If you fall, what are you going to hang on to?

When you are a Granny, you are almost certainly the same sort of age as other Grandparents and many of them have been friends for years; a few childhood friends, some school friends, teenage friends, friends whose weddings you went to and friends who you met at the school gate or in the playground when you were learning how to be a parent!   Now only a few of them have a parent left, I have two friends with parents who are around and they are the survivors aiming for the hundredth birthday royal telegram.  

All of these friends have had aspirations to happiness, remember the smiling faces at weddings, at christenings, at school sports days and at graduations.  And then remember seeing all these things through your granny eyes, it's a different way of looking.  The thing is to have no regrets and that is a job in itself but it is an even bigger job when you get bowled the real hard ones, the tragedies that come out of the blue and whop you under the chin or right in the stomach.  I would like to say that meditation prepares you for these shocks, it doesn't make you numb but it helps you to see things in perspective and to find letting go of the deep attachments to life a little easier.  

Sri Shantananda Saraswati
Shankaracarya of Northern India
until his death 

There are some people who are called to the inner life early and they have a quality about them which is comforting.  I believe that they are the gatekeepers, they are there to welcome you in to the place they have made for you.  Get to know them, find about their practice so that you can come to it when you need it.   There are more of them around than you may think!  And of course if you come to St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 26th in the day or to St James' Piccadilly in the evening you will meet some very good examples of just this and you get to try out meditation and stillness yourself in a beautiful place.  To find out more go to www.justthisday.org or click on this link to read the newsletter.  Here is a picture of someone who knew all about this and sent loving messages to us in the West to say that meditation was the key ingredient to both spiritual and secular life.

Granny at the Vatican!

watch out for grannies

Headline in today's Easter Sunday paper is about Grandmother, aged 71 tackling slave traffickers for the Pope.  This conjures up an old lady out in St Peter's Square beating up people trying to make off with vulnerable young people.  Of course that is what you think of grannies, they should be old and have sticks and be a bit cross with people who do the wrong thing.  But let me tell you that grannies are of every kind, they aren't all old at heart and this one in the newspapers is qualified for the job by her intellect and passion, not by her age.  I expect that she meditates too, don't you?

Happy Easter every one, Grannies, grandchildren and all that lies between.

Archbishop calls for wild burst of enthusiasm for religious life

A beautiful Nun

Sister Jayanti, BK

Our very own ABC, (Archbishop of Canterbury), Justin Welby, (click to see video) speaking about what he saw as a dangerous decline in the true religious life, said yesterday that Monks and Nuns are like trainspotters….(.I find myself imagining monks and nuns leaning over railway bridges and lurking round stations with notebooks like trainspotters because this seemed a rather odd description of "a decline in the religious life"!)   However, I think he meant that train spotters stay in one place spotting trains and the rest of us are commuters.   They watch, we move in the world.  He also described embracing the religious life as a "the ultimate wager on the existence of God".  

So, where has the religious life gone?  the ABC says that the Church needs not just an outward expression of religion but it is upheld by those who commit themselves totally to a religious life, committing themselves totally to God as an ultimate and total reality.  He has invited members of  a religious community, Chemin Neuf to live at Lambeth Palace.  This would mean that a cycle of prayer and interiority was at the centre of the Palace and I think this is what he is really after.  Life in the world is anchored by these few who are called to commit themselves totally to God or totally to an interior life, and what he says is that the outer world is dependent on that.

Nuns of the Order of St Benedict

Buddhist Monks

So, Meditating Grannies and meditating people, this is what we do, we hold the interior ground, we don't just do it to feel good, we do it because it is an imperative to keep the balance and it is as much an act of love for the world as all the wonderful work that goes on out there.  This makes meditating when you might not feel so much like it, or when you don't think you are any good at it, a really really reasonable thing to do not a gamble or wager at all.   So go Grannies Go, or maybe stop going Grannies because the world needs your peace and stillness.  Actually I expect there will be a revival of the religious life after Call the Midwife.  There has certainly been an upsurge in applications for midwifery because we all loved those midwives but we really all loved Jenny Agutter, the Mother Superior and all the faces of the nuns as they sang and prayed and kept the Mother House a centre of spiritual life in the East End.