Wounded Healers

A Mutual Vulnerability
Wednesday,  September 16, 2020

Earlier this year, my colleague and dear friend Jim Finley gave an unpublished talk to Illuman, an organization that supports men in authentic spiritual development. Jim shared some stories from his own life, including how he began to heal from his own childhood abuse and trauma with the help of Thomas Merton, who was his novice master and spiritual director at the Abbey of Gethsemani.

When I went in to see Merton for direction, I was eighteen years old, I was just out of high school. Because of my trauma history I had this issue with authority figures. So when I went in to try to talk to him, I hyperventilated; I had a hard time breathing. And he said to me, “What’s going on?” I told him, my voice was shaking, and I said, “I’m scared because you’re Thomas Merton.”

I can remember being so ashamed, because I wanted him to think well of me. . . . He said to me something that really was a turning point in my life. . . . I worked at the pig barn at the time. . . . He said, “Under obedience, every day after afternoon work, before vespers, I want you to come here every day and sit down and tell me one thing that happened at the pig barn each day.”. . .

I remember thinking to myself, “I can do that.” And it leveled the playing field. . . . Just two men sitting in a room, talking about daily work. And he became a father figure for me.

I learned a big lesson, which later really was to affect me in my own therapy and as a therapist, that when you risk sharing what hurts the most in the presence of someone who will not invade you or abandon you, you can learn not to invade or abandon yourself. Even deeper down, when you risk sharing what hurts the most in the presence of someone who will not invade you or abandon you, you can discover within yourself what Jesus called the pearl of great price [Matthew 13:46], your invincible preciousness in the midst of your fragility.

So through humility and through vulnerability, the true strength of being empowered, my manhood came forth, sitting in this room. Out of all the studies I’ve done with Merton, and my talks on Merton, I think nothing went deeper than talking with him about the pigs. Because that’s compassion. . . .

So this is my sense of manhood, I guess: a radicality, a spirituality, that gives me the courage to face the most broken and lost places within myself, discovering through that acceptance the oceanic tender mercy of God that sustains us in that brokenness, so that by learning to be this way ourselves we can pass it on to others. We can be someone in whose presence it’s safe to be vulnerable and to be open, and truly courageous and strong and powerful, as Jesus was strong and powerful, in the truest, deepest sense of the word.

Tuesday,  September 15, 2020

While all Christians are called to follow Jesus, some communities have been brought deeper into the Paschal Mystery of death and resurrection through unjust and unrelenting collective suffering. Dr. Diana L. Hayes, an African American Catholic theologian and scholar, describes the “wounding” of the African American community and their faithful courage which has brought forth so many sacred gifts in the United States and beyond. She writes:

African American spirituality was forged in the fiery furnace of slavery in the United States. The ore was African in origin, in worldview, in culture, and in traditions. The coals were laid in the bowels of ships named, ironically, after Jesus and the Christian virtues, which carried untold numbers of Africans to the Americas. The fire was stoked on the “seasoning” islands of the Caribbean or the “breeding” plantations of the South where men, women, and children of Africa were systematically and efficiently reduced to beasts of burden and items of private property. Yet those who came forth from these fires were not what they seemed. Despite the oppressive and ungodly forces applied against them, they forged a spirituality that encouraged hope and sustained faith, which enabled them to build communities of love and trust and to persevere in their persistent efforts to be the free men and women they had been created to be. . . .

The African American spiritual story is one of hope in the face of despair, of quiet determination in the face of myriad obstacles, of a quiet yet fierce dignity over against the denial of their very humanity. Theirs is a spiritual history literally written in the blood, sweat, and tears of countless foremothers and forefathers who died under the lash, were sold as commodities, were treated as less than human beings, but who struggled and survived despite and in spite of all the forces arrayed against them. It is the story of their encounter with Jesus Christ who enabled them to find a “way out of no way,” who justified their self-understanding as children of God, and who enabled them to persist in the belief that one day they would be free.

The spirituality of African Americans expresses a hands-on, down-to-earth belief that God saw them as human beings created in God’s own image and likeness and intended them to be a free people. . . .

