relearning what our souls already know...

There is a profoundly wise statement John Phillip Newell makes in his most recent book, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul, that has been swimming around inside me for a few months. Newell's wisdom percolated up inside me again this week urging me to give it my full attention: he writes that this moment in time must be about "relearning what our souls already know."

We know things in the core of our being that we have not necessarily been taught, and some of this deep knowing may actually be at oddes with what our society or religion has tried to teach us... In the Celtic tradition it was said that we (often) suffer from soul-forgetfulness. We have forgotten who we are and have fallen out of true relationship with the earth and with one another.

I can't say exactly why this moment is any different from all the others, nor do I know why my soul grabbed me by the scruff of the neck a few nights ago and literally awoke me from a sound sleep with this recollection. I do trust, however, that when the student is ready, the Buddha will appear. 

St. Paul noted that "now we see as through a glass darkly, later we shall face to face." My hunch is that this type of "seeing" is both a part of creation's cyclical pattern of helping us process life's wisdom from: 1) a series of encounters; into 2) contemplation and reflection; so that 3) in time we can embrace and incorporate our experiences in a healthy way. It also seems likely that such vision is a mirror of the deeper manner of how truth is embedded and revealed to us at the end of our journey. Like Henri Nouwen confessed: "If God is love, and we come from God, then we shall return to love when this journey is complete." Integrating life's lessons leads us into an organic wisdom that simultaneously enriches our existence even as it trains us to rest into our demise. (Talk about the paradox of the Alpha and the Omega!)

Before turning off my reading light last night, I had to jot down a short list of "spiritual" truths I've long known in my soul but had either forgotten or hadn't yet discovered words to describe. This list looks a lot like a mystical "rule of life" that has been taking shape incrementally within me for five or six decades. 

1.  All spirituality comes down to noticing when we tense-up in life and when we let it all go in trust. As Cynthia Bourgeault teaches in The Wisdom Way of Knowing: holding on and becoming rigid causes our heart to atrophy and our soul to shrink; while releasing our feelings into trust opens us to compassion and strengthens our intimacy with all that is human and holy. In this, all prayer and spiritual discipline becomes an incarnational and experiential encounter as the Word communicates grace to us through our Flesh. This does not discount other ways to practice resting into the presence of the holy, it simply clarifies how each discipline actually works.

2. We are the midwives of creativity and love, NOT their source. We cannot control most of what takes place in our lives. But we can choose to assist the birth of beauty, truth, solidarity, and trust. These blessings can be twarted, too through arrogance, selfishness, or ignorance. The symbolism of midwifery, therefore, is all about where and how we give our attention to others. Having assisted the two different sets of midwives who guided the delivery of our two daughters led me to trust that our calling as human beings is to tenderly partner with others in their celebrations and sorrows. We are not in charge. We are allies whose humble presence can help or hinder those we cherish.

3. The trajectory of authentic Christian spirituality is not one of ascent, but descent. This is not always honored in Christian orthodoxy as it was taken hostage by the promises of neo-Platonic binary thinking. Still, at its best, we love the God who "comes down at Christmas" like Christina Rossetti sang. We worship the "marriage of heaven and earth, where justice and peace kiss one another and compassion and humility embrace." (Psalm 85) We seek to follow the path and presence of the Word becoming Flesh. (John 1) And we look for the holy within the human and material rather than etherial abstractions. St. Luke tells us in chapter four of his gospel that at the inauguration of his public ministry, Jesus proclaimed:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Historically, spiritual wisdom in both the East and West has been shaped by the confines of ascent: our goal and destination supossedly points upward to the top of the mountain, to the heights of heaven, to a release from human suffering into the blissful anticipation of noncorporeal eternity. Jesus articulated and embodied a whole new way of exploring intimacy with the sacred with his spirituality of "small is holy." Ours is not a journey of escape, but solidarity. Phillipians 2 summarizes this downward mobility well:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himsel and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.

Therefore God exalted him even more highly and gave him the name that is above every other name, so that at the name given to Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

4. The Holy Trinity shows us how to search, wait, and then enflesh the integation of competing truths rather than fight them into a synthesis of inadequate compromise.  Most deep thinking about conflict resolution in our culture is guided by Hegelian patterns wherein one truth bumps into a competing truth as they battle it out until a compromise can be achieved. (i.e. thesis - antithesis = synthesis) The presence of the sacred Three in One and One in Three, however, celebrates a different process where progress and resolution are realized as opposing realities are embraced equally into the presence of love, trust, and surrender. Professor Brueggemann is clear that the prophets of ancient Israel tell us that injustice, suffering, and oppression require grieving until our hearts are broken open by reality. When this takes place, and we are finally empty and beyond all illlusion of control, then in God's time but not our own, we are able to be surprised by new truths born in love that most often arrive from the periphery of the status quo through our creative artists. Relinquishing our long romance - dare I claim addiction - to binary thinking is essential in cultivating a commitment to the sacred deep healing and transformation promised by God.

5. In an age filled with noise and chaos, many intuitively hear God with their ears in music even if we don't believe in God with our minds. For most of my life I have listened to creativity's call as the presence of the sacred. I have lived this, trusted it, and encouraged it without having the words to describe it. Upon reading American philosopher and eco-theologian Jay McDaniel, however, his words resonated with my history of "hearing God" with my ears even in my intellectual questioning and/or disbelief. He cuts to the chase saying:

Three voices singing in harmony are an invitation to imagine that we
humans can dwell in creative community with one another, keeping our differences while holding on to each other in caring, non-suffocating ways. When we sing together our singing (becomes) a coordinated act of kindness and creativity, courage and compassion, delight and sharing. Jews call this shalom; Muslims call it salam; and Christians call it peace. Whatever words we use, the spirit of this peace is fluid and changing (filled with possibilities) which means that you can never fix it in a single frame and say gotcha.

Increasingly, I trust that singing and sharing beauty is essential.

6. Laughter that is guided by self-deprecating humor is an incarnational way of nourishing sacred humility. Some humor is cruel. Some is shallow and even stupid. But it is not coincidental that the word humor and humility are etymologically linked to the word humus which the Oxford Dictionary defines as: the organic component of soil, formed by the decomposition of leaves and other plant material by soil microorganisms. That is, to paraphrase Ernest Kurtz, its the shit out of which new life emerges. When we can laugh at ourselves, living as part of the whole rather than the center of the universe, when we've learned NOT to take ourselves too seriously, there is room for others to thrive. There's space for us to ripen and grow deeper. There are possibilities for all of us. Our culture is one of hierarchy that tends to use humor as a weapon or else a defense mechanism. But that is sadly stagnate and does nothing to welcome change or progress. 

7. Given enough space, safety, encouragement, and time most people are able to ripen into their best selves. Not always, of course. And some wounds are too deep to be healed in this realm. But rather than nag, cajole, push, shove, judge, or make ultimatums, I have come to see that waiting and trusting God's love is always the best course. This requires a deep comfort with silence. And holding one's tongue. It also necessitates a deep self-awareness, too because if what I want for myself is any indication of what is useful for another, then I need to shut up more than sound off, right?

I owe a world of debt to Cynthia Bourgeault and Richard Rohr (as you might have gathered.) Same goes for the faith communities I participate in: L'Arche Ottawa, Iona, and the Dancing Monks of the Abbey of the Arts. What do you think? I would love to know your thoughts and reactions, ok?