st bernard and dominionism

The Prophet (peace be upon him!) said to the returning soldiers, ‘Blessed are those who have performed the minor jihad and have yet to perform the greater jihad.’ When asked, ‘What is the greater jihad?' the Prophet replied: ‘The jihad of the self.’
(Al-Majilisi, Bihar al-Anwar,hadith no. 31.)

The last lines of the Gospel we read today (Mt 23:1-12) seems to me to be one of those fundamental truths about Jesus’ way, this movement toward littleness, toward simplicity, toward powerlessness: “The greatest among you must be your servants. Those who exalt themselves will be humbled; those who humble themselves will be exalted.” But it is often the first thing to go, even––maybe especially––in religious life. Do not be like the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus warns his disciples. “All their works are performed to be seen. They widen their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels. They love places of honor at banquets, seats of honor in synagogues, greetings in the marketplaces, and being called ‘Rabbi.” But we love our widened phylacteries and long tassels, and seats of honor and our honorific titles! (Our OSB Cams and Revs!) I remember being at Mass at a seminary in Rome one Sunday when this Gospel was read. I had never seen such pomp and circumstance at an ordinary Sunday Mass. We were all arranged hierarchically, with even visiting concelebrating priests in full vesture, with a dozen or so acolytes. And I remember saying to the priest who was with me as the guy started the homily, “I can’t wait to hear what he does with this!” After the homily he whispered back to me: “He was brilliant. He avoided the gospel completely!” We have to be constantly vigilant, swim against the stream, because without our noticing it, sometimes what we started out to do can become its polar opposite.

Of course what it brings to mind for me is the monastic impulse in the church. At least one version of the story has it that when Christianity was legalized and got too comfortable, this band of men (and some women too) headed out into the desert to live a life of renunciation, solitude, simplicity and austerity, swimming against the stream of, as C. H. Lawrence wrote in his brilliant book Medieval Monasticism, “laxer standards and the careerism that crept into the church once imperial approval had given it respectability.” (Lawrence, 2) But those early desert dwellers were simply going out to live a life that was rooted in the Gospels, in imitation of Jesus, by following the evangelical counsels, in poverty and simplicity, by avoiding clericalism and any kind of social standing. I think too of our own founder St. Romuald, who turned his back on the comfort (and corruption) of San Apollonare in Classe and headed into the forest, to live a life of austerity and simplicity, features that would be the hallmark of the Romualdian reform in general, again swimming against the stream of the natural tendency toward social position and comfort.

Today is also the feast of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and we could certainly say the same thing about him and the early Cistercians as well. They were definitely a reaction against what they saw as the corrupting influences of the wealth and power of Cluny. They aimed to live a life of greater austerity, simplicity––“in the swamps of France”; they even wore a white habit to distinguish themselves from the black habits of Cluny. And when St. Bernard preached his fiery sermons about conversion, he wasn’t trying to convert people just to Christianity, but to the monastic life as a living out of the Christian life, “…claiming that those who observed the Rule of St Benedict were reproducing the life-style of the Apostles.” (Lawrence, 184)

Yesterday was the feast of St. Bernard Tolomei, the founder of the Olivetan monastic congregation, the congregation of Laurence Freeman and my good friends at San Miniato. We heard all about Bernard Tolomei’s “contempt for the world” that was the impetus for his beginning to live a monastic life. Ironically, he took his name from Bernard of Clairvaux, but the first thing I thought of was what Pope Benedict wrote about Bernard of Clairvaux––the exact opposite! (This is from the encyclical Spe Salvi 15):

It was commonly thought that monasteries were places of flight from the world (contemptus mundi) and of withdrawal from responsibility for the world, in search of private salvation. Bernard of Clairvaux, who inspired a multitude of young people to enter the monasteries of his reformed Order, had quite a different perspective on this. In his view, monks perform a task for the whole Church and hence also for the world… [M]onks have a duty towards the entire body of the Church, and indeed towards humanity; he applies to them the words of pseudo-Rufinus: “The human race lives thanks to a few; were it not for them, the world would perish ...”

And in keeping with the theme for the retreat that Douglas Burton-Christie is giving to us at New Camaldoli this year, “Practicing Paradise”:

In fact Bernard explicitly states that not even the monastery can restore Paradise, but he maintains that, as a place of practical and spiritual “tilling the soil,” it must prepare the new Paradise. A wild plot of forest land is rendered fertile—and in the process, the trees of pride are felled, whatever weeds may be growing inside souls are pulled up, and the ground is thereby prepared so that bread for body and soul can flourish.

But then there is this dark side of Bernard’s legacy too that many speak of: first his preaching of the Crusade, and then the Cistercians’ sponsorship and Bernard’s near canonization of the Knights Templar. I’ve been reading a lot about this in James Carrol’s book Jerusalem, Jerusalem. Did nobody notice that this was the polar opposite of “the Gospel of peace and love”? The Knights Templar thought of themselves as warrior monks; they even adopted the Cistercians’ white habit, but now it was emblazoned with the dramatic, distinctive red cross, the cross that had become a sword. Didn’t anybody notice that as far as professions are concerned “monk and warrior stood at opposite poles”? (Those are the words of C.H. Lawrence again.) Later the Knights themselves would be charged with various heresies and perversities, and eventually they were brought before the Inquisition and suppressed––though they would rise again a generation or two later as the Masons. Again another polar opposite: what started out as a military order to protect the church turns into a secret society against it! But even more importantly, how did the tendency toward simplicity and poverty get transformed into the energy for violence and worldly domination?

