EP 7 - From Meditation to Contemplation

00:00 No, no, peace, domine, domine. No, no, peace, domine. L'Anthettlo was born into, well, a very poor working-class family in Lancashire, Belated, he was evident from his earliest years that he had a brilliant mind.

00:42 So his parents sent him to a grammar school. Their he went to Oxford to study grades. Now, grades means Latin and Greek at ancient history.

00:53 He got a first-class degree and came back to teach Latin and Greek and ancient history a St. Beach College.

01:05 I met him 25-30 years later when I became a student at that school. I was terribly impressed by his erudition, and yet it was yoked with such utter simplicity, no side on this man wants, however, utter simplicity.

01:26 …and yet, once a term, he would digress from the subject that he was teaching, and suddenly hold forth about his greatest abomination, and it was mindless criticism.

01:45 Anyone can criticize, gentlemen, he would say, anyone can criticize, OOOOOOOOGH! Thats easiest thing in the world! Anyone can pretty size!

01:58 But! Only constructive criticism.. With love will ever achieve Adam and Al! And that was that! Three times a year we were treated to his outburst!

02:15 Pest. Now, I saw on the other side of Father Tetlo that other boys didn't see because I was a border.

02:23 It was both a boarding and a day school. And every Sunday, a different priest would come in and he would lead us in prayer after benediction in the evenings.

02:38 And when it was Father Tetlo's turn, for the very first time, I got an awful shock. It was the shock came from a combination of his utter simplicity, the simplicity of this extremely brilliant man, this great classical mind.

02:55 He would always choose the Jesus Salter, a prayer that was used and particularly loved in penal times in England when Catholics were suffering so much.

03:09 It would begin thus. In his words, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, he would say, grant us grace to love thee, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, grant us grace to love thee, and so it would go on, very deeply personal, and obviously from his heart.

03:39 The whole attention was focused on Jesus' living and alive, now risen and glorified, he had to be the centre of our attention throughout this prayer.

03:52 As he must be throughout the whole of our life, please remember, it is Jesus Christ our a Lord who is the head of the mystical body in heaven, just as he is the head of the Church on Earth.

04:11 The Pope is his vicar. We have sadly, sadly to say and sadly to admit, had some poor vickers in the history of the Church, some bad ones.

04:24 At the moment, we are unfortunately having to deal with a poor one a who is not giving us the leadership that we have every right to expect.

04:37 We must then unite together, all of us. You unite together in our complete focus on Christ. Remember, we must renew, sorry, remember, de, we must unite together in repenting, interning to him.

05:00 Each one of us together in praying, in raising our hearts and minds to God, each one of us together now because we are in desperate need.

05:14 And then thirdly, we must learn to sacrifice, Repent, Prayer, the raising of the heart and mind to God, and then sacrifice.

05:27 Because sacrifice must be the main way in which we practice what I'm about to call the asceticism of the heart, to keep the heart fixed upon God.

05:45 And the most important thing that we have, what is most precious to us, more precious than anything else, is our time, our time.

05:59 This is what we have to offer our time. For without time, we will have no time for prayer. And no time for prayer means no time for God.

06:12 Time now wiesonsa reference for miserable at the very beginning of our spiritual journey infrastructure? Remember when I left school?

06:24 I missed it…. a spорт fo MississippiI missed the rugby.

06:40 I loved playing rugby. So I began to play for a local team called Sail. Now there, I became very friendly with an older man.

06:51 His name was Rocky, played in the centre. We both played in the centre. I was left centre. He was right centre.

06:59 And we got on very well together. So well together that he said he wanted to introduce me to the most beautiful girl in the world.

07:07 a most beautiful girl in the world, or in his world, was called Amanda. Three weeks after introducing me to her and she was indeed a very beautiful young woman, he said to me, I am in trouble.

07:29 Something's going wrong and I can't put my finger on it. ―I don't know what it is, but she is losing interest in me.

07:41 ―I'm happy when the idea why. Can you help me? Any suggestions? ―I said, well, frankly, I'm not very, very experienced in these things.

07:51 In fact, I'm not really experienced at all. ―But I said, but I said, h roots? Have you noticed that you are standing perhaps more time with me in the week than you're spending with her?

08:12 He said, what do you mean? I said, look, we meet together on Monday night's. Monday nights is, well we supposed more to miss it, but the batch we played on Saturday.

