YOUR IMAGE OF GOD CREATES YOU

How can we look at the Biblical text in a manner that will convert us or change us? I am going to define the Bible in a new way for some of you. The Bible is an honest conversation with humanity about where power really is. All spiritual texts, including the Bible, are books whose primary focus lies outside of themselves, in the Holy Mystery. The Bible is to illuminate your human experience through struggling with it. It is not a substitute for human experience. It is an invitation into the struggle itself ¢â‚¬”you are supposed to be bothered by some of the texts. Human beings come to consciousness by struggle, and most especially struggle with God and sacred texts. We largely remain unconscious if we avoid all conflicts, dilemmas, paradoxes, inconsistencies, or contradictions.

The Bible is a book filled with conflicts and paradoxes and historical inaccuracies. It is filled with contradictions and it is precisely in learning to struggle with these seeming paradoxes that we grow up ¢â‚¬”not by avoiding them with a glib one-sentence answer that a 16-year-old can memorize. If I had settled for the mostly one-line answers to everything from my Fr. McGuire ¢â‚¬â„¢s Baltimore Catechism, my spiritual journey would have been over in the third grade. And for many people, otherwise educated in other fields, that is exactly what happened. We created people with quick answers instead of humble searchers for God and truth, which never just falls into your lap, but is only given as a gift to those who really want it and desire it.

From A Teaching on Wondrous Encounters (webcast) (CD/DVD/MP3)

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My dear friend, Dr. Gerald May, made a distinction years ago that I have found myself using frequently. He says spirituality is not to encourage willfulness, but in fact willingness. Spirituality creates willing people who let go of their need to be first, to be right, to be saved, to be superior, and to define themselves as better than other people. That game is over and gone and if you haven ¢â‚¬â„¢t come to the willing level ¢â‚¬” ¢â‚¬Å“not my will but thy will be done ¢â‚¬  ¢â‚¬”then I think the Bible will almost always be misused.

I would like to say that the goal in general is to be serious about the word of God, serious about the scriptures. We have often substituted being literal with being serious and they are not the same! (Read that a second time, please.) I would like to make the point that in fact literalism is to not take the text seriously at all! Pure literalism in fact avoids the real impact, the real message. Literalism is the lowest and least level of meaning in a spiritual text.

Both Origen and Augustine in the third and fourth centuries said there were at least four levels of interpretation to every scripture text. Recent fundamentalism, which says that literalism is in fact the truest meaning of the text, is totally inaccurate ¢â‚¬”and very late in coming. Literalism is the lowest level of meaning and if you just stop there you will never come to any real Encounter. You have engaged your own critical and self-protective mind, instead of bringing your mind into union with your heart. It will not get you very far. It will make you willful but not willing, and that makes all the difference.

From A Teaching on Wondrous Encounters (webcast) (CD/DVD/MP3)

Prayer:

My image of God creates me.

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Thomas Merton said it was actually dangerous to put the scriptures in the hands of people whose inner self is not yet sufficiently awakened to encounter the Spirit, because they will try to use God for their own egocentric purposes (This is why religion is so subject to corruption!). Now, if we are going to talk about Lent being a time of conversion and penance, let me apply that to the two major groups that have occupied Western Christianity ¢â‚¬”Catholics and Protestants. Neither one has really let the Word of God guide their lives.

Catholics need to be converted to giving the Scriptures some actual authority in their lives. Luther wasn ¢â‚¬â„¢t wrong when he said that most Catholics did not read the Bible. Most Catholics are still not that interested in the Bible (historically they did not have the printing press, nor could most people read, so you can ¢â‚¬â„¢t blame them entirely). I have been a priest for 42 years now, and I would sadly say that most Catholics would rather hear quotes from saints, Popes, and bishops, the current news, or funny stories, if they are to pay attention. If I quote strongly from the Sermon on the Mount, they are almost throwaway lines. I can see Catholics glaze over because they have never read the New Testament, much less studied it, or been guided by it. I am very sad to have to admit this. It is the Achilles heel of much of the Catholic world, priests included. (The only good thing about it is that they never fight you like Protestants do about Scripture. They are easily duped, and the hierarchy has been able to take advantage of this.)

