Today James Finley will introduce us to another great mystic, John of the Cross. As with all of the mystics, a different kind of reading and perception is required. Remember that mysticism is simply experiential knowing, rather than intellectual knowing. Read today’s reflection with your heart wide open.

John of the Cross (1542-1591) met Teresa of Ávila—then fifty-two years old—when he was a newly ordained Carmelite priest at twenty-five. John was planning to join the Carthusians and become a hermit, but Teresa asked him to join her instead in reforming the Carmelites. Teresa and John shared a rich friendship and correspondence.

When I first read John at age eighteen, there was a certain resonance in realizing he was talking about something that I didn’t understand but I knew mattered very, very much. I’m seventy-four years old now, and I’m still reading him.

Like Teresa, John believed that Infinite Love is the architect of our hearts, and we are made in such a way that nothing less than an infinite union with Infinite Love will do. Love is our origin and our destiny. Creative love sustains us breath by breath, heartbeat by heartbeat. John writes:

God sustains every soul and dwells in it substantially, even though it may be that of the greatest sinner in the world. This union between God and creatures always exists. By it He conserves their being so that if the union should end they would immediately be annihilated and cease to exist. Consequently, in discussing union with God, we are not discussing the substantial union that is always existing but the soul’s union with and transformation in God. This union is not always existing, but we find it only where there is likeness of love. We will call it “the union of likeness”; and the former, “the essential or substantial union.” The union of likeness is supernatural [meaning graced or given]; the other, natural. The supernatural union exists when God’s will and the soul’s are in conformity, so that nothing in the one is repugnant to the other. When the soul rids itself completely of what is repugnant and unconformed to the divine will, it rests transformed in God through love. [1]

God’s will for you is Godself. When you, in the freedom of your will, want nothing but what God wills—that is, you live by and for the ever-deepening consummation of this union in love—then these two wills are united in love.

Our spiritual task is to discern the ways in which our heart is at variance with God’s heart. We see how our own subjective perceptions and intentions are compromised or violate our ultimate destiny in love. By this graced recognition, we are released and liberated.

Gateway to Silence:
Fall deeper into love.

————————-

God’s Silence— Then What?
By Oswald Chambers

When He heard that he was sick, He stayed two more days in the place where He was. —John 11:6

Has God trusted you with His silence— a silence that has great meaning? God’s silences are actually His answers. Just think of those days of absolute silence in the home at Bethany! Is there anything comparable to those days in your life? Can God trust you like that, or are you still asking Him for a visible answer? God will give you the very blessings you ask if you refuse to go any further without them, but His silence is the sign that He is bringing you into an even more wonderful understanding of Himself. Are you mourning before God because you have not had an audible response? When you cannot hear God, you will find that He has trusted you in the most intimate way possible— with absolute silence, not a silence of despair, but one of pleasure, because He saw that you could withstand an even bigger revelation. If God has given you a silence, then praise Him— He is bringing you into the mainstream of His purposes. The actual evidence of the answer in time is simply a matter of God’s sovereignty. Time is nothing to God. For a while you may have said, “I asked God to give me bread, but He gave me a stone instead” (see Matthew 7:9). He did not give you a stone, and today you find that He gave you the “bread of life” (John 6:35).
A wonderful thing about God’s silence is that His stillness is contagious— it gets into you, causing you to become perfectly confident so that you can honestly say, “I know that God has heard me.” His silence is the very proof that He has. As long as you have the idea that God will always bless you in answer to prayer, He will do it, but He will never give you the grace of His silence. If Jesus Christ is bringing you into the understanding that prayer is for the glorifying of His Father, then He will give you the first sign of His intimacy— silence.

Exploring the Mystics with James Finley

Being with Ourselves
Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Guest writer and CAC faculty member James Finley continues reflecting on the Christian mystic Teresa of Ávila and The Interior Castle. Again, he invites you into a different kind of reading. Let your rational mind rest and allow your heart to awaken.