08:25 Takes us half the evening and the other half of the evening were having in the clubhouse, and then come Tuesday, it's down to full action again on the rugby pitch, practicing.

08:43 We're in the gym on Wednesday night, and on Thursday night it's the night off. Now, I noticed here, I said, you used to go to the films with her, but recently you started to go to the movies with me.

09:01 costselInaudible But we just have different images of films She likes romance and I like war films and westerns like you, that's why I started to go to the movies with You, And then what happens on Friday night Back to full training again.

09:23 Flat out, then Saturday at the match, yes, she comes along as the ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― dar He simply disappeared.

09:55 Not from my life, I did meet him later, and in fact, he is still alive now, because I saw only recently that he and his wife, Amanda, have spent something like, no, not something like, 65 years together, they've just had their anniversary, because he started to give her time.

10:20 …and that's what we've got to do with God. This is the most important sacrifice we must make. We must give him time.

10:29 Time to practice what I've already told you I call the… …the asceticism of the heart. …and that is to give time to God.

10:47 Now, here is the principle of the asceticism of the heart that I want to give you now. It's quite nice, really.

10:54 If you just listen to it, it doesn't sound very difficult or very demanding. Here it is. Don't give up anything you like or enjoy except when it prevents you from giving some quality space and time to God each day for prayer.

11:23 You see, the thinking behind this principle is this, that quite frankly, at the beginning of our spiritual life, we haven't got much love to give, we haven't got much strength, we haven't got great spiritual resources, and until we receive them, we must make best t devices a what we've got, of what little

11:44 resources we have, and so to give our time to God each day, quality space and time to God. Not large spaces of time to begin with just that five, ten, fifteen minutes, perhaps expanding to twenty as the months go by, in order to learn how to come to know and how to love God.

12:12 There was a famous medieval abbot. You may have heard of him. His name was William of San Thierry. He was a great buddy of St.

12:22 Bernard. In fact, such a buddy that he finally gave up his Benedictine way of life and became a substitution, very late in life.

12:31 Now William Asanteire had this to say, he said, look, you will never actually be able to love anyone unless you know them.

12:47 But he said, you will never really know them unless you love them. EROώULË kriedna silenata in etoen mic manageda.

13:04 bewe 받a. Liebebe di m Sensailoma. Liebebe di m Sensailo ra醫solga. Liebebe di Sensailo ra醫solga. argolo, yno gafolica.

13:18 Don't put frantint, uneasy, noo, jam! it has a very simple meaning. Theology is the study of God. And of course, it is a vast study, you study it in college.

13:32 You can study it at high school University. You can get a doctorate in it, become a professor of them, et cetera, et cetera.

13:41 It is a vast subject, and even then you lonely, no, a tiny degree þa speakers, þa庵lithu, Quája knha addு diabetes.

13:50 It is a huge study. It is a medius. Mapa-talitum upp buoy. Da, kkeba-talitum upp entropy, vasut drown agurste, ët演 rar u mundo.

14:13 To adul chiefitive, athiology has disappeared from the curriculum in seminaries and universities and so on and so forth. Hardly taught at all now.

14:23 And yet it is the most important of all because everything depends on the heart, everything depends on love in authentic Christian spirituality.

14:35 We need to know no more than the gospels. That is enough knowledge to set our heart, moving our heart, going.

14:43 a heart rising towards God, we do not need vast amounts of knowledge. So mystical theology is the study then of how the heart is prepared and purified for union with God to receive His love into our hearts and from our hearts to be disseminated into every part of our being so that we gradually become

15:08 more and more perfect In such a way that we can be united with Jesus Christ our Lord, not just in His being, but in His acting.

15:20 That's why mystical theology is so important, and that's why I'm going to be talking about it a lot in the future.

15:28 a just for now and just for the time being, I want you just to home in on making quality space and time for God in prayer.

15:42 That is your daily sacrifice. That is how in the first instance you will come to know Him with sufficient knowledge to ignite the will or the heart …to enable the holy spirit to penetrate you, purify you to be united with Christ and in his contemplation with the Father.

16:09 That is why it is so important. But the question is, where do we begin? It is all right to say, love God, and loving God and so forth, «But where is God?

16:24 Where do we discover his love? Where do we start from here?» How do we begin? The answer is very simple.

16:36 God's love is to be found, most perfectly as embodied in the body of Jesus Christ on Earth.

16:48 Why was That's why he came. That's why the Father sent him so that we could discover the Father in the Son.

