Cynthia Bourgeault, one of CAC’s core faculty members, names Jesus’ teaching and way of life “the path of conscious love.”

[This phrase] emphasizes the life-affirming and implicitly relational nature of the path, and the word “conscious” makes clear that the touchstone here is transformation, not simply romance. Conscious love is “love in the service of inner transformation”—or if you prefer, “inner transformation in the service of love.” Either way, this is exactly what Jesus was about. [1]

Cynthia’s words “conscious love” ring true for me as a definition for our life’s purpose and the goal of all spirituality. When we’re conscious, we will always do the loving thing, the connecting thing, the intimate thing, the communion thing, the aware thing. We will be our True Selves.

Cynthia describes what this means: “The first requirement of conscious love is, of course that it has to be conscious—or in other words, anchored in a quality of our presence deeper than simply egoic selfhood. [It is] unitive, or nondual, awareness.” [2]

As I’ve said several times this year, the source of violence and so many of our world’s hurts is the illusion of separation. Our culture of romance suggests that sex and marriage solve the problem of loneliness and longing. But from many people I’ve talked with, it seems there is a great deal of unhealthy sexuality, trauma, and wounding in our sexually preoccupied world. Almost half the marriages in the United States end in divorce. Perhaps the Church intuited that the issue is deeper when it mandated celibacy for priesthood and religious life, but their proposed solution can also be a clever avoidance of intimacy too. I believe sex, marriage, and celibacy are not given to us to solve the problem, but to actually reveal the problem. All of these life stances show us that we still don’t know how to love. At the same time, if we are conscious and aware, they give us the daily practice and opportunity to try one more time! I find every healthy marriage comes to this conclusion sooner or later.

Cynthia writes: “For Jesus as for all teachers of conscious transformation . . . the work with a partner is in service of this goal. It is not intended simply to fulfill physical or emotional needs, but to accelerate the process of awakening.” [3]

She quotes psychologist John Welwood:

A conscious relationship is one that calls forth who you really are. . . . [Instead of looking to a relationship for shelter] we could welcome its power to wake us up in areas of life where we are asleep and where we avoid naked, direct contact with life. This approach puts us on a path. It commits us to movement and change, providing forward direction by showing us where we most need to grow. Embracing relationship as a path also gives us practice: learning to use each difficulty along the way as an opportunity to go further, to connect more deeply, not just with a partner, but with our own aliveness as well. [4]

Gateway to Silence:
We are temples of God.

———————

“What Is That to You?”
By Oswald Chambers

Peter…said to Jesus, “But Lord, what about this man?” Jesus said to him, “…what is that to you? You follow Me.” —John 21:21-22

One of the hardest lessons to learn comes from our stubborn refusal to refrain from interfering in other people’s lives. It takes a long time to realize the danger of being an amateur providence, that is, interfering with God’s plan for others. You see someone suffering and say, “He will not suffer, and I will make sure that he doesn’t.” You put your hand right in front of God’s permissive will to stop it, and then God says, “What is that to you?” Is there stagnation in your spiritual life? Don’t allow it to continue, but get into God’s presence and find out the reason for it. You will possibly find it is because you have been interfering in the life of another— proposing things you had no right to propose, or advising when you had no right to advise. When you do have to give advice to another person, God will advise through you with the direct understanding of His Spirit.

Your part is to maintain the right relationship with God so that His discernment can come through you continually for the purpose of blessing someone else.

Most of us live only within the level of consciousness— consciously serving and consciously devoted to God. This shows immaturity and the fact that we’re not yet living the real Christian life. Maturity is produced in the life of a child of God on the unconscious level, until we become so totally surrendered to God that we are not even aware of being used by Him. When we are consciously aware of being used as broken bread and poured-out wine, we have yet another level to reach— a level where all awareness of ourselves and of what God is doing through us is completely eliminated.

A saint is never consciously a saint— a saint is consciously dependent on God.

Richard Rohr, Sunday, November 12, 2017

Authentic love is about giving a bit of myself to another—and, in this surrender, something new is created, whether a baby or another form of life and beauty. The flow of love is a divine experience mirroring the relationship within the Trinity. That’s why I’m calling this series of meditations “God as Us.” I know it is a daring title, but I wanted to allow you to connect your varied experiences of embodiment—through gender, sexuality, physicality—with the very life of God flowing through you. We are “co-creators” with God in a world that is continually evolving and unfolding (Romans 8:28), not just passive observers.