Teresa asks, “Wouldn’t it be a pity not to understand ourselves?” The pity is we tend not to. Teresa is writing about healing the sorrow that arises from being exiled from our soul.

Now let us return to our beautiful and delightful castle [which is our soul] and see how we can enter it. I seem rather to be talking nonsense; for, if this castle is the soul, there can clearly be no question of our entering it [since we are the soul we are going after]. For we ourselves are the castle: and it would be absurd to tell someone to enter a room when he was in it already! But you must understand that there are many ways of “being” in a place. [1]

All of us are here (wherever we may be), right here. But the degree to which each of us is here right now—in terms of a deeply awake, grateful awareness of the gift and miracle of being here—varies greatly from person to person. Another way of saying it is that everyone who’s married is married. Some people are more married than others.

The issue is our tendency to get stuck focusing on what my father or mother, wife or ex-wife, children or friends, pastor or boss thinks of me. What if instead we could join God in knowing who God knows I am eternally in God, before the origins of the universe, and know ourselves hidden with Christ in God forever? If I’m so caught up in perceptions of myself—projections and wounds—if I’m caught up in this labyrinth of confusion, it eclipses my view of the God-given godly nature of who I absolutely, invincibly am.

This is how Teresa of Ávila starts her book, The Interior Castle. We’re just on page two, and it’s clear this isn’t going to be a light read! But what’s also clear is it’s not theoretical. The pedagogy of the mystics slows us down enough to catch up with ourselves. How can we ponder the intimate immediacy of what matters most? How can we learn to not treat ourselves like someone we don’t want to spend time with? How can we settle into a quiet, prayerful pondering about who we deep down really are and are called to be? And how can we be more faithful to it?

Gateway to Silence:
Fall deeper into love.

_____________________________________________________

How Will I Know?

By Oswald Chambers

from Center For Action & Contemplation

CAC faculty member James Finley continues exploring The Interior Castle in which Teresa of Ávila describes our soul as a beautiful castle with many rooms; at the center of the castle God dwells. As James shared yesterday, the mystics can’t be understood rationally, but must be read slowly, prayerfully, and with an open heart.
Teresa begins her book with the revelation that God creates us in God’s own image and likeness:
I can find nothing with which to compare the great beauty of a soul and its great capacity. In fact, however acute our intellects may be, they will no more be able to attain to a comprehension of this than to an understanding of God; for, as He Himself says, He created us in His image and likeness [Genesis 1:26]. Now if this is so—and it is­—there is no point in our fatiguing ourselves by attempting to comprehend the beauty of this castle; for, though it is His creature, and there is therefore as much difference between it and God as between creature and Creator, the very fact that His Majesty says it is made in His image means that we can hardly form any conception of the soul’s great dignity and beauty. [1]

Teresa then invites us to reflect with her on the far-reaching implications of this revelation. First, to recognize the fact that we’re created in the image and likeness of God is to know that creation is perpetual and absolute.
That is, at this very moment, a God who is Infinite Reality itself is giving reality to us right now. If God would stop creating you into your chair at the count of three, then at the count of three your chair would be empty—because you’re nothing, absolutely nothing, outside and other than God. If at the count of three, God would cease loving the universe into existence, the universe would disappear because the universe is God’s body. The world embodies the Infinite Love that is Reality giving itself away as this universe. This is true of all creation: Brother Sun and Sister Moon, stones and trees and stars and birds and so on.
Teresa says our soul refers to our God-given godly nature. Your God-given godly nature is the infinite reality of you. You’re worth all that God is worth. You are as precious as God is precious. You have a value that cannot be calculated. Teresa says this is why we don’t understand ourselves. To understand yourself you’d have to understand God, who right at this moment is loving you into existence as the very reality of yourself and your nothingness without God. This is crystal clear, isn’t it? No wonder we can’t figure ourselves out!
Although we might not be able to understand ourselves, as humans we do have the unique capacity to be conscious of Infinite Love embodied in us. And in realizing this reality, we’re empowered to assent to it. Love is never imposed; it’s always offered.
As Teresa says, “Let us now then enter this castle.”

