It is true that your life is not about you; rather, “your life is hidden with Christ in God. He is your life, and when he is revealed, you will be revealed in all your glory with him” (Colossians 3:4).
Once our soul comes to its True Self, it can amazingly let go and be almost anything except selfish or separate. The True Self does not cling or grasp. It has already achieved its purpose by being more than by any specific doing of this or that. Finally, we have become a human being instead of a human doing. This is what we are practicing when we sit in contemplative prayer: we are practicing under-doing and assured failure, which radically rearranges our inner hardware after a while. And yet even in our pursuit of the True Self, we must be careful not to reject the parts of ourselves that are not there yet. The most courageous thing we will ever do is probably to accept that we are who we are. As Henri Nouwen once shared with me personally, he believed that original sin could only be described as “humanity’s endless capacity for self-rejection.”
All the truly transformed people I have ever met are characterized by what I would call radical humility. They are deeply convinced that they are drawing from another source; they are simply an instrument. Their genius is not their own; it is borrowed. They end up doing generative and expansive things precisely because they do not take first or final responsibility for their gift; they don’t worry too much about their failures, nor do they need to promote themselves. Their life is not their own, yet at some level they know that it has been given to them as a sacred trust. Such people just live in gratitude and confidence and try to let the flow continue through them. They know that love can be repaid by love alone.
In this time of crisis, we must commit to a posture of prayer and heart that opens us to deep trust and connection with God. Only then can we hold the reality of what is happening—both the tragic and the transformative. I am finding myself turning more often in these days to the simple Christian prayer of “Lord, have mercy.” From our place of humility, God can work through us to help our loved ones, neighbors and the most vulnerable. As Francis of Assisi said to us right before he died in 1226, “I have done what was mine to do. Now you must do what is yours to do.” [1]
In the spiritual life, what we think we are doing is actually being done to us. All we can do is say yes to it. This True Self is ironically much more glorious, grounded, original, and free than any self-manufactured person could be. We are interrelated with being, participating with the life of God, while living out one little part of that life in our own exquisite form. The True Self neither postures nor pretends. It comes down to this: the soul and the True Self know that “my life is not about me, but I am about life.”
Lesson
Two: Your Name Is Written in Heaven
Tuesday, April 7, 2020
Click here to watch a special video or listen to the audio of Richard Rohr introducing Holy Week and this week’s Daily Meditation theme on “Reality Initiating Us,” addressing our current global crisis as a collective initiation experience which we are all undergoing. You are not important, and yet Jesus says, “Rejoice because your name is written in heaven” (Luke 10:20).
We need a still point in this twirling world of images and feelings, especially in a time such as ours. If we are tethered at some center point, it is amazing how far out we can fly and not get lost. The True Self, “our name in heaven,” is our participation in the great “I Am.” It is what Peter daringly calls the “ability to share the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). This True Self is characterized by contentment, an abiding low-level peace and happiness. Every now and then it even becomes pure joy.
If there is no list of names in eternity, no confidence that we are known and chosen by God, we are burdened with making a name for ourselves every day. We must be self-made, every person out for themselves in a dog-eat-dog world, vying with one another for zero-sum dignity and importance. Instead of comparison, envy, competition, and scarcity, authentic spirituality is an experience of abundance and mutual flourishing. We are tempted to count only our material and ego gifts which decrease with usage, whereas spiritual gifts actually increase with each use, in ourselves and in those around us.
If we have no foundational significance, we must constantly attempt to self-signify and self-validate. Everyone is then a competitor and rival. We cannot help but be pushed around by our neediness and judgments, and we will push others around too. If we have no unshakable experience of divine approval, we will be lost in fragile momentary experiences of “victory” that cannot be sustained or really enjoyed.
We must find our North Star outside our own little comparative systems or we will be lost in rivalry and daily defeat. It is a whole different way of looking at what we mean by “God saving us.” God first of all saves us from ourselves, our emotional neediness and hurt, and our obsessive mind games. Then the truth of being is obvious and all around us.
