Christened Reality
Sunday, April 7, 2019

Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. When he had reached a certain place he passed the night there, since the sun had set. Taking one of the stones to be found at that place, he made it his pillow and lay down where he was. He had a dream: a ladder was there, standing on the ground with its top reaching to heaven; and there were angels of God going up it and coming down. And YHWH was there, standing over him, saying, 

“I am YHWH, the God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac. I will give to you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. . . . Be sure that I am with you; I will keep you safe wherever you go, and bring you back to this land, for I will not desert you before I have done all that I have promised you.” 

Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Truly, God is in this place and I, I did not know.” He was afraid and said, “How awe-inspiring this place is! This is nothing less than a house of God, this is the gate of heaven!” 

Rising early in the morning, Jacob took the stone he had used for his pillow, and set it up as a monument, pouring oil over the top of it. He named the place Bethel. —Genesis 28:10-19

I believe the Scriptures say that reality was christened or anointed from the very beginning, from the first moment of its inception. The Hebrew text describes the ritual of anointing, pouring oil over something to reveal its sacredness, starting with the Stone of Jacob, Beth El: “This is the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.” Throughout the Bible we see a growing recognition of God’s all- pervasive, ever-invading Presence. Reality is soaked with Presence from the first meeting of Spirit and matter in the first line of the Bible (Genesis 1:1). The anointing oil doesn’t make anything sacred as such; it simply reminds both the anointer and the anointed of what was already the case.

The trouble is that many Christians have limited that anointing to the unique person of Jesus. Saying God’s presence is only here and not there, deciding what is anointed and what is not, is not our call to make. This entire world is soaked through and through with Christ, with divinity, like an electron planted in every atom. As Paul writes, “Creation retains the hope of being freed . . . to enjoy the same freedom and glory as the children of God. . . . We are all groaning in one great act of giving birth” (Romans 8:21-22). Unfortunately, most of us were not taught to see it that way. We thought we could torture animals, pollute the earth, kill people who we deemed not Christ-soaked because we thought it was up to us to decide: “She’s got the anointing and he doesn’t.” Only God decides what to anoint—which, thank God, is all of creation and all of humanity from the beginning. No exceptions. Our Christian word for all anointed reality is “Christ.”

We Are All Anointed by Spirit
Monday, April 8, 2019

Remember that it is God who assures us all, and you, of our sure place in Christ and has anointed us, marked us with God’s seal, giving us the pledge, the Spirit, that we carry in our hearts. —2 Corinthians 1:21-22

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord. —Luke 4:18-19

We all know respect when we see it (re-spect = to see a second time). We all know reverence because it softens our gaze. Any object that calls forth respect or reverence is the “Christ” or the anointed one for us at that moment, even though the conduit might just look like a committed research scientist, an old man cleaning up the beach, a woman going the extra mile for her neighbor, an earnest, eager dog licking your face, or an ascent of pigeons across the plaza.

All people who see with that second kind of contemplative gaze, all who look at the world with respect, even if they are not formally religious, are en Cristo, or in Christ. For them, as Thomas Merton says, “the gate of heaven is everywhere” [1] because of their freedom to respect what is right in front of them—all the time.

The Christ Mystery anoints all physical matter with eternal purpose from the very beginning. We should not be surprised that the word translated from the Greek as “Christ” comes from the Hebrew word mesach, meaning “the anointed” one or Messiah. Christ reveals that all is anointed, not just him.

Many Christians are still praying and waiting for something that has already been given to us three times: first in creation; second in Jesus, “so that we could hear him, see him with our eyes, watch him, and touch him with our hands, the Word who is life” (see 1 John 1–2); and third, in the ongoing beloved community (what Christians call the unfolding Body of Christ or the Parousia—Growing Fullness), which is slowly evolving throughout all of human history (Romans 8:18). How can we participate in this Flow?

