St. Philip Neri and the Courage of Joy

A reflection on humility, humour, and the wisdom that is lived

If the Venerable Bede taught us how to handle truth with care, and Meister Eckhart taught us how to loosen the grip of ego and performance, then St. Philip Neri completes the arc by reminding us of something essential: Wisdom must be carried with joy or it risks becoming a burden rather than a gift.

Philip Neri lived in 16th-century Rome, at a time when religious life had grown formal, hierarchical, and deeply concerned with appearances. He was a priest of great devotion and spiritual depth, yet he resisted solemnity whenever it threatened to eclipse humanity. His response was not rebellion, but joy. Philip became known for his playful acts of humility. On one occasion, he appeared at an important gathering with half his beard shaved off. At other times, he deliberately behaved in ways that disrupted admiration, choosing embarrassment over pride. These were not stunts. They were spiritual discipline.

Philip understood something many forget: ego thrives on seriousness. By laughing at himself, he loosened its grip. Unlike Bede or Eckhart, Philip Neri did not leave behind a major body of writing. What we know of him comes largely through the lives written by those who knew him including The Life of Saint Philip Neri, Apostle of Rome and Founder of the Congregation of the Oratory. These accounts preserve not arguments or doctrines, but gestures, habits, laughter, and daily choices. Philip’s legacy survives because it was lived in full view of others, and because that life made an impression worth remembering. This, too, is a form of authorship.

St. Philip Neri by Sebastiano Conca (1680–1764. (Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

Philip trusted presence more than proclamation. He gathered people through warmth rather than authority, through friendship rather than fear. He listened, laughed, walked alongside others, and made room for affection in spiritual life. His joy was not exclusionary or performative. It was hospitable. The Roman Catholic Church would later name him the patron saint of humour and joy. It is a title that sounds almost whimsical, until one considers how radical it truly is. Joy, for Philip Neri, was not a distraction from holiness. It was protection against arrogance.

Where Bede insisted on truthfulness, and Eckhart insisted on inner freedom, Philip insisted on lightness of being.

He knew that devotion without joy becomes brittle. That sincerity without humour hardens into performance. That authority without humility forgets the human heart. In our own time, seriousness often masquerades as depth. We perform importance. We curate gravity. We forget that wisdom does not need to scowl in order to be taken seriously. Philip Neri offers a gentle corrective. Joy, he reminds us, is not frivolous. It is evidence that ego has loosened its hold. It is a sign that truth is being carried with care. Taken together, these three figures form a quiet lineage:

Bede teaches us to honour truth and name our sources.
Eckhart teaches us to release the self that seeks recognition.
Philip Neri teaches us to laugh — especially at ourselves.

Truth. Freedom. Joy. Perhaps these are not separate virtues, but companions. And perhaps this is the invitation that remains with us now: To write without false authority. To create without performance. To carry wisdom lightly, so others are not crushed beneath it. If our words are truthful, our intentions free, and our spirit joyful, then what we leave behind may not only endure. It may also invite others to live more fully. Not all wisdom arrives as text. Some of it arrives as presence. And sometimes, the truest teaching is the one that makes room for laughter.

Rebecca

#Authenticity #Joy #RebeccaSReadingRoom #SacredWritings #StPhilipNeri #Truth

Meister Eckhart and the Freedom to Begin Again

A reflection on ego, creativity, and what it means to be true

After spending time with the Venerable Bede, with his care for sources, his honesty about limits, his refusal to claim authority he did not possess, I found myself drawn further along the same path. Not outward this time, toward memory and preservation, but inward, toward motive and meaning. That path leads naturally to Meister Eckhart.

