Cynthia Bourgeault, one of CAC’s core faculty members, names Jesus’ teaching and way of life “the path of conscious love.”

[This phrase] emphasizes the life-affirming and implicitly relational nature of the path, and the word “conscious” makes clear that the touchstone here is transformation, not simply romance. Conscious love is “love in the service of inner transformation”—or if you prefer, “inner transformation in the service of love.” Either way, this is exactly what Jesus was about. [1]

Cynthia’s words “conscious love” ring true for me as a definition for our life’s purpose and the goal of all spirituality. When we’re conscious, we will always do the loving thing, the connecting thing, the intimate thing, the communion thing, the aware thing. We will be our True Selves.

Cynthia describes what this means: “The first requirement of conscious love is, of course that it has to be conscious—or in other words, anchored in a quality of our presence deeper than simply egoic selfhood. [It is] unitive, or nondual, awareness.” [2]

As I’ve said several times this year, the source of violence and so many of our world’s hurts is the illusion of separation. Our culture of romance suggests that sex and marriage solve the problem of loneliness and longing. But from many people I’ve talked with, it seems there is a great deal of unhealthy sexuality, trauma, and wounding in our sexually preoccupied world. Almost half the marriages in the United States end in divorce. Perhaps the Church intuited that the issue is deeper when it mandated celibacy for priesthood and religious life, but their proposed solution can also be a clever avoidance of intimacy too. I believe sex, marriage, and celibacy are not given to us to solve the problem, but to actually reveal the problem. All of these life stances show us that we still don’t know how to love. At the same time, if we are conscious and aware, they give us the daily practice and opportunity to try one more time! I find every healthy marriage comes to this conclusion sooner or later.

Cynthia writes: “For Jesus as for all teachers of conscious transformation . . . the work with a partner is in service of this goal. It is not intended simply to fulfill physical or emotional needs, but to accelerate the process of awakening.” [3]

She quotes psychologist John Welwood:

A conscious relationship is one that calls forth who you really are. . . . [Instead of looking to a relationship for shelter] we could welcome its power to wake us up in areas of life where we are asleep and where we avoid naked, direct contact with life. This approach puts us on a path. It commits us to movement and change, providing forward direction by showing us where we most need to grow. Embracing relationship as a path also gives us practice: learning to use each difficulty along the way as an opportunity to go further, to connect more deeply, not just with a partner, but with our own aliveness as well. [4]

Gateway to Silence:
We are temples of God.

———————

“What Is That to You?”
By Oswald Chambers

Peter…said to Jesus, “But Lord, what about this man?” Jesus said to him, “…what is that to you? You follow Me.” —John 21:21-22

One of the hardest lessons to learn comes from our stubborn refusal to refrain from interfering in other people’s lives. It takes a long time to realize the danger of being an amateur providence, that is, interfering with God’s plan for others. You see someone suffering and say, “He will not suffer, and I will make sure that he doesn’t.” You put your hand right in front of God’s permissive will to stop it, and then God says, “What is that to you?” Is there stagnation in your spiritual life? Don’t allow it to continue, but get into God’s presence and find out the reason for it. You will possibly find it is because you have been interfering in the life of another— proposing things you had no right to propose, or advising when you had no right to advise. When you do have to give advice to another person, God will advise through you with the direct understanding of His Spirit.

Your part is to maintain the right relationship with God so that His discernment can come through you continually for the purpose of blessing someone else.

Most of us live only within the level of consciousness— consciously serving and consciously devoted to God. This shows immaturity and the fact that we’re not yet living the real Christian life. Maturity is produced in the life of a child of God on the unconscious level, until we become so totally surrendered to God that we are not even aware of being used by Him. When we are consciously aware of being used as broken bread and poured-out wine, we have yet another level to reach— a level where all awareness of ourselves and of what God is doing through us is completely eliminated.

A saint is never consciously a saint— a saint is consciously dependent on God.

Richard Rohr, Sunday, November 12, 2017

Authentic love is about giving a bit of myself to another—and, in this surrender, something new is created, whether a baby or another form of life and beauty. The flow of love is a divine experience mirroring the relationship within the Trinity. That’s why I’m calling this series of meditations “God as Us.” I know it is a daring title, but I wanted to allow you to connect your varied experiences of embodiment—through gender, sexuality, physicality—with the very life of God flowing through you. We are “co-creators” with God in a world that is continually evolving and unfolding (Romans 8:28), not just passive observers.

