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I do not know where you are from... (Luke 13:25)

8/23/2016

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 In Luke 13:22-30, Jesus responds to those who ask him about being saved. His response is: “Strive to enter through the narrow door, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough. After the master of the house has arisen and locked the door, then will you stand outside knocking and saying, ‘Lord, open the door for us.’ He will say to you in reply, ‘I do not know where you are from.’ And you will say, ‘We ate and drank in your company and you taught in our streets.’Then he will say to you, ‘I do not know where [you] are from. Depart from me, all you evildoers!’  (Luke 13:27). Jesus ends by saying: "For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.” (Luke 13:30).

To me, this Gospel speaks to the roots of Christian Contemplative understanding of the True Self and false self. The True Self is our identity in God ("Where we are from") and our false self is the identity we adopt and create as part of the experience of living and surviving in the world.

I believe that one of Thomas Merton's greatest contributions to modern Christian Spirituality has been the understanding he developed around the True Self/false self. In New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton describes the false self as "an illusory person... the (person) I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him... My false and private self is one who wants to exist outside the reach of God's will and God's love... And such a self cannot help but be an illusion." (p 34)


Merton further writes: "We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves... For most of the people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin. All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real." (pp. 34 - 35)

Merton proceeds to then unveil the True Self: "The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God. But whatever is in God is really identical to Him, for His infinite simplicity admits no division and no distinction. Therefore I cannot hope to find myself anywhere except in Him... Therefore, there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my True Self I will find Him." (pp 35 - 36)

In a fashion similar to the Gospel, Merton states how hard this is: "But although this looks simple, it is in reality, immensely difficult. In fact, if I am left to myself it will be utterly impossible... This is something that no man can ever do alone... The only One Who can teach me to find God is God, Himself, Alone." (p. 36)


Tying it all together Merton writes: "God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of Himself... if I am true to the thought of Him I was meant to embody, I shall be full of His actuality and find Him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere. I shall be lost in Him: that is, I shall find myself. I shall be 'saved.' ... We must be saved from immersion in the sea of lies and passions which is called 'the world.' And we must be saved above all from that abyss of confusion and absurdity which is our own worldly self... The free son (or daughter) of God must be saved from the conformist slave of fantasy, passion and convention. The creative and mysterious inner self must be delivered from the wasteful, hedonistic and destructive ego that seeks only to cover itself with disguises.... To be 'saved' is to return to one's inviolate and eternal reality and to live in God" (pp. 37-38)

Merton then leaves us with his guidance: "'Finding God' means much more than just abandoning all things that are not God, and emptying oneself of images and desires... No natural exercise can bring you into vital contact with Him. Unless He utters Himself in you, speaks His own name in the center of your soul, you will no more know Him than a stone knows the ground upon which it rests in it inertia. Our discovery of God is, in a way God's discovery of us... We only know Him in so far as we are known by Him, and our contemplation of Him is a participation in His contemplation of Himself. We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us.... God Himself, bearing in Himself the secret of who I am, begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and True Self... ('I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me.')" (pp. 39 - 41)

Now I'm going to try to make some further sense out of this as I relate it to Luke's Gospel.

As I've come to understand it, the primarily focus of our ego and the forces that create the false self (Keating does a good job at going into more depth on this in the Human Condition) are for the purpose of our survival and happiness as individuals. The problems we face lie in the fact that we've learned to focus on living out of our false selves in an exaggerated manner. By doing so, we lose awareness of our True Self, the place of our underlying genuineness, of our connectedness to God and with others. Living out of the false self becomes a self-perpetuating and endless cycle; the more exaggerated our false self becomes, the more we focus on our on ourselves and soon it seems that our very survival is dependent on increasing the importance and satisfaction of our false self needs. As Merton observes: "Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real." Operating out of our false self leads to selfishness and we take actions at the expense of others which serves to further alienate us from our True Selves by creating our shadow, those things that we begin to deny and hide about ourselves. As Merton writes: "A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin." 

Merton makes it clear that finding the True Self is "something that no (one) can ever do alone." He hints at the process by saying that "Our discovery of God is, in a way, God's discovery of us."  

