Month: July 2016

I think often of some words by Dr Martin Israel:

‘To be fully oneself is the greatest joy we can know, for at last we are free. How can we know God? Simply by living in the present moment and responding  positively  to those around us and the challenges they might bring. This is spirituality – no longer to be thought of as the preserve of religion. The journey into our own inner nature is always the way to God. In this lies eternal joy’.

Too often religions can become fossilised, instututionalised – and even repressive.  To join a religious group can be a support and guide, but what is being realised increasingly today is that individuals can find their own way without going anywhere near a church, mosque or synagogue. An outstanding example of this is Etty Hillesum, whose story I have mentioned before, who, simply through the practice of meditation, found that there was a deep well inside her ‘and in it dwells God.’

It was on 9 March 1941 that this 27 year old Dutch Jewish student living in enemy occupied Amsterdam made the first entry in a diary that was to become one of the most remarkable documents to emerge from the Nazi Holocaust. Over the course of the next two and a half years, an insecure, chaotic and troubled young woman was transformed into someone who inspired those with whom she shared the suffering of the transit camp at Westerbrook and with whom she eventually died at Auschwitz.  Through her diary and letters she continues to inspire those whose lives she has touched since.

I recommend Patrick Woodhouse’s excellent introduction to her life and work: Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed, published by Bloomsbury.  

Meditating is like gazing into a pool and our busy, distracting thoughts are like the ripples disturbing the surface of the water. Slowly we become aware how, below the surface, everything is still. Once the turbulence dies down and the water becomes clear we can see into the depths.

The most vivid example of this process is one that happened when I was leading a retreat in a large country house in Suffolk. On a cold day in March a group of us were sitting, swathed in blankets, around a large ornamental pool. Our meditation was to gaze into that pool. In it the grey-blue sky was reflected, its stillness disturbed at first only by the passage of a bird reflected in the water, a crow making its way to the nearby woods. Then, beneath the surface of the mirror, among the dark roots of water lilies, we became aware of a large carp moving slowly, appearing and disappearing. At the heart of every pool the Great Fish lies waiting but we cannot command it. It appears of its own will and in the same manner disappears. When the mirror reflects nothing but the empty sky, even then, the Great Fish is there, deep beneath the surface.

We sat on, watching and waiting. We saw the mirror change colour as the sky became green and then, softly, snowflakes began to fall and we watched as each met its image in the water and was dissolved in the Great Pool, becoming one with the infinite. ‘When you fix your heart on one point,’ said the Buddha, ‘then nothing is impossible for you.’ At the heart of the Pool the Great Fish lies waiting.