Laurence Freeman OSBLaurence Freeman OSB

““Who do you say I am?Who do you say I am?

One day when he was praying alone in the presence of his disciples, he asked them,

‘Who do the people say I am?’ They answered, ‘Some say John the Baptist, others

Elijah, others that one of the prophets has come back to life.’ ‘And you’, he said, ‘who do

you say I am?’ Peter answered, ‘God’s Messiah.Luke 9:18

““Who do you say I am?”Who do you say I am?”

“This book is really a play of variations on that theme...running through it all, is the

universal understanding that we cannot know anything, let alone God, without knowing

ourselves.”

(Introduction p.16)

“To ignore Jesus because of the imperfections of the churches is a

foolishness of tragic dimension.....Christianity on the other

hand, must be transformed.”

(Steps in Relationship p.241)

“Religion is a sacred expression of the spiritual, but if the spiritual experience

is lacking then the religious form becomes hollow, superficial and self-

important.”

(John Main)

“By meditation I mean not just the work of pure prayer but the whole life-field of

self-knowledge which it drives.”

(Steps in Relationship p.242)

“Prayer means growing in self-knowledge rather than merely performing or

mouthing a set ritual.”(The Key Question p.34)

You are here to kneelWhere prayer has been valid.

And prayer is moreThan an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

(T S Eliot ‘Four Quartets’)

““Who do you say I am?”Who do you say I am?”

“For many Christians..this is a question they have never really listened to seriously or

taken personally. Doing so will have a profound effect on their self-understanding as

well as their sense who he is. It awakens us to the need for silence and

attention as the prerequisites for all listening.”

(Introduction p.16)

Discovering Jesus’ identity for us is not achieved through intellectual or historical enquiry. It happens in the opening to our

intuitive depths, to deeper and more subtle ways of knowing and seeing than we are

accustomed to. This is prayer...an entry into an inner space of silence, where we are

content to be without answers, judgements and images. ...It is the indefinable silence at

the heart of the mystery of Jesus that ultimately communicates his true identity

to those who encounter it.”

(The Key Question p.30/32)

“Humanly Jesus communicates to us how even within the limits of his humanity he enjoyed the vision of God. He knew what

prayer really is. ...He knew the divine presence which is at the heart of prayer”

(Steps in Relationship p.245)

ReflectionReflection

Who is Jesus for you?

Who is he in relation to you?

The veil of imagesThe veil of images

“We can only imagine Jesus with the means provided by our cultural and personal

imagination.”

(The Key Question p.22)

Jesus made in our imageJesus made in our image

“Christians often seem more concerned about promoting their Jesus in support of their

moral or social opinions than in discovering who he really is.”

(The Key Question p.23)

The redemptive questionThe redemptive question

Who am I?Who am I?

Are we the ego?

“Ego is essentially the image we have of ourselves, the image of ourselves that we try to project.

All illusion, all false perceptions of ourselves and others and God are

the offspring of the ego.” (John Main)

“The limits of my language [thoughts] are the limits of my world.”

(Wittgenstein)

When Alice complains to Humpty Dumpty that he is misusing words, Humpty

Dumpty scornfully replies: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to

mean – neither more nor less.”

“To her lover, a beautiful woman is a delight; to an ascetic, a distraction; to a

wolf, a good meal.”

(Zen tradition)

Who do you think you are?!

“Nothing is as difficult as not

deceiving oneself.”

(Wittgenstein)

“What the world values is money, reputation, long life, achievement. What it counts as joy is health

and comfort of body, good food, fine clothes, beautiful things to look at, pleasant music to

listen to….If people find that they are deprived of these things, they go into panic or fall into despair…They are so concerned for their life

that their anxiety makes life unbearable, even when they have the things they want. Their very

concern for enjoyment makes them unhappy….In so doing they are alienated from themselves, and exhaust themselves in their own service as though they were slaves of others. The ambitious run day and night in

pursuit of honours, constantly in anguish about the success of their plans, dreading the

miscalculation that may wreck everything. Thus they are alienated from themselves, exhausting their real life in service of the shadow created by their insatiable hope… thirst for survival in

the future makes them incapable of living in the present.”

(Chuang Tzu - 4/3rd Century BCE)

“To listen is to turn towards another, to leave self behind; and that is to

love....It is essential to Christian faith that we listen to Jesus with such unclouded attention that we lose ourselves.....thus he becomes....a

‘door’ that leads to self-knowledge.”

(And Who Do You Say I Am p.42)

HumilityHumility

“He communicates himself simply by being himself. Such humility allows the community of the true self to unfold towards us and to

enfold us.”

(The Key Question p.34/35)

The IndividualThe Individual

“‘I’ is always an individual...Originally it meant indivisible.....Once an individual was a person

or thing seen in relation to the whole it belonged to. The whole defined the individual

because the individual was indivisible from it.”

(The Labyrinth p.232)

The ‘self’

“Deep down the consciousness of humanity is one.”