This tendency is still with us, and maybe it always will be. I’ve been reading a lot lately about a school of thought that has been surfacing in our own political realm known as Dominionism. The philosophy is basically that Christians (and Christians alone!) are biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Jesus returns. (See Ryan Lizza’s excellent article “Leap of Faith,” New Yorker, August 15 & 22, 2011.) Some of these Dominionists, like this man the late Francis Shaeffer who is singled out as the main inspirer of this movement, even argue for violent overthrow of governments––in the name of the Bible! Dominionism relies on Genesis 1:28, where human beings are urged to “have dominion over all the earth.” But it seems to me that the texts Christians should be looking at for how we are supposed to have dominion in the world should be the one we heard today: “The greatest among you must be your servants.” Or the Philippians Canticle that says Jesus “emptied himself and took the form of a slave… and therefore God raised him on high.” Or else John 13, which shows exactly how Jesus had dominion: he tied a towel around his waist and washed his disciples’ feet! That’s how we are supposed to have dominion over the earth. We are supposed to be the slaves even of the fish and the fowl and the cattle; we are supposed to be servants of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth; we are supposed to wash the feet of all others, not be their masters.

It’s not just the monastic movement, but the Christian movement itself is marked by this tendency toward poverty and powerlessness. And not just the Christian movement, but the spiritual life itself is marked by this movement toward dispossession and a blessed simplicity. The famous hadith of the Prophet Mohammed comes to mind. He had dispatched a contingent of the army to the battlefront, and when they returned he said to them

‘Blessed are those who have performed the minor jihad and have yet to perform the greater jihad.’ When asked, ‘What is the greater jihad?' the Prophet replied: ‘The jihad of the self.’
(Al-Majilisi, Bihar al-Anwar, vol. 19, p. 182, hadith no. 31.)

In Arabic this is known as jihad al-nafs, the “struggle against the self.” (The Arabic word nafs of course is related to the Hebrew word nepesh, sometimes translated as “soul.”) This struggle against the self is really against evil ideas, desires and the powers of lust, anger, and insatiable imagination, placing them all under the dictates of reason and faith in obedience to God's command, and finally, purging all evil ideas and influences from one's soul. This struggle is much more difficult than fighting on the battlefield. Pope Benedict ends the section on St. Bernard saying that, “Are we not perhaps seeing once again, in the light of current history, that no positive world order can prosper where souls are overgrown?” Otherwise, what Carrol’s book brings in high relief, how often we turn religion into a kind of tribal warfare. At one point he recalls the quote of Abraham Lincoln, about not presuming that God is on our side, but humbly praying every day that we are on God's side.

We have to be constantly vigilant, swim against the stream, because without our noticing it, what we started out to do can become its polar opposite. Let’s pray in the authentic spirit of the gospel, and St. Bernard, that the trees of our pride would be felled, and that whatever weeds may be growing inside our souls would be pulled up, and that the ground of our being would be prepared so that our bodies and souls may flourish.

the betrayal of easter

God never forces open the doors if shut against him.
For this self of ours has to attain its ultimate meaning…
not through the compulsion of God’s power
but through love,
and thus become united with God in freedom.
(Rabindranath Tagore)

Probably the most chilling moment for me in the telling of the story of Jesus’ death is how Matthew and Mark report that Jesus cries out from the cross, Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani––“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Both Matthew and Mark say that right after saying these words, Jesus then lets out a loud cry, a kind of primal groan. These words are of course from Psalm 22, and I’ve heard various explanations as to why Jesus says them. In the Matthew and Mark the crowd thought he was actually calling on Elijah. One explanation I heard was that Jesus was just saying the prayers that a devout Jew would say as he was dying. Bede Griffiths explained it by saying that even Jesus’ own image of God was taken from him, all his ideas about God, a similar kind of death that we have to undergo in our prayer lives as we let go of all names and forms that we hold on to for comfort. But I think there is an even more chilling, literal, scriptural explanation for Jesus saying these words––and that is that the Father does really abandon Jesus!

The Greek word paradidonai appears quite a few times in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ death. It means basically “to hand over or to betray.” So Judas hands Jesus over to the temple guard, the temple guards hand him over to the Sanhedrin, the Sanhedrin hands him over to Pilate, and Pilate hands him over to be scourged and finally to be crucified. But the ultimate betrayer of Jesus, the one who has really “handed Jesus over” isn’t Judas or the high priests or the Sanhedrin or Pilate or the Romans; it’s God the Father. God abandons Jesus to this event. His Abba, the one whose love Jesus had spent his whole life preaching about––Look at the birds of the air, learn from the flowers of the field! Blest are the poor in spirit!––hands him over to as humiliating and torturous of an experience as a human being could have, as scripture says, God did not spare his only Son. That’s why those other lines from Psalm 22 are so poignant: He trusted in the Lord, let him save him and release him if this is his friend. But God doesn’t save him or release him from this horrible experience.

Of course the real horrible news about all of this is that if God abandoned Jesus, if God does not save Jesus from all of this, where does that leave us? Could it be that God will and does abandon us too? Even good Christian women get sexually assaulted, advocates for peace and justice get assassinated, and tens of thousands of people get killed or washed out to sea in an earthquake and a tsunami for no sin or wrongdoing. My God, my God, why have you abandoned us? I keep remembering a couple of scenes from the movie “Of Gods and Men,” that tells the story of the French Trappist monks in Algeria who decided not to abandon their monastery during a civil war even though they knew they were facing probable death. The youngest monk, Christophe, is the one who is the most afraid of what probably lies ahead, and one powerful scene shows him praying in his cell, absolutely terrified, saying over and over again, “Aides-moi, aides-moi–Help me! Help me!” Sheer terror. Not only is his body about to be destroyed, psychologically he has been brought to the edge, to the limit of his strength.

We––or at least I––still have a tendency to think of prayer as magic, that God is the Wizard of Oz and we are like Harry Potter. But in actuality our bodies and even our souls do not always get spared––God abandons us to the wiles and ways of creation. What Jesus has experienced is a total destruction of his body and perhaps a total destruction also of his psyche, his ego, his whole mental complex. But there is something deeper to us than our bodies and our souls: our real Self (I write this with a capital “S” as Indian sages and Jungians would), our real Self that is something hidden––with Christ––in God. That’s what cannot be destroyed, annihilated. There is something about us that is deeper than our bodies and beyond even our souls––our real Self.

