Father Richard reminds us of our deepest Reality in God, which we cannot access except by facing our lived realities.

Both God’s truest identity and our own True Self are Love. So why isn’t it obvious? How do we find what is supposedly already there? Why should we need to awaken our deepest and most profound selves? How do we do it? By praying and meditating? By more silence, solitude, and sacraments? Yes to all of the above, but the most important way is to live and fully acknowledge our present reality. This solution sounds so simple that most of us fabricate all kinds of religious trappings to avoid taking up our own inglorious, mundane, and ever-present cross of the present moment.

As James Finley says, “The greatest teacher of God’s presence in our life is our life.” For some reason, it is easier to attend church services than quite simply to reverence the Real—the “practice of the presence of God,” as some saints have called it. Making this commitment doesn’t demand a lot of dogmatic wrangling or managerial support, just vigilance, desire, and willingness to begin again and again. Living and accepting our reality will not feel very spiritual. It will feel like we are on the edges rather than dealing with the essence. That’s why many run toward more esoteric and dramatic postures instead of bearing the mystery of God’s suffering and God’s joy inside themselves. But the edges of our lives—fully experienced, suffered, and enjoyed—lead us back to the center and the essence, which is Love.

We do not find our own center; it finds us. Our own mind will not be able to figure it out. We collapse back into the Truth only when we are spiritually naked and free—which is probably not very often. We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking. In other words, our journeys around and through our realities lead us to the core Reality, where we meet both our truest self and our truest God. We do not really know what it means to be human unless we know God. And, in turn, we do not really know God except through our own broken and rejoicing humanity.

In Jesus, God reveals to us that God is not different from humanity. Thus, Jesus’ most common and almost exclusive self-name is “The Human One” or “Son of Humanity.” He uses the term dozens of times in the four Gospels. Jesus’ reality, his cross, is to say a free “yes” to what his humanity daily asks of him. It seems we Christians have been worshiping Jesus’ journey instead of doing his journey. The worshiping feels very religious; the latter just feels human and ordinary. We are not human beings on a journey toward Spirit; we are already spiritual beings on a journey toward becoming fully human, which for some reason seems harder—precisely because it is so ordinary.

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Five for Friday John Chaffee

1.
“Lovers are the ones who know the most about God; the theologians must listen to them.”

• Hans Urs von Balthasar, Swiss Theologian
   
  There are two ways of coming to a knowledge of God.  One way is by studying and the other is by loving.  The curious and wonderful thing is that since God IS love, then any love being given or received can become our lesson about God.

In Western, post-Enlightenment, northern hemisphere culture, the study of God has been overemphasized to the detriment of the whole tradition.

Fortunately, it is an extremely short distance to get back to the occasion of love (and experience of the Divine) that is possible in every moment.

2.
“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

• F. Scott Fitzgerald, American Writer
   
  I mean, we call these things “the Humanities”, don’t we?  It is all well and good to make progress within and to learn STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), however, we should not be surprised that those topics allow us to forget what it means to be human.

If the modern world has something against it, it’s that the endless pursuit of money, property, assets, business, etc. can shape us to see others more as obstacles to our agenda rather than people with whom to live and to love.

In response to that, the Humanities (and I would argue spirituality) offer a necessary correction to help round us all out.

3.
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”

• Simone Weil, French Philosopher
   
  I don’t think I can or should comment on this.  It is so succinct and to the point.

4.
“You can measure an organization (church, denomination, government, business, etc) by the number of lies you need to tell to be a part of it.”

• Parker Palmer, American Poet and Activist
   
  The degree to which truth or untruth reigns, is the degree to which an organization is healthy.

If an organization has robust, open, and unrestricted dialogue about things in the organization, then it is bending toward health.

If an organization has restrained, behind closed doors, and whispered dialogue about things in the organization, then it is already bending toward unhealth.

Truth is not merely a philosophical ideal, it is a symptom of health and an inoculation against unhealth.

5.
“Do not [take on the same schema/form] of this [eon], but be [meta-morphed/transformed] by the [ever-newing/maturing] of your mind.”

• Romans 12:2
   
  You have likely heard or read this verse translated into English as, “Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  Although the above may read clunky, at least it carries with it some of the original ideas or nuances Saul of Tarsus intended!

This past week I was driving and became curious about what the word “renewing” was in the original Koine Greek…

I found out that it was a variant of ανακαινοωσις (anakainoosis), which breaks down as ana- meaning “again”, kaino- meaning “new”, and sis- meaning “process.”

IN ADDITION TO THAT…

Anakainoosis also means “to cause to grow up.”

This means that the transformation that many of us are looking for may not be found in simply learning new things, or going back to having what our Buddhist brothers and sisters call the “beginner’s mind,” but taking the initiative to “mature” the way we think about everything.

This blew me away because, for more than a few years, I have been shifting my theological paradigm concerning faith away from being focused on perfection and more toward maturity.  It was astounding to see that the idea of maturity was right here in a Bible verse I had to memorize during my Freshman year of college.

After all these years of being a student of the Bible, it still surprises me.

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