Opening words: Gospel of Thomas: Saying 7
Jesus said, “Blessed is the lion that the human being will devour so that the lion becomes human. And cursed is the human being that the lion devours; and the lion will become human.”

1st Reading – by Jane Hirshfield

At times
the heart
stands back
and looks at the body,
looks at the mind,
as a lion
quietly looks
at the not-quite-itself,
not-quite-another,
moving of shadows and grass.

Wary, but with interest,
considers its kingdom.

Then seeing
all that will be,
heart once again enters—
enters hunger, enters sorrow,
enters finally losing it all.
To know, if nothing else,
what it once owned. Jane Hirshfield

2nd Reading: from Parker J Palmer

Most of us arrive at a sense of self and vocation only after a long journey through alien lands. But this journey bears no resemblance to the trouble-free “travel packages” sold by the tourism industry. It is more akin to the ancient tradition of pilgrimage—”a transformative journey to a sacred center” full of hardships, darkness, and peril.

In the tradition of pilgrimage, those hardships are seen not as accidental but as integral to the journey itself. Treacherous terrain, bad weather, taking a fall, getting lost—challenges of that sort, largely beyond our control, can strip the ego of the illusion that it is in charge and make space for true self to emerge. If that happens, the pilgrim has a better chance to find the sacred center he or she seeks. Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now—in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep within our own hearts.

But before we come to that center, full of light, we must travel in the dark. Darkness is not the whole of the story—every pilgrimage has passages of loveliness and joy—but it is the part of the story most often left untold. When we finally escape the darkness and stumble into the light, it is tempting to tell others that our hope never flagged, to deny those long nights we spent cowering in fear.

The experience of darkness has been essential to my coming into selfhood, and telling the truth about that fact helps me stay in the light. But I want to tell that truth for another reason as well: many young people today journey in the dark, as the young always have, and we elders do them a disservice when we withhold the shadowy parts of our lives.

When I was young, there were very few elders willing to talk about the darkness; most of them pretended that success was all they had ever known. As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race. Parker J Palmer

Song: You’ve got to walk that Lonesome Valley: Terry De Castro and Simone White

Talk:

‘Truth ecology’ is a phrase I first heard used by thinker Daniel Schmactemberger. In human discourse and behaviour he suggests there is a ratio of authenticity to fabrication. We are able in our interpersonal relationships to manage that ratio ourselves.
Honesty is the best policy is the phrase that probably best represents this, if you tell a lie, any lie and come to depend on it, you have to remember what it was, and that becomes complicated, as Shakespeare, who was a gifted fabricator himself, noted: ‘Oh what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive’, or, as the screen writer william Golding later put it in his autobiography of wheeling and dealing inHollywood: ‘Which lie did I tell?’ – so honesty as policy keeps things simple. And as our networks extend out from our immediate relationships to our families our neighbour groups and wider communities it is in our gift to manage the truth we feed into our system.
The truth ecology is the environment or context of authenticity in which we live. And we have an opportunity to directly influence our own interpersonal networks in this way. We might wish to curate rather carefully our truth ecology, because if we pollute it, that can have far reaching implications which we cannot from the outset predict – any lie introduces an uncertainty into the environment; and your reliability is at stake.

Perhaps you’re old enough to remember the ‘sexed up’ dossier, the dossier about the possible existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq?
In order to comply with international law any aggressor nation must have a ‘Causus Belli’, the Latin phrase means cause for war, and the cause must be openly established so that everyone can see that your action is justified and hopefully proportionate.
And although Saddam Hussain was quite obviously a terrible leader who had clearly transgressed against moral duty to respect represent and serve all the people of his nation, the US just couldn’t establish a cause for war which would be clear and beyond doubt so, aided by the British, they made one up. On September 16, 2004 Kofi Annan, then secretary of the UN said of the invasion “it was not in conformity with the UN Charter. From our point of view… it was illegal.” Hans Blix the United nations inspector commissioned with ensuring that Iraq was in compliance with United Nations resolution 1441 has complained that, to this day, the United States and Britain have not presented him with the evidence which they claim to possess regarding Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

The war that was subsequently visited on the people of Iraq killed between a quarter to half a million people, and the subsequent fall out from it continue to reverberate in that region. That region incidentally includes the Ur valley, the small fertile zone between the Tigris and the Euphrates which is the mythic backdrop to the story of Abraham and Sarah in the Holy scriptures of the Abrahamic religions.
Holy ground which was extensively firebombed by the ‘coalition of the willing’.

Why bring up the Iraq war of 2003-2009 in 2022 you may ask? Well I didn’t start it, it was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin – who has started a few things recently, including potentially world war three, but he raised the subject because he expressed the grievance that he is being judged on different standards than the West is judged, the Empire of Lies, as he calls the West (with some justification) had no cause to invade Iraq, they did so illegally, based on lies, so they should leave aside judgement of his ‘military operation to liberate the oppressed people of Ukraine’.
This is what is meant by a ‘poisoned truth ecology’.

