The Meaning of Easter

At the first Easter, a great cosmic drama was enacted by a group of conscious players, the leading role being taken by Jesus. Only He had reached the very high state of consciousness necessary for making the divine sacrifice. But His supporting players were also important; without them, the drama could not have been staged, and the inner meaning would have been lost.

By "staged", I don't mean that anything about the first Easter was fake. On the contrary, everything was starkly real. Christ was truly betrayed, He truly suffered, and truly rose from the dead on the third day. Nobody else has attained the degree of consciousness that Jesus had reached, but what He did showed the way that all could follow. And the enormous supernatural energies that were released at His death and resurrection made that possible.

In the drama of the innocent victim hanging on the cross, we're shown the nature of our daily reality.
Constantly, every hour, every day, until we finally achieve some degree of awareness, we sacrifice our Essence, our inner being, to the myriad petty I's that make up our False Personality. We betray our conscience and crucify our Real I.

Because our Higher Emotional Centre can't think in words but only in images, Conscious Humanity had to act out this terrible drama in such a way that we couldn't forget it. It was the only means by which we could be shown our true nature, our sinfulness. Sin, in the Greek, actually means "missing the mark", and every time we act mechanically we are spiritually falling short of what ought to be our target, our progression towards a higher state of consciousness.

Wars, murder, theft, slander, envy, gluttony, avarice - everything that steals our consciousness and diminishes our Being - are among the results of mankind's lack of awareness. Both on a large scale and in our own small lives we choose Barabbas, the robber, the False Personality who steals our energy and condemns us to greater and greater mechanicalness.

And when we do this, we crucify Christ. Christ suffers every single day because of our mechanicalness. He freely accepts this suffering, knowing it is necessary for us to witness and to share in it, as we undertake the painful task of remembering ourselves and growing closer to our Real I. As we see images of the Crucifixion, we should remember that this is our doing, that it is our own very low state that has caused and will continue to cause this suffering. And by seeing it depicted in this dramatic, bloody and horrific way, we may be shocked into remembering ourselves - at least for a while.

The Catholic Mass includes a prayer of repentance for sin, when the congregation strike their breasts and say "Though my fault, through my fault, through my own most grievous fault". The Mass reenacts the sacrifice of the Crucifixion, and in this prayer everyone present relates Christ's death to their own sinfulness.

Every participant in the drama of the Crucifixion should be seen as an "I" in us. We are the ignorant crowds, the apathetic Pilate, the robber Barabbas, and the wavering, bewildered disciples. We are Peter when we deny all that is highest in us; Peter again when, remorseful, we weep for what we have done and find the strength to persevere towards the light.

We are Mary, the helpless, devoted mother as she stands by the cross watching her perfect Son put to death because of sin.

We are all the I's that look away, deny, choose the easier path, cheat, and lie. And we are the I's that justify our own evil actions, as Pilate and the Temple priests did.

The life and death of Jesus followed centuries of gradually dawning awareness. They did not spring from nothingness. God had prepared the way for this great cosmic event by inspiring different philosophies and religions during the eras which preceded his birth.

Druids and Greeks had rituals of dying and rising gods; so did the Egyptians in their own mysteries of Osiris. The Jews were led out of the slavery in "Egypt", the land which represented sensuality in the Bible, into a moral, ethical code which was entirely new in the world, ethical monotheism.

As Teilhard de Chardin put it, "...the beauty fashioned through its age-long history by ancient Egypt, the anxious expectancies of Israel, the patient distilling of the attar of oriental mysticism, the endless refining of wisdom by the Greeks: all these were needed before the Flower could blossom on the rod of Jesse and of all humanity. All these preparatory processes were cosmically and biologically necessary that Christ might set foot on our human stage. ... When Christ first appeared before men in the arms of Mary, he had already stirred up the world."

And when Christ died, announcing from the cross that "It is finished", his death released a tremendous burst of energy into the universe. He gathered up everything that had gone before, and transformed it in a blaze of light. The old patterns were now outgrown. Something radically new had happened, and it changed history.

