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MESSAGE FROM FATHER LAURENCE, 4 April 2007
    HOLY SATURDAY | EASTER SUNDAY|
    HOLY SATURDAY -- Apart from learning to love, experiencing death is the great initiation into life.
    In facing death all the ideas, opinions and images in which we wrap the gift of life unravel. We
    see what is really there and it is rarely what we supposed. Having an idea of something is not
    the same as seeing it directly – which is enlightenment. For the Christian, enlightenment is a
    ‘new creation in Christ’. It is not anything esoteric or discovering a new power but simple
    unobscured vision. Seeing things as they really are is seeing God and all it needs is a pure heart.

    Holy Saturday liturgically symbolises that great tract of time and space between one way of
    knowing - that death concludes – and another way of seeing which includes full understanding.
    The first feeling is of utter loss. “We will never see him again” and there is really no consolation
    for this because it is irreversibly true. At least we will never see him in the same way ‘in the
    flesh’ which is the only way we knew.

    Every true human friendship – and every kind of relationship aspires to perfect friendship –
    evolves beyond fear and self-consciousness. It becomes ever more a sacrament. We take such
    gifts for granted, that’s part of the gift. It’s a fruit that has grown and should be eaten. But then
    we learn that it’s not the end. After the fruit there is death which has to separate again before
    final union is realised. “It is good for you that I am going away..” Jesus told his friends. And
    when re-union happens it is something quite new because a third presence is there – the space
    in which two solitudes meet, the go-between who was always there, the invisible, unobtrusive,
    Holy Spirit. We really grow up with the sending or rather the receiving of the Spirit which opens
    our eyes to see all that is really there as well as all that we had misunderstood.

    The best is to grieve before death happens and nature often gives us this chance if we can face
    it. Jesus tried to prepare his friends for his leaving but they could not understand who he was
    and so could hardly be prepared for losing him. So they were scattered and the community
    broke up, held together probably by the women waiting for what they did not know.

    Someone calculated we spend in all two weeks of our life waiting at red traffic lights. So much
    of life evaporates in mindless, impatient waiting in line or for bureaucracy to work or rectifying
    mistakes or just getting small things done. So much of the fruits of our labours are not what we
    planned and so many hopes fizzle out. This is part of the Holy Saturday meaning. Yet it doesn’t
    have to be a waste of time. It can be a holy waiting, an enlightenment without the light (this is
    faith and hope), a blind vision, in which simple acts of kindness in ordinary daily affairs give us
    enough of the light of love by which to see our way. Embracing the ordinary that lies between
    Friday and Sunday, accepting the uneventful, staying faithful to commitments even when the
    novelty has worn off: this is the ascesis of the ordinary and it is the only cure for the conditioned
    boredom of our culture.

    Seeing is the treasure buried in the field of the ordinary. Meditation is the discovery and the re-
    burying of it, the selling of everything ‘for sheer joy’ and the appropriation of the field which
    means making our life truly and uniquely ours. Christ too is buried in the field of daily life. The
    buried Christ may confuse us about the kind of faith we have. Are we looking backwards just to
    the historical Jesus or forwards to a second coming? These are blurred, dreamlike ways of
    seeing. Clear seeing which Holy Saturday prepares for is the vision of a pure heart,
    contemplative knowing. At first it feels odd because the old subject-object setup has gone for
    good. The mirror mind is smashed by death (as it is by meditation), the infinite regression of two
    facing mirrors has gone and so has the image reflected in them. If we are to see anything now it
    will be in the way the Risen Jesus is seen. But how can we describe this without using the
    language of the old way of seeing? Now in the Spirit we see the Risen Christ who penetrates
    subject and object, making the two one though without destroying the two.

    To see the risen Christ means to recognise him and this happens when we are ready. The Holy
    Saturday aspect of life can be lived contemplatively, mindfully, as our preparation for this. We
    learn to feel his expectant gaze. For we are also got ready by the experience of being seen –
    and known and loved - just for who we are. This is the beginning of enlightenment. The
    Resurrection experience is the experience of seeing. It is prepared for by a long period of blind
    vision (‘never seeing again’) and a purification of heart helped by the knowledge that we are
    seen. This is the silent activity of Holy Saturday. And it lasts as long as it needs to.