There is a beautiful teaching of Rabindranath Tagore from his book Sadhana that speaks about this, this realm, this part of us beyond our physical and mental organism, which, he says, “the great King of the universe has not shadowed with his throne.” In our physical being, in our mental being, we have to acknowledge the rule of something beyond us, the intractable laws of nature. But this deepest part of us God has left free, even free to disown God. And Tagore says that it is only in this region that anarchy is permitted; it is only in this realm of our being that “the discord of untruth and unrighteousness can hold its reign.” This is ultimately the region of our will. It is there, in our real Self, that God has actually withdrawn his commands, for there God comes to court our love not command it. God’s “armed force, the laws of nature, stand outside its gate,” Tagore says, “and only beauty, the messenger of God’s love, finds admission within its precincts”; and it is there that God must win an entrance, where God comes as a guest, not as a king, and where God has to wait to be invited.

... and things can come to such a pass that we may cry out in our anguish, “Such utter lawlessness could never prevail if there were a God!” Indeed, God has stood aside from our self, where his watchful patience knows no bounds, and where [God] never forces open the doors if shut against him. For this self of ours has to attain its ultimate meaning… not through the compulsion of God’s power but through love, and thus become united with God in freedom.

It’s only there that we are really free. What has felt like God abandoning us has been actually God withdrawing, God standing aside, waiting to be invited. It’s at that moment when we must invite God in. Every other aspect of our being is subject to intractable rules and laws, but here, in the deepest part of our being, we are free. What will it take for us to find that aspect of our being?

There is another line from the Psalms that Luke tells us that Jesus uttered on the cross just before he dies, from Psalm 31: No one can take my life from me, I give it freely. Now as he dies, that’s the moment when he hands over his spirit and thus becomes pure vessel of the Spirit, or as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, that’s when and why he becomes the source of salvation. As old Brother Luc says in the movie: “I’m not scared of death. I’m a free man.” That’s the moment he hands over his spirit, and becomes pure vessel of the Spirit. In this region of self that anarchy is permitted, Brother Luc does not let anarchy come in. In that moment praying in anguish in his cell, Brother Christophe is choosing to believe that there is something else, beyond his body and beyond the limits of his own mind, and he calls out to That in his anguish and invites the Sacred Guest in. In this realm of his being where “the discord of untruth and unrighteousness can hold its reign,” he ultimately does not allow it to hold its reign. That’s the moment he delivers over his spirit and becomes a pure vessel of Spirit. Later in the film there is another long shot of him praying before the altar just as the morning sun is rising, and it is very subtle but you can see slowly, slowly his face eases and the hint of a smile appears on his face, as that which is beyond his body and beyond his soul makes itself known to him. Now he too is no longer scared of death; in his spirit, he is a free man. He’s found his spirit and becomes pure vessel of Spirit.

This is why the saying goes that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the faith," because when we hand ourselves over we surrender our spirit and thus become pure vessels of the Spirit. We are the seed that falls unto the ground and dies and thus yields a rich harvest. It’s not our place to know what that harvest will be. I myself would like to believe that the body even in this life in some way shares in the transformation brought about by the spiritual life and that this is the lesson of the Transfiguration, the Resurrection and the Ascension, the triumph of the flesh––and that maybe we will even experience a kind of physicality in it all as literal interpreters of scripture would have us believe. At least we all like to believe that our souls will in some way live on as an essence, a kind of ghost or angel or presence. Truth is, we simply do not know what kind of existence is beyond death. It’s not our place to know what that harvest will be, but the Resurrection tells us only to have hope that there will be a harvest, that something will grow from our lives being handed over. As Paul tells us in his great discourse about the resurrection, what is sown is corruptible––our bodies and our souls––what is raised up is incorruptible. Our bodies and our souls are the seed that falls onto the ground and dies; the harvest is a great mystery. It’s not our business to know what it is exactly that is raised up, our job is only to believe that if we fall to the ground and die, something of the essence of us will live on, and that life will continue and we will have been and will still be a part of it. It’s not our business to know what that part is––if we will live on in a song or a sermon, in a building or a grandchild, in inspiration or something more concrete––our job is to hand over ourselves to the hands of the divine, to invite the Sacred Guest in, and thus to deliver over our spirit––even now––and so become pure vessels of the Spirit––even now. That’s the promise and fruit of Jesus’ Resurrection.

the nature of the ground

The significance of Brahman is expressed by neti, neti!
(Not so! Not so!)
For beyond this, that you say it is not so,
there is nothing further.
Brahman’s name, however, is “the reality of the reality.”
That is to say, the senses are real,
and Brahman is their reality.
(Brihdarankyaka Upanishad.)

I’ve been reading with fascination the theologian Robert Barron recently. I first ran into his book And Now I See… in England. My friend Patrick Eastman recommended it and I quickly was hooked. Then my friend the philosopher Janice Daurio in Camarillo gave me a copy of a talk he had given at a theological conference on “Religion A and Religion B,” which I found very provocative, and maybe will get to later. Then at my last stop in Milwaukee (I’m in St Louis now), I ran into a classmate of the same Robert Barron, and we had a number of good conversations about his (Barron’s) thought. There is one thing that I have been particularly fascinated by, his writings on the great theologians Thomas Aquinas and the more modern Protestant Paul Tillich, on God as being and God as ground of being. Of course what I am looking for is resonances with the Hindu notion of Brahman––the divine as ground of being, and further Atman––the divine as ground of consciousness, and I think that it folds in nicely with our discussion of Chapter II of Huxley, “On the Nature of the Ground.” The latter is harder to squeeze out of Western Christian thought but the former is quite present. Some sampling, citing Barron’s own citations…