If Catholics need to be converted, Protestants need to do penance. Their shout of  ¢â‚¬Å“sola Scriptura ¢â‚¬  (only Scripture) has left them at the mercy of their own cultures, their own limited education, their own prejudices, and their own selective reading of some texts while avoiding others. It has become laughable, as slavery, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia have lasted authoritatively into our time ¢â‚¬”by people who claim to love Jesus! I think they need to do penance for what they have often done with the Bible! They largely interpreted the Bible in a very individualistic and otherworldly way. It was an evacuation plan for the next world ¢â‚¬”and just for their group. Most of Evangelical Protestantism has no cosmic message, no social message, and little sense of social justice or care for the outsider. Both Catholics and Protestants (Orthodox, too!) found a way to do our own thing while posturing friendship with Jesus.

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The sacred texts of the Bible are filled with absolute breakthroughs, epiphanies, and manifestations of the highest level of encounter, conversion, transformation, and Spirit. The Bible also contains texts which are punitive, petty, tribal, and idiotic. A person can prove anything he or she wants from a single line of the Bible. To tell you the truth, the Bible says just about everything you might want to hear ¢â‚¬”somewhere! Maybe this sad and humiliating recognition can be your ashes today. Like a phoenix you can rise and rebuild your knowledge of Scripture in a prayerful, calm, skillful, and mature way. Then you can read with head and heart and Spirit working as one, and not just a search for quick answers.

Maybe one of the biggest mistakes in the history of Christianity is that we have separated spirituality from theology and scripture study. In other words, we put the Scriptures in the hands of very immature and unconverted people, even clergy. We put the Scriptures in the hands of people at entirely egocentric levels, who still think  ¢â‚¬Å“It ¢â‚¬â„¢s all about me, ¢â‚¬  and who use the Bible in a very willful way. It is all dualistic win or lose. The egocentric will still dominates: the need to be right, the need to be first, the need to think I am saved and other people are not. This is the lowest level of human consciousness, and God cannot be heard from that heady place. Perhaps it is not accidental that we place the ashes of Ash Wednesday precisely on the forehead.

From A Teaching on Wondrous Encounters (webcast) (CD/DVD/MP3)

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What is God doing in the Scripture reading? With that question in mind, I want to give you an operative principle that, I believe, had it been used the last 500 years, would have given us a much more exciting and positive Christian history. If you are meditating on a Bible text, Hebrew or Christian, and if you see God operating at a lesser level than the best person you know, then that text is not authentic revelation.  ¢â‚¬Å“God is love ¢â‚¬  (1 John 4:16) and no person you meet could possibly be more loving than the Source of all love itself. It is as simple as that.

Haven ¢â‚¬â„¢t you read texts like this, and not known what to think? Yahweh presumably tells the Israelites to kill every Canaanite in sight ¢â‚¬”men, women and children ¢â‚¬”and then has them impose a ban on every pagan town, telling the Israelites to enter, burn, and destroy everything (e.g., Joshua 6-7). Do you really think that is God talking? I don ¢â‚¬â„¢t think so.

Well, you say, it is in the Bible and that makes it right, right? That is why we have to use a whole different lens for interpreting any authoritative text. How we deal with sacred texts is how we deal with reality in general. And how we deal with reality in general is how we deal with sacred texts. And both reality and all sacred texts are also fragmented and  ¢â‚¬Å“imperfect ¢â‚¬  (1 Corinthians 13:12). It takes a certain level of human and spiritual maturity to interpret a Scripture. Vengeful and petty people find vengeful and hateful texts (and they are there), but even when they are not there! Loving and peaceful people will hold out until a text resounds deep within them (and there are plenty there!). In short, ONLY LOVE CAN HANDLE BIG TRUTH.