In the midst of lovemaking, we realize that there is a third element that is beyond us or our beloved. In the Christian Trinitarian view, we call this third energy the Holy Spirit. Unconditional, unselfish love—where I love and care for the other for their own sake, even to the point of suffering for their good and seeking their pleasure more than my own—takes us to a level beyond separation, a place where we are one even if we are far apart physically or in time.

I’ve witnessed this eternal, unbreakable intimacy in many whose partner has passed away. More than one bereaved spouse has said to me, “He’s actually more real, more present to me now than when I had his body.” This means they fully experienced “the bridal chamber” or the divine espousals, to use mystical language. We are part of the divine lovemaking in which we are both making love and being made love to in the same action. This is experienced as an energy and life that is larger than our own. We are merely along for the ride!

Of course, the greater the light there is in something, the greater the shadow it casts. Sexuality and false intimacy also have the power to destroy and wound. No wonder there are so many taboos around sexuality. It has been said, “Where nothing is forbidden, nothing is required.” Because there’s something so significant required of the soul to make love, I’m not surprised religions have created so many moralistic guidelines (even if a lot of them were not very helpful or healing). Impulse control is certainly a valuable skill for an adolescent to learn, but too often the Church’s teaching just led to shame or pre-emptive repression rather than healthy sexuality. (This is not to say that all free expression is wonderful, moral, or even helpful!)

What is so important and essential here? I believe it’s simply this: You are a sacred image of the Divine, you are a co-creator with God, so respect your own embodiment—and the sacred embodiment of the other. Let Paul speak his truth here: “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? The temple of God, which you are, is holy” (1 Corinthians 3:16-17).

I believe the temple happens when “two solitudes protect and border and greet each other,” as Rilke so perfectly put it. [1] This alone is the sacred temple. We do not create this temple; we only occasionally dwell within it—by a daring respect and a risky surrender. [2]

Gateway to Silence:
We are temples of God.

_________________________________________________________

Discovering Divine Design

By Oswald Chambers

…from Richard Rohr:

I want to say a little about purity and about passion. What I mean by purity is singleness of heart, when the head and the heart are working together in a way that allows you to see wholeness, to see from your True Self.

Purity also has to do with appropriate boundaries, protecting the sacred character of intimacy on both sides of a relationship. You have to know the rules and know what they’re trying to protect before you too quickly throw them out. I don’t mean to sound like a prudish old priest, but I’ve worked with young people who have already had so much casual sex that I wonder if it will ever have the power to lead them to the great feast, the great romance, the great union. Sex is all too often an experience of disunion, failure, or entertainment rather than enlightenment.

If the world does not understand purity and its necessity, it seems to me the church has not understood passion and its necessity. Christianity has mostly mistrusted passion and the abandonment, excitement, joy, freedom, playfulness, and enthusiasm that human love can inspire.

Passion is an energy, a drive from within. The French call it elan vital, a creative force. It’s a thirst for union, a thirst for myself, for more of true life. As such, passion surprisingly carries with it some inevitable dissatisfaction. It never lasts and is never enough once you feed on it. Passion constantly creates within you a hole that longs to be filled. In the Christian tradition we call such implanted longing the indwelling Holy Spirit. The Spirit keeps yearning in us for union with more—with ourselves and thus with God. Drawing from her deep experiences in prayer, St. Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510) shared with conviction, “My own me is God! My own me is God!” [1] Passion is a “leading-string of love” drawing us into God (see Hosea 11:3-4).

We must realize that human love (eros) and divine love (agape) are on a continuum; human love and passion prepare us for and lead us to divine love. As Cynthia Bourgeault explains:

The great secret of erotic love—which all true lovers instinctively know and which I believe Jesus also knew—is that agape is in essence transfigured desire. There are not two loves, one agape-based and the other eros-based. Rather, agape is what emerges from the refiner’s fire when that surging desire to cling, possess, consume the object of one’s adoring is subjected to the discipline of kenosis, self-giving love. . . . [K]enosis is an exercise in the pure generosity of standing in the other’s place, discovering what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself—not as much as one’s self, as egoic consciousness always appends, but as the intimate expression of one’s own being. [2]

“My life is not about me. I am about Life,” the mystic comes to believe! Or as Paul put it, “I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

Gateway to Silence:
We are temples of God.

