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MESSAGE FROM FATHER LAURENCE, April 2007
    Dear Friends,
    Someone asked me recently what uniquely did Jesus bring to the world? I found myself replying
    with the word ‘touch’. He did not bring a new philosophy or morality so much as a new capacity
    to experience God in the fullness of our human being, mind and sense. Touch reminds us of our
    wholeness. No part of us can be rejected or diminished without the divine beauty of creation
    being dishonoured. One reason that meditation opens up a new way of ‘verifying the truths of
    our faith’, as Fr John taught us, is simply that when we meditate we can only do so as a whole
    person. And wholeness is the accumulating effect of the daily practice. Wholeness is an
    expanding sense of reality and of integration with others. These aspects of spiritual growth
    make sense of salvation not as a legal reprieve but as full health, vitality and the liberation of
    overwhelming natural goodness.

    This is why we dedicate special time to pondering the meaning of Easter in the light of the
    experience of meditation. It is also why we do lectio and why we share our insights with one
    another. Understanding of this type arises in us from the heart centre rather than from the
    intellect alone. However ‘spiritual’ we are we do need ritual, sacred symbolism, the communal
    repetition of the founding story to sensitise ourselves to the many more subtle ways in which
    this spiritual knowledge can unfold.

    What grounds the immensity of the Easter mysteries throughout the sacred Triduum is this
    comprehensive, faithful sense of touch. Tomorrow we see the bodiliness of the Eucharist and
    its connection with mutual service in the ‘lost sacrament’ of the feet-washing. On Good Friday
    we see shockingly how touch can also be abused to cause deliberate pain and how, in doing so,
    it diminishes the one responsible by locking them into their own dark ignorance. But we also
    see that the deep inner touch of love - that never ceased to be the supreme reality of Jesus’
    consciousness - need not be dispelled by suffering. With the nails in his hands and feet he
    asked the Father to forgive. Forgiveness is a way of touching the one who pushes us away and
    so of restoring the vital human connection with what has been lost.

    Only on Holy Saturday does the gift of touch abandon us. We feel the strange limbo of being un-
    touched. It’s a necessary transition, but not one we want to linger in longer than necessary even
    though it feels as if many today are stuck precisely in that no man’s land of personal isolation. A
    disturbing feeling of unreality follows death but by the purifying process grief – the gift of tears -
    it is also transformed into a way of breaking into higher reality. It is like climbing a mountain and
    passing through levels of thick mist. Then comes the unobservable sunrise of Resurrection. At
    what moment exactly - any day - can we say that the rays of the sun touch our eyes and skin?
    The sun breaks over the horizon differently for everyone because the horizon itself is only an
    idea, one that is relative to our own subjective position. The Resurrection touches us – as it
    gradually did the first disciples - into the awareness that the horizon, all that limits our humanity,
    has been surpassed.

    To be touched by Christ is to be reminded of all we had forgotten, to be restored to ourselves
    and to the actual world with a momentous new ordinariness. It is, as the New Testament says,
    like a new creation because everything within and outside is charged with fresh energy and
    meaning. The worst has happened and cannot happen again. What is lost is found and cannot
    be lost again. The power of illusion evaporates like the night and we begin an endless journey
    into everlasting day.

    Meditation is itself like a Triduum as it takes us through different levels and on different time-
    scales through this process of the paschal mystery: the ascent of consciousness beyond the
    limited tangibility of the ego into the universality of the spirit where everything is touching
    everything.

    I hope that during these days you have the opportunity to take the time to enter into the
    mysteries we are about to celebrate as a community in harmony with the universal church that
    is the new body of Christ. I hope you have the time to sit some quiet moments with the great
    texts that carry this meaning through the centuries. And I hope you can find a little extra time to
    meditate so as to allow these experiences to come together and lead you deeper into the
    wondrousness of everyday.

    I will be celebrating Easter at the monastery at Cockfosters with the monastic and parish
    community here and with a group of meditators who will be making a Triduum retreat. Time and
    inspiration permitting I will try to share some of the retreat talks each day with you and the
    wider community through the WCCM website. I have recently heard from our co-ordinator in the
    Solomon Islands which has been hard struck by the recent natural disaster. It is a remote and
    often overlooked part of the world – but one where meditation is being taught and has formed a
    strong community. So let us specially hold the Islanders in our hearts and pray that in the midst
    of their troubles they may also feel like us the same touch of the Risen Christ.

    With much love
    Laurence

    www.wccm.org