Where is boundless life to be found?

Consumerism wants us to think about life in terms of consumption. Freedom, we’re told, is having the widest range of choices available to us.

For obvious reasons (like the generation of profit), consumer culture isn’t very keen on the notion of narrowing down our choices, or on any apparent limitation of what we are told is freedom. The ‘good life’ is equated with having the widest range of options to fill our life with as many things as possible. Freedom is freedom to consume. And to consume as much as we can.

The paradox of the narrow gate

In the face of this, Jesus’ teaching that the gateway to life is narrow, that the path to life is constricted, might sound more than a little harsh (Matthew 7:13-14).

‘Enter through the narrow gate’ might sound like a recommendation to switch off the music just as the party is starting to get going. It might sound like the sort of puritanism a wit once described as, ‘the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.’ It’s certainly profoundly counter-cultural.

In meditation, we discover that the narrow gate doesn’t restrict our life, but leads to its opening. We discover that the path is not constricting, but liberating.

To help us think about the relationship between Jesus’s teaching and our ancient way of meditation, think of two funnels, the sort you might use to pour something into a bottle. Imagine that the narrow ends are joined – and that we are on a journey through the funnels.

We begin our journey entering the wide-open mouth of the funnel facing us. Here, the path appears broad. But as we proceed, the further we travel, the narrower our path becomes. This is the journey of learning to focus our mind to a single point of narrow attention.

Eventually we come to the narrowest point, where the funnels are joined together, and we pass through the centre.

Passing through the centre, our journey now seems very different. The narrow path has opened out, and keeps on opening. There is no end to the opening. We are journeying into the infinite, the boundless.

Human beings or human becomings?

‘Enter through the narrow gate,’ Jesus teaches, and follow the path to life. This is the path we follow in meditation.

Saying our prayer word, following our breath, we let go of all that disperses and scatters our attention, and gently bring it to a single point of focus. ‘Forgetting the things lying behind, we stretch out to what lies ahead’ (Phil. 3:13). This is all we need to do to enter a journey which never ends, an endless expansion within the infinite, a journey of ever-deepening communion.

There can be no end-point to the opening of our awareness, of our capacity for love, in God. Because God has no end-point, no boundary. The infinite has no limit of any kind. One of my most important teachers liked to say that the basic paradigm for what it is to be human is one of endless growth, endless opening, endless becoming – that we are not so much human beings but human becomings.

‘Two wings of a bird which help carry us home’…

All the great meditation traditions of the world recognise how concentration (training the surface mind to focus narrowly) facilitates the opening of awareness.

The Zen Buddhist teacher and founder of the worldwide Plum Village community, Thich Nhat Hanh, spoke of the cultivation of concentration and the opening of awareness as being like the two wings of a bird which helps carry us home.

When our attention is scattered in a dozen directions, we are not present in our life, but mentally elsewhere. To one degree or another, we can easily spend a great deal of our lives wandering along the ‘wide path’ of distractedness that leads us away from life.

Following the narrow path of attention, we come home to the present moment, to our life, to each other, to God. We discover that the gateway to relationship is right here, and we are already passing through it.

Sometime in the mid-fourteenth century, the great theologian and teacher of the spiritual life St. Gregory Palamas wrote a letter of guidance to a holy nun. Speaking with great wisdom and beauty, he said: ‘Yours is a narrow path…not even wide enough for two together.’ (1)

The gateway and the path to life are only wide enough for one. The Oneness which holds everything. The Oneness in which we find our life, and find each other.