————————–

Faith or Experience?
By Oswald Chambers

…the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. —Galatians 2:20

We should battle through our moods, feelings, and emotions into absolute devotion to the Lord Jesus. We must break out of our own little world of experience into abandoned devotion to Him. Think who the New Testament says Jesus Christ is, and then think of the despicable meagerness of the miserable faith we exhibit by saying, “I haven’t had this experience or that experience”! Think what faith in Jesus Christ claims and provides— He can present us faultless before the throne of God, inexpressibly pure, absolutely righteous, and profoundly justified. Stand in absolute adoring faith “in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God— and righteousness and sanctification and redemption…” (1 Corinthians 1:30). How dare we talk of making a sacrifice for the Son of God! We are saved from hell and total destruction, and then we talk about making sacrifices!
We must continually focus and firmly place our faith in Jesus Christ— not a “prayer meeting” Jesus Christ, or a “book” Jesus Christ, but the New Testament Jesus Christ, who is God Incarnate, and who ought to strike us dead at His feet. Our faith must be in the One from whom our salvation springs. Jesus Christ wants our absolute, unrestrained devotion to Himself. We can never experience Jesus Christ, or selfishly bind Him in the confines of our own hearts. Our faith must be built on strong determined confidence in Him.
It is because of our trusting in experience that we see the steadfast impatience of the Holy Spirit against unbelief. All of our fears are sinful, and we create our own fears by refusing to nourish ourselves in our faith. How can anyone who is identified with Jesus Christ suffer from doubt or fear! Our lives should be an absolute hymn of praise resulting from perfect, irrepressible, triumphant belief.

Images of God

Monday, November 6, 2017

In the image of God they were created, male and female God created them. —Genesis 1:27

The Bible is filled with images of God, metaphors for the sacred. The biblical commandment to make no graven images of God obviously did not mean avoiding word-images. But it does mean that no one of these should be “carved in stone”—that is, made absolute.
Yet within “common Christianity,” by which I mean what most Christians took for granted and shared in common not so long ago, male images of God have often been absolutized. God is “father,” “king,” and “lord.” Enshrined in the Lord’s Prayer and the creeds, male images dominate much of Christian liturgy and hymnody.

But the Bible includes many metaphors for God that are not male. Some are beyond gender because they do not image God in human form. God is like fire, light, a rock, wind, breath, spirit.
Even when God is imaged in human form, the person-like metaphor is sometimes female. Of course, most of the time the person-like imagery is male; both the Old and New Testaments [Hebrew and Christian Scriptures] come from patriarchal cultures. Given this, it is remarkable that the Bible uses female imagery for God at all.

For example, “El Shaddai,” one of the Hebrew names of God, is most often translated into English as “God Almighty.” But its linguistic roots suggest that it meant “breasted God”—God as “mother,” not “father.” Another example: God is “womb-like.” Old Testament scholar Phyllis Trible convincingly argues that Jeremiah 31:20, in which God remembers Israel, should be translated, “My womb trembles for him; I will truly show motherly-compassion on him.”
And (Richard here, with my own example) if we still miss the point, the prophet Jeremiah reminds us: “For YHWH is creating a new thing upon the earth: a woman [God] will seek and protect a man [collective humanity]” (31:22).

Gateway to Silence:
I am created in God’s image.

