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‘And Who Do You Say I Am?’

Because of its position at the entrance to Bantry Bay, one of the world’s great natural harbours, Bere Island once enjoyed great strategic military importance. Churchill even had to be dissuaded from reoccupying it with British troops during the Second World War with the reminder that Ireland was now a sovereign state.

To reach Bere Island, you take a little ferry that leaves at the discretion of its owner from the dock in Castletownbere about a mile away. On my first visit there since childhood, I arrived direct from London. It was a day of driving rain and gale-force winds. The pub, however, not the weather, was delaying our brave captain. So I took dry refuge in the tiny cabin to anticipate stepping ashore again on my magic island. I was startled to see a young woman sitting silently in a corner by the steering wheel. She said nothing as I entered and returned my greeting with a fleeting glance and nod. Despite being English it seemed to me too absurd to sit there saying nothing so I attempted a conversation. After trying the weather I asked if she lived on the island. She shot me a frightened look as if I was probing her most intimate secrets. After mumbling an incoherent answer she looked resolutely out of the window. Wondering if she was just shy I launched on a number of friendly questions which I soon realised were merely compounding my error, whatever that was. The psychological temperature fell lower than the weather. Eventually we retreated into a neutral silence until the melancholic captain tottered on board. The crossing took fifteen minutes. As we climbed off the boat onto the island my fellow passenger turned suddenly to me and with a softly knowing smile, as if we had been chatting easily all along, asked if the weather was as bad as this in London. Had she read my mind, looked into my soul with psychic powers? I had given her no information about myself. I guessed that the island grapevine had informed her that one of the O’Sullivan Bere’s girls’ children was coming from England to visit his cousins. She probably knew before I did.

I had learned an important lesson about island silence and privacy. The truth is a sensitive creature around which you have to tread very gently. Too many questions scare the truth away. When we want to find out about others too directly we often forget that we ourselves are also known.

What are we trying to find out about Jesus by listening to his question?

Luke tells us that the people considered Jesus to be a kind of reincarnation of John the Baptist, a second coming of Elijah or one of the other prophets.

. . . he asked them, ‘Who do the people say I am?’ They answered, ‘Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, others that one of the old prophets has come back to life.’¹

This was what the people were saying about him². Neither Jesus nor the gospel writers discuss these as literal answers, although Jesus once indicated that John the Baptist was the Elijah who was expected to be the forerunner of the messiah.

The New Testament uses about one hundred and thirty titles to describe Jesus: Christ, Lord, King, Lamb of God, rabbi, Son of Man, Son of David, Son of God, being the most frequent. ‘Teacher’ is used about 50 times in the gospels (‘Rabbi’ is found only in John’s gospel, and there nine times.) ‘Son of David’ is found about seventeen times and so less often than ‘King’ or ‘Lamb of God’. The characteristic title ‘Son of Man’ is found eighty-five times and has a rich fabric of meanings which Jesus found useful. The prophet Ezekiel uses the title often to mean a weak or mortal human being (the prophet himself). The book of Daniel (Chapter seven) uses the phrase in a heavenly sense and it is found in some psalms where it means, simply, a human being. Jesus thus knew the title from scripture and used it of himself. The uses of ambiguity in the phrase are revelatory. It does not only mean ‘an ordinary human being’ because it is the Son of Man who will come to judge the world, a work associated with God. And the Son of Man, like God, forgives sins. Sometimes, indeed, Son of Man is a circumlocution for Jesus the speaker as, for example, when he says the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. The interpenetration of divine and human connotations of identity in this simple phrase is highly subtle.³

In addition to ‘Son of Man’ the New Testament uses ‘Christ’ over 500 times, ‘Lord’ 485 times, ‘Son of God’ seventy-five times, ‘Son of David’ seventeen times. These titles were attributed to a man who, to all appearances a politician and religious failure, had died the most shameful death possible under the Roman Empire as a common criminal.