And just for the avoidance of any doubt I utterly condemn Putin who is thievery’s worst kind: a lying and deceptive viper, a muscle hearted, steroid-driven, cold-blooded maniacal butcher.

Jesus said, “Blessed is the lion that the human being will devour so that the lion becomes human. And cursed is the human being that the lion devours; and the lion will become human.”

I read some absurd commentary that suggested Jesus was here making a claim similar to we are what we eat.
I don’t think he was.
This statement is from the Gospel of Thomas a first century text filled with sayings which are mystical and strange, very strongly rooted and associated with first century mystical tradition within Judaism.
The Gospel of Thomas is called apocryphal because for various reasons it was not included in the canon of Christian scripture, and as a result is an insight I believe into a Jesus before he was airbrushed by successive centuries of scholarship.
I think he is talking here of the human capacity for mastery of our emotional context; the capacity for rage, the capacity for savagery that dwells in each of us, that has to dwell with in us in evolutionary developmental terms. We must have strength to withstand Physical difficulties and intelligence to outwit situational challenges and the development of our nature over many, many centuries is the story which is re-told in mythic form in the stories of Genesis; of Abraham and Sarah and their journeys through the lands of the south where they are forced to wander.
But the strengths which we develop as a species could consume, or overwhelm our better nature, could devour us.

We are blessed if we are able to develop, but not be overwhelmed by, the mastery of our capacities.

Truthfulness, personal authenticity is the key quality we must work on if we are to own and not be owned by the narrative which we walk, the story of ourselves. Our own story can either be based on truthfulness or self fabrication, and every Wednesday I am reminded of this as people walk in from lives which are naturally shaped in relationship to that world commerce and competition which is the working city. We assume masks based on our roles and responsibilities and rarely get a chance to discard these masks.

The theatre practitioner Augusto Boal pointed this out, noticing how uncanny it was that the roomful of actors looked unmistakably like actors, while at the workshop for playwriting in the next room everyone was impeccably disguised as a playwright, but over the square the chamber of lawyers are instantly identifiable as lawyers, and the street cleaners, and the trades unionists and the grandmothers and so on.

Roberto Assagioli was a psychoanalyst who worked on this he suggested that we are more than what we appear.

Although we have responsibilities and roles, we are not those responsibilities and roles. Of course these occupy our time, and they influence well being, and satisfaction (in our context they can’t help but do so) but we do not exist to serve these feelings; I do not exist to serve other’s opinions, and I am not only validated from other perspectives.

What am I then Assagioli asks? What remains after discarding from my self-identity the physical, emotional and mental contents of my personality, of my ego? It is the essence of myself – a centre of pure self-consciousness and self-realisation. It is the permanent factor in the ever varying flow of my personal life. It is that which gives me the sense of being, of inner security. I recognise and affirm myself as a centre of pure self-consciousness. This centre not only has a static self-awareness but also a dynamic power; it is capable of observing, mastering, directing, and using all the psychological processes and the physical body. I am a centre of Awareness and of Power.

How often are we able to attune to our own sensitivity to this reality?

We walk through lives which are beset by difficult doubt and set back. We have endured two years of pandemic and now are likely to endure at the very least ongoing anxiety and distress and economic fall out from existing as bystanders and witnesses to the illegal wars and occupations throughout the world and now again within the continent of Europe.

That journey we make is why I needed to hear the Parker J Palmer reading again: our journey, the journey through life that lent asks us to tune into is a journey bearing no resemblance to the trouble-free “travel packages” sold by the tourism industry. It is more akin to the ancient tradition of pilgrimage—”a transformative journey to a sacred center” full of hardships, darkness, and peril.

In the tradition of pilgrimage, those hardships are seen not as accidental but as integral to the journey itself. Treacherous terrain, bad weather, taking a fall, getting lost—challenges of that sort, largely beyond our control, can strip the ego of the illusion that it is in charge and make space for true self to emerge. If that happens, the pilgrim has a better chance to find the sacred center he or she seeks.

This is our pilgrimage, our lenten journey through hard terrain. What will our journey do to us? Will we devour the lion so that it becomes human? or will we be forced to respond in such a way that our humanity is abandoned until all that is left standing in our place is a lion…

On their return from the wilderness both John and Jesus preached ‘a new mind’, a repentance, a self free of deception.

Lets take it lightly at this point let us head towards the light: we know that we can’t haul off and go to the desert to live on honey and locusts, just as we know that we can’t utterly renounce the compromises that allow us to navigate everyday life, but we can make a start, with awareness, and we can resolve to work towards a more truthful existence, a cleaner truths ecology.

And not get eaten by any lions.

Dark into light, light into darkness, spin. When all the birds have flown to some real haven, We who find shelter in the warmth within, Listen, and feel new-cherished, new-forgiven, As the lost human voices speak through us and blend Our complex love, our mourning without end. May Sarton