Gateway to Silence:
Fall deeper into love.

———————–

Building on the Atonement
By Oswald Chambers

…present…your members as instruments of righteousness to God. —Romans 6:13

I cannot save and sanctify myself; I cannot make atonement for sin; I cannot redeem the world; I cannot right what is wrong, purify what is impure, or make holy what is unholy. That is all the sovereign work of God. Do I have faith in what Jesus Christ has done? He has made the perfect atonement for sin. Am I in the habit of constantly realizing it? The greatest need we have is not to do things, but to believe things. The redemption of Christ is not an experience, it is the great act of God which He has performed through Christ, and I have to build my faith on it. If I construct my faith on my own experience, I produce the most unscriptural kind of life— an isolated life, with my eyes focused solely on my own holiness. Beware of that human holiness that is not based on the atonement of the Lord. It has no value for anything except a life of isolation— it is useless to God and a nuisance to man. Measure every kind of experience you have by our Lord Himself. We cannot do anything pleasing to God unless we deliberately build on the foundation of the atonement by the Cross of Christ.
The atonement of Jesus must be exhibited in practical, unassuming ways in my life. Every time I obey, the absolute deity of God is on my side, so that the grace of God and my natural obedience are in perfect agreement. Obedience means that I have completely placed my trust in the atonement, and my obedience is immediately met by the delight of the supernatural grace of God.
Beware of the human holiness that denies the reality of the natural life— it is a fraud. Continually bring yourself to the trial or test of the atonement and ask, “Where is the discernment of the atonement in this, and in that?”

Thomas Merton, Part I

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was born in France and lived most of his adult life as a Cistercian (Trappist) monk at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. He died tragically in Bangkok of accidental electrocution. Merton has been a primary teacher and inspiration to me since I first read his book The Sign of Jonas in my high school seminary library around 1959. Merton almost single-handedly pulled back the veil and revealed the contemplative, mystical wisdom that had been lost in the Western Church for the last five centuries. He remains a spiritual master for many Christians and non-Christians to this day.
Scott Peck explains that Merton “‘left the world’ for the monastery . . . because he was afraid of being contaminated by the world’s institutionalized evil. . . . [But he] continued to consistently and passionately protest the sins of greater society. This burning desire to be in the world but not of the world is the mark of a contemplative.” [1] James Finley, who learned from Merton for six years as a monk in Gethsemani, says Merton would tell him, “We don’t come to the monastery to get away from suffering; we come to hold the suffering of all the world.” [2] This can only be done by plugging into a larger consciousness through contemplation. No longer focused on our individual private perfection—or what Merton called “our personal salvation project”—we become fully usable by God.
Merton wrote, “Paradoxically, I have found peace because I have always been dissatisfied. My moments of depression and despair turn out to be renewals, new beginnings. . . . All life tends to grow like this, in mystery inscaped with paradox and contradiction, yet centered, in its very heart, on the divine mercy . . . and the realization of the ‘new life’ that is in us who believe, by the gift of the Holy Spirit.” [3]
It was in the power of this Spirit that Merton struggled against “the evil [that is also] in us all . . . [and] the blindness of a world that wants to end itself.” He fought against violence, war, racism, poverty, and consumerism. He said, “Those who continue to struggle are at peace. If God wills, they can pacify the world.” [4]
My friend, John Dear writes of Merton:
The contemplative work of inner conversion, inner disarmament, and inner peacemaking as the key to peace for the world held Merton’s interest throughout his life. It’s what he admired most about Mahatma Gandhi, and what he tried to achieve for himself. . . . Merton observed that Gandhi’s political revolution sprang from an inner, spiritual revolution of the heart. . . . Merton wrote . . . “The whole Gandhian concept of nonviolent action and satyagraha is incomprehensible if it is thought to be a means of achieving unity rather than as the fruit of inner unity already achieved.” [5]

Gateway to Silence:
We are all one with You.