In the encounter with his disciples which is our starting-point here, Jesus neither approves nor rejects what people were saying about him. Instead he speaks about the suffering that lies ahead both for himself and his disciples. Soon after his public ministry began, Jesus probably guessed that he would become a victim of a power-play by the authorities. He was too popular to be ignored and he had no power base of his own to protect him. His family and friends were deeply frightened for his safety⁴. The gospels agree that he was well aware of the ordeals lying ahead. His socially radical, religiously revolutionary teaching and his preference for silence over self-definition all point to a deep sense of his destiny.

He exposes the high cost by which self-knowledge is achieved. As a teacher more than as a political radical he describes the path by which his disciples will come to know him and themselves. He does not trivialise the cost of discipleship. To know oneself requires unknowing one’s self. Finding involves loss. Seeds grow only through death. To find the light of the true Self there is no way except through the dark tunnel of the way of the cross. Finding demands losing. Life is gained only through death: sometimes even physical death but every day demands the death of the ego’s old illusions, habits, values and beliefs.

And to all he said, ‘If anyone wishes to be a follower of mine, he must leave self behind; day after day he must take up his cross and come with me. Whoever cares for his own safety is lost; but if a man will let himself be lost for my sake, that man is safe. What will a man gain, by winning the whole world at the cost of his true self?’⁵

To listen is not mere passivity. To listen is to turn towards another, to leave self behind; and that is to love. St. Augustine said that whoever loves Jesus believes in Jesus. The question Jesus asks, and which is so central to Christian faith and identity, does not throw up denominational barriers between Christians and non-Christians as answers can do. Indeed by leading to the universal question, who am I?, his question positions him as one of the universal teachers of humanity and therefore as one in whom human beings can best find their unity with each other.

All religions, it has been said, share three basic elements: a liberating experience of truth, enlightenment or awakening; a tradition that interprets this formative experience; and a set of rituals or systematic symbolism that derive from this.

Christianity like all religions can be understood in this way. But behind and before (and within) Christianity is Jesus. And at the heart of Jesus’ encounter with our humanity is his relational question. Jesus asks us who we say he is. What he tells us about himself does not replace the relationship opened up by the humility of his question. It is essential to Christian faith that we listen to Jesus with such unclouded attention that we lose ourselves. His question, if we listen to it, rather than only answering it, hooks our mind like a koan–a thought that stops thought. It is thus that he becomes, as he called himself, a ‘door’ that leads to self-knowledge.

The gospel of John says that the words of Jesus are ‘spirit and they are life’. His question bears a primal power to awaken the dormant, unrealised part of us and to guide it towards the knowledge of the Self. Through contact with the power of his self-knowledge his question persuades us to ask ‘Who am I?’ Immediately it alerts us to who we are not and who we cannot possibly be. Asking Who am I? demands that we face the uneasy question of Who I am not?

I am not my moods and thoughts, my beliefs or my social roles and status. All of these are powerful aspects of myself. They possess a temporary, partial reality. But they are too arbitrary, too conditioned and too ephemeral to constitute Selfhood. Nor can I identify myself with my sensations, my desires, my fears, my pleasures and my pains. Passing emotional states, however intense, are uncertain foundations for a true sense of identity. This simple truth is the universal truth in the Buddha’s assertion of anatta: the no-selfhood of all things, including the human thing. I may say I am victim, ruler, lover, judge, hunter, artist, priest, father, mother, child, clown or trickster–there are many archetypal roles and combinations. But they don’t answer the important question. Until knowledge of the Self has dawned their impermanence will always lead me back to the same question Who am I?–the essentially religious question.