____________________________________________________

Intimate Theology

By Oswald Chambers

Cosmology

God’s Heartbeat
Friday, November 3, 2017

CAC’s core faculty member, Cynthia Bourgeault, shares insights from other mystics—current and past—to reveal mercy at the heart of the universe. She shares the theological implications of quantum physics from contemporary Episcopal preacher, Barbara Brown Taylor:

Where is God in this picture? God is all over the place. God is up there, down here, inside my skin and out. God is the web, the energy, the space, the light—not captured in them, as if any of those concepts were more real than what unites them—but revealed in that singular, vast net of relationship that animates everything that is. . . . At this point in my thinking, it is not enough for me to proclaim that God is responsible for all this unity. Instead, I want to proclaim that God is the unity—the very energy, the very intelligence, the very elegance and passion that make it all go. [1]

Cynthia reflects:

Barbara’s point may seem like a nuance, but it is a crucially important one. Our visible, created universe is not simply an object created by a wholly other God in order to manifest God’s love, but the created universe is that love itself—the very heart of God, fully expressive in the dimension of time and form.

When we speak in these terms, of course, we begin to use the classic language of the mystics, the language of visionary utterance. For Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) the name in German for mercy was Barmherzigkeit—“warmheartedness.” Boehme saw mercy as “the holy element”: the root energy out of which all else in the visible universe is made. The Mercy is “holy substantiality”—the innermost essence of being itself. It is that “river of God,” running like the sap through the tree of life. [2]

Lest we be inclined to discount this insight as merely the rambling of a God-intoxicated mystic, it is astonishing to discover virtually an identical insight revealed by the eminently sane psychotherapist Gerald May (1940-2005). May affirms that from a clinical standpoint, once the various differentiations and feeling-tones have been stripped away from our subjective emotional life, what remains is a raw, root energy that is, finally, none other than divine love. “It is as if agape [divine love] were the base metal, irreducible and unadulterated,” he writes. “The universe runs on an energy that is, at its core, unconditionally loving.” [3]

May’s vision of agape—divine love—is very close to Boehme’s (and my own) notion of the Mercy. Far from pity or condescension, it is the very heartbeat of God resonant in creation; the warmth that pulses through all things as the divine Mystery flows out into created form.

Gateway to Silence:
We live, move, and have our being in love.

________________________________________________

A Bondservant of Jesus

By Oswald Chambers

Cosmology

Coming to Be Love
Wednesday, November 1, 2017
(All Saints Day)

Ilia Delio, a Franciscan sister and scientist, continues reflecting on love as the heart of the universe.

To see the universe through the eyes of love helps us make sense of evolution, not as a process of cold, blind chance or randomness, but one of passion, yearning, novelty, union, gift, suffering, death, and new life. Love is the faithful heart of the cosmos, the constancy of all life; yet love seeks to become more being-in-love and hence is the energy of change. . . . The name “God” points to this mystery of love in its unlimited depth, the center of all that is; love that overflows onto new life. God is not a super-natural Being hovering above earth, but the supra-personal whole, the Omega, who exists in all and through all.

God is love—eternal, divine, overflowing, personal love. Love goes out to another for the sake of the other and manifests itself in relationship. Divine love is personally relational—Trinity: Lover, Beloved, and the Breath of Love. Divine Love, breathed forth into Word incarnate, marks the history of evolution. . . . Every star, every galaxy, every leaf and bird breathed forth in divine Love, reveals the Christ who is the personal unity of divine being-in-love. From all eternity, God has sought to love another, to be love in another, and to be loved by the other forever—this other is the Christ who is the aim and purpose of this evolutionary universe.

[Evolution] is not only the universe coming to be, but it is God who is coming to be. Divine Love, poured into space-time, rises in consciousness and erupts in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, becoming the pledge of our future in the risen Christ: “I am with you always until the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20). We can read the history of our 13.7-billion-year-old universe as the rising up of Divine Love incarnate, which bursts forth in the person of Jesus, who reveals love’s urge toward wholeness through reconciliation, mercy, peace, and forgiveness. Jesus is the love of God incarnate, the wholemaker who shows the way of evolution toward unity in love. . . . In Jesus, God comes to us from the future to be our future. . . .

Christian life is a commitment to love, to give birth to God in one’s own life and to become midwives of divinity in this evolving cosmos. We are to be wholemakers of love in a world of change.

In summary, this is why I (Richard) say we need to switch our thinking from “Jesus came to fulfill us” to “we have come to fulfill Christ.” We are a part of this ever-growing cosmic Christ that is coming to be in this one great big act of giving birth described in Romans 8:22. [1]

Gateway to Silence:
We live, move, and have our being in love.