In the Work we think of the higher hydrogens that we can create when we work on ourselves; Christ's own transformation produced energy at an unimaginably high level, and the wonder is that we are invited to add to His own redemptive work by our small, personal, daily sacrifices. Everything we do can be offered up to Him, to Conscious Humanity, for their saving and transforming work, which reaches backwards and forwards in time from that one huge, shocking event in Jerusalem, two thousand years ago.

The physical importance of the sacrifice is often overlooked, but Mrs Pogson reminded groups of the effect of Christ's blood falling upon the earth, some of it collected in the chalice of Joseph of Arimathea and honoured as the "Holy Grail".  This blood, she said, was so charged with higher energies, so purged of everything base, that it has purified the Earth ever since, and will go on doing so as long as is necessary: that is, until mankind as a whole takes a step forward towards consciousness.

And the picture of the Precious Blood falling on the earth also carries the meaning that in us, too, the "earth", the ground of our Being, can now be purified.

The resurrection which followed on the first Easter Sunday gave the disciples another enormous shock, and illustrated for them and for us how dying to oneself in one form can lead to a rising on a higher level, a total transformation of what went before.

At Easter, we can already see and feel new natural energies arising in the Earth. Flowers begin to bloom, trees blossom, birds build nests and lay their eggs. Nature pulsates with new life. So too in us there can be new life at Easter, because that is the eternal purpose of the Crucifixion.

A meditation on Palm Sunday, Easter and "the Jews"

Reading the gospel accounts of Jesus's crucifixion and death can be quite confusing to the literal mind. Here we are, on Palm Sunday, visualizing the joyful crowds which greeted His entry into Jerusalem, riding on a donkey as the Messiah was prophesied to do. They wave palm leaves before Him and acclaim Him with loud "Hosannas".

And then, just five days later, "the Jews" call for his crucifixion. Stirred up by a group of corrupt and greedy Temple priests, the crowd is persuaded to cry for the release of the thief Barabbas and the death of Jesus. How could this happen?

First, we have to remember that "the Jews" in the crowd calling for Jesus's crucifixion were only a small number out of the huge masses who greeted His triumphal entry a few days earlier. The Temple priesthood had a vested interest in suppressing the teachings of this dangerous, upstart rabbi, who had just whipped the moneychangers out of the Temple and who was telling the crowds that God was their loving Father, not the stern judge who demanded more and more animal sacrifices.

And the Temple priests depended on the machinery of animal sacrifice for their very livelihood. If this were abolished, as Jesus seemed to be seeking, they would be out of a job! So they sent "agents provocateurs" into the crowds to shout for the release of the criminal, in place of the rabbi. And then they must have breathed a sigh of relief as Jesus was led away to be killed by the Romans.

But these apparently stupid and easily-led crowd members were but a fraction of Jesus's followers. Weeks later, at Pentecost, the followers of Jesus numbered in the thousands, and a new religion (which was, initially, seen as a new branch of Judaism itself) was born.

As the Catholic church repeatedly pointed out in the 20th century after the tragedy of the Holocaust, it is a grave sin to blame all Jews, right down to contemporary Jewish men and women, for the death of Jesus. Such a charge is foolish, and worse. Only a few had been culpable, two thousand years before, and even they could not bear full responsibility, though the gospels say they willingly accepted it. They were the more suggestible and fearful ones, those who needed for whatever reasons to be in the priesthood's "good books". Perhaps they owed money to the priests or to the moneychangers; perhaps they were offended by Jesus's teachings about sin.

Whatever the reason, they reacted mechanically, just as many I's in us react completely mechanically to outside influences. And the result was not only the death of Jesus, but the birth of antisemitism.

Antisemitism is the world's oldest version of racism, and it led to the deaths of millions of innocent people in the gas chambers of the Nazis as well to the repeated terrorist attacks against Jews today.

