AND THEIR EYES WERE OPENED
Early this morning I began by enjoying the beautiful gift of this day — the scents of Spring, greening everywhere, blue sky with thin wisps of cloud, full-volume birdsong, nature getting us used to the summer that’s a-coming. Who could not feel grateful even if they didn’t know who to thank?
Then, after meditation and breakfast, I listened to the news and the dark side of the human condition swept over me. The wrenching, devastating death of loved ones and loss of family homes, of hope for tomorrow and needless man-made suffering inflicted anonymously and with cruel indifference. The displacement of hundreds of thousands of people like us, vulnerable, unprotected by power sytems and security details.
How can we reconcile the intoxicating joy of the natural world and the unnatural cruelty of humanity? We must try or we become indifferent too. We have to bring them together in a greater whole and from there re-find balance and integration. So here we are, in person in the barn at Bonnevaux with hundreds online around the world. Worship is about recconciling, both the external worship that brings us together for an hour or so and the worship we enter interiorly each time we meditate. It is the ‘worship in spirit and truth’ that Jesus says God wants. This means, I would hazard to say, whatever brings us and God back into one, us and nature, friends and foes. True reconciliation is authenticated by the release of pure gratitude?
The word Eucharist just means ‘thank you’. Meister Eckhart said that ‘If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is ‘thank you’, it will be enough’. In a eucharistic act we bring everything in the world and in the human condition together and restores the gasp we make when we see the wonder of being.
Today’s Gospel is a story of the two disciples running away from Jerusalem on the road to Emmaus after the first collapse of the Jesus movement (the first of many to come). Their meeting with the resurrected Jesus on the road, talking with him but not knowing who they were talking to, gives a glimpse of what the mystery of the resurrection feels like. In all the resurrection appearances, there is a first reaction of not recognizing or mistaking him for someone else; this is followed by doubt or fear and then the definitive moment (who knows, maybe lasting weeks or months?) of full recognition: the eureka moment when what you see and what you understand become one. Fear, resistance, scepticism, doubt or misperception, are signs of not being present to what is happening.
During a retreat I was giving last week for a group of Belgian and Irish meditators we were discussing the question of disillusionment. When we know we are deluded we no longer are held in the grip of illusion or falsehood but accepting that knowledge is painful. We agreed on the need to be disillusioned. Someone shared an experience of disillusionment which took us rather by surprise. He said he was on the toilet in the bathroom when his six-year-old daughter, started knocking loudly on the door. He called out he was in there. She called back through the door urgently saying she had a question. He said to tell him, and she asked, ‘is there really a Saint Niklaus (Santa Claus, Father Christmas)?’ Although the conditions were not ideal, he recognized it was an important moment in her childhood. He decided to be direct and honest and said, ‘no, there isn’t a St Niklaus. ‘Then,’ she said, ‘why did you tell me there was?’ ‘Because’, he replied, ‘we wanted to show you that people you don’t know can give you gifts, and we like to give gifts that are a nice surprise. Sometimes we don’t want to be seen to be the people the gift. We just want to it to be a happy surprise.’ She was silent for a while, then said ‘Oh, I see, well that’s alright. But I have another question. What about the elves? Are there elves?’ He said, ‘no, elves aren’t real, but they are part of the story, and they show us how we need help from others to give gifts to people we love.’ She was satisfied by that and left him in peace.
He told us what a powerful experience it had been for him to dis-illusion his daughter and he was so relieved it had gone well. Often, disillusionment is not as easy as that. When our false perceptions collide with truth, it is upsetting because it change our minds, not merely giving us something new to think about. What we were given to explain and relate to the world is like a pattern, a template, a model of reality and truth. We probably added defended it against non-believers. Now it is smashed into and collapses as suddenly and irrevocably as the Twin Towers. Metanoia is hard work. It is very difficult to change our minds. To really get into the operating system of our consciousness and clear space for truth and let change happen is the work of meditation.
To really change, not just on the surface, involves the suffering of the loss of a familiar vision of reality and the dawn of a deeper and clearer vision. That is the fruit of meditation which is the work of contemplation. One way or another, life brings us to this. Illusion will always evaporate eventually but it takes time, even a lifetime. As long as we act and speak under the influence of illusion, we do great harm to ourselves and others. Meditation allows us to cooperate with the natural life-process of peeling illusion away, giving up even the most comforting falsehoods. In the long run, the processes of growing up and seeing reality as it is, are unstoppable. Yet they demand something of us, a letting go and acceptance of change that surprise us by their scale.