16:55 Do you remember those words at the last supper when Philip sh先 of a bit frustrated. Well, well, where is the Father?

17:04 And he said, have I been with you all this time ―and you do not know that I am in the father and you were in me and I, I mean you!

17:22 ―So we begin therefore, by discovering God's love, as it is embodied, as we see it in action, in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord while he was on this earth.

17:38 And that's where the first Christians were taught to begin. Those who had never actually known him while he was on earth.

17:51 Let me explain what I mean by taking you back again to the first Pentecost day. On the first Pentecost day, the Holy Spirit was sent out.

18:04 He entered into our lady, he entered into the apostles and he entered into three thousand others once they'd heard Saint Peter speak and responded and been baptized.

18:19 Now, the three thousand hadn't actually come from Palestine, the Holy land. They come from all over the diaspora. And so they really hadn't heard much about Jesus Christ, they might have heard that somebody claiming to them Messiah had recently been crucified, but they didn't know much about him.

18:40 And so they had to be taught to come to know him in order to love him. And so was born for the first time, a new type of prayer or rather a new Meditation had existed before, particularly in the Far East.

19:07 A Buddhist had used forms of meditation, using a mantra, breathing exercises, other different like yoga, and so forth, and other different types of exercises.

19:20 Lately, this would come to the West. Platonist would take up this form of prayer. In fact, Plotinus, the leader of the most important to the Platonist, actually set out for India in order to learn how to use mantras and so forth, because he thought it would believe it would fit into his system of coming

19:41 to know God and so on. So it had existed before, but what was new Flewingon was meditation. And they were taught under the influence of our Lady who of course had known and loved her beloved son since he was born to since he died on the cross.

20:05 She began to teach because she was not only the queen of the church, she was also the mother of the church …and they would learn from her in more detail than from anybody else, but of course from the apostles to who'd known him and other disciples.

20:26 In fact, at Mass on Sunday, or the supper of the Lord, or the breaking of the bread as they called it, sometimes there'd been more than one, sometimes two or three preachers, people who'd known Christ, telling them about him what a luvable, adorable man he was to excite their interest and not just their

20:47 interest in their knowledge, but to set their hearts afire as their hearts had been set afire. And so, that's what the purpose of meditation was in the very earlier centuries, and for that matter down to the present day.

21:04 So it is there now in learning to meditate that we come to know Christ as he was on earth. But us the flicker of flame began to burn and they began to love this person.

21:28 Jesus Christ our Lord, the very physical embodiment of God's infinite love, as they began …and to love him.

21:42 Like all love, they wanted to draw closer and closer to him. Not just to be closer to him, but to enter into him.

21:53 Love wants union. That is the end of any real genuine deep love. You want union with the one. a whom you are have been drawn but of course there was a problem, because Jesus was dead, He was no longer alive on the face of the earth as He had been and it's the same for us too.

22:30 Þit." We have not seen him, and yet we too, therefore, have to learn to come to know and love him through meditation.

22:40 But for what happens next, we must go back again to the first pentadosh day and see what happens when Mary – our mother is possessed by the Holy Spirit.

22:53 ами, reWhat do you far to Gratową mou na par しaina ei mouosas Universiten, le lundan misda Gear morning ever since, morning ever since he died.

23:27 Now she is reunited with him mystically through prayer, through contemplation, and that happens immediately. So when the first Christians saw what happened to Mary, they saw where they were going, what would happen to them?

23:43 Because gradually their love for Jesus as he was on earth and the desire for union, bilhaju waso scr delays pasistctrala Vakaiti watienikuku Brock Spy cof a live now, risen and glorified, and this is where contemplation begins.

24:07 We'll begin to enter into the same contemplation that Mary was taken up to up into our Matt First Pentecost Day, but of course there was a big difference you see.

24:19 Bad news for us, we're not emaculately conceived. We have a sin and we are sinners and so our process of moving into the heights of contemplation that she experienced instantly will take time, it happens gradually.

24:39 The beginning of our experience of the light of God's love in contemplation is to experience a darkness as his love highlights the sinfulness that is within us, and so now we have to learn to push on the through contemplation, to be purified and refined by the Holy Spirit, before we can journey, before

25:06 we can be united with Mary, our mother. In the early church, they had married to teach them, but they also had the apostles too, who were a lot closer to them, because let's face it, the apostles weren't yet saints, they were saints in the making, reread the scriptures, and you will see, you will see

25:32 how even at the end they were still bickering amongst one another who was going to be first in the kingdom of God, remember?