    EASTER SUNDAY -- It seems odd at first that so little space in the Gospels is given to the most
    important element of the story. We would not have celebrated the last Supper or the Crucifixion
    or got through the emptiness of Saturday if it were not for the Resurrection. Yet the Gospels
    seem to treat the Resurrection almost as a footnote. The point is probably that they and the
    communities for whom they were written well understood the all-embracing centrality of the
    Resurrection. They took it for granted that the meaning of the whole story came from it.
    Everything in the Gospels is bathed in the light of the Resurrection. The Gospels don’t only make
    a case. They reflect the actual life of the community they nourish.

    The Resurrection experience is real. It happened. But exactly what were the physics of it we
    don’t know. It wasn’t observed and it can’t be described. But it can be seen by its effects and felt
    deep in our selves. In Indian thought there are four states of consciousness: ordinary waking,
    dreaming, dreamless sleep and the fourth which is enlightened, unitive awareness. This fourth
    state (‘turiya’) is pure consciousness but not strictly a separate state because it enfolds and
    penetrates all consciousness. Perhaps this helps understand the Resurrection experience as
    something that underpins and pervades all Christian thought and action.

    The Resurrection appearances that are the theme of the liturgical readings in the coming days
    of Eastertide are strange narratives. They emphasise the physicality of the risen Jesus. He can
    be heard, seen, touched and eaten with. But he is no longer bound by ordinary material
    limitations. And he is still on a journey through this realm of perception towards the Ascension
    when he passes beyond the realm of signs or, perhaps, enters into everything so that
    everything is capable of signifying him.

    How do the Gospels describe the disciples’ experience? In Matthew we are told that ‘Suddenly
    Jesus was there in their path’ and his first words are ‘do not be afraid.’ Before he disappears
    from their sight he assures them he will be ‘with you always to the end of time.’ In Mark he
    reproaches them for their incredulity and dullness but never for their desertion of him. In Luke
    he teaches the Emmaus walkers how to understand him in terms of scripture. And in John we
    have the richest collection of stories, including the appearances to Mary of Magdala, to Thomas
    and to the disciples at the Sea of Tiberias. In John, too, Jesus breathes on them and gives them
    the Spirit as part of the Resurrection event. There are many theologies in these diverse
    accounts. Over the millennia they have been developed into the profoundly catholic diversity of
    Christian understanding.

    One common feature of the Gospels on the Resurrection is the role of women. The first
    appearances are to women who, unlike the male disciples, believe immediately once they
    recognise him although, like the men, they are amazed or at first prevented from seeing him
    clearly. Women are also the first apostles of the good news. For a patriarchal society in which
    the testimony of women was not valued this is an extraordinary choice. Perhaps it illustrates
    the meaning of the event. The Resurrection does not usher in a new religion or philosophy or
    dream about the next life but a new way of living this life. The injection of the risen life of Jesus
    into the human and cosmic realm is progressive. As it spreads – through the transformed
    minds and hearts of disciples – we see that it is not a privatised experience. We see and meet
    Christ in community. (Meditation for this reason creates community as we know). And those
    can be called his disciples who have felt the beginning of the transformation he effects and also
    the mission and meaning that follow. When this happens we are no longer paralysed by choice,
    as so many modern people are, but experience the freedom of being chosen and empowered.
    Jesus as teacher has expanded beyond his culture, his time and himself. He is a teacher on a
    scale and at a depth that is hard to imagine. But he is not a co-dependent guru who
    accumulates adoring but star-struck disciples. He empowers those he loves to become
    spiritually mature, to go out and make their proclamation and with whom he works (Mk 16:20).
    The Resurrection continues to happen and extend its influence. It is still beginning.

    As John Main reminds us every time we meditate we enter into the paschal mystery. Each
    meditation takes us into fellowship (never a ‘perfect’ community) as on Thursday, the silent
    meal. Through death of the ego as on Friday. Through days of uneventfulness and hidden action
    as on Saturday. And onto Sunday and into the beginning of the great dilation and great
    awakening of the Resurrection, the universal embrace that is salvation.

    With much love,
    Laurence