It is a contemplative, holistic, joyful, and communitarian spirituality. This means that it is expressed in prayer through a deeply conscious prayer life that is not passive. . . . This spirituality sustained and nurtured them and enabled them to hold their heads up and “keep on keeping on” when all and everything seemed opposed to their forward movement. It is a spirituality expressed in song, in dance, in prayer, in preaching, and most important, in living each day as best they could in solidarity with one another and their God over against the principalities and powers of their time.

Wounded Healers

God Uses Everything
Monday,  September 14, 2020
Feast of the Triumph of the Cross

The genius of Jesus’ ministry is that he embraces tragedy, suffering, pain, betrayal, and death itself to bring us to God. There are no dead ends. Everything can be transmuted, and everything can be used. Everything.

It seems that everybody wants to take easy sides. It’s so consoling for the ego to have an answer; to be sure that my position is the final and only true answer. Yet, as Paul says, on the cross Jesus becomes the sin and the problem. He identifies with the wound, the pain, and the suffering (2 Corinthians 5:21). He does not stand apart from it but enters into it. What a paradox, what a mystery!

Jesus tells Peter, “Peter, you must be sifted like wheat. And once you have recovered, then you, in your turn, can strengthen your companions” (Luke 22:31–32). Until there has been a journey through suffering, I don’t believe that we have true healing authority. We don’t have the ability to lead anybody anyplace new unless we have walked it ourselves to some degree. In general, we can only lead people on the spiritual journey as far as we ourselves have gone. We simply can’t talk about it beyond that. That’s why the best thing we can do for people is to stay on the journey ourselves. We transform people to the degree we have been transformed. When we can somehow be compassion, not just talk about compassion; when we can be healed and not just talk about healing, then we are, as Henri Nouwen said so well, “wounded healers,” but not before.

It always comes through the wounding. What we do when faced with our deepest wounds determines whether there is authentic spirituality at work or not. If we seek to blame other people, accuse, attack, or even explain and make perfect, logical sense out of our wounds, there will be no further spiritual journey. But if, when the wounding happens, we find the grace and the freedom to somehow see that it’s not just a wound, but a sacred wound, then the journey progresses. Then we set out to find ourselves, to find the truth, and to find God.

It’s all about what each of us does with the wound. If we ourselves have never walked through some kind of suffering, whether betrayal, abandonment, rejection, divorce, loss of job, struggles with sexuality, we probably will give people “head” answers. We don’t touch or heal their hearts because our own have not been transformed. I don’t think it’s any accident that in most of Jesus’ healings, he physically touches people. He’s showing that healing cannot be done through the head, through explanations, theories and theologies, or quick, “logical” conclusions. It must somehow be a communication of life and love energy, held even at the cellular level.

Wounded Healers

Our Sacred Wounds
Sunday,  September 13, 2020

Ministry can indeed be a witness to the living truth that the wound, which causes us to suffer now, will be revealed to us later as the place where God intimated [God’s] new creation. —Henri J. M. Nouwen (1932–1996)

Christianity, in its mature forms, keeps pushing us toward the necessary tragic: “the foolishness of the cross,” as Paul calls it (1 Corinthians 1:18). Normally, the way God pushes us is by disillusioning us with the present mode. Until the present falls apart, we will never look for something more. We will never discover what it is that really sustains us. That dreaded falling-apart experience is always suffering in some form. All of us hate suffering, yet all religions talk about it as necessary. It seems to be the price we pay for the death of the small self and the emergence of the True Self—when we finally come to terms with our true identity in God. Many Jungians describe this in psychological terms as the “necessary soul suffering” that comes from the death of the ego. Jesus would say, “Unless the grain of wheat dies, it remains just a grain of wheat” (John 12:24). By avoiding this legitimate pain of being human, we sadly bring on ourselves much longer lasting and, often, fruitless pain.