Our importance
is given and bestowed in this universe as part of the unbreakable covenant
between us and our Creator. We are declared important “from the beginning” (Ephesians
1:4, 9), and when we really know it, we have no need to prove it. We are
reminded who we really are in God when Jesus tells us that our “name is written
in heaven.” Surely God holds medical workers and first responders close to
God’s heart right now, as they put their lives on the line to support us all.
The courage they are showing is the kind of courage that comes from knowing the
value of life. I pray we might all operate from that place as we struggle
through the coming days.
For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you too will appear with him in glory. —Colossians 3:3-4
In the larger-than-life, spiritually transformed people I have met, I always find one common denominator: in some sense, they have all died before they died. They have followed in the self-emptying steps of Jesus, a path from death to life that Christians from all over the world celebrate this week. At some point, such people were led to the edge of their private resources, and that breakdown, which surely felt like dying, led them into a larger life. They broke through in what felt like breaking down. Instead of avoiding a personal death or raging at it, they went through a death of their old, small self and came out the other side knowing that death could no longer hurt them. This process of transformation is known in many cultures as initiation. For many Christians, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the preeminent example of this pattern. Following Jesus, we need to trust the down, and God will take care of the up. Although even there, we still must offer our yes.
If the five truths of initiation from last week seemed demanding or negative, I want to also name the energizing source that makes them possible and that becomes their long-term effect. I call these consolations the “common wonderful,” the collective beauty and security that healthy people live within, no matter what words they use for it. Some have called the lessons “the five positive messages”; I am calling them the “five consoling messages.” The “common wonderful” is a cosmic egg of meaning that holds us, helps us grow, and gives us ongoing new birth and beginnings. It is our matrix for life, our underlying worldview, and the energy field that keeps us motivated each day. In some sense it must be held by at least a few people around you, or it is very difficult to sustain absolutely alone. Perhaps such people are “the two or three” gathered in Jesus’ name (Matthew 18:20).
The five consoling messages must be a part of our inner experience, something we know to be true for ourselves, not something we believe because others have told us to. These five messages, which will form the basis of the Daily Meditations this week, can be described using New Testament quotes (although there are similar messages in all the great religious traditions):
It is true that life is hard, and yet my yoke is easy and my burden is light (Matthew 11:28).
It is true that you are not important, and yet do you not know that your name is written in heaven? (Luke 10:20).
It is true that your life is not about you, and yet I live now not my own life, but the life of Christ who lives in me (Galatians 2:20).
It is true that you are not in control, and yet can any of you, for all of your worrying, add a single moment to your span of life? (Luke 12:26).
It is true that you are going to die, and yet neither death nor life. . . can ever come between us and the love of God (Romans 8:38-39).
Lesson One: My Yoke Is Easy and My Burden Is Light Monday, April 6, 2020
Life is hard, and yet Jesus says, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28).
It is hard to bear God—but it is even harder not to bear God. The pain one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a greater and longer-lasting pain than the brief pain of facing it head on. Enlightened people invariably describe the spiritual experience of God as resting, peace, delight, and even ecstasy.
If our religion has no deep joy and no inherent contentment about it, then it is not the real thing. If our religion is primarily fear of self, the world, and God; if it is primarily focused on meeting religious duties and obligations, then it is indeed a hard yoke and heavy burden. I’d go so far as to say that it’s hardly worthwhile. I think the promise from Jesus that his burden is easy and light seeks to reassure us that rigid and humorless religion is not his way and certainly not the only way.
It is God within us that loves God, so seek joy in God and peace within; seek to rest in the good, the true, and the beautiful. It is the only resting place that also allows us to bear the darkness. Hard and soft, difficult and easy, pain and ecstasy do not eliminate one another, but actually allow each other. They bow back and forth like dancers, although it is harder to bow to pain and to failure. If you look deeply inside every success, there are already seeds and signs of limits; if you look inside every failure, there are also seeds and signs of opportunity.