————————

The Nature of Degeneration
By Oswald Chambers

Just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned… —Romans 5:12
The Bible does not say that God punished the human race for one man’s sin, but that the nature of sin, namely, my claim to my right to myself, entered into the human race through one man. But it also says that another Man took upon Himself the sin of the human race and put it away— an infinitely more profound revelation (see Hebrews 9:26). The nature of sin is not immorality and wrongdoing, but the nature of self-realization which leads us to say, “I am my own god.” This nature may exhibit itself in proper morality or in improper immorality, but it always has a common basis— my claim to my right to myself. When our Lord faced either people with all the forces of evil in them, or people who were clean-living, moral, and upright, He paid no attention to the moral degradation of one, nor any attention to the moral attainment of the other. He looked at something we do not see, namely, the nature of man (see John 2:25).
Sin is something I am born with and cannot touch— only God touches sin through redemption. It is through the Cross of Christ that God redeemed the entire human race from the possibility of damnation through the heredity of sin. God nowhere holds a person responsible for having the heredity of sin, and does not condemn anyone because of it. Condemnation comes when I realize that Jesus Christ came to deliver me from this heredity of sin, and yet I refuse to let Him do so. From that moment I begin to get the seal of damnation. “This is the condemnation [and the critical moment], that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light…” (John 3:19).

Thérèse of Lisieux, Part II

I understand so very well that it is only through love that we can render ourselves pleasing to the good Lord, that love is the one thing I long for. The science of love is the only science I desire. —Thérèse of Lisieux [1]
Thérèse of Lisieux died just before the most violent century in human history. What if we had studied the “science of love” in the Little Way as she did? Harnessing the energy of love in the smallest interactions, moment by moment, we might have found that, indeed, “Love is as strong as Death” (Song of Songs 8:6). What if we had practiced confidence as Thérèse did—as deep trust in the mercy, love, and goodness of God? Maybe we would not have found ourselves in the position where good people participated in wars that killed over 100 million people in the twentieth century.
I am convinced that “the sin of the world” (John 1:29) is ignorant killing, and as we see today, we are destroying the world through our ignorance. We need to recognize our own personal and structural violence. The death instinct always comes from people who are unconscious, unaware, and indeed do not know what they are doing. Now we can hear Jesus on the cross and know why he said, “Forgive them, Father, they don’t know what they’re doing” (Luke 23:34). When we love, we do know what we are doing! Love, if it is actually love, is always a highly conscious act. We do evil when we slip into unconsciousness.
Thérèse learned the “science of love” not by willfully forcing herself to be loving, but by being aware of and learning from the times she was tempted to be unloving or overly attached to her own emotions. Brother Joe Schmidt brilliantly describes how God taught Thérèse to apply her initial weaknesses of self-consciousness and sensitivity to studying how to especially love the most unlovable of the sisters with whom she spent nine years in the convent. Then that widened to loving the whole world. Schmidt writes:
Through prayerful self-reflection on her spiritual journey, Thérèse came to know the depth of her self-centeredness, the extent of her God-inspired desires, and the role and significance of her thoughts, acts, and feelings in the spiritual life. Thérèse had a great self-confidence in her ability to be honest with herself and an enormous intuitive capacity about the ways of human and divine love. Under the microscope of prayer, in her self-awareness, she came to learn universal truths about love: how love originates, how it is nourished or blocked, and how it grows. Her life became a microcosm of love, her teaching, a school of love. [2]

Thérèse has emerged as a primary teacher for many Christians throughout the world, Catholic and Protestant, lay persons, ministers, and formal religious. Many of us just think she “got it!” And then she gets you!

Gateway to Silence:
We are all one with You.

