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MESSAGE FROM FATHER LAURENCE, 19 MARCH 2008
    THURSDAY, HOLY WEEK


    Dearest Friends,
    Last night, at the mass of the Lord’ Supper that opens the Easter Triduum and ends Lent we
    entered into sacred time. Here on Bere Island we are making what we call a spiritual retreat.
    But what does “spiritual” mean. We often use the word only when we don’t know what else to
    say. Sometimes we use it to distinguish a level of experience that is different from the
    ‘material’. Yet as we explore these meanings in the light of our ordinary experience we see
    the boundaries between mind and matter, the spiritual and the material, simply dissolve.

    Science gives us ways of describing reality, rather than exhaustively explaining it. We know
    now for example that what we call solid matter is as impermanent and evanescent as mental
    energy. All is energy.  Einstein said matter is a form of energy and Teillhard that spirit is
    “matter incandescent”. With the discovery of ‘dark matter’, composing a major part of the
    cosmos, we have another metaphor to help us understand both ourselves, consciousness
    and the universe.

    The mandorla is an ancient symbol illustrating the overlap and intersection of two parallel
    circles, creating a zone of integral unity – what we might call the expanding and contracting
    realm of the sacred.

    At the Eucharist we enter into this union of the spiritual and material, living out the deepest
    implications of the Incarnation itself. We ingest the bread and wine which become part of us
    and then, through us, part of the world (both human and impersonal) that embodies us.
    In meditation we bypass and transcend the egoistical force that separates and then often tries
    to make the divisions themselves into substitutes for the sacred – forgetting that what divides
    (the di-abolic) negates the sacred. Behind the mysterious communion of spirit and matter, self
    and others, that we celebrate in the Eucharist, is not magic but the self-giving of Christ that
    incarnates the divine self-giving.

    How odd then that we should have turned the Eucharist into another power structure, ringed
    round with rules and regulations that can more often divide than unite. At the heart of the
    mass is the supreme energy of powerlessness, the all-powerful and all-creative energy of
    love. As we washed each others feet, meditators and islanders, last night, as the wind blew
    hard outside, I felt we were trying to express and understand this simple and all-unifying truth
    that allows us to enter into the darker valley of Good Friday without fear.
       



    Laurence