Who among us has not been able to eventually recognize the silver lining in the darkest of life’s clouds? You would think the universal pattern of death and life, the lesson of the Gospel and Jesus’ life would be utterly clear to me by now, yet I still fight and repress my would-be resurrections, even if just in my own mind. For some reason, we give and get our energy from dark clouds much more than silver linings. True joy is harder to access and even harder to hold onto than anger or fear. When I walk my dog Opie and look at the beautiful cottonwood trees in my yard, God helps me experience rest and peace.
If our soul is at rest in the comforting sweetness and softness of God, we can bear the hardness of life and see through failure. That’s why people in love—and often people at the end of life—have such an excess of energy for others. If our truth does not set us free, it is not truth at all. If God cannot be rested in, God must not be much of a God. If God is not joy, then what has created the sunrise and sunset?
Gateway to Action & Contemplation: What word or phrase resonates with or challenges me? What sensations do I notice in my body? What is mine to do?
Prayer for Our Community: O Great Love, thank you for living and loving in us and through us. May all that we do flow from our deep connection with you and all beings. Help us become a community that vulnerably shares each other’s burdens and the weight of glory. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our world. [Please add your own intentions.] . . . Knowing you are hearing us better than we are speaking, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of God, amen.
Click here to listen to Richard Rohr introduce this week’s Daily Meditation theme on “Reality Initiating Us,” addressing our current global crisis as a collective initiation experience which we are all undergoing.
The surprise of surprises is that although everybody who has ever lived in this world has died, for some reason, we think we won’t. —Hindu aphorism
Jesus did not once tell us to worship him; he only told us to follow him on the necessary three-day journey that Christians celebrate during Holy Week. And “three days” did not necessarily mean Friday to Sunday. It is a classic initiatory phrase for going the distance or the full cycle. The transformational journey of death and resurrection is the only—and always denied—message. It really is the way we are saved.
However, death, in any form, is perceived as the great human enemy. We construct much of our lives to avoid it, delay it, and deny it. It seems that we are not ready to die, until we have truly lived. Ironically, people who touch upon real life are the ones who can also let go of it. It is the people who have not yet begun to live who fear death the most. True insight has not happened to them yet, which leaves them without a center, foundation, or even primal desire. Their core has not been touched and so they have nothing to harken back to or look forward to or anything to trust deeply within. They are afraid. And we must be honest that this is much of humanity.
In initiation rites, some ritual of death and resurrection was the centerpiece. This is probably why Jesus sought out and submitted to the death and rebirth ritual of John the Baptist at the Jordan River. It is probably why he kept talking to his disciples, three times in Mark’s Gospel, about the necessity of this death journey, and why three times they changed the subject (8:31–10:45). It is undoubtedly why he finally stopped talking about it, and just did it, not ritually but for real.
The genius of ancestors who practiced initiation ceremonies is that they exposed and revealed the truth about pain in a sacred space, which makes all the difference in the world. Now pain is no longer a scary unknown, an unfortunate mistake, something we must change, but maybe an entranceway! As Eckhart Tolle says, “You do not need to be a Christian to understand the deep universal truth that is contained in symbolic form in the image of the cross.” [1] Before such transformative images, the worst things can become the best things.
The initiation instinct realized that facing one’s death was the ultimate encounter with the sacred. Walking through one’s fear of the last thing becomes an encounter with the first thing. A person is then free to live, often for the first time outside of their head or their fear. Death encounters seem to be the primary way to build or rebuild a real life. Then life itself, in all its depth and beauty, becomes the unquestionable gift.
Lesson
Four: You Are Not In Control
Thursday, April 2, 2020
Click here to listen to Richard Rohr
introduce this week’s Daily Meditation theme on “Reality
Initiating Us,” addressing our current global crisis as a collective
initiation experience which we are all undergoing.
