Presence

The Prophet said that God has said, "I cannot be contained in hallowed places. Heaven and earth cannot hold Me. But I am contained by true hearts. If you seek Me, search in those hearts."

Rumi

What a marvelous paradox! God cannot be contained or limited by physical space or by the rational mind, but can be "contained" in our hearts. As humans we are limited by our physical boundaries, our "skin encapsulated egos", and we are prone to limit God accordingly. Yet He has given us the tool in the form of the kardia to directly experience Him if we awaken our spiritual senses instead of relying on the physical senses.

In the beginning was the word....

What happens when you merge the power of the word with the language of the soul? Research has shown that the words we speak, silently or aloud, can graphically change the world within and around us. Prayers, poems and sacred writings are the language of the soul. When you take them deeply into yourself and speak them alound you cause shifts in your feellings, your thoughts and your biochemistry, aligning you at every level with what matters most. The simple and powerful act of creating a deep relationship with words you love can abe a medicine, igniting healing and awakening in you and those around you.

Kim Rosen

Football

I’m not very good at football, but my grandson wants to play. He got all the gear this Christmas—a helmet (a real one), shoulder pads, Tony Romo shirt, pants with knee pads. I can hear his bright voice, “Grandpa, can you come out and play football with me?” “Sure I can,” I always say and off we go. I am one team and he’s the other. The rules change as we play, laughing and tackling. Its about memories, love, attention and the stage of life a little nine-year-old is living. And I reflect, given the developmental differences and the shared consciousness, are my interests just another game being played with the Divine Beloved—patiently and with love, pushing at the developmental edge?

Experiencing God

He is formless, and can never be seen with these two eyes. But he reveals himself in the heart made pure through meditation and sense-restraint. Realizing him one is released from the cycle of birth and death.

Katha Upanishad

Perhaps the Christmas season is a good time to question our very human need to experience God through the physical senses. However beautiful and comforting, the accretions to the Christmas story throughout the centuries when taken literally foster and amplify this need, and obscure what Jeshua taught as the way to achieve at-one-ment with God. Although the need to personify and anthropomorphize God exists in most religions, it seems to me that the eastern religions are more forthright in emphasizing that God is indeed formless and unattainable through external physical senses.

Fundamentalism

I recently read the following "working definition" of fundamentalism, and it rings true for me.

"I know that there isn't one neat and tidy definition of "fundamentalism", but for me some of the hallmarks of this religion are:

Stubbornly maintaining the exclusive validity of one's set of beliefs over the beliefs of others, especially when confronted with a differing viewpoint;

Consistently favoring dogma over dialogue or discussion;

An inability to give another the benefit of the doubt or open oneself to the possibility that one might have something yet to learn from the other."

Seems pretty accurate to me.

A solstice prayer

I pray we, all children of the earth, no matter our path to enlightenment, come to realize that we are one. We may walk our own paths, but we are not alone, for we walk at the same time, toward the same end/beginning. From our individual perspectives, be we Pagan, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddist, Taoist, or Hindu, we are the same. I pray that we all feel the love of our Creator and by example learn to see each other as brothers and sisters, allowing the boundary lines of religion to fade away. May the Creator bless your path. May you always have enough, and may you give enough in return. Blessed Be.

FaeAisling

Reflection

When the mirror of the heart becomes pure and clear, impressions of the other world will become manifest. The image and the image-maker will become visible, like the carpet and the carpet-spreader.

- Rumi

Congratulations

Congratulations are in order for Michael Sciretti who graduated from Baylor University, Saturday, Dec. 19th with a PhD. He completed his work and dissertation with flying colors and earned this hard-won degree with great grace and joy, but also through a lot of hard work. Congratulations also to his wife, Rachel, to his children, Anastasia and Zoe, and to his parents who were all gathered to watch the Graduation Ceremony with Jackie and I yesterday on the Baylor University Campus.

Michael's dissertation, which I watched him write over numerous occasions here at the Retreat Center, is titled: "Feed My Lambs": The Spiritual Direction Ministry of Calvinistic British Baptist Anne Dutton During the Early Years of the Evangelical Revival." . What Michael has done is to research, discover and explicate the learnings and writings of this extraordinary woman mystic from the Anabaptist tradition.

I am grateful for his work, his efforts, and his contributions to our understanding. Now we watch as Michael and Rachel take their next steps in life and ministry from this place forward. The are already contributing much to the contemplative communities in and around Waco, Texas.

Paul's transcendant experience

I had an interesting "aha" moment earlier this year after a Sunday School lesson on Paul that made the connection for me between Paul's emphasis on sacrifice, resurrection, etc. to the exclusion of what Jeshua actually taught with a comment Ken Wilber made in one of his interviews. Wilber's comment was that people can experience high or intense spiritual states (usually temporary such as Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus) regardless of the stage (permanent) of spiritual consciousness they have achieved, and that they will interpret the "state" experience from the perspective of their "stage". Thus folks at a mythic or at a rule/role bound level or stage of consciousness interpret a spiritual state or experience as confirmation that their belief system is correct.

