THE SPIRIT
 ¢â‚¬Å“They were filled with the Holy Spirit. ¢â‚¬ 
~ Acts 2:4
God has grown accustomed to our small and cowardly ways of waiting behind closed doors of fear and self-doubt. God knows that we settle for easy certitudes instead of Gospel freedom, for a small god instead of a Big Mystery. Yet God seems surely determined to break through.
The Spirit eventually overcomes the obstacles that we present and surrounds us with enough peace so that we can accept the  ¢â‚¬Å“wounds in His hands and His side ¢â‚¬  ¢â‚¬”which, I hope you know, is really to accept our own.

Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, day 205, pp.192-193
~~
The day of Pentecost frees the apostles to believe in a God who is actively involved in their lives and no longer a mere intellectual belief. The Holy Spirit has become wind, fire, joy, excitement, universal shareability, and not just another boring Sabbath obligation or more commandments to obey. Notice how all the metaphors of Spirit presence are dynamic, alive, moving, and universal.
The Spirit will always be totally unmerited grace. She always takes the initiative. The Holy Spirit is experienced as intimacy and warmth and fire, as the power to love beyond boundaries and ethnicities. She is presented as surprising, elusive and free, and yet totally given. The Spirit comes from no place we can control, least of all by our good behavior or even our bad behavior. All we can do is surrender and enjoy.
Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, day 206, p. 193
Prayer: Break through my closed door, O God.
~~
MEDITATIONS
ON THE MYSTERY OF TRINITY

In the name of the Holy One
In the name of the Son
In the name of the Spirit
We are made one

God for us, we call You Father
God alongside us, we call You Jesus,
God within us, we call You Holy Spirit.

You are the Eternal Mystery that enables and holds
and enlivens all things
 ¢â‚¬”even us and even me.

Every name falls short of Your goodness and greatness.
We can only see who You are in what is.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
Amen
~~
THE SPIRIT
A Christian is someone who is animated by the Spirit of Christ, a person in whom the Spirit of Christ can work. That doesn ¢â‚¬â„¢t have to mean that you consciously know what you are doing, or that you even have to know. As Paul said to the Athenians,  ¢â‚¬Å“You have been worshiping ‘the Unknown God’ without even knowing it ¢â‚¬  (Acts 17:23).
Then again in Matthew 25, the dead say,  ¢â‚¬Å“When have we seen you hungry? When have we seen you thirsty? ¢â‚¬  and the Eternal Christ says,  ¢â‚¬Å“Because you did it for these little ones, you did it for me. ¢â‚¬  They did not know, consciously; they just did what they were inspired to do.
It never depends upon whether we say the right words, but whether we live the right reality. It is rather clear to me in my old age that the Spirit gets most of Her work done by stealth and disguise, and not just by those who say,  ¢â‚¬Å“Lord, Lord! ¢â‚¬ 

Adapted from Simplicity, p. 157

Prayer:
Break through my closed door, O God.
~~
THE SPIRIT
Any way we receive the Spirit is just as real and just as good as any other. God meets us where we are and makes a healing presence known to us in the exact way we are most ready to experience it. She fills our hearts in whatever measure we are open to the Spirit, just like any true lover might desire to do.
And when grace does happen, we know that we did nothing to deserve it. It is God ¢â‚¬â„¢s graciousness,  ¢â‚¬Å“or grace would not be grace at all ¢â‚¬  (Romans 11:6). It is what makes people fall in love with God. So be open to surrendering to such  ¢â‚¬Å“radical grace. ¢â‚¬ 
Adapted from Great Themes of Scripture, pp. 90-91
(no longer available, see New Great Themes of Scripture (CD))
Prayer:
Break through my closed door, O God.
~~
 ¢â‚¬Å“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. ¢â‚¬ 
~ Acts 1:8
To span the infinite gap between the Divine and the human, God ¢â‚¬â„¢s agenda is to plant a little bit of God, the Holy Spirit, right inside of us! (Jeremiah 31:31-34, John 14:16ff).
This is the very meaning of the  ¢â‚¬Å“new ¢â‚¬  covenant, and the replacing of our  ¢â‚¬Å“heart of stone with a heart of flesh ¢â‚¬  that Ezekiel promised (36:25-26). Isn ¢â‚¬â„¢t that wonderful? It is God doing the loving, in and through us, back to God, toward our neighbor and enemy alike, and even toward the sad and broken parts of ourselves.
Adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 97
~~
MEDITATIONS
ON THE MYSTERY OF TRINITY
One reason so many theologians are interested in the Trinity now is that we ¢â‚¬â„¢re finding both physics (especially quantum physics) and cosmology are at a level of development where human science, our understanding of the atom and our understanding of galaxies, is affirming and confirming our use of the old Trinitarian language ¢â‚¬”but with a whole new level of appreciation. Reality is radically relational, and the power is in the relationships themselves!