——————

The Vision and The Reality
By Oswald Chambers

…to those who are…called to be saints… —1 Corinthians 1:2

Thank God for being able to see all that you have not yet been. You have had the vision, but you are not yet to the reality of it by any means. It is when we are in the valley, where we prove whether we will be the choice ones, that most of us turn back. We are not quite prepared for the bumps and bruises that must come if we are going to be turned into the shape of the vision. We have seen what we are not, and what God wants us to be, but are we willing to be battered into the shape of the vision to be used by God? The beatings will always come in the most common, everyday ways and through common, everyday people.

There are times when we do know what God’s purpose is; whether we will let the vision be turned into actual character depends on us, not on God. If we prefer to relax on the mountaintop and live in the memory of the vision, then we will be of no real use in the ordinary things of which human life is made. We have to learn to live in reliance upon what we saw in the vision, not simply live in ecstatic delight and conscious reflection upon God. This means living the realities of our lives in the light of the vision until the truth of the vision is actually realized in us. Every bit of our training is in that direction. Learn to thank God for making His demands known.

Our little “I am” always sulks and pouts when God says do. Let your little “I am” be shriveled up in God’s wrath and indignation— “I AM WHO I AM…has sent me to you” (Exodus 3:14). He must dominate. Isn’t it piercing to realize that God not only knows where we live, but also knows the gutters into which we crawl! He will hunt us down as fast as a flash of lightning. No human being knows human beings as God does.

Richard Rohr

Thérèse of Lisieux, Part I
Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897) has long been an important teacher for me. The French Catholic Church of her time emphasized an ideal of human perfection, which took the forms of legalism, perfectionism, and immense self-preoccupation. Yet Thérèse humbly trusted her own experience, as mystics must always do, and taught the spirituality of imperfection instead. She called it her “Little Way.”

Thérèse is one of my favorite mystics, perhaps because I am an Enneagram Type One. The trap for the One is a self-created perfectionism, which makes us always dissatisfied and disappointed in just about everything, starting with ourselves. Our inner critic is quite well-trained and practiced, and it takes years of inner work to recognize how completely this critical worldview impairs our perception and keeps us from our natural compassion. We eventually see that we are not really loving God or others, but merely our own self-image.

Thérèse has often helped me in this inner work. As Brother Joseph Schmidt writes:

Thérèse shifted her focus more and more from attaining perfection or acquiring holiness to the attitude of the publican (see Luke 18:9-14): She let God’s mercy be her perfection, her holiness. “I desire, in a word, to be a saint,” she prayed, “but I feel my helplessness and I beg you—Oh my God!—to be Yourself my Sanctity!” [All true holiness is mirrored and reflected, and Thérèse allowed herself to enjoy that.]

“Jesus, draw me into the flames of your love,” she wrote. “Unite me so closely with you that you live and act in me.” [1]

These prayerful sentiments expressed her solution to the problem of perfection. Thérèse came to a complete reversal of her original idea of what it means to be on the path of holiness and undid centuries of Catholic legalism. And against all odds, this 24-year-old, formally uneducated French woman, has now been declared a “Doctor of the Church” (meaning her teaching is entirely trustworthy). She showed many of us that Gospel holiness has little to do with moral achievements or the elimination of defects (those are ego needs). It is almost entirely about receiving God’s free gift of compassion, mercy, and forgiveness. We know God by participation in God, not by trying to please God from afar. Please think long and happily about that! “Let the one who would boast, boast in God,” as Paul says (1 Corinthians 1:31). It is our faults and our weakness that bring us to God, not our perfection and our strength. What a surprise for most people! I believe this is the heart of the Gospel.

Gateway to Silence:
We are all one with You.