________________________________________________

“You Are Not Your Own”

By Oswald Chambers

500th Anniversary of the Beginnings of the Reformation

Today we celebrate an important milestone in the history of Western Christianity. On this day in 1517, an Augustinian friar named Martin Luther posted his famous “95 Theses” to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. This set off a much-needed firestorm that has continued to this day. “I have come to set fire upon the earth and how I wish it were already blazing,” says Jesus (Luke 12:49). The flames of the reformation are still burning, bringing regeneration and new life in their wake.

When I first preached in Germany in the 1980s, my Lutheran friends took me to Wittenberg, and we staged a scene of this Franciscan friar nailing my agreement with Martin Luther to the same church door. With irony, we enacted a too-Catholic-God striking me dead.
For the most part, Roman Catholics have viewed the Reformation as the division of Christendom. Yet we should not have been surprised by Luther’s call to reform! Catholics teach that “the church was reformed but always in need of reformation.” Reformation is the perpetual process of conversion that is needed by all individuals and by all institutions. Otherwise people and churches become idols.

Christianity has experienced many periods of dramatic change and upheaval, beginning with the Constantinian privileges and separation from the poor in 313. In the Great Schism of 1054, Christianity split between East and West.

In my opinion, this is the way that history and spirituality move forward. Change is never in a perfectly straight and logical line; it happens through the constant push and pull, death and life, that mirrors the Paschal Mystery: Some seeming Ideal Order is the easiest way to begin.
This is followed by a necessary experience of Disorder, which Christians call “the folly of the cross.” Finally, there is a Reordering, what Christians name the Body of Christ, the Mind of Christ, or Resurrection!

In the Center for Action and Contemplation’s Living School, drawing from the teachings of George Gurdjieff and Cynthia Bourgeault, we call this sacred pattern Holy Affirming > Holy Denying > Holy Reconciling. It is the subtle but powerful work of grace. Without the self-correcting of Holy Denying (Disorder), all persons and groups become idolatrous of themselves and thus corrupt.

At the time of the Reformation, this was true of the Catholic Church. As many Lutherans now recognize, this was soon true of the new Lutheran and Evangelical churches as well. Both Lutherans and Catholics are “reformed but ever in need of reforming.” None of us will ever live up to “the full stature that is Christ” (Ephesians 4:13), though at the same time we are all already in Christ. It took the Catholic Church until the Second Vatican Council of 1963-1965 to admit its mistakes and return to a more Scripture-based Christianity.

Now, by the grace of God, we are all beneficiaries of a Holy Reconciling by a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, formally agreed to by the highest theological authorities of the Vatican and the Lutheran Church in 1999. The declaration affirms that Luther was largely right, but both churches split into our own forms of dualistic thinking and remained in our dueling camps for 500 years. One side made an idol out of the Bible (Sola Scriptura!) and the other made an idol out of tradition (placing all confidence in leadership), but they were much the same in their human idolatry of something other than God. We are still learning the dangers of the dualistic concept of “only”!

Now the Reformed churches and many other denominations have affirmed this important and healing Joint Declaration, although the common churchgoer knows little of it. We are ever so slowly growing up together (how else could it be?). The future of Christianity is certainly ecumenical and even interfaith, and thus finally and hopefully “catholic” (universal). How else could Jesus ever be “The Savior of the World” (John 4:42)?

For 500 years we were stuck in Holy Denying of one another’s ideas and practices. But today we celebrate a new Holy Reconciling! There is no point in perpetually restating the initial arguments which have kept us in an endless Holy Affirming. The Risen Christ is forever leading us into a much larger future that is always created by God, where none of us wins or even needs to win. Here only God—Love—wins.

Be forewarned that this Holy Reconciling now sets the stage for the cycle to begin again! All we can do is to be ready and willing and a little less surprised.