No good Christians would have denied the Trinitarian Mystery, but until our generation none were prepared to see that the shape of God is the shape of the whole universe!

Great science, which we once considered an  ¢â‚¬Å“enemy ¢â‚¬  of religion, is now helping us see that we ¢â‚¬â„¢re standing in the middle of awesome Mystery, and the only response before that Mystery is immense humility. Astrophysicists are much more comfortable with darkness, emptiness, non-explainability (dark matter, black holes), and living with hypotheses than most Christians I know. Who could have imagined this?

Adapted from The Shape of God: Deepening the Mystery of the Trinity
(CD, DVD, MP3)

Prayer:
God is a circle dance of communion.
~~
In our attempts to explain the Trinitarian Mystery in the past we overemphasized the individual qualities of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but not so much the relationships between them. That is where all the power is! That is where all the meaning is!

The Mystery of God as Trinity invites us into a dynamism, a flow, a relationship, a waterwheel of love. The Mystery says God is a verb much more than a noun. God as Trinity invites us into a participatory experience. Some of our Christian mystics went so far as to say that all of creation is being taken back into this flow of eternal life, almost as if we are a  ¢â‚¬Å“Fourth Person ¢â‚¬  of the Eternal Flow of God or, as Jesus put it,  ¢â‚¬Å“so that where I am you also may be ¢â‚¬  (John 14:3).

Adapted from The Shape of God: Deepening the Mystery of the Trinity
(CD, DVD, MP3)
~~
Our Franciscan Saint Bonaventure, who wrote a lot about the Trinity, was influenced by a lesser-known figure called Richard of Saint Victor. Richard said,  ¢â‚¬Å“For God to be good, God can be one. For God to be loving, God has to be two because love is always a relationship. ¢â‚¬  But his real breakthrough was saying that  ¢â‚¬Å“For God to be supreme joy and happiness, God has to be three. ¢â‚¬  Lovers do not know full happiness until they both delight in the same thing, like new parents with the ecstasy of their first child.

When I was first becoming  ¢â‚¬Å“known, ¢â‚¬  people wanted to get close to me and be my friend or have a special relationship with me. I asked myself how I would choose between all these friends and I realized that the people I really found joy in were not always people who loved me nearly as much as people who loved what I loved. That helped me understand what I think Richard of St. Victor was trying to teach. The Holy Spirit is the shared love of the Father and the Son, and shared love is always happiness and joy. The Holy Spirit is whatever the Father and the Son are excited about; She is that excitement ¢â‚¬”about everything in creation!
~~

Paul says,  ¢â‚¬Å“God ¢â‚¬â„¢s weakness is stronger than human strength ¢â‚¬  (1 Corinthians 1:25). That awesome line gives us a key into the Mystery of Trinity. I would describe human strength as self-sufficiency or autonomy. God ¢â‚¬â„¢s weakness I would describe as Interbeing.

Human strength admires holding on. The Mystery of the Trinity is about each One letting go into the Other. Human strength admires personal independence. God ¢â‚¬â„¢s Mystery is total mutual dependence. We like control. God loves vulnerability. We admire needing no one. The Trinity is total intercommunion with all things and all Being. We are practiced at hiding and protecting ourselves. God seems to be in some kind of total disclosure for the sake of the other.

