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Western Christianity

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September 16 – September 21, 2018

Western Christianity

Summary: Week Thirty-eight


To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter. —Archbishop Rowan Williams (Sunday)

Meditation [was] not a newfangled innovation, let alone the grafting onto Christianity of an Eastern practice, but rather . . . something that had originally been at the very center of Christian practice and had become lost.—Cynthia Bourgeault (Monday)

God is not just with us, not just beside us, not just under us, not just over us, but within us, at the deepest level, and, in our inmost being, a step beyond the true Self. —Thomas Keating (Tuesday)

Sin is primarily living outside of union; it is a state of separation—when the part poses as the Whole. It’s the loss of any inner experience of who you are in God. (Wednesday)

Addiction can be a metaphor for what the biblical tradition called sin. It is quite helpful to see sin, like addiction, as a destructive disease. . . . If sin indeed makes God unhappy, it is because God loves us, desires nothing more than our happiness, and wills the healing of our disease. (Thursday)

The word contemplation must press beyond the constraints of religious expectations to reach the potential for spiritual centering in the midst of danger. . . . During slavery, . . . crisis contemplation became a refuge, a wellspring of discernment in a suddenly disordered life space, and a geo-spiritual anvil for forging a new identity. —Barbara Holmes (Friday)

 

 

The Sound of the Genuine

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Howard Thurman (American Mystic. 1899 -1981)

rom a Commencement speech, Spelman College, 1980

The Sound of the Genuine

There is something in every one of you that waits, listens, for the sound of the genuine in yourself and if you cannot hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it was better that you had never been born…

You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all the existence and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all yourself spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls…

There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and sometimes there is some much traffic going on in your minds, so many different kinds of signals, so many vast impulses floating through your organism that go back thousands of generations, long before you were even a though in the mind of creation, and you are buffeted by these, and in the midst of all of this you have got to find out what your name is. Who are you? How does the sound of the genuine come through you…

The sound of the genuine is flowing through you. Don’t be deceived and thrown off by all the noises that are part even of your dreams, your ambitions, so that you don’t hear the sound of the genuine in you, because that is the only true guide that you will ever have, and if you don’t have that you don’t have a thing.

You may be famous. You may be whatever the other ideals are which are a part of this generation, but you know you don’t have the foggiest notion of who you are, where you are going, what you want. Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in yourself.

Now there is something in everybody that waits and listen for the sound of the genuine in other people… I must wait and listen for the sound of the genuine in you. I must wait. For if I cannot hear it, then in my scheme of things, you are not even present. And everybody wants to feel that everybody else knows that she is there.

I want to feel that I am thoroughly and completely understood so that now and then I can take my guard down and look out around me and not feel that I will be destroyed with my defenses down. I want to feel completely vulnerable, completely naked, completely exposed and absolutely secure… that I can run the risk of radical exposure and know that the eye that beholds my vulnerability will not step on me. That I can feel secure in my awareness of the active presence of my own idiom in me.

So as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill. It doesn’t matter whether I become a doctor, a lawyer, housewife. I’m secure because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself and having learned to listen to that I can become quiet enough, still enough to hear the sound of the genuine in you.

Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear, and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the music

Eastern Christianity

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Eastern Christianity

September 9 – September 14, 2018

The Cappadocian Fathers developed an intellectual rationale for Christianity’s central
goal: humanity’s healing and loving union with God. (Sunday)

Matter and Spirit must be found to be inseparable in Christ before we have the courage and
insight to acknowledge and honor the same in ourselves and in the entire universe.

Christ is the Archetype of Everything.
(Monday)

Just as some Eastern fathers saw Christ’s human/divine nature as one dynamic unity,
they also saw the Trinity as an Infinite Dynamic Flow. (Tuesday)

St. Gregory of Nazianzus emphasized that deification does not mean we become God,
but that we do objectively participate in God’s nature. We are created to share in the life-flow
of Trinity. (Wednesday)

[Gregory of Nyssa taught universal salvation from] a fundamental belief in
the impermanence of evil in the face of God’s love and a conviction that God’s plan for humanity
is intended to be fulfilled in every single human being. —Morwenna Ludlow (Thursday)

The Eastern Fathers have always stressed . . . that if we are in Christ we participate
in His paschal victory over sin and death. —George Maloney (Friday)

 

Two Roles of Religion

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Let me begin with one of my favorite passages from the brilliant philosopher Ken Wilber:

. . . Religion itself has always performed two very important, but very different functions. One, it acts as a way of creating meaning for the separate self: it offers myths and stories and tales and narratives and rituals that, taken together, help the separate self make sense of, and endure, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. This function of religion does not usually or necessarily change the level of consciousness in a person; it does not deliver radical transformation. Nor does it deliver a shattering liberation from the separate self altogether. Rather, it consoles the self, fortifies the self, defends the self, promotes the self. As long as the separate self believes the myths, performs the rituals, mouths the prayers, or embraces the dogma, then the self, it is fervently believed, will be “saved”—either now in the glory of being God-saved or Goddess-favored, or in an afterlife that ensures eternal wonderment.

But two, religion has also served—in a usually very, very small minority—the function of radical transformation and liberation. This function of religion does not fortify the separate self, but utterly shatters it—not consolation but devastation, not entrenchment but emptiness, not complacency but explosion, not comfort but revolution—in short, not a conventional bolstering of consciousness but a radical transmutation and transformation at the deepest seat of consciousness itself. [1]

This second function is the ultimate goal of all mature spirituality. This is the contemplative dimension of religion. As Thomas Keating says, “The primary purpose of religion is to help us move beyond the separate-self sense to union with God.” [2]

In the weeks ahead, we will focus on the transformational level of the Abrahamic religions where God is central and the goal is to be transformed into God’s likeness, rather than what I would call the transactional level where our ego or false self is central and we are trying to control God.

 

[1] Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality (Shambhala Publications, Inc.: 2000), 25-26.

[2] Thomas Keating and Joseph Boyle with Lucette Verboven, World Without End (Bloomsbury Continuum: 2017), 24.

 

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Rhor’s meditation

Early Christianity

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Early Christianity

Seeking Spiritual Freedom

Thursday, September 6, 2018

A brother was restless in the community and often moved to anger. So he said: “I will go, and live somewhere by myself. And since I shall be able to talk or listen to no one, I shall be tranquil, and my passionate anger will cease.” He went out and lived alone in a cave. But one day he filled his jug with water and put it on the ground. It happened suddenly to fall over. He filled it again, and again it fell. And this happened a third time. And in a rage he snatched up the jug and broke it. Returning to his right mind, he knew that the demon of anger had mocked him, and he said: “Here am I by myself, and he has beaten me. I will return to the community. Wherever you live, you need effort and patience and above all God’s help.” —Story of a desert father [1]

As the Christian church moved from bottom to top, protected and pampered by the Roman Empire, people like Anthony of the Desert (c. 250-c. 356), John Cassian (c. 360-c. 435), Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345-399), Syncletica (c. 270-c. 350) and other early Christians went off to the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria to find spiritual freedom, live out Jesus’ teachings, and continue growing in the Spirit. It was in these deserts that a different mind called contemplation was taught.

As an alternative to empire and its economy, these men and women emphasized lifestyle practice, psychologically astute methods of prayer, and a very simple spirituality of transformation into Christ. The desert communities grew out of informal gatherings of monks or nuns, functioning much like families. A good number also became hermits to mine the deep mystery of their inner experience. This movement paralleled the monastic pattern in Hinduism and Buddhism.

The desert tradition preceded the emergence of systematic theology and formal doctrine. Christian faith was first a lifestyle before it was a belief system. Since the desert dwellers were often formally uneducated, they told stories, much like Jesus did, to teach about essential issues of ego, love, virtue, surrender, peace, divine union, and inner freedom.

Thomas Merton described those early Christians in the wilderness as people “who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a decadent state,” who didn’t wish to be ruled or to rule. He continues, saying that they primarily sought their “true self, in Christ”; to do so, they had to reject “the false, formal self, fabricated under social compulsion ‘in the world.’ They sought a way to God that was uncharted and freely chosen, not inherited from others who had mapped it out beforehand.” [2] Can you see why we might need to learn from them?

References:
[1] Western Asceticism, ed., trans. Owen Chadwick (Westminster John Knox Press: 2006, ©1958), 92.

[2] Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert(New Directions: 1960), 5-6.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer(Paulist Press: 2014), 51; and
“Desert Christianity and the Eastern Fathers of the Church,” The Mendicant, vol. 5, no. 2 (Center for Action and Contemplation: April 2015), 1.

