Today would have been James’s 95th birthday. He died quickly and peacefully at home just a fortnight ago, on a warm Autumn evening, 26 October, comfortable, cared for, and surrounded by love.
Continue reading 11 November 2022
Some practical benefits
Disenchantment with materialistic values has led to an awakening of interest in the many forms of meditation, from the 1960s onwards, especially mindfulness meditation, which has been adapted from Buddhist techniques. Its medical use as a contribution to various forms of psychotherapy has been widely embraced.
Meditation can also serve as a special preparation for a demanding task, such as a musician, dancer, or actor before a performance, or when we are faced with a major responsibility. Meditation may take the form of repeating a specific word or text, as with the Hindu and Buddhist mantra, the Islamic dhikr, and the Jesus Prayer. It can also focus upon a visual image, as in the Tibetan Buddhist use of the mandala (a Sanskrit word which means circle) as a focal point for one’s meditation.
What’s in a name?
There is the expression ‘Blessed be the name of God’ just as sometimes we think of someone who is very special to us and we say ‘Blessed be Hywel’s name, or Christina’s.’ The name, however, is just a label. A rose by any other name will smell as sweet. It is only when we smell the rose, and experience its colour and shape, that we experience the rose. And so it is only through sitting quietly that we begin to experience that which we may call God.
That stumbling word
The word God has increasingly become a stumbling block for so many. What is important to grasp is that God is not a person, neither male nor female. As Meister Eckhart wrote, ‘God is no thing’. The nearest we can get is that of a cosmic energy and intelligence behind this universe. For myself, God is like an ocean of Love in which we live and move and have our being. But first we have to learn to swim!
The eternal mother
The story of Mary in the Gospels moves me by her sheer silence. When she and her husband take the baby to be blessed she is told that her heart will be broken. The next we know is that when Jesus is taken to Jerusalem for his bar mitzvah he is found talking theology with the scribes and, when rebuked by his mother, makes the enigmatic remark that he is about his Father’s business. We read how ‘Mary bore all these things in silence.’ For thirty years Jesus lived at home, as far as we know, until he discovered his vocation – why so late? – and left home to fulfill it. His mother then has to suffer being publicly rejected by him, ‘Woman, what have I to do with you?’
Thereafter silence. At the end, when Jesus, weak from the loss of blood, is hoisted onto the cross, his feet and hands nailed to the wood, his cries of pain echoing those of the hundreds of other crucified Jews around him, there she is, at the foot of his cross, silently keeping watch over his last hours.
It is not surprising that subsequent generations projected onto Mary the archetype of the Eternal Mother, and that she has commanded such devotion over the centuries. As St Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, ‘In danger, in doubt, or difficulties , think of Mary, call upon Mary.’
At the threshold
Dionysius the Areopagite wrote, ‘It is in that Silence that we learn the secrets of the Darkness that fills with a brightness more beautiful than beauty the minds that know how to shut their eyes.’ Often as we sit in silence we become aware that we are seated at the threshold of a vast ocean of love and knowledge that is beyond words.’
Holy ground
The sacredness of modern life has too often been obscured by the idea that the only holy place is the built church. Such a notion is wholly at odds with the idea teaching that God is present in all places; while Jesus’ own specifications have nothing to do with buildings, but rather any place ‘where two or three are gathered together in my name’. The ground on which we all stand is holy ground. It is good to recall the words of the Sufi mystic, Rumi: ‘I searched for God and could not find Him. I looked into my heart and there I saw Him. He was nowhere else.’
Practice
There are some who take to meditation like ducks to the water, but for many of us it is a hard slog! Repeating a mantra at intervals throughout the day is straightforward, but the act of sitting quietly for half an hour, and not letting the mind be swarmed by endless distractions, can be very testing. There will be good days and there will be bad days. But we persevere! As a character in one of Samuel Beckett’s stories remarks, ‘I can’t go on. I will go on.’
Torch-bearers
Throughout history there have been holy women and holy men in every culture who act as torch-bearers for the rest of us, signalling the way forward. The major figures are obvious: Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad… But there are countless others who are less well known. It is important to realise that there are many in our midst, living lives like the rest of us, in whom we sense a deeper quality which draws us to them.
Thomas Merton again
The Annunciation
The image of an angel appearing before a young woman is familiar to us from its countless depiction by artists. A sense of what might have been happening at that moment for this very young woman is conveyed most hauntingly by Edwin Muir in his poem The Annunciation.
The angel and the girl are met.
Earth was the only meeting place,
For the embodied never yet
Travelled beyond the shore of space.
The eternal spirits in freedom go.
See, see, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other’s face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there. He’s come to her
From far beyond the farthest star,
Feathered through time. Immediacy
Of strangest strangeness is the bliss
That from their limbs all movement takes.
Yet the increasing rapture brings
So great a wonder that it makes
Each feather tremble on his wings.
…
But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.
Muir’s words capture the inner experience of this young woman, an experience we occasionally we may also share, that deeper awareness of another order of reality.