He writes about Thomas Merton discovering, in the writings of the influential 20th century neo-Thomist and Christian humanist Etienne Gilson, the notion that God is not a thing or a being, but rather God is the sheer act of Being itself. It’s so easy to, as we say, reify God––to make of God a thing, just another entity, just another Being though somewhat Bigger and Better than a human being. But God is not a being: God is being itself, in whom all other things exist. Listen to this beautiful poetic passage:

There is a mysterious reality, at the borders and at the heart of ordinary experience, suffusing and yet transcending all that surrounds us, a reality that can be invoked with a thousand names and that cannot finally be named… It is as high as the heavens are above the earth and as low as the caverns of Hell; it is as dark as a pillar of cloud and as luminous as a pillar of fire; it is the burning bush that is not consumed, and it is the water from the rock. It is the sheer act of Being itself, and it is nothing at all; it is the hardest to see, and it is what is most obvious. (And Now I See, 91)

Being itself––and not just some supreme being––is that which transcends any particular thing that exists. This is why Paul says in the Acts of the Apostles, “in whom we live and move and have our being.” And this Being itself, this sheer energy of existence, “must be that which grounds every particular thing in the universe, that which works its way into every nook and cranny of finitude, that which is unsurpassably immanent to creation.” (107) Barron speaks of it too in relation to what he calls the “serenity of God,” drawing from both Tillich and Thomas, saying that, since God is the sheer act of existence, “there is a peaceful untrammeled serenity to the divine being,” as suggested by the sacred name “I Am Who Am.” And repeats again this very important point twice on one page: “God is the act of existence unreceived, unlimited, undefined; God is not a type of being, but rather the sheer energy of to-be itself.” Or as Thomas Aquinas taught, Deus es ens––God is being.

But then he goes on to write about Thomas’ notion of the creatio continua, that this sheer energy of being, this sheer act of existence is continuously bringing forth life, continually creating, continually pouring forth as creation. Creation is not a once and for all act of some essentially transcendent being at the top of a hierarchy of being, “but rather the ever present and ever new gift of being poured out from the divine source.” We creatures are in relationship, or better, simply are relationship to this energy which (who) is continually drawing us into being, continually making us new. So the presence of God is always at work at the very roots of our being. Hence we can refer to the ground of our being, the continual creative ground of all existence that/who is “just as close to a simple stone as to an archangel… There is no place where the grounding Power of Being itself is not at work.”

So much for ground of being; there is a firm and authoritative orthodox tradition within Christianity’s conception of God. Ground of consciousness is a little harder to find.

The idea, if I understand it, from Hinduism, is that if we were to descend into and explore the depths of our own consciousness, through meditation, Yoga, training the senses stilling the mind, going beyond our shallow false self to our real self––we would discover that the ground and source of our consciousness is none of than God as well. Ken Wilber might say, “we run smack dab into God” when we make the interior journey through the meditative/contemplative traditions. It may not be that easy without a last of grace, but that is another topic. Still... What I did find I Barron’s exposition of Augustine’s teaching on the mind, which forms the basis of his explanation of the Trinity. Augustine our psychological functioning mens, which is usually translated as “mind,” but Barron suggest it might be better translated as––are you ready for this?––“spirit.” Now what Barron means by “spirit” and what I understand it to mean may be two different things, but let’s assume that “spirit” is our openness to the divine that Paul writes of in his letters, and what Bede Griffiths thought of as the fine point of the soul, beyond body and beyond mind, soul, all forms of higher consciousness. This mens–spirit is not only analytical or rational power, as we usually understand mind; for Augustine it is “the grounding psychological and spiritual energy of consciousness. It is the font and source of all intellectual activity, the spirit as such.” There it is––atman, the ground of consciousness. Augustine does not say, and neither does Barron, that this ground and energy is God’s own self, but we are pretty close here when we speak of the “spiritual energy of consciousness.”

One might say it either way, to satisfy the skeptics: we believe that there is a ground, a source, a font of being, that is Being itself; and a ground, a source, a font of consciousness, that is Consciousness itself. And we believe that that Being self-discloses––this is, by the way, what the Word––Logos is, Being’s self-disclosure. Is this not consciousness? We believe that there is something intentional (dare I say, personal?) about Being itself. And we call Being itself, who is the ground and source of Being, God. And we call the ground of consciousness God. You could either say God is Being itself; or one could simply say that we call the ground of Being, “God”; either that God is consciousness itself (Word and Wisdom), or that we call the ground of consciousness “God.”

I ran into several allusions to Psalm 139 in Joel Goldsmith’s book A Parenthesis in Eternity, a book that was profoundly influential on Eckhart Tolle, and I have found them again and again in Barron too, the idea that where can we possibly run from this? I wrote this meditation (on the “notes” app on my iPhone) and have been carrying it around with me for some time, inspired first by Goldsmith, solidified even more by Barron:

God is Being itself––Deus es en, the One Who Is––Sat.
God is consciousness, mens, logos, the Word and Wisdom who was with God from the beginning and is God––Chit.

Being and Consciousness are not two,
because Being is conscious, intentional, intelligent;
and consciousness––the Word––is the self-disclosure of Being.

To know this is Bliss––Ananda.

I am a word made flesh,
an Imago Dei, an image of the unseen God,
an individual manifestation of Consciousness,
Consciousness manifest as an individual,
like a branch on a vine.
God is the source of my being,
the ground of my consciousness.
To know this is Bliss.

I am a branch on the vine.
God and I are one––
the father-creator,
who made us by whom we subsist,
the mother of the ten thousand things,
in whom we live and move and have our being.