Every Easter, all over Europe, the UK (during the periods when Jews were allowed to live there), Poland and Russia, terrible, bloodthirsty pogroms were fomented by local rulers and police. Jews were accused of killing Christian children to take their blood to make matzoh, the Passover "unleavened bread" of the annual Jewish seder ritual. Watch "Fiddler on the Roof" for a sort of "pogrom lite" account. Men and children were murdered, women raped and property ransacked before the few surviving Jews were forced to move on, to somewhere safer. But nowhere was safe.

In York, Jews were herded into a tower and burned to death. In Spain and Portugal, Jews were exiled to wherever they could find that would take them in. Columbus's discovery of America in the same year, 1492, gave the Jews the chance to emigrate to the Americas, and they did so if they could.

It's hard to imagine a more stupid or ignorant accusation. Jews are forbidden to consume any blood, and all animal flesh has to be purged of blood before it may be cooked and eaten. So to imagine that any Jew would use human blood for this purpose simply beggars belief. It couldn't happen. And yet, such has been the world's resentment and envy of Jews, and so strong our need for scapegoats to explain our own failings, that this ridiculous libel has reared its head again and again over the centuries.

It culminated in the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, but it didn't end there.

The forged document known as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", which purports to show a plot for Jews to control the world, surfaces from time to time in the Middle East, and contributes to the cauldron of antisemitism and anti-Israel feelings there.

Today, antisemitism, and its concomitant political attitude of anti-Zionism, bedevils world politics and endangers the survival of Jews everywhere. There is so much antisemitism now in Europe, in the UK, and throughout the world that Jews are being exhorted not to wear symbols of their faith in public, and many are considering emigrating to Israel.

Even there, they can never feel completely safe. Radical Islam is sworn to destroy Jews everywhere, beginning with the tiny - and completely legally established - State of Israel. The rulers of Iran and other terrorist States have vowed to destroy Israel first of all, and then to go on to kill Jews wherever else in the world they may be. In the Second World War, Hitler and the Mufti of Jerusalem collaborated in the destruction of Jewry. They admired each other's goals, just as so many modern Islamist leaders do.

And Israel gets the blame for their own victimization. If they only gave away more land, world leaders insist, they'd get peace. But no such giveaways in the past have ever led to peace. On the contrary: Israel gave away a large part of the Sinai to Egypt, Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, and parts of the Lebanese border in the north to Lebanon. And in return they got only terrorist cells and unceasing attacks. No wonder they are unwilling to try this again.

And I believe much of this hatred can be traced back to the misreading of the gospels and their accounts of the crucifixion.

You may be surprised to read this somewhat political piece in a blog devoted mainly to spirituality. But the root of antisemitism - of all racism - is a spiritual evil. It is a denial of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; of the God of the New Testament, the Father of Jesus. It is a deepseated, unholy passion to control the city of Jerusalem, where the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus took place. If you can control that piece of sacred ground, their reasoning goes, you can wipe out Judaism and Christianity at one fell swoop and prevent the Messiah's return. 

Antisemitism is a Satanic, demonic evil that must be resisted and fought with all our power. I devote quite a large part of my time to endeavouring to educate and inform people about Israel and the Jews, because although in the Work we think of most political ideas as a form of lunacy, the search for peace is definitely not; it is mandatory for all who care about the future of humanity. The level of Jew-hatred and anti-Israel feeling that now exists is capable of bringing about World War III. And that, of course, would be the end of the planet.

There's another reason why those in the Work should support Israel. It's the only Middle East country where there is a Work group. You can't imagine that ISIL, Iran or any other country ruled by fanatics would allow mystics to flourish, and they don't. The Sufis have been persecuted and expelled from everywhere they used to live, from Turkey, Turkmenistan, Syria, Iran and Iraq. The monasteries and Sufi teachers of Gurdjieff's time have vanished, having been murdered or exiled. Christians are being beheaded or burned alive every day. Jews are being terrorized. Only a few Jewish and Christian mystics and the Work group itself remain, in Israel, itself a huge beacon of spiritual light in an increasingly benighted place.