In the midst of lovemaking, we realize that there is a third element that is beyond us or our beloved. In the Christian Trinitarian view, we call this third energy the Holy Spirit. Unconditional, unselfish love—where I love and care for the other for their own sake, even to the point of suffering for their good and seeking their pleasure more than my own—takes us to a level beyond separation, a place where we are one even if we are far apart physically or in time.

I’ve witnessed this eternal, unbreakable intimacy in many whose partner has passed away. More than one bereaved spouse has said to me, “He’s actually more real, more present to me now than when I had his body.” This means they fully experienced “the bridal chamber” or the divine espousals, to use mystical language. We are part of the divine lovemaking in which we are both making love and being made love to in the same action. This is experienced as an energy and life that is larger than our own. We are merely along for the ride!

Of course, the greater the light there is in something, the greater the shadow it casts. Sexuality and false intimacy also have the power to destroy and wound. No wonder there are so many taboos around sexuality. It has been said, “Where nothing is forbidden, nothing is required.” Because there’s something so significant required of the soul to make love, I’m not surprised religions have created so many moralistic guidelines (even if a lot of them were not very helpful or healing). Impulse control is certainly a valuable skill for an adolescent to learn, but too often the Church’s teaching just led to shame or pre-emptive repression rather than healthy sexuality. (This is not to say that all free expression is wonderful, moral, or even helpful!)

What is so important and essential here? I believe it’s simply this: You are a sacred image of the Divine, you are a co-creator with God, so respect your own embodiment—and the sacred embodiment of the other. Let Paul speak his truth here: “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? The temple of God, which you are, is holy” (1 Corinthians 3:16-17).

I believe the temple happens when “two solitudes protect and border and greet each other,” as Rilke so perfectly put it. [1] This alone is the sacred temple. We do not create this temple; we only occasionally dwell within it—by a daring respect and a risky surrender. [2]

Gateway to Silence:
We are temples of God.

_________________________________________________________

Discovering Divine Design

By Oswald Chambers

…from Richard Rohr:

I want to say a little about purity and about passion. What I mean by purity is singleness of heart, when the head and the heart are working together in a way that allows you to see wholeness, to see from your True Self.

Purity also has to do with appropriate boundaries, protecting the sacred character of intimacy on both sides of a relationship. You have to know the rules and know what they’re trying to protect before you too quickly throw them out. I don’t mean to sound like a prudish old priest, but I’ve worked with young people who have already had so much casual sex that I wonder if it will ever have the power to lead them to the great feast, the great romance, the great union. Sex is all too often an experience of disunion, failure, or entertainment rather than enlightenment.

If the world does not understand purity and its necessity, it seems to me the church has not understood passion and its necessity. Christianity has mostly mistrusted passion and the abandonment, excitement, joy, freedom, playfulness, and enthusiasm that human love can inspire.

Passion is an energy, a drive from within. The French call it elan vital, a creative force. It’s a thirst for union, a thirst for myself, for more of true life. As such, passion surprisingly carries with it some inevitable dissatisfaction. It never lasts and is never enough once you feed on it. Passion constantly creates within you a hole that longs to be filled. In the Christian tradition we call such implanted longing the indwelling Holy Spirit. The Spirit keeps yearning in us for union with more—with ourselves and thus with God. Drawing from her deep experiences in prayer, St. Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510) shared with conviction, “My own me is God! My own me is God!” [1] Passion is a “leading-string of love” drawing us into God (see Hosea 11:3-4).

We must realize that human love (eros) and divine love (agape) are on a continuum; human love and passion prepare us for and lead us to divine love. As Cynthia Bourgeault explains:

The great secret of erotic love—which all true lovers instinctively know and which I believe Jesus also knew—is that agape is in essence transfigured desire. There are not two loves, one agape-based and the other eros-based. Rather, agape is what emerges from the refiner’s fire when that surging desire to cling, possess, consume the object of one’s adoring is subjected to the discipline of kenosis, self-giving love. . . . [K]enosis is an exercise in the pure generosity of standing in the other’s place, discovering what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself—not as much as one’s self, as egoic consciousness always appends, but as the intimate expression of one’s own being. [2]

“My life is not about me. I am about Life,” the mystic comes to believe! Or as Paul put it, “I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

Gateway to Silence:
We are temples of God.

