The cure is in the illness - a reflection from Fr Laurence Freeman

August 17, 2020

'If one had to be confined anywhere, Bonnevaux is a beautiful prison and the community I was incarcerated with did not riot or make unreasonable demands'. Fr Laurence Freeman reflects on his time in lockdown. This reflection was originally published in the WCCM newsletter and has been re-shared with permission. 

Several people have asked me, some with a smile, if I found it hard being confined at Bonnevaux during the past few months, given my frequent travel around the World Community in recent years. Hoping not to disappoint them with my answer, I said that I could honestly say ‘no’ to that question.

If one had to be confined anywhere, Bonnevaux is a beautiful prison and the community I was incarcerated with did not riot or make unreasonable demands. We grew together peacefully, sharing solitude and many wonderful moments of celebration and solidarity with the rest of the world with whom we wanted to share the peace we have found here. Before each of the four times that we meditate together daily, I walk up the hill and see other faithful pilgrims also quietly approaching the Barn from different directions and activities. Converging with others in a common place of prayer as the frame of one’s life is a joy I wish more in our troubled society might taste even briefly. Many, of course, did discover it –- in the blooming of online meditation groups – during these months of shutdown where they found loneliness cured by shared solitude.

I did not write the book or read as much as I hoped. Many days I wasn’t travelling further than the Barn but I was meeting with meditators around the world, several continents a day sometimes. I am sure St Benedict would have written a chapter in his Rule on ‘The Right Use of the Internet’. If the Bonnevaux commentary on the Rule that might come out of our daily sharing on it is written one day, I’m sure this chapter will be there, together with advice on welcoming guests like Christ while keeping social distancing.

The secret of peace, as children know, is regularity with variety. Since the Confinement, we have felt called to share the peace of our regular life with all who seek a “contemplative path through the crisis”. This was how we called the new website we started when the crisis broke. With a small editorial group of our younger teachers – Sarah Bachelard, Sicco Claus, Vladimir Volrab, Leonardo Correa – we tried to help make meaning of chaotic events and also to see the opportunity being offered us in often hard and frightening ways. Despair and anger are normal reactions whenever we feel mastered by outside forces that block our plans. But when this negative resistance is not converted, it only worsens the suffering.

The cure is in the illness. Misfortune is a call to conversion. Of course, we cannot see this in the first impact of a crisis. Something childish in us, the ego facing its own powerlessness, makes us feel irrationally that if we deny and resist what is happening to us strongly enough, it will go away. But it doesn’t. And as reality takes on the force of fate, it is clear that only deep and full acceptance can make sense of it. Only acceptance keeps us sane and allows the feeling of dead-endedness to evolve into something rich and strange. Eventually we say ‘this must be what hope is’. In events we cannot negotiate with, predict or control, or that seem meaninglessly cruel, there emerges the humble surrender of acceptance. Without words we say, ‘As it is, then let it be’. Acceptance is a long process, with many relapses into rage or self-pity, that evolves into surrender. ‘Resist not evil’, Jesus said. Gandhi saw this truth, too, that what we resist persists. Merely to be against something gives it energy., In a silent moment of deep interiority, when the surrender is signed, what we refused to accept becomes a new permanent feature of the landscape of our life now deprived of its power to harm. Accepting the unwanted, welcoming the unattractive stranger into our household, liberates, bestows meaning and expands us beyond anything we could have imagined.

Surrender that is this deep and total becomes a triumph.

Laurence Freeman OSB is a Benedictine monk and the spiritual guide and Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation, a contemporary, ecumenical, contemplative community. Website > https://acontemplativepath-wccm.org/

His book Sensing God is a practical introduction and guide to Christian meditation as taught by Fr John Main and continued through the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) Learn more >