So do we just wait passively and hope for God to acts? I don't believe so and feel that Merton's own insight guide us to what's required: "the secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God."  It's been my understanding and experience that the best way to foster God's discovery of us is to open ourselves to share in God's love and mercy, first and foremost for ourselves. I experience this as being open to genuine self-compassion and self-acceptance of the totality of who I am and what I've done including those parts of myself I'd rather keep hidden. This is an extremely difficult, ongoing process and that's why few undertake it (Luke's Gospel refers to it as "entering through the narrow gate"). I've found that this is only possible by opening to God's assistance and, in doing so, opening up to the discovery of God's compassion.  I'm finding that as I strive to accept my selfishness and my shadow, that my false self diminishes as I begin to recognize it for what it is. When I no longer need to hide from or justify my false self and can accept my own shadow, then I'm "saved" from living out of illusion and become free to live out of my True Self and in so doing encounter God in me. This feels to me like a life-long process which I also find Merton commenting on in his Journal:

Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself. - Journal Entry October 2,1958


Tying together my Contemplative understanding of Merton's insights on false self / True Self allow me to read this Gospel as:

Strive to live the difficult process of facing and letting go of your false self.  Many take the easy route of clinging to the worldly illusions of the false self which can only lead to misery. Start by facing and accepting your false self with God's love and mercy and gradually its needs will diminish and you will be saved as you genuinely encounter God in your True Self. Your True Self is from God and so can know Him. Your false self is something separately created and despite the actions it takes, cannot genuinely know God. The false self's search to know God will ultimately end up in frustration... It is easiest for those who are not so successful or invested in this world to find their True Selves for their false selves are easier to let go of.
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The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.    (Matthew 22:39)

7/10/2016

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In Matthew's version of the Greatest Commandment, he emphasizes the similarity of loving Neighbor as Self to loving God with your whole self (all you heart, your soul and your mind). As I've commented on previously, there are three persons involved in these two commandments; God, Neighbor and Self. It's been my experience that to fully love God or to fully love Neighbor, requires, first, that I fully love Self; you can't give what you don't have!

This year I've embraced Non Violent Living which I believe is the epitome of this commandment. As I reflect on my daily struggles to do this, I've recognized that to love myself in the fullest way and therefore be able to love God and Neighbor, I must first recognize and embrace my own dignity!  Through my Christian Contemplative Spirituality and practice I've come to know that God dwells in me (and in everyone / everything else). The very fact that God is the deepest part of my soul grants to me a dignity that I can never lose. I am, of course, fully human and so subject to the Human Condition, as such, I operate from motivations that I'm largely unconscious of. It's when I'm drawn to blindly operate from these largely hidden motivations, that I can "sin" (i.e. to operate in a way that belies my fundamental dignity) or as St Paul writes:  "What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate." Romans 7:15.

Being conscious that nothing I do can diminish the fundamental dignity inherent to God's presence in me, allows me to be present to my "sin" and the motivations of my shadow self. This frees me from projection (he/she caused me to act or feel this way), any victim mentality (I act this way because), or denial or repression (that was nothing) to justify my actions. Trusting in my inherent dignity allows me to be genuinely present and learn from my shadow self and the inner pain or difficulty I experience that causes me to act badly. For me, presence to such pain and difficulty is only possible with the graces of the Indwelling God. This dependence on God serves to both fortify my loving relationship with God and to increase my own humility. This process allows me to experience the gradual acceptance and transformation of my own shadow self. 


Once I embrace my own dignity, am present to enough of my shadow and have been able to work through the transformation process with God, I begin to know that the same dignity and unconscious motivation toward acting badly exists in others. As I develop more compassion for myself and humble reliance upon God in this process, I develop more compassion and patience for others as well. Now when I look at others, I begin to see them like myself at an even deeper level; I'm able to embrace their dignity inherent in God dwelling within them as well as their own unique struggle with the Human Condition. I can begin to genuinely love them more deeply.

So to me, living a Non Violent life starts with recognizing and trusting in my own inherent dignity. This allows me to be consciously present to my own struggles with the Human Condition and shadow self and my own dependence upon God to assist in the transformation process. In this way I diminish my need to blame another and, instead, can be present to an awareness of the inherent dignity we share through God.  Living a Non Violent life permits me to assist God in the transformation process of love that's at the heart of this Greatest Commandment.
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No one can come to me unless it is granted him by my Father... (John 6:65)

8/24/2015

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It's the custom in the Centering Prayer groups I facilitate to choose a portion of the upcoming Sunday Gospel reading to Lectio Divina. This week's Sunday reading was John 6:60-69. As the group shared their reflections and inspirations on this Gospel a few folks mentioned how troubled they were by the exclusivity expressed in the portion of the reading highlighted in the title of this Blog entry. To many, it's as if only some of God's creation are pre-destined by for "salvation". 

I personally don't understand God as being this exclusive. I believe that God desires a personal, deep relationship with all of His creation and it is through the depth of that relationship that we're spiritually nourished. As I see it, the purpose of our lives is to provide us with opportunities to grow into that deeper relationship. If there is any exclusivity, it's our resisting the deepening relationship with God; excluding Him from our lives.