————————–

Faith or Experience?
By Oswald Chambers

…the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. —Galatians 2:20

We should battle through our moods, feelings, and emotions into absolute devotion to the Lord Jesus. We must break out of our own little world of experience into abandoned devotion to Him. Think who the New Testament says Jesus Christ is, and then think of the despicable meagerness of the miserable faith we exhibit by saying, “I haven’t had this experience or that experience”! Think what faith in Jesus Christ claims and provides— He can present us faultless before the throne of God, inexpressibly pure, absolutely righteous, and profoundly justified. Stand in absolute adoring faith “in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God— and righteousness and sanctification and redemption…” (1 Corinthians 1:30). How dare we talk of making a sacrifice for the Son of God! We are saved from hell and total destruction, and then we talk about making sacrifices!
We must continually focus and firmly place our faith in Jesus Christ— not a “prayer meeting” Jesus Christ, or a “book” Jesus Christ, but the New Testament Jesus Christ, who is God Incarnate, and who ought to strike us dead at His feet. Our faith must be in the One from whom our salvation springs. Jesus Christ wants our absolute, unrestrained devotion to Himself. We can never experience Jesus Christ, or selfishly bind Him in the confines of our own hearts. Our faith must be built on strong determined confidence in Him.
It is because of our trusting in experience that we see the steadfast impatience of the Holy Spirit against unbelief. All of our fears are sinful, and we create our own fears by refusing to nourish ourselves in our faith. How can anyone who is identified with Jesus Christ suffer from doubt or fear! Our lives should be an absolute hymn of praise resulting from perfect, irrepressible, triumphant belief.

Images of God

Monday, November 6, 2017

In the image of God they were created, male and female God created them. —Genesis 1:27

The Bible is filled with images of God, metaphors for the sacred. The biblical commandment to make no graven images of God obviously did not mean avoiding word-images. But it does mean that no one of these should be “carved in stone”—that is, made absolute.
Yet within “common Christianity,” by which I mean what most Christians took for granted and shared in common not so long ago, male images of God have often been absolutized. God is “father,” “king,” and “lord.” Enshrined in the Lord’s Prayer and the creeds, male images dominate much of Christian liturgy and hymnody.

But the Bible includes many metaphors for God that are not male. Some are beyond gender because they do not image God in human form. God is like fire, light, a rock, wind, breath, spirit.
Even when God is imaged in human form, the person-like metaphor is sometimes female. Of course, most of the time the person-like imagery is male; both the Old and New Testaments [Hebrew and Christian Scriptures] come from patriarchal cultures. Given this, it is remarkable that the Bible uses female imagery for God at all.

For example, “El Shaddai,” one of the Hebrew names of God, is most often translated into English as “God Almighty.” But its linguistic roots suggest that it meant “breasted God”—God as “mother,” not “father.” Another example: God is “womb-like.” Old Testament scholar Phyllis Trible convincingly argues that Jeremiah 31:20, in which God remembers Israel, should be translated, “My womb trembles for him; I will truly show motherly-compassion on him.”
And (Richard here, with my own example) if we still miss the point, the prophet Jeremiah reminds us: “For YHWH is creating a new thing upon the earth: a woman [God] will seek and protect a man [collective humanity]” (31:22).

Gateway to Silence:
I am created in God’s image.

____________________________________________________

Intimate Theology

By Oswald Chambers

Cosmology

God’s Heartbeat
Friday, November 3, 2017

CAC’s core faculty member, Cynthia Bourgeault, shares insights from other mystics—current and past—to reveal mercy at the heart of the universe. She shares the theological implications of quantum physics from contemporary Episcopal preacher, Barbara Brown Taylor:

Where is God in this picture? God is all over the place. God is up there, down here, inside my skin and out. God is the web, the energy, the space, the light—not captured in them, as if any of those concepts were more real than what unites them—but revealed in that singular, vast net of relationship that animates everything that is. . . . At this point in my thinking, it is not enough for me to proclaim that God is responsible for all this unity. Instead, I want to proclaim that God is the unity—the very energy, the very intelligence, the very elegance and passion that make it all go. [1]

Cynthia reflects:

Barbara’s point may seem like a nuance, but it is a crucially important one. Our visible, created universe is not simply an object created by a wholly other God in order to manifest God’s love, but the created universe is that love itself—the very heart of God, fully expressive in the dimension of time and form.

