THE ART OF LETTING GO

What does letting go on the practical level tell us? Letting go is different than denying or repressing. To let go of something is to admit it. You have to own it. Letting go is different than turning it against yourself; different than projecting it onto others. Letting go means that the denied, repressed, rejected parts of yourself, which are nonetheless true, are seen for what they are; but you refuse to turn them against yourself or against others. This is not denial or pretend, but actual transformation.

The religious word for this letting go is forgiveness. You see the imperfect moment for what it is, and you hand it over to God. You refuse to let any negative storyline or self-serving agenda define your life. This is a very, very different way of living; it implies that you see your mistakes, your dark side, but you do not identify with either your superiority or your inferiority.

Forgiveness is of one piece. Those who give it can also receive it. Those who receive it can pass forgiveness on. You are a conduit, and your only job is not to stop the flow. What comes around will also go around. The art of letting go is really the secret of happiness and freedom.

Adapted from The Art of Letting Go (CD)

Prayer: May I learn to let go.

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FALLING UPWARD

The task of the first half of life is to create a proper container for one ¢â‚¬â„¢s life and to answer the first essential questions:  ¢â‚¬Å“What makes me significant? ¢â‚¬ ,  ¢â‚¬Å“How can I support myself? ¢â‚¬ , and  ¢â‚¬Å“Who will go with me? ¢â‚¬  As Mary Oliver puts it,  ¢â‚¬Å“. . . what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? ¢â‚¬  ( ¢â‚¬Å“The Summer Day ¢â‚¬ ). The container is not an end in itself, but exists for the sake of your deeper and fullest life, which you largely do not know about yourself! Far too many people just keep doing repair work on the container itself and never  ¢â‚¬Å“throw their nets into the deep ¢â‚¬  (John 21:6) to bring in the huge catch that awaits them.

Problematically, the first task invests so much of our blood, sweat, eggs and sperm, tears and years that we often cannot imagine there is a second task, or that anything more could be expected of us.  ¢â‚¬Å“The old wineskins are good enough ¢â‚¬  (Luke 5:39), we say, even though according to Jesus they often cannot hold the new wine. According to Jesus, if we do not get some new wineskins,  ¢â‚¬Å“the wine and the wineskins will both be lost ¢â‚¬  (Luke 5:37).

Adapted from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, pp. 1-2

Prayer:

God ¢â‚¬â„¢s grace is sufficient for the journey!

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I would like to offer you a form of prayer so you can practice letting go and practice what seems like losing but is actually finding.

 ¢â‚¬Å“The Welcoming Prayer ¢â‚¬  encourages you to identify in your life, now or in the past, a hurt or an offense: someone who has done you wrong, or let you down.

Feel the pain of the offense the way you first felt it, or are feeling it in this moment, and feel the hurt in your body. (Why is this important? Because if you move it to your mind, you will go back to dualistic thinking and judgments: good guy/bad guy, win/lose, either/or.)

Feel the pain so you don ¢â‚¬â„¢t create the win/lose scenario. Identify yourself with the suffering side of life; how much it hurt to hurt. How abandoned you felt to be abandoned.

Once you can move to that place and know how much it hurts to hurt, you would not possibly want that experience for anybody else.

This might take a few minutes. Welcome the experience and it can move you to the Great Compassion. Don ¢â‚¬â„¢t fight it! Don ¢â‚¬â„¢t split and blame! Welcome the grief and anger in all of its heaviness. Now it will become a great teacher.

If you can do this you will see that it is welcoming the pain, and letting go of all of your oppositional energy against suffering, that actually frees you from it! Who would have thought? It is our resistance to things as they are that causes most of our unhappiness ¢â‚¬”at least I know it is for me.

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I don ¢â‚¬â„¢t understand the physics of this, but it is said that the reason a bird sitting on a hot wire does not get electrocuted is quite simply because it does not touch the ground to give the electricity a pathway. That is what the welcoming prayer is doing, and that is what I am asking you to do. Stay like a bird, sitting on the hot wire, holding the creative tension, but do not ground it in a bad way by thinking of it, by critiquing it, by analyzing it. Actually welcome it in a positive way. Hold on to it. As a Christian, I think that is what Jesus was doing on the cross. He was holding all the pain of the world, at least symbolically or archetypically; and though the world had come to hate Jesus, he refused to hate back.

Jesus revealed to us how to bear the pain of the world instead of handing on the pain to those around us. When you stop resisting suffering, when you can really do something so foolish as to welcome the pain, it leads you into a broad and spacious place where you live out of the abundance of Divine Love. I can ¢â‚¬â„¢t promise you it will leave that quickly or that easily. To forgive is not the same as to forget.

Forgiveness has the power to lead you to your True Self in God. Because the hurts of life are so great, you cannot let go of the pain on your own. At that point, you need to draw from a Larger Source. What you are doing with forgiveness is changing your egoic investment in your own painful story ¢â‚¬”which too often has become your ticket, and sometimes your very identity. Forgiveness is one of the most radically free things a human being can do. When we forgive, we have to let go of our own feelings, our own ego, our own offended identity, and find our identity at a completely different level ¢â‚¬”the divine level. I even wonder if it is possible to know God at all ¢â‚¬”outside of the mystery of forgiveness (Luke 1:77).

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HEALING OUR VIOLENCE

It seems to me that we have made God a being instead of Being itself. Both John Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas said  ¢â‚¬Å“Deus est Ens, ¢â‚¬  or  ¢â‚¬Å“God is existence itself. ¢â‚¬  That is the first name of God in the Book of Exodus (3:14), which could rightly be translated  ¢â‚¬Å“I am Am-ness, ¢â‚¬  or perhaps as Acts of the Apostles puts it:  ¢â‚¬Å“God is the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being ¢â‚¬  (17:28).

Being, or naked existence, is the one thing that we all are a part of. It seems the essential religious problem is that human beings suffer almost universally from a massive case of mistaken identity about their radical union with God. If we can break away from the illusion of our separateness then the rest follows rather clearly, and we can reconnect with our core identity. We are each a manifestation of that Universal and Divine Being, which then takes the form of angels, humans, animals, trees, water, and Earth itself. Until we recognize that inherent and shared sacredness, we have no philosophical or compelling basis for nonviolence.

