From the poems of Hafiz

Friend, wake up! Why do you go on sleeping? The night is over–– do you want to lose the day the same way? Other women manage to get up early and have already found an elephant or a jewel. And so much was lost already–– while you slept. . . and that was so unnecessary.

The one who loves you understood but you did not. You forgot to make a place in your bed next to you.

Instead, you spent your life playing in your twenties and did not grow because you did not know what the intense part of you was.

Wake up! Wake up! There's no one in your bed; he left you during the long night. The only woman awake is the woman who has heard the flute.

A reading from the Gospel according to Matthew

Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise replied, ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour. Mt 25:1-13

THE END OF TIME, THE POWER OF NOW

In the season of Advent, especially at the beginning of the season, we speak a lot about Jesus’ Second Coming, and about the end of time and the fullness of time. We can have a tendency to focus on this as a definitive break in history. I’d like to suggest that we shift the focus from a new definitive break in history––which also may be a shift from fear to love––and concentrate on understanding the Second Coming and the end of time as the kingdom of heaven, as the reign of God that is none other than the rule of the Holy Spirit, the reign of love––now, in our hearts, where the love of God has been poured. As a friend of mine who is a scripture scholar says, and he knows these things scripturally much better than I, “If not now––not then.” Jean-Yves le Loup explains beautifully how for the ancients the Kingdom of heaven is not so much about a definitive break in history or a rupture of time and space, so much as it is about “the Holy Spirit ruling over our faculties,” on earth as it is in heaven. The Kingdom of God, he says, is “the reign of love, [the] love that informs and directs our other faculties.” This love, of course, is what we are attempting to come into contact with when we practice the art of meditation, the love that can and will inform and direct all of our faculties.

There is only now for God, and ultimately there ought only be now for us. One of the words we use to name the final coming of Jesus is the Greek word parousia. In its English form, this word is normally used to specifically denote the future return of Christ in glory to “judge the living and the dead and to terminate the present world order.” But its original meaning in Greek is simply “presence”, as in something that is suddenly, unexpectedly present. And Jesus certainly often warns us about the unexpected and sudden nature of his coming. After the story of the ten bridesmaids in Matthew 25, for instance––the five foolish ones who had not brought enough oil and five wise who had––he says, Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.

To my mind, this parable can be understood as being not about a definitive moment in history but about a certain state of presence in which we are called to live constantly. This state of alertness seemed to be something the early Christians took very seriously, and I want to propose that it’s a very contemplative stance in the world: to be still and yet highly alert, to not be absent, to not be unconscious. The Song of Songs gives us the beautiful image: I slept but my heart was awake. How often we hear the admonitions in Advent about this state of presence: keep watch, stay awake! What Advent wants to remind us is this is how we should be living all the time, constantly. As the New Age gurus have rightly told us: Be here now! You know there is a popular bumper sticker that says, “I’d rather be fishing!” or “I’d rather be shopping” or I’d rather be in Mazatlan.” This is really our attitude, and our state of mind. We are absent. Recently I saw an antidote to that, a bumper sticker which read , “I’d rather be here, now!”

I want to suggest that Advent is a perennial reminder pointing toward the possibility of living in an entirely new state of consciousness. This is the state of consciousness the earliest followers of Jesus lived in constantly, but it began to be lost as soon as the literal second coming of Jesus did not happen right away. What is this new state of consciousness? Bede Griffiths describes it as

… the transformation of our body consciousness, which is limited by time and space, into a state of transformed body consciousness which is that of the resurrection. In the resurrection Jesus passed from our present state of material being and consciousness into the final state when matter itself, and with it the human body, passes into a state of the divine being and consciousness.

And this is our destiny, the destiny of all humanity––to pass into a state of divine being and divine consciousness. Most importantly, this is also a consciousness that we can be sharing in right now.

