Becoming Love, Becoming Peace

‘It is almost 11 months ago that I first zoomed in on your Saturday meditation,’ someone in our practice community wrote to me last week.

‘I didn’t expect much,’ they continued. ‘I certainly didn’t expect to have my spiritual life turned upside down and inside out, and yet in a way naturally continued… I feel newly alive, excited, challenged and unsettled.  I don’t know if you can remember how enormous it is to hear for the first time:  God is your being; we are love loving, compassion compassioning;  you are light from light; in meditation we only have to show up and leave it all to God.’

A mystery of mutual presence

Well, I do remember how enormous it was to hear these key Christian teachings for the first time from my monastic teachers when I was 19 and living at Prinknash Abbey. It was equally enormous to hear where this knowledge leads. In the words of the great second-century teacher, St Clement of Alexandria, ‘The most beautiful and the greatest learning, is to know oneself. For whoever knows their self knows God. And whoever knows God becomes like God.’ (1)

God is a mystery of mutual Presence. This Presence is the deepest truth of who we are.  Each of us, all of creation, is the radiance, the overflow of this Presence. And we have the extraordinary privilege of becoming aware of this Presence, of being able to respond to it, centre our lives in it, to become, in the words of St Paul, the fragrance of God in the world (2 Corinthians 2:14),  the fragrance of the One who is infinite love, infinite peace.

Becoming peace

To be a person of love, of peace, we need to be at peace within ourselves. Jesus knew, embodied and taught this. In the Gospel of Matthew, we hear Jesus teaching how we might cultivate this peaceful heart within us:

The English word ‘yoke’ and the Sanskrit word ‘yoga’ both come from the same ancient Proto-Indo-European root meaning to yoke together, to join, to unite, to become one. With this and the teaching of Clement in mind, let’s listen again to Jesus’s teaching:

‘Come to me, the deepest truth of who you are, all who struggle and are carrying a heavy load, and I will give you rest. Follow my way of union. Learn from me, because I am peaceful and open to all, and you will find rest for your selves. My way of union is gentle and light to carry.’

Seeds of violence…and seeds of peace

Jesus taught how all violence, cruelty and injustice comes from within us, from within our heart (Mark 7:20-21), that there is work to be done to become aware of the seeds within us that give rise to this, and to learn to stop feeding them, and to become aware of the seeds of goodness and peace within us, and to learn to cultivate them. He calls us to the same purity of heart that was in him, to cultivate hearts of peace.

If this sounds a little daunting, impossible for us to bring about for ourselves, we might remember Jesus’ teaching that it is not possible for us to heal ourselves, but that what is impossible for us is possible for God (Luke 18:26-27), if we commit ourselves in trust (Mark 5:34; Luke 7:50, 17:19, 18:42).

The practice of surrender

Each time we meditate, we surrender in trust, we consent to being healed, to our heart being transformed. Taking time each day to cultivate a little more peace in ourselves, is an intention worth setting for ourselves as we begin this new year.

Our simple practice of peaceful, compassionate abiding with ourselves, can help us to be more compassionate and peaceful towards others. We do not concern ourselves with thoughts about reaching some state of perfection. Our opening within the ever-deepening infinity of God’s love will never end. We just practice, one moment, one breath at a time, content to trust that God has everything in hand – that if we commit to this each day, our hearts will awaken. We will come home to the love and compassion, gentleness and peace of our essential nature.

The deeper truth of our life

Meeting and accepting the whole of our experience in meditation (however much we may not like seeing parts of this), is part of how we cultivate peace and loving-kindness within ourselves. Know what appears in the foreground of your life, we can hear Clement say, and you will come to know the deeper truth of your life.

And this isn’t about feeling ‘good’ all the time. It’s about learning to sit quietly and non-judgementally, with all that we see within us, with self-honesty, with self-compassion. In this way – learning to be compassionate as God is compassionate (Luke 6:36) – we come to see how we react to our thoughts and feelings, to life’s events. We see how strong currents of emotion can sweep us off our feet, how we cling to certain things and run away from others.

Learning to meet and befriend ourselves, we are better able to meet and befriend each other.

Accepting Christ’s invitation

In meditation, we accept Christ’s invitation to practice awareness in the present moment, to wake up, to be attentive to the ordinary details of our day-to-day life, to live in the present more peacefully. Every day gives us countless opportunities to practice peaceful-awareness. Over time, as we continue with the practice, we inhabit the present more fully. Becoming more peaceful and at ease with ourselves, this flows into our relationships. Peaceful-awareness allows us to recognise and nurture what is life-giving within us, to meet our anger, our fear, sorrow and hostility, to transform what needs to be transformed,  and to grow in compassion and peace. Saying our prayer word, following our breath, we can learn to meet ourselves and the whole world with kindness, to let joy and gratitude arise.

Waking up

The journey of meditation, is the journey of waking up. We might say that we were born in such-and-such year. Or I could say that this life is part of the process of being born – the gift of our life unfolding. As we awaken, we begin to see ever more clearly. Coming to know the deepest truth of who we are – that God is our being – we come to know that every person is a precious child of God, being loved-into being, just like us. We begin to see the whole universe anew, as God’s being, being ceaselessly given. Looking around us with a peaceful heart, we recognise every human being as our sister, our brother. And as this happens, we become ever more sensitive to the enormous need for justice and peace in our world – for all the work that needs done.

I do remember how enormous it was to hear this for the first time.

It is even more enormous that we are invited to know this in the depths of who we are.

And it is even more enormous, even more astonishing, that we are invited to become this, to become the fragrance of the One who is all love, all peace.