For that hard task we need continuous support and encouragement and the reassurance to stay on the path of disillusionment. This reinforcement is always available even if we don’t see it at first. It comes as the great gift of community. But it comes with a twist because community itself is dis-illusioning and so it is at first a hard gift to accept. It is why people who follow this path of disillusionment come together, as we do this morning online and here in person at Bonnevaux. We need a community to give thanks with. We need a community to be eucharistic and yet the Eucharist very strangely creates what it needs and feeds the community it reveals.
Jesus left us this medicine of the Eucharist, like a dietary supplement that, I feel almost like saying, sweetens the pill of reality.
Here is the story of the two on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24).
On the first day of the week, two of the disciples of Jesus were going to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and they were talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognising him. And he said to them, ‘What is this conversation that you are holding with each other as you walk?’ And they stood still, looking sad.
Then one of them, named Cleopas, answered him, ‘Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?’ And he said to them, ‘What things?’ And they said to him, ‘Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.
Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened. Moreover, some women of our company amazed us. They were at the tomb early in the morning, and when they did not find his body, they came back saying that they had even seen a vision of angels, who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but him they did not see.’ And he said to them, ‘O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?’ And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
So, they drew near to the village to which they were going. He acted as if he were going farther, but they urged him strongly, saying, ‘Stay with us, for it is towards evening and the day is now far spent.’ So, he went in to stay with them. When he was at table with them, he took the bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognised him. And he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?’ And they rose that same hour and returned to Jerusalem. And they found the Eleven and those who were with them gathered together, saying, ‘The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!’ Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread.
How the Resurrection appearances are described itself shows the new vision of reality that the Resurrection opens up. It is not a problem to solve or a riddle to understand. Wittgenstein said that intellectually he couldn’t make sense of it but that he believed it and for that you need love. The narrative of the Resurrection enters human history in an unprecedented way. It is either true or mythical or both. It sounds like a very solemn statement yet at the same time the way it is described in quite a simple and funny way. Mistaken identity in a sitcom or pantomime can be hilarious absurdity makes us laugh even as it unsettles our sense of what makes sense. Absurdity is a function of disillusionment. How do we reconcile this way of telling a story with the sacredness of what is being said?
Get Laurence Freeman osb’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Perhaps one reason for the humour is that in the resurrection, God is making fun of what the human being fears most in life, which is death. Unspeakable. The meaning of death is more of a taboo in our culture than sex. It is the one thing we can’t see around or explain. The resurrection appearances hit us where we hurt, like this one experienced by disciples running in fear from the disillusionment of Jesus’ failure to initiate the ‘Kingdom’. They were still suffering from their false understanding of what the Kingdom meant, but Jesus points out their failure and, through the scriptures, brings them to understand what he meant. This is serious and laboured stuff, like the healing of a trauma, but it is also something playful in the way illusion and truth are being reconciled in a unified vision of reality. As the bread is broken, so their eyes are opened, and eventually they see duality in the light of non-duality.
There’s a Sufi story from the mystical dimension of Islam about two Sufis talking of the differences in their common path. One of them asks the other ‘what’s particular about your path?’ He replied, ‘When God sends us something, we gratefully accept it. If it’s food, we eat it. But if God doesn’t give it, we just endure the absence of it with patience and try to take the desire for it out of our hearts.’ His friend replied, ‘ but that’s what dogs do. If they find a bone, they eat it. And if not, they wait.’ His fellow Sufi asked him, ‘well, how would you define Sufism?’ And he said, ‘when anything is given to us, we prefer others to ourselves. In other words, we share what we have been given, we give it away. On the other hand, if we don’t like what get we occupy ourselves with gratitude. We feel grateful and pray for forgiveness.’
I think the second Sufi seems deeper. It reminds me of what Job said when everything he had and loved was wrenched away from him, family, prosperity, status and finally his health. This brought him to a wisdom which he expressed in few words: ‘the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’
The ability to feel gratitude in all conditions of life is itself the greatest gift from God. Left to ourselves, we moan and complain or obsess with what we don’t have or what we have lost. The ability to feel gratitude in every condition of life is what we should be most thankful for. Gratitude is what awakens thankfulness in us because it changes everything, our minds undergo metanoia.
What is gratitude? The Eucharist is one way to see it. Unfortunately it has been misunderstood and mis-represented by churches. But in essence it is sharing equally in the goodness of life, joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, and allowing them all to be transfigured in the gift of Jesus’ self-giving. He gives not like a Santa Claus but as one like us who is one with us whether we can yet see it or not.
