Click here to listen to Richard Rohr introduce this week’s Daily Meditation theme on “Reality Initiating Us,” addressing our current global crisis as a collective initiation experience which we are all undergoing.
The surprise of surprises is that although everybody who has ever lived in this world has died, for some reason, we think we won’t. —Hindu aphorism
Jesus did not once tell us to worship him; he only told us to follow him on the necessary three-day journey that Christians celebrate during Holy Week. And “three days” did not necessarily mean Friday to Sunday. It is a classic initiatory phrase for going the distance or the full cycle. The transformational journey of death and resurrection is the only—and always denied—message. It really is the way we are saved.
However, death, in any form, is perceived as the great human enemy. We construct much of our lives to avoid it, delay it, and deny it. It seems that we are not ready to die, until we have truly lived. Ironically, people who touch upon real life are the ones who can also let go of it. It is the people who have not yet begun to live who fear death the most. True insight has not happened to them yet, which leaves them without a center, foundation, or even primal desire. Their core has not been touched and so they have nothing to harken back to or look forward to or anything to trust deeply within. They are afraid. And we must be honest that this is much of humanity.
In initiation rites, some ritual of death and resurrection was the centerpiece. This is probably why Jesus sought out and submitted to the death and rebirth ritual of John the Baptist at the Jordan River. It is probably why he kept talking to his disciples, three times in Mark’s Gospel, about the necessity of this death journey, and why three times they changed the subject (8:31–10:45). It is undoubtedly why he finally stopped talking about it, and just did it, not ritually but for real.
The genius of ancestors who practiced initiation ceremonies is that they exposed and revealed the truth about pain in a sacred space, which makes all the difference in the world. Now pain is no longer a scary unknown, an unfortunate mistake, something we must change, but maybe an entranceway! As Eckhart Tolle says, “You do not need to be a Christian to understand the deep universal truth that is contained in symbolic form in the image of the cross.” [1] Before such transformative images, the worst things can become the best things.
The initiation instinct realized that facing one’s death was the ultimate encounter with the sacred. Walking through one’s fear of the last thing becomes an encounter with the first thing. A person is then free to live, often for the first time outside of their head or their fear. Death encounters seem to be the primary way to build or rebuild a real life. Then life itself, in all its depth and beauty, becomes the unquestionable gift.
Lesson
Four: You Are Not In Control
Thursday, April 2, 2020
Click here to listen to Richard Rohr
introduce this week’s Daily Meditation theme on “Reality
Initiating Us,” addressing our current global crisis as a collective
initiation experience which we are all undergoing.
At some moment I did answer Yes to
Someone—or Something—and from that hour I was certain that existence is
meaningful and that, therefore, my life in self-surrender had a goal. —Dag
Hammarskjöld
To be in control of one’s destiny, job, or finances is
nearly an unquestionable moral value in Western society. The popular phrase
“take control of your life” even sounds mature and spiritual. It is the
fundamental message of nearly every self-help book. On a practical level, it is
true, but not on the big level. Our bodies, our souls, and especially our
failures teach us this as we get older. We are clearly not in control, as this
pandemic is now teaching the whole planet. It is amazing that we need to assert
the obvious.
Learning that we are not in control situates us correctly
in the universe. If we are to feel at home in this world, we have to come to
know that we are not steering this ship. That teaching is found in the mystical
writings of all religions. Mystics know they are being guided, and their
reliance upon that guidance is precisely what allows their journey to happen.
We cannot understand that joy and release unless we’ve have been there and
experienced the freedom for ourselves.
In my life I have found the mystic teachings of St.
Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897) helpful for living into this truth. She was a
master teacher who was never afraid of presenting humiliating evidence about
herself. She called this her “little way.” As she so brilliantly put it, “If
you are willing to bear serenely the trial of being displeasing to yourself,
you will be for [Jesus] a pleasant place of shelter.” [2] What gives religion
such a bad name is that most religious people are eager to be pleasing to
themselves, and want to be a part of a “big way.”
Being willing to be “displeasing to ourselves,” or to
allow our autonomous ego’s needs to take a back seat to the larger field of
love, is part of what it means to not be in willful control.