From A Teaching on Wondrous Encounters (webcast) (CD/DVD/MP3)

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Your image of God, your de facto, operative image of God, lives in a symbiotic relationship with your soul and creates what you become. Loving people, forgiving people have always encountered a loving and forgiving God. Cynical people are cynical about the very possibility of a coherent loving center to the universe. So why wouldn ¢â‚¬â„¢t they become cynical themselves? Of course they do.

When you encounter a truly sacred text, the first questions are not: Did this literally happen just as it says? How can I be saved? What is the right thing for me to do? What is the dogmatic pronouncement here? Does my church agree with this? Who is right and who is wrong here? These are largely ego questions, I am afraid. They are questions that try to secure your position, not questions that make you go on a spiritual path of faith and trust. They constrict you, whereas the purpose of the Sacred is to expand you. I know they are the first ones that come to our mind because that is where we live, inside of our ego, and these are the questions we were also trained to ask (unfortunately!).

I would, however, offer you and invite you to ponder another question. Simply having read the text, ask: What is God doing here? Then ask yourself: What does this say about who God is? Then, what does it say about how I can also meet this same God?

From A Teaching on Wondrous Encounters (webcast) (CD/DVD/MP3)

Prayer:   My image of God creates me.

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As Lent approaches I am inviting you to look at Scripture in a new way. If you are using my book Wondrous Encounters, you will find many Scripture readings for this season of Lent. If you are not familiar with the term Lent, it is the forty-day period preceding Easter, which mimics Jesus ¢â‚¬â„¢ forty days in the desert. It is usually considered a time of conversion and penance. Using the scripture readings of this season, I would like to teach people how to use scripture. How can we put the Old Testament or Hebrew scriptures together with the Christian scriptures? I do not want to just share information or data or facts about Jesus, or history of the Hebrews, but in fact I want to help you experience an encounter between the soul and God.

I am going to repeat a phrase three times because I don ¢â‚¬â„¢t want it to just be a throwaway phrase. I want to lay a foundation with this mantra because I think this is why good theology, good scripture, and a good approach to scripture and to spirituality are so crucially important. The phrase is:

Your image of God creates you.

Your image of God creates you.

Your image of God creates you.

From A Teaching on Wondrous Encounters (webcast) (CD/DVD/MP3)

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DISCOVERING YOUR TRUE SELF THROUGH PRAYER

Prayer is not about changing God, but being willing to let God change us, or as Step 11 in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous says,  ¢â‚¬Å“praying only for the knowledge of His will. ¢â‚¬  Jesus goes so far as to say that true prayer is always answered (Matthew 7:7-11). Now we all know that this is not factually true ¢â‚¬”unless he is talking about prayer in the sense that I am trying to describe it. If you are able to switch minds to the mind of Christ, your prayer has already been answered! That new mind knows, understands, accepts, and sees correctly, widely and wisely. Its prayers are always answered because they are, in fact, the prayers of God, too.

True prayer is always about getting the  ¢â‚¬Å“who ¢â‚¬  right. Who is doing the praying? You or God-in-you? “Little old you” or the Eternal Christ Consciousness? Basically prayer is an exercise in divine participation ¢â‚¬”you opting in and God always there!

Adapted from Breathing under Water:

Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, pp. 96-97

Contemplation (the prayer beyond words and ideas) is a way to describe what Jesus did in the desert. It is not learning as much as it is unlearning. It is not explaining as much as containing and receiving everything, and holding onto nothing. It is refusing to judge too quickly and refining your own thoughts and feelings by calm observation and awareness over time ¢â‚¬”in the light of the Big Picture.

You cannot understand anything well once you have approved or disapproved of it. There is too much you there. Contemplation is loosening our attachment to ourselves so that Reality can get at us, especially the Absolute Reality that we call God.

