From Head to Heart
Lower your head, shut your eyes, breathe out gently and imagine yourself looking into your own heart. Carry your mind, that is, your thoughts, from your head to your heart.
—St. Symeon the New Theologian
CAC teacher James Finley continues to reflect on St. Symeon’s instructions for praying the Jesus Prayer:
St. Symeon instructs us to “shut your eyes” when praying the Jesus Prayer. What if we could all close our eyes right now and be interiorly awakened? And what if, when we open our eyes, we would see through our own awakened eyes what Jesus saw in all that he saw? What would we see? We’d see God! Because Jesus saw God in all that he saw.
What’s wonderful about this is that it didn’t matter whether Jesus saw his own mother or a prostitute, the joy of those gathered at a wedding or the sorrow of those gathered at the burial of a loved one. It didn’t matter whether he saw his disciples or his executioners, or a bird or a tree—Jesus saw God in all that he saw. Jesus tells us, “You have eyes to see but you do not see” (Mark 8:18). You have not learned to awaken to your God-given capacity to see the God-given, godly nature of yourselves, others, and all things. This is the source of all your sorrow and confusion. Our prayer then becomes, “Lord, that I might see your presence presencing itself and giving itself away as the intimate immediacy of the grace and miracle of our very presence and of all things in our communal nothingness without you. Help us to understand that the generosity of the Infinite is infinite and that we are the generosity of God. We are the song you sing.”
St. Symeon tells us, “Imagine yourself looking into your own heart.” We’re looking into our own hearts not only as the center of emotions, but as the very place where the ongoing, self-donating presence of God, and us in our nothingness without God, are pouring out and touching each other. In our heart there is this oneness….
Next, “Carry your mind, that is, your thoughts, from your head to your heart.” We learn to settle into the transformative energies of the prayer by being quietly absorbed in the deepening communion with God by doing our best not to be carried off by the thoughts that arise and fall around the edges of our minds. Each time we realize we have been carried off into thinking, we return to the words of the prayer as a way of renewing our trust in God’s merciful love…. In this way, we make our descent into the realm of the heart where our own presence is realized to be eternally one with the mercy of God revealed to us in Christ. Little by little, we begin to realize that our deepening experience of learning to rest in the realm of heart … is beginning to show up in all sorts of unexpected ways, in each passing moment of our lives, up to and including the moment of our death and beyond.
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| Acknowledging the Problem of Evil |
| One of the most persistent challenges to faith is what philosophers call the Problem of Evil. The problem is easy to understand, but much hard to answer. It says: If God is all-powerful and all-good, why is there so much evil in the world? This sets up three possible answers: 1) God is good but not all-powerful and therefore unable to stop evil. 2) God is all-powerful and could stop evil but chooses not to and is therefore not all-good. Or, 3) God does not exist. Some skeptics engage this problem by observing the world around them. Stephen Fry, for example, is a famous comedian and atheist in the U.K. When asked what he would say to God if he discovered he existed after death, Fry responded: “How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-spirited, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?” Fry went on to talk about bone cancer in children and parasites in people’s eyes—all manner of inexplicably terrible things. For others, the Problem of Evil is deeply personal. Russell Baker was a well-known columnist for The New York Times and wrote frequently about his childhood. His father died when he was a boy, and Baker said, “After this, I never cried again with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone’s God except indifference.” Every worldview, including the non-religious ones, must address our universal experience of evil. Some do this by ignoring God, like Russell Baker. Others address evil by denying God’s existence altogether, like Stephen Fry. But in their attempt to solve the Problem of Evil, these answers actually create another problem. As celebrity atheists Richard Dawkins admits, without God there is “no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” In other words, by solving the Problem of Evil you create the Problem of Good. How does one explain the existence of goodness, justice, and hope in a world without God? Other philosophies solve the Problem of Evil by denying the reality of evil preferring to redefine it as merely the absence of good the way darkness is the absence of light, but not a thing itself. Some Eastern philosophies go farther by dismissing suffering as merely an illusion one must transcend. Christian faith is different. While affirming an all-powerful, all-loving Creator, it also acknowledges the very real presence of evil in the world. This seemingly paradoxical vision is what Jesus’ parable of the Wheat and the Weeds illustrates. Good and evil are real and exist in this age side-by-side; a truth that is self-evident. The parable, however, does not explain why evil exists but instead draws our attention to the coming harvest when evil will be extracted from the world and destroyed forever. For me, this is one of the more appealing aspects of Jesus’ teaching. Unlike others, he fully acknowledges and sympathizes with our experience of evil while also offering us hope for the day when it will be overcome by good. DAILY SCRIPTURE MATTHEW 13:24-30 MATTHEW 13:36-43 REVELATION 21:1-4 WEEKLY PRAYER C. Eric Lincoln (1924 – 2000) Lord, let me love, though love may be the losing of every earthly treasure I possess. Lord, make your love the pattern of my choosing. And let your will dictate my happiness. I have no wish to wield the sword of power, and I want no man to leap at my command; nor let my critics feel constrained to cower for fear of some reprisal at my hand. Lord, let me love the lowly and the humble, forgetting not the mighty and the strong; and give me grace to love those who may stumble, nor let me seek to judge of right or wrong. Lord, let my parish be the world unbounded, let love of race and clan be at an end. Let every hateful doctrine be confounded that interdicts the love of friend for friend. Amen. |