Gerald May (1940–2005), one of my own teachers, very
helpfully contrasts willingness with willfulness:
Willingness
implies a surrendering of one’s self-separateness, an entering-into, an
immersion in the deepest processes of life itself. It is a realization that one
already is a part of some ultimate cosmic process and it is a commitment to
participation in that process. In contrast, willfulness is a setting of oneself
apart from the fundamental essence of life in an attempt to master, direct,
control, or otherwise manipulate existence. [1]
For many of us, this may be the first time in our lives
that we have felt so little control over our own destiny and the destiny of
those we love. This lack of control initially feels like a loss, a
humiliation, a stepping backward, an undesired vulnerability. However, recognizing
our lack of control is a universal starting point for a serious spiritual walk
towards wisdom and truth.
Please join me
in trying to be faithful to that walk, even as we pray for God’s mercy for
those who suffer, and especially the most marginalized.
Click here to listen to Richard Rohr introduce this week’s Daily Meditation theme on “Reality Initiating Us,” addressing our current global crisis as a collective initiation experience which we are all undergoing.
O God, if I worship you in fear of hell, burn me in hell. If I worship you in hope of paradise, shut me out from paradise. But if I worship you for your own sake, do not withhold from me your everlasting beauty. —Rábi‘a (717–801), Islamic mystic and poet
When we are willing to be transformed, we stop wasting time theorizing, projecting, denying, or avoiding our own ego resistance. The true spiritual teacher is not afraid to give us a dose of humiliation. If we immediately balk at some minor blow to our ego, the teacher knows that no basic transformation into our True Self has taken place yet. It takes a masterful teacher or mentor to teach us that we are not important. Otherwise, reality itself teaches us: painful life situations have to dismantle us brick by brick, decade by decade.
Jesus knew that he needed to destabilize a person’s false, separate self before they could understand that they had a True Self, but destabilizing our security systems and our ego is always a hard sell. He says, “What does it profit a person if they gain the whole world and lose their soul?” (Luke 9:25). Typically, it is the prophets who deconstruct the ego and the group, while priests and pastors are supposed to reconstruct them into divine union. As God said in the inaugural vision to Jeremiah: “Your job is to take apart and demolish, and then start over building and planting anew” (Jeremiah 1:10).
True master teachers, like Jeremiah and Jesus, are both prophets and pastors, which is why their teaching is almost too much for us. They both deconstruct and reconstruct. But the only reason they can tell us that we are not important is because they also announce to us our infinite and unearned importance. Maybe the reason we have to be reminded of the first truth is because we no longer believe the second. We no longer allow our separate self to be humiliated because we no longer believe in the Great Self.
Our personality and self-image are all we have.
Every parable or spiritual riddle, every one of Jesus’ confounding questions is intended to bring up the limitations of our own wisdom, power, or tiny self. If we have not yet touched upon our essence, we will continue to build up ego structures in defense of our momentary form. Most Westerners no longer tolerate it when our small selves are ignored, subverted, or humiliated. We appear to be lost in a whirlwind of images, all passing and changing week by week.
With all of us globally experiencing our common vulnerability to this virus we can learn the lesson that we are one in our humanity. No one is more important than anyone else. Powerlessness is the beginning of wisdom, as the Twelve-Steppers say. All we can finally do is pray that we allow the flow of the Spirit’s very presence within us. If there is no living water flowing through us, then we must pray for the desire for it to flow! Once the desire for something more is stirred and recognized, it is just a matter of time. Nothing less will every totally satisfy us again.
Reality Initiating Us: Part One
Lesson Three: Your Life Is Not About You Wednesday, April 1, 2020
Click here to listen to Richard Rohr introduce this week’s Daily Meditation theme on “Reality Initiating Us,” addressing our current global crisis as a collective initiation experience which we are all undergoing.
After any true initiating experience, we know that we are a part of a much bigger whole. Life is not about us, but we are about life. We are not our own. We are an instance of a universal and even eternal pattern. Life is living itself in us. We have been substituting the part for the whole! This message is an earthquake in the brain, a hurricane in the heart.
Accepting that our lives are not about us is a Copernican revolution of the mind, and it is just as hard for each individual today as it was for earthbound humans when they discovered that our planet was not the center of the universe. It takes a major and monumental shift in consciousness, and it is always given and received with major difficulty. It comes as an epiphany, as pure grace and deliverance, and never as logic or necessary conclusion.
