cheering of others.
Self-knowledge, which can hurt like hell at times, is nevertheless essentially joyful. And it always has the element of surprise. It is never predictable because it is never going to happen. It is always here. To realise that it is, and has always been here, is like finding that the glasses you have been looking for everywhere have never left the top of your head. We are surprised at finding them and maybe feel a little foolish. But we laugh with others, in joy and relief, because it is so clear we were never really separated from them.
Self-knowledge is also like freedom. It cannot be forced or cajoled. Being complacent and denying problems do not facilitate it. Forgiveness and love, on the other hand, can make it flourish. Repressive power structures, social or psychological, slow down the process. True spiritual practice, like good art, enhances human freedom. It develops the taste for freedom and a passion to let others enjoy it. So eventually it overturns every egotistically driven power-structure whether internalised within us and institutionalised around us. The spiritual path will therefore cause conflict, or bring it to light, within and outside us; but it also resolves conflict and accelerates growth. The process of self-knowledge develops discipline, perseverance, patience, all of which are necessary for freedom and justice. Because it is a process rather than an event, we may not know the dates and times of our awakening any more than we know when we will die. But we can see it happening within us and we can see its influence on the world we inhabit.
We also learn soon enough how impatience slows us down. As soon as you begin to practice a serious spiritual path, to listen to the silence, you meet inner resistance. To continue to meditate is then to struggle with all the innumerable conditioned habits and patterns of the ego, our individual and collective narcissism. The East calls them the countless vasanas. Soon after the first turn on the spiritual journey, one that can be accompanied by feelings of bliss and many sweet consolations, it all seems to get blocked. It feels as if some inner negative force is complicating and spoiling what had felt so simple and delightful. A demonic curve seems to be thrown into the divine directness. This is where the grace of the teacher is indispensable.
And be assured, I am with you always, to the end of time.14
Even with the rabbuni so close–closer to us than we are to ourselves according to St Augustine–the power of self-deception and illusion can be overwhelming. Often the path disappears beneath us as we struggle with the demons of anger, fear, pride, greed and ignorance.
At times we may even glimpse embarrassingly the absurd envy of the ego towards the guru. Being jealous of Jesus is the Judas-reflex in the human psyche, the dark side of the luminous night of faith. It has shown itself in many powerful minds like Nietsche. The ego only slowly learns, like a difficult child, that there is no need to compete with Jesus. It is eventually stopped in its tracks when it discovers that there is no competition anyway. You cannot argue for long with someone who is silent when you expect them to retaliate. You cannot fight forever with someone who turns the other cheek. You cannot push someone over who gives way. Every predictable power-structure which the ego seeks to defend is overturned by the humility of the true Self. As our own experience of the Self awakens we see how we do not have to prove ourselves equal to Jesus. He has already renounced his superiority. He has called us his friends.
I call you servants no longer; a servant does not know what his master is about. I have called you friends, because I have disclosed to you everything that I heard from my Father.15
Friendship is perhaps the most evocative way of describing our relationship with Jesus.
Pilate asked Jesus if he was a king and Jesus did not deny it. But made it clear it was a different kind of kingship from any that Pilate had in mind. Every friend is a king in the sense Jesus used: a benevolent ruler, protector and educator in the life of the one befriended. Friendship expresses itself in precise acts of love, concern, and intimate thoughtfulness. Jesus performed one of these before the last meal that he was to share with his friends. He washed their feet. Peter, who thought he knew who Jesus was, recoiled at this offer of menial, humiliating service. Jesus insisted. And when he had finished the ritual he asked them if they had understood what he had done for them. Clearly they had not. History went on to show how often his later disciples would also miss the point.
You call me Master and Lord, and rightly so for that is what I am. Then if I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example: you are to do as I have done for you.16
Later during the meal, the first Eucharist, Jesus opened their minds further to the meaning of what he had done, of who he was for them. He told them they were not his servants, his devotees or acolytes, but his friends. Friendship needs to be expressed and grows through its signs. His sign of friendship was that he had disclosed to them everything he had heard from his Father. By word and deed. He had come to know who he was through his listening to the silence of the Father. It was this knowledge he shared with them. His friends are those who allow him to wash their feet with his self-knowledge. A profound new symbol of God entered humanity’s history at that moment. It is one we have still not fully understood because it so surprisingly confounds all earlier images of God. His friendship with humanity opens new depths of consciousness that reach into the abyss of the Creator’s love.
Outside the divine friendship all other knowledge of God is tainted by the ego’s sense of separation. Without friendship the spiritual path is distorted by the religious roles we play: fear, formal reverence, self-conscious submission, bargaining, flattery, guilt, forced praise. All of these are substitutes for true ways to the knowledge of God. Sometimes, of course, as AA members know, you have to ‘fake it to make it’. But when we fail to see God in the light of friendship it is because our own role-playing deceives us. These roles give the ego a stage for self-exhibition, to dress up in religious garb as saint, sinner, priest or martyr, philosopher or mystic. The friendless part of us clings to these identities in compensation for its loneliness. We even begin to enjoy it. Friendship, however, permits no pretence or deception. Nothing more is needed in friendship than fidelity. Even self-justification is irrelevant because no one knows us better than a true friend. If we fool a friend we fool ourselves. And without being known by a friend who can come to self-knowledge? By this high standard we can see how few real friends we make in a lifetime. How many are the misjudgements of friends we call betrayals. And yet, when we do find God in the gift of friendship and glimpse God’s friendship towards humanity, we have reached the highest goal, the ‘end of love-longing’.
Friendship has been devalued in our culture. In other times however it was recognised as the noblest expression of relationship. A life without a friend was less than human. One of the essential goals of life for a civilised person was to find and cultivate a person suitable to be a true friend, ‘another one’s self’ as Plato called it. Friendship was understood to develop in the sharing of self-knowledge. You cannot be friends without knowing it and knowing it means you know you are known. This rich classical tradition of friendship entered into Christian thought and one of its greatest exponents was a twelfth-century English monk, Aelred of Rievaulx. He wrote the only complete treatise on friendship in medieval Christian literature, Amicitia Spirituale. It is a psychological and spiritual masterpiece combining both passion and prudence. In his work he drew into Christian thought the main classical themes: the dignity of friendship and its ennobling effect, the different types of friendship, from the utilitarian to the most selfless and the need to balance emotion and reason by not forcing the pace of growth in the friendship. His unique Christian contribution however was the insight that all human friendships are born and grow to fulfilment in Christ. When two friends truly love one another as Jesus instructed, they would experience the wonder of recognising him as being present with them.
And