At the end of our time together that evening I privately shared how this particular passage spoke to me with someone who seemed particularly troubled. That's what I'd like to do below in an expanded form.

For me, it's helpful, to start with a larger context for this reading. Jesus (John 6:1-15) had just performed the miracle of feeding the 5,000 men with 5 barley loaves and 2 fishes.

Further in the Gospel (John 6:26-35) Jesus begins to provide some clarity:

26 ... “Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled. 27 Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.... 29 Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one He sent.” ... 32 So Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
34 So they said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” 35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.

Then the shocking message begins to be revealed in John 6:47-59:

47 Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; 50 this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” ...  53 Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. 54 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. 55 For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. 57 Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.”

As his audience hears this they react as I imagine anyone who is thinking about a purely physical existence would:

60 Then many of his disciples who were listening said, “This saying is hard; who can accept it?” 61 Since Jesus knew that his disciples were murmuring about this, he said to them, “Does this shock you? ... 63 It is the spirit that gives life, while the flesh is of no avail. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life. ... 64 But there are some of you who do not believe.”...65 And he said, “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by my Father.”  66 As a result of this, many [of] his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him. 67 Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?” 68 Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." 

I've highlighted the words that help me make sense of this. Jesus differentiate between our physical and material needs (the flesh) and our deeper, internal needs (the spirit). I don't see Jesus saying that the physical and material needs are unnecessary (many of his miracles are about taking care of people's physical needs such as the feeding of the 5,000 that beings this chapter of John) just that our attachment to satisfying them is overly exaggerated!. 

To me, Jesus is saying that spending all our time and energy taking care of physical and material needs is insufficient, we need to feed our interior, spiritual selves which supports our authentic life at a deeper and more satisfying level and which allows us to share in this authentic life with others thus sustaining them and us.

We can, and must, have physical nourishment to exist physically and have to take care of our material needs. However, we all know that we eat and after a while we'll eat again when we're hungry. When we get something new materially (perhaps a new car or a bigger, nicer house) we're satisfied with it and then that satisfaction wears off and we begin to pursue something else. This is an endless pattern we follow until our physical bodies age and wel eventually die. 

When we feed our spirit (our inner self), we are nourishing the part of us that gives us deeper existence and satisfaction. This satisfaction is something that deepens and, overtime, satisfies us in a richer way. Unlike our physical existence, which is temporary, our spiritual existence continues into eternity. So nourishing and developing this self has lasting value. It sustains us as it also sustains those in the world ("the life of the the world.")

Furthermore, I understand this spiritual food to be beyond Jesus' words or even just his actions, it's his very life. For me, the life of Jesus' (his being and how he lived) is the "bread that comes down from heaven" . "Eating Jesus' flesh and drinking his blood" is his complete offer of the entirety of his being to us. We are called to take him in completely and in so doing be transformed into Christ fully alive in us. (As described in Symeon the New Theologian's writing in my last Blog entry.) This is our awakening to Christ living through us, with us and in us in our daily lives and actions. This intimate union with Christ is so that we become his flesh and blood in the world and realize his spirit into eternity.   

As his listeners in the Gospel (and perhaps us as well) say : "This saying is hard, who can accept it." and "as a result many of his disciples returned to their former way of life". Jesus asks "Does this shock you?". He provides the necessary clarity which leads to the point that is perhaps most often misunderstood: "For this reason I have told you, no one can come to me unless granted by my Father." 

Jesus is helping us recognize the truth that we cannot live the "shocking" demands of a deeply Spiritual life by ourselves. To do so requires God's grace and intimate relationship. It's easy to have an external faith based on receiving God's outward, physical assistance and consolations ("you are looking for me ... because you ate the loaves and were filled") ; this, however, requires little transformation from us. 

But, to live our live the radical example of the life Jesus lived, requires us to develop an intimate relationship with God and the help of his grace. Through the consent and surrender of our will we open ourselves to be able to embrace the life Jesus exemplified. It's through the power of God's grace that allows us to commit and follow through. 

As Jesus shows through this Gospel, there's no backing down from this striking truth, and most of us are not ready, willing or able yet to surrender and accept it. For many of us, radical consent and surrender requires some event or life circumstance that completely challenges our own belief and reliance in ourselves and in our ordinary physical and material experience of reality. This "dying" to what we have taken as certain, necessary and comfortable, helps us to know the words of Simon Peter in this Gospel: "to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." 