Self-knowledge, as we will see in Chapter Six, characterises the state of what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God. We make sense of the process of discovering the Self with the help of the great religious traditions, their themes and archetypes. Any one person’s journey, of course, may not be restricted to just one religious institution. Many religious themes and symbols span different traditions, uniting them and enriching their dedicated practitioners. Often today, too, these themes and archetypes have a life outside overtly religious contexts. This need not lead to syncretism or confusion. It offers us today a new kind of recognition of the fundamental unity of all paths of human growth and self-transcendence. It expresses the unity of humanity itself, our common origin and destiny. For all our crises, humanity seems to be growing into a new corporate self-awareness today. What seemed recently to be irreconcilable differences and divisions are now, through dialogue, often recognized as parallel paths. It may well be that, at least for some people, the mutual enrichment of differing traditions will be necessary in order to fully understand the subtler stages of the path to true Selfhood.⁶

One of the stages of self-knowledge which all traditions recognise, although by different terms, is repentance. This is a pre-condition for any spirituality and it involves the purification of one’s way of life. Jesus began his preaching with the call to repentance. Some more negative styles of Christian spirituality in the past interpreted this as a call to fixate upon one’s personal sinfulness and then develop an abiding sense of guilt. The guiltier you felt the more repentant you were. Nothing could be more inconsistent with Jesus’ meaning here. If anything, his call to repentance is a release from the psychological disorder of guilt. He urges repentance, not to instil a fear of punishment but because the kingdom of heaven is imminent. Time is short and we have to get ourselves ready for a long journey. Guilt wastes time, even a lifetime, if it lingers for more than a few seconds it becomes unhealthy. Repentance is nothing to do with guilt. It is all to do with seeing ourselves unclouded by self-deception.

Listening to his question about self-knowledge clarifies the need for repentance precisely because it confronts us with our own emptiness and impermanence. It leads to an open space of the spirit that is uncluttered by institutional and psychological props. Poverty of spirit is another term for it. This naked self-awareness is the stage in us in which the great biblical theme of repentance is enacted.

After John had been arrested, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the Gospel of God: The time has arrived: the Kingdom of God is upon you. Repent and believe the Gospel.⁷

Repentance is both more serious and more joyful than fundamentalists and prophets of doom suggest. It drives us to seek a more interior and demanding spiritual practice. It lightens the burden of the past and breaks the shackles of sin. It sets us free for our life’s work. By the light of meditation and the guiding question of Jesus we can see repentance as a liberating, redemptive insight into what we are not. If this experience of emptiness seems at first to be destructive or nihilistic, it is not for long. In fact, it precedes the discovery and full affirmation of who we are.

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. Each interweaving is a knot we must untie, a death to die. Quite naturally, we dread the poverty that brings self-knowledge. It seems horrible to imagine we might discover a void of nonbeing, an eternal anonymity at the core of our being. So we cling to anything, however superficial, which seems to give substance to the claim ‘I am this or I am that’. Our fear of emptiness and our evasion of repentance can be so intense that it blocks us from hearing any redemptive question in our life at all. Or the question is rejected because it is felt as a threat to our integrity. This fear of nonexistence, the fear of death, costs us many opportunities. The desperate need for identity can be so great that mere self-expression or an egocentric search for self-fulfilment can get enshrined as the ruling value of life. The emotional exploitation of others quickly replaces compassion and love. We drop others when they no longer seem to fulfil us. Without the clarity of repentance, in other words, we try to make the ego fit the Self. We are deluded by self-ignorance, the selfishness which is sin.

We cannot understand grace without understanding sin. Sin is what is actually not but what we think is.

It is the nonreality that the East calls maya, the cycle of addictive desire and disappointment called samsara. The great teachers of Christian life, like the desert Fathers of the Egyptian Desert in the fourth century, have also explored with deep psychological perception this human affliction that robs us of happiness. The abbas of the desert described the operation of the ‘seven deadly sins’ just as Buddhist teachers expanded on the ‘afflictive emotions’. The Christian understanding also places sin in the context of personal freedom that is an aspect of our being images of God, and so of our personal relationship to a loving God. But they do not say that sin is only what we choose to do. It arises from ignorance, our fallen state. It is a further state of disharmony and suffering that we fall into when we miss the target we should be aiming at or when our attention fails and we get lost in fantasy.⁸ Sin is the consequence of unwise, irresponsible choice, not only the act of choice itself. It has consequences for ourselves as for the universe to which we are responsible. Personal freedom explains why we each must listen for ourselves to the redemptive questions that bring us to self-knowledge by dispelling illusion. This is why we must repent personally. No group, church or sangha, not the best of gurus even, can do it for us without our willing consent.