In the work I have done with men’s spirituality, we call that suffering in its transformed state “the sacred wound.” The sacred wound is a concept drawn from classical mythology, but also from the Christ story. In mythology, the would-be hero is always wounded. The word innocent (innocens, “not yet wounded”) is not a complimentary term in mythology. The puer is the young boy (puella for the young girl) who refuses to be wounded. More precisely, he refuses to recognize and suffer the wounds that are already there. He’s just going to remain nice and normal so everybody will accept him. In our culture, he might smugly remain white and middle class, healthy, “sinless,” Catholic, good-looking, and happy. Maybe he will drive a fancy car or wear the latest clothing. He refuses to let things fall apart. He refuses to be wounded, much less to allow the humiliating wound to become sacred and sanctifying. Yet, I personally believe that the Gospels are saying there is no other way to know something essential. Allowing our always-unjust wounds to, in fact, become sacred wounds is the unique Christian name for salvation. We always learn our mystery at the price of our innocence.

We must trust the pain and not get rid of it until we have learned its lessons. The suffering can be seen as a part of the great pattern of how God is transforming all things. If there is one consistent and clear revelation in the Bible, it is that the God of Israel is the one who turns death into life (see Isaiah 26:19; Romans 4:17; 2 Corinthians 1:9). When we can trust the transformative pattern, and that God is in the suffering, our wounds become sacred wounds. The actual and ordinary life journey becomes itself the godly journey. We trust God to be in all things, even in sin and suffering.

Restorative Justice

Greater Proximity, Greater Mercy
Friday,  September 11, 2020

Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument. —Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971)

Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer, social justice activist, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. [1] In his book Just Mercy: A Story of Redemption and Justice, he makes the case that it is distance—physical, social, and spiritual—that allows injustice to flourish. Proximity to one’s neighbor—and remember, we’re all neighbors according to Jesus—is what turns our hearts towards love and restorative justice. Stevenson writes about his first interaction with an inmate named Henry on death row: two men, exactly the same age, one studying at Harvard Law School, one condemned to die:

Henry asked me questions about myself, and I asked him about his life. Within an hour we were both lost in conversation. . . .

I had no right to expect anything from a condemned man on death row. Yet he gave me an astonishing measure of his humanity. In that moment, Henry altered something in my understanding of human potential, redemption, and hopefulness. . . . Proximity to the condemned and incarcerated made the question of each person’s humanity more urgent and meaningful, including my own. . . .

I’ve also represented people who have committed terrible crimes but nonetheless struggle to recover and to find redemption. I have discovered, deep in the hearts of many condemned and incarcerated people, the scattered traces of hope and humanity—seeds of restoration that come to astonishing life when nurtured by very simple interventions.

Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. Finally, I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.

We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others. The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it’s necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and—perhaps—we all need some measure of unmerited grace.

A Healing Process
Thursday,  September 10, 2020

When human beings admit to one another “the exact nature of our wrongs,” as the Twelve Steps recommend, we invariably have a human and humanizing encounter that deeply enriches both sides. It is no longer an exercise to achieve moral purity, or regain God’s love, but in fact a direct encounter with God’s love. It is not about punishing one side but liberating both sides. Robert Yazzie, Chief Justice Emeritus of the Navajo Nation, speaks from his Diné tradition about “talking out the problem” as a necessary step towards healing justice.

Many people seem to be turning away from law as coercion and are looking to restorative and reparative principles. Restorative is defined as “the process for renewing damaged personal and community relationships.” Reparative is defined as “the process of making things right for those affected by an offender’s behavior.” In other words, how can we help victims? We use only one word for both ideas: peacemaking. The Navajo term is Hozhooji Naat’aanii. . . . I will simply describe it as “talking things out in a good way.”. . .

The procedure is fairly simple. Its elements are 1) prayer; 2) expressing feelings; 3) “the lecture”; 4) discussion; 5) reconciliation; and 6) consensus.

1. Prayer. A traditional prayer puts people in the right frame of mind for the talking out. . . .
    
2. Expressing feelings. After prayer, everyone has a say about what happened. They also express how they feel about what happened. . . . In peacemaking, you must know how I feel, and I must know how you feel. That is part of making or restoring a healthy relationship. . . .
    
3. “The lecture.” When the prayers have been said, when emotions have been expressed, and when people have told their stories, it is time for guidance from our naat’aanii [peacemaker or Elder] . . . when the peacemaker does some teaching. . . . By offering guidance from our stories, traditions, and ceremonies and applying them to the situation, our peacemakers teach the law. . . .
    