And so much of this irrational, devilish hatred springs from a simple misreading of the gospels. The writers never intended that all Jews, everywhere, should be blamed for the death of Christ! They were pointing out how stupid and mechanical we can all be, when one day we hail a great religious teacher who could be the Messiah, and a few days later call for his death. The "Jews" in this narrative are us, our silly, shallow, suggestible, unconscious I's. The "Jews" swing wildly from side to side of the pendulum in this narrative; so, too often, do we.

It is only when we are asleep that evil can happen. The gospels must be read metaphorically as well as literally, so that we can all picture ourselves in the crowds on Palm Sunday, and then again before Pontius Pilate, faced with the choice between Barabbas and Jesus.

We are all "the Jews" here. The gospels show us why we need to wake up, that our sleep can bring about unimaginable evil. Do we listen to that call? 

Or would we, too, rather sleep? Rather see our Real I crucified than make the effort to awaken? Picture yourself in the crowd, being urged on by the Temple priests to call for the death of Jesus. Do you wake up and resist - or do you shrug, turn away, and betray all that's sacred?

Bona Mors: A "Good Death"

Today we treat death in the same way the Victorians dealt with sex: we'd rather it didn't happen at all, but if it must, let it take place out of sight and with no mention of it in polite society.

The Catholic idea of the "bona mors" - a good death - is never discussed. We do use the term "euthanasia", which literally means the same in Greek as the Latin phrase, but we take it to mean the willful ending of a life that the person, or their representative, considers to be no longer useful. People argue passionately for the right to have a doctor administer a lethal injection, but they don't realize the implications of such an act.

What it means to those who wish to legalize it is that human life has become a commodity, not a gift. In such a view, people are valued because of their roles as producers and consumers. When both become irrelevant, as with the terminally ill, the severely disabled or the very old, then life itself is thought to be expendable. It is a utilitarian, heartless view of human beings. Catholics see it as part of a pervasive "culture of death" that now permeates society.

And the risk is that if society adopts such a viewpoint, those thought to be "useless mouths", as Hitler called the disabled, will be encouraged or compelled to end their own lives.  Chronically sick or elderly people may be made to feel guilty for living too long. Why should they take up space and resources, when they are no longer contributing anything measurable to society?

In some countries this may already be happening. There have been cases in Europe of people who are depressed, or suffering from a minor illness, asking for lethal injections, when with good medical and psychiatric care they could go on to enjoy happy lives.

How very sad.

This desperate situation is the result of 50 years of gradual erosion of religious and spiritual values in the West, so that huge masses of society are apathetic as to the purpose of their lives. If they think about it at all, it's in terms of those two roles: can they still produce anything? And can they consume - food, clothing, cars, houses, anything that advertisers attempt to sell us? Are they themselves still "marketable commodities" - young-looking, energetic, healthy? If not, away to the crematorium with them. Call Doctor Death.

Nobody now, except for Catholics and - as far as I know - Orthodox Christians and Jews contemplate death as a vital transition to a new life; the most important moment, in fact, of our entire earthly existence. All our lives lead up to this moment, and yet we banish it from consciousness and try to deny its reality with more and more consumption, plastic surgery, vitamin injections, and so on.

So what does a good death mean, to a religious person?

First of all, it means, as Gurdjieff said, not "dying like a dog". And that, of course, is exactly what the euthanasia lobby would like to see. We give our beloved pets lethal injections when they are suffering, so why not treat human beings in the same way? After all, we're only animals, aren't we?

To die like a dog meant, to G, dying without having fully lived. Without having become fully conscious; without having made the effort to transform our own being, and in so doing, to help the universe to evolve.

To a Catholic, the most important aspect of death is that it will present us before God, just as we are at the moment of our decease. Therefore, Catholics strive to ensure they will have a priest near at hand when their death is imminent, so that a confession may be made, the Eucharist taken, and the soul sent on its journey towards God in a state of peace and hope.

Throughout their lives, however, Catholics (and all Christians, until the Reformation) will have gone regularly to confession, have examined their conscience every day, and fed their soul on spiritual truths. In doing so, they will have fought against many temptations during their lifetime, and so when they die they can feel assured that they have fought a good fight, and that Christ will receive them.