Sin includes all attempts to avoid the truth of emptiness. It evades the repentance from which all authentic spiritual practice derives. The badness of sin lies not in the fact we are breaking rules, failing to conform as we should, but that it creates suffering for ourselves and for others. All suffering arises from the sinful, false identification of the ego with the true Self. We fall into this trap time after time when we forget that the Self we seek to know is not different from the person who is seeking to know it. The true Self is not something anyone can objectify in mental concepts or contain in ritual actions. Self-knowledge is really the state of self-knowing rather than the possession of knowledge about something. The Self, according to Sankara, the Indian philosopher eight centuries before Jesus, is the ‘inner light’. It is self-evident and it does not become an object of perception.

When the Pharisees asked Jesus when the kingdom would come he responded with a similar comment, reminding them how its interiority could never be objectified:

You cannot tell by observation when the kingdom of God comes . . . for, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.⁹

Seeing how repentance, the kingdom of heaven and the true Self are related is an integral insight for Christian faith. These are interdependent aspects of the human spiritual journey. They become clarified and embodied in that form of relationship with Jesus that is discipleship. Thus, through discipleship, as all traditions affirm, we learn saving truths. We learn that the Kingdom is the experience of God in the nonduality of the Spirit. No one can know God except by sharing in God’s own self-knowledge, as St Irenaeus said in the third century. We learn that there is no way to the true Self except the narrow way of renouncing all the false selves of the ego-system. What is left when I have let go everything that I am not is who I truly am. It is who I have been all along but without recognising it. At that point the duality of discipleship itself dissolves. Master and disciple are experienced as one in the Friendship of the Self.

May they all be one; as you, Father are in me, and I in you, so also may they be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me.¹⁰

Illusion breeds disunity and the excessive individualism of our modern culture. Ignorance and self-deception are aspects of sin that need to give way to truth before the light of the Self can shine. There is nothing less abstract than this. A favourite story of the East is often told to show how simple and down-to-earth it is. A man returns to his home at night and sees a large snake coiled up in front of his door. Terrified to move he stays frozen to the spot all night. As the light of dawn breaks he finally sees that the snake is in fact a coiled piece of rope. The false identification of the snake had to be abandoned before the truth could be known. Nothing new is created but what is there is finally, clearly seen. Ultimately only the light of truth can dispel falsehood. The mystery is where the light comes from. It takes time for the light of dawn to grow strong enough for us to see clearly. St Peter uses the same image of dawning light when he says that the clearing of mental obscurity requires the work of attention–a work in which the reading of Scripture is a powerful spiritual tool:

All this confirms for us the message of the prophets, to which you will do well to attend; it will go on shining like a lamp in a murky place, until day breaks and the morning star rises to illuminate your minds.¹¹

The quest for self-knowledge entails the shedding of false personas. Listening to Jesus’ question leaves us in the end with no image of him at all, only real presence. All the false messiahs in our imagination, forms of projection, must be exposed and toppled before the truth of the messiah can be recognized. The Zen practitioner is told that if he meets the Buddha on the road he should kill him. When two disciples met Jesus on the road to Emmaus, after the Resurrection, they failed to recognise him until he broke bread with them. Then, in the Eucharist, their eyes were opened and they recognised him. So, meeting Jesus, the Christian disciple does not kill him. He has already been killed. Perhaps the equivalent to the Buddhist practice is to eat him. In any case, for the original to be recognised all images must go. St. Gregory of Nyssa in the fifth century warned that every image and concept of God becomes an idol.

Of course there are different kinds of recognition. All religions recognise Jesus as a universal teacher. Not everyone follows him as their personal guru. His greatness as a teacher, even for a Buddhist or a Hindu, is not only in his moral or religious wisdom but in his power to awaken in others the experience of reality. The East especially knows that a guru is more than an exemplar of moral or religious truth. A guru is one who has himself or herself become a bridge for the disciple to cross over from the land of illusion to the reality of the kingdom, of the Self.