4. Discussion. Who participates in the peacemaking? The parties themselves (who are the “judges”), a leader and planner (naat’aanii), and relatives. . . . The discussion phase also gets at the causes of problems. . . .
    
5. Reconciliation. If you operate a “winner take all” system of justice, expect ongoing problems. If you have a system that works toward reconciliation, you may resolve the conflicts that underlie ongoing problems. . . . Navajo justice is restorative justice. . . .
    
6. Consensus. Finally, based upon the prayer, venting, discussion, and knowledge of the traditional way of doing things, the people themselves usually reach a consensus about what to do. Planning is actually a central Navajo justice concept, and the people plan a very practical resolution to the problem. Today, we put it in writing, and the parties sign it. Consensus is what makes our justice and harmony ceremony—peacemaking—a healing process.

Restorative Justice

Justice in Relationship
Wednesday,  September 9, 2020

Fania E. Davis is a civil rights attorney, writer, scholar, and the founding director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth. She explains that through engaging in a relational process of repairing harm, restorative justice is:

A justice that seeks not to punish, but to heal. A justice, according to Kay Pranis, that is not about getting even, but about getting well. [1] A justice that seeks to transform broken lives, relationships, and communities, rather than shatter them further. A justice that seeks reconciliation, rather than a deepening of conflict.

Davis has studied the indigenous roots of restorative justice around the world, particularly in Africa, as shown in her reflections:

African justice making, rather than an occasion to inflict punishment, is an opportunity to teach, learn, reemphasize social values, and reaffirm the bonds of our inherent inter-relatedness. It is also an opportunity to identify and redress problematic social conditions that may have given rise to interpersonal harm.

In African indigenous justice, vindication of the person harmed is prioritized. The person responsible, and often their family, is obligated to offer apology, recompense, and reparation to the harmed person and community. A wrong can be made right by subsequent actions of the responsible person and other community members. Community is central. The concept of family in Africa embraces the nuclear family and the extended family as well as people who do not share blood or marriage relationships. Also, the African family extends beyond the living to include the realm of the ancestors.

Indeed, in the African worldview, when something happens to one, whether blessing or burden, it happens to all. A newborn baby is good fortune for family and also the entire village. Marriage unites two clans, not just two individuals. The deeply communal ethos among African and other indigenous traditions also holds true when wrongdoing occurs. If an individual steals from or kills another, they damage the relationship between their respective lineages or villages. In the wake of harm, making it right is not solely the responsibility of the individuals directly involved; it also the responsibility of communities. The focus is on repairing and rebuilding relationships with the intent of bringing social harmony. African indigenous justice seeks to strengthen relationships by fashioning win-win outcomes.

In keeping with the worldview and principles of African and other indigenous justice systems, restorative justice invites a paradigm shift in the way we think about and do justice—from a justice that harms to a justice that heals. Our prevailing adversarial system [of justice] . . . harms people who harm people, presumably to show that harming people is wrong. This sets into motion endless cycles of harm. Restorative justice seeks to interrupt these cycles by repairing the damage done to relationships in the wake of a crime or other wrongdoing, and do so in a way that is consonant with indigenous wisdom—Africa’s and that of other traditions. Justice is a healing ground, not a battleground.

Making Amends
Tuesday,  September 8, 2020

So what are we restoring? For me it’s about returning to the part of us that really wants to be connected to one another in a good way. Returning to the goodness inherent in all of us. —Fania Davis

For justice to be truly restorative, we must seek to restore the dignity and relationships of all involved. Howard Zehr, a long-time advocate, teacher, and practitioner of restorative justice, centers the needs of the victims. He writes:

Restorative justice requires, at minimum, that we address the harms and needs of those harmed, hold those causing harm accountable to “put right” those harms, and involve both of these parties as well as relevant communities in this process. [1]

Here, Zehr explains why making amends is so foundational to healing:

Restorative justice is based upon an old, common-sense understanding of wrongdoing. Although it would be expressed differently in different cultures, this approach is probably common to most traditional societies. For those of us from a European background, it is the way many of our ancestors (and perhaps even our parents) understood wrongdoing.