Understanding that our lives are not about us is the connection point with everything else. It lowers the mountains and fills in the valleys that we have created, as we gradually recognize that the myriad forms of life in the universe are merely parts of the one life that most of us call God. After such a discovery, we are grateful to be a part—and only a part! We do not have to figure it all out, straighten it all out, or even do it perfectly by ourselves. We do not have to be God. It is an enormous weight off our backs. All we have to do is participate!
After this epiphany, things like praise, gratitude, and compassion come naturally—like breath. True spirituality is not taught; it is caught once our sails have been unfurled to the Spirit. Henceforth our very motivation and momentum for the journey toward holiness and wholeness is immense gratitude for already having it!
I am convinced that the reason Christians have misunderstood many of Jesus’ teachings is because we did not understand his pedagogy. Jesus’ way of education was intended to situate his followers to a larger life, which he called his “Father,” or what we might call today God, the Real, or Life. When we could not make clear dogma or moral codes out of Jesus’ teaching, many Christians simply abandoned it in any meaningful sense. For this reason, the Sermon on the Mount—the essence of Jesus’ teaching—seems to be the least quoted by Christians. We sought a prize of later salvation, instead of the freedom of present simplicity.
My life is not about me. It is about God. It is about a willing participation in a larger mystery. At this time, we do this by not rejecting or running from what is happening but by accepting our current situation and asking God to be with us in it. Paul of Tarsus said it well: “The only thing that finally counts is not what human beings want or try to do, but the mercy of God” (Romans 9:16). Our lives are about allowing life to “be done unto us,” which is Mary’s prayer at the beginning and Jesus’ prayer at the end.
The Patterns That Are Always True Sunday, March 29, 2020
Click here to listen to Richard Rohr introduce this week’s Daily Meditation theme on “Reality Initiating Us,” addressing our current global crisis as a collective initiation experience which we are all undergoing.
In this time of global crisis, it may be that reality is revealing itself to us—through great suffering—universal patterns that are always true. A little over fifteen years ago, I wrote a book called Adam’s Return that focused on male initiation rites. These are the sacred rituals in indigenous cultures that marked the symbolic growth of a self-referential boy to a generative, compassionate man. While that book was written specifically for men, it seems to me that reality is “initiating” all of us to know and live by these same essential truths. This week I will be trying to present this global crisis as a global initiation into what matters and what lasts. Now women need this essential initiation just as much as men.
The work of sacred rituals like initiation was to situate life in a bigger frame, so nature, beauty, suffering, work, sexuality, and ordinary moments were seen to have transcendent significance. They gave life meaning— the one thing the soul cannot live without. Heaven and earth have to be put together or this world never becomes home. That integration is the necessary human and spiritual task, at which initiation rites succeeded, probably on a much broader scale than modern churches.
Initiation was always, in some form, an experience of the tension and harmony of opposites: of loss and renewal, darkness and light, the cycle of seasons, death and resurrection, yin and yang, the paschal mystery. Somehow initiates had to see the wide screen and, at least for a moment, find goodness and meaning in what was offered right in front of them, which is all we can love anyway. Universally, early cultures insisted on large doses of separation, silence, looking, listening, and various kinds of suffering.
In my cross-cultural research on male initiation rites, I perceived five consistent lessons or truths communicated to the initiate, meant to separate initiates from their attachment to who they think they are and reattach them to who they really are.
In this time of global disruption, these lessons can help us align to reality, our own belonging in it, and remain grounded in the infinitely trustworthy presence of God.
These five essential messages of initiation are:
Life is hard.
You are not important.
Your life is not about you.
You are not in control.
You are going to die.
You may be shocked by the seemingly negative character of these five truths. Most Western postmodern people are, but there’s no way around these truths, hard as they may be. In fact, one could say much of the superficiality of our world is because we stopped growing up men. We will be exploring these five lessons in this week’s Daily Meditations and their positive spiritual counterparts the following week. None of this is easy work. We typically want to flee from our current anxiety, grief and pain, but I encourage you to stay with these messages. They are truths for your soul that can help you find meaning and a sense of God’s compassionate presence inside of the chaos. W
Lesson One: Life Is Hard Monday, March 30, 2020
Click here to listen to Richard Rohr introduce this week’s Daily Meditation theme on “Reality Initiating Us,” addressing our current global crisis as a collective initiation experience which we are all undergoing.