Our strength, we think, is in asserting and protecting our boundaries. God is into dissolving boundaries between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, yet finding them in that very outpouring! Take the rest of your life to begin to unpackage such a total turnaround of Reality.
~~
A Threefold God totally lets go of any boundaries for the sake of the Other, and then receives them back from Another. It is a nonstop waterwheel of Love. Each accepts that He is fully accepted by the Other, and then passes on that total acceptance. Thus  ¢â‚¬Å“God is Love. ¢â‚¬  It ¢â‚¬â„¢s the same spiritual journey for all of us, and it takes most of our life to accept that we are accepted ¢â‚¬”and to accept everyone else. Most can ¢â‚¬â„¢t do this easily because internally there is so much self-accusation (self-flagellation in many cases). Most are so convinced that they are not the body of Christ, that they are unworthy, that we are not in radical union with God.

The good news is that the question of union has already been resolved once and for all. We cannot create our union with God from our side. It is objectively already given to us by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us (Romans 8:9 ¢â‚¬”and all over the place!). Once we know we are that grounded, founded, and home free, we can also stop defending ourselves and move beyond our self-protectiveness, too.
~~
Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist who was a major contributor to quantum physics and nuclear fission, said the universe is  ¢â‚¬Å“not only stranger than we think, but stranger than we can think. ¢â‚¬  Our supposed logic has to break down before we can comprehend the nature of the universe and the bare beginnings of the nature of God.

I think the doctrine of the Trinity is saying the same thing. There is something that can only be known experientially, and that is why we teach contemplative prayer and quiet. Of all the religious rituals and practices I know of, nothing will lead us to that place of nakedness and vulnerability more than forms of solitude and silence, where our ego identity falls away, where our explanations don ¢â‚¬â„¢t mean anything, where our superiority doesn ¢â‚¬â„¢t matter and we have to sit there in our naked  ¢â‚¬Å“who-ness. ¢â‚¬  If God wants to get through to us, and the Trinity experience wants to come alive in us, that ¢â‚¬â„¢s when God has the best chance. God is not only stranger than we think, but stranger than the logical mind can think. Perhaps much of the weakness of the first 2000 years of reflection on the Trinity, and many of our doctrines and dogmas, is that we ¢â‚¬â„¢ve tried to do it with a logical mind instead of with prayer.
~~

EUCHARIST AS TOUCHSTONE
Sunday, June 10, 2012
I believe that the primary healing of human loneliness and meaninglessness is full contact with full reality itself, especially in its concrete forms (instead of just ideas and concepts). But, as T. S. Elliot said in the Four Quartets,  ¢â‚¬Å“[Human]kind cannot bear very much reality. ¢â‚¬  What human existence often prefers is highly contrived ways of avoiding the real, the concrete, the physical. We fabricate artificial realities instead, one of which, I’m sad to say, is religion itself. So Jesus brought all of our fancy thinking down to earth, to one concrete place of incarnation ¢â‚¬”this bread and this cup of wine!  ¢â‚¬Å“Eat it here, and then see it everywhere, ¢â‚¬  He seems to be saying.

If it’s too idealized and pretty, if it’s somewhere floating around up in the air, it’s probably not the Gospel. We come back, again and again, to this marvelous touchstone of orthodoxy, the Eucharist. Eucharist, in the first physical incarnation in the body of Jesus, is now continued in space and time in ordinary food. Note how John (6:53-66) almost embarrassingly keeps insisting on the fleshly physicality of it all! And  ¢â‚¬Å“many left Him and stopped going with Him ¢â‚¬  (John 6:66). It is still an embarrassment of sorts, so we high churches surround the scandal with all kinds of pretty gold and lace and candles.

Adapted from Eucharist as Touchstone (CD, MP3)

Prayer: Eucharisteo. I give thanks.

~~

EUCHARIST AS TOUCHSTONE

The mystery of Eucharist clarifies and delineates Christianity from the other religions of the world. We have many things in common, but Christianity is the only religion that says that God became a human body; God became flesh, as John’s Gospel puts it (1:14). Our fancy theological word for that is the Incarnation, the enfleshment. It seems that it is much easier for God to convince bread of what it is than for God to convince us. Incarnation is scandalous, shocking ¢â‚¬”cannibalistic, intimate, sexual! He did not say,  ¢â‚¬Å“Think about this, ¢â‚¬   ¢â‚¬Å“Fight about this, ¢â‚¬   ¢â‚¬Å“Stare at this; ¢â‚¬  but He said  ¢â‚¬Å“Eat this! ¢â‚¬  A dynamic, interactive event that makes one out of two.