____________________________________________

The Place of Ministry By Oswald Chambers

Julian of Norwich, Part II (Richard Rohr)

The place which Jesus takes in our soul he will nevermore vacate, for in us is his home of homes, and it is the greatest delight for him to dwell there. . . . And the soul who thus contemplates is made like [the one] who is contemplated. —Julian of Norwich [1]
On that day, you will know that you are in me and I am in you. —John 14:20
“That day” John refers to has been a long time in coming, yet it has been the enduring message of every great religion in history. It is the Perennial Tradition. Divine and thus universal union is still the core message and promise—the whole goal and the entire point of all religion.
Lady Julian of Norwich uses the idea of “oneing” to describe divine union. She writes:
The soul is preciously knitted to him in its making, by a knot so subtle and so mighty that it is oned into God. In this oneing, it is made endlessly holy. Furthermore, he wants us to know that all the souls which are one day to be saved in heaven without end are knit in this same knot and oned in this oneing, and made holy in this one identical holiness. [2]
Julian says, “By myself I am nothing at all, but in general, I am in the oneing of love. For it is in this oneing that the life of all people exists.” [3] She continues: “The love of God creates in us such a oneing that when it is truly seen, no person can separate themselves from another person” [4], and “In the sight of God all humans are oned, and one person is all people.” [5]
This is not some 21st century leap forward in theology. This is not pantheism or mere “New Age” optimism. This is the whole point and always has been. It was, indeed, supposed to usher in a new age—and it still can and will. Radical union is the recurring experience of the saints and mystics of all religions. Our job is not to first discover it, but only to retrieve what has been re-discovered—and enjoyed, again and again—by those who desire and seek God and love. When you think you have “discovered” it, you will be just like Jacob “when he awoke from his sleep” and shouted, “You were here all the time, and I never knew it!” (Genesis 28:16).

Gateway to Silence:
We are all one with You.

—————————————-

The Place of Humiliation
By Oswald Chambers

If You can do anything, have compassion on us and help us. —Mark 9:22
After every time of exaltation, we are brought down with a sudden rush into things as they really are, where it is neither beautiful, poetic, nor thrilling. The height of the mountaintop is measured by the dismal drudgery of the valley, but it is in the valley that we have to live for the glory of God. We see His glory on the mountain, but we never live for His glory there. It is in the place of humiliation that we find our true worth to God— that is where our faithfulness is revealed. Most of us can do things if we are always at some heroic level of intensity, simply because of the natural selfishness of our own hearts. But God wants us to be at the drab everyday level, where we live in the valley according to our personal relationship with Him. Peter thought it would be a wonderful thing for them to remain on the mountain, but Jesus Christ took the disciples down from the mountain and into the valley, where the true meaning of the vision was explained (see Mark 9:5-6, Mark 9:14-23).
“If you can do anything….” It takes the valley of humiliation to remove the skepticism from us. Look back at your own experience and you will find that until you learned who Jesus really was, you were a skillful skeptic about His power. When you were on the mountaintop you could believe anything, but what about when you were faced with the facts of the valley? You may be able to give a testimony regarding your sanctification, but what about the thing that is a humiliation to you right now? The last time you were on the mountain with God, you saw that all the power in heaven and on earth belonged to Jesus— will you be skeptical now, simply because you are in the valley of humiliation?

Mysticism: Week 1

Meister Eckhart, Part II
Friday, September 29, 2017

What is life? God’s being is my life. —Meister Eckhart [1]

Meister Eckhart illustrates the height of western non-dualism. This is why he is largely impossible to understand with our usual dualistic mind. When Eckhart says, “Let us pray to God that we may be free of God,” [2] our logical mind would see this as nonsense! It takes unitive consciousness to discover what Eckhart means. There is no concept of God that can contain God. Your present notion of God is never God. As Augustine said, “If you comprehend it, it is not God.” [3] We can only come to know God as we let go of our ideas about God, and what is not God, is slowly stripped away.

