Being there

One of the fruits of meditating is a greater tolerance of others. It sometimes happens, even with close friends, that one of them will suddenly turn on us, or seem to reject us. It is then all too easy to withdraw and break off the relationship – unless we learn to recognise that our friend is nearly always projecting onto us some problem of their own. All we need to do is bide our time, keeping the relationship open. As a former Abbess of Stanbrook Abbey once wrote, ‘What a mystery is friendship. Some we have to carry, while others carry us.’ This is what Jesus meant by inviting us to love our neighbour as ourself. We are all journeying men and women and need to be there for one another. 

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Untying knots

Frequently we experience situations, most often in relationships, when we are faced with a problem that seems tangled and insoluble, a situation when any attempt to talk through the problem only seems to complicate matters further. What to do? As so often Shakespeare expresses it succinctly:

‘O Time, ‘tis thou must untangle this, it is too hard a knot for me.’

We learn to wait. We learn it through our practice of meditation.

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Loving

However much we may love another human being and however important their role in our lives, we must never seek to possess them. Even if we are linked in marriage or a civil partnership we have to learn to stand on our own feet, work out our own problems, rather than lean too heavily on our partner – who will be on their own unique journey. We also need to recognise that in a long-term relationship it can sometimes seem as though love has died. It is important to trudge on through the desert, knowing that if we persevere we shall in due course come to a new oasis where love flourishes afresh. We have but to persevere.

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