It's at the point of crisis in our lives when we are most open to a genuine relationship to God and his graces. Those moments are when our real spiritual life begins and when we begin to receive genuine spiritual nourishment. These moments of opening to God graces occur at different points in people's lives. We only embrace these opportunities we're ready for them, until then we "return to our former way of life" once we get past the issue at hand. However, I believe God is patiently waiting for us, inviting us and ready to deepen His relationship with us and share his graces whenever we're truly ready.

The Contemplative teaching and my own experiences of True Self / false Self are very helpful to me for exploring and informing my understanding of this particular Gospel passage further.
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We All Travel Our Road To Emmaus

12/27/2014

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It seems fitting that my first Blog entry should be about the Road of Emmaus and that the first companion with whom I have shared and formed my thoughts is Deacon Art Miller, a dear friend in whom I have found inspiration, support and mentorship. His deep faith in Christ and love of Family,Friends and Community makes this a fitting passage to start. I hope this and subsequent entries will provide insights for your journey.
Our Spiritual Journey is part of our journey through life itself which is experienced as a mixed bag of disappointments and unrealized expectations, sorrow, doubt, fear, friendship, surprise, joy, love and moments of profound awakening. This seems to have always been true even for those who were closest to the living Jesus, who knew and experienced him personally. It would be surprising if it were any different for us today, this is simply the experience of being human.

Though each of us is ultimately responsible for our individual Spiritual Journey, j
ust like the disciples on the Road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35), we all need to share that Journey. The Spiritual Journey requires the companionship of others as well as guidance along the way. In this reading, it was the risen Jesus who provided that guidance to the confused disciples. Their searching together fulfilled the Gospel promise that when two or three are gathered in His name, Christ is also in (their) midst.(Matthew 18:20). The reading ends by emphasizing the significance of community. It was in the disciple's invitation to risen Jesus and his sharing and breaking of bread, the most fundamental of communal activities, that Jesus was finally recognized. In my own life, I often find that fundamental community expressions of loving and sharing most often cause me to experience God's love and being open enough to recognize Christ in others.

An important point made in this passage is the necessity of opening our heart in Spiritual matters. We often rely on our cognitive abilities to get us through life and so find it natural to try to apply our thinking skills to make sense of God's ways. On the Road to Emmaus the two disciples are "conversing and debating" in order to make sense of all they experienced in Jesus life, death and afterwards. After joining them and allowing them to speak their minds, Jesus criticizes the disciples by saying  "How slow of heart to believe". Even though Jesus shared in their discussions by interpreting the Word of God (Scripture) to them as they walked, he doesn't appear to be trying to impart knowledge as much as to touch and open their hearts. Once they recognized the risen Jesus, the disciples said to each other "Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the way and opened scriptures to us?"  A careful reading of the Greatest Commandment in all the synoptic gospels (Matthew 22:36-40,Mark 12:28-31,Luke 10:25-28)  also illustrates the importance of the heart when it comes to our relationship to God: "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your (1) heart, with all your (2) being, with all your (3) strength, and with all your (4) mind". It strikes me as important that Jesus instructed us that loving God starts from the heart, then all other facets of ourselves and lastly with our mind. This is a significant reminder for me to put my heart first and my mind last when it comes to the ways of God. I am rarely able to deeply understand or make sense of Spiritual things in any other way.

Another point in this Gospel reading is how remarkable and natural the human tendency is to equate Spiritual reality with material/worldly expectations. As the disciples stated in the Gospel reading: "But we were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel." These disciples were looking to equate a human salvation (from Roman oppression) to a Spiritual one (the ushering in of the Kingdom of God). How many times do we ask God to satisfy our human or material desires, which may be important in many circumstances, but without an awareness of our Spiritual needs. If we solely focus our attention on worldly concerns, our awareness closes down to Spiritual realities.

I find it notable that in this account, and many other accounts of Jesus after the resurrection, that he was not immediately recognizable. At times on our Spiritual Journey we are transformed by dying to our false selves (a part of our humanness is put aside) and a part of our True Self originally born in Christ is resurrected. This is our personal death and resurrection experience of which St Paul also writes in Galatians 2:19-20 "I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me." Each time we experience this process of transformation that is awakening to our True Selves, we are less recognizable in comparison to our previous selves.

Finally, after their encounter with Christ the disciples forget their worldly concerns and immediately head  back to Jerusalem to share the news with others. When we truly experience God, our worldly concerns become much less important; we find ourselves compelled to share our joy with others.
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    The Road to Emmaus is one of my favorite scripture passages (Luke 24:13-35). It captures many essential elements of the Spiritual Journey.
     

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