At some moment I did answer Yes to
Someone—or Something—and from that hour I was certain that existence is
meaningful and that, therefore, my life in self-surrender had a goal. —Dag
Hammarskjöld
To be in control of one’s destiny, job, or finances is
nearly an unquestionable moral value in Western society. The popular phrase
“take control of your life” even sounds mature and spiritual. It is the
fundamental message of nearly every self-help book. On a practical level, it is
true, but not on the big level. Our bodies, our souls, and especially our
failures teach us this as we get older. We are clearly not in control, as this
pandemic is now teaching the whole planet. It is amazing that we need to assert
the obvious.
Learning that we are not in control situates us correctly
in the universe. If we are to feel at home in this world, we have to come to
know that we are not steering this ship. That teaching is found in the mystical
writings of all religions. Mystics know they are being guided, and their
reliance upon that guidance is precisely what allows their journey to happen.
We cannot understand that joy and release unless we’ve have been there and
experienced the freedom for ourselves.
In my life I have found the mystic teachings of St.
Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897) helpful for living into this truth. She was a
master teacher who was never afraid of presenting humiliating evidence about
herself. She called this her “little way.” As she so brilliantly put it, “If
you are willing to bear serenely the trial of being displeasing to yourself,
you will be for [Jesus] a pleasant place of shelter.” [2] What gives religion
such a bad name is that most religious people are eager to be pleasing to
themselves, and want to be a part of a “big way.”
Being willing to be “displeasing to ourselves,” or to
allow our autonomous ego’s needs to take a back seat to the larger field of
love, is part of what it means to not be in willful control.
Gerald May (1940–2005), one of my own teachers, very
helpfully contrasts willingness with willfulness:
Willingness
implies a surrendering of one’s self-separateness, an entering-into, an
immersion in the deepest processes of life itself. It is a realization that one
already is a part of some ultimate cosmic process and it is a commitment to
participation in that process. In contrast, willfulness is a setting of oneself
apart from the fundamental essence of life in an attempt to master, direct,
control, or otherwise manipulate existence. [1]
For many of us, this may be the first time in our lives
that we have felt so little control over our own destiny and the destiny of
those we love. This lack of control initially feels like a loss, a
humiliation, a stepping backward, an undesired vulnerability. However, recognizing
our lack of control is a universal starting point for a serious spiritual walk
towards wisdom and truth.
Please join me
in trying to be faithful to that walk, even as we pray for God’s mercy for
those who suffer, and especially the most marginalized.
Click here to listen to Richard Rohr introduce this week’s Daily Meditation theme on “Reality Initiating Us,” addressing our current global crisis as a collective initiation experience which we are all undergoing.
O God, if I worship you in fear of hell, burn me in hell. If I worship you in hope of paradise, shut me out from paradise. But if I worship you for your own sake, do not withhold from me your everlasting beauty. —Rábi‘a (717–801), Islamic mystic and poet
When we are willing to be transformed, we stop wasting time theorizing, projecting, denying, or avoiding our own ego resistance. The true spiritual teacher is not afraid to give us a dose of humiliation. If we immediately balk at some minor blow to our ego, the teacher knows that no basic transformation into our True Self has taken place yet. It takes a masterful teacher or mentor to teach us that we are not important. Otherwise, reality itself teaches us: painful life situations have to dismantle us brick by brick, decade by decade.
Jesus knew that he needed to destabilize a person’s false, separate self before they could understand that they had a True Self, but destabilizing our security systems and our ego is always a hard sell. He says, “What does it profit a person if they gain the whole world and lose their soul?” (Luke 9:25). Typically, it is the prophets who deconstruct the ego and the group, while priests and pastors are supposed to reconstruct them into divine union. As God said in the inaugural vision to Jeremiah: “Your job is to take apart and demolish, and then start over building and planting anew” (Jeremiah 1:10).
