The problem of so much human endeavour, so much inadequacy that eats into years of life and renders them void of content, is the lack of awareness of the one who is called. Each day we are called by God to do our work to the fullness of our capacity, to live the present moment in its divine glory, to grow into wisdom and love through a direct participation of the circumstances that mark out the present scene, and to act as agents of renewal of all that is unclean around us. But we see nothing of this greater plan of creation amid the distraction of our present situation. We fail to appreciate the constant unfolding of opportunity that is the very nature of life because we are wrapped up in our own limited, unproductive fantasy world. This world is often peopled with creatures of darkness, the progeny of smouldering resentment and menacing fear. At other times we conjure up scenes of delight in order to flee from our own distress. If only we could see clearly like the man born blind, in John 9, who could say after his healing by Jesus, "All I know is this: once I was blind, now I can see"! Those who interrogated him, men of strong religious faith but beset by emotional blockages and dogmatic preconceptions, could see nothing except the bare physical features of a changed man. We see the pearl as our intimation of a world of enduring values, but how rapidly does the mundane view occlude that vision, how rapidly do we return to past, unproductive ways of thinking! The coarse flesh hems in the spiritual emanations of the soul until such time as the carnal nature is humbled and shown its rightful place in the scheme of regeneration, that it must be still and listen instead of looking for its own satisfaction. It is the weakness of the flesh that is both our impediment and our way of spiritual growth. To hold fast to the pearl and the diversions of the world - the gnawing lust of the flesh and the temptations of the evil one, who is working towards a complete disintegration of the personality as a step towards the annihilation of the universe - is the test of our integrity, the measure of our persistence in the face of daily discouragement.
In the first of the twin verses of the Dhammapada, the Buddha writes:
All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts and made up of our thoughts. If a man speak or act with an evil thought, suffering follows him as the wheel follows the hoof of the beast that draws the wagon . . . If a man speak or act with a good thought, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him.
But in order to attain this state of blessed equanimity which is the prerequisite for the spiritual life, there must be the practice of silence before the Creator. When we are still, even if encompassed by chaos and threatened by the hostility of those close to us, the power of the Holy Spirit infuses us and shows us the reality that underlies all phenomenal appearances. In this state of "holy indifference" we can initiate a series of right actions, for it is no longer merely we who are responding, but the power of the Creator working through us. He lightens our path by his spiritual radiance, and then the pearl is seen as a diadem on the heavenly throne. In other words, the act of thought that both the Buddha and St Paul (in Philippians 4.8, as we have already noted) emphasize as the true basis of the spiritual life, finds its consummation in deep contemplative silence before God, however we may know the divine principle of eternal creation. Thus we read the Buddha's teaching about the first and ultimate cause of all, "There is an unborn, not become, not made, uncompounded, and were it not for this unborn, not become, not made, uncompounded, no escape could be shown here from what is born, has become, is made, is compounded."
To be aware of God at all times ensures our conscious participation in the phenomenal universe with all that impinges directly upon us. To be unresponsive to the divine dispensation that protects us day by day, lays us open to the invasion of our consciousness by subversive forces in the intermediate, psychic realm that interpenetrates the present moment. If we give of our best, we will receive the highest reward, the essence of which is the power to continue with the great work. The Christian would extend the Buddha's teaching about the ground of all existence by finding love as its central core. In this way the measureless, incomprehensible void, that is the Godhead, shows itself in the world of becoming - in which we are all to grow into the fullness of our own being, the height of the stature of our individual integrity - as love. This love cares for all its creatures equally, both in their present individual mode and in their collective dispersion as the body of the universe. Meister Eckhart said, "Why do you prate of God? Whatever you say is wrong." The great mystics of the world know that the deity is neither this nor that, while at the same time being both this and that, the coincidence of opposites that Nicholas of Cusa glimpsed. In needle-pointed awareness the totality of existence is both apprehended and transcended as the divine light shines upon the intellect, so that it is transformed into an instrument of active receptivity. It can assimilate the divine light and transmit its essence to the world in rational