“If I climb up to the heavens, you are there.
If I fly the wings of morning, you are there.
If I dwell across the waves, if I lie down in a grave,
in the light or in the darkness, you are there.”
(Ps 139)

ashes on the third eye

Fasting is the soul of prayer, mercy is the lifeblood of fasting. Let no one separate them; they cannot be separated. So if you pray, fast; if you fast, show mercy; if you want your petition to be heard, hear the petition of others. (Peter Chrysologus)

In Hinduism and Buddhism, there is this marvelous tradition of the third eye. It’s located between the eyebrows (at the ajna chakra), and is considered to be the tenth opening of the body. But where as the other openings in the body lead out, this one leads in. It is the inner eye of wisdom, the eye that opens when one has achieved enlightenment, moksha or nirvana. It’s sometimes called the gyananakashu–the eye of knowledge, the seat of the antar-guru-the inner teacher. You often see statues of gods or the Buddha, or famous yogis and sages and bodhisattvas with some kind of a mark there. People who follow Indian traditions wear a tilaka there between the eyebrows to represent the third eye, as at our ashram Shantivanam in south India we would mark ourselves three times a day, with golden sandal paste in the morning, the red kumkum of devotion in the afternoon, and the vibhuti ashes in the evening.

Some years ago, a friend of mine who is pretty cynical about Christianity wrote me at the beginning of Lent saying, “Oh yeah, Ash Wednesday. The day you Christians cover up your third eye with ashes.” Cute. I thought about it for a minute and then remembered that story in the Gospel of John chapter 9 when Jesus heals a blind man. Jesus spit on the ground and made some mud and smeared it on the man’s eyes and told him to go wash his eyes out and when he did he was healed. So I wrote back to my sarcastic friend, “Yes, we cover up our third eye with ashes for a short time, but only to have them washed 40 days later in the waters of Baptism so that we can really cleanse and open that third eye with the wisdom of resurrection at Easter.” I’m not sure it convinced him, but the image stays with me.

Lent is all about Easter, and Easter is all about Baptism. From ancient times Baptisms were performed on Easter and there was a preparation period beforehand for those about to be baptized, the catechumens, a period of cleansing and formation in which the candidates prepare to die to their old selves and rise to a whole new way of seeing, a new way of living, a new way of being in the world. Interesting enough, one ancient Greek word that was usually associated with both conversion and Baptism is photismos, which means, enlightenment or illumination; Baptism was meant to be an enlightenment experience! For most of us Christians we were baptized when we were, as one of my theology professors used to say, “little red-faced humanoids” and have no recollection of the event let alone any kind of enlightenment associated with it. I often feel like our spirituality is all about trying to catch up with something that happened to us long ago, to realize a reality that is already somehow operative in the depths of our being. And so the period of Lent is a time for the rest of us too to cleanse and purify, die to our old selves and realize this enlightened self––cleanse that third eye of wisdom by renewing, remembering, realizing our Baptism at Easter.

Traditionally there are three practices that are offered as ways of cleansing this eye of wisdom, three ways of dying to the old self so that the new self can emerge from the ashes. Most of us Catholic kids only associate Lent with “giving up something for Lent,” usually candy. But, as you see in that passage from Peter Chrysologus I quoted above, there are actually three practices that go together, and you almost get the impression that none of them work unless they are done together: prayer, fasting (or sacrifice), and mercy (almsgiving, charity). Peter Chrysologus says, “prayer knocks, fasting obtains, mercy receives.”

How do these practices help us die to ourselves? Well, as for prayer, most of us don’t discover prayer until we experience some kind of need or want, and usually that’s when we turn to prayer almost like magic, and much more often for a want than for a need. But if you really want to understand the power of prayer, go to an AA meeting or another 12 Step meeting some time. There there are people who really need some kind of power greater than themselves for survival and prayer is conscious contact with that Power. There’s a saying from AA I heard once: “All you got to know is that there is a God and it’s not you.” That’s the dying to self––a recognition that there is a Power Greater than me that is not me. But the marvelous thing is that when I am in touch with that Power Greater than me, I find out, discover, that that power is actually my ground and my source, and that power can be the very energy of my life, if I die to my small self and rise to this greater one.

As for fasting or any kind of abstention––again I think it’s a matter of need. We are for the most part spoiled rich kids who have no experience of real need. We most of us have the basics of life. But I wonder: are we really free because of that? I want a soda, I am free to drink a soda: but am I free to not drink a soda? I am free to surf the Internet and send text messages to my friends all night long; but am I free not to? I am free to get drunk, smoke a cigarette, get high, load up on caffeine and sugar all I want; but am I free not to? What fasting does is put a little space between me and what I want; that self of my cravings dies for a moment. And when and if I can do this two marvelous things happen: first I discover a freedom, knowing that I am not a slave to my desires, not a slave to my bodily cravings; and then I get this sweet pure sensation of actually feeling need––feeling hunger, feeling loneliness, feeling poverty.

That leads to the third practice: mercy, charity or almsgiving. As I said, most of us are spoiled rich kids, and poverty is kind of an abstract thing to us. We don’t actually feel what it feels like to be hungry, cold, homeless, sick. Well, hopefully when I actually have a sense of what that feels like, I can actually development a sense of solidarity or compassion or sympathy for those who actually are hungry, homeless, lonely, sick on a regular basis, perhaps through no fault of their own. The marvelous magical formula about reaching out then is this: we discover that, as the Prayer of St Francis says, in giving we receive, in pardoning we are pardoned. An open heart is an open heart––the heart open to give is also open to receive. If we die to our little insular world of comfort, we discover a whole world of connection, a web of relationships.

So, let’s see what these three practices put together can offer during this season. Maybe they could lead us to cleanse that third eye of wisdom in the waters of Baptism, that when our old self dies––the self-sufficient small self––a new self will arise, our real self that is hidden with Christ in God.

the nakedness of the journey

We are called to see each arising of our day
not as a threat, but as an opportunity––
a chance to open our arms,
lay down our weapons,
and surrender to this exact moment of our lives.
(Reginald Ray)

Always on the lookout to overcome dualism, to redeem eros, to recover our bodies, the earth, and to see, as Wilbur and Aurobindo and Huxley insist, that any duality is really a misunderstanding of the seed of truth that is in the tradition, the core of the perennial philosophy. So some things I’ve run into recently.