True master teachers, like Jeremiah and Jesus, are both prophets and pastors, which is why their teaching is almost too much for us. They both deconstruct and reconstruct. But the only reason they can tell us that we are not important is because they also announce to us our infinite and unearned importance. Maybe the reason we have to be reminded of the first truth is because we no longer believe the second. We no longer allow our separate self to be humiliated because we no longer believe in the Great Self.
Our personality and self-image are all we have.
Every parable or spiritual riddle, every one of Jesus’ confounding questions is intended to bring up the limitations of our own wisdom, power, or tiny self. If we have not yet touched upon our essence, we will continue to build up ego structures in defense of our momentary form. Most Westerners no longer tolerate it when our small selves are ignored, subverted, or humiliated. We appear to be lost in a whirlwind of images, all passing and changing week by week.
With all of us globally experiencing our common vulnerability to this virus we can learn the lesson that we are one in our humanity. No one is more important than anyone else. Powerlessness is the beginning of wisdom, as the Twelve-Steppers say. All we can finally do is pray that we allow the flow of the Spirit’s very presence within us. If there is no living water flowing through us, then we must pray for the desire for it to flow! Once the desire for something more is stirred and recognized, it is just a matter of time. Nothing less will every totally satisfy us again.
Reality Initiating Us: Part One
Lesson Three: Your Life Is Not About You Wednesday, April 1, 2020
Click here to listen to Richard Rohr introduce this week’s Daily Meditation theme on “Reality Initiating Us,” addressing our current global crisis as a collective initiation experience which we are all undergoing.
After any true initiating experience, we know that we are a part of a much bigger whole. Life is not about us, but we are about life. We are not our own. We are an instance of a universal and even eternal pattern. Life is living itself in us. We have been substituting the part for the whole! This message is an earthquake in the brain, a hurricane in the heart.
Accepting that our lives are not about us is a Copernican revolution of the mind, and it is just as hard for each individual today as it was for earthbound humans when they discovered that our planet was not the center of the universe. It takes a major and monumental shift in consciousness, and it is always given and received with major difficulty. It comes as an epiphany, as pure grace and deliverance, and never as logic or necessary conclusion.
Understanding that our lives are not about us is the connection point with everything else. It lowers the mountains and fills in the valleys that we have created, as we gradually recognize that the myriad forms of life in the universe are merely parts of the one life that most of us call God. After such a discovery, we are grateful to be a part—and only a part! We do not have to figure it all out, straighten it all out, or even do it perfectly by ourselves. We do not have to be God. It is an enormous weight off our backs. All we have to do is participate!
After this epiphany, things like praise, gratitude, and compassion come naturally—like breath. True spirituality is not taught; it is caught once our sails have been unfurled to the Spirit. Henceforth our very motivation and momentum for the journey toward holiness and wholeness is immense gratitude for already having it!
I am convinced that the reason Christians have misunderstood many of Jesus’ teachings is because we did not understand his pedagogy. Jesus’ way of education was intended to situate his followers to a larger life, which he called his “Father,” or what we might call today God, the Real, or Life. When we could not make clear dogma or moral codes out of Jesus’ teaching, many Christians simply abandoned it in any meaningful sense. For this reason, the Sermon on the Mount—the essence of Jesus’ teaching—seems to be the least quoted by Christians. We sought a prize of later salvation, instead of the freedom of present simplicity.
My life is not about me. It is about God. It is about a willing participation in a larger mystery. At this time, we do this by not rejecting or running from what is happening but by accepting our current situation and asking God to be with us in it. Paul of Tarsus said it well: “The only thing that finally counts is not what human beings want or try to do, but the mercy of God” (Romans 9:16). Our lives are about allowing life to “be done unto us,” which is Mary’s prayer at the beginning and Jesus’ prayer at the end.
