Laurence Freeman OSB
“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?”
“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 kneel
Where prayer has been valid.
And prayer is more
Than 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?”
“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 selfunderstanding 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)
Reflection
Who is Jesus for you?
Who is he in relation to you?
The 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 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 question
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)
Humility
“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 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)
Redemption
“Redemption is knowing with our whole being who we
are and where we have come from.”
(The Key Question p.36)
Repentance/ Metanoia
“Repentance has nothing to do with guilt. It has all to do
with seeing ourselves unclouded by selfdeception....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)
Sin
“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 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?
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 selfsufficiency, 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 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 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 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 selfknowledge 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)