a system of blood vengeance to the right order of community, but more than that as Hans Urs von Balthasar explains (Cf. The Glory of the Lord Vol. 4 p121) – calming grace always assists in the establishing of justice, it tells us that the interior destructive distress of conscience’s objectively just indictment, guilt, should not be the last word. It speaks then of an authority of grace, a power of expiation which allows guilt to be washed away and truth to become redemptive. The longing for truth does not just make demands on us but also transforms us through expiation and pardon. Our being is transformed from within and beyond our own capability; this is the real innovation of Christianity. The truth then is no longer a yoke which is too heavy for us and from which we must escape into a freedom that is empty, but a yoke that is ‘easy’ (Cf. Matthew 11:30) we now know from inner experience that truth has come to us, loves us and has consumed our guilt in the fire of his love. Now we can hear the message of conscience with joy and without fear.

The sub-title of this article is a reminder of the crucial question Jesus asked his disciples. The answers of the people were on the right track in the sense that Jesus is the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophets, but they are looking backwards. Peter sees what is new in the person before him, he was able to answer correctly because he was open to receive the revelation of the Father, that Jesus is the Christ of the living God. It is the question we all have to answer ourselves; we cannot do that just through our own resources, we are drawn to Jesus by the Father and our openness to receive his revelation. Jesus said he would build His Church on Peter’s profession of faith; that building up of the Church can only continue on our profession of faith in Jesus’ identity. Given that we are made in the image and likeness of God and that Jesus is the image of the Father, to have seen Jesus is to have seen the Father, then it is crucial to identify Jesus correctly, not only as a matter of truth in itself but as the first step in ascertaining our own identity, so that God may see and love in us what He sees and loves in His beloved Son. (Cf. Roman Missal - Preface 35) The question Jesus asks his disciples, including ourselves, becomes then a question that we in turn can now ask of God! We can ask ‘Who do you say I am?’ Meditation for John Main is simply a way we can open ourselves to hear the reply, the simplicity required does not make it easy. St. Paul speaks of his own struggles, he does not do the things he wants but does the things he hates. He does not understand himself but realises his need of God’s help, where sin is grace abounds. In fact his weakness, his imperfections are a source of strength because the power of God can dwell in him all the more. It is not he who lives but Christ lives in him. He speaks of himself as a servant, slave or prisoner in the Lord, he is constrained to do the will of God; he knows that this is his way to true freedom. It has been said that criminals and saints are similar in so far as they pose a threat to society and so are mistrusted. The criminal poses a destructive threat, although they can be a rebuke in an unjust situation. The saint however poses a challenge in the call to transcendence, for society to go beyond itself to find its true self or nature. It is in this sense that Socrates was seen as a threat to the youth of Athens and was condemned to death. His confidence in our capacity for truth as opposed to the view that we alone set standards for ourselves leads Socrates to become, like Thomas More, a martyr for the truth and in a sense a prophet of Christ himself, who is himself the truth that sets us free. Samuel Beckett in his first novel Murphy; begins with ‘The sun shone having no alternative’ which in itself appears to understand the relationship between freedom and necessity, but he continues ‘on the nothing new’. For Murphy there appears to be no springtime, no newness of life to look forward to, no growth beyond what and where you are. It is a machine like necessity, mechanical as opposed to the vocational pull of the saint or the necessity that artists experience in having to write, compose or paint. Murphy sits, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton; a mew being a cage for a moulting bird of prey. He must soon make new arrangements for the mew has been condemned.

As Balthasar says – ‘The centre lies in the heart; this is why reverence is given to the incarnate heart, and to the head only when it is all covered with blood and wounds, because then it reveals the heart.’ (Cf. Love Alone is Credible p146) It is through revelation we realize that the restless heart understands itself only if it has seen the love offered to it by the divine heart that breaks for us on the Cross. Georg Trakl in his poem ‘Song of the captive Blackbird’ says of the crucifixion itself - ‘The compassion of radiant arms embraces a breaking heart.’ It was only when the wounds of Jesus touched Thomas inwardly and opened his heart that he could profess his faith. Heart spoke to heart, reason comprehends rationally that he is incomprehensible and experiences the limitation of being a creature in relation to the creator. St. Therese saw herself as a feeble little bird, she is not an eagle but she has an eagle’s eyes, heart and aspirations. Her littleness leads her to a bold surrender to God’s grace; she keeps her eyes trained on the object of her desires. Like John the Baptist she knows that she must decrease so that he may increase, the way up is the way down. This requires simplicity, also a filial trust that God would never give a desire that he cannot fulfil, and the boldness to want to be her true self in the image and likeness of Christ, because in reality the gift has already been given, it has simply to grow and blossom through the light and grace of God’s love for her. At the end of her life Therese suffered the solitude of physical suffering, but she trusts and is certain of God’s love. In her final hours the solitude tips over into desolation, she can’t take any more but does not regret falling into God’s love. Desolation is the experience of the absence of our essential solitude, an experience of the abandonment of God, of not being at home even to oneself. The wilderness is a place of desolation, where no one lives, the place that Jesus came to repopulate. We remember his own Temptation in the wilderness, his prayer in Gethsemane that the cup pass him by but that not his will but the Father’s will be done, and his final cry on the cross – ‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me?’ (Cf. Psalm 22:1) To come through these temptations and extremes of suffering requires our will to be united to the will of God. In the early history of the Church there was much controversy about whether Jesus had one will (monotheletism) or two wills (dyotheletism). The Church’s teaching finally favoured the latter; Jesus has two wills corresponding to his divine and human natures. They always act in harmony for Jesus came to do nothing except the will of the Father, and so to have seen Jesus is to have seen the Father. Jesus’ sacrifice (ie. to make holy, from sacre = holy and facere = to make) on the cross is one of atonement precisely because of this at-one-ment of his two wills. When this exists there is that trust and faithfulness which draws all things to itself, it articulates the body, joins it together in an act of re-membering. The heart of Christ becomes the alpha and omega of the blood supply that brings life to the whole body; which can now grow and become its true self. (Cf. Remainder of Psalm 22) The blood flows continually through vein and artery in opposite directions, from the heart and to the heart. Like dancers who have to move in opposite but complementary directions, otherwise the dance descends into a wrestling match! (Cf. Genesis 32:24) Meditation helps us pray without ceasing, even old men should be explorers for the condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything, where our will and God’s become as one. As the poet Blake put it ‘He who binds to himself a joy/ Does the winged life destroy;/ But he who kisses the joy as it flies/ Lives in eternity’s sun rise.’ Like St. Paul, St. Therese and all the saints we can ‘escape the snare of the fowler.’ (Cf. Psalm 91:3) and ‘fly like a bird to the mountain.’ (Cf. Psalm 11:1) All shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well for it is no longer we who live but Christ lives in us, see Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 1:15-23. Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus!