THE MATERNAL FACE OF GOD

Historically speaking, in our culture the role of men has been to create, to make new things, to fix broken things, and to defend us from things which could hurt us. All of these are wonderful and necessary roles for the preservation of the human race.

However, most children saw their mother in a different way. She was not a creator, a fixer, or a defender, but rather a transformer. Once a woman has carried her baby inside of her body for nine months and brought it forth, through the pain of childbirth, into the world, she knows the mystery of transformation at a cellular level. She knows it intuitively, yet she cannot verbalize it. She just holds it at a deeper level of consciousness. She knows something about mystery, about miracles, and about transformation that men will never know (which is why males had to be initiated!). Women who are not mothers often learn it by simply being in the  ¢â‚¬Å“community of women. ¢â‚¬ 

The feminine body can be seen as a cauldron of transformation. Her body turns things into other things ¢â‚¬”her body turns a love act into a perfect little child. Yet, in her heart, she knows SHE did not do it. All she had to do was to wait and eat well, to believe and to hope for nine months. This gives a woman a very special access to understanding spirituality as transformation ¢â‚¬”if she is able to listen.

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All this  ¢â‚¬Å“women-stuff ¢â‚¬  is not only important; it is half of conversion, half of salvation, half of wholeness, half of God ¢â‚¬â„¢s work of art. I believe this mystery is imaged in the woman of the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse:  ¢â‚¬Å“pregnant, and in labor, crying aloud in the pangs of childbirth . . . and finally escaping into the desert until her time ¢â‚¬  (Revelation 12:1-6).

Could this be the time? It is always the time! The world is tired of Pentagons and pyramids, empires and corporations that only abort God ¢â‚¬â„¢s child. This women-stuff is very important, and it has always been important, more than this white male priest ever imagined or desired! My God was too small and too male.

Much that the feminists have said is very prophetic and necessary for the Church and the world. It is time for the woman to come out of her desert refuge and for the men to welcome her. As we see in the Roman Church today, this is still quite difficult, if you have been an  ¢â‚¬Å“alpha male ¢â‚¬  all of your life. No surprise that Jesus came  ¢â‚¬Å“meek and humble of heart ¢â‚¬  (Matthew 11:29) to undo the male addiction to power.

Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 279, day 290

Prayer: Oh God, show me your Your face.
Adapted from The Maternal Face of God
(available in On Transformation: Collected Talks, Volume 1 (CD))

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In one generation after 1531, under the mother symbol of Our Lady of Guadalupe, almost all of the native peoples of Mexico accepted Christianity. A new level of Christianity unfolded in the New World, exactly as it was fighting and dividing in the Old World. I believe that Christ takes on the face and features of each people God loves. In this case God knew that the face and features had to be feminine and compassionate, after centuries of a tyrannical Sun god and Catholic-Spanish machismo. The Lady of Guadalupe is the eternal feminine, the heart, hope, and strength of all new life revealed in a marvelous brown and pregnant image ¢â‚¬”to people who could not read.

The Mother believes in this little one, Juan Diego, who cannot believe in himself. She challenges him, yet she makes him special and beloved in a love that he can understand. She empowers him to face again and again the distant father (bishop), finally revealing the inner and transcendent woman on his own chest ¢â‚¬”and the disbelieving father (bishop) finally kneels at the boy ¢â‚¬â„¢s feet. No logic is offered, no theological subtleties ¢â‚¬”just December roses given and received. God knew all along what feminist theologians are only recently saying ¢â‚¬”that sometimes God ¢â‚¬â„¢s face must be feminine. Maybe it is only  ¢â‚¬Å“the Eternal Feminine ¢â‚¬  who will be able to heal the wars, the oppression, the mistrust and the status symbols that divide the children of God. (We have only started seeing women at international peace talks in very recent years. Could that be why they seldom succeeded in the past?)

Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 325, day 337;
p. 216, day 226

Prayer:
Oh God, show me Your face.

~~

The twentieth century will be known for the emergence of the feminine mind into the mainstream. Before this time the feminine mind had never been in the mainstream of most cultures and religions, but was invariably demeaned or dismissed as inferior. However, in many of the erotic writings of the saints and mystics, and in Jesus ¢â‚¬â„¢ life, where he lived in a male body but with a beautifully feminine soul, we do find some fine ways to appreciate and love the feminine face of God.

Lady Julian of Norwich, my favorite mystic, calls Jesus  ¢â‚¬Å“our Mother. ¢â‚¬  She says,  ¢â‚¬Å“Jesus is our true mother in Whom we are endlessly carried and out of Whom we will never come. ¢â‚¬  For many Christians Mary became the archetypal image of the maternal face of God. It was the only way they could break through, especially if they never had a good man in their life. Many Catholics, especially in macho cultures, actually loved Mary much more than Jesus, or God  ¢â‚¬Å“the Father, ¢â‚¬  or the neutered Holy Spirit. It was bad theology, but predictable and brilliant psychology.

Adapted from The Maternal Face of God
(available in On Transformation: Collected Talks, Volume 1 (CD))

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Much of what we find in the eyes of Jesus must first have been in the eyes of Mary. The mother ¢â‚¬â„¢s vision is powerfully communicated to her children. Mary had to be his first  ¢â‚¬Å“spiritual director, ¢â‚¬  the one who humanly gave a life vision to Jesus, who taught Jesus how to believe. What was in Jesus ¢â‚¬â„¢ eyes was somehow first in hers. And in both of their eyes is what they both believe about God.

The Eternal Feminine holds us naked at each end of life: the Madonna first brings us into life, and then the grief-stricken mother of the Piet ƒ ¡ hands us over to death. She expands our capacity to feel, to enter the compassion and the pain of being human. She holds joy deeply, where death cannot get to it. Jesus learns by watching her, and he protects her Motherhood almost in his very last words (John 19:26) from the cross.

Not a word is spoken in either place, at his birth or at his death. Did you ever think about that? Mary simply trusts and experiences deeply. She is simply and fully present. Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them ¢â‚¬”all the way through!

Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, pp.153-154, day 163

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Sara Ruddick, in her book Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, speaks of the attentive love of a mother. In summary, Ruddick says mothers are characterized by attentive love. They have to keep watching this new life; they have to keep listening and adjusting to the needs of the child. It is necessary to recognize a new agenda with the growth of the child. If the mother cannot transform herself into attentive love, she quite simply cannot be a mother. She has to learn early on that life is about change, not about  ¢â‚¬Å“standing your ground, ¢â‚¬  which is not going to help a child. All growth is about changing and adjusting to what is needed at this moment, with these tears, and by this child. The mother cannot run to abstract truths. Philosophy and theology courses at that point would probably be boring to her.

I cannot help but think that the present persecution of the Religious Sisters by the Vatican reflects this difference. The Sisters, by and large, went toward human need and pain with  ¢â‚¬Å“attentive love. ¢â‚¬  The clergy, I being one of them, can easily stay in abstract theories and theologies and never get to love at all.

Adapted from The Maternal Face of God
(available in On Transformation: Collected Talks, Volume 1 (CD))

~~

THE COSMIC CHRIST

Sunday, May 20, 2012
Feast of the Ascension
I remember once seeing a painting in a European museum of the Ascension. It was rather huge, and at the very top, right beneath the frame, were the bare feet of Jesus as He ascended into heaven. It almost felt comic. Most of the painting was the apostles looking up in various poses of fear, confusion, and awe. It struck me that the Ascension was the final stage of His human life, and every human life, when the material world returns to its spiritual Source.

The Ascension is about the final reunion of what appeared to be separated for a while: Earth and Heaven, human and divine, matter and Spirit. They are again one, and it was important that we see ordinary human feet going into heaven! If the Christ is the archetype of the full human journey, now we know how it all resolves itself in glory.

 ¢â‚¬Å“So that where I am, you also will be. ¢â‚¬ 
~ John 14:3
~ Richard Rohr

Prayer:
My life is a joyful participation in the Cosmic Christ.

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To more fully understand the concept of the Cosmic Christ we must be ready to receive a mystery that is too good to be true. God is saving everything and everybody until, as Paul says,  ¢â‚¬Å“Christ will be all in all ¢â‚¬  (1 Corinthians 15:28). Or, as St. Augustine put it,  ¢â‚¬Å“In the end there will only be Christ, loving Himself. ¢â‚¬  Now this may sound like a shocking statement at first, but we are talking on a mystical level, about where history is going. Most of us did fairly well with the passion and death, but any comprehensive theology of what we mean by the Risen Christ has not really been developed.

Christ in His risen presence is pervading all of creation, all of humanity. The metaphor used in the New Testament is that we as Christians are the firstfruits, the adopted sons and daughters. Jesus is the Son and we are the inheritance, like the Jews were for history. To use the language of Paul in his letter to the Ephesians:  ¢â‚¬Å“Before the world began, we were chosen in Christ to live through love in His presence ¢â‚¬  (1:3).

Adapted from The Cosmic Christ (CD, MP3)

Jesus is the microcosm; Christ is the macrocosm. There is a movement from Jesus to the Christ that you and I have to imitate and walk, as well. A lot of us have so fallen in love with the historical Jesus that we worship Him as such and stop there. We never really followed the same journey He made, which is the death and resurrection journey ¢â‚¬”Jesus died and Christ rose.

Unless we make the same movement that Jesus did ¢â‚¬”from His one single life to His risen and transformed state ¢â‚¬”we probably don ¢â‚¬â„¢t really understand, experientially, what we mean by the Christ ¢â‚¬”and how we are part of the deal! That is why He said,  ¢â‚¬Å“Follow me. ¢â‚¬  The Jesus that you and I participate in, and are graced by and redeemed by, is the risen Jesus Who has become the Christ, which is an inclusive statement about all of us and all of creation. Stay with this startling truth in the days ahead, and it will rearrange your mind and heart, and change the way you see everything, because you are the Christ Mystery too!

Adapted from The Cosmic Christ (CD, MP3)

As many mystics and saints throughout history have said, God created because God needed something to love. And then, to take this one step further, God created humans so that we could love God back freely. Robots cannot love. Now parallel this to your relationship with your own children. Your fondest desire, maybe at an unconscious level, when you conceived a child was to bring forth a love object.  ¢â‚¬Å“I want to love this child in every way I can, and even have the desire that this child will love me in return. And the way I love them becomes their empowerment to love me back. ¢â‚¬ 

Apply all this to God. I think this is why the reproductive process is given to us in this sequential way, so that we can experience the reciprocal character of love. God is creating an object of love that God can totally give Himself to, so that eventually we will be capable of freely loving Him back in the same way. Humans are like two-way mirrors, receiving and reflecting.

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Jesus didn ¢â‚¬â„¢t move from Jesus to the eternal cosmic Christ except through death and resurrection to a larger space and time. We don ¢â‚¬â„¢t move from our independent, historical body to the Christ consciousness without dying to our false self, either. As Stephen Levine says, death is the  ¢â‚¬Å“imaginary loss of an imaginary self. ¢â‚¬  Imaginary because it thinks it is separate.

We, like Jesus Himself, have to let go of who we think we are, and who we think we need to be.  ¢â‚¬Å“Dying at 30? I am just getting started! ¢â‚¬  He must have thought. We have to let go of the passing names by which we have tried to name ourselves and become the  ¢â‚¬Å“naked self before the naked God. ¢â‚¬  That will always feel like dying, because we are so attached to our passing names and identities. Your bare, undecorated self is already and forever the beloved child of God. When you can rest there, you will begin to share in the universal Christ consciousness, the very  ¢â‚¬Å“mind of Christ ¢â‚¬  (1 Corinthians 2:16).