As Reverend Jacqui Lewis asks:

What if every human being is anointed, Messiahed, Christ? What if the most fundamental aspect of our identity is that we are each anointed and appointed by The Holy One, by Spirit—to preach good news to the poor, liberty to the captive, and sight to the blind? What if we take seriously being the Body of the Christ—that we are the hands, feet, and heartbeat of the Living God? What if we are Word made flesh, Love made flesh, Light made flesh? [2]

Dying Before You Die

Acceptance
Thursday, April 4, 2019

All great spirituality is about letting go. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection show us how to win by losing. In fact, this “Path of Descent” could be called the metanarrative of the Bible. It is so obvious, consistent, and constant that it’s hidden in plain sight. Christianity has overlooked this overwhelmingly obvious message by focusing on other things. Why did that happen? How is it that we were capable of missing what appears to be the major point? I think it has to do with the Spirit patiently working in time and growing us historically. I think it has to do with human maturity and readiness. And I think it has a lot to do with the ego and its tactics of resistance.

Author Philip Simmons (1957–2002) shared what it took to awaken him to this wisdom:

We’re stubborn creatures, and it takes a shock to make us see our lives afresh. In my case the shock was the news, when I was just thirty-five years old, that I had the fatal condition known as ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and would probably be dead within a few years. . . . At some point we all confront the fact that each of us, each individual soul is, as the poet William Butler Yeats says, “fastened to a dying animal.” [1] We’re all engaged in the business of dying, whether consciously or not, slowly or not. For me, knowing that my days are numbered has meant the chance to ask with new urgency the sorts of questions most of us avoid: everything from “What’s my life’s true purpose?” to “Should I reorganize my closets?” What I’ve learned from asking them is that a fuller consciousness of my own mortality has been my best guide to being more fully alive. . . .

We deal most fruitfully with loss by accepting the fact that we will one day lose everything. When we learn to fall, we learn that only by letting go our grip on all that we ordinarily find most precious—our achievements, our plans, our loved ones, our very selves—can we find, ultimately, the most profound freedom. In the act of letting go of our lives, we return more fully to them.

To accept death is to live with a profound sense of freedom. The freedom, first, from attachment to the things of this life that don’t really matter: fame, material possessions, and even, finally, our own bodies. Acceptance brings the freedom to live fully in the present. The freedom, finally, to act according to our highest nature. . . .

Only when we accept our present condition can we set aside fear and discover the love and compassion that are our highest human endowments. And out of our compassion we deal justly with those about us. Not just on our good days, not just when it’s convenient, but everywhere and at all times we are free to act according to that which is highest in us. And in such action we find peace.

Living Fully
Wednesday, April 3, 2019

In the last few decades, I’ve faced my own mortality on several occasions through cancer and a heart attack. Each time I’ve experienced an outpouring of love and care from others and from God. The sky and the whole world take on a nostalgic and fleeting tone. God seems inside, closer than my own skin. I hope I can hear the messages: listen to your body, slow down, live in the precious now, love all that is. How can I not believe in the Incarnation of God in the compassion of so many, in a pattern of discovery, waiting, and healing that all feels like mercy? Facing my death has helped me live more fully.

Anthropologist Angeles Arrien (1940–2014) described approaching what she called the Gold Gate:

At last we arrive at the Gold Gate, which is glowing and bathed in a numinous light. This is where we awaken to the deepest core of who we are, and are asked to let go and trust. . . . It is the gate of surrender, faith, and acceptance, where we learn to release and detach before beginning something new or progressing forward. . . . It requires us to befriend the death of our physical form. . . .

At the Gold Gate, late in life we learn to befriend death and prepare for its arrival. We acknowledge that we have been born, lived, learned, and loved. We accept our losses, the roads unexplored, the people we miss, and the dreams unfulfilled; we begin to make peace with all that is in and around us. We reject nothing and cling to nothing. We simply observe the ebb and flow of our life.

We practice the art of dying while we live, experiencing endings when we say good-bye to people who will be separated from us for a time, or when we complete something that has significance. Every night we practice letting go when we release ourselves to sleep and the mysterious place of dreams, trusting that we will return. . . .

The Gold Gate offers the wisdom gifts of freedom and liberation. Nonattachment, surrender, and acceptance foster our deliverance, while courage and faith strengthen our capacity to face our own suffering, pain, or sadness. . . . To hold onto nothing is the root of happiness and peace. If we allow ourselves to rest here, we find that it is a tender, open-ended place. This is where the path of fearlessness leads, and where we rest in expanded, unlimited peace. . . .