Meister Eckhart was born around 1260 in what is now Germany and became a Dominican friar, theologian, and preacher at a time when religious thought was closely guarded by institutions and authority. He was highly educated, holding prestigious teaching positions in Paris and serving in senior roles within his order. Yet it was not his credentials that made him memorable. It was his language. Eckhart preached in the vernacular rather than Latin, speaking directly to ordinary people about inner freedom, detachment from ego, and the birth of truth within the soul. His ideas were considered radical for their time, and late in his life some of his teachings were investigated for heresy. What unsettled authorities was not rebellion, but his insistence that true transformation did not depend on external status or performance, but on an inner letting go. This was a freedom that could not be controlled. It is from this tension, between authority and authenticity, that Eckhart’s words still speak.

Much of what we know of Meister Eckhart today comes to us through later scholars who recognized the enduring power of these voices. One such guide is William Ralph Inge, whose collection Light, Life, and Love: Selections from the German Mystics of the Middle Ages brings Eckhart into conversation with other thinkers who shared his concern for inner freedom, humility, and truth beyond performance. Inge did not treat these mystics as relics, but as living companions and voices capable of unsettling complacency and opening space for renewal.

Eckhart lived in a world of sermons, scholarship, and public religious life, yet much of his teaching points in the opposite direction, away from performance, away from self-display, and toward inner freedom. Again and again, he warned against confusing activity with authenticity. “One must not always think so much about what one should do,” he wrote, “but rather what one should be. Our works do not ennoble us; but we must ennoble our works.”

A contemporary artistic rendering of Meister Eckhart, created in the spirit of reflection rather than historical record. Image generated as a contemporary artistic interpretation.

What Eckhart understood and what feels especially relevant now, is that ego often disguises itself as purpose. We speak to be heard. We write to be seen. We create in order to secure our place, our identity, our relevance. Eckhart offers a quieter, braver alternative. In a culture that rewards certainty, Eckhart invites beginner’s mind. “Be willing to be a beginner every single morning,” he urges.

There is great freedom in this. To be a beginner is to release the burden of expertise as identity. It is to allow curiosity to return. To admit we are still learning. To trust that beginnings are not a weakness, but a renewal. “And suddenly you know,” Eckhart writes, “it’s time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.” Perhaps this is why one of Eckhart’s most beloved lines is also one of his simplest: “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.” Gratitude leaves no room for performance. It quiets comparison. It grounds us in presence. It reminds us that creation is not something we manufacture to prove ourselves, but something we participate in with humility and care.

Bede taught us to handle truth responsibly.
Eckhart teaches us to receive it freely.

Together, they form a quiet ethic for our time — one that resists both noise and self-erasure. An ethic that asks not for perfection, but for honesty; not for visibility, but for sincerity. So perhaps the invitation here is simple. What might you begin again, not to be noticed, but to be true? What might you write, read, or remember if you no longer needed it to perform?

Past wisdom does not bind us. When tended with care, it becomes freedom. We don’t need to master this. We don’t need credentials. We don’t even need certainty. Just the willingness to begin.

Rebecca

#Authenticity #Creativity #Ego #MeisterEckhart #RebeccaSReadingRoom #SacredWritings

The Venerable Bede and the Ethics of Remembering

A reflection on writing, truth, and what we carry forward

Before words were fast, they were careful. Long before writing became something we shared instantly, it was an act of patience and devotion. Marks were scratched into clay, traced on stone, copied by hand in cold rooms by people who understood how easily words could disappear. Writing began not as performance or publication, but as remembrance. A way of saying this mattered enough to be carried forward.

It is easy, in our own time, to forget how fragile memory once was.

In the early eighth century, there lived a monk named Bede, known to history as the Venerable Bede. The title was not granted because he travelled widely, held power, or participated in great public decisions. It was earned through the quality of his attention.

The Venerable Bede writing the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, from a 12th-century codex at Engelberg Abbey, Switzerland (Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

Bede spent almost his entire life within the walls of a monastery in Northumbria. His world was bounded, his movement limited. He was not “at the table” where authority gathered. And yet, from that enclosed life, he shaped how history itself would be remembered.