Adapted from Healing Our Violence

Through the Journey of Centering Prayer (CD)

Prayer:

We are love, and we are made for love, and our natural abiding place is love.

~~

Hiroshima Remembrance and

Feast of the Transfiguration

(Is there a connection here?)

I think the one thing the Church should do is teach people how to pray. Contemplative prayer in particular can give people back their birthright as children of God (inherently connected to and created by God). That is the only way to know your birthright experientially.

Prayer is not something you do; it ¢â‚¬â„¢s finally something you are whenever you collapse back into the very Ground of your being. Unfortunately, we flee into our minds instead ¢â‚¬”to create and defend our separateness and our specialness. The mind concocts an identity for itself based on our race, our country, our shape, our color, our religion, etc. ¢â‚¬”the very things which are passing and accidental and not essential. These are the very things that are going to die when we die; you might say we fight wars precisely because we don’t pray.

Adapted from Healing Our Violence

Through the Journey of Centering Prayer (CD)

Prayer:

We are love, and we are made for love,

and our natural abiding place is love.

~~

If the self doesn ¢â‚¬â„¢t find some way to connect radically with Being, it will live in anxiety and insecurity. The false self is inherently insecure. It ¢â‚¬â„¢s intrinsically fragile, grasping for significance. That ¢â‚¬â„¢s precisely because it is insignificant! So it grabs atthings like badges and uniforms and titles and hats and flags to give itself importance and power. People talk about dying for the flag of their country. They don ¢â‚¬â„¢t realize that the Bible would definitely call that idolatry. What were you before you were an American? Will you be an American in heaven? Most of us don ¢â‚¬â„¢t know how to answer those questions without a spiritual journey and an inner prayer life.

In prayer you will discover who you were before you were male, before you were female, before you were black, before you were white, before you were straight, before you were gay, before you were Lutheran, Mormon, or Amish. Have you ever lived there? At that naked place, you will have very little to defend, fight about, compete with, overcome, hate, or fear. You are then living in the Reign of God, or what Buddha calls the Great Compassion. Violence is unneeded and undesired.

Adapted from Healing Our Violence

Through the Journey of Centering Prayer (CD)

Prayer:

We are love, and we are made for love,

and our natural abiding place is love.

~~

Hebrew Scriptures interpreted by the Prophets

Many times Christians have downplayed the Hebrew Scriptures. Even our term the  ¢â‚¬Å“Old ¢â‚¬  Testament could imply that they are out of date, that they don ¢â‚¬â„¢t apply anymore. That ¢â‚¬â„¢s why I prefer to call them the Hebrew Scriptures. I want that to be foundational in our Living School, because I think if you get the whole Hebrew revelation, first of all you can understand Jesus, and secondly, you can recognize that Judaism is archetypal religion. It does it absolutely right and it entirely misses the point ¢â‚¬”at the same time ¢â‚¬”just as Catholicism and Protestantism and every other tradition does.

The key to a truly expansive interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures is to read them through the eyes of the Jewish prophets. Without the prophets, you don ¢â‚¬â„¢t have self-critical thinking. You simply have tribal thinking. But when you put the communal salvation of history (Torah) together with self-critical thinking (Prophets), then you have the best of the Hebrew Scriptures, which is found in books like Job, the Psalms, and Ecclesiastes(Wisdom).

~ Richard Rohr, 2012

Adapted from Fr. Richard ¢â‚¬â„¢s teachings on his lineage

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Patristic Period, particularly in the East

The Patristic Period is referring to the teachers that emerged largely in the second to fifth centuries of Christianity. Since they would have been closer to the source, we can somehow trust their witness and their testimony. It ¢â‚¬â„¢s amazing when you go back to the “fathers of the church” (and they were largely men, it seems, because they were the only ones who got educated) we find a version of the Gospels that in many ways is more focused, and yet more broad, than the church we have now. It ¢â‚¬â„¢s very surprising.

I can see why many patristic scholars have said we ¢â‚¬â„¢ve got to return to the sources. I ¢â‚¬â„¢d like that to be a regular part of our school, with particular emphasis upon the fathers of the Eastern Church, because we didn ¢â‚¬â„¢t realize that Roman Catholics and Protestants didn ¢â‚¬â„¢t pay much attention to the fathers in general, or the Eastern fathers in particular. They have a lot to say about transformation (theosis) and contemplation.

~ Richard Rohr, 2012

Adapted from Fr. Richard ¢â‚¬â„¢s teachings on his lineage.

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Gospels, Incarnation, and Jesus

We who are Christian have often forgotten that Jesus was born a Jew and died a Jew ¢â‚¬”and lived as a Jew. He was not a “Christian”! The Gospels have been formative of my entire life vision, and we now live in a time that enjoys the fruit of immense Jesus scholarship from all the denominations.

The main, and really only, thing that Jesus adds to his Jewish tradition is the mystery of “Incarnation”; God is enfleshed inside of the material world, and any remaining gap between us and God has been overcome by “Emmanuel,” or  ¢â‚¬Å“God with us. ¢â‚¬  This rearranges consciousness so much that it ended up becoming its own religion; whether Jesus intended that or not, we do not know.

But this eternal Christ Mystery allows Jesus to be be a teacher for all ages and all religions, as he offers humanity “full and final participation” with God through our own enfleshed existence.

~ Richard Rohr, 2012

Adapted from Fr. Richard ¢â‚¬â„¢s teachings on his lineage.

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RICHARD ROHR’S LINEAGE

Desert Fathers and Mothers

The desert Fathers and Mothers were honestly not referred to that much, because they just told little stories. These stories seemed like harmless anecdotes, and we wanted to go ahead with serious religion. But in the last 30 years, there ¢â‚¬â„¢s been a rediscovery of the absolute simplicity of their message and the fact that it isn ¢â‚¬â„¢t concerned about the issues that we ¢â‚¬â„¢ve been concerned about in recent centuries. In fact, they ¢â‚¬â„¢re usually concerned about the ego (though they didn ¢â‚¬â„¢t call it that), or our attempts to make ourselves more important than we are. It is this undercutting of egocentricity, this surrendering of everything in the search for God, that makes them newly attractive. While it certainly won ¢â‚¬â„¢t be a major course, I ¢â‚¬â„¢d like to be able to bring them into our teaching in a regular way.