categories. This is the great moment of decision ahead of the seeker of the pearl of great price, a renunciation of the way of known transit for a passage that is hidden from the sight of mortal travellers on the path. Yet how often do we lose the strand of immediate awareness and its consequences even in the course of a single day! Two episodes from the gospel stand out particularly in this respect. In one, quoted in Luke 17.11-19, as Jesus was entering a village he was met with ten men who had a disfiguring skin disease, termed leprosy in the common translation, but probably a condition different from the well-known disease of that name. But one thing was certain: the sufferer was taboo from the remainder of the community. He had to identify himself publicly, was ritually unclean, and had to live apart and stay outside the settlement (Leviticus 13.45-6). Cruel as this seems, it was also a primitive health precaution and should be judged accordingly, as should much of the Mosaic code that appears so strange to modern minds. The ten victims called on Jesus, from some way off, to have pity on them. At once they were healed of their disfigurement. But only one, an outcast Samaritan, had the gratitude to come back to Jesus and give thanks to God for what he had received. The nine Jews, sons of the covenant, had so forgotten their past suffering in the face of their present cure that it never occurred to them to give thanks for what they had received; and they are typical of many sick people who take their medical cure for granted and never so much as think of giving thanks, not only to the doctors and medical ancillaries, but to God himself. They might, of course, retort that it was God who laid the burden of illness on them in the first place, and so it was his business - almost his duty - to see to their healing. Only a deeper awareness of their past attitudes and actions might begin to clear their inner vision so that their own responsibility in their illness became more apparent to them. And even if their own lives had been impeccably virtuous, they would still have to learn that no man lives to himself alone, for we are all members of a greater community. In the famous words of John Donne, "No man is an island, entire of itself. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." So the suffering of even a distant neighbour has its repercussion on those afar off.
I suspect that the outcast, heretical Samaritan, the only one who flowed out to Jesus in thanksgiving, knew this truth, even if he could not have articulated it so roundly. When we too are left on the ground struggling for life, like the assaulted, robbed man in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, certain basic facts of life strike our aware mind, aware because it is singularly free from worldly distractions and can now concentrate on the one thing that matters, that is, the divine presence that never leaves us even when we leave it for more immediately attractive pursuits. The Samaritan leper knew that he was an unworthy individual in his own right - as indeed we all are - but was nevertheless taken up in love by God, revealed in Jesus, and miraculously healed. This is the basic Christian experience, and at once it converts us from a devotion to secular things to a dedication of ourselves to God, revealed definitively in the person of Jesus. What later generations of Christians were to know as an inner experience, was shown to this man, poor in reputation, yet rich in grace. He was made aware while the nine Jewish lepers remained as unconscious of God's love afterwards as they had been before.
The story is an appropriate complement to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, where once again it is the outcast who helps the stricken traveller, while the pillars of religious propriety walk in oblivious selfishness on the other side of the road, lest their inner deliberations be disturbed by their fellow man in need. It could well be that the healed Samaritan was destined later to be the good Samaritan who acted with charity in the famous parable. The episode also shows us the vast distance that separates the cure of a disease from the healing of the whole person; the nine were as far from that healing after Jesus' work as before it, while the solitary outcast was at least on the right road. Jesus' healings were a manifestation of the imminence of the kingdom of God, but not all who received the healing opened themselves up to the greater gift of God's undemanding love. The tragedy of love lies in the frequently negative response in those to whom it is given. Until they are inwardly aware, love simply flows through them like water in a sieve, or else they reject it out of hand. Free will is God's supreme gift to us but its use entails an enormous responsibility. It is for this reason that physical and mental healing are preferably gradual, so that the patient can learn to cope with their implications in slow stages. In the same way the person suddenly left a large legacy may find it a burden rather than a cause for rejoicing. He is, at any rate, more likely to spend it improvidently than invest it wisely for his own good and the benefit of the community. The person who has felt the full impact of poverty and family responsibility will have a much more sober attitude to gifts of money.