[We] make the conscious choice of living not in the past or future, but in each present moment. This takes great courage and the ability to make peace with your life: to live without hope or fear, to let go without regret, to know that you have lived fully. [2]

Dying Before You Die

Dying to Ego’s Delusions
Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Dying to the false self before our physical death allows us to be reborn as our more authentic and soulful selves. Today James Finley, one of CAC’s core faculty members, reflects on how hard it is for our ego to surrender to the path of descent, to the transformative process:

In meditation, our customary, ego-based ways of experiencing ourselves yield and give way to more interior, meditative ways of being, ways that transcend all that ego can attain. While we may wish for transformation, realizing it to be the way we awaken to our eternal oneness with God, the process is at times immensely difficult.

It is amazing how a caterpillar spins about itself a hiding place from which it emerges and takes flight as a butterfly with delicate, iridescent wings. Similarly, Christ lived as a human being who freely entered into the hiding place of death to emerge, deathless, filled with light and life, utterly transformed. Our faith proclaims that in following Christ we experience the same thing: “Therefore if any person is in Christ, they are a new creature; the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

We sit in meditation so that the last traces of our tendency to identify with egoic consciousness might finally dissolve as our habitual base of operations. We come face-to-face with how deeply entrenched our tendencies to remain identified with ego consciousness are. The truth is, our own ego-based sense of ourselves is afraid to open to unknown depths, transcending its circle of influence and control. We will go halfway, in a willingness to become a caterpillar with wings. This leaves our ego intact, an ego which has now attained spiritual gifts or mystical states of oneness with God. Surrendering ourselves to something as radical as a complete metamorphosis of consciousness itself is too great a risk. The possibility of realizing a life that is at once God’s and our own is beyond what we can comprehend.

When we sit in meditation, we take the little child of our ego self off to school, where we must learn to die to our illusions about being dualistically other than God. We must also die to any grandiose delusions that we are God. In meditation, we learn to wait with compassion and patience until we are ready to take our next faltering step into a deeper realization of oneness with God. This tender point of encounter is Christ, understood as God in our midst, listening, loving, and helping God’s children across the threshold into eternal oneness with God.

This, then, is one way of understanding how to deal with the ongoing loss of our old familiar ways of understanding ourselves. And this is how we can, with Christ-like compassion, be present to the self-metamorphosing process in which, little by little, breath by breath, love dissolves the illusions and fears born of our estrangement from the infinite love that is our very life.

Stumble and Fall
Sunday, March 31, 2019

Something in you dies when you bear the unbearable. And it is only in that dark night of the soul that you are prepared to see as God sees and to love as God loves. —Ram Das [1]

Sooner or later, if you are on any classic “spiritual schedule,” some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life with which you simply cannot cope using your present skill set, acquired knowledge, or willpower. Spiritually speaking, you will be led to the edge of your own private resources. At that point, you will stumble over a necessary “stumbling stone” (see Isaiah 8:14). You must “lose” at something, and then you begin to develop the art of losing. This is the only way that Life/Fate/God/Grace/Mystery can get you to change, let go of your egocentric preoccupations, and go on the further and larger journey.

We must stumble and fall, I am sorry to say. We must be out of the driver’s seat for a while, or we will never learn how to give up control to the Real Guide. It is the necessary pattern. Until we are led to the limits of our present game plan and find it to be insufficient, we will not search out or find our real Source. Alcoholics Anonymous calls it the Higher Power. Jesus calls this Ultimate Source the “living water” at the bottom of the well (see John 4:10-14).

The Gospels teach us that life is tragic but then graciously added that we can survive and will even grow from this tragedy. This is the great turnaround! It all depends on whether we are willing to see down as up or, as Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) put it, “where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” [2] Lady Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) said it even more poetically, and I paraphrase: “First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall—and both are the mercy of God!” [3]

The Prayer of Abandonment by Brother Charles de Foucauld (1858–1916) expresses openness and intention to give up control to God in the middle of life, even before our physical death:

Father,
I abandon myself into your hands;
do with me what you will.
Whatever you may do, I thank you:
I am ready for all, I accept all.

Let only your will be done in me
and in all your creatures—
I wish no more than this, O Lord.