When we speak in these terms, of course, we begin to use the classic language of the mystics, the language of visionary utterance. For Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) the name in German for mercy was Barmherzigkeit—“warmheartedness.” Boehme saw mercy as “the holy element”: the root energy out of which all else in the visible universe is made. The Mercy is “holy substantiality”—the innermost essence of being itself. It is that “river of God,” running like the sap through the tree of life. [2]

Lest we be inclined to discount this insight as merely the rambling of a God-intoxicated mystic, it is astonishing to discover virtually an identical insight revealed by the eminently sane psychotherapist Gerald May (1940-2005). May affirms that from a clinical standpoint, once the various differentiations and feeling-tones have been stripped away from our subjective emotional life, what remains is a raw, root energy that is, finally, none other than divine love. “It is as if agape [divine love] were the base metal, irreducible and unadulterated,” he writes. “The universe runs on an energy that is, at its core, unconditionally loving.” [3]

May’s vision of agape—divine love—is very close to Boehme’s (and my own) notion of the Mercy. Far from pity or condescension, it is the very heartbeat of God resonant in creation; the warmth that pulses through all things as the divine Mystery flows out into created form.

Gateway to Silence:
We live, move, and have our being in love.

________________________________________________

A Bondservant of Jesus

By Oswald Chambers

Cosmology

Coming to Be Love
Wednesday, November 1, 2017
(All Saints Day)

Ilia Delio, a Franciscan sister and scientist, continues reflecting on love as the heart of the universe.

To see the universe through the eyes of love helps us make sense of evolution, not as a process of cold, blind chance or randomness, but one of passion, yearning, novelty, union, gift, suffering, death, and new life. Love is the faithful heart of the cosmos, the constancy of all life; yet love seeks to become more being-in-love and hence is the energy of change. . . . The name “God” points to this mystery of love in its unlimited depth, the center of all that is; love that overflows onto new life. God is not a super-natural Being hovering above earth, but the supra-personal whole, the Omega, who exists in all and through all.

God is love—eternal, divine, overflowing, personal love. Love goes out to another for the sake of the other and manifests itself in relationship. Divine love is personally relational—Trinity: Lover, Beloved, and the Breath of Love. Divine Love, breathed forth into Word incarnate, marks the history of evolution. . . . Every star, every galaxy, every leaf and bird breathed forth in divine Love, reveals the Christ who is the personal unity of divine being-in-love. From all eternity, God has sought to love another, to be love in another, and to be loved by the other forever—this other is the Christ who is the aim and purpose of this evolutionary universe.

[Evolution] is not only the universe coming to be, but it is God who is coming to be. Divine Love, poured into space-time, rises in consciousness and erupts in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, becoming the pledge of our future in the risen Christ: “I am with you always until the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20). We can read the history of our 13.7-billion-year-old universe as the rising up of Divine Love incarnate, which bursts forth in the person of Jesus, who reveals love’s urge toward wholeness through reconciliation, mercy, peace, and forgiveness. Jesus is the love of God incarnate, the wholemaker who shows the way of evolution toward unity in love. . . . In Jesus, God comes to us from the future to be our future. . . .

Christian life is a commitment to love, to give birth to God in one’s own life and to become midwives of divinity in this evolving cosmos. We are to be wholemakers of love in a world of change.

In summary, this is why I (Richard) say we need to switch our thinking from “Jesus came to fulfill us” to “we have come to fulfill Christ.” We are a part of this ever-growing cosmic Christ that is coming to be in this one great big act of giving birth described in Romans 8:22. [1]

Gateway to Silence:
We live, move, and have our being in love.

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“You Are Not Your Own”

By Oswald Chambers