Paul as the first Christian Mystic

A lot of people don ¢â‚¬â„¢t like Paul, and I can understand that. I always say that Paul had his good days and, like me, Paul had his bad days. He makes some statements that could be interpreted in a moralistic way, a sort of finger-shaking way. But not in the majority of his letters. I think we have to admit that Paul was a mystic of the greatest magnitude. It ¢â‚¬â„¢s that understanding of Paul that I would like to bring out in our school. He is my personal hero!

~ Richard Rohr, 2012

Adapted from Fr. Richard ¢â‚¬â„¢s teachings on his lineage.

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RICHARD ROHR’S LINEAGE

Until recently I ¢â‚¬â„¢ve never been forced to ask myself,  ¢â‚¬Å“By what authority do you say the things you do, Richard? How do we know these are not justyour ideas? Why should we believe you? ¢â‚¬  I do think that those are completely legitimate questions. So as we began to dream about the Living School, some of the staff said,  ¢â‚¬Å“Richard, why don ¢â‚¬â„¢t you try to chart your own growth, your own tradition, your own lineage? ¢â‚¬  I did so, and came up with fifteen foundational sources. For the next days, we ¢â‚¬â„¢re going to present them in a somewhat logical order.

 ¢â‚¬Å“Bible ¢â‚¬  of Nature and Creation

We have to begin with the first bible, which is creation itself ¢â‚¬”that God has revealed who God is through what is. If we don ¢â‚¬â„¢t learn to honor, respect, and learn from creation ¢â‚¬”the natural world ¢â‚¬”I think it ¢â‚¬â„¢s very unlikely that we are going to know how to read the second bible ¢â‚¬”the written Bible ¢â‚¬”with respect, reverence, and in an open way. So I believe (and of course this is very Franciscan for me) that we have to start with the first bible, which is the created world itself, or nature.

~ Richard Rohr, 2012

Adapted from Fr. Richard ¢â‚¬â„¢s teachings on his lineage.

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Early Franciscanism:

Bonaventure and Duns Scotus

Of course, I ¢â‚¬â„¢m a Franciscan, and was formed in Franciscan philosophy and Franciscan theology. Everybody loves Francis himself, but lesser known are our intellectuals, who took the intuitive genius of Francis and tried to interpret it in an academic and philosophical way that could be respected in the universities. The two that most influenced me are St. Bonaventure, who wrote shortly after the life of Francis, and John Duns Scotus, who was a part of the founding of the theology school at Oxford. He lived less than a hundred years after Francis. Their thinking is not just pivotal in my own formation; many are finding both of these teachers very, very helpful as we try to renew Christianity and get it back to its sources.

~ Richard Rohr, 2012

Adapted from Fr. Richard ¢â‚¬â„¢s teachings on his lineage.

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Non-Dual thinkers of all religions

I know the term  ¢â‚¬Å“non-dual thinking ¢â‚¬  is still new or strange to many people. It simply means our ability to read the moment, to read reality in a way that is not judgmental, a way that is not exclusionary of the part that we don ¢â‚¬â„¢t understand. And it takes practice to learn that. It ¢â‚¬â„¢s very interesting that the term  ¢â‚¬Å“non-dual ¢â‚¬  is taken for granted in three of the Eastern religions: Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. This word would be very familiar to them because it ¢â‚¬â„¢s the best descriptor of high-level consciousness ¢â‚¬”when you don ¢â‚¬â„¢t split everything up according to what you like and what you don ¢â‚¬â„¢t like. You leave the moment open, you let it be what it is in itself, and you let it speak to you.

I was able to reintroduce this word for many people in my book, The Naked Now. I would like to continue to build on that because I think it ¢â‚¬â„¢s central to the reform of religion, to our own spiritual progress, and really to building a necessary bridge between East and West. We had it in the West, but we called it  ¢â‚¬Å“unitive ¢â‚¬  consciousness. So it ¢â‚¬â„¢s just a different word for the same reality.  ¢â‚¬Å“Non-dual, ¢â‚¬  however, forces Westerners to struggle, so I think we ¢â‚¬â„¢ll keep using it. Reality is not totally one, but it is not totally two, either! Stay with that necessary dilemma, and it can make you wise.

~ Richard Rohr, 2012

Adapted from Fr. Richard ¢â‚¬â„¢s teachings on his lineage.

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Orthopraxy in much of Buddhism and Hinduism

Orthopraxy is usually distinguished from orthodoxy. Orthodoxy refers to doctrinal correctness, whereas orthopraxy refers to right practice. What we see in many of the Eastern religions is not an emphasis upon verbal orthodoxy, but instead upon practices and lifestyles that, if you do them (not think about them, but do them), end up changing your consciousness.

This was summed up in the Eighth Core Principle of the Center for Action and Contemplation: We don ¢â‚¬â„¢t think ourselves into a new way of living; we live ourselves into a new way of thinking. I hope that can be a central building block of the Living School.

~ Richard Rohr, 2012

Adapted from Fr. Richard ¢â‚¬â„¢s teachings on his lineage.

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Much of the teaching of C. G. Jung

Some people do not like the fact that I quote the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung. I must admit that he ¢â‚¬â„¢s had a major influence on my entire life. I first read him when I was very young, and again and again he would offer phrases that I knew were true. When I first read his work, I didn ¢â‚¬â„¢t have the education to academically know that. I just knew intuitively that  ¢â‚¬Å“He is right. ¢â‚¬  Carl Gustav Jung was a great thinker, and he wanted to bring externalized religion back to its internal foundations. He brought together amazing theology (his father was a Protestant minister) with very good psychology ¢â‚¬”and he is surely not an “enemy” of religion at all. When asked if he “believed’ in God, he said, with wonderful simplicity, “I do not believe, I know.”

I ¢â‚¬â„¢m not saying I agree with every word he ¢â‚¬â„¢s ever said, but what I am saying is that  ¢â‚¬Å“much of the teaching of C. G. Jung ¢â‚¬  is in my lineage. He gives us more than enough wisdom to trust him. After all, I am sure you do not agree with every word I say. I would be disappointed in you if you did.