25:41 They would even asking Christ to call down Fire and Rimstone on those who rejected them. The most important of them all rejected in three times.

25:52 No, are the first Pentecost day. They were not saints. Instant contemplation for our Lady, but not for them. Houda to jernion, for a long time in prayer.

26:07 Bein purified by the Holy Spirit, Bein refined. It was a gradual process. It was a journey. That's why the first Christianity was first called simply The Way.

26:25 Somali, it was a mystic way, in which we are purified by the Holy Spirit to be united with Christ. The Apostles were on the way, in it was years, before they were sufficiently purified and ready to go out to be propelled by the Holy Spirit who now possess them from within to go out and become.

26:52 But Apostles are meant to become witnesses to the resurrection not so much by what they said but by who they were.

27:03 Now while this process was going on in Jerusalem, as the Apostles were learning to grow in wisdom and understanding with the years, Under the influence of the Holy Spirit, who Jesus promised at the last supper he was sending and precisely for that purpose to prepare them for their greater postulate.

27:23 While this was going on in Jerusalem, it was going on elsewhere to an a man called Saul. You remember Saul thrown down on his way to Damascus?

27:35 HOW ARE YOU PERSECUTING ME? N죠 MEROF bakara A N죠GAs d'Accension A T Ц one What does it do go out to preach and teach and change the world?' Oh, no!

28:00 He knows just how sinful he is and so he goes out immediately into the Arabian desert as his forefathers had learned to do.

28:11 All the prophets said, whenever there was a time for repentance, for Leo it was always back to the desert when we were first formed, back there to be purified and so he goes for three years into the Egyptian desert to allow the Calling department to cooperate with the Holy Spirit and through the purification

28:33 necessary to make him into a great apostle, the apostle to the Gentiles. But even that wasn't enough in his book on the history of his ecclesiastical history Montsenia, Montsenia Philip Hughes, says that he went back near by his old home in Selicia, near Tarsus and he spent seven more years there preparing

29:04 , seven more years. Perhaps a very good example, perhaps he should be made. He should be made the patron saint of converts for today to realize that when you have a conversion experience t牌ewler di framka su h�� satu potelecusat'vi, di chi niga drudoldu Islandsinum., di kagos Rahoiffisahominanago coi

29:25 shackosat'i, di chi kagos ち3 -> tri bii ˈk , in ecstasy.

29:50 We know he had revelations. If you read Corinthians, I think it is chapter 2, the second to the Corinthians, chapter 12, those first six verses there when he tells us of what had happened to him then.

30:10 At the end of it towards the end, at least of his Navishat, how he had profound mystical experiences. and if you want to understand them, you would need to read St.

30:20 Teresa's interior castle. To receive the explanation of what he went through and why, and of what particular junction he was at in his spiritual journey.

30:38 ‒ And then you must realise for anybody to come to this point to reach such heights in the spiritual life in a comparatively short period of time, they had to also go through what St.

30:56 John of the Cross caused the dark night of the cell. Now, this wasn't just true for St. Paul, it was true for the apostles too.

31:11 The spiritual rather Christianity is a way, it is a mystic way, it is a journey where we are purified and when we are purified and we are refined, it's not an ideology.

31:33 just because it is only later in medieval times or even later still with St. John of the Cross and St.

31:42 Teresa of Avela that we get mystical terminology and the language and it becomes systematized into something of a spiritual science, a science of the spit itch all way.

31:56 It does not mean this was not understood in the early Church not only was it understood, it was practiced percentage wise by far more people than at any other time in the later history of the Church.

32:09 They just hadn't got the terminology and the language. How else could these ordinary people, ordinary nobody's as celcists call them.

32:20 The Greek philosophical philosopher Hell who потрrut Piece ma was being in the scummer fear, then nobody, these Christians, think that these nobody's transformed Roman Empire into a Christian empire in simply no time at all, how?

32:36 By the power of the Holy Spirit that possessed them. Yes, they could all begin to say, Beycent sheep, we live no, we not only live itist Christ, all lives in us and it was Christ living in them, as they pursued this profound spiritual journey —troher Memberva Esther —coastagi popularizes change its ancient

32:57 pagan world into a christian empire, and in such a short time. Catholicism is a journey! It is not a static ideology!

