Minute Meditations

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.

Because we are so bombarded today with messages and demands, and our attention is being pulled in many different directions, we like the idea of simplicity. We may also like leaving big decisions that we should take for ourselves to other people like the government or doctors or, though less often today for obvious reasons, to clergy. There is a plethora of courses and programs on the market offering to sort us out and give us skills we need to take control of our lives—provided we buy (and believe). Corporations and governments, distractedly aware of how much they are losing the war against distraction, are especially interested in these solutions. A spiritual solution, however, is different in a number of ways: it’s been around a long time and doesn’t claim to be new; it is not for financial profit; it is a discipline, not a technique; it is simple, not easy. Today’s teaching says the most important thing in life is to love God, your neighbor and yourself—equally. You will have to have become very simple before you can do this, but in the trying you will be radicalized—in the good sense—radically simplified and your capacity for love fully amplified. 

“Are you with me?” It’s a question we might ask an audience to make sure they haven’t gone off to sleep while we were talking. Or at a critical moment in negotiations when we need to know who is on our side and who isn’t. Or to a companion during a dark and dangerous walk along a cliff-edge to reassure ourselves he hasn’t fallen off. I don’t think Jesus means any of these when he says, "Whoever is not with me is against me; and whoever does not gather with me scatters" (Luke 11:23). We might still be “with him” even if we have fallen off to sleep or feel isolated in a hard place. He himself felt abandoned, but not disconnected from his Father at the end of his life—a strange and perhaps unique experience of communion and separation. In this saying, however, I think he means a deeper knowledge than is provided by evidence-based research—what we can see or deduce. It’s the knowledge that is knowing, not the knowledge stored in memory. The opposite of it is being “scattering.” To be scattered is to have our sense of self diluted by distraction, overextended by stimulation or fragmented in myriad lines of fantasy. It is a state in which we can say or do nothing useful and in which we may be dangerous if we can pretend to be there and with it. How might you respond to Jesus's question: "Are you with me?"

When we see hypocrisy—the enemy of integrity—we are cautious. If we condemn it—as Jesus and the great teachers did—we expose ourselves to attack. No one likes to be called a hypocrite, yet at some level we all know that we are. The word comes from the Greek hypokrisis, which means “actor.” Yet it is almost inevitable that we pretend to be or feel what we are not, or do not, even if we would also like to be what we pretend. We don’t have to despair about our inauthenticity, simply admit it. That defuses it and prevents our false self from blocking the way to the deeper level of consciousness. The sign that we are heading there is that we don’t take ourselves too solemnly and that we laugh at our false self and welcome other people to do the same. Gradually the actor’s mask becomes—as in great theatre rather than in soap opera—a transparent means of revealing the deeper truth. Form can then communicate the emptiness that is fullness. The wonderful thing is that this happens—if we allow it and make the space necessary—in subtle ways and in the most ordinary things of life. That is why Lent is about small things. And why meditation is more about practice than good intention.

When we see hypocrisy—the enemy of integrity—we are cautious. If we condemn it—as Jesus and the great teachers did—we expose ourselves to attack. No one likes to be called a hypocrite, yet at some level we all know that we are. The word comes from the Greek hypokrisis, which means “actor.” Yet it is almost inevitable that we pretend to be or feel what we are not, or do not, even if we would also like to be what we pretend. We don’t have to despair about our inauthenticity, simply admit it. That defuses it and prevents our false self from blocking the way to the deeper level of consciousness. The sign that we are heading there is that we don’t take ourselves too solemnly and that we laugh at our false self and welcome other people to do the same. Gradually the actor’s mask becomes—as in great theatre rather than in soap opera—a transparent means of revealing the deeper truth. Form can then communicate the emptiness that is fullness. The wonderful thing is that this happens—if we allow it and make the space necessary—in subtle ways and in the most ordinary things of life. That is why Lent is about small things. And why meditation is more about practice than good intention.