If we did not have the Eucharist, we would have to create it; sometimes it seems that outsiders can appreciate it more than Christians. As Gandhi said,  ¢â‚¬Å“There are so many hungry people in the world that God could only come into the world in the form of food. ¢â‚¬  It is marvelous, that God would enter our lives not just in the form of sermons or Bibles, but in food. God comes to feed us more than just teach us. Lovers understand that.

Adapted from Eucharist as Touchstone (CD, MP3)

Prayer: Eucharisteo. I give thanks.

~~

When we start making the Eucharistic meal something to define membership instead of to proclaim grace and gift, we always get in trouble; that ¢â‚¬â„¢s been the temptation of every denomination that has the Eucharist. Too often we use Eucharist to separate who ¢â‚¬â„¢s in from who ¢â‚¬â„¢s out, who ¢â‚¬â„¢s worthy from who ¢â‚¬â„¢s unworthy, instead of to declare that all of us are radically unworthy, and that worthiness is not even the issue. If worthiness is the issue, who can stand before God? Are those who receive actually saying they are  ¢â‚¬Å“worthy ¢â‚¬ ? I hope not. It is an ego statement to begin with.

The issue is not worthiness; the issue is trust and surrender or, as Th ƒ ©r ƒ ¨se of Lisieux said,  ¢â‚¬Å“It all comes down to confidence and gratitude. ¢â‚¬  I think that explains the joyous character with which we so often celebrate the Eucharist. We are pulled into immense gratitude and joy for such constant and unearned grace. It doesn ¢â‚¬â„¢t get any better than this! All we can do at Eucharist is kneel in gratitude and then stand in confidence. (Actually, St. Augustine said that the proper Christian posture for prayer was standing, because we no longer had to grovel before such a God or fear any God that is like Jesus.)

~~

The hiding place of God, the revelation place of God, is the material world.

You don ¢â‚¬â„¢t have to put spirit and matter together; they have been together ever since the Big Bang, 14.6 billion years ago (see Genesis 1:1-2 andJohn 1:1-5). You have to get on your knees and recognize this momentous truth as already and always so. The Eucharist offers microcosmic moments of belief, and love of what is cosmically true. It will surely take a lifetime of kneeling and surrendering, trusting and letting go, believing and saying,  ¢â‚¬Å“How could this be true? ¢â‚¬  Gandhi also said, “If I really believed what you believe, I wouldn’t get up from my knees.” The only trouble is that many fervent Christians kneel before the Eucharistic Body of Christ but not the Human Body of Christ that Paul brilliantly describes (1 Corinthians 12:12-26). Remember, it is much easier for God to transform bread than to transform people, and the bread is for the sake of the people.

Adapted from Eucharist as Touchstone (CD, MP3)

~~

Christ is the bread, awaiting hunger.

~ St. Augustine

Eucharist is presence encountering presence ¢â‚¬”mutuality, vulnerability. There is nothing to prove, to protect, or to sell. It feels so empty, naked, and harmless, that all you can do is be present.

The Eucharist is telling us that God is the food and all we have to do is provide the hunger. Somehow we have to make sure that each day we are hungry, that there ¢â‚¬â„¢s room inside of us for another presence. If you are filled with your own opinions, ideas, righteousness, superiority, or sufficiency, you are a world unto yourself and there is no room for  ¢â‚¬Å“another. ¢â‚¬  Despite all our attempts to define who is worthy and who is not worthy to receive communion,  our only ticket or prerequisite for coming to Eucharist is hunger.  And most often sinners are much more hungry than the  ¢â‚¬Å“saints. ¢â‚¬ 

~~

Jesus says,  ¢â‚¬Å“If you eat this bread you will live forever ¢â‚¬  (John 6:51). You’re indestructible, as it were. You see, if I live by the momentary identity that others give me, that ¢â‚¬â„¢s what dies when I die, and I ¢â‚¬â„¢m left with nothing. Your relative identity is what passes away. When Jesus says He’s giving Himself to you as the  ¢â‚¬Å“bread of life ¢â‚¬  and  ¢â‚¬Å“If you eat this bread you will live forever, ¢â‚¬  he’s saying,  ¢â‚¬Å“Find yourself in Me, and this will not pass or change or die. Eat this food as your primary nutrition, and you are indestructible. ¢â‚¬ 

You learn to live in what Thomas Merton would call the True Self ¢â‚¬”who you are, and always have been, in God. Who you are in God is who you forever are. In fact, that’s all you are, and it is more than enough. Everything else is passing away. Reputations, titles, and roles do not determine our identity. As Paul puts it,  ¢â‚¬Å“I live no longer; not I, but God lives in me ¢â‚¬  (Galatians 2:20). When I hand out the bread I love to say to the assembly,  ¢â‚¬Å“You become what you eat. Come and eat who you are! ¢â‚¬ 

Adapted from  Eucharist as Touchstone

~~

This absolute touchstone, this body and blood of Christ, is a place we must come to again and again to find our face, to find our name and our absolute identity in God. It takes years to sink in. It is too big a truth for any one moment, too grand and wonderful for our small hearts and minds.

And so we keep eating this mystery that is simultaneously the joy of God and the suffering of God packed into one. (Some see the body-bread as the joy and the blood-wine as the suffering). All we can do is be present, because we cannot ever rationally understand this. When the two presences meet, then we have what Catholics brilliantly call  ¢â‚¬Å“the Real Presence. ¢â‚¬ 

~~

THE PERENNIAL TRADITION

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Father’s Day

I can ¢â‚¬â„¢t believe that God expects every human being to start from zero and to reinvent the wheel of life in their own small lifetime. We must build on the common “communion of saints” throughout the ages. This is the inherited fruit and gift which is sometimes called the Wisdom Tradition. It is not always inherited simply by belonging to one group or religion. It largely depends on how informed, mature, and experienced your particular teachers are. Most seminaries, I am afraid, merely exposed ministers to their own denomination’s conclusions and did not have time for much interfaith or ecumenical education, which broadens the field ¢â‚¬”from “my religion which has the whole truth” to “universal wisdom which my religion teaches in this way. ¢â‚¬  If it is true, then it has to be true everywhere.

There have been generations who ¢â‚¬â„¢ve gone through the same human journey and there is plenty of collective and common wisdom to be had. It is often called “the perennial tradition” or the “perennial philosophy” because it keeps recurring in different religions and with different metaphors. But the foundational wisdom is usually the same. I guess on this “Father’s Day, ¢â‚¬  I would say these master teachers are the true “Fathers of the Church” ¢â‚¬”of course, with lots of Mothers doing the same. This is what we hope to hand on in the Living School that we will start in 2013 (for more information, visit cac.org after July 1, 2012).

Adapted from a non-published talk at a conference in Assisi, Italy, May 2012

Prayer:

 ¢â‚¬Å“That all may be one ¢â‚¬  (John 17:21)

~~

The perennial philosophy, or perennial tradition, is going to be the undergirding of our Living School, which we hope will expose people to the great Wisdom Tradition, based also in Christianity in its own concrete way (“Incarnation”!). The perennial tradition includes a recurring theme in all of the world ¢â‚¬â„¢s religions and philosophies. They continue to say, each in their own way:

• There is a Divine Reality underneath and inherent in the world of things.
• There is in the human soul a natural capacity for, similarity to, and longing for this Divine Reality.
• The final goal of all existence is union with this Divine Reality.

Adapted from a document distributed at a conference in Assisi, Italy, May 2012

Prayer:    ¢â‚¬Å“That all may be one ¢â‚¬   (John 17:21)

~~

THE PERENNIAL TRADITION

The perennial tradition was defined by Aldous Huxley in his book The Perennial Philosophy. In essence, he said this teaching is immemorial and universal. This would make sense if the Holy Spirit is guiding all of history.