In a pair of articles in the Winter 2010 issue of Tricycle with Reginald Ray the well known contemporary teacher in the Tibetan tradition. He himself is a student of the controversial Chögam Rimpoche, founder of Naropa Institute, where Ray himself taught for some years. He uses the terms Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana––normally associated with Theravadan, Chinese-Japanese-Korean-Vietnamese, and Tibetan Buddhism respectively, to refer to three stages in which he spiritual journey unfolds. Obviously he has a prejudice toward the Vajrayana, his own tradition, but it is specifically because he has found in it an insistence on the unique power of relative reality, and the power of all that makes up the ordinary human experience. Here we are of course in the realm of the relation of the Absolute to the Individual, the One to the many, the foundational problem of our spiritual traditions.

The first stage is the Hinayana stage. The word literally means the "lesser vehicle" and came to be seen as a pejorative term for the Southeast Asian tradition that stays close to the Pali canon, more monastic, insistence on a total break from “the world.” But seen as a stage, this is when we begin to realize that there is such a thing as reality that is only relative––the realm of feelings, thoughts, perceptions, situations––and they are experienced as an obstacle. At this stage in our meditation practice the focus is on gradually (or not so gradually!) extricating ourselves from our karma, understood here as our “reactivity,” which digs us deeper and deeper into suffering–dukkha and clinging to self. In a second stage, which he refers to as the Mahayana stage–literally the “great vehicle,” a term obviously favoring this tradition; “here comes everybody!”––we gradually become more and more aware of something that lies beneath that relative reality, “in a spacious, open and unimpeded dimension” of our existence. But in having made that discovery, we are not meant to leave that realm of the limited and relative, we are not meant to simply dismiss the world of emotions, feelings, perceptions, etc. behind forever. From the Vajrayana viewpoint, “it is actually the opposite”:

The third, Vajrayana stage of the journey calls us to reenter the world of the relative with a ferocity and intensity that is––to the conventional mind––quite crazy. In the Vajrayana we see that our difficulties with relative reality stem from our attitudes and beliefs, rather than from reality itself. We are called to see each arising of our day not as a threat, but as an opportunity––a chance to open our arms, lay down our weapons, and surrender, to this exact moment of our lives.

I suppose that’s why the name of the article is “The Vajrayana Journey is an experience of love, power, and freedom”!

Last Sunday I was reflecting on how we don’t wait to we get our lives together before we enter into service, that service and our insertion in the world is actually part of our sadhana; it is the Yoga of Compassion (the phrase of Karen Armstrong that I like so much), the corporal works of mercy. At the same time, there are legitimate and necessary times of withdrawal from the world, pratyahara, if you will, to reassess and reconnect with our own ground, hopefully also with the Ground of Being and Consciousness itself. I am still picking carefully through Teilhard’s Divine Milieu, and I am, as always, fascinated by the complementary if not opposite approach presented by the different traditions. For Teilhard we also need to first get in touch with this ground of our being, but he refers to it as, as the title implies, the divine milieu. There is no good English translation of the French word milieu, though it of course has been adapted as an English word meaning one’s social environment. (As a matter of fact one early translation of the book into English left the whole title in French, le Divin Milieu, noting the inadequacy of English to convey the meaning.) The French concept and for Teilhard, a milieu is much more than a social context. It is a realm, and the divine milieu an all encompassing realm, much like Fr. Bede’s notion of the spiritual realm, as well as Ken Wilbur’s, which is both source and summit, but also somehow saturates all of reality like water that soaks a sponge, like the smoke from the incense on my altar and my inefficient fire place insinuates itself into everything I own. Teilhard teaches that we must first become aware of this:

Before considering others (and in order to do so) the believers must make sure of their own personal sanctification––not out of egoism [he insists], but with a firm and broad understanding that the task of each one of us is to divinise the whole world in an infinitesimal and incommunicable degree. (DM, 142)

Once we have become aware of this realm, that’s when we really understand charity.

As insipid as the word "charity" sounds to us moderns sometimes, this is a specific type of love that implies a love for humankind, with kindness and tolerance. The ancient translation of the famous text is Deus caritas est–“God is charity” not “God is love” (incidentally, the name of Pope Benedict’s first encyclical), and though the famous hymn usually comes down to us as Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est––“Where there is charity and love, there is God,”––early manuscripts show the version used by our friend Bob Hurd in his beautiful and popular rendition: Ubi caritas est vera, Deus ibi est–“Where charity is true, there is God.” When we discover this divine milieu we also discover charity, in the sense that “our salvation is not pursued or achieved except in solidarity [emphasis his] with the justification of the whole ‘body of the elect.’” We are all one person, according the Teilhard, and this is his understanding of who/what Christ is––the Person, the head and living summary of humanity. (Is this not the Purusha, or am I seeing too much into this?) And so our individual mystical efforts await their essential completion in union with the mystical effort of all others who make up this body. We link our work with that of all the laborers who surround us; we rekindle our ardor by contact with that ardor of others; we make our sap communicate with that circulating in all other cells. That is when power bursts asunder the envelope in which our individual microcosms “tend jealously to isolate themselves and vegetate.” Ouch.

But here it is, and compare this with Reginald Ray’s call for us to reenter the world of the relative with a ferocity and intensity:

Those with a passionate sense of the divine milieu cannot bear to find things about them obscure, tepid and empty which should be full and vibrant with God. They are paralyzed by the thought of numberless spirits which are linked to theirs in the unity of the same world, but are not yet fully kindled by the flame of the divine presence. They had thought for a time that they had only to stretch out their own hand in order to touch God to the measure of their desires. They now see that the only human embrace capable of worthily enfolding the divine is that of all people opening their arms to call down and welcome the Fire. The only subject capable of mystical transfiguration is the whole group of humankind forming a single body and a single soul in charity. (DM, 144)

May all become compassionate and wise!