______________________________________________________

The Trial of Faith

By Oswald Chambers

Cosmology

We Are Already One
Monday, October 30, 2017

There was no place in the universe that was separate from the originating power of the universe. Each thing of the universe had its very roots in this realm. —Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry [1]

There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything. —Colossians 3:11

Believe it or not, a Roman Catholic priest first proposed the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. In 1927, Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest, astronomer, and physics professor, suggested that the expanding universe might be traced back to a single point of origin, a singularity. As Ilia Delio describes, “[It] appeared like a little quantum size blip on the screen [creatio ex nihilo] and inflated rapidly like a balloon and since that time, it has been expanding.” [2] I’ll let Delio, a scientist, explain the implications for this cosmology—our story of the universe:

Every human person desires to love and to be loved, to belong to another, because we come from another. We are born social and relational. We yearn to belong, to be part of a larger whole that includes not only friends and family but neighbors, community, trees, flowers, sun, Earth, stars. We are born of nature and are part of nature; that is, we are born into a web of life and are part of a web of life. We cannot know what this means, however, without seeing ourselves within the story of the Big Bang universe. Human life must be traced back to the time when life was deeply one, a Singularity, whereby the intensity of mass-energy exploded into consciousness. Deep in our DNA we belong to the stars, the trees, and the galaxies.

Deep within we long for unity because, at the most fundamental level, we are already one. We belong to one another because we have the same source of love; the love that flows through the trees is the same love that flows through my being. . . . We are deeply connected in this flow of love, beginning on the level of nature where we are the closest of kin because the Earth is our mother. [3]

We began as one and our goal is oneness. Studying evolution, the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) found that increased complexity and increased consciousness surprisingly lead to greater unity at a much higher level—which we would call love. Unity is not the same as uniformity! With increased complexity, there is actually greater diversity and a greater enjoyment of that very diversity, which is the fruit of love. As Teilhard said, “Everything that rises must converge.” [4] We are in the midst of that convergence today—and seemingly at an accelerated pace—both in terms of good and resistance to the good.

Gateway to Silence:
We live, move, and have our being in love.

_______________________________________________________

Faith

By Oswald Chambers

Richard Rohr
Climate Change

Thursday, October 26, 2017

Science and religion should be natural partners when it comes to caring for our common home. As Christians, we have a clear mandate to steward Creation (see the invitation to “cultivate and care for” the earth in Genesis 2:15). Yet with real perversity, much of Judeo-Christian history has preferred the earlier verse, “fill the Earth and subdue it” (1:28), as license to exploit this world—and even other peoples—in an entirely selfish way. The Catholic Church’s tragic “Doctrine of Discovery” even supported the conquest, oppression, and destruction of indigenous people and their lands. Once we feel free to objectify anything, we are no longer inside the life of the Trinity, which is always and entirely a subject-to- subject way of relating. Yet it is the same Church which teaches us this loving way of relating!
For decades, since the first World Climate Conference in 1979, we have known that the globe is warming due to increased carbon emissions. Pope Francis has affirmed that climate change is real and is primarily “a result of human activity.” [1] Scientists, he says, “speak very clearly.” [2] Oil and gas companies don’t want us to stop using fossil fuels, so they have fabricated their own “science” to deny climate change. [3] The debate has become politicized, and people create their own preferred reality, all evidence to the contrary.
Today we are no longer simply theorizing about, but actually witnessing intensified and more frequent hurricanes, coral reefs dying, glaciers rapidly melting, and sea levels rising. So many people and creatures will suffer and face extinction if we do not quickly change our lifestyle. Let us work together to creatively find solutions, to reduce our carbon footprint, to live more simply and sustainably on this, our only home. Humanity and the earth really will live or die together. The health of the planet and our continued existence depend upon our choices and actions.
Pope Francis urges us:
Given the complexity of the ecological crisis and its multiple causes, we need to realize that the solutions will not emerge from just one way of interpreting and transforming reality. Respect must also be shown for the various cultural riches of different peoples, their art and poetry, their interior life and spirituality. If we are truly concerned to develop an ecology capable of remedying the damage we have done, no branch of the sciences and no form of wisdom can be left out, and that includes religion and the language particular to it. [4]
Our goal is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity, but rather to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it. [5]
To rebuild spirituality “from the bottom up,” we must turn the valuable information of science and theology into transformation, change of heart, mind, and being. I invite you to learn about and connect with the suffering of someone or some place and discern your own part to play in healing our collective brokenness.
Gateway to Silence:
Divine Reality, endlessly knowable

_____________________________________________________

What is a Missionary?