The perennial philosophy recognizes again and again in different religions and in different ways and with different languages that there is a Divine Reality substantial to the world of things. There is something eternal, there ¢â‚¬â„¢s something transcendental to the world of things, lives, souls, and minds. The goal of human existence is quite simply to experience union with that Reality, ideally on every level. Jesus, of course, says the same (Mark 12:30), and in fact, equates love of others, love of self, and love of God throughout his teaching.

Adapted from a non-published talk at a conference in Assisi, Italy, May 2012

Prayer:

 ¢â‚¬Å“That all may be one ¢â‚¬  (John 17:21)

~~

Summer Solstice

The perennial tradition is not just a metaphysic, but it ¢â‚¬â„¢s a psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, that Divine Reality. That ¢â‚¬â„¢s the “univocity of being, ¢â‚¬  as John Duns Scotus called it. The assumption of philosophers is that you have no way to understand another thing, even minimally, unless there is a little bit of it already in you. Like knows like. If something is completely foreign to you, you ¢â‚¬â„¢re normally bored by it. There has to be a little bit of something in you to recognize, or to be attracted to, or to be drawn to that thing. We cannot deeply experience or even desire union with something that is totally foreign or alien to us. So God planted a little bit of God inside of us ¢â‚¬”and all things. It seduces us into even more universal love and life.

Today, may Brother Sun, at his zenith, call forth that same sunshine which is in you.

~~

The perennial tradition is not just a metaphysic, it ¢â‚¬â„¢s not just a psychology; it also becomes an ethic that places a person ¢â‚¬â„¢s final end in seeking union with all things. This is the simple goal of our existence. If your religion is not helping you to do that, then you ¢â‚¬â„¢d better get a new religion.

Most people, particularly young people, have no knowledge that the purpose of their life is union with Divine Reality. They have been told that the purpose of life is to get a degree and make money and have kids and die. That ¢â‚¬â„¢s the narrowed-down secular understanding of reality, which is de facto followed by many Christians. Most are no longer connected to the perennial philosophy, and just waste time fighting their own religion. This is not wisdom at all ¢â‚¬”it is low-level survival. We ¢â‚¬â„¢re now living in a largely survival mode in our culture. No wonder so many of our kids turn to drugs, drink, and promiscuous sex, because there ¢â‚¬â„¢s nothing else that ¢â‚¬â„¢s very exciting or very true.

~~

Philosophy in general, and the perennial philosophy in particular, loves to talk about the Big Picture. What is the nature of “Being” in itself, for example?

The Scholastic philosophers were in rather universal agreement that the character of BEING is that it is always ONE (this is the basis for non-dual consciousness), it is always TRUE, and it is always GOOD. These were called the three transcendentals. Naked IS-NESS is the most foundational level of being. Pure being is always one (inherently connected). It ¢â‚¬â„¢s always at its foundation true, and it ¢â‚¬â„¢s always good. It starts with original blessing and not “original sin”! If you were connected inherently with the nature of BEING, you would always be united and uniting, you would always do the inherently true thing, and you would always do the morally good thing. That is the ideal and it is still our goal.

~~

Franciscan John Duns Scotus says that when the one, and the true, and the good are operating in unity, whatever is happening will always also bebeautiful! This is his de facto definition of beauty: the harmony between unity, truth, and goodness. When you can see all three, or even one, you will always be delighted. Whenever naked being (always united, somehow true, and somehow good) shows itself, I will have the ability to see there ¢â‚¬â„¢s something beautiful about it, too, even though it might be broken, or poor, or sad, or suffering. Scotus was merely making a grounding philosophy out of Francis’ own love of lepers, the marginalized, and the poor ¢â‚¬”whom he found “beautiful”!

Beauty is experienced precisely in our ability to hold together the oneness, the truthfulness, and the goodness of things ¢â‚¬”despite all the seeming contrary evidence (which is always there!).

~~

Adapted from a non-published talk at a conference in Assisi, Italy, May 2012

Prayer:

 ¢â‚¬Å“That all may be one ¢â‚¬  (John 17:21)