You have to be sick and tired of being sick and tired before recovery can begin. —Twelve Step Wisdom
All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. Creation has a pattern of wisdom; and we dare not shield ourselves from it, or we literally will lose our soul. We can obey commandments, believe doctrines, and attend church services all our lives and still daily lose our souls if we run from the necessary cycle of loss and renewal. Death and resurrection are lived out at every level of the cosmos, but only one species thinks it can avoid it—the human species.
I am afraid that many of us with privilege have been able to become very naïve about pain and suffering in the United States and the Western world. We simply don’t have time for it. However, by trying to handle all suffering through willpower, denial, medication, or even therapy, we have forgotten something that should be obvious: we do not handle suffering; suffering handles us— in deep and mysterious ways that become the very matrix of life and especially new life. Only suffering and certain kinds of awe lead us into genuinely new experiences. All the rest is merely the confirmation of old experience.
It is amazing to me that the cross or crucifix became the central Christian logo, when its rather obvious message of inevitable suffering is aggressively disbelieved in most Christian countries, individuals, and churches. We are clearly into ascent, achievement, and accumulation. The cross became a mere totem, a piece of jewelry. We made the Jesus symbol into a mechanical and distant substitutionary atonement theory instead of a very personal and intense at-one-ment process, the very reality of love’s unfolding. We missed out on the positive and redemptive meaning of our own pain and suffering. It was something Jesus did for us (substitutionary), but not something that revealed and invited us into the same pattern. We are not punished for our sins, we are punished by our sins (such as blindness, egocentricity, illusions, or pride).
It seems that nothing less than some kind of pain will force us to release our grip on our small explanations and our self-serving illusions. Resurrection will always take care of itself, whenever death is trusted. It is the cross, the journey into the necessary night, of which we must be convinced, and then resurrection is offered as a gift.
In this time of suffering we have to ask ourselves, what are we going to do with our pain? Are we going to blame others for it? Are we going to try to fix it? No one lives on this earth without it. It is the great teacher, although none of us want to admit it. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it in some form. How can we be sure not to transmit our pain onto others?
Love is Stronger
than Death
Friday, March 27, 2020
The Path of Descent is very real and usually
very painful, but something else is equally true. Love is both who we are and
who we are still becoming, like a sunflower seed that becomes its own
sunflower. It seems to be a fully cooperative effort according to St. Paul
(Romans 8:28), and according to my limited experience too. God never coerces us
toward life or love by any threats whatsoever. Yes, God seduces us, but
coercion? Never (see Jeremiah 20:7; Matthew 11:28–30). Whoever this God
is, he or she is utterly free. Love cannot happen any other way. Love
flourishes inside freedom and then increases that freedom even
more.
We are all allowed to ride life and love’s wonderful
mystery for a few years—until life and love reveal themselves as the same
thing, which is the final and full message of the risen Christ—life morphing
into a love that is beyond space and time. God literally “breathes” shalom and
forgiveness into the universal air (John 20:22–23). We get to add our own
finishing touches of love, our own life breath to the Great Breath, and then we
return the completed package to its maker in a brand-new but also same
form.
I believe the meaning of the Resurrection of Jesus is
summed up in the climactic line from the Song of Songs, “love is stronger than
death” (8:6). If the blank white banner that the Risen Christ usually holds in
Christian art should say anything, it should say: “Love will win!” Love is all
that remains. Love and life are finally the same thing, and we know that for
ourselves once we have walked through death.
Love has you.
Love is you. Love alone, and your deep need for love, recognizes love
everywhere else. Remember that you already are what you are seeking. Any fear
“that your lack of fidelity could cancel God’s fidelity, is absurd” (Romans
3:3), says Paul. Love has finally overcome fear, and your house is being
rebuilt on a new and solid foundation. This foundation was always there, but it
takes us a long time to find it. “It is love alone that lasts” (1 Corinthians
13:13). All you have loved in your life and been loved by are eternal and
true.
Author and Episcopal priest Barbara Taylor Brown invites us to consider the lessons that suffering has to teach us and reminds us that we can only learn when we are willing to stay put instead of turning away.
