The importance of not keeping secrets

Sunday 12A 25^th June 2023

[Matthew 10:26-33]

We call them “whistle-blowers”; those who act on their conscience to report wrongdoing by governments or other institutions. They are often threatened with severe penalties, because the organisations they challenge are enormously powerful. Nonetheless they feel compelled to reveal the truth about the evil, and speak out for the common good.

The Australian parliament recently improved Australia’s whistle-blower laws, but these amendments are not good enough. It is good that those who exposed Australia for shamefully deceiving the Timor Leste government have now been pardoned, but others still face terrible punishments. For instance David McBride blew the whistle on alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, and faces a trial which could put him in prison for up to fifty years. Richard Boyle, who reported misconduct at the Australian Tax Office, could be given a sentence of up to 161 years in prison. And then there is the Australian Julian Assange, who rightly exposed US war crimes and other evils, but has suffered conditions that amount to torture in a British jail, and may still be jail in USA for more than a century.

The twelve apostles whom Jesus sent out were also to told to reveal a secret – “What you have heard in secret, shout from the housetops” – not about guilt, but the glorious news that God is with us. Every human culture since the beginning had sought to grasp the mystery of where we have come from. and our final destination, but these messengers were to announce that the unseen Creator loves us; that we can address God as the most loving parent; that God’s reign was now beginning. Christians call this revelation: the Infinite Consciousness telling us about itself.

Jesus warned his messengers that they would be opposed and even be killed, as he himself was later murdered like the lowest slave. But he also encouraged them not to be afraid of those who can kill the body, but to fear only whatever can kill body and soul in “Gehenna”. The original Aramaic meant the destruction of the whole “self”, not of the soul separated from the body, as Greek philosophy has taught us to imagine.

Whatever the saying means, it does not mean that God might torment some souls or people in hell-fire forever, as Christian artists and preachers liked to portray. Catholics of earlier generations were taught this belief, but when imposed on children this terrible threat was a form of child abuse. Perhaps it was taught because it maintained the power of clerics, who claimed to hold the means to save us from “damnation”. It was one of the ways in which the church went astray.

The bible’s many sayings about the end of human life, or the end of the world, are highly symbolic and metaphorical. The symbol Gehenna comes from the burning, stinking rubbish dump in the valley of Ben Hinnom, outside Jerusalem. It powerfully symbolised the chaos of a life wasted and destroyed.

But immediately after this threat is mentioned, God’s infinite love is declared. We are told that God knows every detail of the natural world, including the movement of sparrows and the loss of human hairs. Jesus’ reported words conclude by saying that we are worth more than many sparrows. So we need to discard any idea we have of God as a human judge, made in our image, and pronouncing a final condemnation. The New Testament tells us that “God is Love” (1 John 4:8 & 16), and that if we can awaken and respond to that love, we will have nothing to fear. (1 John 4:18). This is the “secret” message that Jesus told his apostles to spread. Is it any wonder that he also told them – and all who speak the truth – not to be afraid, even of death, because the Spirit of Infinite Love is within them.

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Shaping many into one

Pentecost Sunday 28^th May 2023

[Acts 2:1-11]

When deciduous trees stand naked in winter, we can see their marvellous structure of strong branches supporting a filigree of tiny twigs. Curiously, these trees can look very like branching stream patterns seen from a plane or in satellite photos.

Both structures are formed by water. In trees it reaches up against gravity, to build a structure that spreads its leaves to the sunlight. In the stream-pattern, gravity draws together millions of water-drops into trickles, brooks, then a mighty river.

In both patterns, many small things work together as one. They call to mind the mysterious Source of the life-force that keeps seven billion of us humans moving around on the planet’s surface.

In today’s story of Pentecost this Source, the Holy One, came as a powerful wind and as fire, which separated, branched out, to touch each person present. Those people waiting in Jerusalem were each different, just as we are. They each had a unique face, voice and finger-prints, and diverse abilities. Yet they each breathed the same air, drank from the same water supply, and shared the belief that Jesus, who had passed through death, was now filling them with his Spirit.

That Spirit gave them power. The biggest jetliners can move 500 people at high speed through the air. They get that power by burning about four litres of fuel every second. The sun burns a million tonnes in that same time. How powerful must be the force, the Consciousness, that sustains the whole universe… what the poet Dante called “the love that moves the stars”?

We imagine – deceiving ourselves – that we do and make things by our own independent power. Yes, our will-power can stand against death itself, but we delude ourselves if we think that we have this power in isolation from others. We exist because of the love and care of other people, and on a wider scale, because of the mind and love of the one Creator. Like those gathered at the first Pentecost, we are continually sustained by the breath of its one Spirit.