The Patterns That Are Always True Sunday, March 29, 2020
Click here to listen to Richard Rohr introduce this week’s Daily Meditation theme on “Reality Initiating Us,” addressing our current global crisis as a collective initiation experience which we are all undergoing.
In this time of global crisis, it may be that reality is revealing itself to us—through great suffering—universal patterns that are always true. A little over fifteen years ago, I wrote a book called Adam’s Return that focused on male initiation rites. These are the sacred rituals in indigenous cultures that marked the symbolic growth of a self-referential boy to a generative, compassionate man. While that book was written specifically for men, it seems to me that reality is “initiating” all of us to know and live by these same essential truths. This week I will be trying to present this global crisis as a global initiation into what matters and what lasts. Now women need this essential initiation just as much as men.
The work of sacred rituals like initiation was to situate life in a bigger frame, so nature, beauty, suffering, work, sexuality, and ordinary moments were seen to have transcendent significance. They gave life meaning— the one thing the soul cannot live without. Heaven and earth have to be put together or this world never becomes home. That integration is the necessary human and spiritual task, at which initiation rites succeeded, probably on a much broader scale than modern churches.
Initiation was always, in some form, an experience of the tension and harmony of opposites: of loss and renewal, darkness and light, the cycle of seasons, death and resurrection, yin and yang, the paschal mystery. Somehow initiates had to see the wide screen and, at least for a moment, find goodness and meaning in what was offered right in front of them, which is all we can love anyway. Universally, early cultures insisted on large doses of separation, silence, looking, listening, and various kinds of suffering.
In my cross-cultural research on male initiation rites, I perceived five consistent lessons or truths communicated to the initiate, meant to separate initiates from their attachment to who they think they are and reattach them to who they really are.
In this time of global disruption, these lessons can help us align to reality, our own belonging in it, and remain grounded in the infinitely trustworthy presence of God.
These five essential messages of initiation are:
Life is hard.
You are not important.
Your life is not about you.
You are not in control.
You are going to die.
You may be shocked by the seemingly negative character of these five truths. Most Western postmodern people are, but there’s no way around these truths, hard as they may be. In fact, one could say much of the superficiality of our world is because we stopped growing up men. We will be exploring these five lessons in this week’s Daily Meditations and their positive spiritual counterparts the following week. None of this is easy work. We typically want to flee from our current anxiety, grief and pain, but I encourage you to stay with these messages. They are truths for your soul that can help you find meaning and a sense of God’s compassionate presence inside of the chaos. W
Lesson One: Life Is Hard Monday, March 30, 2020
Click here to listen to Richard Rohr introduce this week’s Daily Meditation theme on “Reality Initiating Us,” addressing our current global crisis as a collective initiation experience which we are all undergoing.
You have to be sick and tired of being sick and tired before recovery can begin. —Twelve Step Wisdom
All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. Creation has a pattern of wisdom; and we dare not shield ourselves from it, or we literally will lose our soul. We can obey commandments, believe doctrines, and attend church services all our lives and still daily lose our souls if we run from the necessary cycle of loss and renewal. Death and resurrection are lived out at every level of the cosmos, but only one species thinks it can avoid it—the human species.
I am afraid that many of us with privilege have been able to become very naïve about pain and suffering in the United States and the Western world. We simply don’t have time for it. However, by trying to handle all suffering through willpower, denial, medication, or even therapy, we have forgotten something that should be obvious: we do not handle suffering; suffering handles us— in deep and mysterious ways that become the very matrix of life and especially new life. Only suffering and certain kinds of awe lead us into genuinely new experiences. All the rest is merely the confirmation of old experience.
It is amazing to me that the cross or crucifix became the central Christian logo, when its rather obvious message of inevitable suffering is aggressively disbelieved in most Christian countries, individuals, and churches. We are clearly into ascent, achievement, and accumulation. The cross became a mere totem, a piece of jewelry. We made the Jesus symbol into a mechanical and distant substitutionary atonement theory instead of a very personal and intense at-one-ment process, the very reality of love’s unfolding. We missed out on the positive and redemptive meaning of our own pain and suffering. It was something Jesus did for us (substitutionary), but not something that revealed and invited us into the same pattern. We are not punished for our sins, we are punished by our sins (such as blindness, egocentricity, illusions, or pride).