I'm not arguing against pain relief, of course. In some cases, pain-killing injections may be needed of such strength they may endanger life. But in these circumstances, death is not the aim of the injection, but simply an unintended consequence, and I'm sure many people suffering from terminal diseases do die in this way. But what the euthanasia lobby is calling for is the right to ask for injections which have death as the main aim. And this is what is so appalling.

 Of course, a society which denies spiritual reality also denies the existence of an afterlife. Never mind that there are now many people, of whom I'm one, who've been privileged to attain a glimpse of this during our earthly lives. We have all undergone a profound transformation as a result, and have tried to explain to others exactly what we saw, but our consumer society doesn't want to know.

G tells us that we must keep in mind our death every single day. This will cure  us of the disease of "tomorrow", the deeply ingrained habits of procrastination and denial which keep us asleep and  prevent us from working on ourselves.

We may die at any moment. We don't know what will happen by nightfall, or by tomorrow morning. A sudden stroke or heart attack may take us in a second, or we could be mown down by a runaway lorry as we cross the street.

A Catholic prayer asks that we may be protected from an unexpected death, coming at a time when we are unprepared to meet our Maker. The corollary is, of course, that by praying in this way, by keeping our death always in mind, not in a fearful way but simply as one of the possible events that may happen to us this day, we actually do achieve a state of readiness.

Dying with a peaceful conscience is open to everyone, and it is the "good death" that euthanasia is not.

May we all undergo a good death when our time comes.

The Little Way of St Therese of Lisieux

St Therese of Lisieux was born into a bourgeois home in Normandy, and at 15 entered an obscure Carmelite convent. She died, aged only 24, from tuberculosis in 1897. After her death, her fellow nuns wondered what on earth they could put in her obituary - she had, many said, done nothing special at all, and her short journey on this earth had been thoroughly unremarkable.

Yet, by 1899, her family considered leaving Lisieux because so many people were demanding to see where she'd lived, to pray at her grave, and to question her sisters about Therese's spirituality. What had happened?

 In 1898, the convent had had published Therese's spiritual autobiography, "The Story of a Soul", and it had taken the world by storm. Everyone who read it was touched. They could all relate to her particular "brand" of spiritual progress, and their thirst for more knowledge about her was insatiable. Later, her letters, poems and other writings were also published, as were her conversations, and again, the public loved them.  Admirers included the philosopher Henri Bergson, and great spiritual leaders such as Pope John Paul II.

Eventually she was canonized and given the title of  "Doctor of the Church", and made a patron saint of Europe. Today, more than a million visitors visit Lisieux each year to pray at her tomb, and millions more the world over, including many Muslims, pray to her for help and try to follow what she termed her "Little Way" of spirituality, what some have called the "Way of Spiritual Childhood".

In many respects, this Way is like the Work. It embodies many of the timeless, universal spiritual practices that are common to all the great religions and also includes specific Catholic teachings, such as the need to "offer up" one's suffering. The Little Way differs radically from the Jansenist Catholicism then prevalent in France, which stressed the need to fear God, and was a gloomy, pessimistic approach to spirituality. Instinctively, people knew that Therese's Way was right: they could follow it themselves, and yet it could also inspire and guide great souls.

What was so special about it? And in what ways does it foreshadow the Work?

To understand Therese's Little Way, you have to understand Therese, the person. Her wonderful books are a fine introduction, but there are also many excellent biographies available now, among the best being those written by Guy Gaucher, Ida Gorres, and Jean-Francois Six. Do read them if Therese attracts you, but first read her own account of her spiritual growth.

But to gain much from it, you have to lay aside any prejudices against the somewhat flowery and sentimental language of late 19th century French Catholicism, and read the account as what it is; a straightforward response to a request from one of her sisters to write an account of their family life, so that they could all read and enjoy it together in the convent. Without this request, it would never have been written.

Therese was not identified with her writing. She gave it to her Mother Superior, who put it in a drawer and promptly forgot about it until after Therese's death. And Therese didn't mind. She simply accepted all that happened as coming from God's hand. If God willed that her work should be neglected, then so be it.