In his letter Laudato Si, Pope Francis emphasised how all living things, and the mineral world too, are connected and depend on each other. Some philosophers even ask whether deep down, the observer/ subject and the observed/ object are distinct or separate at all. It sounds crazy, but physicists who peer deepest into sub-atomic physics say similar things. We do have to struggle, through childhood and adolescence, to form our individual personality, our character, but it is foolish to think that our ego is independent from – much less superior to – other peoples’.

Why are we envious when others are praised? Their success is ours too. Why gloat over others’ failures? In them, we too are diminished. Why get unreasonably angry when others cause harm? It is our common task to repair the damage.

We Christians cherish the sacred ritual of the Eucharist, the Mass, whose main purpose is not our personal holiness, but to unite us more deeply with others in holy communion. Loving other people is the same thing as coming closer to God. (1 John 4:7-8*) In sacrament, in love, we draw on the Spirit to help unite the human Family.

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* everyone who loves is born of God and knows God… for God is love.

Emerging from our grave

Lent 5A 26^th March 2023

[John 11:1-48]

What makes green shoots spring from the stump of a felled tree? What gives courage and energy to a person trying to save a drowning child? Is this the same force that empowers one born with serious disabilities to be joyful despite them, and play a full part in society? We give the name life to the mysterious force behind all these phenomena, but not even the most learned philosophers or scientists have been able to define what life is.

Human life is made up of relationships, and in John’s gospel, the story of Lazarus being brought back to life includes the deep friendship and love between Jesus, Lazarus and his two sisters. The gospel writer remarks: “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus….”, and reminds us that earlier, Mary had unashamedly shown her love for Jesus by intimately anointing his feet at a public dinner.

Mary and Martha had sent a message to Jesus: “The one you love is ill”. When Jesus, after delaying for several days, eventually arrived at their village, Martha and Mary felt close enough to Jesus for each of them to rebuke him: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died!” But Jesus had told his followers – as he had earlier explained about the man born blind – that Lazarus’ sickness would show people God’s glory. The same can be said of any sickness or tragic event that blocks or diminishes the life-force within us. If it sounds either too pious, or unfeelingly callous, to say that our suffering “gives glory to God” this is only because we don’t yet understand that God’s glory is our glory too. Our body-mind unity can break down in many ways. When it inevitably does, we might shrink in fear, or even despair, until we can accept that such apparent failure is an ordinary part of our life. We are greatly helped to accept such temporary failures in the context of our wider gift: that we exist at all, as living beings who can love and be loved.

For the life that we take for granted has much deeper dimensions. The early Christian communities for whom John’s gospel was written knew that Jesus had passed through death some decades before. They would have been much encouraged to hear this story about Jesus power to raise the dead man, even though Lazarus was only resuscitated and would soon have to face death again.

The faith of Christians does not depend on whether or not the story of the raising of Lazarus happened literally as described. They know from the gospels that even in his brief lifetime Jesus was in profound contact with the Transcendent Creator, and they find good news in Jesus words to his friend Martha: “I am the resurrection and the life”.

From such traditional stories, everyone can learn that the goal of our twenty- or thirty-thousand days of life is to discover that we are invited into the same friendship with the now-transcendent Jesus that his three friends enjoy. Jesus announced that this is our future, when he promised that if we centre our life around love: “…my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them”. (John 14:23)

There is little point in trying to define life: we are immersed in it. But it is our privilege to know that it comes from the living God, who also cannot be defined; and that even the grave is no obstacle to our life’s next mysterious stage.

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Transfiguration: A deeper glimpse of reality

5th March 2023

Three of the gospels describe this scene of Jesus being “transfigured” on a mountain top. Matthew uses it as one more example to portray Jesus as the new Moses. Matthew had already described how King Herod sought to kill Jesus as a baby, as Pharaoh had sought to kill Moses; and had shown him as coming out of exile in Egypt, as Moses had, leading the Hebrew people. Just as Moses had done on Mt Sinai, Jesus had expounded the New Law in his Sermon on the Mount. Here again, having gone up the mountain with a select group, as Moses had done, Jesus encounters God as a voice from a cloud, and like Moses, Jesus’ face then shone so brightly that it was impossible to look at him.

What are we to make of this? Ancient writers often compared the hero they were writing about, with famous figures, real or mythical. This makes some critics exclaim: “Ahah! So the gospels are all myths, imagined, invented!” But this is no more logical a conclusion than it would be to compare a woman of today who killed her children in post-natal depression, to Medea in Euripedes play, and conclude that this made the modern crime imaginary or mythical too.