Not ‘grateful’ like when we possess something but when we are spontaneously delighted by what is there, kissing the joy even as it flies. Whoever ‘binds to himself a joy, does the winged life destroy but he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity’s sunrise.’ To be possessive means being controlled by greed or the fear of losing something. This combination poisons the joy of life. The eucharistic way of living, on the other hand, rises from the lived insight that the wisdom of God is present in everything, in every situation: in fullness and in emptiness, in joy and in pain, in death and in life.
The two Sufis were talking about about Patience and/or Hope. Patience is easier because you just grit your teeth and endure, even with the slightly depressed feeling that you probably missed out on something. Instead, hope breathes in gratitude. It is the greater gift and mystery. Joy of heart, even in the midst of affliction or deprivation, is the ‘medicine of immortality’, the healing of the soul. It is the real gift of the Spirit that converts a beggar into a king. You have nothing but because you can still be open to this gratitude of being, the thankfulness of the spirit, you also enjoy everything. This is poverty of spirit and ‘happy are the poor in spirit’ because they enjoy everything without having to possess it: the Kingdom.
We are not customers going to God shopping for what we want. We are not customers. Human life is better than that. We actually own the shop with Him. That’s the universal mystical wisdom. We don’t go to the shop and ask for what we like on the shelves, but we are welcomed into his shop and share in the shopkeeper’s being. That’s the mystical reality and the most realistic understanding of life.
Of course, we often seem to oscillate wildly between fear and hope. Fear undermines us because even when we are happy, we are frightened by knowing that nothing lasts forever. The shelf-life is even shorter because of our desires, our instability, our shifting ideas, our insecurity and shifting emotions and moods. Then we cannot enjoy anything very much.
Hope is stronger than this fear (hopefully) because it is grounded in a conviction, something we directly know, of the true nature of things. It convinces us that the ground of being is unbounded benevolence. In all the wisdom traditions, this fundamental insight holds the balance between fear and love, patience and hope. Naturally, fear gives some insight: we know like Job, everything can be taken away from us. But we know also that the presence of what we inadequately call ‘God’s love’, is the innate goodness of reality and therefore gives meaning to everything that happens.
Sufis speak about the ‘two wings’ of fear and hope and to fly we need both. The fear is not about the fear of punishment. St. John says very clearly that if you’re frightened of being punished for your faults, your love is still incomplete. Rather, it’s the fear that comes with awe, reverence and the sense of the sacred. The awareness of our weaknesses, our wounded ego and our capacity to be unfaithful and insincere evoke not divine wrath but divine compassion — and humour.
We should be frightened of our weaknesses because they are unpredictable. But hope is greater. It is the conviction of a trust in God deeper than the shame we feel at our failures. It is stronger than the disappointment we feel when we listen to the news and wonder how in God’s name human beings can act as they do to each other. These two wings of fear and hope are more than emotions. They are states of consciousness which give us stability to keep moving on the journey of life like the two disciples on that road to Emmaus. They were running away from Jerusalem driven by fear. Later, they turned around and re-engaged with life.
They had met but didn’t recognize the presence of the risen Christ. They engaged with him without recognizing him. The funny thing is that, like a lot of religious people, they’re talking about God all the time, but they don’t recognize God Him when it’s there. The story of Emmaus is beautiful because it is true in how it shows the human roller coaster of life. They were feeling what we all feel at times, especially these times: our disappointments, anger, fear, despondency and resentment at being disillusioned. They had had their hopes built up on Palm Sunday but on Good Friday it all crashed. Being disillusioned makes us slide back to the bottom. Hope bounces us back.
Spirit is the wisdom of balance and equilibrium, holding us in a dynamic equilibrium, in perpetual transition. This is not a pretended hope denying that dreams are shattered or that illusions cause pain. Every failure plunges us deeper to reveal the primal harmony in the ground of things: equilibrium, equanimity, what Jesus means when he says, ‘don’t worry’.
Equanimity of soul is the basis of social equality, when we see ourselves in others and others in ourselves. The two walking to Emmaus recognized him, as we can do in the Eucharist, at the breaking of the bread. Funny that we should break the bread in order to share it and find communion and build community among people of all types. Disillusionment is simply a form of separation leading to deeper union.
And then he disappears from their sight. They cannot cling to him, just as Mary of Magdala could not cling to him. But they don’t feel that they have lost him again because he has now been become interiorized. He will be with them as joy in all their pleasures and sorrows.
The mystery is Christ within you, your hope of glory (Col:1:27)
Homily, 3rd Sunday of Easter, 19 April 2026, Bonnevaux