Contemplation is the most radical form of self-abandonment that I can imagine. It is most difficult if there is not a profound trust that there is Someone to whom I can be abandoned! Such self-forgetfulness paradoxically leads one to a firm and somewhat fearless sense of responsibility. Now I can risk responsibility precisely because I know the buck does not stop here. There is a co-creation going on, a life giving synergism that is found somewhere between surrender and personal responsibility, God fully  ¢â‚¬Å“co-operating with those who love God ¢â‚¬  (Romans 8:28), as St. Paul says it.

Adapted from Near Occasions of Grace, pp. 18-19

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Starter Prayer:

Teach me to pray.

DISCOVERING YOUR TRUE SELF THROUGH PRAYER

Only the great self, the True Self, the God Self, can carry our anxieties. The little self cannot do it. People who don ¢â‚¬â„¢t pray basically cannot live the Gospel, because the self is not strong enough to contain and reveal our delusions and our fear. I am most quoted for this line:  ¢â‚¬Å“If you do not transform your pain, you will always transmit it. ¢â‚¬  Always someone else has to suffer because I don ¢â‚¬â„¢t know how to suffer; that is what it comes down to. Jesus, you could say, came to show us how to suffer, how to carry  ¢â‚¬Å“the legitimate pain of being human, ¢â‚¬  as C.G. Jung called it. Beware of running from yourself and your own legitimate suffering, which is the price of being a human being in a limited world.

From A Lever and a Place to Stand:

The Contemplative Stance, the Active Prayer, pp. 79-80

DISCOVERING YOUR TRUE SELF THROUGH PRAYER

Our operative God image is often a subtle combination of our mom and our dad and/or any other significant authority figures. Once we begin an inner life of prayer and in-depth study of sacred texts, we slowly begin to grow, and from then on it only gets better. Grace does its work and creates a unique  ¢â‚¬Å“work of art ¢â‚¬  (Ephesians 2:10).

Most early  ¢â‚¬Å“God talk ¢â‚¬  ¢â‚¬”without self-knowledge and inner journey ¢â‚¬”is largely a sincere pretense, even to the person who consciously believes the language (see teachings of Socrates, Teresa of Avila, Carl Jung). The miracle of grace and true prayer is that they invade the unconscious mind and heart (where our real truth lies) ¢â‚¬”and thus really change us! It invades them so much that the love of God and the love of self invariably proceed forward together. On the practical level, they are experienced as the same thing!

Adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, pp. 162-163

DISCOVERING YOUR TRUE SELF THROUGH PRAYER (Richard Rohr)

“Second half of life” wisdom requires prayer and discernment more than knee-jerk responses toward either conservative or liberal ends of the spectrum. You have a spectrum of responses now, and they are not all predictable, as is too often the case with most knee-jerk responses. Law is still necessary, of course, but it is not your guiding star, or even close. It has been wrong and cruel too many times.

The Eight Beatitudes speak to you much more than the Ten Commandments as you grow older. Life is much more spacious now. The boundaries of the container have been enlarged. You are like an expandable suitcase, and you became so almost without your noticing. Now you are just here, and here holds more than enough.

From Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, pp. 118-119

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 ¢â‚¬Å“Everything exposed to the light itself becomes light, ¢â‚¬  says Ephesians 5:13. In prayer, we merely keep returning the divine gaze and we become its reflection, almost in spite of ourselves (2 Corinthians 3:18). The word  ¢â‚¬Å“prayer ¢â‚¬  has often been trivialized by making it into a way of getting what we want. But I use  ¢â‚¬Å“prayer ¢â‚¬  as the umbrella word for any interior journeys or practices that allow you to experience faith, hope, and love within yourself. It is not a technique for getting things, a pious exercise that somehow makes God happy, or a requirement for entry into heaven. It is much more like practicing heaven now.

Such prayer, such seeing, takes away your anxiety for figuring it all out fully for yourself, or needing to be right about your formulations. At this point, God becomes more a verb than a noun, more a process than a conclusion, more an experience than a dogma, more a personal relationship than an idea. There is Someone dancing with you, and you are not afraid of making mistakes.

From The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, pp. 22-23

Starter Prayer:

Teach me to pray.