For many people today of all traditions a particular Indian guru of modern times exemplifies this. He is one who has reminded many Christians of the directly human quality of their relationship with Jesus.

Ramana Maharshi, the sage of Arunachala in southern India, is one of the great spiritual teachers of the modern world. His influence is still felt fifty years after his death.¹² Yet for most of his life he dwelt in silence and it was from silence that he radiated the experience of nonduality that dwelt in him.

When asked about the role of the guru, Ramana Maharshi would always insist on the absolute nonduality subsisting between the teacher and the disciple.

The guru is both ‘external’ and ‘internal’. From the ‘exterior’ he gives a push to the mind to turn inward: from the ‘interior’ he pulls the mind toward the Self and helps in the quieting of the mind . . . There is no difference between God, Guru and the Self.¹³

This is a language and understanding very different from traditional Western ideas about God, human teachers and disciples. Some Christians react to it as threateningly pantheistic (God is everything). Without seeing the option of panentheism (God is in everything), they are scared of sliding into the gnostic heresies (the word heresy literally means choice) that confronted the early church. Furthermore, as Westerners they balk at the apparent loss of personal identity suggested by Ramana’s words. But as Christians they might also recall those sayings of Jesus where he spoke–shockingly, too, for many of his listeners–of the oneness between himself and the Father: ‘My Father and your Father’; ‘to have seen me is to have seen the Father.’ Or of St Paul’s personal confession that he lived no longer but that Christ dwelt in him.

I have been crucified with Christ: the life I now live is not my life, but the life which Christ lives in me; and my present mortal life is lived by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.¹⁴

Ramana expressed his experience of the Self, the immanent and transcendent presence of the Divine Guru, in his own terms conditioned by his Hindu context. He constantly returns to the unity of nonduality (advaita) just as St Paul does to the indwelling Christ,

The guru never sees any difference between himself and others and is quite free of the idea that he is enlightened and those around him are not.

Seeing Jesus as guru serves to understand the New Testament titles used most frequently of Jesus, teacher and rabbi The signs of a true guru, as described by Ramana, are abundantly evident in the gospel picture of Jesus as a human being in communion with God (whom he called ‘Father’). But we see him also as a person of his own time and place with the natural limitations this implies. Ramana says a guru possesses the following qualities:

a steady abidance in the Self, looking at all with an equal eye, unshakable courage at all times, in all places and situations.

If Jesus is guru we are invited to see ourselves as disciples. Our ego may find that unacceptable or impossible. ‘I’ll listen, but I’m not bowing to anyone.’ But dedicated spiritual practice eventually makes disciples of us all. It is interesting then to know what Ramana saw as the qualities of a true disciple:

an intense longing for the removal of sorrow and the attainment of joy and an intense aversion for all kinds of mundane pleasure.

Perhaps the reason that our spiritual practice seems to ‘take so long’, as people often complain, might simply be that we do not intensely enough long for what we protest we want immediately!

The role of the guru in his exterior manifestation is to push the disciple inwards to the quest for the Self. When Ramana Maharshi was asked what method or discipline was best to follow he did not offer an array of meditation techniques. He pointed people to Self-inquiry. The constant thought ‘Who am I’, he said, destroys all other thoughts. Like the stick used for stirring the burning pyre, it will itself in the end be destroyed. Then Self-realization naturally arises.

Of all the thoughts that arise in the mind the I-thought is the first. It is only after the rise of this that the other thoughts arise. It is after the appearance of the first personal pronoun that the second and third personal pronouns appear.

According to Ramana the aim of all spiritual practice is to lead the mind to stillness. When the I-thought has been traced all the way back to its origin, it disappears in its ultimate source of all things, the Self. The radical simplicity of Sri Ramana’s teaching is the expression of a compassionate, decisive but noncondemnatory personality. This is reminiscent of the way Jesus himself treated sinners and outcasts. Ramana remarked to a Hindu visitor discouraged by his inveterate sinfulness:

Even if one be a great sinner one should not worry and weep, ‘O, I am a sinner how can I be saved!’ One should completely renounce the thought ‘I am a sinner’ and concentrate keenly on meditation on the Self. Then one will surely succeed.