Before transformation, you pray to God. After transformation you pray through God, as official Christian prayers say: “Through Christ our Lord. Amen!” Before radical conversion, you pray to God as if God were over there, an object like all other objects. After conversion (con-vertere, to turn around or to turn with), you look out from God with eyes other than your own. As Meister Eckhart stated it in one of his sermons, “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.” [4] All we humans are doing is allowing God to “complete the circuit” within us—until we see from the same perspective. This is the “mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16), which will be experienced as a “spiritual revolution” in thinking (Ephesians 4:22).

Michael Demkovich, a Dominican priest and scholar, explains: “It is through our coming to know the truest self that we are transformed into something divine. Eckhart’s notion of deiformity, a person’s conformity to this underlying reality of Godliness, is critical in his understanding . . . of the soul.” [5] Eckhart did not see the soul as dualistically opposed to the body, but as a guide to the body’s experience. Because God took on a human body in Christ and is present within humanity, the body is sacred. In his preaching, Eckhart uses a verbal illustration, exemplum, of eating to illustrate the body-soul relationship: “The food that I eat is united with my body just as my body is with my soul. My body and my soul are united in one being . . . and this typifies that great union we are destined to have with God, in one being.” [6]

You can see why much of the dualistic church was just not ready for dear Meister Eckhart, and thus he was never canonized a saint. But he is still a “Meister”! When copying one of Eckhart’s most famous sermons, an anonymous scribe praised him as “one from whom God hid nothing.” [7]

Gateway to Silence:
Practice being present.

__________________________________________________

Oswald Chambers

The Awareness of the Call

for necessity is laid upon me; yes, woe is me if I do not preach the gospel! —1 Corinthians 9:16

Hildegard of Bingen (Richard Rohr)
Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Throughout the ages, the mystics have kept alive the awareness of our union with God and thus with everything. What some now call creation spirituality, deep salvation, or the holistic Gospel was voiced long ago by the Desert Fathers and Mothers, some Eastern Fathers, in the spirituality of the ancient Celts, by many of the Rhineland mystics, and surely by Francis of Assisi. [1] Many women mystics were not even noticed, I am sorry to say. Julian of Norwich (c. 1343–c. 1416) and Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) would be two major exceptions (though even they have often been overlooked).

Hildegard of Bingen communicated creation spirituality through music, art, poetry, medicine, gardening, and reflections on nature. She wrote in her famous book, Scivias: “You understand so little of what is around you because you do not use what is within you.” [2]

This is key to understanding Hildegard and is very similar to Teresa of Ávila’s view of the soul. Without using the word, Hildegard recognized that the human person is a microcosm with a natural affinity for or resonance with the macrocosm, which many of us would call God. Our little world reflects the big world. The key word here is resonance. Contemplative prayer allows your mind to resonate with what is visible and right in front of you. Contemplation is the end of all loneliness because it erases the separateness between the seer and the seen.

Hildegard spoke often of viriditas, the greening of things from within, analogous to what we now call photosynthesis. She saw that there was a readiness in plants to receive the sun and to transform it into energy and life. She recognized that there is also an inherent connection between the physical world and the divine Presence. This connection translates into inner energy that is the soul and seed of everything, an inner voice calling you to “Become who you are; become all that you are.” This is our “life wish” or “whole-making instinct.”

Hildegard is a wonderful example of someone who lives safely inside an entire cosmology, a universe where the inner shows itself in the outer, and the outer reflects the inner, where the individual reflects the cosmos, and the cosmos reflects the individual. Hildegard says, “O Holy Spirit, you are the mighty way in which every thing that is in the heavens, on the earth, and under the earth, is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness.” [3] It is truly a Trinitarian universe, with all things whirling toward one another from orbits, to gravity, to ecosystems, to sexuality.

Gateway to Silence:
Practice being present.