Perennial Tradition Summary

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The underlying messages that different religions and denominations use are often in strong agreement, but they use different metaphors to communicate their own experience of union with God. (Sunday)

One way to summarize the substance of perennial wisdom (paraphrasing Aldous Huxley) is:

  • There is a Divine Reality underneath and inherent in the world of things;
  • There is in the human soul a natural capacity, similarity, and longing for this Divine Reality;
  • The final goal of existence is union with this Divine Reality. (Monday)

Our goal is to illustrate both the image and the likeness of God by living in conscious loving union with God. (Tuesday)

Everything you see, think, feel, and imagine is part of and never apart from the same Source. We call this Source by such names as God, Reality, Brahman, Allah, One, Krishna, the Absolute, and the Nondual. The list of names is long; the reality to which they all point is the same. —Rami Shapiro (Wednesday)

Awakening is the expression of that grace in which we see through our apparent separation and notice that we are already one with divine Presence and with all that is. All that is missing is awareness. —David G. Benner (Thursday)

What do you want? If it’s union with Love, then listen to that longing and it will be a reliable guide to truth and intimacy. (Friday)

 

The Perennial Philosophy

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The term “perennial philosophy” . . . refers to a fourfold realization: (1) there is only one Reality (call it, among other names, God, Mother, Tao, Allah, Dharmakaya, Brahman, or Great Spirit) that is the source and substance of all creation; (2) that while each of us is a manifestation of this Reality, most of us identify with something much smaller, that is, our culturally conditioned individual ego; (3) that this identification with the smaller self gives rise to needless anxiety, unnecessary suffering, and cross-cultural competition and violence; and (4) that peace, compassion, and justice naturally replace anxiety, needless suffering, competition, and violence when we realize our true nature as a manifestation of this singular Reality. The great sages and mystics of every civilization throughout human history have taught these truths in the language of their time and culture. —Rami Shapiro 

 

Rami Shapiro, Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent: Sacred Teachings—Annotated & Explained (Skylight Paths Publishing: 2013), xiv.

The Essence of Perennial Wisdom

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  • There is a Divine Reality underneath and inherent in the world of things;
  • There is in the human soul a natural capacity, similarity, and longing for this Divine Reality;
  • The final goal of existence is union with this Divine Reality. 

Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (Harper & Brothers: 1945), vii.

The Beatitudes as Affirmations

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Affirmations: Fr. Thomas Keating refers to the beatitudes as affirmations. Perhaps you will want to reflect and then select one as an affirmation for the time ahead:

Blessed am I, poor in spirit,

for mine is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed am I who mourn,

for I will be comforted.

Blessed am I, the meek,

for I will inherit the land.

Blessed are I who hunger and thirst for righteousness,

for I will be satisfied.

Blessed am I, the merciful,

for I will be shown mercy.

Blessed am I, the clean of heart,

for I will see God.

Blessed am I, the peacemakers,

for I will be called child of God.

Blessed am I who is persecuted for the sake of righteousness,

for mine is the kingdom of heaven.

— cf. Matthew 5: 3-10

Amen.

Seeing with the Eye of the Heart: The Contemplative Way of Knowing”

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“Seeing with the Eye of the Heart: a.k.a: The Contemplative Way of Knowing”
Nowadays people tend to hear the word “contemplative” as simply the Christian equivalent of what most the world knows as “meditation” —i.e., stilling the mind and resting in the flow of consciousness. But in the original understanding of the early Church Fathers, contemplation was primarily a way of luminous knowledge— “knowledge impregnated by love,” as St. John Chrysostom famously characterized it. Cynthia’s talk will explore this profound Christian intuition that contemplation is indeed a way of knowing—in fact, arguably the closest equivalent to what we now call Nondual perception. Drawing on insights from the Hesychastic Tradition of the Christian East as well as the Western medieval spiritual classic The Cloud of Unknowing Cynthia will explore what is arguably the key Western contribution to our understanding of Nonduality: that it is not accessed by the mind alone (mind understood here as “brain”), but requires “putting the mind in the heart,” an instruction to be taken not merely as a metaphor but as an actual physiology of transformation. We will see why indeed—in the memorable words of Antoine de Saint Exupery—that “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Seeing With the Heart: Video Conversation with A LIVE online community conversation with Cynthia Bourgeault facilitated by Vera de Chalambert, part of the Science and Nonduality Emergence Series – Recorded April, 29th 2017