In Christian theology we differentiate between chronos and kairos, chronos (as in “chronometer”) meaning “clock time” or what someone like Eckhart Tolle would call “psychological time”, versus kairos, which is divine time, which of course is eternity, no time. Augustine in Book 11 of the Confessions writes that the three divisions of time that we refer to as past, present and future actually have no independent, absolute existence; they are simply three different ways that human consciousness orients itself to phenomena, either through recollection of the past, through awareness of the present, or through anticipation of the future. But God and, mystics would argue, consciousness itself have absolute existence and are altogether beyond time, beyond past, present and future.

There will really be no end of the world––do not we pray “world without end, Amen”?––; there is really only the end of time, that is, of chronos or psychological time, and the coming of kairos the reign of eternity, the reign of God time when, as we Christians describe it, “all will be recapitulated in the Son and delivered to the Father so that God be all in all.”

I found these thoughts also echoed in the writings of Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini. He writes that time is a creation of the Divine, and he uses this beautiful image, saying that our time is “wrapped in the womb of the God … the loving embrace of God.” But we tend to think of the walls of this womb of time as solid; but they are not. Like a mother's womb, the walls of the womb of time are porous; life flows in and flows out, that is, eternity flows in and flows out. Cardinal Martini then uses the image of Jesus calling to Lazarus saying, “Come out!” as the image of someone being healed of illusion and desperation, perhaps the illusion of the solidity of time and the desperation of fear of death. And so, Cardinal Martini writes

The vigilance required of the Christian consists in living [all of] one’s days in the perspective of the God who came, who comes and will come. … To say to someone “Lazarus, come out!” means to offer them the joy and peace of tasting the present as the awaited hour of the coming of the Lord, his return to take us with him into glory.

Come out of the past! Come out of thinking about the future, and experience the resurrection power of Christ now! The present is the awaited hour of the coming of the Lord, now is the moment of his return to take us with him into glory.

Time ends all the time; eternity keeps breaking in over and over again, whenever God-time breaks in on clock time! This happens especially in contemplative prayer, especially in contemplative living.

You will recall the story of Martha and Mary, the friends of Jesus whom Jesus visited one day. And Martha was scurrying about the kitchen preparing a meal, while Mary simply sat at Jesus’ feet and was present to him. And Jesus said that Mary had chosen the better part, and it would not be taken away from her. Traditionally, Martha and Mary come to represent the active life and the contemplative life. For our purposes we might say that the practice of the active life is life in time, whereas contemplative knowledge is in eternity. We are in time, but ideally we know that our goal is eternity. The role of contemplation, the contemplative life, is to remind us that there is in the world something other than the world. The role of contemplation, the contemplative life, is to remind us that the goal of human life is beyond the human. Contemplation, mystical union with God, is the goal and meaning of all our work, of everything we do.

I want to hasten to say that I'm not trying to oppose action and contemplation; we never should oppose them. We are aiming as always for the sahaja Samadhi, the state above active and contemplative. The problem with Martha is not that she is working, but that she is bothered. As le Loup says, what Jesus asks of Martha is not that she stop working, but “that she love in her service, as Mary loved in her meditation,” because everything we do “without love is time wasted; everything one does with love is eternity regained.” (Mind you there is also one ancient interpretation of the parable of the bridesmaids that interprets the oil itself as love, so the five foolish ones, who had no oil in their lamps, were the ones who had no love. Oh, do not let us be caught like virgins with no oil in our lamps!) So our work done in love, which is work done with attention and intention, is also a movement toward purity of heart, a search for the Kingdom, in the sense that love purifies everything. And the reason the contemplative dimension and meditation is so vitally important in our lives is that there is a certain quality to meditation and to contemplative living that roots us in the Presence of God, and that awareness of the presence of God saturates our whole day, all of our work and rest. Meditation is this sinking into God time, which is time-less-ness, the stream of eternity that flows at the heart of our “psychological time.”

So perhaps these parables about the Second Coming can be seen as not being about the end of the world, but the end of time, more specifically about the end of psychological time. They’re pointing to the possibility of living in an entirely new state of consciousness.

