James Roose-Evans

Church prayers usually end with the phrase, ‘Through Jesus Christ Our Lord’, and there is a sense in which the man Jesus is like a window through which we see beyond to that ultimate reality ­– the force, the energy, that holds the entire universe together. In the same way, each of us, whether we are Buddhist, Christian or Muslim can be like windows reflecting something that lies beyond. But we need to keep our windows clean! One way is through the practice of meditation. As Elizabeth Mills writes in her book In The Stillness:

We need to be open
For the Divine
To enter in
Not too full of self
That there is no room
Making space
By being humble
And seeking to live in Simplicity
Asking for Love to flow in
And make its Home
In the centre of our hearts.

In other words we need to learn how to step aside to let the light through!

As we grow older it is important to be open to change, and when we reach our seventies onwards it is important to learn how to let go. It may be letting go of too many possessions, or too busy a social life. As we grow older it becomes ever more important to listen to the silence within. From a busy outgoing life we realise our task now is to cultivate our own garden, to practise silence, and just being, not having to do anything. In this way we become a still centre to which, perhaps, others are drawn and we find ourselves listening to their needs. The wisdom of old age is something that our society needs to rediscover.

At the end of the play, Hamlet’s last words are ‘The rest is silence.’ Words can convey so much, but not everyone has the ability to articulate their feelings. As Robert Frost once said, ‘If I write a poem about heart-ache or heart-break, and a reader says, “That is exactly what I feel but I couldn’t have put it into words,” then I know I have achieved what I set out to do.’ Again to quote Shakespeare: ‘I were but little happy if I could say how much.’ Which is why silence between close friends is such a gift, just as silence is at the heart of the spiritual journey.

The word ‘God’ can be a stumbling block, partly because of the anthropomorphic image, cultivated over the centuries, of an aged man with a long white beard. The Arabic word ‘Abba’, which Jesus used, means both parents, mother and father, as well as the divine source of all being. Yet, even to refer to God as father and mother is to remain stuck in anthropomorphic imagery. Meister Eckhart wrote, ‘God is no thing.’ For myself, Hamlet’s use of the word Divinity (i.e. a force, an energy) is helpful, as when he says, ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.’ And the image that comes closest for me is St. Paul’s reference to God as ‘an ocean of Love … in which we live and move and have our being’.

Gustav Mahler wrote that ‘Tradition is the handing on of the flame, not the worship of ashes’. It is all too easy for spiritual teachings to become enshrined as part of an organisation with rules and regulations. It is often forgotten that Jesus said, ‘I have come to bring fire to earth and what will I but that it be spread!’ The simple practice of meditation is one important way in which we can keep that flame alive within us.