• “Crime” or wrongdoing is a violation of people and of interpersonal relationships.
• Violations create obligations.
• The central obligation is to put right the wrongs, [that is], to repair the harms caused by wrongdoing. [2]

This is certainly a good description of how my siblings and I were raised by my parents to think about our own “wrongdoings.” Any scrape we got into, any hurt we caused one another, called for restoration far more than retribution. We had to fix what was broken and heal the relationship, not just say, “I’m sorry” or have a “time-out.” I wonder when or why we decided that model of reconciliation was no longer worthy of our time or effort—on familial and societal levels. Zehr continues:

Underlying this understanding of wrongdoing is an assumption about society: we are all interconnected. In the Hebrew scriptures, this is embedded in the concept of shalom, the vision of living in a sense of “all-rightness” with each other, with the creator, and with the environment. Many cultures have a word that represents this notion of the centrality of relationships. For the Maori, it is communicated by whakapapa; for the Navajo, hozho; for many Africans, the Bantu word ubuntu; for Tibetan Buddhists, tendrel. Although the specific meanings of these words vary, they communicate a similar message: all things are connected to each other in a web of relationships. . . .

Interrelationships imply mutual obligations and responsibilities. It comes as no surprise, then, that this view of wrongdoing emphasizes the importance of making amends or of “putting right.” Indeed, making amends for wrongdoing is an obligation. While the initial emphasis may be on the obligations owed by those who have caused harm, the focus on interconnectedness opens the possibility that others—especially the larger community—may have obligations as well.

Even more fundamentally, this view of wrongdoing implies a concern for healing of those involved—those directly harmed, those who cause harm, and their communities. [3]

Story from Our Community:
My day is bookended by the Center’s daily meditations and Fr. Richard’s writings. I keep a notebook for recording ideas that are most resonant with me and I take it with me on daily walks. These things are holding me together in this time where I feel emptiness and anxiety in the pit of my stomach. I hike and listen to the bugling of the Sandhill Crane overhead, the sweet trilling of the wood thrush, and the chiming of the [nearby Benedictine] monastery bells. Here in the peace and quiet of the natural world and with words of wisdom in my notebook, I feel steadied, comforted, and grateful. —Stefanie B.

Restorative Justice

Restorative Love
Monday,  September 7, 2020

As we read the Bible, God does not change as much as our knowledge of God evolves. I certainly recognize there are many biblical passages that present God as punitive and retributive, but we must stay with the text—and observe how we gradually let God grow up. Focusing on divine retribution leads to an ego-satisfying and eventually unworkable image of God which situates us inside of a very unsafe and dangerous universe. Both Jesus and Paul observed the human tendency toward retribution and spoke strongly about the limitations of the law.

The biblical notion of justice, beginning in the Hebrew Scriptures with the Jewish prophets—especially Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea—is quite different. If we read carefully and honestly, we will see that God’s justice is restorative. In each case, after the prophet chastises the Israelites for their transgressions against YHWH, the prophet continues by saying, in effect, “And here’s what YHWH will do for you: God will now love you more than ever! God will love you into wholeness. God will pour upon you a gratuitous, unbelievable, unaccountable, irrefutable love that you will finally be unable to resist.”

God “punishes” us by loving us more! How else could divine love be supreme and victorious? Check out this theme for yourself: Read such passages as Isaiah 29:13–24, Hosea 6:1–6, Ezekiel 16 (especially verses 59–63), and so many of the Psalms. God’s justice is fully successful when God can legitimate and validate human beings in their original and total identity! God wins by making sure we win—just as any loving human parent does. The little “time outs” and discipline along the way are simply to keep us awake and growing.

Love is the only thing that transforms the human heart. In the Gospels, we see Jesus fully revealing this divine wisdom. Love takes the shape and symbolism of healing and radical forgiveness—which is just about all that Jesus does. Jesus, who represents God, usually transforms people at the moments when they most hate themselves, when they most feel shame or guilt, or want to punish themselves. Look at Jesus’ interaction with the tax collector Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1–10). He doesn’t belittle or punish Zacchaeus; instead, Jesus goes to his home, shares a meal with him, and treats him like a friend. Zacchaeus’ heart is opened and transformed. Only then does Zacchaeus commit to making reparations for the harm he has done.