~ Richard Rohr, 2012

Adapted from Fr. Richard ¢â‚¬â„¢s teachings on his lineage.

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RICHARD ROHR’S LINEAGE

Nonviolent Recovery of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.

I ¢â‚¬â„¢m told that the word  ¢â‚¬Å“nonviolence ¢â‚¬  did not exist (at least in the English and German languages) until the 1950s. There ¢â‚¬â„¢s a reason for that: the notion didn ¢â‚¬â„¢t exist in our consciousness. We didn ¢â‚¬â„¢t create a word for it because we didn ¢â‚¬â„¢t get it yet! When Gandhi came along, he pointed out that every religion in the world knows that Jesus of Nazareth taught and lived nonviolence except one religion ¢â‚¬”Christianity. In very short order, after Gandhi, this became obvious to many wise people throughout the world.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was the one who most influenced our American culture regarding nonviolence. That ¢â‚¬â„¢s why I speak of it as a recovery of nonviolence. We had it, but we couldn ¢â‚¬â„¢t hear it, especially after Christianity became the imperial religion. When you ¢â‚¬â„¢re imperial, you can ¢â‚¬â„¢t hear any talk of nonviolence. You have to be violent to be an empire. So after 313 AD, we pretty much lost the nonviolent teaching of Jesus and it was not recovered until the twentieth century. It ¢â‚¬â„¢s sort of unbelievable, but in between, nonviolence was almost universally forgotten, denied, or ignored as Christianity needed to justify its own violence.

~ Richard Rohr, 2012

Adapted from Fr. Richard ¢â‚¬â„¢s teachings on his lineage.

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RICHARD ROHR’S LINEAGE

Unique witness of mythology, poetry, and art

My earliest recordings often included mythological stories, poetry, or art to make the point. Many people are more right-brained learners than left-brained. When you bring in a story, or a poem, or refer to a piece of art, you can see people ¢â‚¬â„¢s interest triple:  ¢â‚¬Å“Wow, I ¢â‚¬â„¢m with you! ¢â‚¬  Whereas, if you stay on the verbal level all the time, their eyes glaze over, they lose interest, they lose fascination and identification with the message.

I don ¢â‚¬â„¢t think Western preachers and teachers have really understood the importance of art in general. Until people can “catch” the message with an inner image, it usually does not go deep. We ¢â‚¬â„¢ve also been afraid of myths that weren ¢â‚¬â„¢t Christian. In fact, we were afraid of the very word  ¢â‚¬Å“myth. ¢â‚¬  We thought it meant something that wasn ¢â‚¬â„¢t true when, in fact, it ¢â‚¬â„¢s something that ¢â‚¬â„¢s always true ¢â‚¬”if it ¢â‚¬â„¢s a true myth. This will be a very important substratum of the Living School curriculum.

~ Richard Rohr, 2012

Adapted from Fr. Richard ¢â‚¬â„¢s teachings on his lineage.

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RICHARD ROHR’S LINEAGE

Scientific evidence from the Universe

We ¢â‚¬â„¢re living in a really amazing time. When I was growing up, the common perception was that science and religion were at odds. In the last twenty or twenty-five years, that has radically changed. Now, as we come to understand the nature of the cosmos (things like relationships, space, darkness, and energy), we ¢â‚¬â„¢re finding that many of the intuitions of religion are being confirmed by science itself.

It makes sense: if truth is one (which it has to be, to be truth), then all of us are just approaching that truth from a different angle. Science is reading it at one level, and religion is reading it at another. But we ¢â‚¬â„¢re both looking at the same Reality. So I would like our Living School to really give science its due, and to give science the credit it deserves for naming things in ways that will allow many people to know and love God ¢â‚¬”and everything. Scientists today are often validating, in different language, what the mystics and saints always believed was true.

~ Richard Rohr, 2012

Adapted from Fr. Richard ¢â‚¬â„¢s teachings on his lineage.

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Twelve Step Spirituality/American Pragmatism

Although I have never formally belonged to a Twelve Step program, I have learned very much from people who are in recovery, and I finally wrote a book on it called Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps. I think the Twelve Step program represents the best of a unique American spirituality. There ¢â‚¬â„¢s something in the American psyche that gets mistrustful and impatient with anything that ¢â‚¬â„¢s too abstract, platonic, theoretical, or distant. For the American, it has to work. We call that pragmatism.

I know that people around the world make fun of Americans because we are so pragmatic. But I think it ¢â‚¬â„¢s also what people admire about Americans. In international meetings, I often sit there just bored to death by the level of abstraction or beating around the bush. My fellow Americans and I just want to pull it down to earth and get to the point, thinking,  ¢â‚¬Å“What works? Is this relevant? Does this theory mean anything? Does it change people? Does it change anything?”

What the Twelve Step program does for many people is make the Gospel believable, relevant, practical, and workable. So I will be referring to it in our courses at the Living School, as I already have over the years.

~ Richard Rohr, 2012

Adapted from Fr. Richard ¢â‚¬â„¢s teachings on his lineage.

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RICHARD ROHR’S LINEAGE

Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory

Spiral Dynamics, what Ken Wilber also calls Integral Theory, is probably a completely new term to many of our people. In the last 150 years, there have been many attempts to chart growth, to “schedule” levels of maturity, morality, and consciousness. For me, these different theories have been best summed up in the latest version, which some have called Spiral Dynamics. It has nine levels of consciousness. The first three coincide with the Purgative Way, the second three with the Illuminative Way, and the third three with the Unitive Way in Christianity.

I am told that diplomats and ambassadors all over the world now rely upon Spiral Dynamics to help them understand different cultures. They recognize that many cultures are still largely at level three, and some at one or two (out of nine). That doesn ¢â‚¬â„¢t make them bad people, but it helps us understand how they ¢â‚¬â„¢re likely to respond to violence, to fear, to authority, and to relationships. So I would like to popularize the notion of Integral Theory, because I think it ¢â‚¬â„¢s a way for us ordinary folks to understand things in a rather sophisticated way.

~ Richard Rohr, 2012

Adapted from Fr. Richard ¢â‚¬â„¢s teachings on his lineage.

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JESUS AND BUDDHA

The word  ¢â‚¬Å“Buddha ¢â‚¬  means  ¢â‚¬Å“I am awake. ¢â‚¬  The last words of Jesus before his arrest in the garden were also “Stay Awake” (Matthew 26:38). To be awake is to be fully conscious. The Buddhists sometimes call it  ¢â‚¬Å“object-less consciousness ¢â‚¬ ; I might just call it “undefended knowing. ¢â‚¬  It is a consciousness where we are not conscious of anything in particular but everything in general. It is a panoramic receptive awareness ¢â‚¬”whereby you take in all that the moment offers without eliminating anything or attaching to anything. You just watch it pass.

This does not come naturally to us, surely not in our culture. We have to work at it. All forms of meditation and contemplation teach some form ofcompartmentalizing or limiting the control of the mental ego ¢â‚¬”or what some call the  ¢â‚¬Å“monkey mind, ¢â‚¬  which just keeps jumping from observation to observation, distraction to distraction, feeling to feeling, commentary to commentary. Most of this mental action means very little and is actually the opposite of consciousness. In fact, it is unconsciousness. It is even foolish to call it  ¢â‚¬Å“thinking ¢â‚¬  at all, although educated people tend to think their self-referential commentaries are high-level thinking.

Adapted from Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening (CD, DVD, MP3)

Prayer:

May I be fully awake!

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JESUS AND BUDDHA

The West has made an art form of the individual person; it is one of our gifts to civilization, but we have paid a big price for this gift. Because of our over-identification with the self, we overemphasize our separateness and uniqueness, remaining trapped and alone. (Even Christians usually seek an entirely private notion of salvation instead of their communion with everybody else ¢â‚¬”which would be “heaven” itself).

What mature religion does is give us an experience of what Owen Barfield calls  ¢â‚¬Å“full and final participation ¢â‚¬  in the mystery of God and creation. This means that before you identify with your separateness, you identify with your union and participation in something larger than yourself. This no longer comes naturally to us; instead we crawl back to our primal union with great difficulty.

The private self we are overly conscious of, the self we are absorbed in, is the one that mystics say does not even exist as separate ¢â‚¬”at all! Buddhists would call this passing form “emptiness. ¢â‚¬  Jesus would call it “the self that must die” ¢â‚¬”and is going to die anyway in its illusion of separateness. So Jesus would say,  ¢â‚¬Å“Go ahead and let it die now and then you will be free! ¢â‚¬ 

Adapted from Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening (CD, DVD, MP3)

~~

JESUS AND BUDDHA

Moving to the level of  ¢â‚¬Å“participative knowing ¢â‚¬  is first of all a cellular experience, a full-body knowing. It is nothing you can prove intellectually. It is something you know by inner experience ¢â‚¬”by prayer, by love, and by suffering. Paul ¢â‚¬â„¢s line, quoted even by Buddhists, is  ¢â‚¬Å“I live no longer, not ‘I’; but I live with the life of Christ, who lives in me ¢â‚¬  (Galatians 2:20). Our little self that appears to be visible here and takes itself so seriously is merely arelative identity (whether good or bad); it is not our absolute identity that we are eternally in God.

The Buddhist idea of letting go of our attachment to our relative identity is almost identical to Jesus ¢â‚¬â„¢ teaching of dying to our self (or even  ¢â‚¬Å“renouncing the self ¢â‚¬  as in Mark 8:34). Christians got themselves off of a necessary hook by thinking Jesus was talking about various forms of mortification and little sacrifices, which were usually nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on a Titanic that must and will sink. I say it that strongly in hopes that this truth will become full-body knowing.

Adapted from Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening (CD, DVD, MP3)

~~

JESUS AND BUDDHA

The Christian tradition became so concerned with making Jesus into itsGod and making sure everybody believed that Jesus was God that it often ignored his very practical and clear teachings. (How many of us love our enemies?) Instead, we made the questions theological and metaphysical ones about the nature of God (which asked almost nothing of us!). Most of our church fights have been on that level, and no one ever really “wins, ¢â‚¬  so it goes on for centuries.

What Buddha made clear is that the questions are first of all psychological and personal and here and now. We created huge theories about how the world was saved by Jesus. I think what Jesus was primarily talking about was the human situation and describing liberation for us right now. Clearly the Kingdom of God is here and now, as Jesus said. However, we turned Jesus’ message into a reward or punishment contest that would come later, instead of a transformational experience that was verifiable here and now by the fruits of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). For Jesus and for the Buddha both rewards and punishments are first of all inherent to the action and in this world. Goodness is its own reward and evil is its own punishment, and then we must leave the future to the mercy and love of God, instead of thinking we are the umpires and judges of who goes where, when, and how.

Adapted from Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening (CD, DVD, MP3

~~

JESUS AND BUDDHA

There are so many parallel quotes from Buddha and Jesus that it is clear they are coming from a similar level of consciousness. Their diagnosis of the human dilemma is very similar. For example, humans are ignorant more than malicious, blind more than evil. As Jesus said on the cross,  ¢â‚¬Å“Father, forgive them. They don ¢â‚¬â„¢t know what they are doing ¢â‚¬  (Luke 23:34). The vast majority of humanity lives in blindness about who it is, where it came from, and where it is going.

Both Buddha and Jesus were trying to give us a kind of cosmic shock about what is real and what is unreal ¢â‚¬”about what lasts and what doesn ¢â‚¬â„¢t last. Marcus Borg says he believes the only real difference in their teaching is the strong social and political undercutting that you find in Jesus. The Buddha is so insightful in recognizing the games that the ego (separate self) is playing, and puts most of his emphasis there. The sad thing is that most of the social implications of Jesus ¢â‚¬â„¢ teaching have been consistently ignored because we didn ¢â‚¬â„¢t want to move transformation to the political and economic levels. Christians kept salvation very private and personal, but largely without the Buddha’s amazing insight and critique at that very level.

~~

JESUS AND BUDDHA

In many ways, Jesus and Buddha were talking about the same experience of human transformation.

Suffering is the teacher of transformation for both of them. It is the only thing strong enough to grab our attention and defeat the ego. Suffering, for me, is whenever we are not in control. It is our opposition to the moment, our inner resistance that says,  ¢â‚¬Å“I don ¢â‚¬â„¢t want it to be this way. ¢â‚¬  The ego is always trying to control reality and therefore it is invariably suffering, because reality is never fully what we want.

Jesus ¢â‚¬â„¢ suffering on the cross was a correct diagnosis and revelation of the human dilemma. It was an invitation to enter into solidarity with the pain of the world, and our own pain. Lady Julian of Norwich understood it so well, as if to say,  ¢â‚¬Å“There is only one suffering and we all share in it. ¢â‚¬  That is the way all mystics eventually see it. That is the way the Buddha saw it. There is only one suffering, and for Christians Jesus personified that surrender to that cosmic mystery ¢â‚¬”a  ¢â‚¬Å“non-resistance ¢â‚¬  to reality until we learn its deepest lessons. The ultimate lesson is always resurrection.

Adapted from Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening (CD, DVD, MP3)

JESUS AND BUDDHA

The loving kindness that the Buddha speaks of (which is often translated as compassion in Buddhist literature) and the love of God that Jesus talks about are pointing to the same foundational reality. Both of them see love and compassion as the full and final source and goal of religion. The goal of religion is to make people like God and  ¢â‚¬Å“God is Love ¢â‚¬  (1 John 4:8).

How can we move into the wisdom of both Jesus and the Buddha? First, we Christians can start with honest Jesus scholarship, which is now readily available. We can be honest about who Jesus really was and what Jesus was really saying before we made him into “our” religion. Second, we need more concrete practice concerning the issues of the many levels of healing that Jesus was clearly concerned about, much clearer than any founding of a church institution or making dogmatic declarations. Then we will see for ourselves the immense similarities between the teaching of Jesus and the teaching of the Buddha.

From Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening (CD, DVD, MP3)

~~

THE ART OF LETTING GO

We don ¢â‚¬â„¢t come to God (or truth or love) by insisting on some ideal worldly order or so-called perfection, but in fact we come  ¢â‚¬Å“to knowledge of salvation by the experience of forgiveness ¢â‚¬  (Luke 1:77) ¢â‚¬”of reality, of others, of ourselves. One reason why I am so attracted to Jesus and then to Francis is that they found God in disorder, in imperfection, in the ordinary, and in the real world ¢â‚¬”not in any idealized concepts. They were more into losing than winning. But the ego does not like that, so we rearranged much of Christianity to fit our egoic pattern of achievement and climbing.

Isn ¢â‚¬â„¢t it strange that Christians worship a God figure, Jesus, who appears to be clearly losing by every criterion imaginable? And then we spend so much time trying to  ¢â‚¬Å“win, ¢â‚¬  succeed, and perform. We even call Jesus ¢â‚¬â„¢ very  ¢â‚¬Å“losing ¢â‚¬  the redemption of the world. I think Christians have yet to take that message seriously. Religion has largely become  ¢â‚¬Å“holding on ¢â‚¬  instead of letting go. God, it seems to me, does the holding on (to us!), and we must learn the letting go.

It is good to remember that a part of you has always loved God. There is a part of you that has always said yes. There is a part of you that is Love itself, and that is what we must fall into. It is already there. Once you move your identity to that level of deep inner contentment, you will realize you are drawing upon a Life that is much larger than your own and from a deeper abundance. Once you learn this, why would you ever again settle for scarcity in your life?  ¢â‚¬Å“I ¢â‚¬â„¢m not enough! This is not enough! I do not have enough! ¢â‚¬  I am afraid this is the way culture trains you to think. It is a kind of learned helplessness. The Gospel message is just the opposite ¢â‚¬”inherent power.

Thomas Merton said the way we have structured our lives, we spend our whole life climbing up the ladder of supposed success, and when we get to the top of the ladder we realize it is leaning against the wrong wall ¢â‚¬”and there is nothing at the top. To get back to the place of inherent abundance, you have to let go of all of the false agendas, unreal goals, and passing self-images. It is all about letting go. The spiritual life is more about unlearning than learning, because the deepest you already knows (1 John 2:21).

Adapted from The Art of Letting Go (CD)

Prayer: May I learn to let go.

~~

POWER AND POWERLESSNESS /

RIGHT AND LEFT

Lenin is supposed to have said, shortly before he died, that if he had to do his Russian revolution over again, he would have asked for ten Francises of Assisi rather than more Bolsheviks. He realized that something imposed by domination and violence from above only creates the same mirrored response from below. It is just a matter of time. He realized that the only communism that would ever be helpful to the world was the voluntary and joyous simplicity of a Francis of Assisi. (As a Franciscan, I am indeed a  ¢â‚¬Å“communist ¢â‚¬  as we share all things equally and from a common purse.) That element of the practice of the early church (Acts 2:44) and of Jesus (John 13:29) was never taught with any great seriousness. It was never expected of the clergy ¢â‚¬”certainly not of the higher clergy ¢â‚¬”and therefore why would we, or could we, ask it of the rest of the church? Jesus was training the leaders, because you can only ask of others what you yourselves have done first. He was initiating them as spiritual elders, much more than ordaining them as  ¢â‚¬Å“priests ¢â‚¬  (which is an Old Testament word never used for his apostles).

Once we saw the clerical state as a place of advancement instead of downward mobility, once ordination was not a form of initiation but a continuation of patriarchal patterns, the authentic preaching of the Gospel became the exception rather than the norm ¢â‚¬”whether Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant. The first human  ¢â‚¬Å“demon ¢â‚¬  that normally needs to be exposed is the human addiction to power, prestige, and possessions. These tend to pollute everything.

Once we preach the true Gospel, I doubt if we are going to fill the churches.

Adapted from A Lever and a Place to Stand, pp. 95-96

Prayer:

I am powerless without You.

~~

If we look at history, I think we can see a constant swinging back and forth between two poles, Right and Left, representing two necessary values. Those two necessary values have something to do with the first task of life and the second task of life, but they also need and feed one another.

The first value seeks order, certitude, clarity and control. It is the best way to start. But whenever that pattern is in place for too long or is too overbearing, what will eventually emerge is a critical alternate consciousness. Whenever the law-and-order thing is overdone, another group of people will react against it. Once you have an establishment, you will eventually have a dis-establishment. When some have all the power, those who don ¢â‚¬â„¢t have power ask very different questions, and the pendulum swings back again ¢â‚¬”eventually. That has been the story of most of history and the sequencing of most revolutions. It is understandable and predictable, although the extremism on both sides could be avoided if we had more initiated elders who held the midd le.