[Psychotherapist Miriam] Greenspan says that painful emotions are like the Zen teacher who whacks his students with a flat board right between their shoulder blades when he sees them going to sleep during meditation. If we can learn to tolerate the whack—better yet, to let it wake us up—we may discover the power hidden in the heart of the pain. Though this teaching is central to several of the world’s great religions, it will never have broad appeal, since almost no one wants to go there. Who would stick around to wrestle a dark angel [see Genesis 32:22-31] all night long if there were any chance of escape? The only answer I can think of is this: someone in deep need of blessing; someone willing to limp forever for the blessing that follows the wound.
What such people stand to discover, Greenspan says, is the close relationship between “individual heartbreak and the brokenheartedness of the world.” [1] While those who are frightened by the primal energy of dark emotions try to avoid them, becoming more and more cut off from the world at large, those who are willing to wrestle with angels break out of their isolation by dirtying their hands with the emotions that rattle them most.
In this view, the best thing to do when fear has a neck hold on you is to befriend someone who lives in real and constant fear. The best thing to do when you are flattened by despair is to spend time in a community where despair is daily bread. The best thing to do when sadness has your arms twisted behind your back is to sit down with the saddest child you know and say, “Tell me about it. I have all day.” The hardest part about doing any of these things is to do them without insisting that your new teachers make you feel better by acting more cheerful when you are around. After years of being taught that the way to deal with painful emotions is to get rid of them, it can take a lot of reschooling to learn to sit with them instead, finding out from those who feel them what they have learned by sleeping in the wilderness. . . .
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,” Carl Jung wrote, “but by making the darkness conscious.” [2] Reading this, I realize that in a whole lifetime spent with seekers of enlightenment, I have never once heard anyone speak in hushed tones about the value of endarkenment.
What a compelling word and question Brown Taylor invites us to consider: endarkenment. What are we learning about ourselves, each other, and even God through these times? What are we only now coming “to know” through this time of not-knowing?
CAC faculty member Brian McLaren is
an author and contemplative activist. He spent over twenty years as the pastor
of a church where he lived, worked, and prayed with people in good times and
bad. Responding to crises is not theoretical for him, but a deeply felt and
lived experience which comes through so clearly in these words. I hope you will
feel encouraged to take this practice to your own time of prayer in the days,
weeks, and months ahead.
When we call out for help, we are bound more powerfully
to God through our needs and weakness, our unfulfilled hopes and dreams, and
our anxieties and problems than we ever could have been through our joys,
successes, and strengths alone. . . . [1]
Anxieties can gray the whole sky like cloud cover or
descend on our whole horizon like fog. When we rename our anxieties, in a sense
we distill them into requests. What covered the whole sky can now be contained
in a couple of buckets. So when we’re suffering from anxiety, we can begin by
simply holding the word help
before God, letting that one word bring focus to the chaos of our racing
thoughts. Once we feel that our mind has dropped out of the frantic zone and
into a spirit of connection with God, we can let the general word help go and in its place hold
more specific words that name what we need, thereby condensing the cloud of
vague anxiety into a bucket of substantial request. So we might hold the word guidance before God. Or patience. Or courage. Or resilience. Or boundaries, mercy, compassion,
determination, healing, calm, freedom, wisdom, or peace. . . .
[2]
Along with our anxieties and hurts, we also bring our
disappointments to God. If anxieties focus on what might happen, and hurts focus on what has happened, disappointments
focus on what has not happened.
Again, as the saying goes, revealing your feeling is the beginning of healing,
so simply acknowledging or naming our disappointment to God is an important
move. This is especially important because many of us, if we don’t bring our
disappointment to God, will blame our disappointment on God, thus alienating
ourselves from our best hope of comfort and strength. . . .
Whether we’re dealing with anxieties, wounds,
disappointments, or other needs or struggles, there is enormous power in
simple, strong words—the words by which we name our pain and then translate it
into a request to God. Help
is the door into this vital practice of petition, through which we expand
beyond our own capacities and resources to God’s. . . .