Into your hands I commend my soul:
I offer it to you with all the love of my heart,
for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into your hands without reserve,
and with boundless confidence,
for you are my Father. [4]

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.

Dying with Christ
Monday, April 1, 2019

My good friend and Franciscan colleague Sister Ilia Delio writes:

God is radically involved with the world, empowering the world toward fullness in love, but God is unable to bring about this fullness without the cooperation of humans. Human and divine cannot co-create unto the fullness of life without death as an integral part of life. Isolated, independent existence must be given up in order to enter into broader and potentially deeper levels of existence. Bonaventure [1217–1274] speaks of life in God as a “mystical death,” a dying into love: “Let us, then, die and enter into the darkness; let us impose silence upon our cares, our desires and our imaginings. With Christ Crucified let us pass out of this world to the Father.” [1] [2]

Contemplative prayer is one way to practice imposing “silence upon our cares, our desires and our imaginings.” Contemplative practice might be five or twenty minutes of “dying,” of letting go of the small mind in order to experience the big mind, of letting go of the false self in order to experience the True Self, of letting go of the illusion of our separation from God in order to experience our inherent union. Prayer is quite simply a profound experience of our core—who we are, as Paul says, “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).

Delio continues:

Only by dying into God can we become one with God, letting go of everything that hinders us from God. Clare of Assisi [1194–1253] spoke of “the mirror of the cross” in which she saw in the tragic death of Jesus our own human capacity for violence and, yet, our great capacity for love. [3] Empty in itself, the mirror simply absorbs an image and returns it to the one who gives it. Discovering ourselves in the mirror of the cross can empower us to love beyond the needs of the ego or the need for self-gratification. We love despite our fragile flaws when we see ourselves loved by One greater than ourselves. In the mirror of the cross we see what it means to share in divine power. To find oneself in the mirror of the cross is to see the world not from the foot of the cross but from the cross itself. How we see is how we love, and what we love is what we become. [4]

True life comes only through many, many journeys of loss and regeneration wherein we gradually learn who God is for us in a very experiential way. Letting go is the nature of all true spirituality and transformation, summed up in the mythic phrase: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” Following Christ is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world, not a requirement for going to heaven in the next world.

Oneness
Friday, March 29, 2019

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, and one love. —Meister Eckhart [1]

Today we continue reflecting on what David Benner calls “spirit-centered awakening.” Again, he offers excellent insights:

The cosmic self reminds us that oneness with God is not intended to be a private experience. Because all people live and move and have their being in God (Acts 17:28), it is not just me and God that are one. Even beyond this, because everything that exists is held in the unity that is Christ (Colossians 1:15-17), everything that exists is one in Christ. The old joke about the mystic who walks up to the hotdog vendor and says, “Make me one with everything,” misses the point. I am already one with everything. All that is absent is awareness. This awareness is the gift of the cosmic self.

. . . This is not life in a psychotic fog of enmeshment. It does not involve a regressive return to a developmental state before differentiation of self from others. Instead, it involves transcendence through awareness that the apparent separateness of the one from the many is an illusion. Slowly we begin to see that both the one and the many are held together in the One—the Eternal Godhead. And as we come to know our self within this One, we also come to know our oneness with all that is held by the One. . . .

Awareness allows us to know this reality, and our cooperation with the Spirit allows this awareness to become transformational.

This knowing is often called enlightenment because it involves seeing what is [with the eyes of the heart]. . . . The eyes with which we see are the eyes of the One. . . .

To be one with everything is to have overcome the fundamental optical illusion of our separateness. We establish boundaries to try to reinforce individuality, but what we get is isolation and alienation. We think we have bodies instead of being our bodies, and the result is alienation from our bodies. We distinguish between our self and the natural world, and we end up exploiting the environment from which we feel estranged. We think we are separate from other people, and the result is a breach in our knowing of our underlying shared humanity. Boundaries disrupt the flow of participative energy between elements of creation that can be distinguished but that are intimately interrelated. Raimon Panikkar captures this well: “I am one with the source insofar as I too act as a source by making everything I have received flow again.” [2] To realize that we are already one with everything is to have restored the flow of creation and allowed ourselves unqualified participation in the life of God.

