| The World Community for Christian Meditation |
| Christian Meditation with Children |
|
| TEACH YOUR CHILDREN TO BE IN THE PRESENCE OF GOD |
- SATURDAY - HOLY WEEK
Dearest Friends,
The spare day in between. The day after the funeral. The day of blessed solitude and of
unusual loneliness. When the worst has happened, and despair has been achieved. After
enlightenment chopping wood and drawing water and doing the laundry. But with particular
intensity.
When do we ever get what we want? And how long do we have to wait for it? Just as Eros is
about pursuing the ultimately unattainable so faith too never grasps its goal. And yet, as this
holy interval between death and resurrection teaches us, waiting is not about intensifying
desire and trying to make time pass more quickly, but about dissolving the boundaries of time
and allowing the consciousness of the present seep through and fill us to whatever capacity
we may have attained.
This morning and afternoon we had meditation on our own or in small spontaneously formed
groups. Solitude and community, freedom and discipline, melted into each other. A precious,
unanticipated spontaneity and collectors’ freedom we could not endure for very long. At 6 we
met in the island church to rescue it from its bareness. Some had collected yellow flowering
gorse, others daffodils, some with strong convictions decided where they would be best
placed as others practiced the music, ranging in the end from plain chant to Celtic to Leonard
Cohen. On Bere Island, any island, like life floating in an ocean of otherness.
We prepare for parties, or liturgies, sometimes long before they happen. Often it’s half the fun
of the final event. As the day and hour come closer so does the feeling of excitement, the
coming up against the horizon that we have been looking at for so long. As the long awaited
arrives we may wish we had practiced more patience. We may wonder why we did and said
so many things that were impatient and unmindful when what was going to happen was
always going to happen in its own time. But in the happiness of its happening our unwisdom is
forgiven and disappears in the light of dawn.
Meditation is a passionate patience. It teaches us that we even wait and get impatient in the
here and now. There is no escaping what we wait for.
O Happy Fault.
Much love,
- Laurence
| Father Laurence´s Special Messages 2008 |