Through this
practice of expansion and petition, we discover something priceless: the sacred
connection can grow stronger through, not in spite of, our anxieties, wounds,
disappointments, struggles, and needs. The Compassionate One is our gracious
friend, and we don’t have to earn anything, deserve anything, achieve anything,
or merit anything to bring our needs to God. We can just come as we are.
[3]
The curtailing of individual freedom to live, move, and work may be a new experience for some of us—but is familiar to communities who have suffered from oppression for centuries. By necessity, they have developed ways of coping with fear and uncertainty on an individual and communal level. During the CONSPIRE 2018 conference, Living School faculty member Dr. Barbara Holmes shared some of her experience working with the path of descent.
During crisis, individuals put to sleep the light of rationality, and descend during dark nights of the soul. As William Shannon puts it, “We darken and blind the exterior self and awaken to the inner self as we grow closer to God.” [1]
But crisis doesn’t just happen to individuals. . . . It also happens to communities, particularly when a community shatters on the anvil of injustice. Crisis contemplation . . . is [the] point of spiritual and psychic dissolution. Shattering events that create the crisis displace the ordinary until the suffering reaches the point of no return. We are bereft. We are unable to articulate the extent of our suffering or even to reintegrate our fractured meaning structures. And so, the descent begins, and we are in free fall toward the center of our being. . . .
In my book Joy Unspeakable, I use the black community’s experience of slavery as an extreme example of crisis contemplation, a breaking of extraordinary magnitude. When the crisis is communal, communities may be victimized by systems because of immutable traits like race, gender, ethnicity, sexual identity or fluidity, class, political or social differences, real or imagined, and more. When communities are in crisis, first comes the fear. Perhaps you’re Harriet Tubman hiding and trying to make it to Canada with your community, or you’re a person of color today, wondering when the powers that be will decide to put you in the same foil blankets and cages that they’re currently using for Mexican babies.
After the fear comes the cruelty and the oppression along with the wondering, “Where is God?” Here’s the rub: even as a member of an oppressed community, you’re always an individual, but during a crisis of this magnitude, you do not have the luxury of responding as an individual. Suffering [of community in crisis] cannot be absorbed by individuals, no matter how tenuous and invisible the bonds of community are. Individuals cannot respond. You must do it as community, for safety, for comfort, and for survival.
I want to echo her final point here: We cannot face large-scale crises as individuals; we cannot carry the pain of this reality on our own, nor can we only look out for ourselves. The pain is communal and so too must be the response.
The CONSPIRE 2018 conference focused on the Path of Descent as the Path of Transformation. Suffering isa universal experience occurring across space and time, revealing the“big T”Truth that going down, going through, and going into the unknown can be powerfully transformative. In the meditations this week I will be sharing the wisdom offeredby my fellow teachers at the CAC, whom I also call my friends. I hope you will trust their insights as you seem to trust my own. Today, Mirabai Starr shares a breathing practice and a reading from John of the Cross (1542–1591). Don’t hurry through it with your intellectual mind; allow it to do its work in your heart and body as well.
Welcome to the descent. As we slip down deeper and deeper, I invite you to remember . . . that it is not in perfection that we reach the divine, but through the gateway of our mistakes and our suffering. . . .
Let’s take three deep breaths. I invite you to breathe all the way in and hold your inhalation for a while, for as long as you can, holding that inhalation before letting it all go and holding the exhalation. [Do this] three times at your own pace, paying attention to every nuance of your breath as you inhale, hold, exhale and hold, noticing especially the empty space of the out breath.
As you breathe, feel your attention pouring into the container of this moment so that you fully inhabit your own dear body in this precious moment. [You have] nowhere else to go, nothing to accomplish, [you are giving] yourself the . . . gift of being fully present and resting right here.
From Dark Night of the Soul (NocheOscura del Alma):
The divine is purifying contemplation, and the human is the soul. The divine lays siege upon the soul in order to make her new and to make her divine, stripping her of habitual affections and attachments to the old self to which she had been reconciled. The Divine disentangles and dissolves her spiritual substance, absorbing it in deep darkness. In the face of her own misery, the soul feels herself coming undone and melting away in a cruel, spiritual death.