By Oswald Chambers

Evolution
Wednesday, October 25, 2017

The whole creation is eagerly waiting for the full revelation of the children of God. . . . From the beginning until now, the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth. —Romans 8:19-22
In this familiar passage, St. Paul seems to fully assume evolution. It has always seemed completely strange to me that there should be any resistance whatsoever to evolution in Christian theology or practice. Christians should have been the first in line to recognize and cooperate with such a dynamic notion of God. But maybe many do not enjoy a fully relational God—with all that that implies—and have just met an independent “substance” they call God.
It’s hard to imagine why so many still have a very static notion of God with Christianity’s rich wisdom: Trinity; the Indwelling Holy Spirit; Incarnation; salvation; the development of consciousness as seen in Judeo-Christian Scriptures, history, and individual lives. We largely surrendered to a notion of time with the human story ending in Armageddon and Apocalypse, which is complete heresy. Even resurrection was understood as a one-time anomaly concerning only Jesus; few saw it as a portent and promise for all of creation (see 1 Corinthians 15:20–25), as Paul and many of the early Church Fathers clearly did.
I can only assume that this reflects a very limited inner experience of God, which is always and predictably developmental and unfolding. Anyone with an inner life of prayer and a sense of soul knows this to be true. Anybody who has paid any attention to their inner life or read any history books surely recognizes that life and love are always cumulative, diffusive, and expanding. Perhaps it is this change that we fear. For some reason, we seem to think that admitting such love dynamism and, in fact, cooperating with it (see Romans 8:28), is going to compromise our eternal, unchanging notion of God. It’s just the opposite, I think.
If our God is both incarnate and implanted, both Christ and Holy Spirit, then an unfolding inner dynamism in all creation is not only certain, but also moving in a positive direction, with a divine goal that is always set before us. If not, we would have to question the very efficacy, salvation, hope, and victory that the Gospel so generously promises. Foundational hope demands a foundational belief in a world that is still and always unfolding. Personally, I have found that it is almost impossible to heal individuals if the whole cosmic arc is not also a trajectory toward the good, the true, and the beautiful. A popular Christian book in the 1970s, The Late, Great Planet Earth, gave a horrible theological foundation to our present cynical, nihilistic, and angry culture. [1] If the whole thing is going to hell in a handbasket, it is almost impossible to have personal hope or joy.
I believe the truth is we are “children of the resurrection” (Luke 20:36), and we are both burdened and brightened by a cosmic and irrepressible hope. We are both burdened and brightened with the gift of an optimism whose headwaters are not rational or provable, and yet are endlessly knowable to both scientists and mystics, if their hearts and minds are humble. Somehow that is the key.

Gateway to Silence:
Divine Reality, endlessly knowable

—————-

Submitting to God’s Purpose
By Oswald Chambers

I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. —1 Corinthians 9:22

A Christian worker has to learn how to be God’s man or woman of great worth and excellence in the midst of a multitude of meager and worthless things. Never protest by saying, “If only I were somewhere else!” All of God’s people are ordinary people who have been made extraordinary by the purpose He has given them. Unless we have the right purpose intellectually in our minds and lovingly in our hearts, we will very quickly be diverted from being useful to God. We are not workers for God by choice. Many people deliberately choose to be workers, but they have no purpose of God’s almighty grace or His mighty Word in them. Paul’s whole heart, mind, and soul were consumed with the great purpose of what Jesus Christ came to do, and he never lost sight of that one thing. We must continually confront ourselves with one central fact— “…Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2).
“I chose you…” (John 15:16). Keep these words as a wonderful reminder in your theology. It is not that you have gotten God, but that He has gotten you. God is at work bending, breaking, molding, and doing exactly as He chooses. And why is He doing it? He is doing it for only one purpose— that He may be able to say, “This is My man, and this is My woman.” We have to be in God’s hand so that He can place others on the Rock, Jesus Christ, just as He has placed us.
Never choose to be a worker, but once God has placed His call upon you, woe be to you if you “turn aside…to the right or the left…” (Deuteronomy 28:14). He will do with you what He never did before His call came to you, and He will do with you what He is not doing with other people. Let Him have His way.