Eckhart Tolle speaks about this kind of state of presence in his book The Power of Now. I was surprised by how resonant he was with what I know of the Catholic contemplative tradition. He writes that this state of presence can be compared to waiting, just as Jesus used the analogy of waiting in his parables. But this waiting is not the usual “bored or restless kind of waiting that is a denial of the present,” he says. “It is not a waiting in which your attention is focused on some point in the future, [in which] the present is seen as an undesirable obstacle that prevents you from having what you want.” It’s a qualitatively different kind of waiting, one that requires your total alertness, as if something could happen at any moment and if you’re not absolutely awake, absolutely still you will miss it. We might recall again this image of the cat before the mouse hole, perfectly poised and yet perfectly relaxed at the same time. (If Jesus can compare himself to a thief in the night, then surely we can imagine ourselves as cats keeping vigil at a mouse hole!) Perhaps this is the kind of waiting Jesus talks about, when all our attention is in the now, not in the future, mind you, but in the now. There is no energy left for “daydreaming … remembering, anticipating. There’s no tension, there’s no fear, there is just an alert presence, present with your whole being, present with every cell of your body.”

Jesus says, “Be like a servant waiting for the return of the master.” The servant does not know at what hour the master will come––as the cat does not know the moment when the mouse will come out of the hole––, so she stays awake, alert, poised, still, lest she miss the master’s arrival. So perhaps this carelessness of the virgins in Jesus’ parable is really unconsciousness, the state of not being alert, the state of not being present, of not being here now. They don’t have enough oil to keep their lamps burning, and so they miss the bridegroom and don’t get to the wedding feast. They don’t have enough consciousness to stay present and they miss union with the Beloved, spiritual enlightenment.

Andrew Olendzki says as much about Buddhism as well, that the reason why meditation is such a crucial tool for Buddhist studies is because the wisdom spoken of in Buddhism is really only accessible to a settled and focused mind. Could this be said of all spiritual wisdom, all real understanding of theology: it is really only accessible to a settled and focused mind?

The mind that is tranquil but alert is capable of glimpsing something about reality that is otherwise obscured––it is capable of penetrating illusion with understanding––and it is this understanding that constitutes wisdom and ultimately leads to awakening.

I have heard Laurence Freeman use words very similar to this many times in talks on Christian meditation, when he quotes Fr John Main and Simone Weil speaking about the sin of daydreaming, that is, to be taken up in some future moment and not to be present now to the presence of Christ. Along with that, the “word” or mantra that he teaches in his method of meditation, which he got from his teacher John Main, is Marana tha! The very last words of the New Testament: Come, O Lord! Not later! Now! Come, O Lord! Breathe in and breathe and out, come O Lord! Now! Be here, now! This is what we pray in Advent. This is what we pray in the Our Father every day: may your kingdom come (now!). In other words: may your will be done (now!) on earth (now!) even as it is done in heaven. “As we wait in joyful hope!”

Here is Abhishiktananda:

Only one thing is real, the present moment, in which I am face to face with God, begotten by the Father in Jesus the divine Word, in the communion of the Holy Spirit. All the rest [little pieties], how small they are, compared to this reality which is even now before me. We are like rich people with bags of gold, who waste their time over copper farthings. I only preach one thing: Realize what you are, at this moment: see yourself in the bosom of the Trinity, where your Baptism, your communion has placed you, and be faithful to yourselves, to what you are.

Which recalls the words of St. Charles Borromeo:

Beloved, now is the acceptable time spoken of by the Spirit, the day of salvation, peace and reconciliation. . . This holy season teaches us that Christ's coming was not only for the benefit of his contemporaries; his power has still to be communicated to us all.

