By Roland Ashby
August 6 is the day we commemorate the Transfiguration of Jesus (Luke 9:28-36), in which he radiated a dazzling light. August 6 1945 was also the day that America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which also radiated a dazzling light, but of a very different kind.
There is perhaps no more confronting juxtaposition of polar opposites. It powerfully encapsulates the stark choice which faces humanity – will we choose the path which leads to death, suffering and destruction, or will we choose the path which leads to life, love, joy and peace?
One of the prophets of our time, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, has been sounding the alarm in increasingly desperate terms, not only about nuclear proliferation and war, but also the existential threats posed by global warming, greed and inequality.
In Mark Chapter 3 we are told that Jesus’ family “went to take charge of him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind’.” He was of course “out of his mind” because he was surrounded by such desperate need for love and compassion and healing. Everywhere he looked, the need was so great that, at times, he must have felt overwhelmed – out of his mind - with sadness.
You, like me, may also often feel overwhelmed with sadness at the state of the world. This is indeed a time of lament for our world, and so I often find myself turning to the psalms of lament, which make up just over a third of all the psalms.
Psalms of lament cry out to God in sorrow, grief and anger, while also clinging to the hope that the God of Love, infinite source of a love that is stronger than death, will not desert us in this hour of need.
I recently felt compelled to write my own psalm of lament:
A Lament for our time
Dear God of love and all that is life-giving;
eternal source of infinite mercy;
wellspring of all goodness;
my soul thirsts for you,
as a drought-plagued land thirsts for soaking rain.
My soul cries out,
and my heart breaks in anguish,
as your enemies revel in their victory: those purveyors of death and destruction, suffering and misery mock you in a myriad ways:
Through the catastrophic fires and floods of global warming, which also steals from our children and grandchildren – and all living things – their futures;
Through the mindless brutality, pain and bloodshed of war;
Through the insatiable lust for money and power which afflicts some, and which condemns many others to poverty and stunted potential;
And through the ruthless regimes which savagely persecute and oppress, torture and murder.
So come, Holy Spirit, come!
Heal your broken world!
And deliver us from the evils of genocide and ecocide.
Oh Creator, sustainer and redeemer, make haste
to purge us, renew us and make us whole.
Scatter the foul stench of fear and hate with the sweet fragrance of your love,
and cleanse us of our sin.
Oh God of Compassion and Justice,
Whose love reaches the furthest star and penetrates every atom,
let not your enemies triumph over you!
Enkindle the fire of your love in every heart,
wake us from the sleep of complacency and indifference,
in which we pursue pleasure and ease at others’ expense,
and stir us to act fearlessly for the well-being of all.
Oh God of steadfast and unfailing love, do not desert us in this hour of need.
What I find most disturbing is the reality of evil in our world, a reality so horrifyingly evident in the pictures we see every night on our TV screens, of the bombing of Palestinians, particularly children, or the events of October 7 and the taking of hostages by Hamas. Such images pierce the soul and shake the very foundations of our faith.
Indigenous Australian and Journalist, author and theologian Stan Grant has recently written that “evil is a state of being – or non-being – that severs our connection to what ancient philosophers or theologians described as supreme goodness, a ‘One’, a God”.
“In the West,” he adds, “we don’t take evil seriously. The media uses the word too casually. We live in a secular, hyper-rational world. How can we see the Devil if we cannot see God?...
“We should know it and name it when we see it. Evil lives in the gulags and the gas chambers; it lives in genocide. Evil haunts all the lands of the Earth.
“Evil exists in our indifference to suffering, our callous disregard of the poor, the abandonment of the mentally ill, the tear-smeared faces of children devastated by war, and the gluttony of the rich.”
He doesn’t let the Church off the hook either: “Evil inhabits what should be the holiest places, the churches that have perpetrated abuse of the most vulnerable.”
Jesus prays in John 17 verse 15 that his disciples may be protected from the Evil One, and indeed in the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer that he taught us to pray, we are to ask God to ‘deliver us from evil’.
As the Word, the logos, Christ offers us an alternative reality, and liberation from the power of evil.
This alternative reality for me is most powerfully experienced in meditation and contemplative prayer.
I was recently invited to put the following question to God:
Holy One, who do you say that I am?
By reflecting on my meditation practice, this is what I heard in response:
You are my beloved child, created by Love, in Love, and for Love.
You are created to be,
And to delight in my gift of simply being.
You are Being-in-Love,
and as you awaken to Being-in-Love
you will discover your True Self in me, in Being itself,
in the Christ Mind, the Christ Consciousness –
the Deep Spring of all love.
And as you awaken to your Being-in-Love,
the mists of all that you thought you were,
And all that others told you that you were,
will begin to clear, and reveal a still, timeless lake -
a mirror of the beauty of my creation, of sky and earth,
in silence and peace,
joy and love.