Adapted from A Lever and a Place to Stand, pp. 96-97

~~

It is interesting that these two different powers took the words Right andLeft from the Estates-General in France, where on the right of the throne sat the nobility and the clergy (what were the clergy doing over there?) and on the left sat the peasants and 90 percent of the population. Those are now commonly used terms in the global political world. The Right is normally concerned with maintaining some status quo, stability, continuity, and authority; that is a legitimate need and without it you have chaos. Those on the Right are normally considered innocent until proven guilty.

Those on the Left are presumed, for some reason, to be guilty until proven innocent, at least in the minds of many. (Note how even the Vatican goes to great length to reconcile  ¢â‚¬Å“heretics ¢â‚¬  on the Right, but never the opposite.) The powers that be have tended to write history from the side of authority and power, and those who protect it. Once we see this, we wonder why we never saw it before. But some form of the Right is necessary for authority and continuity in a culture, and some form of the Left is necessary for truth and reform in a culture. And thus the pendulum swings, and I guess we all hope we are living at the appropriate time when it is swinging toward our preferred side.

Adapted from A Lever and a Place to Stand, p. 97

~~

THE ART OF LETTING GO

Isn ¢â‚¬â„¢t it strange that a religion that began with a call to change or letting go has become a religion that has been so impervious and resistant to change? Many people think that what it means to be a Christian is to be in love with the 13th century or, if you are Protestant, the 16th century, thinking that  ¢â‚¬Å“this is when Christians were really Christians! ¢â‚¬  There is no evidence that this is really true but it allows us to create  ¢â‚¬Å“religion as nostalgia ¢â‚¬  instead of religion as transformation.

What healthy religion is saying is that the real life is both now and later. You have to taste the Real now, you have to experience God now ¢â‚¬”and if now, then also then ¢â‚¬”both now and later. Now becomes the pledge and guarantee of forever. The full now is always an eternal now. We are just practicing for heaven.

~~

The important and fundamental question we must ask is this:  ¢â‚¬Å“When is the real life? ¢â‚¬   ¢â‚¬Å“Now! ¢â‚¬  the modern materialist would say ¢â‚¬”the good life, the real life is now and then it ends. Many reincarnationists, pious Christians, and mainline religious people in all denominations believe that the real life islater, after death. This falsehood has framed the Christian religion more than anything else, despite the fact that Jesus clearly said the kingdom of God is now, and in the Lord ¢â‚¬â„¢s Prayer, we ask it to  ¢â‚¬Å“come ¢â‚¬  here!

Once Jesus ¢â‚¬â„¢ great and good news became a reward-punishment system that only checked into place in the next world instead of a transformational system in this world, Christianity in effect moved away from a religion of letting go and became a religion of holding on. Religion ¢â‚¬â„¢s very purpose for many people was to protect the status quo of empire, power, war, money, and the private ego. So in many ways, we have not been a force for liberation, peacemaking, or change in the world. One thing for sure is that healthy religion is always telling us to change instead of giving us ammunition to try to change others. Authentic Christianity is a religion of constantly letting go of the false self so the True Self in God can stand revealed ¢â‚¬”now.

Adapted from The Art of Letting Go (CD)

Prayer:

May I learn to let go.

~~

HEALING OUR VIOLENCE

All great spirituality teaches about letting go of what you don ¢â‚¬â„¢t need and who you are not. Then, when you can get little enough and naked enough and poor enough, you ¢â‚¬â„¢ll find that the little place where you really are is ironically more than enough and is all that you need. At that place, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect.

That place is called freedom. It ¢â‚¬â„¢s the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don ¢â‚¬â„¢t feel the need to eliminate anybody because they ¢â‚¬â„¢ve come to the place where, as I like to say, everything belongs. To live from this place cuts the roots of violence at their very foundation, for there is not even any basis for fear or anger or protection or hatred. Negativity must be nipped in the bud ¢â‚¬”that is to say, in the mind.

Adapted from Healing Our Violence

Through the Journey of Centering Prayer (CD)

Prayer:

We are love, and we are made for love,

and our natural abiding place is love

~~

Jesus, and any great spiritual teacher, is somehow talking about the transformation of persons from their false self into their true self ¢â‚¬”and then the discovery that the true self is who you already were all along, but you didn ¢â‚¬â„¢t know it. You didn ¢â‚¬â„¢t know how to live consciously out of that deep place of union. Infants still know it, symbolized by Adam and Eve in the garden, but they soon leave the garden.

It seems to me that a secular world is almost condemned to being violent, as is a falsely religious world. Both of them have too much ego to protect, because they do not know their true self in God. Most wars have had some form of religious motivation because the ego always believes it speaks for God and threatening others can be eliminated as evil. Religious egos are quite dangerous.

Adapted from Healing Our Violence

Through the Journey of Centering Prayer (CD)

~~

I think that the great disappointment with so much political activism, even many of the non-violent movements of the 60s and 70s, and why many people were not long-lasting in these movements, is because these movements did not proceed from transformed people. They were coming from righteous ideology of either Left or Right, from mere intellect and will, and not from people who had put head, heart, body, and soul together.

We need to find inside ourselves the positive place of communion, of holiness, where there ¢â‚¬â„¢s nothing to react against. Pure action is when you are acting from a place which is good, true, and beautiful. The energy at that point is entirely positive.

Until you can find that, don ¢â‚¬â„¢t act. I ¢â‚¬â„¢m trying to keep you in there for the long haul. I ¢â‚¬â„¢m trying to call forth an instrument that can really make a difference in the world. These people are the lightning rods of God ¢â‚¬â„¢s energy into the world. They can be quite adamant, clear, and long-suffering. They can even allow themselves to suffer violence, like Jesus, instead of inflicting it on others.

Adapted from Healing Our Violence

Through the Journey of Centering Prayer (CD)

Prayer: We are love, and we are made for love,

and our natural abiding place is love.