P.S. Ray also said something during in an interview entitled “Blazing With Wakefulness” (get a load of that!) in the same magazine that really struck me, referring again to his relationship with his old teacher Chögyam Rinpoche:

When spiritual instruction and mentoring become too fixed, then the vitality tends to be lost, and a person’s development is compromised… You can’t build your spiritual life on inflexible procedures and rules and regulations, because at that point your armor is pretty much back in place. Once you start living out of “shoulds” and “oughts” and rules and credentials and levels and attainments, all of a sudden the nakedness of the journey is lost.

then!

At the beginning of time
I declared two paths of spiritual discipline:
jnana yoga, the path of spiritual wisdom,
and karma yoga, the path of action.

Those who shirk action do not attain freedom;
nor can gain one perfection by abstaining from work.
Indeed, no one is inactive even for an instant;
all creatures are driven to action by their own nature.
(Bhagavad Gita 3:3-4)

There’s an upside and a downside to the self-help culture in which we live. The upsides are actually many––folks getting a sense of their own worth and dignity, a sense of an inner power that is transformative, inspiration toward greater healing and fulfillment. The downside is that we can focus too much on ourselves. I find the same thing happens often when people initially get focused on the so-called mystical traditions––Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, for instance. I’ve been working on some new chapters for Universal Wisdom (there are 30 online now, by the way: see the Sangha Shantivanam website), and once I cross over the dividing line between Buddhism and Judaism I can feel a whole change in the cabin pressure. The texts from the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, Dhammapada, are very inward focused (the exception being certain passages from the Gita, as the one quoted above about detached action). Part and parcel of this is a criticism of Christianity, especially of Western Christianity (how often I heard this in India, from Christians!) for being so extroverted, outwardly focused on God and others instead of cultivating the cave of the heart. Of course, once the polemics die down and we can see the contrast non-judgmentally, we can also see what a beautiful marriage it would be if East and West were to really meet and complement each other, like breathing in and breathing out.

I am constantly trying to cultivate for myself and teach to others a holistic, integral spirituality, that is, care of the body, the soul and the spirit: health of body, which includes care for our environment, care for the soul with its multiple layers of consciousness from emotional intelligence and psychological health through cultivating the intuitive minds of the artist and mystic intuition, opening up to the higher realms of consciousness and ultimately to spirit itself. But when I end the retreats that I offer on Spirit, Soul and Body, I often draw a circle on the board divided into four quadrants, one for each of the above and a fourth quadrant for––what? Along with my confrere Bruno I don’t always know what to call this fourth quadrant: incarnation, insertion, participation? Usually I wind up calling it simply “service.” What the Ur self-help program––the 12 Steps of Alcoholic Anonymous––teaches is that service is an intrinsic part of recovery. In other words, we don’t wait until we get it all together before we start being of service; no, service is one of the tools for getting it all together. I love the phrase that Karen Armstrong uses in her book on the Buddha: the Yoga of Compassion. There is the Yoga of Knowledge, the Yoga of Meditation, the Yoga of Devotion, the Yoga of Sound––and there is the Yoga of Compassion, the Yoga of Action. Again reaching toward an integral approach, it seems as if we are trying to put some element of each of these Yogas into our personal practices, and one essential element is inserting ourselves in the world, participation, incarnation, service, and not just after we’ve been enlightened and gotten it all together. There will always be a place for withdrawal and silence and solitude, but inserting ourselves in the world is one beneficent practice toward our enlightenment. Service itself is a spiritual practice. In Catholicism it is referred to as the “corporal works of mercy.”

Why? Because it gets us out of our small self. I like the image about pratyahara in the eight limbs of Yoga that I learned, sense withdrawal. It’s like a tortoise pulling its head into the shell for a time. I remember a teacher saying, “It’s not because the world is bad; it’s just that we need to rein in our senses every now and then and make sure they are connected with that deepest part of ourselves.” Yes, yes! That’s it. But then what? We find the inner light and that inner light shatters our shell, like the light from Jesus’ heart that blew the stone off the tomb in the garden of the Resurrection.

Often in our tradition we hear a reading from the Jewish scriptures and then hear a reading from the Gospel that is like Jesus doing an exegesis on it. For once, the opposite is happening. This past week the reading from the prophet Isaiah put Jesus’ teaching from the Gospel in context. Those glorious passages from the Sermon on the Mount: You are the light of the world! You are a city built on a hill! A lamp on a lampstand! I could say my whole ministry as a priest has been based on trying to convince people of this, about themselves. But as a minister and a teacher, I find that I am always walking that fine line, trying to know when to build people up and when to challenge then to do something about it. The whole point of being beautiful and radiant and shiny is not to stand around looking beautiful and radiant and shiny. The whole point of being a city built on a hill is for people to live there, feel welcomed there. The whole point is to participate in this cruel crazy beautiful world. Our friend Huxley writes that no religion does any one any good but so far as it brings the perfection of love into us. So “true orthodoxy can nowhere be found but in a pure disinterested love of God and our neighbor.”

What does this mean practically? In a beautiful prophecy from Isaiah he tells his co-religionists in exile:

Share your bread with the hungry!
Shelter the oppressed and homeless!
Clothe the naked when you see them!
Do not turn your back on your own!
Remove from your midst oppression, false accusation and malicious speech.
Satisfy the afflicted…

And here for me is the important word: “Then…”

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn.
Then you shall call and I will answer.
Then light shall rise for you in the darkness.
Then the gloom shall become for you like midday.
(Is 58:7-10)

We crawl into our shell, the beautiful cave of the heart, in meditation and prayer. We find the light, we die to our outer selves in prayer and meditation, and we also do it in service. And then then then… the light bursts our shells, our caves open and we shine. Remember that song I quoted last week from Daisy May Erlewine? "There is work to be done, so you got to shine on!"