Compare this with the parable of the Prodigal Son who returns home to his father’s unconditional, impartial forgiveness;¹⁵ or the story of the sinner and the religious official praying in the Temple and the way the former’s simple humility finds God’s favour rather than the Pharisee’s complacency.¹⁶ When he met with sinners and outcasts, Jesus loved. His anger was reserved for the rigidity of religious authority, the sin that denies that it is sin and even claims to be from God. It was not directed against ordinary sinners. His power was felt not in punishment but in the reintegration of the sinner both to himself and to society. He called them to repentance and a new life: ‘go and do not sin again’ as he told the woman he saved from being stoned to death.¹⁷ He convinced people that they were forgiven and he empowered them to take advantage of the invitation to live more fully that is intrinsic to that discovery. Jesus’ compassionate response to sin emphasises both the person’s will to transcend the habit of sin and the action necessary to fulfil that intention. People did not leave his presence fixated on their sinfulness. They left in liberty to live differently. The energy of this newfound freedom is related to the joy felt in his presence. He was one in whose presence, as a contemporary theologian wrote, it was impossible to feel sad.

Ramana Maharshi’s question ‘Who am I?’ leads beyond all the false identities that constitute the ego. It leads to a tranquillity of mind which evokes the ‘stillness’ of Psalm 46 which Ramana liked to quote: ‘be still and know that I am God’. For those who listen to it, the self-inquiring question of Jesus, ‘Who do you say I am?’, discloses just this power of inner stillness. ‘The false perception of the world and of our self,’ Sri Ramana taught, ‘will disappear when the mind becomes still.’

Seeing Jesus as a guru who teaches by means of question and presence, rather than as a moralist and rule-giver, may be a challenge for many Western Christians. Yet full Christian faith recognises Jesus as the incarnate manifestation of the essential quest and question of the human journey to God: the incarnational form of the ‘Who am I?’ which makes us human. Jesus, as the Word of God, like a mantra, draws our attention from its scattered state of egotism, unifies it and awakens us to the truth he identified with life itself. ‘I have come,’ he said, ‘so that you may have life, and may have it in all its fullness.’¹⁸

Jesus does not have this effect by magic or through psychic powers. According to the gospel we come to know and understand Jesus by ‘faith’. Listening to his question is the beginning of an unmapped expedition of faith. As we tread the narrow path of his question we discover how much more than belief faith means. The intellectual mind (manas in Indian philosophy) believes; but faith is our capacity for insight (buddhi, or spiritual intelligence). Faith is the ‘vision of things unseen’.¹⁹

In a “Peanuts” cartoon Lucy once told Charlie Brown that she had a new philosophy: ‘All will be well.’ ‘That’s nice’, he replied. ‘Only thing . . .’ she added. ‘What’s that’, he asked? ‘I don’t know what it means.’

Faith is not the dream but the felt conviction that things will eventually work out for the best. Without denying the reality of evil or innocent suffering faith knows that the broken can be repaired, the meaningless can be understood, the wounded can be healed, and even that what is dead in us can be raised to new life. Faith knows that despite all signs to the contrary, and there are many, life has constructive meaning and beneficial purpose. The mystery of life is that even its tragedies and setbacks, its disappointments and failures can serve to awaken and deepen faith.

Why should we trouble ourselves to listen to the question Jesus raises concerning himself and how we see him? Because faith is born in the listening. By discovering what we are listening to we find meaning, authentic consolation, joy and fulfilment, in ways which no answers can bestow. How does this transforming, healing and revelatory energy of faith arise through the stilling of the mind? How does the Self shine forth?