It seems that nothing less than some kind of pain will force us to release our grip on our small explanations and our self-serving illusions. Resurrection will always take care of itself, whenever death is trusted. It is the cross, the journey into the necessary night, of which we must be convinced, and then resurrection is offered as a gift.
In this time of suffering we have to ask ourselves, what are we going to do with our pain? Are we going to blame others for it? Are we going to try to fix it? No one lives on this earth without it. It is the great teacher, although none of us want to admit it. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it in some form. How can we be sure not to transmit our pain onto others?
Love is Stronger
than Death
Friday, March 27, 2020
The Path of Descent is very real and usually
very painful, but something else is equally true. Love is both who we are and
who we are still becoming, like a sunflower seed that becomes its own
sunflower. It seems to be a fully cooperative effort according to St. Paul
(Romans 8:28), and according to my limited experience too. God never coerces us
toward life or love by any threats whatsoever. Yes, God seduces us, but
coercion? Never (see Jeremiah 20:7; Matthew 11:28–30). Whoever this God
is, he or she is utterly free. Love cannot happen any other way. Love
flourishes inside freedom and then increases that freedom even
more.
We are all allowed to ride life and love’s wonderful
mystery for a few years—until life and love reveal themselves as the same
thing, which is the final and full message of the risen Christ—life morphing
into a love that is beyond space and time. God literally “breathes” shalom and
forgiveness into the universal air (John 20:22–23). We get to add our own
finishing touches of love, our own life breath to the Great Breath, and then we
return the completed package to its maker in a brand-new but also same
form.
I believe the meaning of the Resurrection of Jesus is
summed up in the climactic line from the Song of Songs, “love is stronger than
death” (8:6). If the blank white banner that the Risen Christ usually holds in
Christian art should say anything, it should say: “Love will win!” Love is all
that remains. Love and life are finally the same thing, and we know that for
ourselves once we have walked through death.
Love has you.
Love is you. Love alone, and your deep need for love, recognizes love
everywhere else. Remember that you already are what you are seeking. Any fear
“that your lack of fidelity could cancel God’s fidelity, is absurd” (Romans
3:3), says Paul. Love has finally overcome fear, and your house is being
rebuilt on a new and solid foundation. This foundation was always there, but it
takes us a long time to find it. “It is love alone that lasts” (1 Corinthians
13:13). All you have loved in your life and been loved by are eternal and
true.
Author and Episcopal priest Barbara Taylor Brown invites us to consider the lessons that suffering has to teach us and reminds us that we can only learn when we are willing to stay put instead of turning away.
[Psychotherapist Miriam] Greenspan says that painful emotions are like the Zen teacher who whacks his students with a flat board right between their shoulder blades when he sees them going to sleep during meditation. If we can learn to tolerate the whack—better yet, to let it wake us up—we may discover the power hidden in the heart of the pain. Though this teaching is central to several of the world’s great religions, it will never have broad appeal, since almost no one wants to go there. Who would stick around to wrestle a dark angel [see Genesis 32:22-31] all night long if there were any chance of escape? The only answer I can think of is this: someone in deep need of blessing; someone willing to limp forever for the blessing that follows the wound.
What such people stand to discover, Greenspan says, is the close relationship between “individual heartbreak and the brokenheartedness of the world.” [1] While those who are frightened by the primal energy of dark emotions try to avoid them, becoming more and more cut off from the world at large, those who are willing to wrestle with angels break out of their isolation by dirtying their hands with the emotions that rattle them most.