(David Bohm)

RedemptionRedemption

“Redemption is knowing with our whole being who we are and where we have come from.”

(The Key Question p.36)

Repentance/ MetanoiaRepentance/ Metanoia

“Repentance has nothing to do with guilt. It has all to do with seeing ourselves unclouded

by self-deception....With repentance there ensues a process of detachment, one by one

from all the interwoven false identities to which we cling with such passion and fearful

desperation.”

(And Who Do You Say I Am p.44)

“Salvation unfolds as a shock to the whole ego system of perception. The shock

stimulates awareness. This is accompanied by a profound sense of

disorientation as the ego’s way of seeing everything revolving around itself is overturned. The new way of seeing

changes the way we behave.”

“Salvation means being loved patiently into the freedom to love.

(Steps in Relationship p.257/8, 254)

SinSin

“Jesus had an ego. So it is not that the ego in itself is sinful. It is egotism, fixation on the ego, that leads to the forgetting and betrayal of our true

Selves. Sin happens when the ego is mistaken for the true Self....

He also demonstrates the human capacity to live in a healthy balance between the ego and the Self.”

(Steps in relationship p.242)

Leaving self behindLeaving self behind

“Jesus exposes the high cost by which self-knowledge is achieved....To know oneself requires unknowing one’s self. Finding

involves loss. Seeds grow only through death. ....every day demands the death of the ego’s

old illusions, habits, values and beliefs.”

(And Who Do You Say I Am p.41)

Who am I not?Who am I not?

Me and my shadow

“Projections change the world into the replica of our own unknown face.”

(Jung)

“It is only from our own need, often concealed in shame, and not from our

pretended self-sufficiency, that we connect with what he communicates and

who he is.”

(The Kingdom of Forgiveness p.106)

“Seeing how repentance, the Kingdom of Heaven and the true Self are related is an integral insight for Christian faith....We

learn that the Kingdom is the experience of God in the non-duality of the Spirit.”

(And Who Do You Say I Am p.46)

Images of GodImages of God“So common was the belief in divine retribution in

Jesus’ time that even his disciples were dumbfounded when Jesus proposed a radically

different way of looking both at suffering and well-being. Good fortune, being comfortable and well-off might in fact, he said , be a curse in disguise.”

“The ...conception of God of an external power that rewards us materially for keeping the

commandments and brings suffering on us for breaking them.... makes an idol of the living God.

Yet we prefer the gods we have fashioned ourselves because we feel we can control them.”

(The Kingdom of Forgiveness p.108)

Sin or KarmaSin or Karma

“ The Judaeo-Christian theology of sin and the Asian doctrine of Karma are comparable ways

of explaining the mystery of suffering and evil..a cosmic law of moral compensation.”

(The Kingdom of Forgiveness p.108)

Love overrides KarmaLove overrides Karma

“Life is more than an intricate system of cause and effect....The full meaning is found in the

encounter between human suffering and divine compassion.... Karmic forces can continue to explain how things happen, but not why they

happen......God is love.”

“Jesus speaks of a power greater then karma. He then claims even more radically that the power of karma can be reversed and dissolved at its

root by forgiveness.”(The Kingdom of Forgiveness p.110)

“When we penetrate into the heart of reality, sin and karma are destroyed. We feel forgiven. We are rendered

free.....Even we in our Godlike turn can dissolve karma by forgiving. Forgive

those who offend you, Jesus said, ‘seventy times seven times’ and curtail

your judgment of others.”

(The Kingdom of Forgiveness p.113)

“The Kingdom is the way God intends us to live... Jesus embodies the Kingdom as a personal reality experienced through relationship. To know him as he really

is, is to find oneself in the Kingdom. It is a fundamental experience of reality as it truly is. To be in the Kingdom is to live

in harmony with heaven and earth, with friend and foe, with body and mind.

(The Kingdom of Forgiveness p.118)

“In relation to Jesus we see that the Kingdom, like God, simply is love, is everywhere, within and amongst us

simultaneously...In the Kingdom each individual being is inseparable from

every other in the divine web of Being.”

(The Kingdom of Forgiveness p.119)

“Where the Kingdom is among us, there is neither hatred nor selfish competitiveness nor any other sources of division. Where the Kingdom is within us, our true nature

has dispelled all ignorance about ourselves and established harmony and integration

between the conscious and the unconscious....The Kingdom is realised when the internal relationships of the

human psyche have found harmony with the true Self.”

(The Kingdom of Forgiveness p.121)

“Jesus was fully human because his self-knowledge derived from consciousness of union with his father......We become

fully human and share in the fully divine through union with his humanity. In the Spirit, the non-duality of God, Jesus can

at the human level share with us everything that he is.”

(Steps in Relationship p.244)

“Modern individualism neglects the common human need for grace, that transcendent help without which the healing force cannot lift us to a new

level of consciousness.”

(Steps in Relationship p.249)

“Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depth of their

hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their

reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of the Divine. If only they could see

themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no

more cruelty, no more greed.”(Thomas Merton)