————————–

The “Go” of Renunciation
By Oswald Chambers

…someone said to Him, “Lord, I will follow You wherever You go.” —Luke 9:57

Our Lord’s attitude toward this man was one of severe discouragement, “for He knew what was in man” (John 2:25). We would have said, “I can’t imagine why He lost the opportunity of winning that man! Imagine being so cold to him and turning him away so discouraged!” Never apologize for your Lord. The words of the Lord hurt and offend until there is nothing left to be hurt or offended. Jesus Christ had no tenderness whatsoever toward anything that was ultimately going to ruin a person in his service to God. Our Lord’s answers were not based on some whim or impulsive thought, but on the knowledge of “what was in man.” If the Spirit of God brings to your mind a word of the Lord that hurts you, you can be sure that there is something in you that He wants to hurt to the point of its death.
Luke 9:58. These words destroy the argument of serving Jesus Christ because it is a pleasant thing to do. And the strictness of the rejection that He demands of me allows for nothing to remain in my life but my Lord, myself, and a sense of desperate hope. He says that I must let everyone else come or go, and that I must be guided solely by my relationship to Him. And He says, “…the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.”
Luke 9:59. This man did not want to disappoint Jesus, nor did he want to show a lack of respect for his father. We put our sense of loyalty to our relatives ahead of our loyalty to Jesus Christ, forcing Him to take last place. When your loyalties conflict, always obey Jesus Christ whatever the cost.
Luke 9:61. The person who says, “Lord, I will follow You, but…,” is the person who is intensely ready to go, but never goes. This man had reservations about going. The exacting call of Jesus has no room for good-byes; good-byes, as we often use them, are pagan, not Christian, because they divert us from the call. Once the call of God comes to you, start going and never stop.

Richard Rohr

Full Participation
Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Jesus’ rather evident message of “full and final participation”—union with oneself, others, creation, and God—was probably only fully enjoyed by a small minority throughout history. Only contemplatives, whether conscious or “hidden,” know how to access unitive consciousness through their nondual and inclusive way of processing the moment.

Unfortunately, the monumental insights of the Axial Age (800-200 BC) began to wane, descending into the extreme headiness of some Scholastic philosophy (1100-1700), the antagonistic mind of most church reformations, and the rational literalism of the Enlightenment (17^th and 18^th centuries). Although the reformations were inevitable, good, and necessary, they also ushered in the “desert of nonparticipation,” as Owen Barfield described, where hardly anyone belonged, few were at home in this world, and religion at its worst concentrated on excluding, condemning, threatening, judging, exploiting new lands and peoples, and controlling its own members by shame and guilt. This happened on the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant sides; the primary difference is what we shamed.

Despite some wonderful exceptions, we almost lost the “alternative processing system”—the nondual consciousness of the mystics. We just argued, proved, and disproved, the very opposite of the contemplative mind and heart. The ongoing and flowing life of the Trinity was unrecognized in most Christian spirituality, leaving us defeated at our very foundations.

Karl Jaspers, Owen Barfield, and Ewert Cousins (1927-2009), each in his own way, foresaw the coming of a Second Axial Consciousness, when the best of each era—pre-rational, rational, and trans-rational—would combine and work together. We live in such a time now! In this consciousness, we can make use of the unique contribution of every era to enjoy intuitive and body knowledge, along with rational critique and deeper synthesis, thus encouraging both intelligent and heartfelt participation “with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength” (Mark 12:30).

Duane Elgin describes the difference between the first and second axial age as follows:

[T]he first axial age began with a view of separation and the “other.” In a world of growing individualism and differentiation [and violence], the religious emphasis on compassion served as a vital bridge between people [and the divine]. Now, a second major axis with a very different orientation is opening in the world. Religions of separation are becoming religions of communion as we realize there is no place to go where we are separate from the ever-generative womb of the living universe.

The second axial age begins with a recognition emerging from the combined wisdom of both science and spirituality; namely, that we are already home—that the living universe already exists within us as much as we live within it. In the words of theologian, Thomas Berry, “The universe is a communion and a community. We ourselves are that communion become conscious of itself.” Compassion remains a vital element of spirituality, but it is now being held increasingly within a context of communion rather than separation. [1]

Amen. May it be so.

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The “Go” of Reconciliation