Minute Meditations

The human mind can be very reactive. We don’t get what we want and we rage, complain, or attack whatever we can blame for the disappointment. It is astonishing how cruel and irrational we can be even over relatively minor things, when things don’t go our way. Pain and sadness usually separate and isolate us. Sometimes they even sever us from the very hand that stretches out offering to save us by connecting us again to a source of compassion and healing. To another. Even in the midst of loss and confusion and fear, we can learn to choose another way. Rather than the reaction of anger there is the response of acceptance. Simply accepting what is. In that openness to truth—the truth is what is—the option for violence dissolves. We see with a higher reason that violence is a terrible lack of imagination. When we respond to events in this way we leave the past behind and a bright light from behind us illuminates the road ahead.

You have only to be truthful to cause trouble. But it’s a different kind of trouble when you are untruthful. You have to decide what kind of troublemaker you will be. Perhaps most people want to avoid causing any trouble because they are frightened of a backlash; but eventually we all have to decide. Are we going to tell the truth, to live the truth or to hide behind platitudes and half-truths? A heightened level of awareness through meditation can  allow us to be truthful even when this carries a high cost. "The truth will set you free." When meditators experience this incremental liberation from fear and evasion, they more readily come out into the open to say what they really mean. And they stand on the side of those in need rather than merely on the side of those who will be the likely winners in a conflict. In the mysterious paradoxes of reality it can often happen that divisions are necessary to create healing and a stronger union. We break the bread in order to share it and be brought into unity. The mystery here is that of separation, which is necessary for us to know ourselves before we can give ourselves to another, to God.

When Yeshua moved about Galilee he was a consistently steady, still point manifesting in many places. People who stay at home but fantasize about trips and being elsewhere do not have anything like this stability. St. Benedict says the monk “must prefer nothing to Christ.” Quite soon in my monastic life I heard the ironical version of this, “prefer nothing to a trip,” from monks who had come to understand stability primarily in geographical terms. Of course we can also be on the move as a way of keeping one step ahead of reality, being on the run from something and protecting ourselves from it. But stability, whether you are busy or not, is a fruit of meditation. It produces the clarity, discernment and good judgment that improves the quality and other-centeredness of our lives. Stability brings the point of departure and the place of arrival together in a dynamic stillness and a radical openness to change. Not a bad goal to identify, even in the last part of Lent.

We slice up experience into beginnings, middles and ends and draw lessons from the slices. We stock our mental shelves with these stories, often adding to or refreshing them according to what we sense our listeners would like. The Irish make a living from this. Reality at the cutting edge, however, is characterized by frayed ends and incomplete conclusions. Chaos is another word for it, one that we don’t like to use about our lives. But we walk a very thin line between cosmos (order) and chaos, and most of the order we put into things has a tendency to unravel very quickly. Even when we get the key to understanding its meaning, like Jesus’s poor parents, we don’t understand it. But he went back and lived with them anyway which, for the time, was evidently enough. In the self-discipline of Lenten meditation, which sharpens our daily awareness, we get deeper and more piercing glimpses into this provisionality of life and, strangely, we even find it reassuring.

Friends are people who are there for us when we need them. Often we don’t know who among our acquaintances are true friends until circumstances reveal it. This being-there-for of friendship applies not only in times when external events overwhelm us and we feel helpless and alone. Friends also, on occasion, save us from ourselves. Our inner high and low pressures threaten us with a personal implosion. A friend knows us well enough to recognize this and does not walk away. Friendship, like the relationship that Jesus describes himself having with his “Father,” is like the digital cloud. Everything here down below is stored up there, non-geographically, but accessible from any physical point and at every moment. Both friends are there together in the cloud. But they are also individuals, living the friendship in all the changing circumstances of life. Perhaps this helps us understand why the way this relationship with the Father is described sounds both deeply intimate and way beyond our grasp.

"Stand up, take your mat and walk." The man healed in the Gospel story (John 5:1-16) complains that no one has helped him to get into the magic pool while the angel was stirring the waters. He has been waiting there for thirty-eight barren years: as long, according to Deuteronomy, as the Israelites had wandered in the desert. What’s the symbolism of that? Are there problems, blocks, hang-ups in yourself, in your character, in your life, that have been with you for as long as you remember? Things that you have given up on ever getting over but which still cause you to regret, complain or feel sorry for yourself? The cause of the problem, however much it is ancient history, set deep in the early layers of your life, is linked to and sustained by the effects of the sadness or anger it has produced. So we are held in a double pincer movement: a historical trauma and an ongoing post-traumatic stress. The past has flooded and incapacitated the present, just as a computer virus invades and slows down operational functions. We are held captive and we feel no one seems to want, or to be able to help. The spirit cannot tolerate such a situation and such a waste. Given half a chance, even a brief encounter by a magical pool, it will penetrate the person and target the problem and say, “Now move on and take that damned mat with you.” This is what is happening in meditation.

Anyone concerned for a loved one in danger, is desperate for a miracle. Even when we have faced the truth and given up false hope, there remains a pocket of desperation where the dream of a miracle never dies. Our need for magic, for manipulating causes and effects from the outside, can even survive despair. Political crisis, economic downturns, fiction and boy wizards all evidence our appetite for the fast food of magical signs and wonders. When things are desperate, that is when we most want magical powers. In the Gospel, Jesus exposes this and so frees us from the addiction to magical solutions. What flows from him is the power of healing in the full force of compassion. In meditation we are saved from our own desperation, not by the external signs of magic, but by what is already within us. Jesus didn’t want people to see him as a magician or even as a messiah. He wanted more, for people to connect with him, to know him, from within themselves. There are also signs and wonders associated with that. But they are not magical. They are the real signs of a wondrous transformation of self, produced by the relationship we call faith.

The truth is not just what you say. You can wait for your lawyer to give you the oily words that will get you off the hook. But truth is lived, not spoken. It is what you live and how you live. Truth cannot be hidden. When the dust of the explosion that tries to destroy it settles, whatever you tried to conceal is more visible than ever. If you have something to hide and if you are afraid of the truth, then this is the terrible, inescapable truth of truth. It will come to light, just as reality will emerge from the ashes of the illusion that tried to evade the truth. This is true not only of deeds done. It is also true of a truth repressed in our minds and memories. A feeling that is too painful to face, a mistake too hurtful to admit, an insight too transformative to welcome. Until we come into the open and let the truth expand in the light, we will be hounded, and we will be on the run. Meditation is living the truth. In the light—in the open.

We say things like “There are two kinds of people…” or “We can do one of two things…” The mind likes dualities because there’s always a winner and a loser. But, as God and the meditator know, dualities are only two-thirds of the story. The deeper, subatomic mind thinks in threes and so winning or losing isn’t the main point. As a teacher, using stories that were both simple and subtle, Jesus used the dualistic to get to the Trinitarian. Don’t we all have moments when we feel superior, if not to everyone else, then at least to the lowest? And don’t we all have, in the murkiest corners of our ego, an awareness that we are very screwed up and can do nothing about it except open ourselves, in that very place, to the God we only discover in humility? Except we do even that imperfectly. So what is the mind that is aware of this duality within us? The third, which makes one. Except it is a non-numerical oneness, a unity and a union in which duality is both healed and transcended in the process of meditation. And so there’s the paradox when Jesus says, "Those who exalt themselves will be humbled, but those who humble themselves will be exalted." You obviously can’t stay long in either place then. So where are we? We arrive at that non-geographical place when we see that God is smiling.