If we know even a little about modern physics – which even physicists do not understand – we know that matter is not the solid stuff that our senses tell us it is. Each of the billions of atoms that make up a piece of metal or the human body, is composed mostly of electrons, electrical energy that is constantly changing, surrounding the “core” of each atom – which is also energy in other forms. Compared to the electrons in an atom, this core is as big as “a fly in a cathedral”, to use the classical comparison. So we are mostly – if not totally – waves of electrical energy, behaving in many different ways. For us Westerners, our thinking distorted by the materialism of the “Enlightenment” to believe that inert matter is all that there is, this raises questions about what matter really is, and how it relates to mind or consciousness, especially the Infinite Divine Consciousness that must be the origin of us all.

So if what we call matter is convertible with energy, actually is energy, as is proven in every nuclear explosion, perhaps bodies can be transfigured, and – to look at another gospel scene – multitudes can be fed from a few loaves and fish. Perhaps too, a deeply spiritual person might go up a mountain and be “transfigured”. This gospel story might be literally true, even while the gospel writer likens Jesus to Moses, the ancient hero and liberator of his people.

In trying to “explain” the Transfiguration, it is easy to lose sight of the context in which it takes place. Jesus had just told his followers that their way to liberation and personal fulfilment is by accepting the loss of everything material and their outer self, their ego; to be figuratively crucified. The heavenly voice then calls on the three witnesses to “listen to him”. As they come down from the mountain, they are told not to try to describe this event until Jesus has endured total loss, and passed through death.

The story of the Transfiguration is used twice in the church’s liturgy: on this second Sunday of Lent, and in a special feast on August 6^th. Was it an accident, or something known by the Infinite Consciousness, which must be aware of everything and every event, that the first time a nuclear explosion was used to turn human bodies – in Hiroshima – into dust and light, was on the 6^th of August, 1945?

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How to listen more deeply

First Sunday of Lent 26^th February 2023

[Genesis 2 & 3; Matthew 4:1-11]

For the past month I have had the privilege of a long retreat, based on several hours of meditation each day. It was in Tiruvannamalai, in Tamil Nadu, at the foot of the ancient holy site, the mountain Arunachala.

Meditation is practised in all religions. Perhaps the chief of its many benefits is that meditating demands silence, the necessary condition for listening. Not just listening with the ears. During most of my meditation times I could hear the sounds usually heard in Indian streets: the nearly continuous horns of trucks, buses, cars and rickshaws; the cries of vendors; the din of motors and the occasional moo of a holy cow. In the ashram temple these sounds were muted by distance, but in my hotel room they were just a few metres below my window. But part of the challenge of meditation is to learn to ignore all such distractions.

In meditation we listen for what we can “hear” when we ignore all bodily sensations and put aside even our thoughts. To do this, it is most helpful if we mentally repeat a mantra, a simple prayer. What do we “hear” or become aware of then? A deeper awareness of who we are – or what we are not – in the context of the silent Mystery, the Infinite Consciousness and Love out of which we have come, which various peoples call Brahma, YHWH, Theos, Deus, Allah or God. Looked at from outside, meditation might seem to be a waste of time, but when properly tried, it becomes obvious that it is about the most valuable and fruitful way we can use our time.

The gospel reading for this First Sunday of Lent shows Jesus, immediately after his baptism – an ancient ritual of purification – impelled to go into the silence of the desert, where he listened, in meditation, for forty days. The gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke describe in their picturesque way how this experience led him to see through the emptiness of giving himself over to the quest for material comforts, or wanting people to admire his spectacular deeds, or lusting for power to dominate them. Jesus listened, learning how to let go of his human ego, preparing to give himself totally to the service of others, even to endure a cruel death for defending the dignity and rights of the poorest.

In stark contrast, today’s First Reading tells the mythical story of Adam and Eve, as Genesis calls the representative first humans. Their story is a brilliant exemplar of our own, of each person’s awakening, in our earliest years, to moral choices. We have an insatiable, God-given desire to learn more about ourselves and the world, so we inevitably, selfishly, make decisions that go against our own good and the good of others. We learn about good and evil. We “disobey God”, our creator.

In everyone’s story, as with Eve and Adam, there is a failure to listen. “You must not eat it… under pain of death”. In our desires, we do not get past surface appearances, choosing what we might gain: in our knowledge – “your eyes will be opened” – and our status – “you will be like gods” – or simply pleasure – “the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye”.

Listening leads us to obeying the inner wisdom of our conscience, which, properly informed, is above all law. Listening also leads us to discover the divine law of love and co-operation written deep in our nature. Experiments have shown that even infants of eighteen months prefer cartoon characters who are kind to each other, rather than those who are not.

We fail to obey these deepest guiding forces when we fail to listen. “Obey” comes from the Latin ob-audire, to listen to. Which is the central purpose of meditating.

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