33:19 …and we begin this journey again, if we want to begin this journey again, if we have been merely nominal capitalists and we want to begin again, then I will tell you how.

33:36 by adopting the three principles, the four principles that I discovered from years of studying early Christian spirituality.

33:50 And they are these, repent and keep repenting, keep turning to God every day of your life, every day of your life, keep raising your heart and mind to God or more prasajsili keep trying to raise your heart and mind to God and thirdly sacrifice, make sacrifices of your time, every single day of your life

34:17 in order to do the one thing necessary, what Christ pulled the one thing necessary, then take all these sacrifices that you have made and take them con you to Sunday Mass and offer them up in with and through Christ to the Father to receive from him the fruits of contemplation so that his love can surcharge

34:52 your love so that when you come out of that mass you come out to begin another week to continue Again, living this mystical dynamism, this endless repenting, turning back to God, this endless raising your heart and mind to God, not just in prayer, but outside of prayer, when you turn to Him in the neighbor

35:15 , indeed, remember St. Paul. That instant realization that he came to Christ is in his brethren when you do it to the least My brethren, you are doing it to me.

35:31 In prayer, therefore, we are turning our heart to God, raising our heart and mind to Him. In love, in the prayer, outside of prayer, we're doing it as we turn to Him in the neighbor in need.

35:48 This is the sacrifice that we make, and we make a sacrifice of our time. Each day, continue practice that ascetic principle that I gave you, which is this once more.

36:05 Don't give up anything you like or you enjoy, because you couldn't do it for long anyway. That happens to be the truth.

36:12 Don't give up anything you really like or enjoy, but only insofar as it enables you to open yourself to God in prayer, raise your heart and Dragons towith him, the four principles, therefore one repentance prayer, turning to God inside and outside of prayer.

36:39 Socrophies of the sacred mystery of the mass where you offer up all of the sacrifices you have made, in the preceding week to be certain you will have more spiritual energy ―to continue on that task in the fourth coming week, ―these are, if you like, the four pillars of the spiritual life.

37:00 So if you've been listening to me so far, do you be saying, well, it's alright, I don't get it all.

37:05 It's a bit hard, ought to take in, you know. All this going back to the early church and the principles there, or scripture class, theology and so forth, I'm only a simple Catholic.

37:16 I find it all too difficult. Don't worry. Independence Day. I'll make everything so simple for you now. Because when I had finished my last book on the early Christian spirituality Less than a year ago, I decided to study the apparitions of our lady to children in the last 100 years or so.

37:42 And I gradually filtered them down to those that I believed were quite clearly ,and obviously, like Fatima, genuine, ,and you know what I found?

37:55 Our lady's message was, ,it was simply repent, pray, ,offer sacrifice, ,and then go to Mass where you offer that sacrifice, ,in with and through Christ to the Father.

38:12 Very, very simple. You don't need to continue this course, Hullet, unirieto, …so in short everything is in fact utterly simple, just go and give yourself to God more and more each day, to begin with it might seem a little like a drudgery, but very soon and I can show you in this it will become like a

39:06 drug that you can't manage without ― ― ― ― ― aragili, you will come to experience the love of God, and then your prayer will become like a drug, and you won't need me to tell you to give more time to prayer.

39:42 You will search it out, you will find more time for prayer because it is the most important thing in your life.

39:50 Now look, the situation, I'm not going to start again on the situation in the church at the moment. ―'م, no we know it is inner'.

39:58 ―'Yes it is inner hell of a mess, ―'and I use those words advising ―'and a hell of the mess. ―Only God and His love can help us ―'can bind us together as one ―to become a new remnant ―to stand up and fight ―'Without His love, ―'Without His power within us, ―we can't do it.' ―'Now he's the call therefore

40:24 de la rependence a pray to sacrifice to the mass. In doing this, let us be bonded together. And I can promise you, without any doubt, thatels may be lost in the near future, but the war will be won because we're fighting in with and through Jesus Christ, our Lord Christ the King.

40:52 …let me end again by, part of phrasing, Saint Teresa of Avenue. There is only one way, two perfection, there's only one way for us to be united with God, only one way for us Army transformation to to to come to His love.

41:20 There is only one way for us together to become Apostles again. Appeal from the Inside by the Holy Spirit to be witnesses to the Resurrection.

41:39 …and that way is to pray, and to pray together, it is the only way. Don't let any body convince you otherwise.