~~

If you ¢â‚¬â„¢re living from the true self, you ¢â‚¬â„¢re going to live from connection and communion with God, with everyone, with everything. You ¢â‚¬â„¢re not going to be judging, dismissing, or complaining, even in your mind. Such people change the world.

The true lightning rods of God ¢â‚¬â„¢s energy in the world, the true instruments, get their  ¢â‚¬Å“who ¢â‚¬  right ¢â‚¬”before they try to figure out  ¢â‚¬Å“what ¢â‚¬  to do about evil and violence. They wait for communion, wait until they are reconnected to Being, wait until they are conscious. They don ¢â‚¬â„¢t operate out of the unconscious, which is always reaction, which is always the small self protecting itself and promoting itself.

We are love, and we are made for love, and our natural abiding place is inside of divine love. As St. Catherine of Genoa said,  ¢â‚¬Å“My deepest me is God! ¢â‚¬ 

Adapted from Healing Our Violence

Through the Journey of Centering Prayer (CD)

Prayer:

We are love, and we are made for love,

and our natural abiding place is love.

~~

FALLING UPWARD

The greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally unsolvable. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.

~ Carl Jung

Whether we find our True Self depends in large part on the moments of time we are each allotted, and the moments of freedom that we each receive and choose during that time. Life is indeed  ¢â‚¬Å“momentous, ¢â‚¬  created by accumulated moments in which the deeper  ¢â‚¬Å“I ¢â‚¬  is slowly revealed, if we are ready to see it. Holding our inner blueprint, which is a good description of our soul, and returning it humbly to the world and to God by love and service is indeed of ultimate concern.

Each thing and every person must act out its nature fully, at whatever cost. It is our life ¢â‚¬â„¢s purpose, and the deepest meaning of  ¢â‚¬Å“natural law. ¢â‚¬  We are here to give back fully and freely what was first given to us ¢â‚¬”but now writ personally ¢â‚¬”by us! It is probably the most courageous and free act we will ever perform ¢â‚¬”and it takes both halves of our life to do it fully! The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it.

Adapted from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, p. xi

Prayer:

God ¢â‚¬â„¢s grace is sufficient for the journey!

~~

In order to construct our life ¢â‚¬â„¢s container we all need some help from  ¢â‚¬Å“the perennial tradition ¢â‚¬  that has held up over time. We cannot each start at zero, entirely on our own. Life is far too short, and there are plenty of mistakes we do not need to make ¢â‚¬”and some that we  need  to make. We are parts of social and family ecosystems that are rightly structured to keep us from falling, but also, more importantly, to show us  how  to fall and also  how to learn  from  that very falling.

We are not helping our children by always preventing them from what might be necessary falling, because we learn how to recover from falling by falling! It is precisely by falling off the bike many times that you eventually learn what the balance feels like. Those who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with. Please think about that for a while.

Adapted from  Falling Upward:  A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, p. 28

~~

When we are not able to do the task of the first half of life well, we go back and try to do it again ¢â‚¬”and then often overdo it! This pattern is usually an inconsistent mix of old-fashioned styles and symbols with very contemporary ideologies: of consumerism, technology, militarism, and individualism. These tend to be our blind spots, which make us not true conservatives at all. In fact, today ¢â‚¬â„¢s neoconservatives are usually intense devotees of modern progress and upward mobility in the system.

Most of us cannot go back on this old path, not because it was bad, butprecisely because we already did it, and learned from it. Unfortunately, we have an entire generation of educators, bishops, and political leaders who are still building their personal towers of success, and therefore have little ability to elder the young or challenge the beginners. They are still beginners themselves. This does not bode well for the future of any church or society.

Adapted from  Falling Upward:  A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, pp. 40, 42, 43

~~

Invariably when something upsets you, and you have a strong emotional reaction out of proportion to the moment, your shadow self has just been exposed. Watch for any overreactions or over-denials. When you notice them, notice also that the cock has just crowed (Mark 14:72)! The reason that a mature or saintly person can be so peaceful, so accepting of self and others, is that there is not much hidden shadow left. (There is always and forever a little more. No exceptions. Shadow work never stops.)

One of the great surprises of the two halves of life is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting. We tend to endure them more than communicate with them, because they have little to communicate. Shadow work is almost another name for falling upward.  Lady Julian of Norwich put it best of all:  ¢â‚¬Å“First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God! ¢â‚¬  I am celebrating that mercy on the 50th anniversary of my first vows today. I have surely fallen many times and my only real recovery has come from God’s unconditional acceptance and forgiveness ¢â‚¬”and from like-hearted friends, like you!

Adapted from  Falling Upward:  A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, p. 133

~~

In the second half of the spiritual life, you are not making choices as much as you are being guided, taught, and led ¢â‚¬”which leads to  ¢â‚¬Å“choiceless choices ¢â‚¬ : these are the things you  cannot  not  do  because of what you have become; things you  do not  need to do  because they are just not yours to do; and things you  absolutely must do  because they are your destiny and your deepest desire. Your driving motives are no longer money, success, or the approval of others. You have found your sacred dance.

Now your only specialness is in being absolutely ordinary and even  ¢â‚¬Å“choiceless, ¢â‚¬  beyond the strong opinions, needs, preferences, and demands of your first half of life. You do not need your  ¢â‚¬Å“visions ¢â‚¬  anymore; you are happily participating in God ¢â‚¬â„¢s vision for you. . . . Our dreams of our early years have morphed into Someone Else ¢â‚¬â„¢s dream for us.

Adapted from  Falling Upward:  
A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, pp. 166-167

~~

Remember this: no one can keep you from the second half of life except yourself. Nothing can inhibit your second journey except your own lack of courage, patience, and imagination. Your second journey is all yours to walk or to avoid. My conviction is that some falling apart of the first journey is necessary for this to happen, so do not waste a moment of time lamenting poor parenting, lost jobs, failed relationships, physical handicaps, gender identity, economic poverty, or even the tragedy of any kind of abuse. Pain is part of the deal. If you don ¢â‚¬â„¢t walk into the second half of your own life, it is you who do not want it. God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. So make sure you desire, desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, and desire everything good, true, and beautiful.

Adapted from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, p. 160

Prayer:  God ¢â‚¬â„¢s grace is sufficient for the journey!

~~