As Isaiah says of God, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways” (Isaiah 55:8). Yet I am afraid we largely pulled God down into “our thoughts.” We think fear, anger, divine intimidation, threat, and punishment are going to lead people to love. Show me where that has worked. You cannot lead people to the highest level of motivation by teaching them the lowest. God always and forever models the highest, and our task is merely to “imitate God” (Ephesians 5:1).

Restorative Justice

Restoring Relationships
Sunday,  September 6, 2020

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced. —James Baldwin (1924–1987)

Almost all religions and cultures that I know of have believed in one way or another that sin and evil are to be punished and that retribution is to be demanded of the sinner—in this world and usually the next world, too. Such retributive justice promotes a dualistic system of reward and punishment, good people and bad people, and makes perfect sense to the ego. I call it the economy of merit or “meritocracy.” This system seems to be the best that prisons, courtrooms, wars, and even most of the church are equipped to do. The trouble is that we defined God as “punisher in chief” instead of Healer, Forgiver, and Reconciler; thus, the retribution model was legitimized all the way down!

However, Jesus, many mystics, Indigenous cultures, and other wisdom traditions show an alternative path toward healing. In these traditions, sin and failure are an opportunity for the transformation of the person harmed, the person causing harm, and the community. Mere counting and ledger-keeping are not the way of the Gospel. Our best self wants to restore relationships, and not just blame or punish. This is the “economy of grace” and an operative idea of restorative justice.

After being wronged, few human beings can move ahead with dignity without a full and honest exposure of the truth, as well as accountability. You cannot heal what you do not acknowledge. Hurt does not just go away on its own; it needs to be spoken and heard. Only then is there a possibility of “restorative justice,” which is what the prophets invariably promise to the people of Israel (as in Ezekiel 16:53-63; Isaiah 57:17‒19) and Jesus illustrates in the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11‒32) and throughout his healing ministry.

While I can talk about restorative justice from the framework of Scripture and theology, this week I will rely on experts in the field. Teachers and practitioners Elaine Enns and Ched Myers define restorative justice and peacemaking as “a range of nonviolent responses to injustice, violation, and/or violence with the aim of

1. reducing or halting the presenting violence in order that
    
2. victims and offenders (as well as their communities and other stakeholders) can collectively identify harms, needs, and responsibilities so that
    
3. they can determine how to make things as right as possible, which can include covenants of accountability, restitution, reparations and (ideally) reconciliation.” [1]

We all need to apologize, and we all need to forgive, for humanity to have a sustainable future. Otherwise, we are controlled by the past, individually and corporately. History easily devolves into taking sides, bitterness, holding grudges, and the violence that inevitably follows. No wonder that almost two-thirds of Jesus’ teaching is directly or indirectly about forgiveness. As others have said, “Forgiveness is to let go of our hope for a different past.” Reality is what it is, and such acceptance leads to great freedom, and the possibility of healing forgiveness.

True Self/Separate Self

Trusting a Deeper Aliveness
Friday,  September 4, 2020

I believe a regular practice of Centering Prayer is one of the most effective tools we have for discovering our True Selves. Sitting in silence, we become adept at compassionately observing our separate self at work, as it tries to maintain control of the inner narrative. Ultimately, however, with our genuine intention and attention, our True Self is revealed, present to the Presence of God. CAC faculty member Cynthia Bourgeault describes how this happens:

When we enter [into] meditation [or contemplative prayer], it is like a “mini-death,” at least from the perspective of the ego. . . . We let go of our self-talk, our interior dialogue, our fears, wants, needs, preferences, daydreams, and fantasies. . . . We simply entrust ourselves to a deeper aliveness, gently pulling the plug on that tendency of the mind to want to check in with itself all the time. In this sense, meditation is a mini-rehearsal for the hour of our own death, in which the same thing will happen. There comes a moment when the ego is no longer able to hold us together, and our identity is cast to the mercy of Being itself. This is the existential experience of “losing one’s life.”. . .

