Spring 2016 Vol
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Meditatio Newsletter April 2016 1 Registered Charity No. 327173 - I N T E R N AT I O N A L E D I T I O N , Vol 40 No 1; April 2016 Three years of the You have a message: London Meditatio Centre “Let’s meditate” Since 2013 the Meditatio Centre has hosted retreats, workshops, talks, art exhibitions, bodywork, music for meditators from the UK and overseas (p. 6-7) Photo by: Mike Lau_ via Visualhunt / CC BY-NC-SA Meditators in China and Singapore are using mobile messaging apps to coordinate virtual meditation groups and distribute readings. Can technology raise the spiritual awareness of a distracted world? One of the regular webcasts transmitted from the London Meditatio Centre connecting the World Community (p.8) Laurence 2 Freeman 10 News 11 Infocus The fullness of life from A report on Meditation with Joseph Pang, a group leader within the great peace of Children in the Caribbean from Hong Kong, describes This issue This eternal Easter island of Antigua the path of meditation changing his life 2 Meditatio Newsletter April 2016 A letter from Laurence Freeman, OSB The Great Peace different meaning in the new experi- stress feeds and grows off itself. Then Dearest Friends, ence of life we call Resurrection. we are deceived – usually by mam- The danger is, that in speaking of mon – into thinking that the more It was a lovely spring afternoon these mysteries of faith that revolve stressed we are the closer we are in London, warm with just the edge at the heart of Christian life we sound coming to the great idol of Success. of winter left. I had not seen Calum, to others a bit out of touch with real- A century ago the most civilized my young godson, for some time ity. And sometimes Christians can, in nations of the world were in the mid- and took him out for lunch and a fact, sound like promoters of a won- dle of ‘The Great War’ to end all wars walk by the river. He brought with derful holiday resort that they haven’t that resulted in thirty-eight million him the camera that his sister had quite yet visited for themselves. In military and civilian casualties. Taking passed down to him. He had become fact, if we have been touched by Res- a short breather to re-militarise, the absorbed in its video function. So urrection, we are in touch with real- ensuing peace of Versailles that was he was filming everything that we ity, ‘the solid reality’, as St John puts it, typical of ‘peace as the world gives it’, passed by on the street and, when that ‘is Christ’. led to a new world war that cost up we got down to the river Thames I was recently speaking with a class to eighty million lives amounting to sparkling in the sunshine, he went of MBA students who had started to three percent of the human family at wild with excitement. Swinging the learn to meditate. Many of them said that time. camera in experimental manoeuvers Whether it’s the death-lust of he chased after a flock of ducks and war or the tragedy of unhappy lives back again to capture an endless sup- (...) the conversation is blighted by the diseases of affluence, ply of new scenes. There was nothing living with and keeping why is it we find the gift of life so hard not interesting enough to film in the to accept? Why does the great peace beautiful light of the day. Everything company with God seem so elusive? Out of the new life shone with the wonder of the world’s that filled the risen Jesus with the ever-surprising diversity. Life flooded they wanted to meditate because it playful love of the Holy Spirit he has through him with abundance and offered them a way of dealing with breathed his peace into us. His physi- excitement. He was radiant and free- stress. The depth meaning of medita- cal respiration ceased on the cross. spirited with all the colours of life. tion, of life itself, had been fore-short- He breathed his last and gave up his And it was vitalizing to be playing the ened by this great and now universal spirit. But this plunged him irrevoca- life-game with him. blockage to real life. I was struck by bly into the inner breath of God, the And it was Easter. As it always is Eas- the depth of this problem, the preva- life-cycle that over-rides the cycles ter. The important theology of Easter lence of the social malaise we call of death and rebirth. He entered the is that once it happens it never stops stress – the anxiety and damage to source and return-point of all that happening. To symbolize that liturgi- health it causes, the enemy of all the exists. From this inner breath of the cally the church extends the day of joys of life, breeder of fear and anger. eternal Easter he breathes the great Easter Sunday for eight days and the Of course life is stressful. It has a peace into the human heart at the season to forty. ‘Ordinary time’ which visible shelf life that changes daily. point where we are one with each follows Pentecost can never be ordi- Anything that is unpredictable, like life, other in a common humanity. nary again. On the other hand what has to deal at best with probabilities. On Bere Island this year the medi- is extraordinary is that it does remain Anything that shows us that nothing is tators on the Holy Week retreat took ordinary. We do not become astral certain until uncertainty has been fully time again to listen to the story of beings. We go back to this life to live accepted will ever be easy. the death and resurrection of Jesus. it in a new way, discovering its new- The problem is not stress itself, The time it took was again richly re- ness afresh continually. We remain then, but whether we understand paid with a clearer understanding of delightfully embodied and thrillingly the stressful aspects of life from with- time and the gift-nature of life which mortal. Death, the great threat to hu- in the great peace. Or, whether we Easter is all about. It comes to us as a man happiness, takes on a wholly experience only stress and find that story. It is above all a story. Christian Meditatio Newsletter April 2016 3 scriptures are not a string of abstract lives. Meditation brings us many ben- the church’s course. They wake us truths plucked from real life. They are efits and fruits. One of the greatest from the sleep inflicted on the hard a certain, amazingly intimate way of of these is that meditation teaches of heart and the self-righteous. They telling a story which plays out in the how to read the gospels in a way that restore us - as the same ancient hom- lives of all those listening – both in draws our whole being into the per- ily I just quoted puts it- to the new their inner lives and their outer lives. son of Jesus, not only as an historical life that fills us with the great peace, Once we have opened our heart to figure but as a personal and actual when we allow it to: this story, we feel an integration and presence. I command you: Awake, harmonizing of the inner and the out- For I in you and you in me sleeper, I have not made you to er – a new simplicity. We see in a new together we are one undivided be held a prisoner in the under- way the unfolding of our own lives. person. (From an ancient homily world. Arise from the dead; I am * for Holy Saturday) the life of the dead. Arise, O man, We are in conversation with God. Christian thought is like a conver- work of my hands, arise, you who In daily use ‘conversation’ means a sation that continually integrates all were fashioned in my image. chat, an exchange of ideas through the reflections and contributions that Rise, let us go hence; for you in words or other symbols of meaning. have been made from ancient times me and I in you, together we are But this is a more modern definition, until today. It is always fresh and yet its one undivided person. coming into use as culture began to richness is always growing. We are part As long as we listen to the story shift away from its spiritual balance to- wards an excessively rational and out- er-directed perspective. From about the 16th century it came to mean only ‘talk’. ‘Conversation’, however, means literally a turning towards something with another. In other words, keeping company with, living with, playing the game of life with… The New Testament is not a sutra. Later there did come Christian sutras, great intellectual reflections and ca- thedrals of the mind, which help to interpret the conversation, the tell- ing of the story which is the heart- mind of the gospel. The gospels are simpler than abstract truths. They are strikingly direct, intimate tellings of of it and as it changes, it changes us. from the outside, only as observers a story that is both cosmic and per- Many of us will have felt this as we and sceptics, we will think that the sonal. read of Pope Francis’ deep and simple new life it speaks about is a return We don’t read the gospels only insights into the mystery of Christ.