Man says, the soul feels as if she herself were coming to an end. David calls out to God: ‘Save me, Lord, for the waters have come in even unto my soul. I am trapped in the mire of the deep. I have nowhere to stand. I have come unto the depth of the sea, and the tempest has overwhelmed me. I have labored in my cry. My throat has become raw, and my eyes have failed while I hope in my God.’ [Psalm 69:2–4] . . . [1]
We abandon the self-improvement project and instead surrender to the Holy Fire. Allowing your breath to be the touchstone of your meditation and contemplation, allow yourself to rest for a few minutes in the stillness.
I am not alone in my tiredness or sickness or fears, but at one with millions of others from many centuries, and it is all part of life. —Etty Hillesum [1]
The “cross,” rightly understood, always reveals various kinds of resurrection. It’s as if God were holding up the crucifixion as a cosmic object lesson, saying: “I know this is what you’re experiencing. Don’t run from it. Learn from it, as I did. Hang there for a while, as I did. It will be your teacher. Rather than losing life, you will be gaining a larger life. It is the way through.” As impossible as that might feel right now, I absolutely believe that it’s true.
When we carry our own suffering in solidarity with humanity’s one universal longing for deep union, it helps keep us from self-pity or self-preoccupation. We know that we are all in this together. It is just as hard for everybody else, and our healing is bound up in each other’s. Almost all people are carrying a great and secret hurt, even when they don’t know it. This realization softens the space around our overly–defended hearts. It makes it hard to be cruel to anyone. It somehow makes us one—in a way that easy comfort and entertainment never can.
I believe—if I am to believe Jesus—that God is suffering love. If we are created in God’s image, and if there is so much suffering in the world, then God must also be suffering. How else can we understand the revelation of the cross? Why else would the central Christian logo be a naked, bleeding, suffering divine-human being? The image of Jesus on the cross somehow communicates God’s solidarity with the willing soul. A Crucified God is the dramatic symbol of the one suffering that God fully enters into with us—much more than just for us, as many Christians were trained to think.
If suffering, even unjust suffering (and all suffering is unjust on some level), is part of one Great Mystery, then I am willing to carry my little portion. Etty Hillesum (1914–1943), a young, Dutch, Jewish woman who died in Auschwitz, truly believed her suffering was also the suffering of God. She even expressed a deep desire to help God carry some of it. How many people do you know who feel sorry for God and want to “help” God within us? She has a stronger sense of the Divine Indwelling within her than most Christians I have ever met:
And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last. [2]
Such freedom and generosity of spirit are almost unimaginable to me. What creates such altruistic and loving people? Perhaps this season of disruption will offer us some clues. I certainly hope so.
Summary and Lamentation Practice for a Time of Crisis
Because Jesus is always listening to God and experiencing God’s presence, God is continually teaching him. (Sunday)
Prophets must first be true disciples of their faith. In fact, it is their deep love for their tradition that allows them to profoundly criticize it at the same time. (Monday)
It is by focusing their attention on, and becoming fully aware of, the political, social, economic, military, and religious tendencies of their time that prophets are able to see where it is all heading. —Albert Nolan (Tuesday)
For me, the word mysticism simply means experiential knowledge of spiritual things, as opposed to book knowledge, secondhand knowledge, or even church knowledge. (Wednesday)
Globally, we’re in this together. Depth is being forced on us by great suffering, which as I like to say, always leads to great love. (Thursday)
We’re all subject to this crisis. Suffering has an ability to pull you into oneness. (Friday)
Practice: Lamentation for a Time of Crisis
Intelligently responding to the Coronavirus demands that we access resources of physical, emotional and spiritual resilience. One practice Christianity has developed to nurture resilience is lamentation. Prayers of lamentation arise in us when we sit and speak out to God and one another—stunned, sad, and silenced by the tragedy and absurdity of human events. Without this we do not suffer the necessary pain of this world, the necessary sadness of being human.
Walter Brueggemann, my favorite Scripture teacher, points out that even though about one third of the Psalms are psalms of “lament,” these have been the least used by Catholic and Protestant liturgies. We think they make us appear weak, helpless, and vulnerable, or show a lack of faith. So we quickly resort to praise and thanksgiving. We forget that Jesus called weeping a “blessed” state (Matthew 5:5) and that only one book of the Bible is named after an emotion: Jeremiah’s book of “Lamentation.”