The other teaching in the gospel that reminds us how soon we forget a gift because of our lack of self-awareness, and of the consequences that this forgetfulness can have, is contained in the Parable of the Unforgiving Debtor (Matthew 18.23-35). In this story, a man who owes his master an enormous amount of money and has no means of repaying the debt, is threatened with being sold into slavery together with his entire family. But because of his terrible distress and his undertaking to pay everything back when he can, the master is so filled with compassion that he releases the debtor absolutely. But later on in the day this same man encounters a fellow-servant who owes him a trifle by comparison with his own debt. Despite the other man's pleas for time to redress the debt, the servant remains adamant in his grasping fury and has his debtor summarily imprisoned. The other servants, not surprisingly, are most distressed over the episode, and tell the whole tale to the master. He then confronts the first servant with his lack of gratitude which should have been reflected in mercy to his debtor, but instead had flared up into insatiable greed. And so the first servant was condemned to torture until he could pay the full amount of his debt, a very unlikely event in view of its magnitude. It is interesting that Jesus compares this sorry story to the kingdom of heaven; it has something therefore to tell us about the ultimate dispensation of things in the eternity of existence that far outdistances our relatively short span of life on earth. The first servant is a typical man of the world, squealing when he is hurt, but as ungrateful after his relief as if nothing at all had happened to him. As he was able to accept the gift of mercy and retain a sense of gratitude for merely a moment in time, so his experience of heaven was as limited in duration. And then an indefinite hell of pain awaited him. One hopes that somehow he was able to pay the debt in full - and here our perspective may widen from mere money to his whole life as dedicated in service to his fellow creatures - but the time taken for spiritual growth to occur would be very long. It gives us a graphic account of hell and an intermediate state of purgation of evil impulses from the chastened personality. It also reminds us how dangerous it can be to remove an impediment from a person until he is able to hold on to the release he has been given.
Jesus illustrates this vividly in his story of an evil spirit that leaves a person for a span to rest in the desert. When it returns to its victim, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and tidy, so off it goes to collect seven other spirits more wicked than itself. They all come in and settle down, so that in the end the person's plight is worse than before (Matthew 12.43-5). The power who should have occupied the cleansed psyche of the person was the Holy Spirit, but he does not enter automatically to fill the vacuum left by the departure of another occupant. He has to be invited to come in, since God's approach to us is always one of courtesy, as befits a creature to whom he has given a free will. The Holy Spirit enters us almost as a bodily presence when we call upon the name of the Lord in rapt prayer; then our awareness is acute and undefiled, so that we can with authority discern between the Spirit of God and various dubious inhabitants of the intermediate, psychic realm who would be pleased to personate God and enter into the sacred domain of the individual personality. In other words, until we are so filled with the love of God that his presence is with us as a conscious power at all times, we are liable to fall victim not only to impulses deeply set in our own unconscious but also to psychic debris around us that is only too available to infest us.
It is, in this respect, no surprise that a person not infrequently falls victim to one misfortune after another until his eyes are opened to the flaw in his own psyche that allows discord and disorder to erupt in his life. Even if we were, in the company of most contemporary psychologists and theologians, to dismiss the concept of entity-possession out of hand as a primitive superstition, we can still understand how one disaster after another can punctuate a vulnerable person's existence until he learns to take charge positively of his life. Practitioners of the power of positive thinking stress this truth with special vigour, but in the end it is God, rather than the individual, who is in charge. Therefore positive thinking, to be truly effective, should be grounded in prayer, the dialogue of the soul with God. Personally, I have little doubt about the possibility of invasion of the personality by external psychic forces both from the living and the dead. But I can see only too clearly how such a belief can so dominate a person's thinking that all untoward phenomena are attributed to external agencies in the intermediate dimension. In this way human responsibility is progressively eroded, while all those who challenge the individual's security and threaten the slender faith by which he lives can be identified with the powers of darkness and then mercilessly persecuted. A sense of balance founded on acute awareness is essential in assessing the cause of all human, and indeed cosmic, disorder. This balance is the product of prayer and responsible conduct in the present moment.
Awareness is closely linked with caution on the one hand and gratitude on the other. The caution is part of the body's defence against foolish, ill-judged actions that would endanger its integrity. The inborn fear of death that we all have, no matter how vigorously we may deny it on an intellectual level, is the body's insistence of its own right of survival. Without that built-in caution we would endanger our lives day by day in foolhardy ventures, and all too probably die prematurely. We, in this context, reflect on Jesus' words in respect of his healing of the man who was born blind, "While daylight lasts we must carry on the work of him who sent me; night comes, when no one can work. While I am in the world I am the light of the world" (John 9.4-5). It would be no blasphemy if we all were to identify ourselves with Jesus in this saying, for we are all unique lights in our own setting, when we are functioning as complete people. It is for this reason that our time on earth is so important; convinced as I am that mortal existence is but a parenthesis in eternity, I also am sure that this time on earth is vitally important in executing work and experiencing relationships that cannot be provided in any other realm of existence. The physical body is both our vehicle of self-expression and our organ of limitation. Time limits the extent of our growth, and its interruption in death cuts off our deepest relationships and emphasizes the necessity for renunciation at every moment. Space limits the scope of our endeavours, and as the body fails, so we are confined to an ever-diminishing domain. Here we have to serve the world, ultimately in prayer alone, as our faculties gradually decline with the attrition wrought by ageing and disease. As St Paul was told in the trial wrought by his persistent "thorn in the flesh" that resisted all prayers for healing, "My grace is all you need; power comes to its full strength in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12.9).