And you will forever abide in what is eternal and true.
Contemplation offers humanity a way out of its cul-de-sac of despair. In his address to the Roman Synod of Bishops in 2012, Dr Rowan Williams, who was Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, said that contemplation is “the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world ... [we] inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.”
He said that contemplation, “is the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom – freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them.”
Contemplation also leads to a freedom from the dualistic mind, which Matthew Fox describes as the reptilian brain of “I win/you lose”, “I’m right/you’re wrong”, in which power, control and domination become the prevalent values.
In John 17:21 Jesus also prays: “May they be one as you Father and I are one. You in me and I in them, may they be perfectly one.” Here, at the heart of the Christian vision, Laurence Freeman says, “is the realisation, the discovery, the breakthrough into the field of undivided consciousness, of oneness, of simplicity.”
Here is an undivided consciousness which is the aim of contemplation, and which leads to the discovery that heaven dwells within us, as Jesus said. This is the ‘living water’ that Jesus offers the Samaritan woman in John’s Gospel, with which, he says, she will never thirst.
“Indeed, the water I give ... will become ... a spring of water welling up to eternal life,” Jesus says. (John 4:14)
The Christian contemplative tradition has embraced this metaphor of water as a way of describing the life-giving, and life-transforming consciousness – the Christ Consciousness or Christ Mind – which may be realised through contemplation.
Anglican Solitary and theologian Maggie Ross calls this deep consciousness “Deep Mind”, which in orthodox Christian terms is the Holy Spirit: the fount of love, grace, wisdom, care for others and all of creation, forgiveness and healing, unity and reconciliation, and life-giving creativity.
John Main, who, together with fellow Benedictine Thomas Keating, was a key influence in the second half of the 20th century in making contemplative prayer accessible to all people, uses a water metaphor to describe the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. This is, he says, “the stream of love that flows constantly between Jesus and his Father”. He describes it as “a prayer that continues in our hearts day and night”, and it is his conviction that this prayer of Christ is really the only prayer.
Commenting on Romans 5:5, and St Paul’s belief that God has flooded our inmost heart with his love through the Holy Spirit he has given us, Laurence Freeman says that this is the essential Christian experience: “to know that our inmost heart has been flooded. It is not just filled, but actually overflowing, with this love of God through the Holy Spirit.”
Towards the end of his encounter with the Samaritan woman, Jesus tells her that true worshippers of the future “will worship the Father in spirit and truth ... God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:23-24)
What is clear from the Gospel story is that a deep, personal knowledge lies at the heart of understanding the two terms. The woman experiences herself as known, but also as loved.
Psychotherapist and spiritual director James Finley says someone is awakened to their ultimate identity as being made in the image and likeness of God when the communication they receive evokes a response in them “in which deep calls unto deep … allowing [them] to know that something very deep within themselves that mattered very much was being addressed”. This is how the “unitive mystery” communicates itself.
When we go beyond the dualities and complexities of the mind through silence, and the utter simplicity of one-pointed meditation, such as mantra meditation, then we are able to enter a state of unitive consciousness, which mystics describe as divinisation, becoming one with God.
If we are to worship in Spirit and Truth, John Main says, then we can only do so “from the depth of our being” and “from the ground of our own experience, our own unique being”.
At the end of the story about the Samaritan woman, we are told that “Many Samaritans believed in Jesus because of the woman’s testimony.” (4:39). In Eastern Orthodox Christianity she is venerated as a saint – St Photini – because she was one of the first to spread the message of Jesus.
Jesus tells us in John 15: 26-27 that “When the Counsellor comes, whom I will send you from the Father – the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father – he will testify about me. And you also must testify ...”
In her commentary on the Rule of Benedict, Joan Chittister writes: “Benedict is begging us ... to realise that God is the only lifeline that life guarantees us. We have been loved to life by God, and now we must love God back with our whole lives.”
I would like to conclude by inviting you pray the following body prayer, inspired by Ephesians 3:16-19. You may wish to remain seated, or stand up.
Dear God of Love,
May I know the depth of your love (stretch your hands to earth)
May I know the breadth and length of your love (stretch your hands out to the horizon and then outwards to the sides)
May I know the height of your love (stretch your hands high above the head)
And even though your love surpasses all knowledge,
May I know your love in my heart (bring the hands to the heart in the prayer pose)
And may I share your love with all and in all (stretch out your hands to the horizon and then outwards to the side in a loving embrace of all – as in Christ’s pose on the Cross)
Amen.
This is a based on a talk given on 24 July 2024 at Benedict’s Well, an online outreach of the Benedictine Oblates of the World Community for Christian Meditation. You can see the talk, which includes a power point presentation and is preceded by a period of meditation, at:
https://www.youtube.com/live/GL81pet_7xM?si=zWybiRW6ZAN-djIi