Thursday, March 28, 2019

If I am not doing my Father’s work, there is no need to believe in me, but at least believe in the work I do; then you will know for sure that the Father is in me and I am in the Father. —John 10:37-38

David Benner, a friend and depth psychologist, explores what it means to grow in Christ, and I think he does it very well:

Being one with the Father seems to have been central to the consciousness of Jesus. His whole life flowed out of this fundamental awareness. I am quite convinced that this [awareness] had to be cultivated. It makes a mockery of his humanity to think that as an infant he knew he was God. His humanity demanded that he grow physically, psychologically, and spiritually. . . .

[Jesus’] own teachings assure us that we also can and are meant to know a similar oneness. This is the testimony of those who have encountered their divine self. . . .

Mystics [across all spiritual traditions] love the Divine so much that they no longer see any boundaries between God and mortals. . . . They point to a single center of their deepest knowing—that they are one with the Beloved, and that the further they go in this journey of love into the Beloved, the less clear any boundaries between God and self become. Cynthia Bourgeault states, “As we move toward our center, our own being and the divine being become more and more mysteriously interwoven.” [1]

Meister Eckhart [c. 1260–c. 1328] speaks of a place in the depths of our soul in which God alone can dwell and in which we dwell in God. Meeting God in this place, we are invited to sink into what he calls “the eternity of the Divine essence.” Doing so, however, we never become the Divine essence. This, he says, is because “God has left a little point wherein the soul turns back on itself and finds itself, and knows itself to be a creature.” [2] The Christian mystics do not confuse themselves and God. They know that in union with God, human personality is neither lost nor converted into divine personality. But they also know the profound inadequacy of language to either hold or communicate these deep mysteries.

I have been blessed to have the opportunity to know well several people for whom union with God was not just a momentary experience but a relatively stable part of their ongoing journey. . . .

What struck me most as I related to them over time was that their ever-deepening journey into God made them more deeply human, not less human. . . . None showed an avoidance of the realities of life, and none seemed to use their spiritual experience as an escape. Although by this point they had all established a contemplative dimension to their life, they all were active in serving others in the world. This, they knew, was their home, and it was here that they had learned to meet God.

Growing in Christ: Week 2

At Home in God
Thursday, March 28, 2019

If I am not doing my Father’s work, there is no need to believe in me, but at least believe in the work I do; then you will know for sure that the Father is in me and I am in the Father. —John 10:37-38

David Benner, a friend and depth psychologist, explores what it means to grow in Christ, and I think he does it very well:

Being one with the Father seems to have been central to the consciousness of Jesus. His whole life flowed out of this fundamental awareness. I am quite convinced that this [awareness] had to be cultivated. It makes a mockery of his humanity to think that as an infant he knew he was God. His humanity demanded that he grow physically, psychologically, and spiritually. . . .

[Jesus’] own teachings assure us that we also can and are meant to know a similar oneness. This is the testimony of those who have encountered their divine self. . . .

Mystics [across all spiritual traditions] love the Divine so much that they no longer see any boundaries between God and mortals. . . . They point to a single center of their deepest knowing—that they are one with the Beloved, and that the further they go in this journey of love into the Beloved, the less clear any boundaries between God and self become. Cynthia Bourgeault states, “As we move toward our center, our own being and the divine being become more and more mysteriously interwoven.” [1]

Meister Eckhart [c. 1260–c. 1328] speaks of a place in the depths of our soul in which God alone can dwell and in which we dwell in God. Meeting God in this place, we are invited to sink into what he calls “the eternity of the Divine essence.” Doing so, however, we never become the Divine essence. This, he says, is because “God has left a little point wherein the soul turns back on itself and finds itself, and knows itself to be a creature.” [2] The Christian mystics do not confuse themselves and God. They know that in union with God, human personality is neither lost nor converted into divine personality. But they also know the profound inadequacy of language to either hold or communicate these deep mysteries.

I have been blessed to have the opportunity to know well several people for whom union with God was not just a momentary experience but a relatively stable part of their ongoing journey. . . .

What struck me most as I related to them over time was that their ever-deepening journey into God made them more deeply human, not less human. . . . None showed an avoidance of the realities of life, and none seemed to use their spiritual experience as an escape. Although by this point they had all established a contemplative dimension to their life, they all were active in serving others in the world. This, they knew, was their home, and it was here that they had learned to meet God.