Just as in meditation [and contemplative prayer] we participate in the death of Christ, we also participate in his resurrection. . . . For twenty minutes we

[i.e., our ego or separate self]

have not been holding ourselves in life, and yet life remains. Something has held us and carried us. And this same something, we gradually come to trust, will hold and carry us at the hour of our death. To know this—really know this—is the beginning of resurrection life. . . .

Virtually all the great spiritual traditions of the world share the conviction that humanity is the victim of a tragic case of mistaken identity. There is a “self” and a Self, and our fatal mistake lies in confusing the two. The egoic self . . . is in virtually every spiritual tradition immediately dispatched to the realm of the illusory, or at best, transitory. It is the imposter who claims to be the whole. This imposter can become a good servant, but it is a dangerous master. Awakening—which in Jesus’ teaching really boils down to the capacity to perceive and act in accordance with the higher laws of the Kingdom of Heaven—is a matter of piercing through the charade of the smaller self to develop a stable connection with the greater Self . . . becoming intimate with our spiritual identity, the sense of selfhood carried in our spiritual awareness. . . .

Through meditation [like Centering Prayer] it gradually becomes ingrained in us that “losing one’s life,” regardless of the action that may ultimately be required of us in the outer world, entails first and foremost a passage from our ordinary awareness to our spiritual one, because only at this deeper level of non-fearbased, wholistic perception will we be able to understand what is actually required of us.

Separateness Is Suffering
Thursday,  September 3, 2020

The idea of the two “selves” within every individual—the True Self and the separate self—is a part of the perennial wisdom and a pathway for transformation in most faith traditions. I share the thoughts of two writers, a rabbi and a Sufi Shaikh (elder), on why this teaching is so central to mature spirituality.

From Rabbi Rami Shapiro:

The term “perennial philosophy”. . . refers to a fourfold realization: (1) there is only one Reality (call it, among other names, God, Mother, Tao, Allah, Dharmakaya, Brahman, or Great Spirit) that is the source and substance of all creation; (2) that while each of us is a manifestation of this Reality, most of us identify with something much smaller, that is, our culturally conditioned individual ego; (3) that this identification with the smaller self gives rise to needless anxiety, unnecessary suffering, and cross-cultural competition and violence; and (4) that peace, compassion, and justice naturally replace anxiety, needless suffering, competition, and violence when we realize our true nature as a manifestation of this singular Reality. The great sages and mystics of every civilization throughout human history have taught these truths in the language of their time and culture. [1]

From Kabir Helminski:

Education as it is currently understood, particularly in the West, ignores the human soul, or essential Self. This essential Self is not some vague entity whose existence is a matter of speculation, but our fundamental “I,” which has been covered over by social conditioning and by the superficiality of our rational mind. In North America we are in great need of a form of training that would contribute to the awakening of the essential Self. Such forms of training have existed in other eras and cultures and have been available to those with the yearning to awaken from the sleep of their limited conditioning and know the potential latent in the human being. [2]

These are key reasons that the Center for Action and Contemplation is dedicated to reinvigorating the teaching of Christian contemplation. The consistent practice of contemplation helps to uncover our true reality, essential Self, or fundamental “I.”

Unfortunately, separateness is the chosen stance of the small self which has a hard time living in unity and love with the diverse manifestations of this One Reality (i.e., ourselves, other people, and everything else). The small self takes one side or the other in order to feel secure. It frames reality in a binary way: for me or against me, totally right or totally wrong, my group’s or another group’s opinion—all dualistic formulations.

That is the best the small egotistical self can do, yet it is not anywhere close to adequate. It might be an early level of intelligence, but it is not mature wisdom. The small self is still objectively in union with God, it just does not know it, enjoy it, or draw upon it. Jesus asked, “Is it not written in your own law, ‘You are gods’?” (John 10:34). But for most of us, this objective divine image has not yet become the subjective likeness (Genesis 1:26‒27). Our life’s goal is to illustrate both the image and the likeness of God by living in conscious loving union with God. It is a moment by moment choice and surrender.