In this respect we remember the dictum of the Wisdom teaching of the Old Testament: the fear of the Lord is wisdom, and to turn from evil is understanding (Job 28.28). This fear is not an attitude of terror at the unpredictable moods of a powerful despot, whose wrath may flare out against us at any moment if we, even unwittingly offend him. It is rather a sense of awe that we have been privileged to be where we are, doing what we are to do, at this present moment, in an infinity of space and an eternity of time. "When I look up at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars set in their places by thee, what is man that thou shouldst remember him, mortal man that thou shouldst care for him? Yet thou has made him little less than a god, crowning him with glory and honour" (Psalm 8.3-5), or again, "Thou it was who didst fashion my inward parts; thou didst knit me together in my mother's womb. I will praise thee for thou dost fill me with awe; wonderful thou art, and wonderful thy works" (Psalm 139.13-14). In our lives the awe of God is closely linked with our gratitude in being alive as human beings. In this frame of mind we can begin to understand the statement in the Genesis story that God created man, male and female, in his own image. Our perspective rises from purely material considerations of daily sustenance to the infinite glory of life itself; we move beyond personal concern to universal benediction and flow out rapturously in love to all God's creatures. It is thus that there is a living synthesis of awe and gratitude; indeed the two responses seem almost to unite to form a new awareness of reality.
God is love, and wrath is not in his nature. The wrath of suffering is due to a contravention of basic laws of life by which God governs his universe. If we disobey those laws, we suffer accordingly. Just as promiscuous sexual habits bring in their train disastrous venereal disorders, and excesses of alcohol, drugs and tobacco, their quota of progressive damage to various organs of the body, so do deceitful actions and treacherous betrayals of trust of intimate relationships lead to strife and conflict. But if we have the honesty to confess our shortcomings and genuinely work towards a nobler style of life, the forgiveness of God helps us to attain a new relationship with the world and a peak of service to our fellows. In the words of Dame Julian of Norwich:
For I saw no wrath but on man's part, and that forgiveth he us. For wrath is not else but a frowardness and contrariness to peace and love; and either it cometh of failing of might, or of failing of wisdom, or of failing of goodness: which failing is not in God, but is on our part (Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 8).
The "frowardness and contrariness" here described are best understood as a perverse antagonism to peace and love. This seems to be the cumulative effect of persistent disobedience to the divine law on the part of God's rational creatures and the suffering that accrues from this rebelliousness. It may need a complete shattering of the individual's fortunes to arrest this fatal trend, a situation well illustrated in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, when the young man comes to his true being only in the midst of penury. Then at last he enters full awareness both of his situation and the way to proceed from its consequences.
The battle between the self-will of the rational creature and the divine will that cares for all creatures without discrimination is also the way of growth of the individual. The end of this battle is not so much a triumph of God's love over personal selfishness as an acceptance, a taking-up of the personal into the transpersonal. There are no lasting victors in any conflict, since the fire of the storm continues to smoulder, albeit beneath the surface, until the conflagration erupts anew. In the end all parties have to be satisfied, and each is then embraced in the all-accepting love of God, in which love there is a transmutation of the base, selfish elements into instruments of world service. We are to come to God as self-aware, responsible people, not as trembling slaves at the feet of an awesome tyrant. Then we can give something valuable of ourselves to him, namely the unique character that we have forged and attained through our confrontation with pain in the vicissitudes of our individual lives.
For all who are moved by the Spirit of God are sons of God. The Spirit you have received is not a spirit of slavery leading you back to a life of fear, but a spirit that makes us sons, enabling us to cry "Abba, Father". In that cry the Spirit of God joins with our spirit in testifying that we are God's children; and if children, then heirs (Romans 8:14-16).
We may remember in this respect that "Abba, Father" was the way in which Jesus started his prayer for relief from his suffering at Gethsemane, which ended in an acceptance of his Father's will (Matthew 26.42). It is above all else a declaration of responsibility, of adult stature, one in which we can co-orperate in loving service with God and our fellow creatures. The intimation of glory in the vision of the pearl is the presage of this maturity, but it has to be actualized in the less exalted situations of everyday life.
