Can meditation have any effect in a time of war? Author and long-time Christian meditator Dr Noel Keating* believes it can. By opening themselves to the compassionate love of God, he believes meditators can bring compassion to the world, touching people in ways we cannot understand intellectually.
Laurence Freeman, who leads the World Community for Christian Meditation, spoke recently about the sickening invasion of Ukraine. He said:
It’s a really dark time for the world and we have to approach it with as much faith and hope and love as possible.The way forward is going to be difficult and unclear, but day by day, moment by moment, if we keep returning to our heart, that feeling of nausea that accompanies irrationality – cruelty, dishonesty and destruction of good relations and of decent negotiation and decent conversation ... can be transformed.
And then he posed a very challenging question asking: ‘What is the link between meditation and this kind of world event?’ His question has challenged me to explore what we can say about our contemplative understanding of the power of meditation, not merely in our own lives but on this broader stage. How can our practice of letting go, of sitting in silence, alone or as part of a group, open and vulnerable to Love, how can that impact on such an awful situation?
Thinking about it I recalled a talk from James Finley on his podcast ‘Turning to the Mystics.’ In a bonus episode for Holy Week 2020, he reflected on Veronica’s Veil and I think it addresses this question very well.
The Stations of the Cross recall the passion of Christ over 14 stations. Each of these stations, bar one, draws on a scene described in the Gospels. The one exception is the sixth station, which is Veronica’s Veil. It describes how Jesus is carrying the cross on the way to His crucifixion; the crowds are lining the streets, and Veronica is there, just one of the crowd. Some are laughing and jeering; others are there out of mere curiosity or because such executions are public events. Jesus’ distraught disciples were surely there too, and Veronica seems to have been one of them.
As she witnesses Jesus’s suffering, she is moved by compassion to offer him solace so she steps out of the crowd to wipe his brow, to wipe away the blood, sweat and tears from his face. She probably did so at considerable risk to herself, both from the Roman soldiers and from the baying crowd.
She offers Jesus the only thing she felt she could in that moment, which was her veil. Finley asks us to imagine that single moment when Jesus buries his face in the veil which she perhaps held in the open palms of her hand, as a parent might do with a child. Finley writes:
There’s this kind of primal moment where Jesus takes her veil, and he closes his eyes and lowers his face into her veil. And in that moment, the softness of her veil is the only solace he can find in a world turned harsh. At a deeper level, the solace he finds is her compassion for him ...[Imagine, as might be shown in a movie in slow motion] that in the moment Jesus closes his eyes to lower his face into the veil, in closing his eyes and lowering his face, the world around him disappears. She disappears. Everyone disappears ... [We can reflect]that in that moment, Jesus, without going anywhere, descends down into the deep, infinite, tender mercy of God, the Father, sustaining him in that moment.
I’m sure all of us can recall incidents when we were deeply touched while witnessing the compassionate action of another person. Seeing, for example, how caring the people of Poland, and elsewhere, have been to those fleeing Ukraine, now refugees. Ordinary, everyday people like ourselves were moved to respond, to offer transport, or accommodation, or both, to people who were fleeing the vicious, inhuman, unprovoked attack. And I think so many watching scenes like that on television were moved by their compassion to do something themselves. Compassion, like love, is infectious.
And so James Finley writes that such a moment, as experienced by Jesus through Veronica’s Veil, although it was a simple, single, limited gesture of compassion from her, was nonetheless experienced by Him as the solace of God the Father. And we can understand how this solace may have re-awakened Jesus to the sustaining depths of the oceanic, never-ending tender Love of God.Indeed that simple gesture of compassion most likely touched all who witnessed it, awakening them too. And it can do likewise for all of us who reflect on it at a time like this in our own lives.
And it is over in a moment as Jesus is forced to move on. If we weren’t paying attention we might have missed it. The legend tells us that when Veronica recovered her senses she realised Jesus’s face was imprinted on her veil. But Finley ask us to consider as a metaphor that the imprinted face is a symbol of her compassion, her face in the world. He asks us to consider that every time we respond with compassion ‘it is your face and my face on the fabric of existence in troubled times’, reminding us that we too are permeated by this solace and love that sustains us in the dramasof our lives, of our time. In other words, we can see the veil as a metaphor for the solace of faith in the midst of unresolved matters.
When you sit in meditation with the intention of grounding yourself in Love, your face, your True Self is imprinted on the fabric of the circumstances in which you find yourself. Those circumstances may be filled with all kinds of suffering, the fabric of your life may be bloody and torn, but that same fabric is the fabric in which this encounter is occurring in the depths of our hearts.
I tell children that meditation makes them kinder; because in meditation we become deeply conscious – albeit at a level of consciousness deeper than ordinary self-consciousness – that despite the differences and division we can see on the surface, even when they hurt us deeply – we are nonetheless united at the deepest level of our being. At the level of the True Self, we are one.
And it isn’t just that when we rise from our meditation we go out into the world a little more kindly. But just as importantly, as we sit in meditation with a trusting heart, we know at a very deep level that through the very act of meditation, the solace of the veil is mysteriously permeated throughout the whole world, touching people in ways that we can never understand intellectually.
We discover that meditation, indeed all prayer, is a ministry of compassion that interiorly touches minds and hearts around the world. And so our commitment to meditation, to opening ourselves to the compassionate love of God, is itself an act of courage, an act of faith, bringing solidarity and compassion into the world.
*Dr Keating has spent forty years in the education sector in Ireland, as a teacher, principal and education officer. He is author of ‘Meditation with Children – A Resource for Teachers and Parents’ (Medio Media) and voluntary coordinator of the Meditation with Children Project, which involves over 40,000 children, who meditate several times each week on a whole-school basis, across more than 200 primary schools throughout Ireland. He can be contacted at mnkeating@gmail.com
For more information about John Main, how to meditate and the WCCM see:
https://www.thelivingwater.com.au/christian-meditation
Prayers for Ukraine and peace can be found here: https://www.thelivingwater.com.au/prayer-for-our-time