In this view, the best thing to do when fear has a neck hold on you is to befriend someone who lives in real and constant fear. The best thing to do when you are flattened by despair is to spend time in a community where despair is daily bread. The best thing to do when sadness has your arms twisted behind your back is to sit down with the saddest child you know and say, “Tell me about it. I have all day.” The hardest part about doing any of these things is to do them without insisting that your new teachers make you feel better by acting more cheerful when you are around. After years of being taught that the way to deal with painful emotions is to get rid of them, it can take a lot of reschooling to learn to sit with them instead, finding out from those who feel them what they have learned by sleeping in the wilderness. . . .
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,” Carl Jung wrote, “but by making the darkness conscious.” [2] Reading this, I realize that in a whole lifetime spent with seekers of enlightenment, I have never once heard anyone speak in hushed tones about the value of endarkenment.
What a compelling word and question Brown Taylor invites us to consider: endarkenment. What are we learning about ourselves, each other, and even God through these times? What are we only now coming “to know” through this time of not-knowing?
CAC faculty member Brian McLaren is
an author and contemplative activist. He spent over twenty years as the pastor
of a church where he lived, worked, and prayed with people in good times and
bad. Responding to crises is not theoretical for him, but a deeply felt and
lived experience which comes through so clearly in these words. I hope you will
feel encouraged to take this practice to your own time of prayer in the days,
weeks, and months ahead.
When we call out for help, we are bound more powerfully
to God through our needs and weakness, our unfulfilled hopes and dreams, and
our anxieties and problems than we ever could have been through our joys,
successes, and strengths alone. . . . [1]
Anxieties can gray the whole sky like cloud cover or
descend on our whole horizon like fog. When we rename our anxieties, in a sense
we distill them into requests. What covered the whole sky can now be contained
in a couple of buckets. So when we’re suffering from anxiety, we can begin by
simply holding the word help
before God, letting that one word bring focus to the chaos of our racing
thoughts. Once we feel that our mind has dropped out of the frantic zone and
into a spirit of connection with God, we can let the general word help go and in its place hold
more specific words that name what we need, thereby condensing the cloud of
vague anxiety into a bucket of substantial request. So we might hold the word guidance before God. Or patience. Or courage. Or resilience. Or boundaries, mercy, compassion,
determination, healing, calm, freedom, wisdom, or peace. . . .
[2]
Along with our anxieties and hurts, we also bring our
disappointments to God. If anxieties focus on what might happen, and hurts focus on what has happened, disappointments
focus on what has not happened.
Again, as the saying goes, revealing your feeling is the beginning of healing,
so simply acknowledging or naming our disappointment to God is an important
move. This is especially important because many of us, if we don’t bring our
disappointment to God, will blame our disappointment on God, thus alienating
ourselves from our best hope of comfort and strength. . . .
Whether we’re dealing with anxieties, wounds,
disappointments, or other needs or struggles, there is enormous power in
simple, strong words—the words by which we name our pain and then translate it
into a request to God. Help
is the door into this vital practice of petition, through which we expand
beyond our own capacities and resources to God’s. . . .
Through this
practice of expansion and petition, we discover something priceless: the sacred
connection can grow stronger through, not in spite of, our anxieties, wounds,
disappointments, struggles, and needs. The Compassionate One is our gracious
friend, and we don’t have to earn anything, deserve anything, achieve anything,
or merit anything to bring our needs to God. We can just come as we are.
[3]
This CO2- (Church Of 2) is where two guys meet each day to tighten up our Connections with Jesus. We start by placing the daily "My Utmost For His Highest" in this WordPress blog. Then we prayerfully select some matching worship music and usually pick out a few lyrics that fit especially well. Then we just start praying and editing and Bolding and adding comments and see where the Spirit takes us.
It's been a blessing for both of us.
If you'd like to start a CO2, we'd be glad to help you and your partner get started. Also click the link below to see how others are doing CO2.
Click Image for John White's Original Vision For CO2's