Bede listened. He read. He gathered letters, oral accounts, earlier manuscripts, and local traditions, carefully weaving them together so they would not be lost. His great work, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, preserved names, dates, and stories that might otherwise have vanished. He even helped organize time itself, popularizing the Anno Domini dating system so the past could be shared and understood across generations.

What makes Bede enduring is not the scope of his life, but the integrity of his work. Limited in movement, he was expansive in care. Rooted in one place, he reached far beyond it. What strikes me most about Bede is not simply what he preserved, but how he went about it. He loved truth, not as an abstract ideal, but as a daily practice. He investigated carefully. He named his sources. He admitted uncertainty. He distinguished between what he had witnessed, what had been reported, and what could not be confirmed.

As one later reader observed in the introduction to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England, Bede’s love of truth showed itself in his scrupulous care in investigating evidence and in acknowledging the sources from which he drew. He took pains to assure himself of authenticity, preferring first-hand testimony whenever possible, and carefully noting when such evidence was lacking. — from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England: A Revised Translation, with Introduction, Life, and Notes, translated by A. M. Sellar

There is something quietly radical in this. Bede did not confuse faith with carelessness, nor reverence with certainty. He understood that memory deserves honesty, and that future readers should know the difference between what is witnessed, what is told, and what is believed.

We live in an age that values visibility. We travel widely. We attend conferences. We celebrate participation, proximity, and being “at the table.” None of this is wrong. But Bede reminds us that presence alone does not confer meaning. What matters is not where we are seen, but how faithfully we work with what we know.

Authentic creativity is not loud. It is careful. Compassionate creativity is not performative. It is attentive. Truthful creativity is willing to say, “This is what I know — and this is where my knowledge ends.”

From within monastery walls, Bede preserved a world. From within our own lives, however bounded or busy they may be, we, too, are shaping what will be remembered. Perhaps the question is not whether we are sitting at the table, but whether our words can be trusted when they leave our hands.

If this reflection reconnects us to anything, perhaps it is this: the desire to write with care, to read with attention, and to remember honestly.What we carry forward matters. And how we carry it matters just as much.

Rebecca

#Authenticity #Creativity #Hstory #Memory #RebeccaSReadingRoom #SacredWritings #VenerableBede

Embracing the Unknown: A Reading in Bardo by Pema Chödrön

Stepping onto the English shore after the Norway voyage, I thought of Prema Chödrön’s words in Embracing the Unknown. She writes that the uncertainty of transition is not to be feared, but welcomed — for it is in that open space, the Bardo, that transformation begins.

Tibetan teaching describes Bardo as the state between death and rebirth, but its wisdom stretches far beyond.

Embracing the Unknown by Pema Chödrön

The Tibetans describe six bardos: the bardo of birth and living, the bardo of meditation, the bardo of dreaming, the bardo of dying, the bardo of the luminous reality (after death), and the bardo of becoming (rebirth). But the spirit of Bardo reaches beyond doctrine: it is the recognition that life is made of thresholds.

Travel itself is a kind of Bardo: leaving behind the familiar, moving into landscapes that are not yet our own. Reading, too, places us in bardos. We open a book and step into pages suspended between what we know and what we are about to discover.

Norway was more than a journey across seas; it was a passage through time and story. Mountains folded into mist, fjords opening like pages of an old manuscript, legends whispering through villages — each moment asked me to inhabit the in-between. Now, at the voyage’s end, I see that endings are never simple closures. They are beginnings in disguise, inviting us to carry their presence into whatever comes next.

Like a beloved book, the Norway adventure has ended on the page, but it continues within me. And so I return to the Bardo, to the in-between, not with fear but with gratitude — ready to read what waits beyond the threshold.

I wonder, dear reader, what books or journeys have brought you into your own bardos — those luminous pauses where endings become beginnings? Perhaps you, too, carry within you a story that has not yet finished speaking.

Rebecca

Anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present without reference point, experiences groundlessness. That’s when our understanding goes deeper, when we find that the present moment is a pretty vulnerable place and that this can be completely unnerving and completely tender at the same time.

Prema Chödrön

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