I think Paul was "primed" by his background and the myths of his time to focus on the sacrifice and "resurrection" of Jeshua as the primary components of the message. And so that became his emphasis in all of his teachings. That this also worked well politically at that time and during the ensuing centuries allowed the western church to consolidate control around that perspective to the exclusion of most of the esoteric teachings of Jeshua.

Why am I a Monk?

This quote from Thomas Merton arrived in my box courtesy of Gail Wiggin. This is his reply to the question, "Why are you a monk?" It bears consideration both for its clear-eyed detachment, and yet its inner sense of vocation. We might ask ourselves the same question, "Why are we monks?"

[to Margaret Randall, June, 1967]

“... Every once in a while someone wonders why I am a monk, and I don't want to be always justifying the monk idea because then I get the false idea that I am a monk. Perhaps when I entered here I believed I was a monk, and kept it up for five, ten, fifteen years, even allowed myself to become novice master and tell others what it is all about. No more. I have nothing to say about this institution except that I wonder if it has any future, at least as it is, and also I am really not that much part of it now. I live alone in the woods and have as far as feasible for me copped out of the monastic institution as well as out of the civil inst. Of course, that too is a delusion. But as far as I am concerned the question "why do you have to be a monk?" is like a question "why do you have to live in Nebraska?" I don't know. It's what the karma added up to, I guess. Here I am, and it would not be physically easy for me to get somewhere else, but on the other hand I have what I want: a certain amount of distance, silence, perspective, meditation, room to do the things I know I must do. I would go nuts trying to do them in the city ...”

Thomas Merton. The Courage for Truth: Letters to Writers, Christine M. Bochen, editor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993): 220.

Nothing But God

The spiritual center, the visionary insight of the Abrahamic traditions is the doctrine of monotheism—the core teaching concerning the oneness and unity of God. In the abstract this may seem inconsequential or even prosaic, but it is far from either. To declare that God is One is not about singularity per sé. It is, instead, the profound understanding that there is nothing but God, there is only God. As Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz says, “It doesn’t really matter so much whether He (God) is one or two or three or more. The true unity of the Divine lies in the fact that there is nothing else. There is no other force or reality or significance besides Him.” When we break through into this knowing, this way of perceiving, that all reality is of and from this One Reality, then we can join in the adventure, the play of discovering God everywhere, and yet confined to no one thing, still less to the sum of all things. This revelation is the sudden recognition that God was, all the while being over-looked, and now we see that the divine Existence both transcends and pervades everything, even myself.

Experience of God

I have always been struck by a remarkable quote from William McNamara's book, The Human Adventure in which he contrasts a religious experience as having tell-tale "hearings" about God, and the direct experience of God. Here is the quote:

What then is the difference between a religious experience and a mystical experience? An example occurs to me. One day some friends came to my house looking for me. I hid in the closet. They happened to hear the noise I made climbing inside. Although they didn't see me, they knew I was there (figuring it had to be me!). We were all present in the same little house together. And so with joyful excitement and heightened anticipation mingled with fearful trepidation, they began to seek out my exact whereabouts. To them, the most real thing, certainly the most influential at the moment, was my unseen presence. Well, that is what a religious experience is like. Finally they opened the closet door, saw me standing there, and even though they knew what they were going to find, when they saw me with their own eyes, came into direct contact with my actual bodily presence which was until that moment merely a suggested presence, a haunting, telltale noise in the room, they stood still and screamed. That is what mystical (direct) experience is like (146).

Humans are meant to have direct experience of God, for as Yeshua says, "Blessed are those with clarity of heart, they shall see God."

Red Book

I have received quite unexpectedly a copy of C.G. Jung's Red Book, a recently disclosed and published work that is now on display and available as a reproduction and translation of the original creative and visionary seeing of Jung. It is remarkable in every way and represents, perhaps, a breakthrough in both spirituality and psychology in the 20th century. I wanted to give a small sampling of this work as a taste of what is there for our exploration.

If we set a God outside of ourselves, he tears us loose from the self, since the God is more powerful than we are. Our self falls into privation. But if the God moves into the self, he snatches us from what is outside us. We arrive at singleness in ourselves. So the God becomes communal in reference to what is outside us, but single in relationship to us. No one has my God, but my God has everyone, including myself. So it is always the one God despite his multiplicity. You arrive at him in yourself and only through your self seizing you. It seizes you in the advancement of your life (p. 245).

Truly a remarkable quote, and not unlike the teachings of Ibn al-'Arabi.