This of course is the example of Jesus too, who as St Paul tells us, did not cling to his godliness, his holiness, who never seemed to be mind being pulled out of his solitary retreats in the mountains abiding with his Abba to heal the sick or preach. Rather, he emptied himself, took the form of a slave. And then he taught his followers, The greatest among you will be the ones who serve; and the first ones among you must meet the needs of all. Then our light will not just glow in our hearts: it breaks forth like the dawn!

Shine on!

Shine on, shine on,
There'll be time enough for darkness when everything's gone.
Shine on, shine on,
There is work to be done in the dark before dawn.
(Daisy May Erlewine)

I learned a long time ago that one of the biggest faults we human beings have, that winds up leading to even bigger problems in the long run, is this two-pronged approach we take to life––avoiding pain and augmenting pleasure. If you think about it, you could almost fit your whole day into one of those two categories––avoiding pain and augmenting pleasure.

“What are you up to today?”
“Avoiding pain. How ‘bout you?”
“Augmenting pleasure…”

We are forever trying to build up a life of ease and comfort, padding our nests and battening down our hatches. We are forever trying to get away from hard things, and we especially want to get rid of any kind of pain as soon as we get a hint of it, whether by an aspirin or by a drink or some harder drug, or some kind of diversion that gets our mind off it. I have two close friends who say almost the same thing: one, who endured the death of several of her family members, a difficult divorce and just had a ling transplant, says, “It’s only pain”; and the other says, “Sometimes things just hurt.” Like a death, or a dysfunctional family, or a debilitating disease. Sometimes we just have to feel the pain, grieve, wail, cry, so that it can pass.

The poet David Whyte says when we are little children we get a little black bag strapped to our waists and everything frightening or painful we throw in the black bag. And it stretches and stretches so that by the time we are adults we can barely fit through the door because the bag is so large. We try to keep on avoiding looking at all those things that we fear or that are going to be difficult for us to face, but at some point––let’s hope this doesn’t have to wait until our deaths––we’re going to have to face it all, and deal with it, and let go of it. And we’re going to have to let go of the pleasures we’ve been clinging to as well, even the legitimate pleasures, loved ones, careers, sometimes even health of mind and body. As Teilhard wrote in The Divine Milieu, “The Master of Death will come soon enough––and perhaps we can already hear his footsteps. There is no need to forestall his hour nor fear it.”

There’s a lot of sweetness and light in the readings we read in church today. First is the prophet Isaiah in Chapter 8, proclaiming that the Gentiles are going to see a great light. This is a passage that is used liturgically also at Christmas time: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; upon those who dwelt in darkness a light has shone.” Later in the text those famous lines come that is not quoted here––I remember it well because some friends of mine and I were working with this text during the summer of 2006 when Israel was in the process of bombing the smithereens out of Lebanon (with the US’s tacit approval), just the opposite of what is going on here, where: “For every boot that trampled in battle, every cloak rolled in blood shall be burnt as fuel for flames. For unto us a child is given, to us a child is born…” And in the Gospel of Matthew we see Jesus is going into the land of the Gentiles, bringing his light, a light that is now going to be for all people, not just for the chosen few.

I’ve heard is said that the dark side of modern spirituality is that it has no dark side. Lest we get too comfortable, there are three little correctives to the sweetness and light in the readings today. In the Isaiah reading, this light shines where there has first been great degradation, great darkness, and Isaiah says it is specifically by the hand of the lord that this degradation and darkness had come, like John the Baptist’s axe laid to the root of the tree. And Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel (4:12-23) is sending his disciples out not just to announce the light, but to call people to repentance so that they can actually make room for this light. And we sneak St Paul’s words in from the end of the second reading (1 Cor 1: 17)––so that the cross of Christ may not be emptied of its power. In this context it seems to me that the repentance could be just what I mentioned earlier. It’s time to get real! It’s time to open that black bag of fears and avoidances you’ve been carrying around, empty it out and face the reality of life. Or as Jesus puts it in another place, “Take up your cross and follow me.” So that the cross of Christ not be emptied of its meaning. Repent may mean to stop clinging to pleasure, even to legitimate pleasure. Stop worrying about what to wear or what to eat or tomorrow––do not live in fear, my little flock! So that the cross of Christ may not be emptied of its power. It’s just pain, it’s just a cross, and it may kill you but it will not destroy you.

There’s a song a friend of mine introduced me to recently and I can’t stop singing it. It also seems to fit so well with today’s readings. It strikes me as an announcement of the gospel, of the good news, even if it doesn’t specifically mention Jesus, because it mentions Jesus’ way. It’s called “Shine On.”

Knocked me off of my feet
But I think it's time for me to start walking again,
Stop running away from things.
Next time you see me,
I will be singing a new song
I am learning to shine on.

Shine on, shine on,
There'll be time enough for darkness when everything's gone.
Shine on, shine on,
There is work to be done in the dark before dawn.

It's been hard not to give in,
And it ain't easy living in hard times.
I know it's weighing on your mind.
Next time you see me,
I'll be uplifting, yes I will give you hope!
I am learning as I go to shine on.

I know how dark it seems,
Feel it coming up inside of me,
And I feel it in you too, in everything you do.
Next time you see me,
We'll both be laughing, oh just to be alive!
We are learning to shine, shine on.

I think this would be a good thing for us to sing to the world right now. I my circle, there are many people despairing, many people hurting, many people hopeless about life. But so that the cross of Christ not be emptied of its meaning, I think we should be announcing this good news to the world: Shine on, shine on. / There'll be time enough for darkness when everything's gone. / Shine on, shine on. / There is work to be done in the dark before dawn. And that work to be done is just what Jesus sent his apostles out to do: preaching that the reign of God is at hand, curing disease and illness among the people, especially the dis-ease of despair, the illness of hopelessness, so that the people who walk in darkness can see the great light of Christ, through us, with us and in us.