It happens through every action of life performed faithfully as a disciple. This means when they are not done selfishly or even for my own spiritual benefit. These practices are not necessarily overtly religious. They cover everything in a normal human life: the love of family, friends and enemies; the finding of our duty and the doing of our work; psychological integration and the development of our personal talents; care for the body and harmony with the material world; mental truthfulness and the study of sacred teaching. Upholding all these activities and converting them into spiritual practices is the work of meditation. Faith leads to discipleship and then, whatever our lifestyle, leads into the contemplative life.

The question of Jesus is significant because it touches the heart and wholeness of human experience, all our aspirations and deepest concerns. Listening to it can make us fully human. It simplifies us without the loss of human dignity.

His question rises out of silence, the still consciousness of his prayer. It stills the mind and awakens the human capacity for faith which is the door to knowledge of the Self. Stillness is not rigidity as when we become fixated on ourselves. Stillness is the condition of unselfcentered attention. It is inherently compassionate and agile. Whatever is still is also silent, therefore, because it communicates directly and not through the medium of any language. We make a serious mistake by thinking that this state does no good for others. Sri Ramana indeed said that silence is the most potent form of work.

However vast and emphatic the scriptures may be, they fail in their effect. The Guru is quiet and grace prevails in all. This silence is more vast and more emphatic than all the scriptures put together.

Today we listen to the question of Jesus in a culture that can make little sense and gives even less time for silence. Technological society is infatuated with the audio-visual and the tangible. It confuses the transfer of information with true communication. It tries to reduce consciousness to mechanics, prayer to positive thinking. It no longer allows the human mind and heart to be expanded by faith that sees what is ordinarily (to sense or thought alone) unseeable. Only faith understands the productivity of silence and the efficiency of stillness. To listen, to be silent, to have faith does not come cheap as the call of Jesus makes crystal clear. Modern spiritual practitioners or disciples may seem to conform to the values of their society but, as we will see in Chapter Eight, they will have to embrace the detachment of an outsider. Discipleship, too, does not come cheap. And if you think the first step is not easy, the demand does not let up.

Jesus’ question and its orientation to silence put us into touch with ancient wisdom. The great spiritual cultures of the world, which materialistic technology so easily discounts, treasured the knowledge that silence is a truly great and beneficial human work.

I will teach thee the truth of pure work, and this truth will make you free.

And know also of a work that is silence: mysterious is the path of work.

The person who in his work finds silence, and who sees that silence is work sees the Light and in all his works finds peace.²⁰

The question of Jesus is all-important for contemporary culture precisely because it recalls us to silence. He does not shout this at us. His silence says it:

Indeed it is better to keep quiet and be than to make fluent professions and not be. No doubt it is a fine thing to instruct others, but only if the speaker practices what he preaches. One such teacher there is: ‘he who spoke the word and it was done’; and what he achieved even by his silences was well worthy of the Father. A person who has truly mastered the utterances of Jesus will also be able to apprehend his silence and thus reach full spiritual maturity, so that his own words have the force of actions and his silences the significance of speech.²¹

Jesus speaks by silence throughout the gospel: the preverbal silence of the newborn child; the look he passed into peoples’ souls to set them free from fear or ignorance; the stillness when Pilate was questioning him and he declined to be enticed into the word games that might have saved his life; the post-verbal silence of the crucifixion. So too in any life today that is guided by the gospel we meet his silence in thought, word, deed and prayer in the Spirit of truth he sent to be humanity’s guide.

We are silent whenever we pay attention. We pay attention when there is no ‘I’ thought, no self-reflective consciousness, no thought that we are the observer. This attention is the essence of prayer. Whenever we are in this state we are in prayer whether we are in church or supermarket, bedroom or boardroom, making love or making money. The dimension of our being that is addressed by the question of Jesus is perpetually in this state. When we pray, we return to prayer. When we listen, we return to silence.

All images echo some original reality. The original always has a silent presence which purifies and energises those who meet it. To encounter the original Jesus, however, means more than contacting the historical Jesus. The original Jesus manifests when we allow the countless images which religion and culture have accumulated to slip aside and be, at least momentarily, silent. A clear reading of the gospels and the work of silence in meditation prepare us for this.