The Buddha was asked at the end
of his life, ‘What did you get out of meditation?’ He said, ‘Nothing… but I lost a lot.’ In Christian understanding this is called kenosis,
a biblical Greek word which means emptying.
Fr Richard Rohr says that all great spirituality is about letting go. That is for most of us, in one way or
another, perhaps in many ways, the hump to get over. I lost a lot… I lost my safe comfort zone, my bolt hole, my
need for certainty… It meant learning to
love without possessiveness. I found I
was losing my fear of life, and of death…
I lost my need to label and categorise, to have black and white, good
and bad, small and great, biblical and unbiblical, christian and unchristian…
These are major shifts in life. They may be quite subtly done, but sometimes
painfully, sometimes abruptly. One real
grace is looking back and finding that the change happened, or started, before
I realised. These are the changes from
having, keeping, possessing, controlling, accumulating… to letting go, what
Jesus called leaving self behind, becoming sensitive to falsity and show, including
my own, reliance on appearance… shedding the need for all that. Discovering instead what Thomas Merton called
my new freedom. It is the fruit of
contemplative life and prayer. The ego retreats,
back towards where it belongs, where God intends it usefully to be. In common idiom, we stop taking ourselves so
seriously. It is not that the ego is bad, simply that it
is demoted, it is no longer determining life and decisions.
I lost a lot, said the
Buddha… He means he lost the imperial “I”, the first person singular pronoun,
the “I” which means me. I lost my
need always to be right, to be well thought of (although of course that is
nice, and to be badly thought of is not nice), I lost my need for my opinion to
prevail, my need to see anyone punished, get what I think they deserve. I lost any vestiges in me of narcissism (a
word scarcely known before the Trump era), needing to be the centre of my
universe, or of the charmed circle of family or tribe, right or wrong. I shed any lingering need to be one of the
right-thinking people, because the things I really needed to know were found
elsewhere, among people who had made mistakes and endured suffering and setback…
among people who have found how to listen.
When the Buddha said, I lost a
lot, I wonder, did he sometimes wistfully want any of that stuff back? I hardly think so. In our western, Kiwi way of life we may find
it comes as a deep draught of free air to find and enjoy the meaningful simplicity
that Jesus prescribes, to know it becoming possible in practice, and to be
applying it gently and sensitively to the lives we lead and the decisions we
make, and the opinions we hold, day by day.
It is, as we repeatedly say, the fruit of a gentle, sensible discipline
of stillness and silence, contemplative life and prayer, and our innermost Yes
to God.
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