And he goes on to say that we shall “share [Jesus’] power, if, through holy faith and the sacraments, we willingly accept the grace [that] Christ earned for us"; and we shall share in his power if we “live by that grace and in obedience to Christ. What the Church asks us to understand is that Christ, who came once in the flesh, is prepared to come again. And when we remove all obstacles to his presence, St Charles says, “he will come, at any hour and moment, to dwell spiritually in our hearts, bringing with him the riches of grace.”

extra material

first part

One of the things I find most interesting about Advent is this strange sense of time. We are constantly speaking of the end of time, and the fullness of time. It's as if these two great tectonic plates were slowly moving, pushing up against each other and causing earthquakes and tremors and moving land masses. What this does for me is give me the sense that Advent is sort of like time outside of time.

One of my favorite books ever was "Once and Future King", a retelling of the King Arthur-Camelot story by T. H White; it was the basis of the movie “Camelot”. In White's version of the story Merlin the magician and teacher of Arthur, was born in the future and is getting younger as time progresses for other people––in other words, he’s going backwards. So when he meets Arthur for the first time, it is the last time he will ever meet him, hence Arthur is the “once and future king.”

I don't know if you’ve ever noticed it but there's something like that going on in Advent. The church in its liturgical use of scripture throughout this season seems to keep forcing us to move backwards, throwing off all sense of chronology if we really pay attention. So, as we ended ordinary time we had already begun concentrating on the second coming, and the end of the world, which I will be referring to specifically as “the end of time.” That, of course, carries over into the first weeks of Advent. Then we meet John the Baptist, and what we’re really hearing about during those days is not the preparation for Jesus’ birth but the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry. (We’re so focused on the celebrations of the Nativity at Christmas that we easily miss this.) It’s only after all that that we will proclaim the lineage, and start retelling the stories of the events surrounding Jesus’ birth. Why are we moving backwards? It’s as if we're swimming upstream during Advent, going against the flow of time. It’s a wonderful exercise really, like a pilgrimage to the source of the Ganges––we start in the future, move through the past and go back, go back to the Source, to that initial movement when the fullness of time was inaugurated, when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And somehow we are called to simply sit still in the midst of the Eternal Now and let it happen––to just be there as it churns on.

In Matthew 24(:36-44) Jesus says

But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. … Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

Now, here is where I must confess that I am a simple monk and not very smart when it comes to scriptural exegesis. I generally tend to avoid any discussion about the second coming, the end of the world, final judgment. But I shall present it as I understand it from the Roman Catholic viewpoint.

I was visiting a friend of mine, who is a priest and wonderful Scripture scholar and teacher, and he was telling the story of browsing through the bookstore one day. And he came across the series of novels in the Left Behind series. At first he was disappointed to see them at all, because he didn't really care for their theology, but on second glance he was consoled to see where they were placed––not in the religion section at all, but in the fiction section, because as far as he was concerned books such as these ought not be considered prophecy: they are fiction, pure and simple. Why? Because of the first line of that section we just heard, Matthew chapter 24 verse 36: “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

It is pretty clear that among other things, Jesus saw himself as an eschatological prophet. So the sections in the synoptic Gospels that refer to the end times, even after all redactions have been explained away, still seem to be based on authentic discourses of Jesus. This is always a slippery and subtle area, speaking of Jesus’ own knowledge of himself, but he himself admits that his human knowledge is limited––these things have not been revealed even to him! He himself might have thought that his second coming was imminent. The Gospels report of him saying, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” Certainly many of his disciples and the first people to pass on the Christian message thought so as well, including St Paul––scholars see an immense change of focus, a radical re-thinking about the coming of the Lord in Paul’s writings from the letter to the Thessalonians, which was probably his first letter, to the letter to Timothy, which was probably his last.