As a young girl, however, Therese acknowledged that she was both vain and proud. She loved the little blue ribbons that, when she was a child, set off her pretty blonde hair! When her mother presented her with a basket full of tempting trifles and asked her to choose something from it, as her sisters had done, Therese said firmly, "I choose everything!" and marched off with the basket.

Growing older, she realized her faults would displease God, and so, even before she entered the convent at the age of 15, she began to work on herself, refraining from gossip, letting go of her vanity, subduing her pride, visiting poor and sick parishioners.

But the then current spiritual climate encouraged people to add up their virtues and sacrifices, as though they were pearls in a heavenly crown! Therese, on the other hand, said that if she had any merits at the end of the day, she offered them all to God. If He, in His mercy, wanted to give her blessings, then she would accept them with open hands but with eyes shut, and turning her head away, so that she would not know what they were but would simply pass them on to others.

What is this but non-identification? And further, if, at evening, she found she had done little or nothing worthwhile and had failed in her efforts, then she would simply offer to God her failures, her "littleness".

This is the secret of her Little Way. It is for "little people", those who can see themselves clearly as they are and know they are without any merits of their own, but whose trust in God allows them to run to His mercy and offer up this self-knowledge.

And isn't this exactly what we do in the Work? Our necessary suffering includes the clear view we have of ourselves when we are brave enough to be honest, that we cannot "do" and frequently fail. To see ourselves in this way, without denying or justifying, is the greatest gift we can offer to Conscious Humanity, and the surest way to spiritual understanding.

Before Therese, nobody but the greatest saints dared to approach God in this way, and consequently people often felt cut off from Him and despondent about their spiritual progress. But Therese says, look, this is how we are, and we shouldn't try to run away from this knowledge, because God is merciful and kind and wants only our complete trust in Him. He never turns His face away from anyone who comes to Him honestly and asks for His mercy. And He is pleased when we accept His graces, which are completely unmerited by us, and when we use them for His glory.

All Therese's convent life centered around self-sacrifice. There were frequent mortifications and interruptions. She was prevented from becoming from identified with the work she was doing, whether physical or mental, by the demands of the next bell, ringing for choir or meal times, when she had to literally put down her pen in the middle of a word and present herself for the next task.

Her illness imposed terrible suffering, for there were no antibiotics, and she was denied pain relief. Today, we would see this as cruel and inhumane, but Therese simply accepted this, too, as coming from God, and refused to complain or to pity herself.

Daily meditation is part of a Carmelite's life, and she had begun this practice as a young child, sitting on her bed and "just thinking about God". In the convent, her hours of contemplative prayer were vital to her growth in knowledge and love of God. Like our morning preparation in the Work, they were the vital foundation of her whole day, and she never missed them.

During her short life she underwent two Dark Nights. The first, the Dark Night of the Senses, consisted of the life of penance and mortification she led as an enclosed Carmelite. The second, the Dark Night of the Soul, which she experienced in the final year of her life, consisted in feeling bereft of spiritual consolations, and that she was drifting along in a sort of twilight, underground.

On her deathbed, however, her sister nuns were struck by the sudden expression of wonder and ecstasy that she assumed just as she was dying. It lasted for several minutes, as though she was experiencing a direct vision of heaven itself, and they were in no doubt that when she actually died, she had gone straight there.

Shortly after she died, miracles began happening to those who invoked her help, and they have not ceased ever since.

In Work terms, I would venture to say that her life was so full of discipline and suffering, willingly accepted, that she accumulated a vast store of Higher Hydrogens, a huge amount of spiritual energy that could then be used by Conscious Humanity, by Jesus and His helpers, saints of all traditions, souls both unknown and unknown, to redeem, comfort and rescue those in distress.

Once a novice nun, finding convent life hard and coming to Therese for advice, complained, "How much I shall have to gain if I'm to make any progress!"

"No," said Therese. "Rather, think of how much you have to lose." She meant, of course, that growing in the spirit requires sacrificing pride, vanity, envy, and all selfish desires.

And that, too, is the Work.