Adapted from The Cosmic Christ (CD, MP3)

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When we finally allow life to take us through the Paschal Mystery of passion, death, and resurrection, we also will be transformed into the Christ Mystery. At this stage we will have found the capacity to hold the pain of being human, not to fear it or hate it or project it onto other people. Actually, it is really God holding the pain in us, because our little self can ¢â‚¬â„¢t do it.

But the Big Self, God in us, can absorb it, forgive it, and resolve it. We know it is grace when we no longer need to hate or punish others, even in our mind. We know someone else is working through us, and for us. Our little life is not our own; henceforward, we do not need it so much. We are now a part of the Big and One Life of the eternal and cosmic Christ,  ¢â‚¬Å“who will inherit everything and through whom everything that is, was made ¢â‚¬  (Hebrews 1:2). The early Franciscan tradition put it this way: Christ was the first idea in the mind of God and will be the last idea. As Scripture puts it, He is  ¢â‚¬Å“the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End ¢â‚¬  (Revelation 22:13). History now has a definitive arc and direction ¢â‚¬”and we are part of that arc of history and God ¢â‚¬”which includes both life and death. The life part is so big now that we can trust the death part.

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In Paul ¢â‚¬â„¢s letter to the Colossians we have the premier texts of the evolving concepts of the Cosmic Christ:  ¢â‚¬Å“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation ¢â‚¬  (Colossians 1:15). Did you get that? The firstborn of all creation! So what happened in Him, and what it means to be born again, is to be born into this new experience. He was the firstborn and we are the second-born.  ¢â‚¬Å“For in Him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth ¢â‚¬  (Colossians 1:16). Here we have the Cosmic Christ. He is not just saying  ¢â‚¬Å“human beings. ¢â‚¬  He is saying  ¢â‚¬Å“all Creation ¢â‚¬  is included ¢â‚¬”Earth and animals, too. Now we have a Cosmic Christ. Now we have a notion of salvation that includes everybody and everything that exists on this planet. Finally history coheres.  ¢â‚¬Å“In Him all things hold together ¢â‚¬  (Colossians 1:17).

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THE SPIRIT
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Pentecost Sunday

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said,  ¢â‚¬Å“Peace be with you! ¢â‚¬  After He said this, He showed them His hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. And He said to them again,  ¢â‚¬Å“Peace be with you! ¢â‚¬ 
~ John 20:19-21

We still wait behind closed doors; fifty days ( ¢â‚¬Å“Pente-cost ¢â‚¬ ), fifty years, five hundred years, we are always waiting and hoping, but not really expecting. It is the day we are always waiting for but never prepared for, the day of the great outpouring of fire-laden love, the day that ties all other days together. Pentecost is actually every day, if we expect it; but, not surprisingly, this is the greatest forgotten major festival of the entire church year. Most come to church expecting no new outpouring, or maybe not even remembering an old one.

Yet it is Pentecost, the day of the great gathering in and the great sending out. The Holy Spirit must get tired of waiting for us, always hiding behind our closed doors.

Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, day 205, p. 192

Prayer:
Break through my closed door, O God.

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THE SPIRIT
We are always waiting for the Holy Spirit ¢â‚¬”somehow forgetting that the Spirit was given to us from the very beginning. In fact, She was  ¢â‚¬Å“hovering over the chaos ¢â‚¬  in the very first lines of Genesis (1:2), turning the  ¢â‚¬Å“formless void ¢â‚¬  into a Garden of Eden.

We are threatened by anything that we cannot control, that part of God  ¢â‚¬Å“which blows where It will ¢â‚¬  (John 3:8) and which our theologies and churches can neither predict nor inhibit. The Holy Spirit has rightly been called the forgotten or denied Person of the Blessed Trinity. We cannot sense the Spirit, like we cannot see air, silence, and the space between everything. We look for God  ¢â‚¬Å“out there ¢â‚¬  and the Spirit is always  ¢â‚¬Å“in here ¢â‚¬  and  ¢â‚¬Å“in between ¢â‚¬  everything.

Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, day 205, p. 192
Prayer:
Break through my closed door, O God.