Let’s remind ourselves of what Jesus thought and taught about the kingdom of heaven. Jesus saw the reign of God coming imminently, with his own preaching of it. Remember his inaugural address in Luke's Gospel? In Luke 4:18-21 Jesus goes into the synagogue, opens the scroll and reads:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

. . . Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

And again in Luke 17, when Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, he answered,

“The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” (Lk 17:20-21)

Over and over we see Jesus proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God not as something in the future but as something here, “already in your midst,” as in the first chapter of Mark: after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled; repent, and believe in the good news, the kingdom of God has come near.” And he sends the disciples to say the same thing: Then Jesus called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal. (Lk 9:1-2)

His death may not have been what Jesus had anticipated at the beginning of his ministry. It could be that Jesus’ own focus began to change when his ministry brought him into conflict with the established authority in Israel, and the sayings about the second coming come from this period, late in his ministry when Jesus comes to see his imminent death as vicarious, based on the eschatology of the Hebrew scriptures. But then after his death the focus changes again: remember the resurrection was a startling and unexpected event for the early church, and it shifts the focus of the second coming. If it originally had had an emphasis on some kind of definitive break into history, after the resurrection there is a new understanding of the coming of the reign of God based instead on the resurrection event and the sending of the Holy Spirit.

Now, if all that is too complicated for you, don’t worry: it is for me too. The point is this: focusing too much, as we usually do, on another definitive break in history can be a real temptation to distraction. It also is much more a spirituality based on fear rather than on love. The point is this––and this I have borrowed verbatim from my friend the scripture scholar: “If not now––not then!” Jesus’ ministry was, and our lives ought to be, based on the reign of God that has come near, on our lips, in our hearts, fulfilled in our hearing. I can’t help but think yet again of that great line that the angels have for the apostles at the ascension: “Men of Galilee, why are you looking up in the sky? This Jesus who has been lifted up into heaven will return.”

Why are you standing there looking in the sky?

How many times a day to we pray, in the words that Jesus gave us, “thy kingdom come”, and then we immediately define what we mean by that by saying “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”? Those two phrases are intimately connected, in the prayer and in our “realized eschatology”: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth.” The reign of God is among us. If not now––not then. The whole point is to be ready.

We must also understand what the “kingdom of heaven” or the “reign of God” means for us. Do you remember the story in Mark 12 (28-34) when one of the scribes came near asked Jesus, “Which commandment is the first of all?”, and Jesus answered, “The first is ‘…you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” Then the scribe says to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said …” and then proceeds to repeat what Jesus has just said. What did Jesus say to him? “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” There is a glimpse here of the ancient mystical notion of the reign of God, the kingdom of heaven.

1. * *

Advent is season of fasting, though we are always careful not to confuse it with Lent. It's not a penitential season in the same way Lent is. Advent is staying lean and mean, ready for action through the long vigil. But we embrace a certain spirit of poverty, a poverty of spirit, and emptying out of ourselves so as to make pleasant shelter for Jesus to dwell. We seek a certain purity of heart, like Mary's, during Advent. But this search for purity of heart is not only the search for paradise lost, not only the search for a lost innocence. le Loup says it is "a return to the integrity of our true nature.

Above all this spirit of poverty allows us to receive the simplest things as gifts, in much the same way fasting makes even the meagerest piece of food taste extraordinary. When we carry this poverty of spirit, this spirit of poverty to every aspect of our lives then all the simple things of life become gifts: a ray of sunshine, a scrap of bread and some water. Little by little we learn contentment.

But this contentment is not yet joy. Joy is the experience in the depths of your being that . . . the goal of all desire, dwells here and now. God is. No one can rob you of this joy.

We're no longer speaking of something sensible, affective or rational. We're speaking of the ground of being. It is only when we can root our joy there, in the ground of our being, that we can really radiate joy in every aspect of our life. This is a joy that doesn't depend on externals, that doesn't depend on what happens to us. This isn't a question of health or temperment but of fidelity to this Uncreated Presence who dwells within us. "This is joy that abides. This joy is not the cheerfulness or lightheartedness of the priviledged temperment, but the deep tranquility of someone who encounters another not to fulfill his or her own needs, but for the pleasure of communing with the life which at once unites and transcends them."

1. * *

These are the words of St Anselm from his famous Prologion:

. . . escape from your everyday business. . . hide for a moment from your restless thoughts. Break off from your cares and troubles and be less concerned about your tasks and labors. ... Enter your mind's inner chamber. Shut out everything but God and whatever helps you to seek him; and when you have shut the door, look for him.