The Wisdom Tradition
Sunday, January 28, 2018
As we explored over the past two weeks, Jesus reveals the divine image clearly, in a personal face we can relate to and love. The incarnation in Jesus tells us that there is no absolute distinction between matter and spirit, sacred and secular. They both reveal the image of God. Jesus also taught and modeled a path for growing into a living human likeness of that image. In particular, his Sermon on the Mount describes the qualities of those who are living truly and fully in the realm of God. (Later this week and next we’ll take a closer look at this classic teaching.)
My friend and Center for Action and Contemplation faculty member Cynthia Bourgeault writes about the power and depth of Jesus’ teaching:
[Jesus was] a wisdom teacher, a person who . . . clearly emerges out of and works within an ancient tradition called “wisdom,” sometimes known as sophia perennis, which is in fact at the headwaters of all the great religious traditions of the world today. It’s concerned with the transformation of the whole human being. Transformation from what to what? Well, for a starter, from our animal instincts and egocentricity into love and compassion; from a judgmental and dualistic worldview into a nondual acceptingness. This was the message that Jesus, apparently out of nowhere, came preaching and teaching, a message that was radical in its own time and remains equally radical today.
I’m mindful here of one of my favorite quotes, attributed to the British writer G.K. Chesterton, who reportedly said, “Christianity isn’t a failure; it just hasn’t been tried yet.” [1] In this great cultural monolith that we call Christianity, which has guided the course of western history for more than two thousand years, have we really yet unlocked the power to deeply understand and follow this Jesus along the radical path he is calling us to? . . . .
From [my] wider immersion [in the worldwide wisdom tradition] I’ve been reaffirmed in my sense that Jesus came first and foremost as a teacher of the path of inner transformation. That doesn’t take away the Jesus you may be more familiar with—the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity—but it does add a renewed emphasis on paying attention to what he actually taught and seeing how we can begin to walk it authentically from the inside. It also suggests that he did not really come out of nowhere, but rather that he belongs to a stream of living wisdom that has been flowing through the human condition for at least five thousand years.
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Discovering Our Inner Divine Spark
Monday, January 29, 2018
Jesus was a remarkable teacher of the Wisdom or Perennial Tradition, a philosophy that has been taught “from age to age in culture after culture,” in the words of Eknath Easwaran (1910-1999). Easwaran was an Indian born spiritual teacher and author, as well as a translator and interpreter of early Hindu texts such as the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. I was personally introduced to him during a visit with Henri Nouwen in the late 1980s. Today I’ll share his description of the Perennial Philosophy so you can see for yourself how East meets West in Wisdom teaching. It’s important to recognize that deep truth is true everywhere and that the historical Jesus was, after all, a teacher from the Near East. Even for those who are not Christian, Jesus’ universal wisdom resonates at the non-dual level. As we look at the Sermon on the Mount, I’ll share a few of Easwaran’s own insights and applications from his reading of the Gospel texts.
In his commentary on Jesus’ Beatitudes [1], Easwaran shares four perennial principles taught by Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) that echo this year’s Daily Meditation theme, “Image and Likeness”:
First, there is a “light in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable” [2]: unconditioned, universal, deathless; in religious language, a core of personality which cannot be separated from God. Eckhart is precise: this is not what the English language calls the “soul,” but some essence in the soul that lies at the very center of consciousness. As Saint Catherine of Genoa put it, “My me is God: nor do I know my selfhood except in God.” [3] In Indian mysticism this divine core is simply called atman, “the Self.”
Second, this divine essence can be realized. It is not an abstraction, and it need not—Eckhart would say must not—remain hidden under the covering of our everyday personality. It can and should be discovered, so that its presence becomes a reality in daily life.
Third, this discovery is life’s real and highest goal. Our supreme purpose in life is not to make a fortune, nor to pursue pleasure, nor to write our name on history, but to discover this spark of the divine that is in our hearts.
Last, when we realize this goal, we discover simultaneously that the divinity within ourselves is one and the same in all—all individuals, all creatures, all of life.
Easwaran’s description is so good and so clear, in my opinion. Fr. Henri Nouwen, surely no light-weight Christian, told me about this wise man when most Christians were not yet free to see these very common threads within other faiths.
Gateway to Presence:
If you want to go deeper with today’s meditation, take note of what word or phrase stands out to you. Come back to that word or phrase throughout the day, being present to its impact and invitation.
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How Could Someone Be So Ignorant!
By Oswald Chambers
Who are You, Lord? —Acts 26:15
“The Lord spoke thus to me with a strong hand…” (Isaiah 8:11). There is no escape when our Lord speaks. He always comes using His authority and taking hold of our understanding. Has the voice of God come to you directly? If it has, you cannot mistake the intimate insistence with which it has spoken to you. God speaks in the language you know best— not through your ears, but through your circumstances.
God has to destroy our determined confidence in our own convictions. We say, “I know that this is what I should do” — and suddenly the voice of God speaks in a way that overwhelms us by revealing the depths of our ignorance. We show our ignorance of Him in the very way we decide to serve Him. We serve Jesus in a spirit that is not His, and hurt Him by our defense of Him. We push His claims in the spirit of the devil; our words sound all right, but the spirit is that of an enemy. “He…rebuked them, and said, ‘You do not know what manner of spirit you are of’ ” (Luke 9:55). The spirit of our Lord in His followers is described in 1 Corinthians 13.
Have I been persecuting Jesus by an eager determination to serve Him in my own way? If I feel I have done my duty, yet have hurt Him in the process, I can be sure that this was not my duty. My way will not be to foster a meek and quiet spirit, only the spirit of self-satisfaction. We presume that whatever is unpleasant is our duty! Is that anything like the spirit of our Lord— “I delight to do Your will, O my God…” (Psalm 40:8).
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