In today’s practice, Reverend Aaron Graham reflects on the elements found in prayers of lament. I hope that you will find in his words and in the text of Psalm 22 a way to voice your own complaints, requests, and trust in God, who is always waiting to hear.
We need to be reminded that our cries are not too much for God. [God] laments with us. In fact, [God] wants us to come to [the Divine Presence] in our anger, in our fear, in our loneliness, in our hurt, and in our confusion.
Each lamenting Psalm has a structure;
They begin with a complaint. . .that things are not as they should be.
They turn to a request. God, do something! Rescue me! Heal me! Restore me! Show mercy!
Laments end with an expression of trust. Laments end with the reminder that God is setting things right, even though it often seems so slow. It is right for our laments to turn towards a reminder that God is in control and about the business of righting all things made wrong. [1]
Consider praying these words found in Psalm 22, or choose another passage of lament. Before you pray, ask God to speak to you.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer,
and by night, but I find no rest.
Yet you are holy,
enthroned on the praises of Israel.
In you our fathers trusted;
they trusted, and you delivered them.
To you they cried and were rescued;
in you they trusted and were not put to shame (Psalm 22:1-5).
As we grow in the spiritual life, our life
will become increasingly centered. Only a few things will really matter.
Because of the coronavirus outbreak, I see a lot of people right now thinking
this way. There’s a sense that we’re all in this together—every continent,
country, class, religion, race, age, or gender. We’re all subject to this
crisis. Suffering has an ability to pull you into oneness.
Maybe you’ve seen such oneness emerge in your family. I
went to Kansas last month for my sister’s funeral, and all of my family was
there. We don’t have any big resentments or conflicts, but the suffering—and
acceptance of that suffering in her death—brought us together in the most
beautiful way. It was such an honor to have the funeral with my own family and
for my own sister.
We see an increasing centering take place with Jesus and
the disciples in the gospel text from this past Sunday [Matthew 17:1-9]. Jesus
is leading the disciples towards the Transfiguration experience. He is
preparing them for the cross, and saying, “It’s going to come! Be ready. It’s
probably the only thing that will transfigure you.”
As I said in yesterday’s reflection, there are only two
major paths by which the human soul comes to God: the path of great love, and
the one of great suffering. Both finally come down to great suffering—because
if we love anything greatly, we will eventually suffer for it. When we’re
young, God hides this from us. We think it won’t have to be true for us. But to
love anything in depth and over the long term, we eventually must suffer.
The disciples first respond to the Transfigured Christ
with fear. In our global time of crisis, this is where many of us are today.
The disciples mirror the itinerary of the spiritual journey: we start out with
many concerns, fears, and worries. Our minds and hearts are all over the place.
But Jesus comes, touches them, and says, “Get up and do not be afraid.” When
the three disciples raise their eyes, they see nothing but one image: Jesus.
Their lives have become fully focused and simplified on the one thing that is
good, the one thing they desire, and the one thing that is necessary. What a
moment of grace and encouragement!
But then Jesus
leads them down the mountain, back into the ordinary world to continue his
labor of love, healing and nonviolent protest against Empire. We can’t stay on
the mountaintop forever. And then Jesus ends with a line that to me was always
a disappointment: don’t tell anybody about what just happened. He might be
saying, “Don’t tell this story to someone else, because they’ll think they
understand it just by hearing about it.” Religious experience has to be
experienced firsthand. We can’t believe it because someone else talked about
it. Sooner or later, we have to go to our own mountaintop. We have to have our
own transfiguration, and we have to walk down the mountaintop into the ordinary
world, on the path of suffering, and the path of love—which are, in the end,
the same. As we experience a suffering world together, I pray that this
community will be drawn to center itself on the cross and bring Jesus’ teaching
to life.
This CO2- (Church Of 2) is where two guys meet each day to tighten up our Connections with Jesus. We start by placing the daily “My Utmost For His Highest” in this WordPress blog. Then we prayerfully select some matching worship music and usually pick out a few lyrics that fit especially well. Then we just start praying and editing and Bolding and adding comments and see where the Spirit takes us.
It’s been a blessing for both of us.
If you’d like to start a CO2, we’d be glad to help you and your partner get started. Also click the link below to see how others are doing CO2.Odds Monkey
Steve Harvey Introduces Jesus To A Secular Audience
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