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

As we grow spiritually, we discover that we are not as separate as we thought we were. Separation from God, self, and others was a deep and tragic illusion. As we grow into deeper connection and union, the things that once brought meaning and happiness to our small self no longer satisfy us. We tried to create artificial fullness through many kinds of addictive behavior, but still feel empty and nothing, if we are honest. We need much more nutritious food to feed our Bigger Self; mere entertainments, time-fillers, diversions, and distractions will no longer work.

At the more mature stages of life, we are even able to allow the painful and the formerly excluded parts to belong to a slowly growing and unified field. This shows itself as a foundational compassion, especially toward all things different from us and those many people who don’t fit society’s standards. If you have forgiven yourself for being imperfect, you can now do it for everybody else too. If you have not forgiven yourself, I am afraid you will likely pass on your sadness, absurdity, judgment, and futility to others. What comes around goes around.

Many who are judgmental and unforgiving seem to have missed out on the joy and clarity of the first childhood simplicity, perhaps avoided the suffering of the mid-life complexity, and thus lost the great freedom and magnanimity of the second naïveté as well. We need to hold together all of the stages of life, and for some strange, wonderful reason, it all becomes quite “simple” as we approach our later years. The great irony is that we must go through a lot of complexity and disorder (another word for necessary suffering) to return to the second simplicity. We must go through the pain of disorder to grow up and switch our loyalties from self to God. Most people just try to maintain their initial “order” at all costs, even if it is killing them.

As we grow in wisdom, we realize that everything belongs and everything can be received. We see that life and death are not opposites. They do not cancel one another out; neither do goodness and badness. There is now room for everything to belong. A radical, almost nonsensical “okayness” characterizes the mature believer, which is why they are often called “holy fools.” We don’t have to deny, dismiss, defy, or ignore reality anymore. What is, is gradually okay. What is, is the greatest of teachers. At the bottom of all reality is always a deep goodness, or what Thomas Merton called “a hidden wholeness.” [1]

Growing in Christ: Week 2

Human Development in Scripture
Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Walter Brueggemann, one of my favorite Scripture scholars, brilliantly connects the development of the Hebrew Scriptures with the development of human consciousness. [1]

Brueggemann says there are three major parts of the Hebrew Scriptures: the Torah, the Prophets, and the Wisdom Literature. The Torah, or the first five books, corresponds to the first half of life. This is the period in which the people of Israel were given their identity through law, tradition, structure, certitude, group ritual, clarity, and chosenness. As individuals, we each must begin with some clear structure and predictability for normal healthy development (a la Maria Montessori). That’s what parents are giving their little ones—containment, security, safety, specialness. Ideally, you first learn you are beloved by being mirrored in the loving gaze of your parents and those around you. You realize you are special and life is good—and thus you feel safe.

The second major section of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Prophets, introduces the necessary suffering, “stumbling stones,” and failures that initiate you into the second half of life. Prophetic thinking is the capacity for healthy self-criticism, the ability to recognize your own dark side. Without failure, suffering, and shadowboxing, most people (and most of religion) never move beyond narcissism and clannish thinking (egoism extended to the group). This has been most of human history up to now, which is why war has been the norm. But healthy self-criticism helps you realize you are not that good and neither is your group. It begins to break down either/or, dualistic thinking as you realize all things are both good and bad. This makes idolatry, and the delusions that go with it, impossible.

My mother could give me “prophetic criticism” and discipline me and it didn’t hurt me indefinitely because she gave me all the loving and kissing and holding in advance. I knew the beloved status first of all, and because of that I could take being criticized and told I wasn’t the center of the world.

The leaven of self-criticism, added to the certainty of your own specialness, will allow you to move to the third section of the Hebrew Scriptures: the Wisdom Literature (many of the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and the Book of Job). Here you discover the language of mystery and paradox. This is the second half of life. You are strong enough now to hold together contradictions in yourself and others with compassion, forgiveness, and patience. You realize that your chosenness is for the sake of letting others know they are also chosen. You have moved from the Torah’s exclusivity and “separation as holiness” to inclusivity and allowing everything to belong.