We have to accept that our life on earth is fraught with danger and suffering no less than relief and joy. Each experience is a stepping-stone towards completion of the person into something of the stature of Christ. We not unnaturally look for happiness and ease, but the adverse states have also to be experienced so that our spiritual endurance may be strengthened. In this vein St Paul compares the spiritual way with that of an athlete contending for an earthly prize, but, as he says, the prize in store for the asceticism of the spiritual aspirant is out of all comparison with earthly rewards. When we understand this, we cease to rail against the injustice of our fate, and instead, like the chastened Jeremiah, get on with the work with renewed determination.
When Job was smitten with misfortune, his wife told him to curse God and die. He in turn made the important observation, "If we accept good from God, shall we not accept evil?" (Job 2.10). While it is intolerable that a God of love should deliberately visit pain on his creatures, there can be no doubt of the immensity of the scale of evil in the world. This is most satisfactorily attributed to the perverse attitudes and actions of the rational forms of life and the power they wield. But these same creatures have bequeathed to those who succeeded them a treasury of music, art, literature, philanthropic endeavour and scientific knowledge. We take all this as a matter of course whenever we attend a concert or listen to the radio, visit an art gallery or read a classic of world literature. Likewise the enormous technical advances in medical science have added years of life and mobility to those many who would have succumbed early to the ravages of heart disease or been painfully crippled with osteo-arthritis which so often afflicts older people. The contributions of the few have added beyond measure to the span and quality of the lives of great multitudes. Likewise do we have to bear our share of the world's terrible agony, so close is human solidarity, even when it is obvious that we ourselves are innocent victims of violence as part of the blind injustice and cruelty of the society in which we live. The emotionally balanced person can bear the implications of the inter-relatedness of all life, this coinherence of consciousness in each member of the group. He can appreciate the privilege of suffering in union with the wretched of the earth no less than that of exulting in the glory of the world's great achievements. St Paul writes, "It is now my happiness to suffer for you. This is my way of helping to complete, in my poor human flesh, the full tale of Christ's afflictions still to be endured for the sake of his body which is the church" (Colossians 1.24). What is thus assumed in love is transferred in prayer to God: the suffering is no longer retributive but is now redemptive of the whole created universe, a suffering fully known in the passion of Christ. We are, in other words, heirs of both the light and the darkness of the world, and as we accept their totality, so we grow in stature as people who can ease the way forward for the world's transfiguration into a kingdom of light in whose midst there radiates the precious pearl. Just as we contain an inbuilt pattern of growth in our personality, so too does the world have its own scheme of development. It too has its times of natural disasters in the form of earthquakes, floods and droughts which affect the lives of all who live in it. Every now and then a tower of Siloam collapses on some hapless victims. They are killed while the previously unaware bystanders are jolted out of their blind complacency and made alert of the precarious nature of all life and its precious quality (Luke 13.4-5). We take the order of the cosmos for granted until some natural disaster opens our eyes to our membership of and dependence on the whole universe. Can we do anything to ameliorate severe natural disasters, which, after all, are simply an indication that not only we but the whole world are in a state of continuous creation? Prayer for good weather conditions, especially during storms and droughts, amuses the secular atheist by its childish dependence on an illusory intelligence that is held to govern the universe, but prayer nevertheless does seem to have an effect remarkably quickly in some emergencies. It is not beyond possibility that maligned psychic currents emanating from disturbed populations could have an adverse effect on the earth's rhythms; concentrated prayer might then by its quiet calmness reverse the disturbance and help to bring the elements back into harmony. Of course, even if this hypothesis were to be confirmed it would not deny the labile nature of the world and its tendency to internal eruption as part of its price for growth. It would simply stress the adverse effect that disturbed human emotions and the psychic currents they produce may have on a precariously balanced universal flux.
It seems that when we behave in awareness of the present moment, much that is unpleasant is brought to light both in ourselves and in the greater world. The unveiling of the face of evil is the work of the Holy Spirit. We cannot turn back, but we are assured of divine assistance in our journey onwards towards the great destination. As we walk in the awareness of God's presence, so we are strengthened to continue with work of lightening the darkness that is always around us. This is the work of the saints of all ages.